Two Texts on Anti-Semitism

[Nakam43]

http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-urban-f04.htm

Anti-Semitism In Germany Today:
Its Roots And Tendencies1
Susanne Urban


The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the world, especially in Europe. Anti-Semitism certainly did not disappear in Germany after WW II. What is new is the blunt expression of anti-Semitism and the fraternization between left-wing and right-wing, liberal and conservative streams. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism continue to spread in German society and are more and more openly expressed.

Right-wing groups and neo-Nazis are no longer the only ones who agitate against Israel and Jews. Together with "traditional" anti-Semitism, Germany has seen a growth of leftist anti-Semitism along with anti-imperialist, antiglobalization, and anti-Zionist attitudes, all reinforcing the new German claim of having been victims in WW II.

There is a widespread animus against Israel, clearly not only toward Israeli policies, that often goes along with pro-Palestinian partisanship. This development is intensified by anti-Israeli media coverage in Germany, often accompanied by anti-Semitic language and images.

This "new" anti-Semitism in Germany correlates with changes in the nation's attitudes toward WW II and remembrance of the Shoah. Laying the blame for "immoral" conduct on Israel, and therefore "the Jews," makes clear that "they" did not learn the lessons of the Shoah; whereas Germans see themselves as having learned the lessons by being watchmen against "immoral" politics.

In 1967 Jean Améry wrote: "The classic phenomenon of anti-Semitism is taking a new shape. The old one still exists, this I call coexistence....To be clear: anti-Semitism, included in...anti-Zionism as the thunderstorm is part of the cloud, is again respectable....But: a respectable anti-Semitism is not possible."2

More than thirty-five years later, it seems nothing has changed. Although anti-Semitism masks itself above all as anti-Zionism or "criticism of Israeli policies," its roots are pure, traditional anti-Semitism.

The Devil in Disguise

Améry’s appeal not to become complacent toward anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism has lost none of its importance. Born in 1912 in Vienna, Améry survived the Holocaust and after 1966 worked mainly as a journalist. His writings are responses to anti-Semitism by someone who lost faith in the world in Auschwitz. He committed suicide in 1978.

The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the world, especially in Europe. There is a clear link to the terror war in Israel, and a widespread animus against Israel (not just Israeli policies) and Diaspora Jews along with pro-Palestinian partisanship. This development is intensified by anti-Israeli media coverage including the use of anti-Semitic language and images.

In Germany, anti-Semitism certainly did not disappear after WW II. What is new is the blunt expression of anti-Semitism and the fraternization between left-wing and right-wing, liberal and conservative streams. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism continue to spread in German society.

Anti-Semitism in Germany, 1945–2004

Anti-Semitism appears to be an essential part of the European cultural tradition, and in Germany, more or less conscious Jew-hatred exists by "tradition" as well. Former East Germany, and before that the Soviet Occupation Zone, never conducted a survey of anti-Semitism, and no data is available. Such surveys were, however, conducted in West Germany. In 1949, a quarter of the West German population described themselves as anti-Semites; in a 1952 survey, one-third said they were definitely anti-Semites.3

By 1980, however, the tracking of various population samples showed that anti-Semitism had decreased. Surveys conducted after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 revealed a huge gap in anti-Semitic attitudes between East and West Germany.4 Surprisingly, East Germany appeared to be very congenial to Jews with almost no anti-Semitism. This, however, was a fallacy related to the fact that many people and even researchers make a facile distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, despite the fact that scholars from the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin5 pointed to the similarities. In addition, East Germans were used to saying what was officially required of them. And, as implied, anti-Zionism and attitudes toward Israel per se were not probed. Indeed, in subsequent surveys the gap between eastern and western Germany closed quickly.6

In May 2003, the Federal Office for Protecting the Constitution published a special study on anti-Semitism and its links with rightwing and neo-Nazi groups.7 The same institution recorded more than 1400 anti-Semitic crimes in 2001,8 confirming a steady rise including a 100 percent increase for Berlin. Anti-Israeli activities, however, such as attacks on the Israeli embassy, are not included in these reports because there is still no systematic monitoring of anti-Zionism.

In 2002, as the neoliberal FDP Party maligned Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and German Jewish leader Michel Friedman, anti-Semitism became an issue for the first time in a postwar German election campaign.

In April of that year, the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt am Main and the University of Leipzig confirmed a new height of anti-Semitism. In their joint study, 20 percent of the respondents agreed that "Jews are to blame for the major conflicts in the world," and another 26 percent shared this opinion to some extent.9

In May 2002, the weekly magazine Der Spiegel published a survey in which 25 percent agreed that "what the State of Israel does to the Palestinians is no different than what the Nazis did during the Third Reich to the Jews."10

As reported in 2003, studies now estimate overt anti-Semitism at around 23 percent, and covert anti-Semitism as existing among 30–40 percent of the German public.11

In 2002, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) in Vienna and the above-mentioned Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism conducted a study on "Manifestations of Anti-Semitism in the European Union: First Semester, 2002." In October 2003 the first version of the report was submitted to the EU, and by January 2004 the final report was in the hands of the EUMC, which kept the study - with the EU’s knowledge and approval - under lock and key. The research shows that, aside from the clear threat posed by "ordinary" right-wing anti-Semitism, Muslims and pro-Palestinian groups are also playing a crucial role. Furthermore, leftist and antiglobalization groups such as ATTAC were described as more or less anti-Semitic.12 The EUMC vaguely criticized the study, saying that "there was a problem defining anti-Semitism, the definition being too complicated," as a member of the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism told the author. Once again, anti-Zionism was treated as distinct from anti-Semitism.

In April 2004, as the Conference on Anti-Semitism in Europe took place in Berlin, the Stephen Roth Institute of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University revealed that the countries with the highest rates of anti-Semitic incidents in the world are Germany, France, Britain, Russia, and Canada.13 Compared to France or Britain, in Germany Islamic and pro-Palestinian groups are involved in only a very small percentage of anti-Semitic incidents: indigenous German anti-Semitism does not need "support" from others. Since there was never a time free of anti-Semitism, it is necessary to ask whether the current wave is really "new anti-Semitism" or centuries old anti-Semitism that has been "modernized" and adapted to the circumstances. Above all, it is a post-Auschwitz anti-Semitism. For many people, provided they are not Holocaust deniers or neo-Nazis, Auschwitz as the symbol of the Holocaust is the obstacle to expressing anti-Semitism and aversion to Jews and Israel. Hence Germans, like many other anti-Semites, use the "anti-Zionist" disguise. This enables declaring Israel "the most evil country" and "nazifying" Israel with comparisons to the Third Reich, or advocating that it vanish from the world’s stage. This, in turn, opens the door to proclaiming Jews to be evil people in general.

These manifestations of anti-Semitism in Germany are deeply linked to the German past from 1933 to 1945 and the wish to get rid of guilt or responsibility for dealing with that past. Germany’s ideological unification since 1989 has two main pillars: a strong anti-American and anti-Israeli attitude, and a new position toward the history of WW II.

Rewriting History

For more than fifteen years, German intellectuals, writers, politicians, and ordinary people have gradually worn down moral and political barriers that for decades kept the overwhelming majority away from open and extensive anti-Semitism.

It started with the Historikerstreit, a series of articles written in 1986, and did not end with the anti-Semitic election campaign in spring 2002. The Historikerstreit was mainly propelled by an article by the historian Ernst Nolte in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which portrayed the National Socialist state and its terror as only a reaction to the Bolshevik threat, and the persecution of Jews and the Shoah as not really singular in human history. (Jürgen Habermas, a representative of the Critical Theory school and intellectual descendant of Theodor Adorno, sharply protested Nolte’s claims.) Germany is a country with far more memorials and museums to the concentration camps, as well as Jewish museums, than other European countries. The volume of Holocaust education in schools and other educational institutions, the number of conferences and workshops devoted to the subject, seems close to unique in Europe. As Yehuda Bauer, chief historian of Yad Vashem, said in an interview:

Germany is most active in promoting Holocaust education for which there is a very good reason. Given their history, they understand the importance of education as a means of preventing future disasters. The Holocaust today serves as a symbol for what we ought to oppose: racism, genocide, mass murder, ethnic hatred, ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism and group hatred.14

Nevertheless, the opposition to inhumanity in general is no obstacle to German anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Holocaust education in Germany may be intensive, but most of the textbooks use cliche's and stereotypes. Moreover, many of the teachers convey compassion for the murdered Jews along with strong reservations toward the Jews of today and, of course, the anti-Israeli attitude. Although Germany is proud of its well-developed culture of Holocaust remembrance and education, which for many years was seen as a force against anti-Semitism, the latter force has gone weak. It was a fallacy to think that knowledge about the Shoah would lead people to love their neighbors or even their Jewish neighbors. Holocaust education in Germany is being slowly but steadily undermined by the new trend of seeing Germans themselves as victims, with many people feeling that they are fed up with the Shoah.15 Well-intended rituals and remembrances have not proved an effective shield against anti-Semitism and the rewriting of history. This widespread "victim" trend in Germany needs to be monitored carefully, since in the long run it may lead to a rewriting of the history of WW II and, in the worst case, to a minimization of the Shoah.

The leading figure among the German "new historians" is Jörg Friedrich, who has published two books on the Allied bombings of Germany.16 The first book deals with the strategy of the Allied bombings and condemns them as inhuman and pointless. Friedrich’s popularized style helped this book become a bestseller. He uses terms that for decades were associated with Nazi persecution and the Shoah; thus, cellars and air-raid shelters in which Germans died are "crematoria," an RAF bomber group is an Einsatzgruppe, and the destruction of libraries during the bombings constitutes Bücherverbrennungen. In this way the Shoah is minimized through language.

Friedrich’s second book was also a bestseller and also depicts Germans as victims. There are no SA men, no SS, no soldiers involved in persecution, murder, and "aryanization." The book contains horrifying photos of the effects of the Allied bombings of Germany. Ruins, burnt bodies, and ashes everywhere evoke associations with the Warsaw Ghetto after its liquidation in 1943 and well-known images from Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Friedrich even declared openly, in several television interviews in winter 2002: "Churchill was the greatest child-slaughterer of all time. He slaughtered 76,000 children." Yet Friedrich, formerly known as a serious historian, never devotes a single word to the 1.5 million murdered Jewish children.

German historiography increasingly portrays Germans as victims in WW II and not as perpetrators, bystanders, or people deriving benefit from persecution. The revised perspective on German history - from the Allied bombings to the Germans’ expulsion from Poland and East European countries - undoubtedly reflects a historical consciousness that is newly embraced by the majority, though not new in itself. There was never any taboo on speaking about the Allied bombings or the postwar expulsions; documentaries, books, journals, and films have dealt with these subjects since the early 1950s, and WW II was commonly discussed in families and by certain organizations. What is new, however, is the public reinterpretation of history, encompassing intellectuals and politicians of both the Left and the Right.

From a Trickle to the Mainstream

A few examples will illustrate this trend. In Frankfurt in 1998, when he received the Peace Prize of German Publishers, the famous German writer Martin Walser gave a speech in which he expressed his weariness at being confronted with Auschwitz; he was supported by large numbers of Germans including intellectuals and politicians. Jews who spoke out in protest were almost on their own. Four years later in 2002, for 8 May - the day marking the liberation in 1945 - Walser was invited for a discussion with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder on "Nation and Patriotism." Their dialogue focused on the question of whether the Allies of WW I were really the ones responsible for Hitler’s coming to power. Walser maintained that patriotism must be based on emotions and deeply rooted in history, and the German chancellor asserted: "The way we as Germans deal with our history shall be decided by each and every generation anew." The decision seems to have been made.

Since the second Palestinian uprising began in the fall of 2000, many consider that Israel is losing the media battle. The Israeli government is frequently blamed for not making its viewpoints known effectively. Pro-Israeli media watchers are an important source of information for their readers. But above all, they are private actors in the Arab-Israeli public relations war.

On 9 November 2002, the memorial day for Kristallnacht in 1938, German public television for the first time in years did not screen the usual quantity of movies and documentaries on this topic. The main news programs devoted about ten seconds to a historical review. Two documentaries were shown at around 11 p.m., one on Hitler’s secretary and the other, not broadcast on either of the two national channels but on three of the sixteen federal stations, on the Sonderkommando (Jews forced to work in the crematoria) in Auschwitz. However, this time the first national channel, ARD, presented the first episode of a three-part series on the German general Erwin Rommel and also the first episode of a six-part series on the SS, and although the SS was portrayed as a brutal organization its victims were absent.

On 17 November 2002, the Day of National Mourning, which is dedicated to soldiers and civilians who died in WW I and WW II, parliament held a four-hour ceremony. Tall black crosses were emplaced in the parliament despite the supposed separation of church and state. Between some classical music pieces, a young woman read from letters written in 1942 by German soldiers based in Stalingrad. During the whole ceremony there was not one word about war crimes, or about the army units that slaughtered Jews. ¨

Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher born in 1947, has stepped out of academia and become a star of German television. Since 2002 he has had his own show, Philosophical Quartet,17 in which he and his regular comrade Rüdiger Safranski, a philosopher and writer, host two other guests to discuss the latest issues. Sloterdijk is known for an elitist and anti-American attitude that goes hand in hand with a conservative view of the German past, a synthesis of leftist and rightist positions. His latest book, Airquake: At the Source of Terror18 recounts catastrophic events that for Sloterdijk are all similar: the Holocaust, the Allied bombings of Germany, the atomic bombing of Japan, and September 11 are the strange pearls on Sloterdijk’s string. He maintains that the source of all these catastrophes was the first attack with poison gas in WW I, which, he emphasizes, was primarily made possible by the German chemist Fritz Haber. With a cynical undertone Sloterdijk stresses the fact that Haber was Jewish, and then alleges a continuity between Haber’s experiments and the gas chambers during the Shoah. Although Sloterdijk does not make the connection explicitly, he implies a horrible conclusion: that without a Jewish chemist there would have been no Holocaust.

