The PLO’s Hanan Ashrawi turned an invitation to New Year’s concert in Vienna into an opportunity to spread lies about Israel in Europe.
By: United with Israel Staff
Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl invited the PLO’s Hanan Ashrawi to a much-vaunted New Year’s concert in Vienna this week, a move that members of the European nation’s Jewish community blasted due to the virulently ant-Israel rhetoric Ashrawi spewed while in Europe.
Kneissl inexplicably referred to Ashrawi as “the Palestinians’ voice of reason,” notwithstanding the PLO firebrand’s history of incitement and hatred of Israel.
During her stay in Vienna as an invited guest of Kneissl, Ashrawi told the Austrian media that Israel is a “rogue state” that “enslaves” Palestinians, vilifying the Austrian government’s allegedly pro-Israel positions, Times of Israel reported.
The leader of the Austrian Jewish community, Oskar Deutsch, responded, “In Israel, every person enjoys equal rights. Muslims, Christians, Jews, atheists and others have the right to elect parliamentarians, judges, and so on. Standing for European values would mean not to invite Israel haters such as Hanan Ashrawi to the New Year’s concert,” reported the Times .
Kneissl has connections with Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, which promotes anti-immigrant policies and has been embroiled in controversy over its Nazi-linked past.
In her 2014 book, “My Middle East,” Kneissl maligined Zionism as a “blood-and-soil ideology based on German nationalism,” leading to accusations that she promotes comparisons of Zionism to Nazism, an ironic twist in light of the fact that the Freedom Party’s first leader was former Nazi and SS officer Anton Reinthaller.