BiCSA

The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism

Schlagwort: antisemitism

Chicago’s mayor goes Pro-Hamas: ‘Ceasefire now’

von

am Februar 2, 2024

in Allgemein

The Times of Israel (TOI), Blogs

By Dr. Clemens Heni

On January 31, 2024, a symbolic resolution for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip was adopted by the Chicago City Parliament in the US with the decisive vote of the mayor. The vote itself had been 23 to 23, meaning that half of the elected representatives had rejected the antisemitic resolution, which had been promoted for weeks, while the other half had approved it.

Many dozens of antisemitic Palestinians and their friends had previously shouted around in parliament and were then banned from the chamber by their buddy, the mayor of Chicago, after some time. But dozens were allowed to continue shouting their antisemitic hate speech loudly behind glass windows in a kind of VIP lounge and display their antisemitic clothing such as the PLO scarf or keffiya.

Earlier, before being ejected from the meeting hall, Chicago’s only Jewish congresswoman Debra Silverstein had been antisemiticaly insulted and a typical antisemitic conspiracy myth intoned that she would use her “Zionist money” to “wipe crime off her desk”.

The modern form of Holocaust denial also comes to the fore here, the unspeakable crimes of Hamas are negated or celebrated and Israel is accused, just as the antisemitic government from South Africa is doing at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The perpetrator-victim reversal is a very typical pattern of antisemitism, as research has shown in recent decades.

In her speech, Silverstein emphasized that it was intolerable to call for a ceasefire and not the complete destruction of Hamas.

The Palestinian organization had massacred over 1200 Jews in southern Israel in a genocidal frenzy on October 7, 2023 and kidnapped over 240, of which about 130 remain held hostage to this day.

Chicago Congressman Byron Sigcho-Lopez had brought fliers and in his speech accused the New York Times of documenting without evidence the genocidal pogroms of Hamas, including the unspeakable rapes of Jewish women by Muslim and Palestinian butchers. Sigcho-Lopez then celebrated the victory against Israel with antisemitic buddies, even if it was only symbolic – Chicago, however, is the third largest city in the USA after New York City and Los Angeles.

Public school students were given extra time off to participate in demonstrations in support of a permanent ceasefire and thus in support of the genocidal, Islamist-terrorist organization Hamas, according to the Wall Street Journal:

In the Windy City, the resolution was helped along by the Chicago Public Schools system, which offered students grace time to join Tuesday walk-outs supporting the ceasefire. Mr. Johnson said he was ‘incredibly proud’ of students for ‘exercising their constitutional rights’ and ‘speak(ing) up for righteousness.’

At these hate demonstrations against Israel on Tuesday, January 30, 2024, hundreds of students from high schools and other schools demonstrated for the antisemitic terror gang Hamas, for Palestine and against Israel.

The mayor was mighty proud of the young people who are standing up for Hamas and a permanent ceasefire, i.e. for the preservation of Hamas and against the complete disarmament of these Nazi-like monsters.

Here you can see the antisemites cheering after the decisive vote for a permanent ceasefire and thus for Hamas by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Chicago has the largest Palestinian community in the US. The 82-year-old “civil rights activist” Jesse Jackson received enthusiastic applause for his mere presence and support of the anti-Israel resolution.

At least two antisemites carried a Palestinian flag with a picture of the Hamas spokesman in Chicago yesterday, according to the Times of Israel (TOI).

So they are fans of the Muslim-Nazis of Hamas and are obviously allowed to walk around freely in the US and spread antisemitic propaganda. People with flags like the one in Chicago should be charged with supporting terrorism and genocide, just like neo-Nazis who deny or celebrate the Holocaust.

Members of the “democratic socialists” in Chicago campaigned for and supported Johnson in 2023, as Politico magazine reports. Reactionary, antisemitic, but in the woke language of the mainstream called “progressives”, anti-Zionist employees of the City of Chicago have been agitating for a permanent ceasefire since the fall of 2023, analogous to employees in the White House of Joe Biden, who is a Zionist and close friend of the only Jewish state.

After the worst mass murder of Jews since the Shoah on 7 October 2023, the antisemitic organization “Democratic Socialists of America” is engaging in a typical perpetrator-victim reversal and is calling for no military aid for Israel from the USA and an end to the “massacres”, by which it means Israel’s self-defense.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has documented and criticized several examples of antisemitism by the “Democratic Socialists of America”. In Salt Lake City, for example, the group incites against the “settler-colonialist apartheid” of Israel, in San Francisco it talks about the “decolonization of Palestine” and calls for further mass murder of Jews with the slogan “from the river to the sea”, i.e. the destruction of the Jewish and democratic state of Israel. Only a few days after October 7, the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America in Denver, Colorado, calls for the complete destruction of Israel – “from the river to the sea“, as the ADL notes. For antisemites like these anti-democratic “socialists” and “democrats”, Israel is the perpetrator and not the victim of genocidal Muslim and Palestinian violence.

At any rate, this is also the milieu that supported the mayor of Chicago in the election campaign. It is therefore his “thanks” to these antisemitic agitators of all genders that he has now intolerably given his decisive vote to the anti-Israel resolution.

The New Yorker and Jacobin magazines, and of course the Young Democratic Socialists of America, were all excited in 2023 about ‘their’ new Mayor Johnson in Chicago, who could be a role model for major cities and other communities across America. What will they say now that their hero has helped an antisemitic resolution to pass with his vote?

America, and therefore the West, is teetering on the brink. In view of Brandon Johnson’s sensational election victory as mayor of Chicago in the spring of 2023, the US Democratic Party has decided to hold the party convention for the 2024 presidential election in Chicago of all places. This will be the most difficult battle for the pro-Israeli Joe Biden, because the extreme opposition to his pro-Israel policy comes from within his own party.

America, and therefore the West, is teetering on the brink. In view of Brandon Johnson’s sensational election victory as mayor of Chicago in the spring of 2023, the US Democratic Party has decided to hold the party convention for the 2024 presidential election in Chicago of all places. This will be the most difficult battle for the pro-Israeli Joe Biden, because the extreme opposition to his pro-Israel policy comes from within his own party. Added to this is the new right-wing agitator and populist Donald Trump, who has still not conceded his 2020 election defeat. Trump’s isolationism and complete arbitrariness could have dramatic consequences for Israel. Trump’s antisemitic and conspiracy-mythic voter base complements the antisemitic and conspiracy-mythic voter base of parts of the Democrats, i.e. the part that is aggressively pro-Palestine.

Immediately after the genocidal massacre by Hamas, Johnson failed politically. A few days after October 7, 2023, he remained equidistant. However, his parliamentary group leader in the Chicago parliament, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, re-tweeted a tweet by the notorious Ilhan Omar, Democrat member of the House of Representatives from Minnesota, in which the antisemitic classic of Jews and Israel as “child murderers” in Gaza and Palestine is rehashed. Ramirez-Rosa himself supports the antisemitic BDS movement, which is why he was dropped as a candidate for the position of lieutenant governor by Daniel Biss in September 2017. However, this did not hinder the career of Ramirez-Rosa, who openly appears as a Palestine supporter on his X profile.

He only had to resign from his position as leader of the Democrats in the Chicago City Council in November 2023 because he apparently has a violence problem – he had put his body in the way of a female colleague and prevented her from entering the meeting room.

The misery doesn’t just consist of people like this “Carlos”. The misery lies in the fact that everywhere, from Berlin to Chicago, San Francisco, Paris or London, those who supposedly stand up for diversity, tolerance and diversity are the exact same people who abandon or hate Jews and Israel and aggressively fight against them.

They are the very people who quite rightly oppose Trump or the AfD and recognize and criticize conspiracy myths, but as soon as a conspiracy myth or an antisemitic lie and perpetrator-victim reversal such as the fantasized “genocide” in Gaza come into play, the “do-gooders” remain silent. This currently affects millions of people in Germany who have taken to the streets and are against right-wing extremism in recent days and weeks – but these people remain silent about hatred of Jews because it comes from Muslims, Palestinians, left-wingers or oh so “progressive” people.

Those who see climate change as a huge threat are often those who see no problem in antisemitism and are antisemitic themselves, see Greta Thunberg. Conservatives, on the other hand, who deny man-made climate change, are sometimes more open to criticism of antisemitism, although this is often accompanied by the note that it is simply against left-wingers or migrants. But leftists and migrants, on the other hand, feel completely immune to criticism, as they are by definition immune to criticism. But today’s antisemitism of the 21st century comes primarily from Muslims and Islam, keyword Iran. Even otherwise secular leftists have been joining the chorus of anti-Zionists and Islamists for decades.

That was the biggest shock for Jews in Germany, the USA and worldwide, that they were left completely alone after the most terrible massacre, which definitely had a genocidal character, on October 7, 2023, and experienced antisemitic demonstrations, rallies and actions of varying intensity in the USA, Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, England and everywhere else.

It was quite typical that the newly elected president of Harvard University had to resign after her refusal to categorize the call for genocide against Jews – “Palestine from the river to the sea” is a genocidal battle cry – as worth fighting and intolerable (which was also because she did unscientific and plagiaristic work). But it was a symbol worldwide of the so-called woke milieu, where it is always about diversity, equality and inclusion, that diversity, equality and inclusion does not mean Jews. Women’s groups refuse to call the documented rapes of Jewish women by Muslim men intolerable and repugnant, just as any rape is intolerable and repugnant. Even genocide researchers are stunned by the unbelievable brutality and sadism of Muslim men and Palestinians. Black Lives matter – but what about when it comes to Jewish lives? Black people in particular are at the forefront of defaming Israel, celebrating Hamas and wishing death on Jews. This was demonstrated when BLM Chicago posted a paraglider with a Palestinian flag. 90,000 people viewed it on X, which did not immediately delete this form of antisemitism and celebration of a genocidal massacre and blocked the account.

The core of the antisemitism problem in Chicago, however, is Brandon Johnson. From cooperating with a BDS supporter, to taking an equidistant stance after the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah, to openly supporting Hamas with yesterday’s decision for a full ceasefire without fully disarming the Muslim-Nazis, Johnson shows which side he is on. He has given the antisemites in Chicago a field day with his vote, leaving behind a deeply divided city parliament and a massively shaken Democratic Party.

The Jewish Union Foundation and the Anti-Defamation League Midwest criticize the anti-Israel resolution of the city of Chicago and emphasize that in recent weeks Jewish life there is no longer safe. Jews are being insulted, stores are being graffitied and pro-Palestinian propaganda is being spread. The perpetrators – Muslims and Palestinians – are being victimized. The old antisemitic game of perpetrator-victim reversal – only it hasn’t happened on this scale since the Holocaust and all Israelis and Zionist Jews also thought that after Auschwitz and Babi Yar there could never be anything like it again. But Israel, for many reasons that are still being worked through, completely failed to protect its own people on October 7, 2023.

The US Democratic Party, however, will be pro-Israeli or it will not be. The election for American president in 2024 will be dramatic in every respect. The antisemite and sexist Trump must not win. But Joe Biden, who is also completely unqualified for the presidency because of his age, will face a massive antisemitic campaign from his own people.

Chicago is a beacon, contrary to any beacon of hope. The city is an antisemitic beacon. Democrats and the left must finally stand up against all forms of antisemitism, mainstream as well as right-wing, anti-Zionist and Holocaust trivializing antisemitism, but also and especially, because it is much more widespread, the anti-Jewish genocide celebrating, Hamas protecting, Muslim, Palestinian and left-wing antisemitism.

Am Israel Chai!

About the Author
Dr Clemens Heni is director of The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA)

BHL’s silence on Holocaust perpetrators in Ukraine

von

am Juni 21, 2023

in Allgemein

BHL’s silence on Holocaust perpetrators in Ukraine

In a recent article in Tablet Magazine by French author Bernard-Henri Lévy the complete victory of Ukraine in the ongoing Russian War in Ukraine is proclaimed. Lévy, known for his obsessive hatred of Russia, Communism and a fact based analysis of the conflict, urges the WEST to not stop fighting this War – until Russia has lost.

