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Germany Commemorates the Holocaust by Ignoring Anti-Semitism

Jan. 29 2015

Last Tuesday, German politicians issued noble-sounding statements to commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. But there has been a spate of recent meetings between prominent German politicians and high-ranking Iranian officials, some well-known for their denials of the Holocaust. Benjamin Weinthal writes:

“The Jews, if they’re not dead, should please suffer, admonish, and warn, but not fight back,” Eike Geisel (1945-1997), a critic of [Germany’s] post-Shoah remembrance culture, wrote.

His insight was reflected in a study the Bertelsmann Foundation released on Monday, showing that 68 percent of Germans want their members of parliament to pull the plug on weapons deliveries to Israel. Eighty-one percent of Germans want to close the chapter of the Holocaust so their lawmakers can focus on “contemporary problems,” the survey revealed. . . .

Days before Tuesday’s Holocaust remembrance, Green Party deputy Claudia Roth and Christian Social Union politician Dagmar Wöhrl, a former Miss Germany, met with Ali Larijani, the president of Iran’s parliament, in Tehran. Larijani infamously defended the regime of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, saying Iran had “different perspectives on the Holocaust.” . . .

In December, Niels Annen, a Social Democratic deputy and foreign-policy spokesman in the Bundestag, met with former Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati to discuss the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and the situation in the Middle East. Velayati was implicated in the assassination of Kurdish dissidents at the Mykonos restaurant in West Berlin in 1992 and the bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in which 85 were killed and hundreds wounded in 1994. Interpol seeks the arrest of Velayati for his involvement in the terrorist attack at the Jewish center. . . .

In the cases of Roth, Annen, and Wöhrl, Germany’s remembrance culture represents, to quote Geisel, “the highest form of forgetting.” In short, efforts to combat modern anti-Semitism are divorced from the crimes of the Holocaust.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Anti-Semitism, Germany, Holocaust, Iran, Israeli-German relations, Politics & Current Affairs

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic