Incident in the use of "Hatikva" in Belarus: The Israeli embassy in Minsk officially protested after the regime's newspaper, the SB newspaper, used the national anthem as a soundtrack for a video regarding the situation of immigrants on the Belarus-Poland border.
The Foreign Ministry said the protest had been forwarded to "appropriate authorities".
The newspaper is published by the President of Belarus.
In the video, a minute and a half long, the national anthem of Israel is heard from the 35th second, and is accompanied by photographs of immigrants washing their hands and washing their clothes from water bottles, with snow falling on them and the forest in the background.
The video appears to have been shot near a logistics hangar near the Polish border, where some of the immigrants were housed.
The video was removed from the network yesterday, apparently at the behest of senior government officials.
The migrant crisis in Belarus began during the winter, when hundreds and later thousands of Iraqi and Syrian citizens began arriving in Belarus. They supposedly arrived for tourism in the country, but miraculously found their way across Belarus's borders with the European Union, first with Lithuania, and later with Poland. In the last month, the crisis has intensified, with Belarusian security forces forcing border migrants to try to break into Poland, helping them with equipment to dazzle and dismantling the fence, while also preventing them from returning to central Belarus. The Minsk regime sought to flood Europe with immigrants to squeeze relief in sanctions imposed on it over election fraud, repression of protests and hijacking of a Rainer plane, but the operation failed: the union both prevented the entry of immigrants and imposed a fifth package of sanctions. Thousands of immigrants are now stranded on the Belarus-Poland border, with several hundred of them being sent to flee the border every night. Several hundred immigrants were allowed to return to Iraq which sent rescue planes for its citizens. The rest are in fact hostages by the dictatorship,Which is trying to shift the responsibility for the crisis to Poland in particular and to the European Union in general, which it claims is committed to absorbing immigrants.
"Israel Today" contacted the SB newspaper and the Foreign Ministry for a response to the incident. Comments will be posted when received.
It should be noted that this is not the first time that the dictatorship has used Israel and Holocaust images for propaganda purposes. For example, in August it was reported in Israel today that the Belarusian embassy in Israel claimed that it was discussing with the Foreign Ministry an event commemorating the "murder of the Belarusian people" - which caused eyebrows to be raised in Israel. About a month ago, the Belarusian ambassador to Israel was summoned for a conversation at the Foreign Ministry following a statement by Lukashenko who claimed that "the whole world worships Jews because they proved the Holocaust." Unsurprisingly, the president's official newspaper also had clear antisemitic expressions. For example, in October last year, the newspaper's commentator Andrei Mokobozczyk drew the attention of his readers to the suspicious family names of the president's critics: Schreibman and Katz (the first is a highly regarded political analyst in Belarus, the second is a former Jewish and Israeli blogger living in Moscow; .Mokobozczyk published another hateful article, this time against the blogger Yevgeny Lipkovich, reminded him of the pogroms against the Jews in the Middle Ages and recommended that he leave for Israel.
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