Lévy, who is Jewish, has obviously no problem at all with pro-Holocaust Memorials dedicated to Holocaust perpetrators in Ukraine. He has no problems with Hundreds of streets named after people who wanted to eradicate the Jewish people from Ukraine during the Shoah, including Stepan Bandera, Yuri Polyanskiy, Dmytro Paliiv, Petro Gudzovatiy, Dmytro Gakh, Stepan Burdyn, Terentiy Pihotskiy, Vasyl Sydor, Omelyan Polovyi, Oleksa Babiy (who played a role in the worst massacre of the Shoah in Baby Yar near Kiew) and many others.

Lev Golinkin gives you a clear picture in the Jewish Forward of all these antisemites and Holocaust perpetrators – every single one of them has a street, memorial, football stadium or plaque named after them. All this happened in the last 30 years and it happens today and tomorrow, including streets named after Neo-Nazis.

Let me be clear:

Russia’s war is a criminal war of aggression that violates international law and must end immediately. But more weapons for Ukraine will prolong this war and cause many more deaths in Ukraine. And the US and Germany want more people to die and the war to continue, otherwise they would not continue to supply Ukraine with weapons and ammunition. What about complicity in the war through NATO’s decades of aggression? This includes NATO’s eastward expansion, although US Secretary of State James Baker promised Gorbachev (!) and the Soviets in February 1990 that NATO would itself in the event of a possible reunification of Germany not expand “one inch eastward”.

Without this promise by the US, Baker, and West-Germany’s Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the USSR would never ever had given their support for a re-unification of  the two Germany’s. NATO expansion ever since was an act of imperialism and is one key factor why Russia fights this war. This is a scholarly explanation, not a support for Putin, to be clear. But I am disgusted by the anti-Russian hatred of Tablet Magazine and most mainstream journals and politicians in the US or Germany.

This war has a history. For sure, it did not start February 24, 2022. Worse, Ukrainian President Zelenskyi argued in an antisemitic manner and trivialized the Holocaust during a speech he gave via video to the Knesset by comparing the date of the start of the war with the founding of the German NAZI Party (NSDAP) in 1920 and even portrayed Ukraine as friends of Jews at the time !! In Israel, there was outrage about that kind of antisemitism and Holocaust distortion. What about Tablet Magazine and Lévy?

Russia will not lose this war – otherwise we might be facing the end of the world: an atomic war, first fought by the United States of America in August 1945 against Japan.

Ever since, our lives face a deadline every single day, because ever since August 6, 1945 and Hiroshima, the entire destrucion of all lives on earth is an option. ‘Thanks’ to the US Army, by the way.

In December 2021, the Russian Federation sent Ukraine, the US and NATO a peace plan for Ukraine. No response from the White House. Biden wanted the War and he got the War.

Then, in March 2022, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett did broker a near to be reached ceasefire – but Boris Johnson, the UK and the US, also France and Germany prohibited that ceasefire, because it included a statement that Ukraine would never ever become member of NATO. Russia, though, would have withdrawn all forces – all forces – to the lines prior to February 24, 2022. Ukraine was even interested in that deal, according to Bennett! But the UK, the US and the West rejected peace!!

Bernard-Henri Lévy, whom I defended against antisemitic resentment in my recent book (dealing with forms of antisemitism in the late 1970s), is an agitator and warmonger. He loves war and he hates peace and Russia. He has no problem with pro-Holocaust Memorials in Ukraine, otherwise he could not have written in Tablet Magazine:

On the other (Ukraine) is a citizens army defending not just their country but also a certain idea of civilization and of Europe: So, as a consequence, they understand why they fight.

That is an obscure fantasy of a French writer with no real knowledge of the history of NATO since 1990 and no real knowledge of streets and memorials named after Holocaust perpetrators in Ukraine.

Contrary to Lévy, I am against this war. This war, like all others like in Yemen or Ethiopia, has to stop immediately. Stop sending weapons to Ukraine now! Support both Russian and Ukrainian men and women, who flee the warzone and reject military service. Support these men and women!!

Support diplomatic efforts to solve this conflict. Reject NATO’s and Putin’s imperialism likewise – and fight for peace in Europe.

And stop Lévy and Tablet Magazine and their one-sided, irrational and obsessive hatred of Russia and their denial of pro-Holocaust political culture in Ukraine, which you can witness in almost every single city or village in Western Ukraine.

Fight Holocaust distortion and pro-Holocaust Memorials named after people like Jaroslav Stetsko who wrote on July 9, 1941:

I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.

Later, in 1983, he made shake hands with then US Vice President George H.W. Bush:

 

Antisemites such as Jaroslav Stetsko are honored in today’s Ukraine, as Lev Golinkin has shown in his groundbreaking study for the Jewish Forward on January 27, 2021.

It is this silence of BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy) that is a typical sign of a decline in historical knowledge, historical accuracy and morality.

The current war started at the latest in 2014 at the MAIDAN in Kiew. It will end asap, but never ever will it end with an Ukrainian victory. Both sides will fail and compromise will be the result.

If Ukraine wins that would also be a victory for those millions of Ukrainians who celebrate their streets and monuments named after pro-Nazi antisemites like Jaroslav Stetsko. Is this what Bernard-Henri Lévy and Tablet Magazine, NATO and German warmongers truly want, deep in their hearts?

About the Author
Dr Clemens Heni is director of The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA)

Germany alone started WW II – Why is TOI running riot against Yad Vashem?

von

am Februar 10, 2020

in Uncategorized

I am not talking about the speeches or remarks at the event (including troubling facts or completely false numbers of Jewish victims in the Soviet Union by Putin in his speech) in question on January 23, 2020, at the 5th World Holocaust Forum. I am only analyzing the major video of that day (7:45 minutes), which is now attacked by the Times of Israel and Sam Sokol and many others, quoted in Sokol’s piece.

We already know about the attempts of gentiles to distort the Shoah. It started shortly after 1945, when Germans compared Auschwitz to the bombing of Dresden. Then, historian Ernst Nolte wrote in the 1970s that Stalin was first, not Hitler and the Germans. This Red equals Brown has become a major ideology of the European Union in the last few decades.

In 1997, French anti-communist (former Maoist) Stéphane Courtois edited the “Black Book of Communism,” claiming that communism killed many more people than Nazism and the Germans: Communism was worse than the Shoah – that is the antisemitic ideology of that kind of people. Those people deny the unprecedented character of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka, where for the very first time in world history, an entire people was chosen to be eliminated: Germans wanted to eradicate Jews and Judaism from the earth. They almost succeeded and killed six million Jews in the Holocaust. Post-colonialism, for those interested in the field, follows an equally troubling denial of the unprecedented character of the Shoah, by the way.

In 2008, the Prague Declaration, signed by Vaclav Havel and Joachim Gauck, along with Czech, Lithuanian and other politicians and activists, urges the EU to rewrite all textbooks and to warn everyone about the evils of both Nazism and Communism. That downplaying of National Socialism is common among many in Europe and the US.

Professor Dovid Katz dealt extensively with the dangerous “double Genocide ideology” of the Prague Declaration, Baltic politics and European activists alike.

It is to some extent news, however, that Jews and Israelis join the chorus of downplaying the role of Nazi Germany when it comes to the Second World War. Sokol claims that the Soviet Union holds a co-responsibility for the outbreak of WWII because of the Hitler-Stalin-Pact from August 23, 1939. That is a lie, though – as Germany wanted to invade and destroy Poland and the Soviet Union and other states in the East anyway. Realpolitik did not change Hitler’s and Germany’s intention to invade Eastern Europe and to kill European Jews, who were seen behind both Western capitalism and Eastern communism.

While it is unclear how many and which videos he talks about, the main video of that event is linked in the article. It is a 7:45 minute video about the development of German antisemitism and the rise of Nazi Germany to power. The video depicts some famous Jews like Einstein, Freud and Walter Benjamin to emphasize the role Jews played in European culture prior to World War II.

It shows how antisemitism spread in Nazi Germany, from boycotts (1933) and harassment to racial laws, the nights of pogroms (Nov. 9, 1938) to deportation, ghettos, starving, torture, murder and extermination. It then shows Sir Winston Churchill who spoke about the importance to stand “together” against Germany.

Then, the video deals with the fact that only an allied pact of the West and East, the US, Great Britain and the Soviet Union was able to fight, stop and finally defeat National Socialism. Correctly, the video says that the Red Army was the first one to fight back against the Germans.

From the time of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 through to the first landings at Normandy in June 1944, millions of Soviet troops and citizens perished in the battle to push the Nazi armies back. D-Day, June 6, 1944, is correctly shown as the start of the major Western front against the Germans, alongside the Eastern front and the Soviet Union that had been fighting effectively from later 1941 onward.

On July 24, 1944, the Red Army liberated the extermination camp of Majdanek, without realizing, before their entry, the unspeakable catastrophe of the Holocaust that transpired there. Then, the Holocaust of Hungarian Jews in some two months in 1944 is reported, with 450.000 Jews being exterminated. Tens of thousands of Jews would then die in the death marches (from the camps westward to Germany).

The video clearly shows the Allies working together in the liberation of Europe. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the US Army Buchenwald and Dachau. British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen. The fall of Berlin (to the Soviet and American armies) and the liberation of Theresienstadt ended the war against Nazi Germany.

I had seen that video — which is linked in the TOI article by Sam Sokol —when it was screened in Jerusalem via the Yad Vashem livestream. I have watched it again now: What is the problem with that accurate video? As in any concise synopsis, many things are of necessity left out. But, it rightly explains how the Allies, including, and most importantly in the actual history as it unfolded, the Red Army, liberated Europe from Nazi Germany and indeed, how Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945.

Obviously Holocaust distorting people with a political agenda to “equalize” Nazi and Soviet crimes as per the far right’s campaign led by East European governments, now notice that the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 23, 1939, is missing. Well, for that matter, so are the capitulations of Chamberlain at Munich and all the others. It has nothing to do with January 27, 1945.

Some might see Yad Vashem as nothing but a loudspeaker of Bibi Netanyahu, and I share skepticism about his policies, no doubt about this. However, this is a huge fight about how to commemorate the outbreak of WWII.

If Sokol and his allies succeed in saying that it HAS TO BE MENTIONED that there was the Hitler-Stalin pact when it comes to Auschwitz – antisemitism has succeeded in bringing even Jewish and Israeli scholars and activists in line with right-wing extremist revisionism.

Why? Because that is an antisemitic and far-right revisionist narrative, modified in fine Western style from its far-right East European originators by historian Timothy Snyder, former German President Joachim Gauck and right-wing extremist historians such as Jorg Baberowski of Germany.

The same people say that fact that Poland was occupied by the Soviets is missing!

Yes, after war’s end, completely true. But what has that got to do with a film about defeating Nazi Germany and liberating Auschwitz?

To focus on crimes by Stalin not as a separate issue, but mixed up with the Holocaust, is wrong and historically misleading. It is precisely what German antisemites since Ernst Nolte tried to pursue: both sides are evil, Nazis and Communists, everything is the same, one big mishmash.

Stalin committed many horrendous crimes. These crimes, though, have literally no place in a video dedicated to the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The video does not focus on the failure of the US or Great Britain. – It could have mentioned the widespread antisemitism in America and Britain, the closure of the US border as well as Palestine by the British.

However, the aggressive tone of Sam Sokol and many historians he quotes – from Deborah Lipstadt to Dan Michman and even Efraim Zuroff – speaks volume about the intention to follow the revisionist narrative: Red equals Brown. Sokol goes so far and writes:

The videos presented at the ceremony — which was attended by dozens of world leaders, among them Russian President Vladimir Putin — focused almost exclusively on the Soviet Union’s role in defeating the Nazis, while downplaying the role of America, Britain, and other countries. They also failed to mention Joseph Stalin’s deal with Adolf Hitler in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that preceded the war, Russia’s occupation of parts of Poland, and other facts uncomfortable for Moscow.”