In November 2002 Sloterdijk invited to his show Luc Bondy, a theatrical director, to discuss the topic of anti-Semitism. Bondy told the audience: "After WW II, as small children, we were confronted with guilt. It was so massive. We as children in postwar times were under fire nearly nonstop and saw those pictures everywhere. My thesis is: the only possible way to get rid of anti-Semitism is therefore to be anti-Semitic again."19

These and many other popularized historical reinterpretations reflect the fact that Germany is on a path toward self-reconciliation. It is a reconciliation between the generations, as the gap that opened between the 1960s leftist movement and the parent generation, who were accused as participants in the war, is closed; and it is also a reconciliation between Left and Right. No longer do historical debates drive a wedge between Germans.

As Anne Applebaum has written:

The country’s collective conscience was enlightened by the TV-Series "Holocaust" to an extent that could never have been achieved by historical science and all its publications. What imperative message, fuelled by emotionalism, is carried by today’s self-reconciliation trend? The discussion on victimhood has now been extended to include the perpetrators. In the dispute over the planned "Centre against Expulsion," for example.20

The gates are wide open to a new cult of victimhood that minimizes - even without malicious intention - Germany’s guilt for the outbreak of war, its crimes against humanity (including those committed by German army units), as well as the uniqueness of the Holocaust.

Misusing the Shoah

The decreasing interest in the Holocaust does not prevent Germans from invoking it in political debates. The "lesson" that Germans now draw from WW II and the Holocaust is one of opposition to the United States and Israel.

It is often claimed that the German public has been sensitized to realities such as the 2003 war in Iraq or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by decades of education on German war crimes and the Shoah as a unique genocide. The Shoah is misused to oppose military conflicts, particularly if they are carried out by the United States or Israel against terror regimes, terror movements, and Islamic fundamentalism. Once a domain of the Left, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism are now embraced by ordinary Germans, reinforced by the books on the Allied bombings and the like. The extreme Right, which normally is identified with xenophobic attitudes, has discovered its solidarity with Islamic and Palestinian "freedom fighters." Pro-Palestinian, anti-American, and anti-Semitic themes were common in the 2003 demonstrations against the war in Iraq.

Israel is condemned, but terrorist movements in Spain, Ireland, or Israel itself are not. The German public does not organize demonstrations after a bus bombing in Israel, but it does after a Hamas leader is killed. Israel, and hence "the Jews," are accused of horrendous behavior that is alleged to be even worse because they are "former victims." In other words, Israel and the Jews have not learned their lessons from the Shoah, whereas Germans have learned them thoroughly.

To clear themselves of the suspicion of being anti-Semitic, Germans accompany every castigation of Israel with the mantra that it is "only criticism" motivated by a just, democratic preference for peaceful solutions. The other side of this coin is their claim that because of the Holocaust, Germans have to side with today’s victims, namely, the Palestinians. Undoubtedly the best tactic, however, is to quote leftist Jews or Israelis to buttress their own views. Jewish witnesses are taken to court against Israel.21

Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism Go Hand in Hand

This anti-Israeli attitude is state-of-the-art in parts of the German media.22 Photos and illustrated reports present the Israeli Goliath against the Palestinian David, Palestinian children against heavily armed Israeli soldiers. We see ruins of Palestinian buildings with distressed women and children standing in front of them, juxtaposed with settlers who live in green, opulent surroundings and act aggressively toward Palestinians.

A 2002 study showed that German media coverage of the Middle East is often characterized by a lack of context and hostile undertones against Israel. Not uncommonly, the Holocaust is minimized by comparing Israel with the Third Reich, blood libels are invoked regarding Palestinian children, and Zionist conspiracy theories are mentioned. The study concluded: "German media coverage of the conflict contributed to an anti-Semitic view of Israel among the German population."23

At the end of 2002, the Federal Centre for Civic Education in Bonn followed up with its own study, which concluded that "an important effect in media is to present Israel and its military power only to convey the impression that Israel is the aggressor."24 During the official presentation of this study, however, the results were distorted and played down. The opening lecture was by Werner Stüber of the University of Düsseldorf, who had lived many years in East Jerusalem and taught at Bir Zeit University. He did not say a sentence about Palestinian terror, but did speak of the "powerful Jewish lobby in the United States." An attempt to dispute this lecture was stifled with the words that the lecture backed the position of the Centre for Civic Education - which, seemingly, did not consider the results of its own study, and, incidentally, is directly connected to the German state. As the conference continued, the focus was not on anti-Semitic tendencies in German media but rather on Israel’s "aggression," "inhuman" behavior, and so on.

After the Jenin operation in April 2002, Süddeutsche Zeitung published a cartoon showing Sharon in front of an Israeli tank that was identified as Jewish-Israeli with a Star of David. To the left of the tank was a bulldozer carrying away dozens of dead, emaciated bodies. UN staff were trying to approach, but Sharon shouted at them, "Go away, this is war!" The bulldozer with the dead bodies is a clear association with images from the liberated extermination camps, in which thousands of dead bodies were carried by bulldozers into mass graves. The simple message of the cartoon is that "the Jews" are Nazis. As Deidre Berger, head of the American Jewish Committee in Germany, noted succinctly, "Israel is under fire in the German media."25

Conclusion

There are various facets of anti-Semitism in Germany today:

* Pre-Auschwitz anti-Semitism, found above all in neo-Nazi circles
* Neo-Nazi anti-Semitism, typically combining Islamism and anti-Zionism
* Neoliberal anti-Semitism, combining massive anti-Israeli attitudes and resistance to both financial and moral responsibility for the Holocaust
* Leftist anti-Semitism, hand in hand with anti-imperialist and antiglobalization attitudes
* Anti-Semitism disguised by general, reflexive “criticism” of Israeli policies
* Anti-Semitism and, hence, anti-Zionism as part of the new German claim of having been victims in WW II

There are no effective, large-scale activities against anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and the majority of Germans would not support them. Although certain individuals and organizations try to put the problem on the agenda, this is much more cosmetics than a successful strategy.

As the historian Julius Schöps of Potsdam University put it in the newspaper Tageszeitung:

Protests against anti-Semitism, organized by small groups, do not get extensive attention in Germany. Resolutions by the German parliament to reject anti-Semitism are drivel of the worst kind....But all those ineffective actions are presented to the world as a strong defense against the charge of anti-Semitism. The truth is: no one is really interested in these matters. No one really cares.26

* * *

Notes

1. This article is based on a lecture presented at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs on 11 May 2004.
2. Jean Améry, "Der ehrbare Antisemitismus," Die Zeit, 25 July 1969 (German).
3. See Werner Bergmann and Rainer Erb, Antisemitismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Ergebnisse der empirischen Forschung von 1946–1989 (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1991) (German).
4. Bernhard Prosch, Reinhard Wittenberg, and Martin Abraham, "Antisemitismus in der ehemaligen DDR. Überraschende Ergebnisse der ersten Repräsentativ-Umfrage und einer Befragung von Jugendlichen in Jena," Tribüne, No. 118 (1991), 102–120; Emnid, for the American Jewish Committee, 1991 (German). ¨
5. Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Technical University (TU), Berlin. Its director, Prof. Wolfgang Benz, is a renowned scholar in this field. Prof. Walter Berg, a member of the Institute, already decades ago pointed to the similarities between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in his research.
6. Surveys were conducted, e.g., by Emnid in 1994 (Zentralarchiv für empirische Sozialforschung, Cologne, No. 2418), Infratest Burke (1996), Forsa (1998), and Infratest Sozialforschung (2002), and published, e.g., in the weeklies Der Spiegel, Stern, and Die Woche.
7. Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, "Die Bedeutung des Antisemitismus im aktuellen deutschen Rechtsextremismus," 20 May 2003. See http://www.verfassungsschutz. de (German).
8. Ibid., p. 40.
9. Elmar Brähler and Horst Eberhard Richter, "Politische Einstellungen in Deutschland. Einstellungen zu Juden, Amerikanern und Arabern," results of a representative survey conducted in spring 2002. A press conference was held at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt am Main, 14 June 2002 (German).
10. Der Spiegel, May 2002 (German).
11. "Unser Verhältnis zu den Juden" (a survey by FORSA), Stern, No. 48 (2003) (German).
12. The EUMC website now presents the study and some additional material, http://eumc.eu.int/eumc/index.php?fuseacti...sp–cat–content& catid>1.
13. See Stephen Roth Institute, Tel Aviv University, http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/.
14. Manfred Gerstenfeld, "From Propagating Myths to Research: Preparing for Holocaust Education - An Interview with Yehuda Bauer," in Europe’s Crumbling Myths (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Yad Vashem, World Jewish Congress, 2003), Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, No. 3, December 1, 2002, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, p. 1, p. 119.
15. A 1998 survey found two-thirds of Germans over age 14 saying there should be an end to discussions of Nazi rule and the Shoah. See Harald Welzer, Opa war kein Nazi (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002) (German). The study concluded that a high percentage of Germans tell myths about the years 1933–1945 and try to disguise their own role while claiming that there was no anti-Semitism and much resistance.
16. Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2002), and Brandstätten (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2003) (German).
17. See the TV channel’s website, http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde?inhalt/8/0,1872, 1021352,00.html (German).
18. Peter Sloterdijk, Luftbeben. An der Quelle des Terrors (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002) (German).
19. See http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/23/0,...021239,00.html, and, there, the link to "Zitate aus der sendung" ("Quotes from the Show") (German).
20. Anne Applebaum, "Germans as Victims," International Herald Tribune, 15 October 2003.
21. See Susanne Urban, "Friend or Foe? Jewish Self-Degradation and Its Misuse by Anti-Semites in Contemporary Germany," Nativ Online, http://www.acpr. org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/03-issue/urban-3.htm, and the printed issue, Nativ, June 2004 (Ariel Center for Policy Research).
22. There have been some analyses of the anti-Israeli media coverage, e.g., "Medientenor," Tribüne, No. 162 (Frankfurt am Main: Tribüne Verlag, 2002), p. 93. (German).
23. This survey was conducted by the Duisburger Institut für Sprach- und Sozialforschung (DISS) for the German office of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and published in 2002. See http://www.ajc.org/german/israel–medien.-asp, where many more articles on this topic are available (German).
24. On 9–10 December 2002, they held a conference called "Learn to Be Suspicious about Pictures" on media coverage of Israel and the Palestinians, during which the Bundeszentrale presented its study, "Nahostberichterstattung in den Hauptnachrichten des deutschen Fernsehens," http://www.bpb.de (German).
25. Deidre Berger, in the presentation of the study conducted together with DISS (see n. 24) in Berlin, 1 May 2002.
26. Julius Schöps, "Antisemitismus ist Teil dieser Kultur," Taz, 25 October 2002. See http://www.berlin-judentum.de/bildung/anti...usforschung.htm (German).
* * *

DR. SUSANNE URBAN is a historian whose current research, along with the subject of contemporary German anti-Semitism, deals with the topic of Youth Aliyah (an organization for Jewish children's immigration to Israel) during the Holocaust. She is affiliated with the Hebrew University and was a research fellow at Yad Vashem in 2004. She is also preparing a book on Jews at the Volkswagen factory in 1944-1945.

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Being Leftist and Anti-Semitic in Germany
Susanne Urban


*

After the reunification of Germany, 1989 surveys indicated that there was much more anti-Semitism in West Germany than in East Germany. This was a fallacy arising from the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Since then, Eastern German "anti-Zionism" has merged with Western German "anti-Semitism" into a homogeneous whole.
*

Since 2000, the German Left has voiced its solidarity and support for the Palestinians and for suicide bombers. This is an extension of the New Left anti-Zionism of the 1960s, with the same structural motifs and expressions.
*

There is also a major trend in the German Left of Nazifying and demonizing Israel, opening the door to proclaiming Jews to be the source of the world's evils.


In October 2004, the Dutch writer and filmmaker Leon de Winter said in an interview to the German liberal newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung: "The old poison of anti-Semitism is very much alive.... I will remain a stranger on this continent.... I fear that in Europe something will once more be done against the Jews."1

Common Ground between Right and Left

Today's German anti-Semitism is deeply connected to the Nazi period and the wish to expunge guilt and responsibility for dealing with it. Right-wing extremism, neo-Nazism, and extreme conservatism seem "naturally" linked to denial or minimalization of the Holocaust, or calling for a new one. As elsewhere in Europe, a relatively new "brotherhood" has emerged in Germany between the extreme Right and fundamentalist Islam.

Anti-Zionism, however - which is not mere criticism of Israeli policies, but the denial of the Jewish people's right to live in their own state - also links leftists and rightists. Since the Six Day War of 1967, both the extreme and the mainstream Left in Europe have shown strong anti-Zionist tendencies, not always distinguishable from anti-Semitism. Although leftist anti-Zionism seemed to decline after the fall of Communism in 1990, it was reanimated by the Second Intifada and the antiglobalization movement, which is today a main source of leftist anti-Semitism.

In a May 2002 survey in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, 25% agreed that "what the state of Israel does to the Palestinians is no different than what the Nazis did during the Third Reich to the Jews."2 A new scholarly book analyzes how deeply anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are rooted in German society.3 Since 1989, united Germany seems to stand on two main pillars: a strong anti-American and anti-Israeli attitude.

The Postwar, Pre-1967 Roots

Anti-Semitism was never exclusive to the Right; Communism, for its part, often vilified Jews as capitalists. Communism in East Germany, as elsewhere, denied the right to practice the Jewish religion and sought to eradicate religion in general, including Judaism. East Germany's anti-Semitic policies first became evident in January 1953 when the Stasi - the state security service - confiscated documents of the Jewish communities, searched the homes of Jewish leaders, and spoke of a "Zionist conspiracy." After the Six Day War, East Germany officially adopted an anti-Zionist stance. However, no serious data on East German anti-Semitism is available before the reunification in 1989.

