Amsterdam Pro-Israel Rally Scrapped Over Terror Worries
Citing security concerns, organizers of a pro-Israel rally in Amsterdam postponed the event indefinitely after meeting with police and city officials.
The rally, which was announced last month as scheduled to take place on January 11, was “postponed because of the current situation in Paris and in coordination with the police, the municipality and security,” members of the Holland4Israel group wrote Friday on their Facebook page. The group did not name a new date.
On Friday, several people were killed when an Islamist took over a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris. Police killed him when they moved in to free more than 20 hostages who survived the attack.
Two men who are believed to have been his accomplices were also killed at the same time in another takeover operation by police at a printing shop north of Paris, where they had been holding one hostage.
The two men, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, are believed to have killed 12 people on Wednesday at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo weekly, which ran numerous cartoons lampooning Islam.
“Currently, safety cannot be guaranteed and we, as an organization, do not wish to see you putting yourselves in danger,” the organizers of the rally from the organization Holland4Israel wrote.
Anti-Semitic attacks have increased in the Netherlands since July, when Israel went to war against Hamas in Gaza over the organization’s repeated targeting of civilians with rockets.
In September, Dutch police reportedly advised the City of The Hague against allowing the erection of a sukkah at a small Jewish-owned housing project that is surrounded by a heavily-Muslim neighborhood.
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