As shown, that is simply incorrect – that video does indeed emphasize the role of the allies! Watch it and you will see.

If Jews now start using anti-Jewish historical revisionism such as that of Ernst Nolte, claiming that Stalin was first or at least as evil as Hitler – then Yad Vashem should stand strongly and clearly against the revisionists.

This is not about belittling the evil intentions of the Stalin-Hitler pact. It is about the misrepresentation by that pact by those in the far right East European antisemitic camp, and their followers in the West, to elevate it to a Holocaust-grade event as part of the effort to downgrade the Holocaust. Many Jews are alive today in Eastern Europe and beyond because from Sept 1, 1939 onward, their forebears escaped from the Nazi to the Soviet held sectors.

It is time for the West, Israel and Yad Vashem to understand which modes of discourse signal the very revisionism that is anathema to all that Yad Vashem stands for.

Finally, let me teach you a lesson about fascism in the 21st century: a few days ago, February 5, 2020, the fascist Björn Höcke and the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) voted in favor of the candidate for the head of the State of Thuringia (some 2 million inhabitants) from the conservative-libertarian FDP, a no-name called Kemmerich. Mr. Kemmerich even accepted the vote after it was clear that he did only win because of the votes by the fascists. Shake-hands with wannabe-Goebbels Björn Höcke followed. Shockwaves through the democratic parts of Germany. That was the first time that a Nazi like party voted for a Prime Minister of a German state since 1945 and their vote was crucial. A few days later, the FDP politician had to resign, due to political pressure from the ruling Christian Democratic Party and the FDP, while both parties had supported Kemmerich just a few hours before!

The main reason for the Conservatives and the libertarian-conservatives to vote alongside with the fascists of the AfD was to avoid the left-wing Prime Minister of Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow from the Party of the Left, who is rather a Social Democrat. The fascists and conservatives frame him as “communist” or “socialist” and preferred fascism over communism or socialism.

Those Israeli journalists or Jewish-American and other historians who claim that the Soviet Union allegedly played a pivotal or any role in the outbreak of World War II follow the very same kind of what I call “existential anti-communism.”

Those who want so speak about the crimes of communism when asked about the liberation of Auschwitz, distort the worst crime in history and follow antisemitic revisionism.

The video in question by Yad Vashem is a video dedicated to teach a big audience about the liberation of Auschwitz and that video is correct in not at all focusing on Soviet policies in other aspects, it does equally not focus on the failure of the US and Great Britain to stop Hitler and the Germans long before September 1, 1939.

Sam Sokol seems to be following the very European antisemitic trope of equating Red and Brown and I am wondering why and if historians such as Deborah Lipstadt (““I am absolutely heartbroken that Yad Vashem, which has such a stellar reputation and stayed above the political fray, should have become part of this politicization of history,” she lamented), Dan Michman (“Unfortunately, the short films that accompanied the event, and especially the film that was meant briefly to present the key points of World War II and the Holocaust, included a number of inaccuracies that resulted in a partial and unbalanced presentation of the historical facts”), or Efraim Zuroff (“Yad Vashem has never engaged in Holocaust distortion; exactly the opposite,” commented Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi-hunter who runs the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office, surmising that the “material was not reviewed by the leading historians of Yad Vashem” before being presented publicly”) play that game, as he quotes them accordingly.

It is not by accident that historian Dina Porat did not say anything in public so far, which is sad, because she could perhaps tell us a different story about that very video by Yad Vashem.

Nazi Germany was all alone responsible for the outbreak of World War II.

Germans wanted the war, they wanted to invade Poland, the Soviet Union and all of Europe. They wanted to eradicate Jews and Judaism from the earth.

To even mention Soviet or other realpolitik when it comes to the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and to insinuate September 1, 1939 was not Germany’s responsibility alone, promotes an old right-wing extremist lie.

Everybody who rejects the historical truth of the German and only German guilt of starting World War II is part of the problem.

Dovid Katz puts it splendidly:

While the Soviets’ 1939 invasion of eastern Poland was one of thousands of disgraceful and contemptible invasions in world history, it was not “the same” as Hitler’s 1939 invasion of western/central Poland. In the German sector, Hitler’s forces unleashed the Holocaust, the worst genocide in the history of humankind. In the Soviet sector, all of the various peoples were granted full equality to live equally under (lousy, autocratic, freedom-stifling, wealth-stealing) Soviet law. Any Jew that could flee to the Soviet sector was quick to do so. Many thousands of Jews today exist on the planet precisely because their parents, grandparents and others fled to the Soviet sector.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/germany-alone-started-ww-ii-why-is-toi-running-riot-against-yad-vashem/

Jews should stop supporting the Alt-Right and the enemies of the Jewish people

von

am November 23, 2017

in Uncategorized

Times of Israel, November 22, 2017

In these troubled days there is no inclination for a flowery introduction. No time for the flowers when 60,000 neo-Nazis march through the streets of Warsaw, flaunting Nazi salutes and promoting a “white” Poland while the minister of the interior applauds, when American neo-Nazis scream “Jews will not replace us” and a US President finds “fine people” among them, in a time when the first neo-Nazi party ever was elected to the postwar German Parliament, the Bundestag. All this in 2017.

Medias in res: Let’s be crystal clear – the pro-Israel camp in the US, Europe and Israel has a huge problem with right-wing extremism, racism, antisemitism and bigotry. Plain and simple.

During my time as a post-doctoral associate at Yale University in 2008-2009, I joined the chairperson of my center, the eminent scholar and dauntless campaigner for an academic response to resurgent antisemitism, Dr. Charles Small, founder of the Institute for the Global Study of Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), and another colleague for an event at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. There was an interesting debate going on with about “Radical Islam and the Nuclear Bomb.” Later, we had a vibrant discussion with Bret Stephens in a smaller circle. Now, Stephens works as a journalist for the New York Times and in a groundbreaking piece on November 16, 2017, he boldly critiqued the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA):

“The Zionist Organization of America feted Stephen K. Bannon at a gala dinner in New York on Sunday night. What a disgrace.

What a mistake, too. It’s a disgrace because no organization that purports to represent the interests of the Jewish people should ever embrace anyone who embraces anti-Semites. Jews have enemies enough.”

Stephens compares the Zionist Organization of America to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, and he does so quite rightly:

“But just as there are anti-Zionist Jews, there are also anti-Semitic Zionists.”

While the Zionist Organization of America hosts and praises the far-right’s hero of the decade, Steve Bannon, the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), headquartered in Los Angeles, even prayed publicly in a PR extravaganza for a new president who is sexist, racist and a follower of antisemitic conspiracy myths.

The Middle East Forum’s (MEF) president Daniel Pipes left the Republican Party (GOP) after 44 years, due to the nomination of Trump. His statement, explaining why he left the GOP is truly important and much to the point:

“The Republican Party nominated Donald Trump as its candidate for president of the United States – and I responded by ending my 44-year GOP membership. Here’s why I bailed, quit, and jumped ship: First, Trump’s boorish, selfish, puerile, and repulsive character, combined with his prideful ignorance, his off-the-cuff policy making, and his neo-fascistic tendencies make him the most divisive and scary of any serious presidential candidate in American history.”

Pipes stands for an anti-Islamist position, distinguishing between Islam as a religion and Islamism as an ideology. Islamism and jihad are main threats to the Western world, to America, and the Jewish state of Israel. Supporting moderate Muslims is also important to the MEF and Pipes.

While Jewish anti-Zionists are very troubling these days, including their support for BDS, pro-Zionist Jewish bodies are of course not attacked by think tanks such as the MEF. However, that same Middle East Forum now goes ahead and supports an extreme right-wing German online page called “Journalistenwatch,” which is a trumpet for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), who’s then chairwoman Frauke Petry was very happy after the election of Trump. It was a big win for the extreme Right.

On November 9, 2017, the anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, Journalistenwatch published an article by Max Erdinger (the article is signed by “ME”, which stands for Max Erdinger). It attacks Jews in Germany, namely former head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany (2006–2010) and former Vice-President of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), Charlotte Knobloch, for her stance against neo-Nazis in general and the extreme right-wing party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) in particular.

The article blames the Central Council of Jews in Germany for their policies of remembrance for the Shoah. Charlotte Knobloch (85 years old), a Holocaust survivor, also works with the World Jewish Congress (WJC) on issues related to Holocaust remembrance. Journalistenwatch writes that Knobloch “agitates” against those who fight immigration and non-Germans.

They blame Knobloch for doing so while in Paris jihadist murder was going on. The accusation that she was silent on Muslim antisemitism, while Knobloch is among the best known critics of Muslim antisemitism, is part of the fake news plague of our time of Trumpism and right-wing extremist conspiracy myths.

Readers will soon learn just how active Knobloch and the Central Council of Jews in Germany are in fighting Islamist antisemitism.

Journalistenwatch says in Erdinger’s piece on November 9, 2017 that there must be “calculation” behind the behavior of Jews such as Knobloch and the Central Council of Jews in Germany in order to succeed in urging Germans to commemorate the Holocaust. What calculation? A Jewish conspiracy? That is an antisemitic resentment, aimed at Jews who urge non-Jews to remember the crimes of their forefathers and foremothers.

Journalistenwatch goes on to bemoan that it is

“not enough to visit concentration camp memorial sites. Then, we also need to talk about communism and socialism, about Stalin, Mao, PolPot, South Africa and the North Korean leader”.

That kind of Holocaust distortion is well-known in the field of research of antisemitism. When asked about Auschwitz, one  answers with Stalin, and that is a clear case of antisemitism –

Why? Because the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, while the Germans had built it and killed and gassed some 1.5 million people there, among them 1.2 million Jews. Stalin’s own crimes have nothing to do with Holocaust remembrance. Yet, this typical reaction by ordinary Germans and their allies is part of today’s Holocaust distortion or “double genocide” ideology. The infamous Prague Declaration and the critique by eminent scholar and defender of history, Professor Dovid Katz from Lithuania, is a case in point.

At the end of the November 9 article by Journalistenwatch we find:

“Therefore, Central Council of Jews in Germany: finally, become honest or shut up your impertinent mouth.”

Jews who urge Germans to visit concentration camps, have an “impertinent mouth”? If that is not antisemitism, what is?

Does the Middle East Forum (MEF) and Daniel Pipes truly want to support a group like Journalistenwatch that is defaming the leading Jewish, Zionist and anti-Islamist body in Germany, the Central Council of Jews in Germany? The Central Council of Jews in Germany is the best-known Jewish voice in Germany when it comes to defending the Jewish state of Israel, to remembering the Holocaust, to protecting German Jews, and combating Muslim antisemitism, and right-wing, left-wing as well as mainstream antisemitism in all its forms.

Journalistenwatch obviously fights against the Jewish community in Germany, which is represented by the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Of course, they might find two or three extremist Jews, who share their resentment against the Central Council. We also have left-wing anti-Zionist Jews in Germany who like to defame the Zionist Central Council of Jews. There are diverse views, and highly fringe views, among all groups, but that is not the point.

For non-Jews in Germany, the Central Council of Jews in Germany is the core concept of “the enemy.” In 2002, extreme right-wing politician Jürgen Möllemann from the Libertarian Party (FDP) accused Ariel Sharon for killing children with tanks, and he attacked Michel Friedman for defending Israel and the Jews. At the time, Friedman was Vice President of the Central Council (May 2002), Möllemann had said on TV (Channel 2, ZDF), on May 16, 2002, that “Jews,” such as “Ariel Sharon or Michel Friedman,” “are responsible for growing antisemitism.” Today, Friedman, who is a public intellectual and journalist, is also anti-Nazi and anti-AfD, to be sure. Hatred of Friedman, and nowadays Charlotte Knobloch or today’s head of the Central Council, Josef Schuster, indicates hatred of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and this has not stopped, but only increased in the years to 2017. Journalistenwatch is a case in point.