Although West German left-wing anti-Semitism also increased steadily after the Six Day War, before then the West German Left supported Israel generally, and specifically the Wiedergutmachung (Reparations Agreement of 1953) and the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1965. This friendliness was, however, based on an idealization of Israel, kibbutzim, and pioneering and was not on genuinely firm ground.4 Opposition to the conservative government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer also played a role in this left-wing philo-Semitism.

During the 1960s, the West German Left divided into a more "conservative" wing and a New Left trend. Whereas Chancellor Willy Brandt was said to be a true and unwavering friend of Israel,5 many young leftists took radical positions and opposed Brandt's "establishment" Social Democratic Party. In 1966 they founded the Nonparliamentary Opposition (APO), a popular movement that sought to "renew" German politics from the outside. Many of its members and supporters later showed sympathy for the RAF, a leftist terrorist movement that had ties to the PLO and whose cadres trained in terrorist camps in Lebanon.

Student Radicalization

During the Six Day War, the New Left definitively transformed its hitherto moderate pro-Arab positions into full support for Arab states and the Palestinians, and its fragile pro-Israeli attitudes dissolved into anti-Semitic slogans thinly disguised as "anti-imperialist" criticism of a "fascist state."

After 1967, however, not only the radicals but large parts of the German Left turned their backs on Israel. This went hand in hand with protests against the Vietnam War, against the conservative mainstream in Adenauer's Germany and afterward the "Great Coalition" that was headed from 1966 by Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former member of the Nazi Party.6 The New Left also idealized Communist China and Ho Chi Minh, despite their involvement in mass murder against their own people.7

Well-known intellectuals who were more moderate leftists tried to dissuade the New Left from its extreme positions. Ernst Bloch, Jean Amery, Herbert Marcuse, Iring Fetscher, and Jean-Paul Sartre argued with the radicals and discouraged blind solidarity with the PLO, as opposed to legitimate criticism of Israeli policies. They warned that notions of Israel's annihilation were intolerable and linked to National Socialist ideology. However, they were not heeded by the radicals.8

A Friend of Israel, a Foe of Leftists

The publisher Axel Caesar Springer, whose press group included the tabloid daily BILD and the daily Die Welt, as well as many other newspapers and journals, was, according to the Israeli diplomat Asher Ben-Natan, a true friend of Israel and the Jewish people:

He expressed opinions I haven't often heard in Germany.... As the demands mounted to draw a "bottom line" under the German past, Springer thought there could never be Wiedergutmachung for the crimes Germans had committed against the Jews. He himself neither suppressed nor forgot the past and did not expect the Jewish people to forgive what had happened....Neither his moral values nor historical insights nor close relations with Jews and Israel involved benefit for him. It came from honest belief....During our conversations he never disguised his hatred for every kind of totalitarian dictatorship, including Communism....After the Six Day War Springer promulgated four guidelines for his employees and his newspapers that are still binding for the journalists and editors working for Springer publications. One was "Fostering reconciliation between Jews and Germany and supporting Israel's right to exist."9

Springer was, however, a major target of the New Left, one reason being that he and his newspapers were clearly pro-Israeli and condemned the anti-Israeli stream in the New Left. Many in this movement decided: "If Springer is pro-Israeli, we have to be against the state of Israel."10

In 1969, on the date marking Kristallnacht, an anarchist-leftist group painted graffiti on Jewish memorials saying "Shalom and Napalm" or "El Fatah." A firebomb was also placed in the Jewish community center in Berlin. The leftist groups' common perception was: "Jews who were expelled by fascism developed themselves into fascists, who in collaboration with American capitalism want to annihilate the Palestinian people."11

Sharing the Ideology of Terrorism

For the New Left, nothing could discredit anti-Zionism. Even after Israeli athletes were taken hostage and murdered during the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, the leftists strengthened their solidarity with the Palestinian terror organizations.

West German New Leftists participated in the 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe, Uganda, where Jewish and Israeli passengers were singled out from the others by a German terrorist. The German Left ignored the hijacking and subsequent rescue operation by Israeli forces, and the German Communist Party in West Germany published a solidarity letter addressed to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

In 1982, after Israeli forces invaded Lebanon and the massacres in Sabra and Shatila were publicized, the whole German Left, moderate and radical, united for the first time in comparing Israel with the Third Reich and the Nazis. Thus, 1982 saw the launching of a new demonization, throughout the German public, of Israel and Jews in which they were frequently equated with Nazis.

The pathological need to compare Israel and Nazi Germany seems linked to the wish to discard the guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust. Also in 1982, the leftist newspaper taz called the Palestinians "the new Jews" and accused Israel of a "reverse Holocaust" in seeking to carry out the "final solution of the Palestinian question."12

The Green Party and the Peace Movement

After 1982, and parallel to the peace movement's agitation against U.S. influence and the deployment of missiles in Germany, the Green Party was founded. In those days both the peace movement and the Green Party were influenced by nationalistic, anti-American, "anti-imperialist," and also "blood and soil" motifs taken more or less consciously from Nazi ideology.

Over the years, the Green Party evolved into a liberal, moderate leftist party. Today its leaders mostly hold pro-Israeli views, while supporting a Palestinian state as well, and fight anti-Semitism sincerely. However, many party members, particularly young ones, have more leftist, pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist attitudes.

As for the German peace movement, it has not changed substantially since 1982, maintaining its anti-American and anti-Israeli emphasis. Although receding in importance after the fall of the Communist bloc, it came back with renewed force in 2002 as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were being planned. Millions of Germans, like their counterparts in other European countries, rallied in the streets to denounce the United States, Israel, and other governments that supported the war on terror.

An Evolving Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification, initial surveys in 1989 revealed a huge gap in anti-Semitic attitudes between East and West Germany.13 This, however, was a distortion fostered by a superficial distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Since it has become clear that East German "anti-Zionism" merged quickly with West German "anti-Semitism" into a homogeneous whole.14 In the Cold War era, readers of East German newspapers and also Western Communist publications were accustomed to "criticisms" of Israeli policies that used anti-Semitic caricatures and clichés. Protests by Jewish community leaders in East Berlin never appeared in public.15

The German Left stridently opposed the First Gulf War in 1991, and expressed strong sympathy for the Iraqi victims of coalition bombings. When Palestinians rejoiced as Iraqi missiles hit Israel, however, some Germans joined in their glee and attributed these attacks to "Israeli policies,"16 meaning "the Jews" are to blame when they are persecuted.

Up to 2000, however, both New Left and mainstream anti-Zionist attitudes differentiated between Israel and the Jews who lived in Germany - although, as mentioned, there were cases of anti-Jewish graffiti and attacks on Jewish memorials and institutions. Only rarely was the Jewish community targeted by hostile actions with an Israeli focus. One could be anti-Zionist yet show high sympathy for the Jews in Germany based on a vague empathy related to the Holocaust.

But since 2000 the Jewish community is no longer safe and has been targeted by anti-Israeli activity, from graffiti and hate mail to demonstrations against the war in Iraq that ended up facing Jewish-community buildings or even a memorial like the Alte Synagogue in Essen. Jews in Germany are somehow held as hostages for Israeli policies, no matter what their own views.

Leftist anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist clichés have also become the common, acceptable property of conservatives, liberals, as well as leftists in Germany since 2000, and are well evident in the German media.17 The trend intensified after the September 11 attack in the United States, which gave rise to new anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that blamed the event on the Mossad. Many books developing such theories were published in Germany, and they were all bestsellers.18 Another outlet for such sentiments was the anti-war demonstrations of 2002, as well as anti-globalization gatherings.

With the Second Intifada, the Left and many other groups rediscovered or discovered their solidarity with the Palestinians - including the suicide bombers. This is an extension of the New Left anti-Zionism of the 1960s, with basically the same structural motifs and expressions. Given the decline of Communism there is less of an "anti-imperialist" emphasis, but the trend of Nazifying and demonizing Israel has grown dramatically in Germany as in Europe generally.

Nazifying Israel, How to Get Rid of the Holocaust

In today's Germany, leftists who Nazify Israel and characterize it as the world's most evil country have opened the door to proclaiming Jews to be evil people in general. Since Nazis represent the pinnacle of evil in leftist ideology, those who allegedly resemble them and perpetrate Holocaust-like actions are seen as being on the same moral level.

In 2002, Freie Sender Kombinat, a radio station in Hamburg run by students and leftist groups, interviewed a Palestinian named Ahmed who described Israelis as "the Nazis of today," and compared the Holocaust to the Palestinian history "under the Zionists." He appealed to Germany to end the Wiedergutmachung and claimed that about ten billion Marks had been paid for each Israeli citizen. The presenters did not question him or even correct the absurd figure.

In October 2001, the far-Left academic journal Contraste published an article by the sociologist Christian Siegrist that claimed: "there are too many Jews in American politics. I think it is legitimate if they are overrepresented in science, this is somehow traditional, but it is not good if American Jews are involved in Middle Eastern politics." He also asserted: "The atrocities against the Palestinian people are a humiliation for the whole Arab world.... They have suffered worse than what the people in New York experienced on that one day."19

On 28 September 2002, the Palestine Committee in Stuttgart held a symposium. No protest was heard as the following statements were made:

*

We have to support the Palestinians unconditionally. This means: Solidarity with suicide bombers.
*

A two-state solution is no solution for Palestine. In the end the reactionary state of Israel and Sharon must fall. Israel must be eliminated.
*

In Germany some parts of the peace movement are under the control of the Zionists. They do not think independently; the Jews are pulling the strings.
*

Western politicians are under the control of the banks and holding companies. They need the aggressive and reactionary regime in Israel to get more and more power in that region. Sharon has nothing to fear since the banks are behind him. Is there any region in the world that is not under the rule of globalized capitalism?... Behind the Jews stands the financial capital - the reeking capitalism.

This gathering included leftist groups as well as the anti-globalization movement, Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC).201

ATTAC

ATTAC, a worldwide group with many members and promoters in Germany, was monitored very thoroughly by Jewish organizations, mainly in France and Britain, as it went beyond criticism of economic policies to address political issues. In a January 2003 demonstration against the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, some of its activists, including Germans, staged a "masquerade." One person, disguised as President Bush, carried with another person a "golden calf." Both "Bush" and the calf were marked with large yellow stars.

Subsequently ATTAC came under heavy criticism and tried to deflect it with a "Discussion Site of ATTAC-Germany on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict."21 Although attempts were made there to deny anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, between the lines the message was clear: Israel is solely responsible for the escalation since September 2000, and European Jewish groups isolate themselves when they decline to attend "anti-racism" rallies together with ATTAC and other leftist groups.

According to one statement: "The killing of Israeli civilians is not only a moral, but also a political problem." In other words, is it morally wrong to kill civilians, or is it understandable that suicide bombers act as they do? The "political problem," however, is not attributed to the Palestinian Authority but to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for allegedly "using the bombings for his foreign policy."

Later, this statement denies that Israel is actually fighting a war against terror and belittles what Israelis undergo. Palestinian terror is legitimized as a "just fight" against the "Israeli occupation," whereas "Israel is only struggling for the continuation of the occupation." ATTAC Germany also asserts at the same site: "During World War II the Allies committed war crimes like the bombings of Hiroshima and Dresden, but their fight against Nazism was just." The Allies are meant to be analogous with the Palestinian terrorists, Nazism with Israel.

Conclusion

In Germany the circle between Right and Left, between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, seems finally to have closed. Israel is now blamed for worldwide problems, just as Jews were accused as the source of misfortunes during the Middle Ages. The centuries-old practice of demonizing Jews has now been transferred to the state of Israel, leading to its delegitimization and isolation amid open calls for its destruction.

The extreme leftist trend in Germany contains elements that envision a world cleansed of the Jewish state.

* * *

Notes

1. Leon de Winter, "Das Boese existiert," Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 18 October 2004 (the quotation is translated by Susanne Urban).
2. Der Spiegel, May 2002.
3. Wilhelm Heitmeyer, ed., Deutsche Zustaende (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005).
4. See Frank Stern, Im Anfang war Auschwitz. Antisemitismus und Philosemitismus im deutschen Nachkrieg (Schriftenr. d. Inst. f. Dt. Gesch. Uni. Tel Aviv 14), Gerlingen, 1991.
5. Based on interviews by Susanne Urban with Asher Ben-Natan, published as a biographical account of Ben-Natan's experiences in Germany: Bruecken bauen, aber nicht vergessen. Als erster Botschafter Israels in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1965-1969) (Duesseldorf: Droste, 2005).
6. See also Bruecken bauen, aber nicht vergessen, pp. 111-145.
7. Jean Amery, "Die Linke und der Zionismus," Tribuene, 32 (Frankfurt am Main, 1969); Thomas Haury, Antisemitismus von Links (Hamburg: Institut für Sozialforschung 2002); Martin W. Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke. Zur Geschichte eines schwierigen Verhaeltnisses (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
8. The article and appeals of these intellectuals were published in student journals, in the quarterly journal Tribuene (Frankfurt am Main), and in left-liberal newspapers like Frankfurter Rundschau.
9. B ruecken bauen, aber nicht vergessen, pp. 93-96 (the quotation is translated by Susanne Urban).
10. Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke, p. 17.
11. Bommi Baumann, Wie alles anfing (Frankfurt am Main, 1976).
12. Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke, pp. 137-143, where more such quotations can be found.
13. Bernhard Prosch, Reinhard Wittenberg, and Martin Abraham, "Antisemitismus in der ehemaligen DDR. Ueberraschende Ergebnisse der ersten Repraesentativ-Umfrage und einer Befragung von Jugendlichen in Jena," Tribuene, 118 (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), pp. 102-120; Emnid (a polling institute), survey conducted for the American Jewish Committee, 1991.
14. See, e.g., a 1994 Emnid survey (Zentralarchiv für empirische Sozialforschung, Cologne, No. 2418), and polls by Infratest Burke (1996), Forsa (1998), and Infratest Sozialforschung (2002). Many of the polls were published in the weeklies Der Spiegel, Stern, and Die Woche.
15. Lothar Mertens, "Staatlich propagierter Antizionismus: Das Israelbild in der DDR," in Siegfried Theodor Arndt, Helmut Eschwege, Peter Honigmann, and Lothar Mertens, eds., Juden in der DDR. Geschichte - Probleme - Perspektiven (Köln: Boehlau, 1988), pp. 125-159.
16. As stated in 1991 by Green Party member Christian Stroebele. See also Martin W. Kloke, "Kathartische Zerreissproben: Zur Israel-Diskussion in der Partei 'Die Gruenen,'" in Herbert A. Strauss, Werner Bergmann, and Christhard Hoffmann, eds., Der Antisemitismus der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1990), p. 124 ff.
17. Analyses of the anti-Israeli media coverage include a survey by Medientenor, published in Tribuene, 162 (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), p. 93 ff.; and a survey by the Duisburger Institut für Sprach- und Sozialforschung (DISS) on behalf of the German office of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), published in 2002. See under: http://www.ajc.org/german/israel_medien.asp. In addition, in 2002 the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Center for Civic Studies) presented its study, "Nahostberichterstattung in den Hauptnachrichten des deutschen Fernsehens," http://www.bpb.de.
18. One book has now analyzed these books' influence and anti-Semitic bias: Tobias Jaecker, Antisemitische Verschwoerungstheorien nach dem 11. September (Hannover: LIT, 2004).
19. Website no longer available; the journal quoted was available online.
20. The quotations are from various websites that are no longer available. Such discussion groups of anti-Semitic incidents disappear quickly.
21. www.attac-netzwerk.de; search "Antisemitismus," "Israel," or "Palestine."
* * *

