New President of the European Parliament
"- First responsibility is to defend the Jewish people"
Brussels, January 27th, 2012 – A full week of meetings commemorating the Wannsee Conference in Berlin and the victims of the Holocaust came to a climax in Brussels on Tuesday night, when the newly-elected President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, gave an official speech. In his speech, one of the first as a newly-elected president, he stated that ”his first obligation as President of the European Parliament is to defend the Jewish people and the State of Israel.” The statement came in his opening address at the 8th Annual Holocaust Remembrance Day in the European Parliament, co-organized by the European Coalition for Israel.
The new president spoke from personal experience when he said that ”Germans born after the war are not guilty of what happened 70 years ago, but nevertheless responsible for remembering and passing on the remembrance to the next generation”. In a private interview with ECI on Tuesday night he explained that ”anti-Semitism is still very much an issue that needs to be monitored in Europe”. Earlier in the week he had taken measures to ban Holocaust denial in the European Parliament, a decision that was criticised by some, but applauded by others.
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