Zionist Federation speaker: immigration will be death of Europe

The UK Zionist Federation (ZF) this week hosts an Israeli professor who has stated that “the only thing that can deter terrorists… is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped.”

Mordechai Kedar, of Bar-Ilan University, will speak at a number of synagogues and Jewish schools across the country. It has been reported that at least one synagogue and college have cancelled.

Back in July, Kedar used an interview on Israeli radio to claim that the rape of female relatives is the “only thing” that could deter “terrorists”. He added: “It sounds very bad, but that’s the Middle East.” After his remarks were publicised, Kedar said that his comments were “hyperbole.”

No such justification, however, for comments Kedar made to Israeli news site Ynet in May 2013, when he claimed that without “an end to immigration, we will soon be hearing the death throes of the [European] continent as we know it.”

Kedar decried what he called “a European softening” that “the Muslims see as a weakness”, adding:

Every year more Muslims than non-Muslims are born in France. Japan has no Muslims because they don’t allow them in. Racism? Maybe. Superiority? Maybe. They don’t care. They want to sustain Japan and are looking down on everyone.

On Sunday, Kedar will speak alongside evangelical Christian and former adviser to the British army Patrick Sookhdeo, at a ZF-organised event called “Christians in Crisis: Violence & Persecution in the Middle East”.

Sookhdeo, who is awaiting trial in Swindon Crown Court in February after pleading not guilty to a charge of sexual assault and two of intimidating a witness or juror, has his own track record when it comes to views on “Islam”.

Sookhdeo believes that “the brutality of contemporary Islamic terrorists…obviously harks back to such paradigmatic examples from Muhammad’s life”, is a signatory to the US-based ‘Coalition to Stop Shariah‘, and told an interviewer in 2009 that “everything about the West is inimical to Islam.”

The theme of Sunday’s event, co-sponsored by Christian Friends of Israel and the Barnabas Fund, is instructive. Like Netanyahu’s parroting of “ISIS” at the UN, the ZF hopes to exploit the catastrophes faced by minority groups across the region to mask Israeli apartheid.

In their choice of speakers, the ZF also shows the kind of people who, increasingly, are the only ones left fighting Israel’s corner, in a world where boycott campaigns are growing, and even political elites are getting frustrated with rejectionist Israeli leaders. Kedar and Sookhdeo are hardly likely candidates to check this increasing isolation.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.