Given the left-wing culture running rampant through Western Europe, combined with a long and sad history of Jew hatred, and a growing militant Muslim population, I cannot say that I am surprised. As the author states, Angela Merkel may be the last Chancellor of Germany even remotely sympathetic towards Jews and Israel.
by Isi Leibler
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, successive German governments have meticulously upheld their obligations to the Jewish people. Study of the Holocaust is a mandatory component of the German state education curriculum, Holocaust denial is classified as a crime and restitution commitments were honored and even exceeded.
Chancellor Angela Merkel is a genuine friend of the Jews and despite intense political pressures and occasional minor vacillations, has consistently supported Israel, describing its security as “part of my country’s raison d’etre”. However in recent years, as in other European countries, German public opinion has turned against Israel, perceiving it as the principal threat to global stability and peace. This hostility has increasingly assumed overt anti-Semitic tones.
There is growing resentment against Jews, who are blamed for imposing excessive emphasis on collective German national guilt for the Holocaust.
Anti-Jewish hostility is often expressed in the more ‘politically respectable’ demonization of the Jewish nation state, allegedly not related to anti-Semitism although the “Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe” (OSCE) explicitly defines such behavior as anti-Semitic.
The German left has accused Israel of war crimes, occupation and racism and also engages in inverse Holocaust imagery, enthusiastically condemning Israel for allegedly behaving towards the Palestinians as its Nazi forebears did to the Jews.
[.......]
These trends are fortified by the sizable Islamic migrant community – now numbering over four million – which aggressively agitates against Israel, utilizing obscene placards at demonstrations chanting “gas the Jews” or “death to the Jews”. Moslems are at the forefront of violence directed at identifiable Jews in urban areas, especially in Berlin, where some Jewish communal leaders are now recommending to avoid wearing kipot in public.
Yet, the government has welcomed the immigration of almost 200,000 former Soviet Jews and invested major funds to resurrect a vigorous Jewish communal life and foster Jewish education.
Despite receiving state subsidies, the Jewish leadership displays its independence and frequently speaks out if it considers the government is not fulfilling its obligations to the Jewish community or fails to act evenhandedly towards Israel.
However the intensification of extreme anti-Israeli hostility combined with a recent spate of disconcerting incidents has created angst within the Jewish community.
Last year, there was a traumatic national debate which assumed ugly anti-Semitic overtones after a judgment in Cologne ruled that male circumcision causes “bodily harm” and declared the practice illegal. The matter was only resolved following the direct intervention of Chancellor Merkel who initiated the passage of legislation legalizing circumcision.
In April 2012, in a provocative outburst, 84 year old Nobel Prize laureate Gunter Grass bitterly accused the Israeli government of seeking to obliterate the Iranian population. He warned that the Jewish state, which he considers ‘insane and unscrupulous’, represents the principal obstacle to peace in the region and called on his government to cancel delivery to Israel of the last Dolphin submarine.
Despite being discredited for having initially concealed that he had served as a member of the Nazi Waffen SS, Grass’s vicious attack on Israel, whilst condemned by numerous politicians and journalists, was enthusiastically endorsed by many Germans.
Shortly after that incident, the state-sponsored Berlin Jewish Museum invited Judith Butler, a notorious Jewish promoter of BDS against Israel, as a guest lecturer. Butler received enthusiastic applause from the 700-strong audience when, purporting to act in accordance with the highest Jewish moral values, she renewed calls to boycott Israel and ‘abolish political Zionism’ in order to create a bi-national Palestinian state.
To provide a platform for such an outspoken anti-Israeli activist at a state-sponsored Jewish Museum in Berlin is surely obscene but not unprecedented. Former Israeli communist Felicia Langer, lives in Germany where she condemns the German government for supporting Israel, constantly equates Israelis with Nazis, calls for Israeli leaders to be tried as war criminals, describes Israel as an apartheid regime and even praises Iranian President Ahmadinejad. In August 2009, German President Horst Kohler, who four years earlier had addressed the Knesset, shocked the Jewish community by honoring Langer with the Federal Cross of Merit, Germany’s most prestigious award.
