Activists associated with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement interrupted an event for a new book on anti-Semitism by a German-born Persian Jew in the German town of Aurich, East Friesland.
Arye Sharuz Shalicar, a former IDF spokesperson who currently serves as head of international relations at Israel’s Intelligence Ministry, was in Germany on a privately organized tour. He grew up in a Muslim-dominated suburb of Berlin and immigrated to Israel in 2001.
Shalicar was reading segments of his new book, “The New-German Anti-Semite – Do Jews today belong to Germany?,” to a crowd of approximately 100 people, when several BDS activists turned on loud music and started shouting “war criminal,” “child murderer,” and “representative of an apartheid state.”
Several attendees from the audience asked the protesters to leave, but it was only after they were removed by German police that Shalicar was able to continue with his lecture.
The author told the Jerusalem Post that in addition to the two men inside, three female BDS activists were protesting in front of the building where he held his talk. He noted that the “BDS activists support terrorism in the way they delegitimize Israel.”
Shalicar, who covers in his book the different strands of German anti-Semitism, said the disruption showed “there is antisemitism within the Left and from BDS.”
He stressed that “the men are not interested in dialogue,” clarifying, “It is not a problem for me if they wish to stay during the talk and ask critical questions during the question and answer period.”
Activists associated with the BDS movement are known to disrupt Israel-related events.
“The same aggressive BDS activists who disrupted my book reading in East Friesland were also the ones who interrupted a reading of a Holocaust surviving woman,” Shalicar tweeted after the incident. “This shows what wood they are carved from.”
The BDS movement also called for the boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest, which took place in Tel Aviv on Saturday. Several artists, including pop icon Madonna, strongly criticized their attempts to politicize the event.
[Photo: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung / Wikimedia Commons]