Official Digital Archive
Jewish Independent
July 25, 2003

Anti-Semitism from a new source

Letters

Editor: Anti-Semites, it seems, never die. They only get reborn under a new identity.

A recent message from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre exposes a crude, anti-Semitic advertisement, posted by the so-called charitable organization Oxfam recently in Belgium. Under the picture of an orange dripping with blood, there is a message strangely resembling similar slogans from 1933 Germany: "Israeli fruit tastes bitter. Say no to the occupation of Palestine. Don't buy any fruit from Israel."

Sixty years earlier, in the spring of 1933, the Nazis delivered the same call:
"Germans. Protect yourselves! Don't buy from the Jews!"

Coming out of a country where the great majority of the Jews who were massacred in death camps were "delivered" to the Nazis by their own countrymen, this is not unexpected. The only remaining question is whether there is any Jew in the world who would ever again give a shekel to Oxfam.

Jack Chivo
West Vancouver, Canada