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Fri, April 15, 2011 | IsraelNationalNews | by Giulio Meotti

New York Times, Friday, November 11, 1938

Germany: The New Kristallnacht

The German’s are as anti-Semitic as they were during WWII. Here is the sobering report.

In December 1972 the terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, who was under trial for the Rote Armee Fraktion’s activities, was questioned on the support issued for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The questioning led her to say:

“Auschwitz means that six million Jews were murdered and carted on to the rubbish dumps of Europe for being that which was maintained of them — Money-Jews”.

Lady Meinhof was proud of her antisemitism. Unfortunately, many German leftists who have never committed acts of violence today take positions approaching hers. Echoing Karl Marx’s observation that “the evil in the world is the Jewishness in the world”, communism in East Germany sought to eradicate Judaism in general and after the Six Day War adopted an anti-Zionist stance.

Now we read that forty-seven percent of Germans are of the opinion that “Israel is exterminating the Palestinians”, according to a poll undertaken by the University of Bielefeld for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, affiliated with the German Social Democratic Party.

In another 2004 poll conducted by the University of Bielefeld, 51% of German respondents agreed with the statement that:

“What the state of Israel does today to the Palestinians, is in principle not different from what the Nazis did in the Third Reich to the Jews”.

The German greedy-business with Teheran, the anti-Zionist ideology and the abuse of the Holocaust are part of a new anti-semitic wind that is on the rise in Germany. All the governments gave anti-Zionist and anti-Israel personalities prizes and speaking engagements to spread criticism of Israel.

In 2008 the German government was deeply involved in funding a conference where then Iranian deputy foreign minister Muhammad Larijani called for the destruction of the Jews.

In 2009 former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder met with President Ahmadinejad in Teheran. Schroder had meetings also with Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki, who opened the “World Without Zionism” conference in Teheran and cast doubt on the “official version of the Holocaust”.

Last year, then-German president Horst Kohler issued the Federal Merit Cross, one of the country’s most important awards, to the lawyer Felicia Langer, who has equated Israel with Nazi Germany and the South African apartheid regime.

Several months ago, the city of Frankfurt invited Alfred Grosser to deliver a speech at commemoration of Kristallnacht. Grosser has compared his treatment by the Nazis in the early 1930s with Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

In today’s Germany, leftists who Nazify Israel and characterize it as the world’s most evil country have simply opened the door to proclaiming Jews to be evil people in general.

Norman Paech, the foreign policy spokesman of Germany’s third largest party, The Left, favors nuclear weapons for Iran and employs Nazi terminology against Israel.

At an academic conference in Gottingen, Professor Arnd Kruger said that the Israeli athletes butchered at the Olympic Games in Munich sacrificed themselves to prolong financial restitution from Germany and to preserve guilt among Germans due to the Holocaust.

These are only a few examples of this new radical hatred for the Jews.

Tel Aviv Municipality’s stand at Europe’s largest gay pride parade, set to take place in Berlin in June, won’t include any Israeli symbols or markers in an attempt to severe the connection between the German’s capital and the Jewish State.

The German public opinion contains once again elements that envision a world cleansed of the Jewish state. Germany’s State TV reported once about Itamar’s massacre saying: “Five dead after attack on settler family”. The neutral terminology paves the way to accept killing of the Jews. Last summer, in Hanover, a group of Muslims attacked an Israeli dance troupe, yelling “Juden raus” as they hurled stones at them. During the Israeli military operation against Hamas, “death to the Jews” was a common chant in the German protests.

In Germany today anti-Zionism — which is not mere criticism of Israeli policies, but the denial of the Jewish people’s right to live in their own state — links leftists, Islamists and rightists. Videos promoting “martyrdom” are shown daily in German houses, fueling anti-Semitism among Muslim youth in Germany. The programs are fed to Germany on Egyptian and Saudi Arabian satellites.

Despite the fact that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government continues to support the Jewish State, German public opinion has a demonizing view of Israel, as does most of Europe. And Germany’s support for Israel, normally unwavering, is not automatic. It can change tomorrow.

Along with Italy, Germany is also the most important Iranian partner for import and export. The German powerhouse economy must be viewed as contributing to Iran’s nuclear revenue base and Ahmadinejad’s financial support for his regime’s satellite terror entities, Hizbullah and Hamas.

There are also terrible historical resonances. The Basf chemical industry is one of the thousands of German firms based in Teheran. Basf was formed out of the assets of IG Farben in 1952, the same company that produced the pesticide Zyklon B for the gas chambers.

A few days ago, an Israeli delegation from Judea and Samaria went to speak to Germany. The mayor of Cologne called them “settlers”, persona non grata, preventing them from entering the City Hall. The mayor denied that the Jews of Samaria ever existed at all.

Bar Ilan University Professor of Literature, Hillel Weiss, handled him a beautiful “lamentation” written by Rabbi Yoel Halevi, whose family and community were murdered during one of the first European pogroms. The lamentation tells of Jewish souls that “like incense rise” to the heavens.

The mirror of the German’s rotten conscience is the Museum of the Holocaust built by the postmodern architect Daniel Libeskind. The building is emblematic of what Alvin Rosenfeld, in his new magisterial forthcoming book, has called “The End of the Holocaust”. Old suitcases, dishes, photographs, glasses, violins and postcards left by the dead Jews serve to transmit the impression of a lost history. An empty space in the basement at the end of a large, dark corridor, neither heated nor air-conditioned, lit only by a shaft of natural light at the top, produces the spectacularization of the Holocaust.

Next time for these good Europeans it will be easier to “digest” the extinction of the Jews as it will be a Kristallnacht transposed to Israel.

About the author,

Giulio Meotti, a journalist with Il Foglio, writes a weekly column for INN. He is the author of the book “A New Shoah”, that researched the personal stories of Israel’s terror vicitms, published by Encounter. He lives in Italy. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary.