The Zionist country has issued a formal complaint with Spain, charging individuals in Spanish elementary schools of promoting anti-Semitic and anti-Israel ideas among young children. The letter comes after Israel’s ambassador to Spain, Rafi Shotz, received recently dozens of postcards from Spanish school students bearing statements such as:
“Jews kill for money,”
“Leave the country to the Palestinians”
and
“Go somewhere where they will accept you.”
A Foreign Ministry official confirmed that the handwriting appears typical of children six to nine years old. The official said:
“Apparently there are anti-Semitic and anti-Israel individuals who get permission to operate within schools…Each time, the embassy has received several dozen postcards from a different school. And it seems as though whoever is doing this is moving from school to school.”
The Foreign Ministry considered summoning Spain’s ambassador to Israel, Alvaro Iranzo, but spoke to the envoy by telephone instead.
Naor Gilon, the ministry’s deputy director for Europe, called Iranzo on Sunday saying
“Israel is greatly distressed”
by the postcards. The envoy insisted the letters are not part of any Spanish Education Ministry program, but the initiative of private citizens.
Meanwhile, in higher education news: universities campuses in more than 40 cities across the world are holding, Israeli Apartheid Week.” They are marking the week with multimedia events, films, lectures, cultural performances and demonstrations.
The participation of several Israelis in the anti-Zionist events is “atrocious,” said David Katz, a member of Britain’s Jewish Board of Deputies who grew up in South Africa and has fought the comparison between that country’s racial segregation and Israel’s ethnic divisions.
Katz said:
“They are free to do as they please, but it’s atrocious…I think they don’t understand the analogy they are making… which is insulting to those who suffered under apartheid…It’s like calling things ‘holocaust’ which are not the Holocaust or terming something ‘genocide’ which is not genocide.”
One Jewish charity brought over Benjamin Pogrund, a South African immigrant to Israel who is the former deputy editor of the Johannesburg-based Rand Daily Mail, to speak to British university students about why Israel is not by any stretch of the imagination, an apartheid state.
He said:
“The game plan of those who seek the destruction of Israel is to equate us with South Africa, a pariah state which had to be subjected to international sanctions…Israelis coming to take part in this week should know better.”
In Canada, the legislature in the province of Ontario unanimously condemned Israeli Apartheid Week, and are voting on a resolution that denounces the campus events.
Conservative legislator Peter Shurman told Shalom Life, a Toronto-based Jewish Web site:
“If you’re going to label Israel as Apartheid, then you are also… attacking Canadian values…. The use of the phrase ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ is about as close to hate speech as one can get without being arrested, and I’m not certain it doesn’t actually cross over that line.”
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