“We
would like a cancellation,” said the mayor’s spokesman when asked about
the BDS activities in the city-subsidized Amerlinghaus building.
The
city of Vienna seeks to pull the plug on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
(BDS) events in early March in a municipal-funded building, a spokesperson for
the mayor told The Jerusalem Post on Friday.
“We would like a cancellation,” said
the spokesman, Martin Ritzmaier, when asked about the BDS activities in the
city-subsidized Amerlinghaus building.
He
added that the city of Vienna has contacted the management of the Amerlinghaus
cultural center to urge a cancellation of the BDS activities.
“The city of Vienna rejects boycott calls
against the State of Israel and the association BDS-Austria receives no funding
from the city of Vienna,” said Ritzmaier. Vienna’s mayor is the Social Democrat
Michael Häupl.
According
to a 2014 report in the newspaper Heute.at, the Amerlinghaus received 113,000
euros ($123,429) from the city of Vienna.
Vienna’s
Jewish community, which has over 7,000 members, has banded together with a
coalition of civil society groups fighting anti-Semitism that are slated to
hold a rally against BDS-Austria events in March. The rally is titled “Against
the anti-Semitic masquerade of ‘Israeli Apartheid Week.”’ The group’s website
is titled “Boycott anti-Semitism.”
The
organizers of the rally said that BDS Austria aims to “delegitimize the Jewish
state.”
In
an email to the Post, Stefan Schaden, a
board member of the Austrian-Israeli Society, wrote: “BDS has an appalling
record of perpetuating old antisemitic stereotypes by projecting them onto the
Jewish state. Our society therefore supports the broad coalition of civil
society organizations that came together to stand up against any form of
antisemitism.”
Two
events organized by BDS-Austria are scheduled to take place in the second week
of March as part of the fringe anti-Israel “Apartheid Week” activities.
The
BDS-Austria event in the Amerlinghaus is titled “Dismantle Colonialism and
Oppression within the Israeli Apartheid System.” The posting on the
Amerlinghaus website states that the freelance Israeli translator Ofer Neiman,
who lives in west Jerusalem, will speak about the Israeli BDS campaign “Boycott
from Within.”
