The volunteers talked about the different definitions of fascism during their podcast on RodonFM on 9th November. Listen to it and learn the difference between fasiscm and racism, what the German movie "The Wave" is about and also the history of Antisemitism and Antisemitism today!
To read the articles the volunteers wrote choose "Antifascism Day" in the categories on the right or, even more easy, click here.

Find further information about this important day on the campaign site!

Es ist eine heikle Angelegenheit über den Israel-Palästina-Konflikt zu schreiben und allen gerecht zu werden, objektiv zu urteilen und niemanden auf die Füße zu treten. Wir haben in der Schule lange und intensiv über das Thema diskutiert, abgewägt und trotzdem fühle ich mich nicht richtig qualifiziert einen Artikel über den Antisemitismus von manchen pro-palästinischen Muslimen zu schreiben. Aber da ich jetzt schon hier bin und du das liest, ziehen wir das durch, denn es ist wichtig zu wissen, dass Antisemitismus nicht der Vergangenheit angehört und nicht den Nationalsozialisten vorbehalten ist.

Im Sommer 2014 gingen pro-palästinische Demonstranten auf die Straße und nutzten den Gaza-Konflikt um gegen Juden zu hetzen. Außerdem wurden 850 antisemitische Straftaten, wie Brandanschläge auf Synagogen, Entfernung von Stolpersteinen und Pöbeleien, registriert. 50 davon wurden von propalästinischen Tätern begangen. In bestimmten Stadtteilen Berlins ist es nicht zu empfehlen eine Kippa zu tragen. Beim Pariser Charlie Hebdo Attentat kamen vier Geiseln um, weil sie im Supermarkt im jüdischen Viertel waren. Im Mai 2014 starben vier Menschen in Belgien im Jüdischen Museum bei einem islamistischen Attentat.

The Holocaust is one of the darkest chapters in all human history, and it is essential to understand the mechanisms of discrimination that led to such a devastating event, in order to not let it happen again.
Recently, Holocaust education has shifted to a more personal approach in many countries in Europe. This approach attempts to place the individuals at the center of our understanding of history. By using personal stories, a more human insight can be achieved, often making young people particularly struck by the fact that so many people allowed this, or can allow any genocide, failing to either resist or protest.
Such terrible things did not started with deportations and concentration camps, but developed step by step. Looking at tendencies in modern Europe, we must be aware that history can be repeated and the Holocaust happened with the silent acceptance and support of the broad majority.

The movie The Wave, directed by Dennis Gansel and based on Ron Jone's social experiment The Third Wave, is a very good exemple of how fascism and things as Holocaust situation could happen again.
The movie takes place in a german high school. During one week of workshops about different subjects, one teacher learn to his students what is autocracy. The Holocaust subject come in their conversation, and students were convinced that something as the Holocaust couldn't happen again because they learnt to much about it. Here, the teacher started to settle a practical exercise : the creation of a small dictature, creating a new ideology, attracting more and more students in his group in order to show them that it's still very easy to fall into this bad situation.

Today,Monday 9th of November is the International day against fascism and antisemitism in commemoration of the « Kristallnacht » translated as « The night of broken  glass », a pogrom where the Nazis and German civilians burned synagogues, attacked Jewish people physically, smashed the front windows of Jewish shops.The Kristallnacht is seen  as the symbolic beginning of the Holocaust. By the end of the second World War this violence has resulted in the death of  around 6 million Jews and around 5.5 million "enemies" of the German state.

This event  is organised by the European network UNITED which is supported by more than 560 organisations from 46 European countries to support the message that originated in 1945 at the end of the WW2 « Never again » a message that nowadays isn't respected as hate crimes are still happening all over Europe and far right movements are getting more and more support in national and local elections.

If you are interested in supporting this cause you can check the UNITED campaign website at : http://dayagainstfascism.eu/

In conclusion, I will end this article by quoting one of the greatest man that ever lived in this world, The Mahatma Gandhi : "Be the change that you wish to see in this world".

By Jacques Merry

The term anti-Semitism means " prejudice against the Jews " or " hatred of the Jews ". Shoah, persecution and the extermination of the European Jews by Nazi Germany and his collaborators, between 1933 and 1945, is the example of the most extreme anti-Semitism.

In 1879, the German journalist Wilhelm Marr created the word anti-Semitism to indicate the hatred of the Jews but also the hatred of various political tendencies of the XVIIIeme and XIXth centuries as the liberalism, the cosmopolitanism and the internationalism which were often associated with the Jews. The equality of the civil rights, the constitutional democracy, the free exchange, the socialism, the financial capitalism and the pacifism were also a part of slandered ideas.
The anti-Semitism does not however date the invention of the term but goes back up well before the modern period. In the History, pogroms so appear among the most common demonstrations of the anti-Semitism (riots of the local populations managed against the Jews, and often encouraged by the authorities). Pogroms were started by false rumors which often accused the Jews of using the blood of the Christian children for their religious rites.

For the modern period, the anti-Semites added to their ideology of hatred a political dimension. During the last third part of the XIXth century, anti-semitic political parties formed in Germany, in France and in Austria.
In the XIXth century, philosophers, academics and German artists of the movement xenophone völkish considering the Jewish spirit as foreign to the Germanness, conceived the idea that the Jew was "non-German". Theorists of the racial anthropology gave them a pseudo-scientific foundation. The Nazi party, based in 1919 and managed by Adolf Hitler, gave a political expression to the theories of the racism.
The Nazi party based partially its popularity by spreading an anti-Jewish propaganda. Millions of people bought the book of Hitler Mein Kampf (My fight) which called up to the eviction of the Jews of Germany.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the party organized anti-Jewish boycotts, staged auto-da-fés, and promulgated a discriminatory legislation against the Jews. In 1935, the Laws of Nuremberg defined the Jews by the blood, and ordered the total separation between "Aryans" and "non-Aryans", what legalized a racist hierarchy. In all Germany and in all Austria, the Nazis destroyed at night from 9 till 10 November 1938 synagogues and shop windows the owners of which were Jewish it was at " Crystal night ".
So now you know why we choose the 9 november for fight anti-semitism and fascism.

By Manali. C