In 2010, despite protests from the Israeli Embassy, Frankfurt’s Mayor Petra Roth invited Alfred Grosser, a German-born Jew known to be frenziedly hostile to Israel, to give the annual Kristallnacht oration in the Paul’s Church. He used the occasion to draw parallels between the behavior of Israelis and Nazis and was lauded by the media.
Another ongoing scandal prevails at the German Center on anti-Semitism in Berlin, considered the most important German institute engaged with the subject. Until last year it was headed by Professor Wolfgang Benz, who received his PhD from Professor Karl Bosl, a former Nazi storm trooper who maintains an ongoing association with right wing extremist groups. To this day, Benz continues defending his mentor.
Benz equates Islamophobia with anti-Semitism, alleging that critics of Islamic practice are reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semites attacking the Talmud. He recently challenged the fact that the Muslim terrorist murders in Toulouse had an “anti-Semitic dimension”. He dismisses concerns about the Moslem Brotherhood as being reminiscent of anti-Semitic phobias like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and bizarrely complains that drawing attention to the fact that Moslems comprise 70% of Berlin prison inmates is comparable to Hitler’s ravings over “the fact that 89% of Berlin pediatricians in the 1930s were Jews”.
[.......]
The most recent upheaval erupted in response to a list compiled by the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, purporting to identify the ten worst anti-Semitic statements of 2012. It included President Ahmadinejad, the Moslem Brotherhood, Nation of Islam founder, Louis Farrakhan and European anti-Semites. Ninth on the list was Jakob Augstein, publisher of the magazine Der Freitag, who also provides columns to Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading weekly, founded by his father.
I have an aversion to simplistic lists prioritizing bigots and having reviewed some of Augstein’s outbursts, I consider that bracketing him with Ahmadinejad or Farrakhan absurdly magnifies his standing and impact. [.......]
Augstein alleges that when “Jerusalem calls, Berlin bows its will”; that US presidents were obliged to “secure the support of Jewish lobby groups”; that American Republicans and the Israeli government profit from violence in Libya, Sudan and Yemen; that “the Netanyahu government keeps the world on a leash with an ever swelling war chant”; that “Israel incubates its opponents in Gaza”; that the recent Prophet Mohammed video provoking riots was initiated by Israel; that ultra-Orthodox Jews are like Islamic fundamentalist terrorists and “follow the law of revenge”.
Even the broadest interpretation of the OSCE definition would qualify such demonization of Israel and allusions to Jewish global power as anti-Semitic.
[.......]
Prominent German Jewish writer and commentator, Henryk Broder, was sufficiently outraged to describe Augstein as “a pure anti-Semite… who only missed the opportunity to make his career with the Gestapo because he was born after the war”.
The president of the Jewish Central Council of Jews, Dieter Graumann, whilst condemning his “horrible, hideous” articles on Israel, criticized his placement on such a list. His vice president, Salomon Korn, went further and foolishly defended Augstein against charges of anti-Semitism.
Juliane Wetzel from the German Center on anti-Semitism was amongst those who rejected suggestions that Augstein was disseminating hatred of Jews. Overall, the bulk of the German media, as well as both leftist and CDU politicians defended him, insisting that he was merely expressing legitimate criticism of Israel.
It was significant that in 2010, two Bundestag leftist representatives were aboard the Turkish Marvi Marmara and that for the first time, the left and the right united in parliament to carry a unanimous resolution censuring Israel for the Gaza flotilla episode. [.......]
For Jews, the positive side of Germany is the evident abundance of pro-Israeli and even philo-Semitic rank and file Germans in all walks of life. Yet, simultaneously the intensifying efforts by left wing activists uniting with Moslem extremists and occasionally even Nazis, to demonize Israel and promote anti-Semitism, provide valid grounds for concern about a future for Jews in Germany.
The situation is likely to further deteriorate drastically after the culmination of Angela Merkel’s term as Chancellor.
Read the rest – Germans lurching towards Anti-Semitism
Tags: Angela Merkel, Isi Leibler
All of this has happened before, and will happen again.
