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German Intellectuals Rush to Defend a Cameroonian Anti-Semite

July 15 2020

Earlier this year, a German music and culture festival invited the prominent Cameroon-born, South African philosopher Achille Mbembe to deliver the keynote address. A liberal German parliamentarian criticized the choice, citing Mbembe’s disturbing record of anti-Israel bigotry and anti-Semitism. Manfred Gerstenfeld elaborates:

Mbembe has written that Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians is worse than South Africa’s treatment of the black population under apartheid. Mbembe is also an academic supporter of the [movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction the Jewish state] (BDS), which demonizes Israel. . . . Mbembe was one of about 300 signatories on a 2010 petition calling for the University of Johannesburg to cut all ties with Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

[In] a travelogue Mbembe published in 1992 under the title “Israel, the Jews and Us,” [he] presented the Holocaust as an event in the history of colonialism and Israel as a massive betrayal of the Jewish experience of persecution. Mbembe claimed that Israel was “taking the place of the murderers” and called the God of the Jews a God of vengeance. In 2015, Mbembe wrote that Israel’s goal is the incremental obliteration of the Palestinians.

Although the festival, scheduled for late this summer, was canceled due to concerns over the coronavirus, the controversy continued in Germany, as over 300 artists and academics from 30 countries signed a public defending Mbembe and denying the charges. Gerstenfeld writes:

The letter’s very first paragraph contained two lies. The first was that Mbembe has never made anti-Semitic statements, an easily disproven claim. The second was that the accusations against Mbembe came from the extreme right. In fact, the exposure of Mbembe’s anti-Semitism originated mostly in mainstream sources. The letter ended with the brazen demand that the German anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, be fired, [for the crime of having] told the truth about Mbembe’s anti-Semitism.

Moreover, many signatories, when asked, confessed to being unfamiliar with Mbembe’s works. The fact of a mob—even a mob of professors—imitating American “cancel culture” called for the head of Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner for criticizing an anti-Semite is bad enough. But perhaps worse still is the possibility that Mbembe’s popularity in Germany stems from his eagerness to minimize the Holocaust by comparing it with apartheid, or to the imagined crimes of the Jewish state.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Anti-Semitism, apartheid, BDS, Germany, Holocaust

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