Linguist and scholar of antisemitism, Professor Monika Schwarz-Friesel of the Technical University Berlin, in 2013 published a book, co-written with Jehuda Reinharz (former President of Brandeis University, from 1994–2010), dealing with 14,000 antisemitic letters to the Central Council of Jews in Germany and to the Israeli Embassy in Germany between 2002 and 2012. They underline that the Central Council of Jews is a core target for antisemites in Germany, including and most importantly, from the mainstream. Journalistenwatch clearly promotes that kind of hatred towards the Central Council.

The Central Council very often gives interviews or statements against different forms of antisemitism. On July 23, 2017, for example, Josef Schuster, gave an interview to the leading newspaper BILD, urging Muslim organizations to be more active against Muslim antisemitism. In an interview with RP online, May 15, 2017, Schuster argued against Muslim antisemitism as well as neo-Nazi antisemitism and he rejects the fantasy, that the AfD is pro-Jewish. On August 5, 2014, then head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dieter Graumann, says the Jewish world in Germany feels “shock waves” after aggressive antisemitic rallies during the Gaza war, mainly from Islamists and Muslim antisemites.

After the jihadist attacks in Paris against the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in January 2015, in an interview with the Berlin based daily Tagesspiegel, January 24, 2015, Schuster argued vehemently against Muslim and Islamist antisemitism. On January 14, 2015, Charlotte Knobloch was quoted as saying she “fears Islamist terrorism”. After the jihadist massacre in Paris on November 13, 2015, where 130 civilians were killed by jihadists, including 89 people at a rock concert in the Bataclan club in downtown Paris, Knobloch, as head of the Israelite Community of Munich [Israelitische Kultusgemeinde München und Oberbayern], issued a statement the following day calling the outrage a “terror of a new dimension.” On November 18, 2017, Knobloch published an article in the mainstream Focus journal, urging Muslims and immigrants to stop preaching anti-Western ideology, including antisemitism and hatred of democracy and a Western way of life.

So much for the blatant untruths of Journalistenwatch that the Central Council of Jews in Germany and Charlotte Knobloch are unable or reluctant to deal with Muslim antisemitism or jihad. It’s just fake news, period.

Islamism, Muslim antisemitism and jihad are at the core of the work of the Central Council. But Journalistenwatch intentionally agitates against Jews such as Knobloch, because she does not share their extreme right-wing agenda.

Journalistenwatch can’t stand Charlotte Knobloch and the Central Council of Jews in Germany, because they stand for a pro-Israel agenda, for genuine Holocaust remembrance, and for a clear stance against neo-Nazism, right-wing extremism and the far-right AfD party.

This extremist agenda of the Far Right in Germany can be seen ever so clearly this month. In November alone, Journalistenwatch agitated against an anti-Nazi congress in Munich, to be held at the Munich chapter of the huge German Trade Union [Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB], which has more than six million members. At that left-wing Antifa congress, the AfD and the right-wing extremist Pegida-movement (Patriots against Islamiziation of the Occident) joined forces and some 50-60 activists protested outside the 600 Antifa people who were a part of the congress.

One of the Pegida-counter protesters, who also joined the AfD event against the Antifa, was a certain Karl-Heinz Statzberger, as the Bavarian chapter of the German first TV channel, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), reports. Statzberger is a convicted neo-Nazi. He wanted to blow up the Jewish Community Center of Munich and was convicted for that crime; his sentence was four years and four months in jail, alongside with his fellow neo-Nazis, including Martin Wiese (seven years) and others.

Today, according to the German daily tageszeitung (taz), Statzberger supports the neo-Nazis of the “National Socialist Underground” [Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund, NSU], who since May 2013 face trial in Munich. The NSU killed at least 10 people between 2000 and 2006, among them nine immigrants and one police officer.

So much for the hapless pretense by Journalistenwatch that the AfD is not connected to neo-Nazis. Journalistenwatch reported about the events against the Antifa congress in Munich without mentioning the participation of a convicted neo-Nazi among the Pegida and AfD “protesters”. Instead, Journalistenwatch posted a video online by a speaker at the Anti-Antifa event, an AfD MP in the Bundestag, Wolfgang Wiehle, who spoke there on Nov. 4, 2017.

German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel said prior to the election, that “real Nazis” will be standing at the speakers desk in Parliament, if the AfD is elected, and Minister of Justice Heiko Maas emphasized, that the party program of the AfD is “in part against the German constitution.”

AfD politician Beatrix von Storch claims that “Islam as such is a political ideology and not compatible with the German constitution.” That contradicts the distinction between Islam as a religion and Islamism as an ideology, made by Pipes and the MEF. The Huffington Post reported on May 27, 2013, about an event with Daniel Pipes about Islamism and Islam and the crucial distinction between Islam and Islamism. If all of Islam is Islamism, we would have lost. Israel would be lost, liberal Muslims couldn’t exist. But they do exist, as the event in Mississauga, a town near Toronto in Canada, where Pipes spoke, indicates. He was invited by a Muslim Committee against Antisemitism. The AfD rejects the core difference between Islam and Islamism.

In their party program of June 2016, the AfD rejects “minarets” in general, which violates freedom of religion and stands against the principles of the Middle East Forum, because, we assume, the MEF supports moderate Muslims, who might be among those who go into mosques with minarets.

In their program for the federal elections to the German Parliament, the Bundestag, on September 24, 2017, from April 2017, the AfD again rejected “minarets” as such. That, again, violates the German constitution and is set against the freedom of religion. Then, the AfD party program rejected also shechita (traditional Jewish slaughtering according to the laws of kosherness) in all its forms (see point 13.4 of their program). In particular they aim at “religious communities” and want to forbid shechita for them as well (nowadays, Germany allows shechtia for religious communities). Is the Middle East Forum against the freedom of religion?

Leading AfD politician Alexander Gauland said on September 2, 2017 at a meeting at the German nationalist symbol, the mountain Kyffhäuser in Thuringia, we should be “proud of two German armies in two World Wars” — including, in other words, the role of the German Wehrmacht in the Holocaust and the destruction of Poland, Belarus, the western Soviet Union and vast parts of Europe. Being proud of the German Army in the Second World War also includes pride for having killed American soldiers.

We are dealing here (most probably) with American donors to the Middle East Forum (MEF) that supported the page Journalistenwatch, which promotes and embraces the AfD, and Gauland is No.1 of the AfD in the German Bundestag, alongside with Alice Weidel. Giving money to an online news page that promotes and supports a political party, which is proud of German soldiers who participated in the Holocaust and also killed American and Allied soldiers who saved Europe from Hitler? Really? Journalistenwatch defends Gaulands pride in the German army of the Second World War!

Former head of the party Frauke Petry has reintroduced the Nazi word “völkisch” (“of the People” in a nationalist-racist conceptual framework) into the mainstream. It was a prime antisemitic term in Nazi Germany.

Other AfD politicians used Nazi slogans such as “Deutschland Erwache,” a slogan of the Storm Troopers (SA, Sturmabteilung), the SS (Schutzstaffel) and the Nazi Party (NSDAP). It is nowadays used on Twitter by Cologne AfD member Hendrik Rottmann, according to a report by the daily Die Welt. That slogan is illegal in Germany, as it resembles Nazi ideology (§86, 4 of the German Criminal Code, see report of the Saxonian chapter of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, report 2015, page 9). Journalistenwatch defends Rottmann.

Many AfD politicians share violent fantasies about hurting, hunting, torturing or killing left-wingers, the Antifa, Muslims, Jews, pro-abortion women etc. Journalistenwatch is promoting the AfD. Prior to his AfD membership Holger Arppe, an MP of the AfD in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, according to leading news site in Germany, Spiegel Online, wrote in a chat on March 17, 2012: “Perhaps we should kidnap [name’s] mother, brutally rape her on a daily basis by a chimp and then send [an acquaintance] a finger, day by day.”

Journalistenwatch trivializes the sick and violent fantasies of AfD-Arppe and equate this politician to Erdogan’s hostage in jail, German journalist Deniz Yücel, and his editor-in-chief of the daily Die Welt, Ulf Poschardt. For Journalistenwatch neo-Nazi-style Arppe, anti-Islamist Yücel, who is also critical of German nationalism, and his ally Poschardt are equally horrible. This kind of comparison is nothing but an insidious trivialization of violent fantasies of the Alternative for Germany’s personal (Arppe) and their loudspeakers (Journalistenwatch).

AfD MP in the Bundestag, Markus Frohnmaier, is working at a “German Centre for Eurasian Studies.” He is collaborating with right-wing extremist Manuel Ochsenreiter, editor of the journal “Zuerst.” Ochsenreiter wrote an anti-Israel book about “The Power of the Zionist lobby in Germany”, that was translated into Farsi with help of the Iranian Ministry of Culture, according to an article by exile Iranian, anti-Islamist and pro-Israel activist Kazem Moussavi. Frohnmaier is a spokesperson for AfD MP Alice Weidel, number one of the party in Parliament, together with Alexander Gauland. Journalistenwatch promotes Frohnmaier.

Journalist Esther Scheiner from Switzerland, who made aliyah to Israel several years ago, urges the Middle East Forum (MEF) to immediately stop supporting antisemitic and extreme right-wing groups such as “Journalistenwatch”, as she writes on a German language Israeli news site.

In 2015, for the first time, a German minister, Heiko Maas, Minister of Justice, spoke at the Israeli government sponsored Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism. Maas is a leading voice against neo-Nazism, right-wing extremism as well as the “Alternative for Germany (AfD).”

Support for Israel must be right in the mainstream, not a partisan project of neo-Nazis, who want a Jew-free Germany (and America).

American NGOs and think tanks, such as the Middle East Forum (MEF), might have reasonable concern about the failure of scholarship and activism when it comes to Israel and jihad, as the pro-Edward Said post-colonial mainstream would seem to indicate. Therefore, support for serious anti-Islamist scholarship and activism, as well as support for Zionist scholarship and activism is essential – but not support for those, who join Germany’s far-right antisemitic establishment in defaming German Jews like Charlotte Knobloch or the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

If NGOs or think tanks support such extreme right-wing groups, they do not just harm Israel and Jews in Germany, they even work against their own commitment to protect American values and interests. Since when has it been an American interest to support German neo-Nazi style agitators who endorse a party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is “proud of German soldiers in two World Wars,” including the Wehrmacht in the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the killing of American soldiers? Since when do donors or members of boards of governors support such German neo-Nazi type groups?

They would do better to listen to Bret Stephens in the New York Times:

“If Israel is going to retain mainstream political support, it cannot allow itself to become the pet cause of right-wing bigots and conspiracy theorists. That requires putting serious distance between Bannon and every pro-Israel organization, to say nothing of the Israeli government itself, by refusing to provide a platform for him and his ilk. Personal and national reputations alike always depend on the company one keeps. Not every would-be supporter deserves consideration as a friend.”

The very same far-right people in the pro-Israel camp also should listen to historian Martin Kramer from the Shalem College in Israel: in an article in Mosaic Magazine, November 6, 2017, he emphasizes the pro-Zionist role of Stalin, Gromyko and other Soviet politicians and diplomats in the years 1947–1949. Without Gromyko, Israel might not have had a diplomatic chance, as US President Truman was not at all as Zionist as many American Jews still like to believe. Stalin was much more pro-Israel at that time, and Stalin was the one who defeated the Germans and who liberated Auschwitz. Without Czech weaponry and Soviet help, Israel would probably not have survived the War of Independence.

Why remember that? Because bipartisanship is at the core of Zionism. Jews and Zionists depended on capitalists and communists to make Israel happen. In Germany, many of the often-defamed Antifa are anti-Nazi and pro-Israel, while the self-declared pro-Israel far right is antisemitic.

Zionists and Jews do not depend on neo-Nazis to defend them, to be sure.

At the end of the day, neo-Nazis want to kill the Jews. However, too many well-meaning pro-Israel Jews, many quiet naive, still don’t get it.