Dr. Susanne Urban is a historian whose current research, along with the subject of contemporary German anti-Semitism, deals with the topic of Youth Aliyah (an organization for Jewish children's immigration to Israel) during the Holocaust. She is affiliated with Yad Vashem and the Hebrew University. Recently she published a book coauthored with Israel's first ambassador to Germany, Asher Ben-Natan, about his experiences there (Bruecken bauen, aber nicht vergessen. Als erster Botschafter Israels in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland [1965-1969], 2005) and a book on Jews at the Volkswagen factory in 1944-1945 (Verschleppt, verborgen und ueberlebt, 2005).

[Severian]

Originally posted by Nakam43@Oct 10 2006, 05:36 PM
There is a widespread animus against Israel, clearly not only toward Israeli policies, that often goes along with pro-Palestinian partisanship.

You might as well say: people who opposed apartheid South Africa, and not just some of its policies, hated the Dutch!

These articles' central thesis is that opposition to Zionism = hatred of Jews. This thesis is not proved except by repeating it.

There is a real problem of anti-Semitism, including on the left. But these articles contribute nothing to understanding or combating it - the opposite is true. Their objective is to demonize opponents of the Israel apartheid state, not to combat anti-Jewish racism.

"Zionists" can sometimes be a codeword for Jews, and anti-Zionism sometimes a cover for anti-Semitism. When someone goes on about "Zionism" in contexts that are not about Israel or the Middle East, that's a giveaway. When they promote conspiracy theories suggesting that Jews control other countries, e.g. the idea that Jews are responsible for many of the wars in the world, or an "Israel lobby" controls U.S. foreign policy.

Urban does correctly point out some examples like these, but then muddies things up by conflating this conspiracist Jew-hatred with opposition to the Israeli state.

The German public does not organize demonstrations after a bus bombing in Israel, but it does after a Hamas leader is killed.

A standard complaint of the pro-war right, in many forms in every country. Why don't you condemn adversary X, instead of your own government?

But opposing "one's own" government is the only antiwar, anti-imperialist or even human rights position. And the German government in fact sends material aid to the Israeli government - and does not send plastic explosives to Hamas.

So in fact it would be pointless to for "The German public does not organize demonstrations after a bus bombing in Israel", that would do nothing to discourage Hamas from conducting more bombings.

From Yugoslavia to Iraq, condemning the atrocities of the other side is typically part of providing political cover for the atrocities of one's own side....which is of course why supporters of the Israeli apartheid state, like Urban, place such emphasis on demanding others denounce Palestinian bombings.

The insistence on the supposed uniqueness of the Nazi genocide against Jews has a similar function. In reality, other peoples have also been targeted for extermination, from Romany during WWII to American Indians....but nobody suggests those people have a "right" to return to their ancestors' homelands and expel the current inhabitants.

'Course, if that served the interests of rich people in the U.S., Germany, and other powerful coutnries, then some justification along those lines might be invented....

Surveys conducted after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 revealed a huge gap in anti-Semitic attitudes between East and West Germany.4 Surprisingly, East Germany appeared to be very congenial to Jews with almost no anti-Semitism.

That Urban finds this "suprising" reveals a lot about her assumptions. The west German army was the institutional continuation of the Third Reich's Heer. Krupp and IG Farben remain major companies. In contrast, German Communists went to the death camps along with Jews.

But she's surprised that there'd be less anti-Semitism in east Germany!

The uncertainty and economic chaos associated with the attempt to restore capitalism in east Germany, of course, created conditions where many people started looking for scapegoats....

Further:

This, however, was a fallacy related to the fact that many people and even researchers make a facile distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, despite the fact that scholars from the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin pointed to the similarities.

Rather than testing the assumption against the assumption, the data is tested against the assumption.

If poll data indicates little anti-Semitism despite widespread opposition to Zionism....maybe that indicates the two are not the same, or even necessarily linked? But no, everyone knows they're the same, so the survey results were wrong.

[Nakam43]

You might as well say: people who opposed apartheid South Africa, and not just some of its policies, hated the Dutch!

It is quite infamous to compare the state of Israel with the brutal racist colonial regime in South Africa. This analogy is a notoriously repeated formula by so-called anti-imperialist left wingers to suggest that Israel would be an illegitimate state.
Many of them compare zionism with nazism. Consider the following, how many non-Jews live in Israel and hold political power, the fact there are both anti-Zionist Jews living in Israel as well as an intellectual move towards post-Zionism however tenuous, and despite Israeli society's somewhat racist acceptance of 'non-Western' Jews the Israeli nation looks nothing like the eugenic volk of the Germans (which was annihilatory of difference).

These articles' central thesis is that opposition to Zionism = hatred of Jews. This thesis is not proved except by repeating it.

Not every criticism of Israel's policies is anti-semitic. It is possible to criticize the settlements in the West-Bank but Israel's existence as protection and defence against anti-semitic aggressions from ultra-racist and nationalist fanatics like Hamas and Hezbullah is necessary until all states are abolished.
Every other solution would be a suicidal act or racist mass murder.

Even before Israel was founded there were anti-semitic pogroms against the jewish population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Hebron_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Safed_massacre

The jewish immigration to Palestine in the end of the 19th century was a reaction to the european anti-semitism. From an anti-racist perspective this was absolutely necessary because of the uncountable pogroms in russia or poland.
Jews were also expelled from arab countries.
http://www.al-bab.com/arab/background/jews.htm

The insistence on the supposed uniqueness of the Nazi genocide against Jews has a similar function. In reality, other peoples have also been targeted for extermination, from Romany during WWII to American Indians....but nobody suggests those people have a "right" to return to their ancestors' homelands and expel the current inhabitants.

This is a relativization of the German project of extermination. Up to now, only the Germans managed to install a mass-murderous ideology – racial antisemitism – as a program that was to be realized by a cooperation of mob and elite, by a fusion of total state, capital and work(ers). This project not only theoretically labeled ‘the Jew’ as the head of an international conspiracy of capitalist and communist forces against the ‘Aryan race’, as a ‘negative principle’, in contradiction to the harmony of the German ‘volksgemeinschaft’, but tried to put this madness to practice: The Germans hunted for every Jew throughout Europe – old or young, rich or poor, left or right, atheist or orthodox – and shot or gassed every Jew they captured. It was even planned to eradicate all Jews worldwide – the ideology of annihilation fully triumphed over any economic, political or military logic.

Imperialism, colonialism, war and exploitation are characteristics of bourgeois society, a society that is based on violence in its inner core. Instrumental rationality as the necessary form of self-preservation in capitalism therefore is fundamentally interwoven/constituted by violence, power, domination and exploitation. The bourgeois subject owns, as mentioned in the above posted text, a specific coldness, i.e. it doesn`t care abot the life, the feeling, the interests of other people, the social environment or nature. It only strives to realise its own, capital-formed particular interests in the murderous concurrence against all others, that is profit and the necessary co-phenomenas of a violent subjectivity as e.g. oppression, violent appropriation of as many things as possible, fun on the cost of others etc. But normally it knows that it needs this others to a certain extent – though it tries to hide this knowledge – and therefore tries to preserve their capacities to work or the other qualities that interest – e.g. men don`t kill their wives but use them as cheap workers and fuckmachines as long as these women play their part as housewives correctly (when they refuse to take over this submissive role they often are threatened or killed by the same husbands that ‘loved’ them before) . So it has been done in the centuries of slavery, where white men exploited black people to accumulate more wealth and thereby also bet, raped, killed and massacred. The difference to Auschwitz is now that the slave holders would have never come to try to kill all blacks and all their descendents over the world because they were interested in their self-preservation and knew that they needed the cheap, hyper-expoited slave workers for this oppressive form of outcome. The Germans were also longing for the accumulation of huge wealth (exactly what they assumed to be the acting of ‘jewish parasites” was their own practice) but in the end put the desire to kill endlessly over the need for self-preservation. So instrumental rationality that objectifies everything under the rule of the egoistic subject (including the subject itself) and that’s why is always paranoid about the ‘evil intentions’ of the others turned into open paranoia (psycho-analytically spoken: the self-reflection ended, pathic projection took over). It was now transformed into such a violent, state-organized mass-murderous appeal that the sacrifice of the own life and the own nation/’race’ seemed more important than the existence in a ‘jewish-dominated’ world. That`s why the holocaust was planned as a universal project that didn’t accept any limits, if the allies wouldn`t have intervened militarically because of their own national interests the Germans would have invented jews and jews again and again and the killing would only have stopped when the last man would have been dead on earth.

[Nakam43]

http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/default.htm

[Demogorgon]

Anti-Semitism is a terrible thing, but it does nobody any favours to try and pretend criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism are the same thing. I can think of very few on the left who wish for th destruction of Israel and many of Israel's strongest left wing critics are Jewish. Are they anti-semite as well?

If Israel would return to pre-1967 borders, grant complete autonomy to the Palestinians, abolish the right of return laws, repeal the population registration act, stop interfering in countries like Lebanon, remove EVERY settlement outside it's pre 1967 territory etc Israel would be regarded with complete respect. As it is now, many like to hide behind ridiculous claims of anti-semitism to try and suppress any criticism of Israel.

As it stands Israel is an apartheid state. Many of it's laws and policies are directly modelled on South Africa's. During South Africa's apartheid years Israel was often it's closest ally, even going as far as to secretly supply it with the technology for nuclear weapons.

Many who fought against apartheid such as Desmond Tutu acknowledge that the two countries practice almost identical practices.

[Wanted Man]

Hey, Zionist scum, why are you posting here? Aren't you busy doing "Unit 731" on your elderly population?

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/772450.html

[Nakam43]

remove EVERY settlement outside it's pre 1967 territory etc Israel would be regarded with complete respect.

Hamas, Hezbullah and Ahmadineyad won't accept Israel in any borders.

Israel's strongest left wing critics are Jewish. Are they anti-semite as well?

No, I accept these positions because they have to live in Israel and want peace in contrast to most parts of the so-called "left". As long as racists like Hamas and Hezbullah kills innocent civilians any process of pacification will be impossible.

__________________________________________________ _________

Hey, Zionist scum, why are you posting here? Aren't you busy doing "Unit 731" on your elderly population?

Fuck off you Nazi scum!

[Demogorgon]

Originally posted by Nakam43@Oct 11 2006, 02:31 PM

No, I accept these positions because they have to live in Israel and want peace in contrast to most parts of the so-called "left". As long as racists like Hamas and Hezbullah kills innocent civilians any process of pacification will be impossible.

I am not justifying the fact they kill, killing is killing, and for all their violence it still hasn't got them anywhere, but you have to recognise why it happens, it is no good to say it is just because they hate jews, no doubt some do, but there are also legitimate grievances. When you suffer like those in the west bank do, it is very hard not to see escape in violence.

Yes both sides are at fault, and I am sure we could go back and forth with me saying Israel is the aggressor and they started it and you disagreeing with me, but at the end of the day, how much longer can this go on for? Somebody has to say "The pain stops with me". It may as well be Israel. After all israel isn't the one with it's country occupied and it's people oppressed. Will the violence just stop if that happens? Of course not, but there will be a lot less of it. Noetheless some wounds take a long time to heal.

At any rate you must understnd that when we look at Israel and see the privilidged lives of Israelis next to the oppression of Palestinians we would have to be monsters not to sympathise with the oppressed.

[Nakam43]

http://www.pmw.org.il/

[LuXe]

Nice read. Bit long though :P

Learned much about this when I recently visited many "KZ lagers" in Poland and Germany.

[Nakam43]

At any rate you must understnd that when we look at Israel and see the privilidged lives of Israelis next to the oppression of Palestinians we would have to be monsters not to sympathise with the oppressed.

What a binary "thinking". I do not support the IDF and do not sympathise with organisations and other islamists that want to eradicate Israel. People that have a communist or anarchist perspektive can not support nationalist, anti-semitic, homophobic and religious extremist groups only because they "fight" against a superiour military force.

[KC]

Israel is an illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

[Demogorgon]

Originally posted by Nakam43@Oct 11 2006, 05:13 PM

At any rate you must understnd that when we look at Israel and see the privilidged lives of Israelis next to the oppression of Palestinians we would have to be monsters not to sympathise with the oppressed.

