Monday, June 22, 2020
From Ian:
Selective Outrage
Salient cases of antisemitism in Germany in the past decade
Selective Outrage
I have written before about the case of Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar, lionized by academics on the left despite or because of her anti-Semitic attacks on Israel.Biden blasts BDS: Why it matters
Recently, the most egregious of Puar’s claims resurfaced in an incident at Florida State University. The Student Senate President, Ahmad Daraldik, reportedly built a website that, among other things, accuses Israel of organ harvesting. But she adds a twist: Just as “the Nazis conducted many different types of experiments on the inmates of the concentration camps,” so, too, do the Israelis harvest organs.
In Puar’s case, the charge goes back to unsourced rumors concerning Israel’s activities during the “knife intifada” of 2015-16. In our student’s case, the charge goes back to the 1990s and concerns a single facility in which corneas, heart valves, and skin grafts were taken, sometimes without family permission, from approximately 150 cadavers. Among those bodies were, as Daraldik’s web site tells you, Palestinians. Also among them, as it does not tell you, Israeli soldiers and civilians.
To compare this incident, in which a pathologist broke a law and thereby harmed Jewish and non-Jewish families, to Nazi experimentation is gross Holocaust minimization and inversion. As Miriam Elman of the Academic Engagement Network says, the comparison is “unequivocally anti-Semitic.” Yet a Student Senate that quite recently, in an overwhelming vote, removed its president over remarks he’d made in an online group chat—he’d stressed the incompatibility between his Catholicism and queer and transgender politics on the other—voted to keep Daraldik in office. Perhaps they were motivated to do so by a letter, signed by numerous purportedly progressive organizations, that mentions Daraldik’s First Amendment rights, doesn’t mention the website, and pretends that Daraldik is the victim of a “smear campaign” to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel.
In fact, critics are instead perpetuating the view that Daraldik can be held to account for noxious views that—though it is unclear when exactly the website went up—he has not disowned.
In a policy paper posted on his campaign website in May, Biden, referring to the boycott divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign, vowed that his administration will “firmly reject the BDS movement – which singles out Israel and too often veers into antisemitism – and fight other efforts to delegitimize Israel on the global stage.” Biden also said that if elected president he will “sustain our unbreakable commitment to Israel’s security,” including “the guarantee that Israel will always maintain its qualitative military edge.”
Biden reportedly made similar comments online at a May 19 virtual event. And on other occasions, he has referred to the US’s “longstanding, moral commitment” to Israel, declaring that “the only way to ensure” that the Holocaust “could never happen again was the establishment and the existence of a secure, Jewish State of Israel.”
BIDEN’S FIRM rejection of BDS contrasts with the views of several members of Congress led by Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), both of whom have explicitly endorsed BDS. In July 2019, the House passed by a 398 to 17 vote a resolution stating the House’s opposition to BDS. While those opposing the resolution accounted for less than 10% of the 234 Democratic House members, they worryingly included many of the Democratic Party’s most voluble legislators.
Much is at stake: Disagreements between allies are bound to occur. If Biden were president, how would he address disagreements over annexation and BDS? How would he lead in the face of challenges from within his party? These policy statements signal how a President Biden would govern.
NEW VIDEO! Florida pastor and @TruNews host Rick Wiles' Craziest Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories. Watch and SHARE! pic.twitter.com/x703F1TjV4
— Canary Mission (@canarymission) June 22, 2020
Salient cases of antisemitism in Germany in the past decade
This incident highlighted the ongoing efforts to demonize Israel by a group of extreme anti-Israel MPs led by Inge Höger and Annette Groth. Both of these parliamentarians were on board the controversial 2010 Mavi Marmara Gaza flotilla that carried armed passengers who intended to break the so-called "blockade" of Gaza, and upon their return to Berlin were hailed by many of their party’s MPs.
The SWC wrote that Groth, Höger and Left party official Claudia Haydt and MP Heike Hänsel - as organizers and participants - played a crucial role in stoking hatred of Israel during the “Toiletgate” scandal. All were present at the Blumenthal/Sheen talk. They are a part of a sizable group of hardcore anti-Israel Left party MPs.
In response to the “Toiletgate” scandal, a petition signed by the reform wing of The Left party MPs, regional politicians and members stated: “By stoking obsessive hatred of and demonizing Israel, members of our party in positions of responsibility are promoting antisemitic patterns of argument and a relativization of the Holocaust and the German responsibility for the extermination of millions of European Jews.”
The 2016 SWC report details how Leaders of the local German Teacher’s Union (GEW) in Oldenburg called for a total boycott of Israel. In September, the Oldenburg GEW local published a pro-BDS article by Christoph Glanz, a public school teacher and fanatic opponent of the Jewish State. Glanz, who has tried posing as a Jew to avoid charges of antisemitism called for the eradication of the State of Israel and relocation of its Jews to southwestern Germany.
In 2019, the most extreme antisemitic event was the failed attack on the synagogue in the German city Halle. Tens of Jews praying in that synagogue on Yom Kippur - Judaism’s holiest day - miraculously escaped certain injury or death at the hands of a neo-Nazi as the attacker failed to break down a security door outside a synagogue in the city. After failing to enter the synagogue, Stephan Balliet, 27, armed with a sub-machine gun and explosives, killed 2 civilians nearby and injured 2 others. Balliet admitted that he was motivated by his hatred of Jews. In his manifesto, he stated, “Kill as many anti-Whites as possible, Jews preferred.”
From the 2019 report: Germany is in the midst of an 18-month stint on the UN Security Council. Its UN Ambassador, Christoph Heusgen made the SWC Top ten list in 2019. He created an uproar after word spread regarding the number of anti-Israel votes he has cast, but above all by his equating 130 rockets fired by terrorist organization Hamas at Israeli civilians in one week in March, with the Jewish state’s demolition of terrorists’ homes.
Heusgen declared: “We believe that international law is the best way to protect civilians and allow them to live in peace and security and without fear of Israeli bulldozers or ‘Hamas rockets.’ Bild, Germany’s best-selling daily, accused Heusgen in an editorial, of “pure malice” against the Jewish State. Heusgen cast 16 anti-Israel votes at the UN in 2018, abstaining once. In 2019, he voted for nine anti-Israel resolutions, including one labelling Jerusalem’s holiest sites as “Palestinian Occupied Territory,” while abstaining three times and opposing only one anti-Israel resolution.
This is much less than one percent of my notes on antisemitism in Germany. Yet it very succinctly shows that the country is far from succeeding in eradicating antisemitism. The publication of Augstein’s article by Der Spiegel, the boycott-promoting teachers union and Heusgen’s comparison of Israel and Hamas reflect how this hatred has permeated and is alive in the German mainstream.
