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 on BESA Center: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/holocaust-uniqueness/