BTW: two main discussion threads posted within a half-hour of each other. Accidental?
Guntar Grass is a pretty rotten human being.
Is it me or does it seem that in this list are Jews who hate Israel. Do they really hate themselves that much? The cognative dissonance in these people must be huge.
This just goes to illustrate something that I have been saying: anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. The Left like to cloak anti-Zionism in the cloak of respectibility, but it isn’t. Scratch an “anti-Zionist” and you find an anti-Semite. That is not to say that there isn’t room for legitimate criticism of Israel, but comparing what Israel is having to do to deal with the “Palestinians” to what the Nazis did to the Jews is offensive and wrong. If Israel were to treat the Palestinians the way the Nazis treated the Jews, there would be no rockets raining down from the Palestinian areas, because there would be no Palestinians to fire them.
Meanwhile, and elsewhere, completely batshit crazy is still the dominating force…
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/03/05/north-korea-vows-to-cancel-korean-war-cease-fire/
@ Mike C.:
But, but Denniss Rodman said Kim Jong Un was a humble guy!
No surprise.
Youngsters gravitate towards the forbidden—and making Nazism forbidden inevitably made it attractive to a new generation of German youth, over and above whatever lingering veins of it remained in German society.
More, I recounted here a while back my experience at a conference some 15 years ago, meeting a German who was just barely old enough to have possibly been in the Hitler Youth towards the end of the war. He was a man of strong religious conviction and deeply worried about the possible resurgence of antisemitic sentiments in Germany.
At the same conference, I met a young German student, who had been born, probably, in the mid-late ’70s. She expressed a great deal of wholly vicarious guilt over the excesses of the Nazi era. This was a terrifying experience, because it was clear that since there was no basis or foundation to this vicarious guilt—since it was, in effect, attached to nothing in her own experience—it could easily turn itself inside out and become hatred.
MikeA wrote:
It is not so much as they hate themselves but they are more narcissistic then anything else. Israelis not cool in their eyes and is a burden to their progressive sensibilities.
Mike C. wrote:
I thought they had already renounced the armistice years ago?
@ Mike C.:
North Korea is always barking. They will do nothing.
Iron Fist wrote:
Well certainly every anti-Semite is an anti-Zionist.
@ Speranza:
It’s much ado about nothing. It’s just NK doing the the Juche standing up to “Evil Imperialists” routine.
@ Iron Fist:
If any other country was in Israel’s position, that would have been the result.
Absolutely! My beef with Israel is that they are a bunch of pushovers for the world community. They always seek to be loved by the world and care too much what London newspapers say. They should adopt Russia attitude and not care what others think.
Rodan wrote:
They’re barking with nukes now… Not maybe, someday nukes, but ones that have actually been exploded.
@ Mike C.:
They have had nukes for years. This is talk.
Rodman needs to get to Germany ASAP and modify their Mulims.
Maybe they like basketball like Lil Kim.
@ Rodan:
Easy for you to say…
Rodan wrote:
The Turks would do to the Palestinians what they did to the Armenians.
The Nazis in Germany and Austria got rid of around 500,000 Jews through first forcible emigration and then murder and now have around 2 million Muslim Turks and Arabs in their midst. A bad trade by any reckoning.
@ RIX:
Maybe Rodman can be sent to the Islamic world make peace?
Mike C. wrote:
I am not scared, like you.
@ Speranza:
Absolutely!
He is the perfect choice./
One day (hopefully) China will get sick of the D.P.R.K. and will allow them to implode as long as they realize that a unified Korea is not hostile towards them.
Speranza wrote:
If Israel were to go away tomorrow, within 20 years the region would be depopulated. The other Mohammedans would exterminate the Palestinians that didn’t kill each other in internicine warfare. The region would return to desert.
@ Speranza:
The worst ethnic exchange in history. Jews integrate and become loyal to the land they live on. Muslims seek to colonize and make it part of Dar al Islam.
@ Iron Fist:
Syria is what the Mideast would look like.