Today, many people in the pro-Israel camp defame Zionist left-wingers and defame every kind of reasonable criticism of Israeli policies or poor pro-Israel advocacy in Germany or other countries. Many simply deny that there are troubling tendencies in Israeli political culture. We do not ignore Arab, Palestinian and Islamist antisemitism, of course. The Arab rejection of the UN partition plan from November 1947 was a historical mistake. It is not the one and only problem, though. The occupation after 1967 is a problem, too, no doubt about this. Just ask David Ben-Gurion.

Some rightwing Zionists in countries such as Germany and America defame Israeli liberals while lionizing pro-fascists such as Bannon. Some would like to forget that President Trump did not mention Jews in his special message for Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2017, an omission that is not “accidental” in the current state of discourse.

Bret Stephens continues in the New York Times:

“The second reason is that political support for Israel is too important to tarnish through association with the likes of Bannon or European kindred spirits such as Holland’s Geert Wilders or Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Israel is not a latter-day Crusader kingdom holding out against a 21st-century Mahometan horde. It is a small democracy trying to uphold a set of liberal values against autocrats and religious fanatics sworn to its destruction. Zionists love Israel because of the way in which it brings together the values of individual freedom and Jewish civilization, not because of some blood and soil nationalism.“

Therefore, we strongly urge the Middle East Forum (MEF) to stop supporting extreme right-wing groups such as “Journalistenwatch” in Germany, and all other groups that harm the Jewish state of Israel, defame left-of-center Zionism, or Jewish bodies such as the Central Council of Jews in Germany. They must stop supporting groups that agitate against all immigrants and Muslims and reject any distinction between Islam and Islamism, reject Holocaust remembrance and praise the German (or Lithuanian or Hungarian, or Ukrainian etc.) armies and units who were involved in perpetrating the Holocaust.

It is all common sense. We need to step back and soberly assess the unique and disturbing combinations and juxtapositions of 2017.

 

An earlier, much shorter version of this article was published in The Times of Israel (TOI) blogs on November 18, 2017. The German online news blog “Journalistenwatch” complained and told TOI that their author McMahon was not quoted correctly from an October 2017 article. In fact, I did not at all refer to that article. I referred rather to an article from November 9, 2017, as indicated in the text. In any event, TOI deleted my article and sent it back (without asking me if I had quoted that October 2017 article, which I had not). Falsification of fact to undermine honest discourse is alas a hallmark of “Journalistenwatch” and hopefully major international Jewish journals and portals will stand their ground firmly.

The author, Clemens Heni, Ph.D., wrote a M.A. thesis in 1999 (at Bremen University) about the relationship of Germany, antisemitism and the Holocaust, comparing Daniel J. Goldhagen’s (Harvard) study “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” (1996) to Critical Theory’s masterpiece “Dialectic of Enlightenment” by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (1944/47); in January 2001 (during the second Intifada), he was a co-author of a brochure about left-wing anti-Zionism in Germany, based on the antisemitic hijacking by left-wing Germans of the Revolutionäre Zellen (RZ) and Palestinians of an airplane in June/July 1976 to Entebbe (Uganda), where Benjamin Netanyahu’s elder brother Yoni was killed; in 2006 he received his Ph.D. at the University of Innsbruck (Austria, “summa cum laude”) with a study (509 pages) about political culture and the New Right in German political mainstream from 1970–2005; in 2008/09 he was a Post-Doc Associate at Yale University (Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, YIISA), doing a study about German antisemitism, including the Nazi time and post-Holocaust antisemitism (332 pages); in 2011 he published a study about Islamic Studies and Antisemitism in Germany after 9/11 (410 pages, in German, supported by the Middle East Forum, MEF); in 2013 he published his study “Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon Holocaust Trivialization – Islamism – Post-colonial and Cosmopolitan anti-Zionism” (648 pages; review in the Middle East Quarterly by the MEF in 2017); in 2014 he did a book (177 pages, in German) about “Critical Theory and Israel. Max Horkheimer and Judith Butler, Judaism, binationalism and Zionism” (lecture at ISGAP in April 2014); 2017 he published a collection of essays (in German, 262 pages) about German nationalism, racism and antisemitism, entitled “An Alternative towards Germany” (also as an E-Book); Heni is director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA), founded in 2011; since 2016 BICSA organizes the Robert S. Wistrich (1945–2015) Memorial lectures (on May 19); 2011 BICSA published Wistrich’s brochure “Muslim Antisemitism” (American Jewish Committee, 2002) in a German translation, 2015 BICSA published a second edition of Wistrich’s groundbreaking “Hitler’s Apocalypse” from 1985, including his analysis of the Islamist threat; 2017, BICSA translated (Clemens Heni and Michael Kreutz, 456 pages) the book “The Israeli Nation-State,” co-edited by Fania Oz-Salzberger and Yedidia Z. Stern, into German; Since May 2016, Heni is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism (JCA) by Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA.

 

Interview with J.J. Goldberg: From the Radical Zionist Alliance to Criticism of Trump and the American Jewish Establishment (audio file)

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am Januar 6, 2017

in Uncategorized

An Interview with J.J. Goldberg from New York City, editor-at-large of the Forward, by Clemens Heni, Director of The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA) – January 5, 2017 (audio file)

Listen to the Interview

:

List of contents:

0:51  Radical Zionist Alliance

2:20  Middle East Forum, Daniel Pipes

4:00  Refugees are also human beings

6:30  Trump might start a war because he is thoughtless

9:15  ADL, SWC & Jewish Establishment

9:45  Alvin Rosenfeld

11:10 ADL and Donors in the American-Jewish Community

11:55 Is protesting Trump useless?

13:00 Demonstrations in a divided country only anger the general public…

14:00 The more principled, the less influence?

16:10 UNSC Resolution 2334 against settlements, but pro-Israel

17:05 For the political Right there is no difference between Israel + the settlements

20:00 Theodore Sasson: The New American Zionism (2014)

22:00 Left-wing pro-Israel groups have not much influence in the US

25:00 American Jewish Community + the influence of the Right (Miami)

30:40 Antisemitism Research: just right-wingers?

31:30 One-state solution as anti-Zionism (Islamism, Butler, settlers)

32:00 Liberals are studying issues between the Jews (like treatment of minorities)

33:15 Conservative Newspapers look what Foreign Countries do to America

33:30 YIISA shut down by Yale – too much pro-Israel

34:30 Is opposing Israel antisemitic?

36:03 Antisemitism is hating Jews for no reason

38:00 Today’s antisemitism is closely related to hostility to the Jewish state

38:30 Gershom Scholem from cultural Zionism to political Zionism (1923–1936/48)

39:50 20% Arabs in Israel

41:10 Own villages for Muslims in Germany?

42:20 Danger of ethno or ethnic pluralism, right-wing ideology of Henning Eichberg

43:00 No Western democracy can exist with segregation on the long run

45:58 Haifa as an example of Jewish-Arab inclusion, not separation

52:57 One-state solution: End of Jewish Sovereignty

53:22 Arab and Muslim antisemitism will not disappear soon

57:00 Sincereness of Arab Peace Plan

1:03:00 Trump remains an earthquake / Divide in American Jewry

 

 

 

The Robert S. Wistrich Memorial Lecture 2016 by BICSA (VIDEO)

von

am Juni 5, 2016

in Allgemein

The Robert S. Wistrich Memorial Lecture

Does Germany need just another Islamist, anti-Israel and antisemitic infusion by John L. Esposito?

von

am Januar 7, 2016

in Allgemein

By Clemens Heni

First published on CampusWatch

75 year old John L. Esposito, Georgetown University’s Director of the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., will be the keynote speaker of a big conference in Germany, Jan 14–16, 2016, about „anti-Muslim racism and hostility towards Islam in Germany and Europe.“

The conference will take place at the University of Osnabrück in the North-West of Germany, over forty speakers are invited to speak. The event is organized by the “Center for Islamic Theology,” and supported by the German Federal Government and its Ministry of Education and Research, Lower Saxony’s Ministry for Research and Culture, and the Post Graduate Program Islamic Theology.

This Center for Islamic Theology is headed by Bülent Ucar, who is the main organizer of the event alongside with his co-worker, Nina Mühe, an anthropologist and Islamic studies scholar known for her attack on Berlin’s Anti-Hijab Law in classroom. Mühe is a former fellow at a German branch of George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

Obviously, attacks like the Charlie Hebdo and Kosher supermarket massacre in Paris in January 2015 are a “reason” for many academics in the humanities and social sciences to focus on an alleged “anti-Muslim racism‟ and not on Jihad, Islamism, Muslim anti-Semitism and Muslim terrorists. This is mainstream in Europe and the Western world ever since 9/11. We are facing in part a racist and nationalist climate in Germany, indeed. But this has nothing to do with the rejection of most academics in the field of Islamic Studies to deal, let alone fight Islamism in all its forms. The true antifascism of the 21st century deals with both the neo-Nazi and Islamist threats.

In his book “Who Speaks for Islam?” (2007, together with Dalia Mogahed), Esposito used the equivalence of anti-Semitism and “Islamophobia.” In his distorted view, Jews aren’t but a “religion” and just one of two “religions with Semitic origins.” In fact, hatred of Jews is a worldwide ideology, while “Islamophobia” is rather an invention by some specific circles, namely Iran and Islamist organizations and their followers.

In “Who Speaks for Islam,” the authors defame Islamic Studies scholar Daniel Pipes of being “anti-Muslim,” intentionally distorting his well-known and long-time distinction between Islam as religion and Islamism as an ideology, or between moderate and radical Muslims. More recently, Esposito also started to defame Egypts’s anti-Muslim-Brotherhood stance and started his „Brigde Initiative,“ dedicated to the analysis of „Islamophobia“ and the defamation of all critics of jihad and Islamism.

Esposito is fascinated by the “Iranian Revolution” from 1979, as can be seen in his edited volume “The Iranian Revolution. Its Global Impact” (1990) and his chapter “The Iranian Revolution. A Ten-Year Perspective,” where he also emphasized the outreach of Iranian style Islamism to Muslims outside Iran. In 2010, he co-edited the volume “Islam and Peacebuilding. Gülen Movements Initiates,” where he promotes the Islamist approach of Fethullah Gülen and frames him as a kind of Islamic version of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Both share a “similar belief in mutual understanding, dialogue and optimism,” murmurs Esposito.

This “optimism” (a nice word for the spread of Islamism, no?) can also be seen in the work of leading Sunni cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, another protagonist of Esposito. In his book “The Future of Islam” (2010), the Saudi (Prince Alwaleed) funded scholar says, al-Qaradawi “claims that everything is acceptable (halal) unless proven forbidden (haram).” This makes him a moderate according to Esposito and his German colleagues Gudrun Krämer and Bettina Gräf. Gräf co-edited a book, “The Global Mufti,” with pieces by another Georgetown academic, Barbara Freyer-Stowasser (1935–2012), about “gender equality” in a fatwa about female suiciding bombing against Israel by al-Qaradawi.

In “The Future of Islam,” Esposito also invokes an equivalence between Islamic and Western “fundamentalism,” taking Ronald Reagan and the Iranian Revolution as examples, he also compares George W. Bush to Osama Bin Laden. This cultural relativist approach is well known. But jihad and the rule of religion (Islamism) is not the same as whatever democratic government in the US, Britain or Germany and France etc. does. Mustafa Ceric, former Grand Mufti of Sarajevo, is another Islamist portrayed as kosher, by Esposito. Ceric once went to the Auschwitz Memorial site, not to remember the Shoah but rather to invoke the Muslims-are-the-new-Jews-analogy. Ceric has also been criticized for his ties to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, among other Islamist aspects of his approach.

