(JTA) The national commemoration committee of the Netherlands named as its keynote speaker a Muslim author who has called Gaza a “ghetto” and is accused of making anti-Semitic statements about Dutch Jews.
The National 4 and 5 May Committee made the announcement Monday of Abdelkader Benali to deliver the annual address at the main memorial ceremony this year in Amsterdam on May 4, the date when the Dutch nation remembers its fallen soldiers and victims of Nazism, including 102,000 Dutch Jews. The king and other dignitaries attend the event.
According to a 2010 article published in the HP de Tijd weekly by Harald Doornbos, one of the Netherlands’ best-known war correspondents, Benali went on an anti-Semitic rant in July 2006 in Beirut, Lebanon, during a conversation they had at a party.
