As thousands celebrate New Year's Eve at Berlin's iconic Brandenburg Gate on Sunday night, a team of medical professionals in a white tent only yards away will be standing by, waiting for possible victims of sexual assault and harassment to seek their help.

After mass sexual assaults occurred on New Year's Eve in several German cities two years ago, Berlin officials now work on the assumption that prevention efforts alone may no longer be sufficient at such large-scale events. Women will be able to speak to psychologists immediately after being assaulted or harassed in a “safe zone” at the Berlin New Year's Eve event.

On New Year's Eve 2015, about 1,200 women became victims of sexual assault in several major German cities, with more than 600 women attacked in Cologne and about 400 victims in the northern German city of Hamburg. Prosecutors established that more than 2,000 men were involved in the assaults, but only a tiny fraction — about half of them foreign nationals who at the time had only recently arrived in the country — had been identified a year later.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/30/berlin-sets-up-new-years-eve-safe-zone-for-women-amid-sexual-assault-concerns/?utm_term=.b474bada0009

1 On Tuesday, December 19, the Iranian government announced a new austerity plan.

2 The plan imposed a 50% increase in the price of fuel.

3 The government decided to cancel the monetary support of more than 34 million people.

4 Economists close to President Hassan Rouhani warned that the plan would lead to a societal explosion.

5 Hassan Rouhani snubbed the advice and decided to proceed with the austerity plan.

6 In this same austerity plan, the government decided to increase the budget for military armament.

16 Demonstrators called on the regime to stop supporting terrorist groups abroad and said clearly in the slogans they chanted “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon ... my soul is searching for the redemption of Iran.”

17 The massive demonstrations from Khorasan province extended to other provinces including Hamdan, Kermanshah and Tehran.

18 Security forces violently treated demonstrators and tried to disperse them with tear gas and arrested hundreds of them.

19 The clerics in Mashhad specifically called for the suppression of demonstrations by all means.

20 The geographical scope of the demonstrations is expected to expand to include provinces such as Sistan, Baluchistan and Persia, with its capital, Shiraz and Isfahan, which also witnessed massive demonstrations at the weekend.

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2017/12/30/All-you-need-to-know-about-the-Iran-protests-in-20-points.html

Atheism could be banned in Egypt in a bid to stop people ‘turning’ gay.

The parliamentary committee on religion has revealed plans to make ‘promotion of atheism’ illegal.

It is thought this is in a bid in case another bill, deemed to be the most ‘homophobic law in the world’, fails.

Speaking exclusively to Gay Star News, a lawyer in Cairo has decoded the law that will ban ‘promotion of atheist thought’.

Abdul, a lawyer who has asked us to not use his last name, says Egyptian psychologists and the media have claimed atheism leads to ‘mental imbalances’.

‘”Mental imbalances” is code for anything they would consider a perversion, such as homosexuality, adultery or psychopathy,’ he said.

https://www.gaystarnews.com/article/egypt-ban-atheism-case-turns-people-gay/

Two people have been arrested after a car plowed into a crowd of Christmas shoppers in Melbourne, Australia, Thursday in what police are calling a "deliberate act."

More than a dozen people were injured including at least one young child when the car hit pedestrians outside Melbourne's iconic Flinders Street station just after 4.30 p.m. local time.

Victoria Police spokesman Comm. Russell Barrett told reporters it was too early in the investigation to determine the motivation. Police appealed for witnesses and advised people to stay clear of what they're calling a "crime scene."

Witnesses told CNN affiliate Seven Network they saw people being thrown meters into the air when the SUV drove into the crowd.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/21/asia/melbourne-car-pedestrians-crash/index.html

For years, antisemitism has been couched in the language of “anti-Zionism”, allowing its proponents to claim that they are only criticising Israel. Explicitly attacking Jews, whether rhetorically or physically, has been generally seen as unacceptable, even among those who dislike Israel and who are suspicious of its diaspora Jewish supporters.

Meanwhile Jews and their friends have become used to having to explain that saying “Zionists” control the media, or created Isis, or are the real perpetrators of terrorist attacks in Europe, doesn’t count as legitimate criticism of Israeli policies.

These are febrile times, though, with radical politics in the air, and it feels like the language of antisemitism is being set free from this politically correct straitjacket. Tahra Ahmed claims to campaign on behalf of Grenfell Tower survivors. She knows who is really to blame for that terrible fire: it was a “Jewish sacrifice”. Just for good measure, “Hitler and the Germans were the victims of the Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany.” No carefully calibrated language about “Zionists” there.

Daniel Harris is a Labour Party activist in Brighton and Hove. He thought it would be funny to superimpose the faces of his political opponents in the local Labour party onto a Chanukah video of three dancing Jews, complete with black hats and tallitot. Maybe he really meant it as a festive joke, but at best it showed a remarkable insensitivity; at worst, given the fractious arguments in Brighton and Hove Labour Party over antisemitism, it was a thinly-veiled dig based on the idea that being Jewish is, somehow, a bad thing to be.

https://www.thejc.com/comment/analysis/antisemitism-no-longer-hiding-behind-anti-israel-rhetoric-1.450512

Canadian police have opened an investigation into a spate of anti-Semitic hate mail sent to several synagogues in Canada over the weekend.

B’nai Brith Canada said synagogues in Toronto, Montreal, Hamilton and Edmonton received identical letters featuring a swastika inside inside a bleeding Star of David with the phrase “Jewry must perish.”

The letters coincide with the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, which began December 12 and ends the evening of December 20.

Earlier this year, B’nai Brith Canada reported that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada set a record in 2016, rising by 26 percent from the previous year.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/canadian-synagogues-targeted-with-jewry-must-perish-hate-mail/

https://twitter.com/DSchwammenthal/status/939393450067324930

Jew-hatred in Berlin: Chanting demonstrators, anti-Jewish slogans at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, burned sheets with star of David on it. The protest was the U.S. decision on the relocation of the Embassy to West Jerusalem. 12/8/2017

“Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud.” Translation: "Jews remember Khaybar. the army of Muhammad is returning”



Text for those w/o Twitter:

Brandenburg Gate, where SS once marched, again scene of anti-Semitic incitement. Translation: "Jews remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning." An Islamist, anti-Jewish battle cry, refers to Muhammad's destruction of ancient Jewish community in Khaybar, near Medina.

The AT5 television station showed a video of the incident, in which a man holding a Palestinian flag and wearing a Palestinian keffiyah on his head smashes the window and kicks down the restaurant’s doors as passersby and two police officers look on. The officers wait until he breaks into the restaurant. They pause as he returns to the street from the restaurant’s interior holding an Israeli flag that he took from there. He throws it at their feet. They then overpower the man and arrest him.

Contacted by JTA, an employee at HaCarmel declined to comment on the circumstances of the incident, which the Federative Jewish Netherlands group reported online with a pictures of a Dutch police officer kneeling in front of a shattered glass window, with a Star of David hanging on the restaurant’s wall in the background.

Herman Loonstein, who heads Federative Jewish Netherlands, said the incident at HaCarmel happened when no patrons were inside the restaurant and ended without injury. “But it is nonetheless an attack, a terrorist attack, carried out by a man whose behavior was that of a terrorist,” he told JTA.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/man-holding-palestinian-flag-smashes-windows-of-amsterdam-kosher-restaurant/

Proves that antisemitism and anti-Zionism go hand in hand.

Emails unearthed in a federal lawsuit appear to show that the American Studies Association’s decision to boycott Israel was orchestrated by a small cadre of academics who infiltrated the ASA’s leadership to demonize the Jewish state.

The ASA website says the scholarly group “promotes the development and dissemination of interdisciplinary research on U.S. culture and history in a global context,” but in December 2013 it endorsed an academic boycott of Israel. The ASA’s leadership, called the National Council, backed the boycott resolution and put it to a membership vote. A third of the members voted, and two-thirds of those endorsed the resolution.

Last year four ASA members sued the organization, alleging the boycott violated its bylaws, the District of Columbia Nonprofit Corporation Act, and laws prohibiting nonprofits from exceeding their chartered purposes. Even putting legality aside, the boycott was out of step with the principle of academic freedom. The boycott generated an immediate rebuke from the executive council of the Association of American Universities.

The ASA sought to have the suit thrown out, arguing that legal challenges violate the group’s First Amendment rights—a claim commonly made by Israel boycotters. A federal judge rejected that argument in March and allowed the case to proceed.

A central figure in the boycott’s adoption was Jasbir Puar, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, according to emails cited in a public filing by the plaintiffs in the case. The emails appear to show that after joining the ASA’s nominating committee in 2010, Ms. Puar actively tried to stack the National Council with boycott backers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-israel-activists-subvert-a-scholarly-group-1512337924

A leading art school has apologised after a swastika was hung from its central hall.

Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London said a student had displayed a large red banner with the Nazi symbol, as part of an installation, despite being forbidden to do so by his tutor and by Professor Jeremy Till, the principal of the university.

One Jewish student was “shocked” to see the Nazi symbol as she made her way to class.

“There was nothing around it that explains that it is part of any sort of installation. It looks so isolated and shocking. It is disgusting. It isn’t art.

“The majority of people around were not even taking on board that this was horrific. People were laughing and joking,” she said.

https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/central-saint-martins-university-of-the-arts-london-1.448097