What a binary "thinking". I do not support the IDF and do not sympathise with organisations and other islamists that want to eradicate Israel. People that have a communist or anarchist perspektive can not support nationalist, anti-semitic, homophobic and religious extremist groups only because they "fight" against a superiour military force.

I don't like them, but that doesn't mean I don't understand them.

Look if I could have my way there would never be another attack on Israel and Israel would never set foot in Palestinian territory again. But in the here and now I think we must recognise that occupation of the West Bank (and interference in the Gaza strip) remains the route of the problem.

[Nakam43]

Israel is an illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

The occupation of the West Bank is illegal, stupid! Look at the international law! have you learned these lies in your trotzkyist sect or where?

[Severian]

Originally posted by Nakam43+Oct 11 2006, 03:22 AM--> (Nakam43 @ Oct 11 2006, 03:22 AM)

Originally posted by Severian+--> (Severian) You might as well say: people who opposed apartheid South Africa, and not just some of its policies, hated the Dutch![/b]

It is quite infamous to compare the state of Israel with the brutal racist colonial regime in South Africa. [/b]

Unfortunately, you add nothing to say nothing to indicate why this analogy is wrong. You immediately change the subject to the Zionist-Nazi comparison, which is an example of overheated rhetoric. Foolish, but not especially bigoted; people compare all kinds of things to the Nazi Holocaust all the time. More about that later.

Just because you say something doesn't make it true. But simply asserting things is your main method of argument, as well as that of the articles you paste.

And the similarities between the Israel and South African colonial-settler states were recognized by both. That's one reason they forged a close alliance, even to the point of jointly developing nuclear weapons.

The apartheid analogy is often used even within Israeli mainstream politics - if they don't . But for some reason the assumption there is that it's only apartheid if the disenfranchised native population is more than 50%. Apparently it's OK to deprive minorities of all human rights.

They are both states founded by settlers from Europe, driving the native population of the land, corraling it in Bantustans or occupied territories. Where the native population was to serve as a source of cheap labor. Bantustans were formally independent of South Africa, in order for the apartheid state to avoid the expense of providing basic services to their inhabitants. Exactly the reason Ariel Sharon and others have given for the current pseudo-independent Palestinian Authority setup.

Oh, and both maintained a facade of parliamentary democracy - for the privileged group. Both successfully played divide-and-conquer games by giving lesser privileges to Indians, Coloureds, Druze, "Israeli Arabs".....

So in fact, the only democratic and anti-racist position is to oppose this state setup entirely. Not accidentally, the only consistently anti-racist parties in Israeli politics are the non-Zionist and anti-Zionist parties, like Hadash.

The former position of the PLO - for a united, democratic, secular state in the whole of historic Palestine - is the only correct one, and there is nothing racist about that. On the contrary, it is analagous to the ANC's position for a united, nonracial and democratic South Africa. The ANC also denied the right of Afrikaners or anyone else to their own, separate homeland. And it was also the subject of all kinds of racist fears that the privileged minority would be slaughtered en masse.

Consider the following, how many non-Jews live in Israel and hold political power,

Not many - tokenism which is no way threatens the Jewish-supremacist setup. (Jewish-supremacist by analogy to white supremacy.) But a lot of Palestinians have lived under Israel rule since 1967 without having any rights whatsoever.

the fact there are both anti-Zionist Jews living in Israel as well as an intellectual move towards post-Zionism however tenuous,

A fact which actually argues against the claim that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism.

Originally posted by Severian
These articles' central thesis is that opposition to Zionism = hatred of Jews. This thesis is not proved except by repeating it.

Originally posted by Nakam
Not every[/u] criticism of Israel's policies is anti-semitic.

Which is like saying it was OK to criticize particular South African policies, and even advocate its withdrawal from Namibia - but not to oppose apartheid entirely.

And again, you avoid the main point and fail to provide any evidence for your central thesis.

Not every opponent of the Israeli state itself is anti-Semitic, either. Feel free to provide proof of the opposite.

I might point out that UN General Assembly voted that Zionism is racism. Was that because all those people in, say, Africa, are raving Jew-haters? They've never had much to do with Jews at all.....or is it because Zionism, as a colonial-settlement project, is inherently racist?

Your argument boils down to saying one must be racist against Arabs or else against Jews, pick one.....

Even before Israel was founded there were anti-semitic pogroms against the jewish population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Hebron_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Safed_massacre

Yes, there is a history of anti-Semitism in Arab countries, including Palestine. Before the rise of Zionism, it was less than in Europe - that's all.

I will point out, however, that was after the Balfour Declaration - which declared the goal of setting up a Jewish National Home, which could only be done by expelling or disenfranchising Palestinians. The Zionist organizations were also buying up land and kicking off the tenant farmers, greatly increasing the number of landless peasants and unemployed.

Despite one-sided versions of history, the main target of the Palestinian national movement remained the British occupation administration. That was the main target of the '36 uprising, for example.

The jewish immigration to Palestine in the end of the 19th century was a reaction to the european anti-semitism.

True. But what kind of reaction? Not to resist European anti-Semitism, but to accomodate it. To become a colonialist instrument of the same governments and ruling classes responsible for the persecution of Jews.

Herzl justified anti-Semitism as an inevitable reaction to the presence of Jews. He also promised British imperialism: "There (in Palestine) we shall be a sector of the wall of Europe against Asia, we shall serve as the outpost of civilization against barbarism."

The Zionist organizations couldn't even demand the British and U.S. governments admit refugees fleeing the Nazi Holocaust. If they found refuge elsewhere, they couldn't be corralled as cannon fodder in Palestine.

So from what perspective is this necessary? Certainly not an "anti-racist perspective".

Severian

@
The insistence on the supposed uniqueness of the Nazi genocide against Jews has a similar function. In reality, other peoples have also been targeted for extermination, from Romany during WWII to American Indians....but nobody suggests those people have a "right" to return to their ancestors' homelands and expel the current inhabitants.

Nakam

This is a relativization of the German project of extermination. Up to now, only the Germans managed to install a mass-murderous ideology – racial antisemitism – as a program that was to be realized by a cooperation of mob and elite, by a fusion of total state, capital and work(ers).

The alleged uniqueness of the Holocaust has been debated before on this board, with better posters than you, so I don't intend to rehash that. At bottom, you can only defend if you don't consider non-white people human. The Nazis just brought that home to Europe - since they were driving to the East, not to the South - and labelled groups of white people as subhuman instead.

Now, supposing you grant the uniqueness claim, then what's the point of Holocaust memorializing? How can you say "Never again" if nothing else is like it anyway?

If the goal is really "Never again" a different kind of education is needed. One that opposes all genocide, not one that opposes only one genocide. (Consider Elie Wiesel helping Turkey forget the Armenian genocide.)

And one that explains how the Nazi regime came to power, what fascism is and how to fight it. That's one thing you never get in any of the official Holocaust memorializing. So of course none of it has done a damn thing to prevent the right of fascist-like movements across Europe, and people like Patrick Buchanan in the U.S., too.

This is not surprising, of course, you can't look to the establishment to fight the facism or the potential for fascism. On the contrary, they pave the way for it.

Depite which, people do compare it to other things all the time. It's Like most Nazi comparisons generally, which are so common they've become a cliche in political hype. Some web-forums have a policy that anyone who makes a Nazi comparison automatically loses the debate and the thread is closed.

So are all those people Jew-haters? Nah. They just haven't fully absorbed the official line that the only reason to remember the Nazi Holocaust is in order to make Israeli atrocities look small by comparison. That's why, in the U.S., official Holocaust remembrance didn't really take off until Israel became a highly valued tool of the U.S. empire after the '67 war.

(I expect you'll make some accusation over that one, so lemme point out that actual anti-Semites make the opposite assertion - that the U.S. government is the tool of the Jews.)

[Janus]

Hey, Zionist scum, why are you posting here? Aren't you busy doing "Unit 731" on your elderly population?

Please don't flame. Unit 731 was a government sponsored project, not the idea of a few "mad scientists".

Fuck off you Nazi scum!

Your flames aren't gonna help with your arguement.

[LoneRed]

good little tidbit

Hitler worked with the Zionist leadership in setting up Israel. The zionists wanted the jewish people to return there, and believed that because their good book told them, and Hitler wanted them out

Zionists collaborating with Nazis, well I'll Be

[Severian]

Originally posted by Nakam43@Oct 11 2006, 04:47 PM

Israel is an illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

The occupation of the West Bank is illegal, stupid! Look at the international law!

So what in international law legalizes the occupation of the other 78% of Palestine? What gives Britain, or the UN General Assembly, the right to give away someone else's homeland?

[Nakam43]

So what in international law legalizes the occupation of the other 78% of Palestine?

I am out!

[Nakam43]

Hitler worked with the Zionist leadership in setting up Israel.

National Socialism and Anti-Semitism in the Arab World

By Matthias Küntzel

Anti-Semitism based on the notion of a Jewish world conspiracy is not rooted in Islamic tradition but, rather, in European ideological models. The decisive transfer of this ideology to the Muslim world took place between 1937 and 1945 under the impact of Nazi propaganda. Important to this process were the Arabic-language service broadcast by the German shortwave transmitter in Zeesen between 1939 and 1945, and the role of Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was the first to translate European anti-Semitism into an Islamic context. Although Islamism is an independent, anti-Semitic, antimodern mass movement, its main early promoters – the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Mufti and the Qassamites in Palestine – were supported financially and ideologically by agencies of the German National Socialist government.

“Listen!” says a rabbi to a young Jew. “We have received an order from above. We need the blood of a Christian child for the unleavened bread for the Passover feast.” In the following shot, a terrified youngster is seized from the neighborhood. Then the camera zooms in on the child for a close-up of his throat being cut. The blood spurts from the wound and pours into a metal basin.

The Al-Manar satellite channel that broadcast this episode is run by the Islamist Hizbollah (“Party of God”). The scene is part of a twenty-nine-part series entitled Al-Shatat (“Diaspora”), produced by Al-Manar with Syrian government backing and broadcast for the first time during Ramadan in 2003. Episode by episode, the series peddles the fantasy of the Jewish world conspiracy: Jews have brought death and destruction upon humanity, Jews unleashed both world wars, Jews discovered chemical weapons and destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs.

With a permanent staff of three hundred, this channel has the greatest reach in the Arab-Islamic world after al-Jazeera. Ten million people a day tune in to the round-the-clock broadcasts from Beirut. Al-Manar (“the Beacon”) is the first and to date only satellite channel that, not even pretending to objectivity, sees itself as the global voice of Islamism. Its popularity is due to its countless video clips, which use inspiring graphics and uplifting music to promote suicide bombing. Al-Manar not only pushes for terrorist acts against Israel but inspires, justifies, and acclaims them.2

Yet three months after the broadcast of the Al-Shatat series, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), a think tank with close ties to the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and the Hizbollah’s “research department” organized a joint conference in Beirut titled “The Islamic World and Europe: From Dialogue to Agreement.” Just as remarkable as the cooperation between an institution of a German party of government and an Islamist terror organization was the conference agenda, which included an item on “occupation and resistance” but nothing on Al-Manar’s anti-Semitic agitation.3

This casual attitude toward Islamist Jew-hatred is typical of the discourse in Europe. Whereas the right-wing anti-Semitism of politicians like Le Pen in France or of German MP Martin Hohmann provokes public indignation, when Muslims express exactly the same anti-Semitism it is often ignored or played down as an alleged reaction to the Middle East conflict. This silence over Islamist anti-Semitism persists alongside an accompanying silence over its roots in National Socialism, as the example of the Zeesen transmitter confirms.

In Zeesen, a town with some four thousand inhabitants to the south of Berlin, once stood one of the world’s most powerful shortwave transmitters. From 1939 onward, it broadcast its daily Arabic-language program. Of all the foreign-language services, the Oriental Service had “absolute priority. It reached out to Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Indians and had an eighty-strong staff, including freelance announcers and translators.”4 Between 1939 and 1945, at a time when, in the Arab world, listening to the radio took place primarily in public squares or bazaars and coffee houses, no other station was more popular than the Zeesen service, which skillfully mingled anti-Semitic propaganda with quotations from the Koran and Arabic music. The Allies in the Second World War were presented as lackeys of the Jews and the notion of the “United Jewish Nations” drummed into the audience. At the same time, the Jews were attacked as the worst enemies of Islam. “The Jew since the time of Mohammed has never been a friend of the Muslim, the Jew is the enemy and it pleases Allah to kill him.”5 Today, this same message is being put out on satellite by Hizbollah’s Al- Manar TV channel. So what are the historical connections between the shortwave transmitter in Zeesen and the Beirut satellite channel?

National-Socialist Propaganda

A highlight of Radio Zeesen’s output was the demand for jihad by the most popular figure in the Arab-Islamic world of the time, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini (1895-1974). From 1941 onward he lived in Berlin, supervising Arabic radio broadcasting out of Zeesen, Athens, and Rome.6 Nobody promoted hatred of Jews among Muslims more effectively than the Mufti. The European responsibility for this is clear: el-Husseini had after all been appointed to and promoted in office by European powers. It was the British who, having first sentenced him to ten years in jail for anti-Jewish incitement in 1920, then amnestied him in 1921 and made him Mufti against the will of the majority of Palestinians. It was the Germans who paid him for his services between 1937 and 1945. And it was the French who in 1946, when the Mufti was being pursued internationally as a war criminal, helped him escape to Egypt and continue his activities.7

Nobody had a greater influence on the early history of the Middle East conflict than the Mufti, who as president of the Supreme Muslim Council was not only the supreme religious authority but also the central figure in Palestinian nationalism. In the 1930s, there were countless Arab nationalists who viewed Germany as an ally against the British without concerning themselves with the nature of the Hitler regime. Things were different where the Mufti was concerned: he knew what the regime was about and was attracted to it for that very reason.

As early as spring 1933, he assured the German consul in Jerusalem that “the Muslims inside and outside Palestine welcome the new regime of Germany and hope for the extension of the fascist, anti-democratic governmental system to other countries.”8 The youth organization of the party established by the Mufti operated for a time under the name Nazi Scouts and adopted Hitler Youth-style shorts and leather belts. During the 1936-1939 Palestinian revolt, the swastika was used as a mark of identity: Arabic leaflets and graffiti were liberally decorated with it, Arab children welcomed each other with the Hitler salute, and vast numbers of German flags and pictures of Hitler were displayed even at celebrations of Mohammed’s birthday. Anyone obliged to travel through areas involved in the Palestinian revolt would attach a swastika to their vehicle to ward off attacks by Arab snipers.9

However, until the summer of 1937, this support was awkward for the German government. Berlin politely but firmly rejected the Arab officers of cooperation. While, on the one hand, Hitler had already stated his belief in the “racial inferiority” of the Arabs in Mein Kampf and contemptuously rejected their “Holy War,”10 on the other, the Auswärtige Amt (German Foreign Office) was extremely anxious not to jeopardize British appeasement of Berlin prematurely by activities in the Middle East, especially since the Mediterranean fell within the sphere of responsibility of Germany’s Italian ally.

Berlin revised this approach for the first time in June 1937. The trigger was the proposal from the British Peel Commission for the division of the Palestine Mandate territory into a smaller Jewish and a larger Muslim-Arab state. The formation of a Jewish state “is not in Germany’s interest,” was the instant response of Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath, since such a state “would create an additional position of power under international law for international Jewry. Germany therefore has an interest in strengthening the Arab world as a counterweight against such a possible increase in power for world Jewry.”11

Strengthening the Arabs against the Jews – it is true that Berlin initially pursued this new course surreptitiously, lest it alienate London. Nevertheless, the scale of the operations now set in motion was impressive. Students from Arab countries received German scholarships, firms took on Arab apprentices, and Arab party leaders were invited to the Nuremberg party rallies and military chiefs to Wehrmacht maneuvers. An “Arab Club” was established in Berlin as the center for Palestine-related agitation and Arabic-language broadcasting.12

Under the direction of the German Propaganda Ministry, the Deutsche Nachrichtenbüro (German News Agency – DNB), whose regional headquarters in Jerusalem had set up an Arab service in 1936, stepped up its work. The head of DNB-Jerusalem, Dr. Franz Reichert, who had excellent links not only with the Mufti but also with the Arabic press, bribed journalists and brought dissident newspapers back on board with lucrative advertising orders.

In September 1937, two members of the Jewish Department of the SS’ secret service (Sicherheitsdienst – SD), one of them Adolf Eichmann, carried out an exploratory mission in the Middle East lasting several weeks. Extended visits by the leader of Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, and the head of the Abwehr (counterintelligence service), Wilhelm Canaris, followed. Finally, in April 1939 the head of the Foreign Office’s Oriental Department, Otto von Hentig, also spent time in Palestine and Egypt. This activism was not without results: von Schirach donated the money for the establishment of an “Arab Club” in Damascus in which German officials trained recruits for the Mufti’s insurgents and Canaris covered the region with a spy network.13

The most effective tool, however, was the Arabic-language broadcasting out of Zeesen, “our long-range gun in the ether” as Goebbels dubbed it. It began regular service on 25 April 1939, transmitting daily at 17.45 hours Berlin time.14 It ridiculed any Arab wishing to negotiate with the Zionists. “The Berlin radio announcer, for instance, used regularly to refer to the Amir Abdallah as ‘Rabbi Abdallah’,” reported Nevill Barbour, later a BBC reporter. “It was therefore not easy to counter Nazi propaganda on the subject of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.”15 But Radio Zeesen was also hard to combat because it had no scruples about mobilizing anti-Western antipathies: with its pro-Arab shift, Berlin had discovered the antimodernist potential of Islam.

The Mufti’s Anti-Semitism

It was not only Heinrich Himmler who waxed lyrical about the “ideological closeness” of National Socialism and Islam, coining the concept of Muselgermanen (“Muslimo-Germans”).16 Haj Amin el-Husseini, too, referred to the parallels between Muslim and German ideals, identifying the following points of contact: (1) monotheism – unity of leadership; (2) the ordering power – obedience and discipline; (3) the struggle and the honor of falling in battle; (4) community; (5) family and offspring; (6) glorification of work and creativity; and (7) attitude toward the Jews – “in the struggle against Jewry, Islam and National Socialism come very close to one another.”17

However, precisely this last point was by no means self-evident. Racialist anti-Semitism and the fantasy of the Jewish world conspiracy were of European origin and foreign to the original Islamic view of the Jews. Only in the Christ legend did the Jews appear as a deadly and powerful force who allegedly went so far as to kill God’s only son.

Islam was quite a different story. Here it was not the Jews who murdered the Prophet, but the Prophet who murdered the Jews: in the years between 623 and 627 Mohammed enslaved, expelled, or killed all the Jewish tribes of Medina. As a result, the characteristic features of Christian anti-Semitism did not arise in the Muslim world. “There were no fears of Jewish conspiracy and domination, no charges of diabolic evil. Jews were not accused of poisoning wells or spreading the plague.”18 Instead, the Jews were treated with contempt or condescending tolerance. This cultural inheritance made the idea that the Jews of all people could represent a permanent danger for the Muslims and the world seem absurd.

This insane idea had therefore to be hammered into the Arab- Islamic world all the more forcefully. The conflict over immigration and land ownership in Palestine was not the reason, merely an opportunity, for its spread. Thus, for example, the pamphlet on “Islam and Jewry” distributed by the Germans to Muslim members of the “Handzar” Bosnian SS division talked about an “ancient enmity,” while Radio Zeesen evoked in ever-new variations the theme of the “eternal enemy, the Jew.” A speech given by the Mufti in November 1943 is typical:

This people has been the enemy of the Arabs and Islam since it came into being. The Holy Koran expressed this old enmity in the following words: “you will find that the most hostilely-disposed toward the believers are the Jews.” They tried to poison the praiseworthy Prophet, put up resistance to him, were filled with hostility to him and plotted against him. This was the case over 1300 years ago. Since then, they have never ceased to hatch plots against the Arabs and Mohammedans.19

Thus was an eternal threat to all Muslims concocted from Mohammed’s defeated contemporaries.

For the Mufti, the reference back to the seventh century fit the bill for a second reason: his hatred of the Jews was a declaration of war on the “invasion of liberal ideas” into the world of Islam. Since the start of the 20th century, Egypt had been opening up to the outside world; in the 1920s Turkey replaced the Caliphate with the Atatürkist model; and Reza Khan, too, was promoting the secularization of Iran. The Mufti made not the slightest concession to this reformist trend in his sphere of control. He saw Jerusalem as the crystallization point for the “rebirth of Islam” and Palestine as the center from whence resistance to the Jews and the modern world was destined to emanate. Speaking at a religious conference in 1935, the Mufti complained: “The cinema, the theatre and some shameless magazines enter our houses and courtyards like adders, where they kill morality and demolish the foundation of society.” The Jews were blamed for this alleged corruption of moral values, as demonstrated by another statement of Haj Amin el-Husseini: “They [the Jews] have also spread here their customs and usages which are opposed to our religion and to our whole way of life. The Jewish girls who run around in shorts demoralise our youth by their mere presence.”20

El-Husseini tirelessly used his office to Islamize anti-Zionism and provide a religious rationale for hatred of Jews. Anyone who failed to accept his guidelines would be denounced by name in the mosque during Friday prayers, excluded from the rites of marriage and burial, or physically threatened. The Mufti implemented this policy along with his most prominent Palestinian ally of the time, the Islamic fundamentalist Izz al-Din al-Qassam, whose name is borne by Hamas’s suicide-bombing units. Al-Qassam was the first sheikh of modern times who, in 1931 in the Haifa region, set up a movement that united the ideology of a devout return to the original Islam of the seventh century with the practice of militant jihad against the infidels.21

The unrest that began in 1936 and that has gone down in history as the “Arab revolt” was the initial testing ground for the emergent Islamist ideology. Here for the first time terrorist methods were employed that would later be inculcated among Muslims in Algeria, Afghanistan, and Iran.

Nucleus of Islamism

The “Arab revolt,” which continued in stages until the start of the Second World War, began in April 1936 as a wave of strikes against Jewish immigration and British rule.22The second phase developed in autumn 1937 after the publication of the Peel Plan on the partition of Palestine. At this point, German foreign policy intervened decisively. “The Mufti himself said that it was at that time only because of German money that it had been possible to carry through the uprising in Palestine. From the outset he made major financial demands that the Nazis in very large measure met.”23

From now on, the character of the unrest was determined by the Mufti and the supporters of Sheikh al-Qassam. In the zones “liberated” from the Jews and British, new dress codes and shari’a law were brutally enforced and numerous “un-Islamic” deviationists liquidated. A German biographer of the Mufti reported admiringly in 1943 on the shooting of Palestinian Arabs who resisted the pressure to submit by refusing to wear the kaffiyeh.24No less draconian were the means used to force Arab Christian women and all other women to wear the veil.

Along with the Jews and the British, Palestinians who sought compromises with Zionism and the Mandatory power and supported the Peel Plan were also targeted. “Sellers of land to the Jews, holders of moderate political views and those whose nationalism was generally suspected,” recounts Porath:

...were not always immediately murdered; sometimes they were kidnapped and taken to the mountainous areas under rebel control. There they were thrown into pits infested with snakes and scorpions. After spending a few days there, the victims, if still alive, were brought before one of the rebel courts and usually sentenced to death, or, as a special dispensation, to severe flogging. The terror was so strong that no one, including ulama and priests, dared to perform the proper burial services.25

The unrest culminated in autumn 1938. El-Husseini now had some ten thousand fighters – including three thousand professional soldiers – at his disposal. The most important commands were in the hands of the “Qassamites,” while the Mufti directed the revolt from Beirut.26 Dr. Reichert from the Intelligence Bureau had several meetings with representatives of the insurgents and repeatedly emphasized that “on the basis of the Third Reich’s undertakings to Haj Amin el-Husseini the Arab nationalists will soon have sufficient financial resources for the continuation of their rebellion.”27

Why did the National Socialists want to prolong the unrest? The most important reason was expressed by Alfred Rosenberg, head of the Nazi Party’s foreign policy department. “The longer the fire continues to burn in Palestine,” he prophesied in December 1938, “the stronger becomes the resistance to the Jewish regime of violence in all the Arab states and beyond that in the other Muslim countries too.”28 These words were borne out. It was, for example, the fighting in Palestine that first turned the core organization of Islamism, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, into the influential organization from whose ranks not only Hamas but also Osama bin Laden’s World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders would later issue. Whereas in 1936 the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood had a mere eight hundred members, by 1938 it already had 200,000. In the intervening period it had undertaken only one campaign: the mobilization behind the Mufti-led revolt in Palestine.29

The Anti-Semitism of the Muslim Brotherhood

Before 1936, there could be no talk of anti-Semitism in Egypt. Jews were well regarded by the population and were influential in economic and political life. The anti-Jewish pamphlets that the NSDAP’s local group in Cairo attempted to disseminate fell on deaf ears. In a letter to Berlin in 1933, the group asserted that further leaflets and pamphlets would be of no avail and that instead attention should be turned to where “real conflicts of interests between Arabs and Jews exist; Palestine. The conflict between Arabs and Jews there must be transplanted into Egypt.”30

Three years later, that is what happened. In May 1936, immediately after the start of the Palestinian revolt, the Muslim Brotherhood called for a boycott of all Jewish businesses in Egypt. In mosques and factories, the rumor was spread that the Jews and British were destroying the holy places of Jerusalem. Further false reports of hundreds of killed Arab women and children circulated.

After the publication of the Peel Plan, the anti-Jewish agitation was stepped up. Cries of “Down with the Jews!” and “Jews out of Egypt and Palestine!” rang out in violent student demonstrations in Cairo, Alexandria, and Tanta. A column titled “The Menace of the Jews of Egypt” was introduced in the Brotherhood’s magazine, Al- Nadhir. In it were published the names and addresses of Jewish business proprietors and owners of allegedly Jewish newspapers from across the world, and all evils – from communism to brothels – were attributed to the “Jewish threat.” In September 1938, the Brotherhood launched a call for people to wear and consume only goods produced in Islamic countries and in all parts of Egypt to prepare to embark on a jihad to defend the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.31

Giselher Wirsing, a prominent journalist of the Third Reich, enthusiastically reported on the shockwaves that the “political earthquake center” in Palestine had created in Egypt. Wirsing, a member of the SS, noted with satisfaction “a marked return to the religious traditions of Islam” and “a fierce hostility to Western liberalism….Recent developments in Egypt…show how strongly this theocracy is able to revive itself after the first onrush of liberalism.” Theocracy instead of democracy, Salafism instead of liberalism: this SS man takes a clear line.32

Priority was now given to supporting the burgeoning Islamist movement in Egypt with German funds. As Brynjar Lia recounts in his monograph on the Muslim Brotherhood:

...Documents seized in the flat of Wilhelm Stellbogen, the Director of the German News Agency (Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro) affiliated to the German Legation in Cairo, show that prior to October 1939 the Muslim Brothers received subsidies from his organisation. Stellbogen was instrumental in transferring these funds to the Brothers, which were considerably larger than the subsidies offered to other anti-British activists. These transfers appear to have been coordinated by Haj Amin el-Husseini and some of his Palestinian contacts in Cairo.33

The contributions enabled the Muslim Brotherhood to set up a printing plant with twenty-four employees and use the most up-to-date propaganda methods. For example, an eighty-page pamphlet called “Fire and Destruction in Palestine,” with fifty photos of alleged acts of violence and torture, was produced and several tens of thousands of copies distributed among the populace.

