The Simon Wiesenthal Center has written a letter to the Dutch Prime Minister asking him to disband a statutory government body that has called on the Netherlands to develop closer ties to the terrorist organization Hamas at the expense of Israel.



The letter to PM Mark Rutte condemns a report by the Advisory Council on International Affairs which calls for the Netherlands to distance itself from Israel and develop closer ties with Hamas. The Dutch Parliament is set to debate the report on October 8th.

In the letter, Head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, says the report is riddled with factual errors and calls for closer ties with Hamas, a terrorist organization whose founding document invokes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a basis to "carry out genocide against Israel's six million Jewish citizens."

The Protocol of the Elders of Zion is a fabricated document detailing Jewish plans to control the world.



Rabbi Cooper said: "It is clear that the advisory Council on Foreign Affairs has produced a fatally flawed document that does not serve the cause of peace but only the most extreme forces in the Middle East."



The letter also said it was dismayed at a worrying trend in the Netherlands quoting a university poll in 2011 that found "38% of Dutchmen thought Israel was exterminating the Palestinians."



Israeli President Shimon Peres has just ended a visit to the Netherlands where he met with the Dutch King, and leading politicians.

Arutz Sheva asked anti-Semitism expert Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, who has published extensively on the Netherlands, to comment on the letter of the SWC to Prime Minister Rutte:

‘It seems on the surface quite far-going for the SWC to ask the Dutch Prime Minister to disband a Dutch government advisory body. Yet, the AIV report represents probably the lowest point with respect to what a government body has permitted itself concerning whitewashing or omitting Palestinian crimes and lies.

"It is thanks to the enormous effort of former Dutch parliamentarian Wim Kortenoeven who has commented the AIV document with hundreds of notes that one can understand how unprofessional and morally bankrupt the document and thus the AIV itself is. It is clear that the AIV presents itself falsely as a serious study organization. Its document which in essence is Palestinian propaganda is likely to be discussed in the Senate.

"The chairman of the AIV and a member of the commission for the Middle East which is responsible for the document is former Dutch Justice Minister Frits Korthals Altes. As Minister of Justice he freed the two last German Nazi war criminals in Dutch jails out of humanitarian reasons in 1989.

"One of them, Ferdinand Hugo Aus der Funten, was in charge of the deportation of the Dutch Jews to extermination camps. More than 100 000, or over 70% of Dutch Jews, were murdered or perished there. This Nazi criminal had after the war been condemned to the death sentence but Queen Juliana refused to sign the execution order.

"I discussed this with Korthals Altes in an interview with him a number of years ago, but his explanation for the freeing seems far from convincing now.

"Another member of the AIV Board is Joris Voorhoeve, who was Minister of Defense when the Dutch UN troops fled Srebrenica in 1995, which made the genocide of about 8 000 Muslim men and boys there by Bosnian Serbs possible. His functioning as minister has been heavily criticized and one wonders why, after this failure, he would be appointed to a government advisory body.

Until earlier this year, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has given little or no attention to the Netherlands. However the many worrying developments in that country concerning both Jews and Israel seem to have led to a necessary change of policy. A 2011 study of the University of Bielefeld shows that over 38% of the Dutch population of 16 years and older think that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians. This attitude of falsely accusing Israel of extreme crimes by about 5 million adult Dutchmen is an indication of their own criminal mindset.

"It is in this general Dutch societal climate that a heavily manipulated and biased document as that of the AIV could at all be published."