Germany, the country that did its best to exterminate the Jewish people, promised in the 1950s to devote its energies to healing this terrible wound. Yet in recent years, it has stood by as hatred against Jews and Israel has risen.
Fiamma Nirenstein, ISRAEL HAYOM
Last modified: 2019-10-13 09:19
As I write these lines in Jerusalem, Yom Kippur has just come to an end. The news has just reached us that during the holiday, a synagogue was attacked in the German city of Halle, and that two people have been killed.
According to the media reports, the assailant, all of 27-years-old and a neo-Nazi, attempted to force his way into a synagogue to massacre those inside. At the time of this writing, no further details are known. But while much about the attack remains unclear, one thing is certain: This crime occurred in the country with the greatest obligation of any in the world to eradicate antisemitism.
In the first months of this year alone, there were 400 antisemitic incidents reported in the country.
Germany’s fatal rendezvous on Wednesday was made possible by the 77% of Germans that think it’s appropriate to forget the country’s crimes. That forgetfulness is what has allowed supremacist Nazi ideology to be resurrected. It is also what has made possible the importation into the country, along with a vast multitude of Islamic immigrants, of well-organized, but willfully ignored, Jew-hatred. Ironically, Germany has done this to demonstrate its spirit of generosity, tolerance, and brotherhood.
See how a paradox determines the destiny of a nation that believes itself to be the mother of philosophical logic.
Felix Klein, the German government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, published an article this past May stating that he was “extremely alarmed by the rise of anti-Jewish hatred in Germany.” Yet his government votes – always, no exceptions – against Israel, both at the United Nations and in the European Union.
In addition, Germany suspends diplomatic relations with Israel whenever Israel’s policies toward “the territories” are not in line with Germany’s wishes. This last happened in 2017, with Germany asserting the right to judge Israel’s security policy and publicly condemning the Jewish state, harshly criticizing its supposed moral shortcomings and making continuous references to “proportionality.”
Worse still, it has allowed public displays of homicidal hatred, such as a demonstration on the streets of Berlin organized by the Lebanese Shiite terrorist organization Hezbollah where chants of “Death to Israel!” and “Death to the Jews!” were shouted.
Klein has said that “sometimes, hatred of Jews is based on a radical right-wing vision, and at other [times], it emanates from Muslim hatred,” and also that it “often originates in left-wing ideology characterized by an apparent global humanism. But each time the image of the enemy that comes out is the same: the Jew.”
According to a study conducted in Bavaria, 50% of immigrants to Germany think Jews have too much influence in the world – and so do between 15% and 25% of Germans. This is the country responsible for the Holocaust, in which more than 1.5 Jewish children were murdered.
Germany has allowed anti-Semitism to flourish everywhere: in its cities, schools, throughout its mass media, in politics, in its streets and institutions, as well as in the suburbs where immigrants live. This shameful, ancient hatred is being nourished by ideologies Germany should be the first to identify and fight.
The German Bundestag took a very positive step in condemning the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement as anti-Semitic, yet it has not done nearly enough.
The rising tide of hate is driving Germany toward a fatal meeting with the past. It will take hard work, attentiveness, and a great deal more honesty, as well as less rhetoric, to seriously address the issue.
And not only in Germany.
As this Yom Kippur ends and Jews in Israel and abroad return home from their respective synagogues, the world has a duty to protect them – in deed and not just in word – as their nation-state, the collective Jew, is cruelly besieged, attacked, and accused of made-up crimes.
Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.
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