@ Rodan:
Islamic Democracy! Everybody gets killed…
Rodan wrote:
Yeah, N. Korea could never actually start anything like a war or anything.
You need to go to an opthamologist and get that tunnel vision checked…
And I guess that’s my fill of stupid for a while, so everybody have a good one.
Iron Fist wrote:
The current mess in Syria is proof positive that the regions instability has little to do with Israel-”Palestine” and has every thing to do with Islam and Arab Imperialism.
Rodan wrote:
Jews were completely assimilated into German/Austrian life and very patriotic.
Let’s not forget how the Turks treat the Kurds who are Muslim too.
Speranza wrote:
Actually, with their history, they would probably join together and invade Japan since there is a history there. Doubt it would happen but I don’t think China is worried about a unified Korea. They worry that a collapse of NK would cause a ton of refugees to head to China and don’t want to absorb them.
In other news, Puss Morgan has his panties in a twist because the “Texas 500″ NASCAR race has become the “NRA 500.”
Dude, do not eff with NASCAR. If you think the NRA was unyielding, race fans are even more so.
Carolina Girl wrote:
That’s because race fans are racist.
/you know it’s coming.
@ Carolina Girl:
Pussy MOrgan needs to go back to Britain. He has no business in this country. I thought he’d promised to go back to Britain if we didn’t get rid of the Second Amendment, anyway. Put up or shut up, pussy boy.
Carolina Girl wrote:
Does anyone watch CNN any more? I mean outside of the fact that they have the monopoly in airports I doubt few care what Morgan, Blitzer, Cooper, et al have to say about anything.
buzzsawmonkey wrote:
Already been tried
NASCAR SMACKS DOWN NBC
The Congressional Black Caucus is now saying the sequester is racist.
The Osprey wrote:
According to them, breathing is racist… if you are not black…
The Osprey wrote:
They unhappy that welfare did not get vicious cuts like other programs?
/
@ citizen_q:
They are useing Sequester as an excuse to spend more. The Democrats intend to bankrupt the nation. They want to destroy America, and they’ve chosen out-of-control spending as their weapon of choice. It is going to work, too. The Republicans don’t have the balls to stand up to the Democrats. They won’t even ask the question “How much spending is enough?” The Dems intend to borrow until it is obvious to everyone that we simply can’t pay the money back. Then the economy collapses.
@ Iron Fist:
There was an article the other day quoting Bloomber as saying the government has unlimited funds to spend because people will never stop lending money to it. I suspect that is the thinking of many democrats given there spending habits.
@ Speranza:
My understanding is his rating are barely 1/3 of what they were a year ago in the key demographics. I can’t see him lasting much longer -- his whole Second Amendment bull is wearing thin even with Americans who agree with him on gun control. And I’m sure if the race had been the “ACLU 400″ instead he’d have had no problem with it.
@ citizen_q:
NASCAR got even with them even bigger. NBC had the contract for the second half of the NASCAR season (it had lost NFL football completely by this time) and was getting excellent ratings. When it came time to renegotiate the contracts, NASCAR advised NBC that they would not even consider allowing them to broadcast the races and gave the contract to ESPN/ABC instead.
@ Iron Fist:
I would love to see someone commit a random act of journalism and ask Obama or his Carney-val clown to distribute a spreadsheet of the amounts of money from the cuts in spending increases that have been applied to each of the dire drastic catastrophic items.
Oh, and the Government has just posted 400 job openings.
@ Carolina Girl:
There’s never going to be a random act of journalism. Not with this Administration. I thought the Media loved Clinton, but that was nothing compared to what they’ve got going on with Obama. Benghazi would have broken a Republican Administration, but Obama’s gotten away with stonewalling on it. There are no journalists, anymore. There are JournOLists. They are pretty much all of them, even Fox News, on the Obama band wagon.
Napalitano is reporting long lines at the airports due to the
evil Republicans and the Sequester!
The airports though report no unusual delays at TSA.
@ Iron Fist:
If Bush had come out with these dire predictions, they would have been clamoring for him to produce the evidence that such economic-impacting events would be taking place. Obama whines about the supposed cuts to the military, but HE was the one who insisted that the sequester disproportionately affect military spending by making it a full 50% of the adjustments. He cannot now claim that he’s upset about it. Of course he will.
