Simon Wiesenthal Center Urges Dutch PM to Reject 'Fatally-Flawed Report Urging Netherlands to Get Closer to Hamas While Maligning Israel

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is calling on the Dutch Prime Minister to reject a heavily biased Middle East peace report that portrays Israel as an aggressor and calls for closer contactwith Hamas and to dismantle the advisory council that prepared it.

In a letter to PM Mark Rutte, the Wiesenthal Center’s associate dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper, called "Between Words and Deeds: Prospects for a Sustainable Peace in the Middle East", createdby the Parliament’s Advisory Council on International Affairs, a “fatally flawed” report that “maligns and demonizes the Jewish state” with legal errors and falsifications of history.

“Beyond its multitude of factual errors,” wrote Rabbi Cooper, “this document in effect calls on the Netherlands to distance itself from the Middle East's only democracy, Israel and getcloser to a terrorist group, Hamas, whose founding document invokes The Protocols of Zion as a basis to carry out a genocide against Israel's six million Jewish citizens.” Cooper told PMRutte that Hamas not only threatens Israeli citizens, but also launches attacks on Egyptians in the Sinai region. In light of all these facts, he said it would be inconceivable thatproposals for relations with the terrorist group can be given any credence.

Rabbi Cooper said that the dangerous proposals in, “Prospects for a Sustainable Peace in the Middle East” would only fuel the already high anti-Semitic and anti-Israel attitudes in theNetherlands. He also referred to the fate of Mehmet Sahin, a Dutch Muslim social worker, who Rabbi Cooper recently visited in Amsterdam, who has been forced into hiding after his effortsto combat anti-Jewish hatred expressed by teenage Muslims on national TV led to death threats. "It is a stain on Dutch society that 70 years after Anne Frank wrote her diary, a Muslimfamily is forced into hiding for trying to use Anne’s words to help Dutch youngsters disengage from anti-Jewish hatred," Cooper added. He also cited a 2011 poll that 38% of Dutch citizensagreed that Israel is carrying on a war of extermination against the Palestinians.

Rabbi Cooper wrote that the Advisory Council’s report is a, “document that does not serve the cause of peace but only the most extreme forces in the Middle East and those in the regionand in the Netherlands who continuously demonize the Jewish nation.”

The letter concluded with a call for PM Rutte to reject the report and dismantle the Advisory Council on International Affairs because it “has proven itself incapable or unwilling toproduce advice worthy of a proud democracy.”

For more information please contact the Center’s Public Relations department at 310.553.9036, join the Center on Facebook, www.facebook.com/simonwiesenthalcenter, or follow @simonwiesenthal for newsupdates sent direct to your Twitter page or mobile device.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at internationalagencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (PARLATINO).