Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is exploiting the murderous attack on a synagogue in Copenhagen yesterday to propagandize the Jewish state.
He did so at his Cabinet meeting today and on twitter here:
To the Jews of Europe and to the Jews of the world I say ‘Israel is the home of every Jew, Israel is waiting for you with open arms’.
Israel’s ready for you:
We say to Jews, our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home. We are preparing & calling for the absorption of mass immigration from Europe.
He plays prognosticator:
This wave of terrorist attacks – including murderous anti-Semitic attacks – is expected to continue.
Denmark’s chief rabbi has rejected the calls. From the JTA:
Denmark’s chief rabbi rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for European Jews to move to Israel in the wake of a terror attack on a Copenhagen synagogue.
“Terror is not a reason to move to Israel,” said Denmark Chief Rabbi Jair Melchior said Sunday.
H.A. Hellyer gets it right: “As a European, I take exception to anyone claiming my fellow citizens ought to leave Europe. Our continent would lose out.” And this tweet: “Netanyahu really ought to stop making declarations upon Europe’s Jews as though he were the Caliph of all Jews.”
Max Blumenthal points out that Netanyahu’s appeal to Danes is a reversal of the legacy of the great Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, who saved so many Danish Jews from the Nazis during the second world war and who was later murdered by a gang led by Yitzhak Shamir in Jerusalem in 1948 because as UN mediator, Bernadotte was recommending that Jerusalem be internationalized. Netanyahu’s Likud party is a political heir to Shamir/Begin and the Revisionists.
Netanyahu has lately been blasted by some American Jews for saying that he’s coming to Washington to speak against Iran next month “not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people.”
Alan Brownfeld writes of Netanyahu’s earlier appeals:
Sadly, the Israeli government seems not to recognize that Jewish Americans are not “Israelis in exile.” Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly called upon American Jews to make a “mass aliyah” (immigration) to Israel.
No other foreign government argues that millions of Americans, because of their religion, are in “exile” in the United States and that their real “homeland”or “nation-state” is that foreign country. Israel should be content to be the nation of its own citizens, whether they are Jewish, Christian or Muslim.
