AMSTERDAM (JTA) — Hanin Zoabi, an Arab-Israeli lawmaker who recently called for a Palestinian uprising, is scheduled to speak about racism in Israel at a Holocaust commemoration event in the Dutch capital.

Zoabi’s attendance at the event organized in Amsterdam on Nov. 8 by Platform Stop Racism and Exclusion, a far-left group that is shunned by local Jews for its members’ perceived animosity toward Israel and sympathy for Hamas, was announced last week.

Zoabi currently is under investigation in Israel for saying in an interview for a Hamas publication that: “Hundreds of worshipers should go up to al-Aqsa to confront an Israeli conspiracy there. Thousands of our people’s ascents there would turn these events into a real intifada.” She later said her words were “not a call to amplify the attacks.”

The Dutch group that invited her wrote on its Facebook page that in previous years it “paid attention to racism in the world (Germany, Austria, Greece) but not in Israel. Given recent events, discussing racism in Israel is unavoidable.” Zoabi will speak on “Israeli discrimination against Palestinians,” the text read.

ADVERTISEMENT

The event where Zoabi will speak is in commemoration of Kristallnacht — the German-language name for pogroms perpetrated in 1938 against Austrian and German Jews that Holocaust historians see as the opening shot in the Nazi-led campaign of violence against Jews and their extermination.

The Platform, previously known as NBK, has been commemorating Kristallnacht since 1992, often with the Jewish community. But in 2010, the Central Jewish Board of the Netherlands broke its ties with NBK because of the group’s perceived attempt to tie the Holocaust with the Arab-Israeli conflict.

NBK activist Miriyam Aouragh in 2004 organized a commemoration service in Amsterdam for Ahmed Yassin, a Hamas leader whom Israel killed that year. In 2009, NBK’s Kristallnacht commemoration featured a speech by Yassin Elforkani, an imam who in 2009 said during a speech at a conference of imams in the Netherlands that Jews in Damascus used blood to make matzah, and who declared himself “a fan” of the radical hate preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who said Adolf Hitler “punished the Jews for their corruption” in the Holocaust.

The Dutch platform also wrote last week that since the Central Jewish Board “has its own event, the taboo [on Israeli racism] is this year broken.”

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.