The Muslim Brotherhood also, of course, enjoyed the assistance of German officers in constructing their military organization and cooperated with Rommel’s army in the Second World War. But they never admired Hitler. For Hassan al-Banna, the founder and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, there was no question of accepting a non-Muslim leader. “When they did express admiration of certain aspects of National Socialism or Fascism, it was usually in the context of demonstrating that the Europeans had implemented some of ‘the principles of Islam,’ such as a modest dress code, encouragement of early marriage, a strong patriotism and a military jihad spirit.”34

Thus did the years 1936-1939 shape Islamism as a new and independent, anti-Semitic and antimodern mass movement. Until 1936 the moderate Arab forces, which welcomed or at least tolerated Zionism, had in no way been marginalized. This changed after the National Socialists threw their weight behind the Islamists. They successfully spurred on the unrest in Palestine and so contributed to spreading the idea that the Jews were the enemy to Egypt. The Islamist mass mobilization was financially and ideologically supported by Radio Zeesen and other means of propaganda. This was one of the reasons that it was the Islamism and anti-Semitism of Hassan al-Banna rather than the enlightened modernism of Kemal Atatürk that gained general acceptance in the Arab part of the Islamic world.35

The Zeesen shortwave transmitter appears in retrospect to have been the interface that transferred the anti-Semitic ideology to the Arab world and linked early Arab Islamism with late National Socialismzism. Although Radio Zeesen ceased operation in April 1945, it was only after that date that its frequencies of hate really began to reverberate in the Arab world.

Brother Hitler

The eighth of May, 1945, was followed by a twofold division of the world. The one division between politico-economic systems is known as the Cold War. The second cleavage, merely covered over by the Cold War, has to do with the persistence of National Socialist modes of thought. In her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Hannah Arendt cast her gaze into this abyss: “the newspapers in Damascus and Beirut, in Cairo and Jordan did not conceal either their sympathy for Eichmann nor their regret that he ‘did not finish the job’; a radio broadcast from Cairo on the opening day of the trial even included a little sideswipe at the Germans, reproaching them for the fact that ‘in the last war, no German plane had ever flown over and bombed a Jewish settlement.’”36 The same regret and heartfelt wish to see all Jews finally annihilated was expressed in April 2002 by a columnist in the second largest, state-controlled Egyptian daily Al- Akhbar.

The entire matter [the Holocaust], as many French and British scientists and researchers have proven, is nothing more than a huge Israeli plot aimed at extorting the German government in particular and the European countries in general. But I, personally and in light of this imaginary tale, complain to Hitler, even saying to him from the bottom of my heart, “If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that the world could sigh in relief [without] their evil and sin.”37

The logic is clear: the Jew is the source of evil in the world that must be destroyed. Israel therefore deserves to be erased from the map. And the Shoah is therefore no crime, but a failed attempt for which a more successful reprise is desired. Demonization of the Jews, legitimization of the Holocaust, and the liquidation of Israel; three sides of an ideological triangle that cannot exist if any one of the sides is missing. But why did this monstrous ideology find its most fertile place of exile in the Arab world after 1945?

Here the Mufti comes back into the picture. Openly and knowing about Auschwitz, he had advocated the Shoah. “Germany,” he declared in 1943, has “decided to find a final solution to the Jewish menace, which will end this misfortune in the world.”38 Nevertheless, the Mufti’s reputation remained intact after 1945. He was, to be sure, personally responsible both for the atrocities committed by the Muslim SS division in Bosnia and for the deaths of thousands of Jewish children in the Holocaust.39 However, in order not to fall out with the Arab world, the United States and Britain refrained from prosecuting him, while France, in whose custody the Mufti had been since 1945, let him escape. When on 10 June 1946 the headlines of the world press announced the Mufti’s “flight” from France, “the Arab quarters of Jerusalem and all the Arab towns and villages were garlanded and beflagged, and the great man’s portrait was to be seen everywhere.”40 While amnestying the Mufti, the Allies also rehabilitated his anti-Semitism. Even more: the Arabs saw in the Mufti’s impunity “not only a weakness of the Europeans, but also absolution for past and future occurrences,” commented Simon Wiesenthal in 1947. Now the pro-Nazi past began to become “a source of pride, not shame.”41

The opposed views of the Holocaust first clashed in November 1947 at the UN General Assembly. On one side were those who considered the Shoah a fact and a catastrophe and were consequently in favor of the partition of Palestine and the founding of Israel.42 On the other were those who saw in the UN resolution a further example of the “Jewish world conspiracy.” Among the latter was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna, who “considered the whole United Nations intervention to be an international plot carried out by the Americans, the Russians and the British, under the influence of Zionism,” while Haj Amin el-Husseini, back in his role as spokesman for the Palestinians, believed that, instead of Palestine being divided into states, “the Arabs” should “together attack the Jews and destroy them as soon as the British forces have been withdrawn” from Palestine.43

No Arab head of state had the courage to contradict the popular Palestinian leader. And so the cynicism of the West, which left the Mufti undisturbed in 1946, and the opportunism of the Arabs paved the way to one of the most fateful turning points of the 20th century: as Israel was founded on 14 May 1948, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon invaded. The general-secretary of the Arab League, Abd al-Rahman Azzam, who had previously stated privately that he considered the partition of Palestine the only rational solution, now stood shoulder to shoulder with the Mufti; “this war,” he declared on the day of the Arab attack, “will be a war of destruction.”44 The new state, to be sure, emerged victorious from this war, at a cost of six thousand Israeli lives. Anti-Semitism, however, took on a new dimension. Gamal Abdul Nasser, whose 1952 putsch was a consequence of the Arab defeat, disseminated the central text of European anti-Semitism, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in the Arab world. Moreover, Nasser employed many of the National Socialist war criminals who had evaded justice by fleeing to Egypt in their former sphere of expertise – anti-Jewish propaganda.45

After Nasser’s military campaign against Israel also failed miserably in the Six-Day War of 1967, the previously incited hate against Jews was radicalized in an Islamist direction. Nasser’s anti-Jewish propaganda was still accompanied by a fondness for life’s pleasures. Now anti-Semitism was mixed with the Islamists’ hatred for sensuality and joy in life and – in taking up the jihad launched thirty years previously in Palestine – popularized as religious resistance against all “corrupters of the world.” Now it was “discovered” that not only was everything Jewish evil, but everything evil was Jewish. Thus, the most important manifesto of Islamist anti-Semitism, the essay “Our Struggle with the Jews” by the Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb – distributed in millions of copies throughout the Islamic world with Saudi Arabian help – declares, with allusions to Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Emile Durkheim, that the Jews are responsible for the worldwide moral and sexual decline: “Behind the doctrine of atheistic materialism was a Jew; behind the doctrine of animalistic sexuality was a Jew; and behind the destruction of the family and the shattering of sacred relationships in society was a Jew.”46 Now Palestine was declared sacred Islamic territory (Dar al-Islam), where Jews should not be allowed to govern even a single village, and Israel’s destruction a religious duty. Intellectual devastation now spread unimpeded: Jews started to be denigrated by reference to verses in the Koran as “pigs” and “apes,” and the claim that the consumption of non-Jewish blood was a religious rite for Jews was offered up as a scientific discovery.47 The greatest victims of the Islamist turn were the Muslims themselves. The “struggle against depravity” means the suppression of one’s own sensual needs and the return to “sacred social bonds” entails the subjugation of women.

A further escalation took place in 1982 when Hizbollah began systematically to employ people as bombs. The hatred of Jews was now greater than the fear of death. The ideology of destruction turned into the practice of ripping any Jew to pieces. Whenever the possibility of a peaceful solution appeared on the horizon, it would be drowned in the blood of suicidal mass murders. The first major series of suicide bombings began in Palestine in 1993-1994, at precisely the moment when the Oslo peace process was under way. It was resumed in October 2000 after Israel withdrew from Lebanon and had made its most far-reaching concessions yet to the Palestinian side at Camp David.48

Islamists and Europeans

From Zeesen to Beirut: the international media campaign against the Jews, which began sixty years ago with a “long-range gun in the ether,” is now being pursued in the form of instruction in close combat by satellite. The bloodier the massacres in Israel and Palestine, the higher the viewing figures for Al-Manar and the more successful the anti- Semitic mobilization in the Arab-Islamic world, in turn ensuring a further rise in the death toll in the Middle East conflict. This escalation strategy is not a response to any specific Israeli policy. Whatever the Israeli government does is subordinated to a mindset that seeks to destroy the Israeli state as the representative of evil.

The “evil,” though, is the Jew himself. In September 2001, the legend that following a warning by the Mossad four thousand Jews had not shown up for work at the World Trade Centre on 11 September – a legend invented by Hizbollah and broadcast by Al-Manar – spread like wildfire. This “I-hate-you” virus was proliferated a millionfold by Internet and satellite across the world. What sort of image of “Jews” does it convey? First of all, it assumes that the Mossad is prepared to wade in blood so as to harm the Arabs. Second, it implies that every Jew outside Israel obeys orders from Tel Aviv. Third, it projects Hizbollah’s own destructive urges onto the victims: the Jews in New York had, allegedly, cold-bloodedly delivered up thousands of their non-Jewish colleagues to death. Goebbels’s dictum that a lie only has to be big enough to be believed was here faithfully followed. Its global spread and acceptance in itself marks a watershed: overnight the fabricated story of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy was popularized as the central interpretative framework for an event of worldwide significance. If today there are “more anti-Semites and more anti-Semitism in the world than ever” as Alain Finkielkraut asserts, then this is due in some measure to Al-Manar.49

In Europe this channel, whose costs are covered by, among other things, advertising the German chocolate Milka, the Finnish Smeds cheese, the Austrian Red Bull drink, and the French Gauloises cigarettes, is broadcast by the Eutelsat satellite firm via its Hotbird 4 satellite.50The French newspaper Libération estimates that 2.6 million households in France alone can receive the channel, which since 9/11 has also gained growing popularity in Germany’s Arab neighborhoods. At least in France the broadcast of the twenty-nine part series Al-Shatat sparked immediate protests. Prime Minister Raffarin, having been shown excerpts from the series, is pressing for changes in the media laws in order to block the channel’s broadcasts.51 There is no whiff of any such steps in Germany. As in February 2004 the president of Eutelsat was meeting representatives of the French monitoring agencies to discuss measures to control Al-Manar, in Beirut the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung was sitting down with the people behind the channel – not, however, in order to dissociate themselves from it, but to “facilitate change through rapprochement,” as the FES wrote in a press release. “We are hoping that they will come to a certain understanding, and that they will form a sort of permanent committee to sustain such dialogue among the Islamists and Europeans,” declared an FES representative in the run-up to the conference.52

From Zeesen to Beirut: why did the anti-Semitic holy warriors in 2002 decide to approach Germany in particular with their conference proposal? The answer is no secret. Udo Steinbach, head of the Deutsche Orient-Institut in Hamburg, quite openly enthused about the “lingering effects of the sympathy traditionally evinced for Germany in the whole region.”53 The ideological basis for this sympathy was decisively strengthened by Radio Zeesen and the Mufti’s pro-German orientation. Is German foreign policy today picking up the threads of this “sympathy”? Foreign Office officials evade giving a clear answer to this question. Instead, the virulent pro-Nazi sentiment is purposefully ignored and the continuation of a Nazi-like anti-Semitism has met with inexcusable nonchalance.

In Beirut, it was not German neo-Nazis who met Hizbollah and its deputy general-secretary, Sheikh Naeem Qasim, but Social Democrats, that is, declared opponents of fascism.54 However, even to mention Hizbollah’s Nazi-like anti-Semitism would have removed the basis for this meeting. So instead the conference tested the waters of “change through rapprochement” around topics where residual German and Arab traditions can be drawn on in equal measure, such as “Neocolonialism or ‘Benevolent Hegemony’?,” “Occupation and Resistance,” and “Self-Determination and Independence in a Globalized World.”

Some justification was needed after the Beirut conference to bridge the gulf between subjective good intentions and the objective validation of Hizbollah’s terror. This justification was “Israel.” Participants in the conference tried to make both themselves and critics of the conference believe that Hizbollah was just reacting to Israel’s policies.55 Certainly, the policies of the Israeli government – like those of any other government – may give rise to anger and criticism. But no Israeli policy, however deserving of criticism it may be, makes plausible the anti-Semites’ tenets that Washington is ruled by Jerusalem and that the Passover meal is prepared with the blood of murdered children.

Anyone, however, who believes in presenting Israel as the scapegoat for Islamist violence is not only diverting attention from the goals of Islamism and its National Socialistzi heritage, but is also, by adhering to a new “the Jew is guilty” model, reconnecting with the ancient forms of European anti-Semitism.