Finally, Esposito refers to German security expert and former head (1996–2000) of the “Federal Agency for the Protection of the Constitution,” Peter Frisch. In his 2010 book (finished in 2009), Esposito writes about Frisch as if he was head of that important institution in 2009, which is a minor problem compared to the lie, the Georgetown scholar spreads about Frisch. Esposito writes: “In Germany, Peter Frisch, head of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), has repeatedly asserted, ‘Muslims want to rule the world.’” He does not quote form a single article by Frisch. In 2001, after 9/11, Frisch argued against the defamation of all Muslims. In 1997, Frisch argued against the rise of Islamism and the reluctance in Germany to even deal with that problem. To my knowledge, he never said that all Muslims want to rule the world. This reproach is rather a lie, invented by Esposito – who runs short to substantiate his claim. But Esposito is obviously not interested in research and quotes.

August 5, 2014, during the latest Gaza War, John L. Esposito tweeted the following: “Elie Wiesel plays the Holocaust trump card in Gaza” and links to an antisemitic homepage – “Mondoweiss.” Wiesel had said, that Jews stopped using children as sacrifices some 3500 years ago, Hamas should stop it now, too. Truly a correct statement, taken the fact that Hamas is verifiably known for abusing children and others as human shields. For Esposito this was just another reason to defame Israel and make fun of the Shoah and a Holocaust survivor.

Esposito compares Israel to Nazis, uses even more antisemitic language, promotes Islamists as possible allies and defames German officials, who headed federal offices in the fight against Jihad and Islamism.

Are these enough reasons for the Jewish Museum Berlin’s Yasemin Shooman, the mainstream weekly “Die Zeit” and its author Yassin Musharbash, the left-green-wing daily “taz” and its Daniel Bax, scholars like Andreas Zick from Bielefeld University, who even sits on Board of the US based “Journal for the Study of Antisemitism” (JSA), or historian Wolfgang Benz, former head of the “Center for Research on Antisemitism” at Technical University Berlin, dozens of other scholars, activists and authors, the Government of Lower Saxony and the German Federal Government to support and join such an event?

 

Dr. Clemens Heni is a political scientist, the author of five books, including “Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon. Holocaust Trivialization – Islamism – Post-colonial and Cosmopolitan anti-Zionism” (Berlin 2013, 648 pages), “Schadenfreude. Islamic Studies and Antisemitism in Germany after 9/11” (2011, in German, 410 pages) and the director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA), www.bicsa.org

A response to Bernard-Henri Lévy

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am November 22, 2015

in Allgemein

By Leslie S. Lebl, Connecticut, USA

On November 16, 2015, French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy published a commentary in which he urges the West to acknowledge that it is at war and must call things by their right names. He subsequently argues that we must battle Islamic jihad while understanding the difference between those Muslims who worship death and those who support a peaceful, tolerant form of Islam.

It is difficult to quarrel with this concept, especially when one remembers that by far the largest number of people who have died fighting various jihadist groups have been Muslims. But, as in so many other cases, “the devil is in the detail.” Lévy’s argument suffers by failing to acknowledge or understand some of the “details.”

Distinguishing ‘moderate’ from ‘radical’ Muslims sounds easy, until you try it. For example, Lévy includes former Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović among the moderates. Yet Izetbegović’s famous Islamic Declaration (1970) presents a vision of Islamic triumph completely consistent with the Islamist goal of imposing traditional Islamic law, or sharia, in Western countries. It argues that Muslims living in a non-Muslim ma­jority country should play by the rules of that coun­try—until they are strong enough to overthrow the system and install an Islamic government. The Declaration has been dismissed as a youthful folly, yet Izetbegović distributed it to Bosniac troops during the 1990s war, suggesting that it still reflected his thinking – as did other actions promoting Islamism and jihad taken while he was in office.[i]

A number of people, including Adolf Hitler, perceived similarities between Islam and Nazism, but it does not help to charge that Nazism is a form of Islamism, as does Lévy while citing French poet, dramatist and diplomat Paul Claudel, a well known Catholic at the time. This trivializes Nazism as just another form of Islamism. From a historical perspective, this is an extremely difficult argument to make, in view of all the other sources of Nazism much closer to home. Nor does it help promote understanding in today’s world, where the word “fascism” is tossed about with abandon. Applying it to the terrorist groups attacking the West does little to focus our thinking. Nor does Levy’s explanation address the much more pressing and painful fact that Islamism has, since World War II, poisoned the Muslim world with its genocidal hatred of Jews, the Jewish state of Israel and the Western way of life. Today, Arabic translations of Mein Kampf and Protocols of the Elders of Zion are available in just about any bookstore, and stories like those told by Robert Satloff of Arabs saving Jews during World War II appear hopelessly remote.[ii] Yes, Arabs in the Middle East can argue that they had nothing to do with the Holocaust, but they cannot simultaneously proclaim their admiration for Nazism while claiming moral superiority.

Lévy is also wrong when he states that the “real source of this flood of horror” is the Islamic State. Islamic State may have carried out the latest attacks, and be our most significant threat right now, but it is only following in the well-established tradition of other groups like Al Qaeda and the Algerian GIS. Nor is it the bloodiest or most murderous group today: that honor belongs rather to Boko Haram.

The problem is not the group but the ideology, which all these terrorist organizations share with the so-called “nonviolent” Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, whom Lévy seems to ignore. All of them want to establish a global Caliphate under sharia, but the “nonviolent” groups believe it is easier and more efficacious to do so without violence. Former U.S. President George W. Bush was indeed wrong to declare a “War on Terror” when what threatens the West is not a tactic but an ideology. Banning hate preachers is fine but will achieve little as long as groups like the Brotherhood, posing as friends of Western democracy, laws and values, in fact act as a Fifth Column (as did Nazi groups, as Lévy notes). Recent events in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere have revealed the Brotherhood’s true face, but Lévy seems to ignore these revelations. Unfortunately, however, the Brotherhood’s presence throughout Western Muslim communities, and its ability to poison traditional Islam, make the problem of isolating our true enemies much more difficult than Lévy imagines.

[i] For more details, see Leslie S. Lebl, Islamism and Security in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Strategic Studies Institute, May 2014, pp. 20–26.

[ii] Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands (New York: Public Affairs, 2006).

 

Leslie S. Lebl, a former US diplomat, is an independent scholar writing on Islamism in Europe. She is currently working on a book about the EU, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation

Huge event at Mount Scopus honors leading researcher on antisemitism

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am Juni 3, 2014

in Allgemein

By Dr. Clemens Heni, Director, The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA)

 

25–28 May, 2014, Israel’s biggest and one of the biggest conferences world-wide ever on the topic of antisemitism was held at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, on the occasion of the retirement of historian Robert Solomon Wistrich. The International Conference was entitled “Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, Delegitimizing Israel.”

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(View from the Maiersdorf Faculty Club over Jerusalem*)

The location was beautifully chosen. From the terrace of the Maiersdorf Faculty Club, where the event was held, one has a stunning view over Jerusalem. On the other side of Mount Scopus, just a five minute walk away at the gorgeous Amphitheatre, one looks out over the Judean Mountains and desert up to the Dead Sea and Jordan.

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(Hebrew University, Campus, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem*)

Robert Wistrich is the author of 17 books and the editor of 12. His work has been translated in many languages. He published over 350 articles between 1973 and 2011 – you find a complete list of his writings from 1973 through 2011 in the German edition of his Muslim Antisemitism, published in 2011 by Berlin based publishing house Edition Critic.

(Prof. Robert S. Wistrich’s German edition of his bestseller brochure from 2002 with the American Jewish Committee on Muslim Antisemitism, published in December 2011 with Berlin based publishing house Edition Critic)

I know of no other scholar who has such a record and continued reflection on antisemitism, the “longest hatred” and “lethal obsession,” as Robert frames it very precisely. His first article was published in 1973 about “Karl Marx, German Socialists and the Jewish Question.”

(Amphitheatre, Hebrew University, Mount Scopus)

Wistrich is known for “stepping back” and looking at the big picture, as he emphasized during his long talk at the conference. He focused on Jewish anti-Zionism, starting with famous Austrian literary critic Karl Kraus. The outstanding nature of Robert’s scholarship became again obvious during his presentation: like almost no one else he is able to jump from 19th century Jewish anti-Zionism and Reform Judaism to Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky’s 21st century Jewish anti-Zionism. He is not drawing direct lines and is very well aware of the differences between Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler, for example. The latter needs the German-Jewish thinker to bolster her own anti-Zionism. Arendt’s criticism of the nation-state, though, is indeed dangerous when it comes to the Jewish state. Still, this might differ from the very outspoken hatred of Zionism known from many Jewish-Austrian thinkers through the 1930s and that of the Butlers, Chomskys or even Finkelsteins of our time.

Robert_Wistrich_at_the_SICSA_International_Conference_2014_in_Jerusalem_0

 

(Prof. Robert S. Wistrich during his presentation at the SICSA conference, Tuesday, 27 May, 2014)

Robert Wistrich dedicated several of his books to his mother Sabina. She made aliyah age 100 in 2010. When asked at Ben-Gurion Airport if she was so fascinated about Zionism to make aliyah at that age, she said: “No, I just want to see the book of my son. That is the reason I came to Israel.” She was thinking of her son’s comprehensive history of antisemitism, A Lethal Obsession. Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, a 1184-page volume, published that year.

Robert Wistrich’s research can be put in five categories:

1)       The Left and Antisemitism

2)       Jewish History

3)       Hitler, National Socialism and the Holocaust/Shoah

4)       Theories and the analysis of antisemitism and anti-Zionism

5)       Muslim antisemitism

Contrary to many, Robert sees Friedrich Nietzsche in the most positive sense of the word as the most anti-German philosopher ever. Nietzsche was not a forerunner of fascism and Nazism. Instead, he embraced the Old Testament and the Jewish “naiveté of the strong heart.” One of the best talks at the huge conference was given by Margaret Brearley (not only because of her wonderful British accent). She dealt with German anti-Jewish esoteric and occult or paganist thinking from Friedrich Schiller through German romanticism and Schopenhauer.

Robert Wistrich was born in April 1945 in Kazakhstan. His father, Jacob Wistreich, a former member of Hashomer Hatzair, was displaced by Stalin (I do intentionally not use the word „deported“ as this means in German to be deported to a Holocaust site). This displacement by Stalin saved his life. Robert Wistrich lost half of his family in the Shoah.

Robert grew up in England, learning Polish, French, then English, German and Hebrew. He also knows or can read and listen to several other languages, including Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Dutch, and Arabic. His focus on Jewish history in Habsburg Austria is of tremendous importance. For example, he analyzed in his 1985 study Hitler’s Apocalypse the antisemitism of Hitler, including the time before 1914. Hitler lived in Vienna from 1907 until 1913. I mentioned this during my presentation at the conference, as we are increasingly facing scholars and authors who distort Hitler’s antisemitism. Take Brendan Simms from Cambridge, England, as an example. He argued in 2014 in an article for International Affairs that the First World War made Hitler an anti-English soldier. Only later did he become antisemitic, according to Simms. The same holds for American journalist Jonah Goldberg (National Review Online) who claims that Hitler was a leftist and “socialist” as he writes in his truly troubling and barely scholarly book Liberal Fascism. I emphasized that the notion that Hitler was left is utterly wrong. For example, “German Socialism,” as we call it, was based on private property and capitalism. The core of this “German Socialism” was hatred of Jews and the creation of the “people’s community” or Volksgemeinschaft in German. Hitler was an antisemite and the most far right politician ever. He was not an anticapitalist and not a “man of the left.”

At least in passing I could mention that there were Marxist (and later post-Marxist) pro-Israel scholars. Take Leo Löwenthal, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno and Critical Theory as an example. Most pro-Israel scholars and authors in America, the UK, South Africa, Australia and Israel think a priori that Critical Theory is anti-Zionist. That is not the case. But one has to be able to read German to discover the truth behind the origins of Critical Theory, founded in 1937 by Max Horkheimer. He had to struggle with Zionism, but supported Israel. He was aware of the Nasserist and Egyptian threat in the 1950s, for example. I have just published a comprehensive study on the topic of Critical Theory and Israel.