@ RIX:
The lies just keep on comin’ from this criminal enterprise of an administration. Did this See You Next Tuesday think no one was going to actually CHECK? And as for her recent statements on criminal illegals being released, she’s backpedaling like mad and saying it was some middle management staffer that made the call. Fine. Give us his name and tell us he’s been fired, because to release criminals on the American public, jeopardizing their safety would indicate to me someone needs to go Big Sis -- and that someone is YOU.
@ Carolina Girl:
Napalitano is promising to release more illegals.
But they are supposed to be low risk & monitored
That’s bull, they don’t deport low risk individuals.
Monitored how? They all get an Obama phone & promise to call in?
@ RIX:
So they can’t afford to house them but they can afford to monitor them. This woman should be removed from office -- everything she’s been “cutting” is directly affecting the safety of the American people. She needs to cuts screeners but there’s no paper pushers in Washington that can’t be furloughed instead.
Amazing -- the private sector has been making do with less and doubling up on work assignments since the recession started, but the government can’t do it?
Carolina Girl wrote:
Napolitano and Sibelius are two rank amateurs who have done enormous damage to our national security. Remember Norm Minetta who was a holdover by W. from the Clinton administration? That was a guy who wanted 90 year old grannies of Scandinavian origin to be body searched the same way that 23 year old Syrian men.
Iron Fist wrote:
Benghazi and Fast & Furious would have sunk any Republican administration.
@ Carolina Girl:
The entire Obama Administration is a sham, including Homeland
Security.
We are less safe under them & the economy is imploding.
I’d like to see a Thunderdome cage match between Janet Napolitano and Judge Napolitano.
Speranza wrote:
Actually, he didn’t want to body search the 23 year old Syrian men. He just wanted to search the grannies. Because proving that we are “tolerant” is more important than stopping plane hijackings.
buzzsawmonkey wrote:
From looking at them, she might win due to having more testosterone…
Thats a MAN, baby!!!!
@ Iron Fist:
@ Speranza:
Some Syrian War Porn!
Al Qaeda captures a major Syrian City.
@ Carolina Girl:
They need their lavish vacations in the Bahamas!
Iron Fist wrote:
Aint that the truth. They may have liked Clinton, but they worship Obama!
The Osprey wrote:
Charles Johnson will concur!
@ Rodan:
Boy the good news from the Middle East just keeps on comin’ -- today that nitwit Kerry said with regard to giving weapons to Islamic nations “there was no guarantee that one weapon or another might not at some point in time fall into the wrong hands,”
Maybe we should look on the bright side and be glad this asshole and his boss aren’t giving them nukes.
@ Rodan:
Fatass is really steppin’ in it -- although there’s some great posts from a Dr. Tesla over at LGF smacking down Gus. He got 25 downdings so I say we need to sign him up! (Unless, of course, hee hee, he’s one of our numerous socks and is already here.)
@ Carolina Girl:
Remember, Obama questions why you or I need an AR 15, but he doesn’t question why the Muslim Brotherhood needs main battle tanks and fighter jets. It is a question of priorities.
Carolina Girl wrote:
That guy is a marked man.
@ Carolina Girl:
Hey at least they are killing each other!\
Carolina Girl wrote:
You can’t get anything passed “Reporting for duty” Kerry.
Iron Fist wrote:
Norm Minetta -- another appalling W. cabinet member.
@ Speranza:
Yeah, there were so many, but the Bush Administration was better than what we have now. That said, I don’t think anyone but Karl Rove is pining for a return of the Bush Administration. We need new blood.
Iron Fist wrote:
Do not underestimate the Bush family. They know how to play Republican voters like fiddle.
Iron Fist wrote:
Compared to now, those were the good old days.
Rodan wrote:
If you loved the GHWB, and GWB administrations you will absolutely be head over heels with Jeb.
Speranza wrote:
Karl Rove likes the cut of his Jeb.