The Jew is the evil of the world, declares the Islamist station today, in unison with the earlier one based in Zeesen. One cannot get away with fuzzy answers to the question of whether Germany and Europe, in their foreign policies, want to play along with this tradition or to break with it. The absence of clarity is the beginning of complicity, wrote the historian Omer Bartov. Or in the words of Leon Poliakov, “anyone who does not denounce anti-Semitism in its primitive and elementary form, and does not do so precisely because it is primitive and elementary, will have to face the question as to whether he is not thereby sending out a sign of secret approval to anti-Semites all over the world.”56

Notes
1. This article was translated by Colin Meade.
2. See Avi Jorisch, “Al-Manar: Hizbollah TV,” Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2004. See also Lisbeth Rausing, “Frequenzen des Hasses. Wie die Hisbollah ihre Mordpropaganda nach Europe trägt,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Vol. 13, March 2004 (German).
3. Along with the FES and the Hizbollah Consultative Centre for Studies and Documentation, the Deutsche Orient-Institut Beirut and the University of Birminham’s Centre for the Study of Islam were also involved in organizing the conference, held on 17-19 February 2004. See the FES’s press release of 23 February 2004.
4. Werner Schwipps, “Wortschlacht im äther,” in DeutscheWelle, ed., Wortschlacht im äther, Der deutsche Auslandsrundfunk im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Haude & Spenersche Verlagsbuchhandlung,1971), p. 58 (German).
5. Seth Arsenian, “Wartime Propaganda in the Middle East,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1948): 421; Robert Melka, The Axis and the Arab Middle East 1930-1945, thesis, University of Minnesota, University Micro- films, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI, 1966, pp. 47; Heinz Tillmann, Deutschlands Araberpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (East Berlin: Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1965), pp. 83 (German). According to Arsenian and Melka, Arabic broadcasting from Zeesen began in 1938.
6. Nicholas Bethell, Das Palästina-Dreieck, Juden und Araber im Kampf um das britische Mandat 1935 bis 1948 (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen-Verlag, 1979), p. 240 (German). According to Bethell, El-Husseini was the “Leiter” (“Director”) of this station, while according to Hurewitz the Mufti was a director of the “Arab Bureau” in Berlin, which was responsible for preparing and transmitting the Arabic broadcasts, under the supervision of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. See J. C. Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine (New York: Norton, 1951), p. 154.
7. Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini und die Nationalsozialisten (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1988), pp. 251 (German).
8. Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion, Vol. 2, 1929-1939 (London, 1977), p. 76.
9. Ralf Balke, Die Landesgruppe der NSDAP in Palästina, thesis, Universität- Gesamthochschule Essen, 1997, pp. 214, 216 (German); Tillmann, Deutschlands Araberpolitik, p. 78 (German); Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), p. 98. See also Iwo Jordan, Araberaufstand. Erlebnisse und Dokumente aus Palästina (Vienna-Leipzig, 1943), pp. 3, 97 (German). Jordan reprints an example of an Arab-Palestinian leaflet with swastikas.
10. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger, GmbH, 1934), p. 747 (German).
11. Tillmann, Deutschlands Araberpolitik, p. 66. Italy did not seem reliable enough for the anti-Jewish project. In the last analysis, according to the German Foreign Ministry, Italy’s rejection of the Peel Plan was motivated “less by antisemitic animosity than by fear that Britain might make the foundation of a Jewish state in Palestine the basis of its Mediterranean policy.” See Melka, The Axis, pp. 70.
12. Melka, The Axis, p. 53.
13. Hurewitz, Struggle for Palestine, p. 87; Balke, Die Landesgruppe, p. 204; Melka, The Axis, pp. 48.; Michael Cohen, Retreat from the Mandate (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978), p. 58; Lukasz Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 54.
14. Information from Gerhard Damm, Zeesen. According to Arsenian and Melka, Zeesen’s Arabic service in fact began broadcasting at the start of 1938.
15. Nevill Barbour, “Broadcasting to the Arab World: Arabic Transmissions from the BBC and Other Non-Arab Stations,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 5, Winter 1951, p. 65. Emir Abdallah, the ruler of Transjordan, was murdered in 1951 by one of the Mufti’s thugs for trying to reach an understanding with Israel.
16. Gensicke, Der Mufti, p. 171.
17. Speech by the Mufti to the imams of the Bosnian SS Division, cited in Gensicke, ibid., p. 207.
18. See Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), p. 122.
19. This speech of the Mufti’s on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration is reprinted in Gerhard Höpp, ed., Mufti-Papiere. Briefe, Memoranden, Reden und Aufrufe Amin al-Husainis aus dem Exil, 1940-1945 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2001), pp. 192 (German). The quotation from the Koran is from the 82nd verse of the fifth Sura. The pamphlet “Islam and Judentum” can be found in Thomas Casagrande, Die Volksdeutsche SS-Division “Prinz Eugen” (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2003), p. 333 (German).
20. Uri M. Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council: Islam under the British Mandate for Palestine (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), pp. 249, 252.
21. On Izz al-Din al-Qassam, see Porath, Palestinian Arab National Movement, pp. 133. In November 1935, al-Qassam became the first victim of the death cult he promoted when he was killed in a skirmish with the British, and has since been revered as a martyr.
22. Davis Thomas Schiller, Palästinenser zwischen Terrorismus und Diplomatie (Munich: Bernard & Graefe Verlag, 1982), p. 123. (German).
23. According to Klaus Gensicke in his important study, Der Mufti, pp. 233. The most detailed accounts of the uprising are to be found in Schiller, Palästinenser, and Porath, Palestinian Arab National Movement.
24. Kurt Fischer-Weth, Amin el-Husseini. Grossmufti von Palästina (Berlin: Walter Titz Verlag, 1943), p. 83. How the kaffiyah, which was permanently worn by Arafat, could become the badge of identity of today’s “progressives” deserves a study of its own.
25. Porath, Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 250.
26. Ibid. , pp. 183. After the failed British attempt to arrest el-Husseini in July 1937, he fled in October to Beirut from where, with a few hundred acolytes who had come with him, he continued to direct the uprising. See Melka, The Axis, pp. 106.; Cohen, Retreat, p. 59.
27. Again in May 1939 British officials reported that “DNB agents are currently undertaking an intensive propaganda campaign in Palestine for a resumption of the rebellion in alliance with the Husseini circle.” DNB agents had stated “that huge sums of money were available to ensure that the rebellion continued and that machine guns have been brought into the country for the rebellion.” Balke, Die Landesgruppe, pp. 205, 207.
28. Alfred Rosenberg, “Die Judenfrage im Weltkampf,” in Alfred Rosenberg, Tradition und Gegenwart, Reden und Aufsätze 1936-1940, Blut und Ehre, IV. Band (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1943), p. 208 (German).
29. Abd Al-Fattah Muhammad El-Awaisi, The Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestinian Question 1928-1947 (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1998), p. 98. For the links between the Islamism of the 1930s and that of the present day, see Matthias Küntzel, Djihad und Judenhass (Freiburg: ca ira-Verlag, 2002) (German).
30. Gudrun Krämer, Minderheit, Millet, Nation? Die Juden in Agypten 1914-1952 (Wiesbaden: Verlag Otto Harrassowitz, 1982), p. 278 (German). Since 1926, Alfred Hess, brother of Hitler’s deputy-to-be, had been building up the NSDAP group in Egypt. See Küntzel, Djihad, pp. 26.
31. Krämer, Minderheit, pp. 290.; El-Awaisi, Muslim Brotherhood, pp. 39, 70, 92; Porath, Palestinian Arab National Movement, p. 199. On the resistance that this campaign at first encountered even in clerical circles, see Küntzel, Djihad, pp. 30.
32. GiselherWirsing, Engländer, Juden, Araber, in Palästina, 5th rev. ed. (Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1942), pp. 136 (German). Wirsing visited Egypt and Palestine in 1936 and 1939 on behalf of the SS. See Otto Köhler, Unheimliche Publizisten (Munich: Droemersche Verlagsanstalt Th. Knaur Nachf., 1995), pp. 290 (German). Salafism (as-salaf as-salih means “the pious forefathers”) is the term used for the ideal of a return to the early Islam of the seventh century advocated by figures such as Hassan al-Banna and Izz al-Din al-Qassam.
33. Brynjar Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1988), p. 175. The British secret service officer Seth Arsenian confirms this information: “Nazi agents also paid subversive groups, such as…the Ikhwan al-Muslimun in Egypt, to run propaganda against the British in Palestine” (Ikhwan al-Muslimun: Arab term for the Muslim Brothers). See Arsenian, “Wartime Propaganda,” p. 425.
34. Lia, Society of the Muslim Brothers, pp. 80, 180. The issue of the reciprocal contacts between Nazis and Muslim Brothers in the Second World War lies outside the scope of this article. On this matter, see, inter alia, John W. Eppler, Rommel ruft Cairo (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1959), p. 165 (German).
35. On the moderate tendencies, see Küntzel, Djihad, pp. 15, 24, 41, 54. That Islamist antimodernism is not automatically associated with the identity- based “The Jews are our misfortune” fantasy is shown by the example of the Islamist movement formed at the same time in Southeast Asia. The force behind this movement, Ala Maududi, was certainly antiliberal and antifeminist, but he did not adopt anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. See Martin Riexinger, “Allahs Kader,” taz-Magazin, 24 January 2004 (German).
36. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1986), p. 81 (German).
37. Cited in Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI), report no. 375, 3 May 2002. On Holocaust denial as a component of average Arab consciousness, see Küntzel, Djihad, pp. 51, 116.
38. Speech on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, 2 November 1943, cited in Höpp, Mufti-Papiere, p. 197.
39. In 1943, the Mufti successfully prevented the implementation of a decision by the governments of Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, which at that time wished to allow several thousand Jewish children to emigrate to Israel. Instead of this, urged the Mufti, they should be “sent where they will be under closer control, for example to Poland.” See Höpp, Mufti-Papiere, p. 164. 40. Daphne Trevor, Under the White Paper (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Press, 1948), pp. 206. See also Gensicke, Der Mufti, pp. 251; Küntzel, Djihad, pp. 48, 146.
41. According to Lewis, Semites, p. 160, and SimonWiesenthal, Grossmufti – der Grossagent der Achse (Vienna: Reid Verlag, 1947), p. 2 (German).
42. On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly decided to divide Palestine into a Jewish state (56% of the Mandate territory with 500,000 Jews and 500,000 Arab inhabitants) and an Arab state (43% of the territory with 750,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews) and place Jerusalem under international control.
43. El-Awaisi, Muslim Brotherhood, p. 195; Bethell, Das Palästina, p. 381.
44. Küntzel, Djihad, p. 46. In 1948, after el-Husseini had been appointed chairman of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine and the deputy of Hassan al-Banna, The Magazine of the Year wrote, ”...about one in every ten Arabs is a follower of the Mufti, and…it is unwise to criticize Haj Amin in public.” See Gensicke, Der Mufti, p. 143. This was also the view of the Egyptian premier, Sidqi Pasha, who had initially supported the Partition Plan. This instrumental reason, which today seems to us like a relic of a distant past, was documented in 1947 by the responsible representative of the Jewish Agency for the Arab world, Eliyahu Sasson: “According to Sasson’s report, the prime minister repeatedly stressed that he is a businessman. He is neither pro-Jewish nor pro-Arab. He looks out for the welfare of Egypt. If that dictates Jewish- Arab understanding, so be it.” Cited in Michael Doran, Pan-Arabism before Nasser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 99.
45. Küntzel, Djihad, pp. 70.
46. Qutb’s text was written in 1950, but could not gain acceptance in the period of Nasser’s bloody suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Qutb himself fell victim by hanging. See Ronald L. Nettler, “Past Trials and Present Tribulations: A Muslim Fundamentalist Speaks on the Jews,” in Michael Curtis, ed., Antisemitism in the Contemporary World (London: Westview Press, 1986), pp. 99.
47. This claim is found, for example, in the standard work on The People of Israel in theKoran and the Sunna by the most famous Sunni spiritual authority of today and Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Mohammed Tantawi, which he presented as a doctoral thesis and was published in 1968- 69. See Wolfgang Driesch, Islam, Judentum und Israel (Hamburg: Deutsches Orient-Institut, Mitteilungen 66, 2003), pp. 53, 74. The most recent edition of this bestseller appeared in 1997.
48. Joseph Croitoru, Der Märtyrer als Waffe (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003), p. 130, pp. 165 (German).
49. “Antisemitismus in Wandel. Ein Gespräch mit Alain Finkielkraut,” FAZ, Vol. 12, November 2003 (German).
50. In contrast to their European competitors, U.S. firms such as Pepsi, Coke, and Western Union ceased their involvement with Al-Manar following protests. See Jorisch, “Al-Manar.”
51. Rausing, “Frequenzen des Hasses,” p. 50.
52. Christian Henderson, “Conference Aims to Take Heads out of the Sand,” Daily Star, 18 February 2004; Markus Bickel, “Reden und lassen reden,” taz, 24 February 2004. The German government was involved in the planning and evaluation of this conference, as is clear from a letter sent by Chancellor Schröder’s senior foreign policy adviser, Bernd Mützelburg, to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris on 6 April 2004. The aim of the conference, according to Mützelburg, was “to test the capacity of political Islam for dialogue.” However, the German government had come to the conclusion that in Beirut they had not yet reached their goal of “contributing to an honest and critical dialogue with members of political Islam” (Simon Wieisenthal Center press release, 14 April 2004).
53. Udo Steinbach, “Der Nahe Osten in der deutschen Aussenpolitik,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B 12/98, p. 27 (German).
54. Among the participants in the conference were Social Democratic MP Christoph Zö pel (between 1999 and 2002 a minister of state in the Foreign Office and currently spokesperson for the SPD’s Middle East Dialogue Parliamentary Group), Michael Lüders and Helga Baumgarten (Middle East experts), Volker Perthes (from the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik think tank), AndräGärber (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung), Manfred Kropp (Deutsches Orient- Institut Beirut), and Friedemann Büttner (FU Berlin).
55. “In the Israeli-occupied territories,” declared the most prominent of the German participants, Christoph Zö bel, “force is used on a daily basis,” as a result of which Hizbollah also thinks in terms of “changing the situation through the use of force.” See “Die Hisbollah ist eine Kraft unter vielen,” interview with Christoph Zö bel in JungleWorld, 25 February 2004 (German). On the relationship between Islamic anti-Semitism and Israeli policy, see Matthias Küntzel, “The Roots of Delusion,” on the website www.matthiaskuentzel. de.
56. Leon Poliakov, Vom Antizionismus zum Anti-Semitismus (Freiburg: ca ira- Verlag, 1992), p. 104 (German).

DR. MATTHIAS KUENTZEL, associate researcher of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a political scientist and author and lives in Hamburg. His most recent book, Djihad und Judenhass. Über den neuen antijüdischen Krieg (Jihad and Jew-Hatred: About the New Anti-Jewish War) was published in 2002. More essays are available on: www.matthiaskuentzel.de.