Gershom Scholem, one of the most famous Israeli and Hebrew University professors ever, became a political Zionist by the mid 1930s, turning his back on the “Brit Shalom” period of 1925–1933, based on binationalism and rather cultural Zionism. In my talk, I focused on scholars like Christian Wiese from Frankfurt University who embraces the binational ideology of Hans Kohn. In 2006, Wiese went so far as to quote from one of the most absurd anti-Zionist books so far, Jacqueline Rose’s Question of Zion from 2005. In that book, Rose wrote that Hitler was perhaps inspired to write Mein Kampf and Theodor Herzl to write Der Judenstaat at the very same concert of Wagner music. The problem is that Herzl finished his manuscript in May 1895. Hitler was born in 1889 and was never in France until 1940 when he conquered the country with the German Wehrmacht. Wiese quoted from the very chapter (pages 58–107) in Rose’s book where this antisemitic fantasy of the Hitler/Herzl association by the same taste in music appeared. Finally, I analyzed the scholarly shortcomings of Yale historian Timothy Snyder in his study Bloodlands, which distorts Auschwitz and the Shoah. I also emphasized his close relationship with anti-Zionist Tony Judt. Likewise I criticized Yale’s Seyla Benhabib and her defamation of Israel in 2010. Then, I mentioned troubling tropes in contemporary scholarship in postcolonial studies that distort the history of the Shoah.

At the conference at SICSA there were almost 40 speakers and presentations from four continents (America, Europe, Africa, Asia). Rabbi Abraham Cooper from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles analyzed the shocking new wave of anti-circumcision and anti-kosher-slaughtering discourse all over Europe, including Germany. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin dealt with the BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) movement in California at the huge University of California (state sponsored) educational system. New York’s Ben Cohen with his deep “Alabama” English accent (that remark was funny, as his accent obviously is British) focused on some core features of today’s antisemitism. He distinguishes between historical German “bierkeller” antisemitism and today’s “bistro” antisemitism. Rude agitation and the defamation of Jews as Jews were replaced in many western societies by the more sophisticated version of 21st century anti-Zionist antisemitism. Stephen Norwood showed the overlapping of left-wing and right-wing antisemitism in the United States. He also emphasized that there was significant support in the American Catholic mainstream and the Church during the 1930s and World War II for far-right Jew-hatred like that of Catholic priest Charles Coughlin.

A very few presentations, though, gave several people pause. One speaker said that there is “no Palestinian people” – who, then, should acknowledge the Jewish state, one must ask. Another speaker went so far as to say that the “West Bank is temporarily occupied by the Palestinians.” This was portrayed as supposedly pro-Israel. In fact, it is damaging the Israeli society from within the pro-Israel camp. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this year said that a future Palestinian state in the territories should think about including Jewish citizens. In fact, since 1948, Israel has some 20% Arab and Muslim citizens as well. Why is everybody a priori thinking of a Palestinian state with no Jews? Today, some 20% Jews are living in parts of the disputed territories. Daniel Pipes wrote about Netanyahu’s “master stroke.” Although I was not able to attend all presentations I did not hear people discussing that idea. This master stroke by Netanyahu includes the acceptance of Jews living in Judea and Samaria and in an Arab state. That would be a signal to the entire Arab and Muslim worlds that Jews are accepted as citizens and are not the “sons of pigs and apes” as the antisemitic discourse in parts of the Arab world always suggests.

Another speaker at the conference said that Norwegian killer Breivik is a criminal, “but” he killed “socialist anti-Zionists and possible future anti-Zionists.” This was shocking not just to me and I left the room soon after.

Jusos

 

 

 

Another speaker stressed that EUrope is already “Islamized” which was a rather racist comment and had nothing to do with a specific criticism of Islamism, Jihad and Muslim antisemitism. One speaker said that Islam as such is the reason for antisemitism and every single (believing) Muslim will become an antisemite sooner or later. Jihadists and Islamists are antisemites today, other Muslims will become antisemitic later. This is of course not the case. Take groups like British Muslims for Israel as an example, among many other pro-Israel Muslims. They are a tiny and oppressed minority in the Muslim community, but they exist. Or look at people like Irshad Manji, known for her modern translation of the Quran. She is pro-Western, pro-Israel and anti-Islamist. The ontologization of Muslims as “the enemy” sooner or later has of course to be rejected.

In addition, I would state: In May 2014, American anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller and her allies started an ad campaign in New York City. They show the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, talking to Hitler in November 1941. It is tremendously important to focus on that alliance, indeed. But what does the ad say? On the right side of that big picture one can read “Islamic Jew-hatred: It’s in the Quran”:

 

This reminds me, sarcastically, of leading Sunni Islamist Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He said in January 2009 on TV that Allah installed Hitler to “punish the Jews.” This Holocaust affirmation is unbelievable. Geller, who is of course pro-Israel and against antisemitism and Jihad, now insinuates that not just the Mufti but also Hitler was inspired by the Quran. The Quran and Islamic Jew-hatred was first and then came Hitler. This is also distorting the history of Islamism as a modern phenomenon in the Muslim world. To claim that today’s Islamist antisemitism is in the Quran – and promoting this ideology with a picture of Hitler – denies or obfuscates the very history of Islamism.

In addition, it also obfuscates the history of Austrian and German modern antisemitism that lead to the Shoah. Islamism is a very modern ideology, as historian and Islamic studies scholar, president of the Middle East Forum (MEF) in Philadelphia, Daniel Pipes, tirelessly emphasizes. Take Hassan al-Banna’s founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 in Egypt as a kind of starting point for 20th century modern Islamism as a mass movement. Old Islamic Jew-hatred rather resembled Christian Jew-hatred, and is distinct from German eliminationist antisemitism during Nazi Germany and the Shoah. Pipes is also always emphasizing the historical and political difference between Islam and Islamism, take 1798 as a starting point for the demise of the Muslim world and the emergence of Islamist ideology.

Holocaust remembrance is used as a tool to fight the Jewish state. This was a core message of one the most fascinating greeting remarks at the gala dinner at the first evening of the conference by Canadian scholar in law and politician, Irvin Cotler. He is known worldwide for his fight against antisemitism and he is using law to fight Jew-hatred like the incitement to genocide by Iran. Cotler focused on the supposedly well-meaning and for sure more sophisticated anti-Zionist activists of today. They say that the Holocaust was a horrible crime, like South-African apartheid. At this point I ignore the Holocaust distorting aspects of that very comparison or equation, by the way. For liberals in particular Israel has become in some respects the new “Apartheid State” or even “Nazi State.” And here is what Irvin Cotler emphasized: IF Israel is an apartheid state or even a Nazi state people have to fight it. The terms apartheid state and Nazi state are not just meant to defame the entire project of a Jewish state. It calls liberals, leftists and all other people of “good will” to arms, according to Cotler. Anti-Zionist antisemitism is seen by those activists as a form of “anti-fascism.” There is a moral “necessity” to be anti-fascist and therefore today “anti-Israel,” as those people insinuate. Cotler’s vibrant and impressive remarks were a model for the entire conference. People truly feel good to fight Israel as this is seen in their delusional worldview as an act of “anti-fascism.” Cotler grasped and criticized that ideology splendidly.

British legal scholar Lesley Klaff showed the mainstreaming of “Holocaust inversion” in the UK, using the example of the Liberal Democratic Party’s MP David Ward. Since 2010, the Liberal Democratic Party is a coalition partner of the British government under the Conservative Party’s leadership of Prime Minister David Cameron.

Political scientist Matthias Küntzel from Hamburg analyzed the failure of the international community to deal with the antisemitism of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Iranian regime. Meir Litvak from Tel Aviv University also dealt with Iranian anti-Zionist antisemitism. However, Litvak also said that Iran is much more a rational country and not driven by Islamist messianism, as some might think. Esther Webman focused on aspects of the Arab antisemitic discourse, including Holocaust denial. Milton Shain from Cape Town, South Africa, focused on left-wing and Muslim anti-Zionist activism in the former apartheid state.

Historian Laurence Weinbaum from the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in Jerusalem spoke about Polish antisemitism in recent decades and the failure of Poland to deal with its involvement in the Shoah and with its own Jew-hatred before and after 1945. At the end of the day, though, the glass of water is rather “half full” and not “half empty,” Weinbaum said, given the fact that Poland is the first country of the former East Bloc that tries to deal emphatically with antisemitism and its own history, thanks in particular to the scholarship of Jan Tomasz Gross. Sarah Fainberg and Samuel Barnai dealt with Russian antisemitism and anti-Zionism, like far-right groups that embrace Nazi antisemitism and the “8. SS Division Florian Geyer” which has supporters among hardcore antisemitic (and anti-Western) groups in today’s Russia, as Barnai showed in his vibrant talk. Fainberg underlined that it is very difficult to take sides in the current crisis in Ukraine. For sure Russia has to be criticized for its policies, but Ukraine is not just a victim: the conflict is much more troubling. Particularly when it comes to antisemitism, this becomes obvious. In addition one could say: take Stepan Bandera statues and pro-OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) propaganda during the uprising this year at the Maidan and in many parts of Ukraine as examples. Russian antisemitism and anti-Western ideology is also very troubling and not every Russian criticism of “fascist” tendencies and antisemitism in Ukraine is necessarily honest in nature, given similar tendencies in Russia which are not condemned by the Kremlin.

French philosopher Shmuel Trigano gave yet another proof of his deep insights in contemporary antisemitic tropes in philosophy, including post-modernism. Trigano frames contemporary antisemitism as disguised as “philosemitism,” which is in fact true. Remember Cotler’s focus on Holocaust remembrance and its abuse by anti-Zionists. Historian Dina Porat underlined the importance of the EUMC working definition of antisemitism. She knows that this was never a legal document. However, it is important, according to Porat, to have a document that states, for example, that comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany are not criticism of Israel but antisemitism.

One of the highlights of the conference was for sure the talk by Indiana Professor emeritus in Jewish Studies, Alvin Rosenfeld. He dealt with the reactions – today we would say “shitstorm” – on his world-famous brochure “Progressive” Jewish Thought and the new antisemitism from 2006, published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). In his monograph Rosenfeld analyzed Jewish anti-Zionist thought, including Jacqueline Rose, Michael Neumann and Tony Judt. The New York Times set the pace for the denunciation of Rosenfeld’s masterpiece. Several authors criticized terms and events that Rosenfeld did not even mention in his piece, like the “Iraq War” or terms like “liberals” or “the liberals.”

Finally, there was a small concert for the conference participants at the Botanical Garden at Hebrew University. The four Israeli Irish folk musicians, among them a kind of young Jerusalem version of Paul Simon, gave the participants a wonderful rest. The place was other-worldly, typical Jerusalem stones surrounded by trees and flowers. At some point, a bird joined the concert. Before, the visit of the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis I, in the Middle East, could not overshadow the fantastic experience at Mount Scopus.

The entire conference was just possible thanks to the support by the Knapp Foundation, New York, and Charles Knapp, who also gave a powerful greeting address at the very beginning of the event and thanked all participants at the very end of the gathering with an exceptional statement: we, the speakers, shall keep on doing our research the way we do it and the way he witnessed it. This would be like a “thank you” to him…

In addition, Felix and Daniel Posen were supporters of SICSA and the event. I was a happy Felix Posen Fellow of SICSA in 2003 and 2004, after having been a speaker at Robert’s first international conference as new head of SICSA in December 2002.

Many conference participants said that they are looking forward to the future work of the honoree. His focus on the “longest hatred” paved the way for many scholars in recent decades. People who know the current situation among research centers on antisemitism world-wide are aware of the fact that this is an exception from the rule. It was a privilege for all speakers and participants to share their views on antisemitism, anti-Judaism and the delegitimization of Israel with the historian of antisemitism of our time.

