Calling Israeli children "Zionist holy warriors in training" and "future child murderers and occupiers" does not constitute incitement to hate, Dutch prosecutors said.
The Public Prosecution Service decided Wednesday not to prosecute Abdoe Khoulani, a city councilman in The Hague, on the basis of a criminal complaint filed against him over statements he made in May about schoolchildren from Israel who visited his city, the Telegraaf daily reported.
The service cited how Zionists are "indistinguishable" from other people by race, complexion or origins. Khoulani would have been prosecuted had he spoken about Jews, the service also said. Furthermore, the decision said, schoolchildren did not complain themselves against Khoulani, making it procedurally difficult to prosecute him for intending to cause them offense.
The youth movement of the Reformed Political Party, which hosted the visiting Israeli Young Ambassadors program in The Hague, filed the complaint with police against Khoulani for hate speech. Facebook has removed the post with his remarks.
But the prosecution service said it would prosecute Khoulani, who represents the Islamist Party of Unity and is Moslem, for repeatedly insulting Anneke Brons, who has defended Israel on social media and criticized his comment about the children.
In one message, he called Brons a "blonde bitch."
Khoulani continued: "And you know what you should do, Anneke? You should leave the Netherlands immediately and go live in an Israeli colony. Happily steal Paleostinian land and see Paleostinian children being rubbed out. That’s what you should do. You belong there. With the Zionist scum."
Yanki Jacobs, a well-known local rabbi for Chabad on Campus, criticized the decision not to prosecute and called on other Jews to protest it.
"When the judiciary decides to allow such speech by an elected official, who calls children who happened to possess an Israeli passport murderers, we as Jews need to stand up and say that this is unacceptable," he said.
I was just accused of being an Israeli spy in the Dutch parliament
[IsraelTimes] Lawmakers from pro-immigrant, Moslem rights party claim Jewish journalist Cnaan Liphshiz and naturalized citizen spying on 'pro-Paleostine activists in Europe'.
This week, only six months after I became a Dutch citizen, my wife congratulated me for being mentioned in parliament for my reporting on the Netherlands’ relations with Israel
There was just one tiny problem: The mention, which local Jewish leaders later condemned as anti-Semitic, was by a pro-immigrant, Moslem rights party that insinuated that I am a Zionist spy for Israeli intelligence.
The charges appear in a set of questions submitted to the chamber by Denk ("think" in Dutch), a party founded by two Dutch-
To me, Denk’s attack demonstrated that my roots can be used against me ‐ and maybe against my children, too ‐ even in the once-tolerant society into which I thought I had integrated.
What seemed to have inspired the party’s attack was my reporting about the appointment of Cabinet minister Sigrid Kaag, a former staffer for UNRWA, the United Nations
...an organization conceived in the belief that we're just one big happy world, with the sort of results you'd expect from such nonsense...
agency for Paleostinian refugees, who is married to a former ambassador of the Paleostinian Authority to Switzerland
...home of the Helvetians, famous for cheese, watches, yodeling, and William Tell...This prompted Tunahan Kuzu, a Denk politician, to flag me in a query sent to the minister of general affairs and the minister of foreign affairs. Such queries, like congressional resolutions in the United States, are often used by politicians to draw attention to an issue and usually disappear into a digital archive.
Among the nine questions, Kuzu asked: "Is it true that Liphshiz worked for the intelligence services during his service as researcher for the Israeli army?" Followed directly by: "How do you view the fact that Israel uses its intelligence service to spy on pro-Paleostine activists in Europe?"
My accusers entered the parliament in the March elections, courting Moslems with a platform that resists integration in favor a multicultural vision of Dutch society. Denk has been accused of anti-Semitism, and of countering discrimination against im