A peaceful silent march for Israel organized by a group of Dutch Christians in Rotterdam has not been authorized by the city’s mayor. The march was to protest against a Hamas conference of Palestinians in Europe on Saturday in the port city.

The city gave as reason for not authorizing the march the fact that police could not guarantee the security of the participants. The party for freedom led by Geert Wilders called on Thursday in the parliament for the army to be mobilized to guarantee security.

Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb and the Ministers of Interior and Justice have rejected calls from Jewish groups for the conference, organized by the London-based Palestinian Return Centre (PRC), a group that is the regarded by western intelligence sources as a support group of Hamas, to be prohibited because such an event could encourage anti-Semitism and embolden terrorist groups among young people.

Hamas is on the EU list of terrorist groups.

Aboutaleb, a politician from the anti-Israel Labor party who was born in Morocco to a Muslim family, explained his refusal to ban the public gathering by the fact that it was not absolutely proved that Hamas is involved in the organization of the conference. But he promised to the Jewish community that justice officials will be present at the April 15 event to “make sure nothing anti-Semitic will happen or will be said.”

The Netherlands’s Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs has expressed his concern that the conference “will incite anti-Semitism or pro-terrorist sentiment” in the country, particularly among the country’s rapidly growing community of ethnic Turks.

Dutch journalist Carel Brendel, who has written about the PRC’s activities, has said that the evidence of the PRC’s connections to Hamas is “overwhelming.” Brendel noted that two of the organizers of the upcoming conference, Adel Abdallah and Amin Abou Rashed, have received awards from Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

The PRC is managed by Zaher al-Birawi, Majed al-Zeer and Dr. Arafat Shoukri, well known Hamas activists who have ties to Hamas-Gaza and abroad and who are operating to promote Hamas’s economical, organizational, conceptual and operational interests in Europe.

Tanya Hoogwerf, a member of the City Council of Rotterdam, has repeatedly pressed the mayor to cancel the conference. “Especially with anti-Semitism on the rise in the Netherlands and Rotterdam as well,we think it’s irresponsible and a bad signal to lay out a red carpet for on organization that believes and states in it's own manifesto that all Jews need to be killed,” she said.

According to Manfred Gerstenfeld, a former chairman of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, the choice of Rotterdam as site of the conference ‘’is far from arbitrary.’’ ‘’The town as a record of many years of anti-Israel initiatives,’’ he said, recalling that las month also in Rotterdam Dutch Turkish hooligans shouted ‘’cancer Jews”” at the police in a confrontation that had nothing to do with the Jews.

Among the participants and speakers at the conference will be controversial Belgian-Lebanese activist Dyab Abu Jahjah, who has publicly called for the radicalization of immigrants in Europe and for terror actions against Israel. A former columnist, he was dismissed by Belgian Flemish daily De Standaard after having called for the ‘’liberation of Palestine by all necessary means.’’