However, we have to be realistic. Future generations of scholars even in Israel are not necessarily very much involved in the study of antisemitism. Nor are they known for a vibrant Zionist approach… Time will tell what research in antisemitism will look like in the years to come. Perhaps this conference was the peak of an entire generation or even several generations of scholars in antisemitism, headed by Robert Solomon Wistrich.

(Backcover of the German edition of Robert S. Wistrich’s Muslim Antisemitism, Dec. 2011)

 

* Many thanks to Lesley for sharing these pics with me and for her encouragement; as ever, I would like to equally thank Leslie for her editing; finally and in addition, the support and encouragement in recent days by friends and colleagues from around the world was wonderful, thanks so much to Simon, Steffi, Elena, Peter, Thomas, Milton, Jonathan and Neil.

Holocaust education: Are we learning the right thing? By Ron Hutter and Fred Winegust

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am November 9, 2013

in Allgemein

On November 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed a series of riots against the Jews of Germany and Austria. In the space of a few hours, thousands of synagogues, Jewish businesses and homes were damaged or destroyed .400 Jews were killed and for the first time, tens of thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps simply because they were Jewish. This event came to be called “Kristallnacht,” “Night of Broken Glass” or “Night of Pogroms” for the shattered store windows that carpeted German streets. These well organized nation-wide pogroms with ordinary Germans being involved and being silent or applauding witnesses, were an essential turning point in Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews, and a significant event in Holocaust history.

There have been noble attempts to educate people about these unique events. In Canada, Holocaust Education Week has been running in Toronto for 33 years in various locations around the Greater Toronto Area with the objective of educating the greater community at large about the lessons of the Holocaust, so that they could be understood and never repeated again. Some have called this the largest annual education event of its kind in the world.

Now, with the 75th anniversary of The Night of Pogroms over the coming days, the effectiveness of Holocaust education is being called into question. Is it enough to have the remaining survivors tell their stories so we have an unbroken chain for future generations? Are we actually providing the right education or are we avoiding education on some of the root causes of the Holocaust, and by so doing, also missing reasons for the resurgence of anti-semitism in the form of anti-Israel boycotts, sanctions and divestment (like the BDS movment or current EU policies starting in 2014 towards Israeli goods from the disputed territorites) today?

Jews have been living in Europe for over 2000 years. Communities in Italy, along the Rhine, the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere once thrived. The Jews served as merchants, physicians and later as advisers to the monarchies who recognised their value. Unfortunately their presence, beliefs, customs and success also sowed the seeds of their downfall when Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe. While paganism was replaced by the ‘Good News’, various pagan elements were incorporated in the new religion such as yuletide as well as superstitions that have endured to this day.Many of these superstitions were (and in some countries still are) about Jews, such as using Christian children’s blood in the making of Passover bread, or the poisoning of wells during the Black Plague.

The Holocaust that ended in 1945 with about 70% of European Jews murdered was supposed to be the shameful end of European  antisemitism. Indeed, for some decades it was not politically correct to be openly antisemitic. That taboo has changed. Experts are puzzled. How can it be that post-Holocaust Europe still retains its antisemitism? Why has post-Holocaust European education failed in this regard?

In 2012 the Bundestag-Report, commissioned by the German Parliament, presented findings indicating that 20% of Germans hold antisemitic views. It reported that even school children use the word “Jew” in a derogatory sense. The recent Bielefeld Study of eight European countries reported that about 40% of respondees indicated that Israel has genocidal policies towards the Palestinians. In Germany this is 48% and Poland 63%.

Concurrent with these studies are continuing attempts to ban Jewish religious traditions such as circumcision and ritual kosher slaughter (neither practised in the same way as Muslim customs).Jewish communities in Germany have been taken aback by the populist wave of anti-Jewish sentiments under the guise of ‘protecting children’s rights’. Despite a detailed brochure explaining facts and myths of circumcision, published by the American Jewish Committee in Berlin, medical and legal experts supported by some politicians, advocate a ban on ritual circumcision. Various explanations given, such as ‘causing’ psychological trauma are clearly absurd and unscientific, given that Jewish boys are circumcised at eight days.

There is a great deal of misinformation where circumcision is lumped together with female genital mutilation. Even those that do acknowledge differences, dark but vague warnings about permanent physical and emotional damage are disseminated. Countries such as Switzerland, Sweden and Norway have banned kosher slaughter, and Poland followed suit early 2013. Clearly there are attempts to snuff out Jewish traditions under the guise of human and animal rights. While Germans during the Holocaust used gas to kill Jews, Europe now seems to want to deprive Jews of their cultural oxygen by eroding basic Jewish traditions.

 

Additionally, about half of Europeans believe that Israel is a quasi-Nazi state despite the fact that the EU definition of antisemitism also includes drawing comparisons between contemporary Israel and the Nazis.Various explanations are given for such beliefs including ignorance, traditional prejudice and attempts to level the field after the Holocaust, thereby blurring distinctions between perpetrators and victims and projecting German guilt onto the Jews.

How is it possible that after the Holocaust, a country such as Germany, can still have a problem with significant antisemitism? Some researchers believe that more education about the Holocaust is needed. However in a country like the Netherlands where Anne Frank’s hiding place attracts many tourists apart from Dutch children learning about her tragic story, soccer crowds chant “Ajax (a Jewish associated team) Jews to the gas”. In Hungary, soccer crowds make hissing noises like gas whilst chanting ’Auschwitz’. The fact that they do so, indicates they are not so ignorant and know what Auschwitz and gas chambers existed. In Cracow, Auschwitz Tours are prominently displayed.

Others, such as sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer of the University of Bielefeld blame antisemitism on economic hardship. However Germany is relatively prosperous, yet all synagogues and Jewish community centres have police guards outside. Moreover, a country like Norway which has one of the highest standards of living and prosperity in the world, is also one of the most antisemitic, notwithstanding it has only about a thousand Jews. Portugal and Spain are amongst the most antisemitic European countries according to the Bielefeld study, yet have very few Jews. On the other hand, in non-European countries where there is significant poverty as in India and where Jews have lived for about 1700 years and sometimes attained prominent positions, anti- Semitism among the Hindu majority is rare.What then can explain Europe’s Jewish problem?

The Holocaust has been described as a Jewish tragedy. It is not generally discussed as a failure of all that Christianity is supposed to stand for. And yet, therein lies the nucleus of Europe’s Jewish problem.

The founders of Christian thought are to be found in the Gospels where Matthew teaches that ‘His blood be upon us (Jews) and upon our children’ (27:24–25). In John (7:1–9) the Jews are referred to as the enemy of Jesus and compared to Satan. John is also the most popular gospel and the most anti-Jewish. While the Vatican has made attempts to reinterpret these texts, it needs to go further. One of the great founders of Christian thought was Augustine, who introduced the term “eternal witness” as the fate of Jews for rejecting Jesus as the messiah. Jews were doomed to be impoverished, homeless and wandering the earth unloved by their hosts. Augustine’s theology has been the basis of Christian oppression of Jews throughout the millennia. The story of Jews in Europe is mostly about forced conversions, pogroms, being expelled, cast into ghettoes and burned.Significantly, Jews became the stereotypical undesirable ‘other’ of European thought as well as in art, literature and music. For instance, the crusaders on their way to the holy land, wiped out Jewish communities in Germany. Later, Martin Luther advocated the expulsion of Jews and the burning of synagogues and Jewish holy books. Some 400 years later, his wishes would be carried out on his birthday on “Kristallnacht” in 1938. Luther’s theology would also be used in the defence of the Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg trials after the war. In the 18th century, European Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire, argued for the liberation of mankind, but maintained their hatred of Jews.

With the advent of German nationalism, the hep-hep riots in Germany targeted Jews while Wagner’s opera ‘the flying Dutchman’ played on the theme of Jewish homelessness and wandering through metaphor. Wagner’s irrational hatred of Jews – despite his support from Mendelssohn and conductor Hermann Levi – is well known. In literature, Grimm’s fairy tales, enjoyed by many children, included some antisemitic stories such as “The Jew in the bramble.” Indeed, Germany’s Nobel Prize literary icon, Gunther Grass, who belatedly admitted his membership of the SS, wrote a poem in 2012 that demonised the Jewish state, Israel. Most Germans in a survey agreed with him.

Musical celebrities, like former Nazi party member, conductor von Karajan, are highly idolised, his conduct during the war ignored .The Karajans and Grasses of Europe are glossed over at best. At the Berlin Film Festival the movie ’Paradise Now’, won several awards. The movie is an apologia for Palestinian suicide bombers. The sole Jew in the movie is one who gets paid for smuggling the suicide bomber across the border. These examples are a mere drop in the ocean. The Jewish problem in Europe is pervasive. It is therefore understandable that post-war Germans have transformed or integrated most of their old hatred of Judaism and Jews to resentment of the “collective Jew,” the Jewish state. This is reflected in a very biased media and cartoons.

For instance the highly respected Sueddeutsche Zeitung, abused a cartoon (made for another story with no connection to Israel or Jews) depicting a beastly looking god Moloch representing Israel, being served by Germany. Its resemblance to the cartoons of Nazi publication, Der Sturmer was remarkable.

While classic antisemitism is mostly a thing of the past, it is not always so. The anti-Judaic stance by traditional churches such as the Church of Scotland, stating that G-d’s covenant with the Jews has lapsed (and hence its link to the holy land), as well as the promotion of Israel boycotts by other churches and clerics such as Bishop Tutu continues to persist. The Lutheran churches in Germany and Scandinavia host radical anti-Israel guest speakers, many advocating boycotts and divestment of Israel and supporting radical NGO’s to undermine the democratically elected government of the Jewish state.

On the other-hand, Europe, including Germany has been largely indifferent to the persecution of Christians in Arab countries. It appears that the obsession with the Jewish state – where all non-Jewish citizens enjoy freedoms that can only be dreamed of in Arab countries – trumps genuine concern for their Christian brethren in Egypt and Iraq.

The difficulty with Europe is that it cannot reconcile its traditional antisemitism with modern developments and the unexpected course of history.It is ambivalent at best towards the Jewish state, and understandably so, for the stereotype of the Jew, who has been forced to wander unloved, homeless, and impoverished over 1800 years has now, not only a home, but a prosperous home that is a remarkable success story, exceeding hopes and expectations. Israel has won many Nobel prizes that Europe envies. In the last decade, Israel has won 7 science based Nobel prizes compared to Germany’s 4 and France’s 6. It is called the start-up nation because of its cutting edge research and development in bio medical, engineering, pharmaceutical, water and clean energy technologies.

All this, after the Holocaust and being in a state of constant war. In contrast, much of Europe is struggling economically and also demographically.It is no wonder that the EU invited Israel to participate in the Horizon 2020 program in scientific research – the only non-European country to be invited. Europe desires the know-how of the Jewish state, while resenting it at the same time.

This is reminiscent of the Jews in medieval times when they were needed in trade and medicine, but also resented as people who did not accept Jesus as the messiah. Importantly, the Jewish state’s existence and success, has put the theology of Augustine and stereotype of the Jew on its head – hence the resentment and envy of Europe. It is this cognitive dissonance that Europe must deal with. Reinterpreting the basis of traditional Christian thought that would be in harmony with 21st century reality is the challenge Europe needs to face. Would Europe have the courage or will to do so? Or, are Augustine and Luther so deeply ingrained in the psyche and culture of Europe, that Europe will remain a prisoner of its ancient beliefs and folklore?

Perhaps by exploring this in more depth, programs such as Holocaust Education Week can begin to change the dialogue from one of explaining what happened during the Holocaust to engaging in a dialogue to understand and eventually render irrelevant, the anti-Jewish teachings of the Christian church, which led to the Holocaust. Clearly, the present course of events especially in Europe requires a rethink and expansion of Holocaust education to include hitherto neglected issues.

 

Ron Hutter is a clinical psychologist currently practising in Berlin, Germany
 
Fred Winegust is a business development professional in Vaughan Ontario, and was part of the team that co-founded Toronto’s Holocaust Education Week

 

 

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