Germany Urged by US Jewish Group to Freeze Sports Cooperation Deal With Terror-Glorifying Palestinian Authority
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by Algemeiner Staff
Palestinian Authority official Jibril Rajoub. Photo: Dlisbona via Wikimedia Commons.
A leading US-based Jewish human rights group is calling on the German government to freeze a sports cooperation deal it recently signed with the Palestinian Authority until it stops glorifying violence against Israel.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Simon Wiesenthal Center urged German Chancellor Angela Merkel to “suspend this unthinkable agreement until the Palestinian Authority removes all names of terrorists from all sectors of Palestinian sport and their acts of terror be publicly condemned by Ramallah.”
Dr. Shimon Samuels — the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s director for international relations — expressed “revulsion” that “today’s Germany could be associated through sport with the blatant sanctification of Jew-killers, thereby evoking the shadows of the 1936 Nazi Olympics and the 1972 Munich Olympics atrocity.”
A list of 21 Palestinian athletic teams, tournaments and stadiums named after terrorists was published by the group.
The sports cooperation deal was inked last week by Germany’s Ramallah envoy Peter Beerwerth and Palestinian Football Association chief Jibril Rajoub — who has a long history of virulent anti-Israel rhetoric, including a 2013 threat to nuke the Jewish state.
