RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last month’s anti-Semitic beating in Berlin of a yarmulke-wearing, 21-year-old Arab-Israeli student who was testing for himself whether hatred of Jews was rising in Germany prompts questions.  Namely, 75 years after the Holocaust, are Jews safe in Deutschland, and how committed is the German government to protecting its Jewish citizens?

When Hitler rose to power in 1933, 500,000 Jews lived in Germany.  Today, only 100,000 reside there, and Jewish leaders have warned Jews not to wear kippot to avoid being attacked.  Felix Klein, recently appointed by Chancellor Angela Merkel to deal with the surge in anti-Semitism, admits that “Germany has a problem with hatred of Jews.”  He adds that regardless of the refugee influx, “around 20% of Germans hold anti-Semitic views, a statistic that has remained stable for years and has never gone.”

Germany’s modern-day incarnation of anti-Semitism exists primarily, but not exclusively, in the demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state.  German organizations support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) of Israel despite official statements that condemn BDS as Jew-hatred.  In November, NGO Monitor, a watchdog organization that analyzes and reports on NGO activities, discovered that the German government was donating millions of euros to groups promoting BDS, including some groups with ties to a designated terrorist group, the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).  Meanwhile, at the same time, the German organizations were providing generous entitlements to Muslim refugees, even though the refugees include ISIS-supporters and 13% of them believe that suicide bombings are justified, according to a Pew Research poll.

Last April, Germany’s then-foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, met with Breaking the Silence during a visit to Israel.  This NGO promotes unsubstantiated “war crimes” charges against Israel and has repeated the blood libel of  Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, that Israel poisons the wells of the Arab-Palestinians.  Abbas made this libelous claim to a standing ovation from his funders in the European Parliament in 2016.  He later retracted his assertion under pressure.

In the banking industry, Germany’s Bank for Social Economy has been providing bank accounts for BDS groups, including Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East and B’Tselem, both anti-Israel groups that accuse the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, racism, oppression, and apartheid.  The newly appointed German commissioner for combating anti-Semitism has called on the bank to close the BDS accounts, but to no avail.  The bank defends its actions under the aegis of freedom of expression and proclaims its acceptance of divergent views on the Middle East conflict.

In politics, Germany’s Social Democrat Party, one of Germany’s two major contemporary parties, is a self-declared strategic partner with Abbas’s Fatah party, which is a funder of NGOs that support terrorism and BDS.  The Social Democrat Party supported Angela Merkel’s decision last year to cancel a diplomatic trip to Israel as punishment for Israeli construction in the disputed territories.  The party also reported that it was “stimulated” by Abbas’s 2017 anti-Israel speech to the European Parliament.

The German government has long funded the PLO and Hamas.  In 2016, Germany admitted that the Palestinian Authority, to which it provides nearly $200 million annually, is paying terrorists in Israeli jails and the families of jihadist martyrs.  When informed of this, German authorities agreed to “take up the matter with the Palestinian Authority and other partners,” but former German parliament member and Green Party Chief Whip Volker Beck claims that the government ignored the very same concerns when he discovered the problem in 2014.

Germany also remains a signatory to the deeply flawed nuclear agreement with Iran that prohibits inspections of Iran’s military sites and fails to acknowledge the threat it poses to Israel and America’s allies in the region. Germany persists in support of the agreement even though it is inimical to Israel’s security, Israel’s clandestine operations have exposed Iran’s nuclear proliferation activities, and President Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).  Germany’s positions seems obstinately anti-Semitic, given Iran’s persistent threats to annihilate Israel, the presence of Hezb’allah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Israel’s border with Syria, and the Iranian recent rocket attacks in the Golan Heights.

While bashing Israel for oppressing Arab-Palestinians, the German government has pursued a lucrative relationship with the Islamic terrorist state of Iran, a state that continues to call for “death to Israel” and “death to America.”  As Iran’s biggest trading partner with exports of $2.8 billion in goods in 2017 and sizable business interests inside the ayatollah’s regime, Germany’s motivation is clear.  The government lobbied for the JCPOA, and exports doubled after sanctions were lifted.  Now that the United States is no longer a partner to the Iran nuclear deal, Germany will continue to honor the agreement despite knowledge from its own intel that Iran has not curtailed its missile program and its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Quite disturbing as well is Germany’s interference with Israel’s rights as a sovereign nation to designate its capital and control construction in its communities.  Along with other E.U. countries, Germany has duplicitously encouraged Arab-Palestinian settlement in an area in Jerusalem – Area C, where Israel has exclusive administrative and security control according to the Oslo Accords.  In 2011, the German Foreign Ministry supported a U.N. Security Council resolution to condemn Israeli settlement construction as “illegal.”  The fixation on blaming construction projects in Israeli communities for the lack of Middle East peace and censoring the only democracy in the Middle East, while displaying reticence to criticize Muslim Palestinians’ murder of Israeli Jews, belies Germany’s double standard toward the Jewish State.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Chancellor Merkel to express his disappointment about Germany’s position on the U.N. resolution, the Muslim “refugee” champion, who favored forcing Israeli Jews alone to freeze settlement construction, rebuked Netanyahu for “failing to advance peace.”  She told him, “How dare you?  You are the one who is disappointing us.  You haven’t made a single step to advance peace.”

Despite its failure to adequately protect Jews, the German government has been encouraging massive Muslim migration and has shielded Muslim residents with anti-hate speech laws and protections from prosecution, even though Muslims are massively over-represented in every category of crime.  Social media are reviewed for offensive statements against Muslims.  Germans who openly object to the settlement of Muslim “refugees” are charged with incitement and hate speech, forced to pay fines and endure probation or suspended sentences.  Chancellor Merkel has gone so far as to chastise her fellow countrymen about those “with hate in their hearts” “who seek to marginalize others.”

Recently, German Parliament member Beatrix von Storch became the target of a criminal complaint and had her Twitter and Facebook accounts frozen after criticizing Cologne police for sending a New Year’s tweet in Arabic.  Ironically, Cologne was the site of mass sexual assaults by Arab and African Muslims on New Year’s Eve in 2016.  This past December, Muslims burning Israeli flags at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin were characterized by the authorities as exercising their protected freedom of speech.

The German media, who never miss an opportunity to malign Israel, take great pains to obscure the religion, nationalities, and motives of Muslim assailants and often refrain from reporting incidents altogether to avoid charges of racism or xenophobia.  In 2013, in an extreme case of Germany’s so-called open-mindedness, the prestigious Ludwig-Borne literary prize was given to a philosopher who sympathized with Islamic terrorist organizations and equated the 9-11 attacks with the Holocaust, the Allied bombings of Nazi Germany, and the atomic bombing of Japan.

Germany’s official narrative is that the influx of Muslim refugees is creating a positive, multicultural influence on Germany; that Islam is truly a religion of peace and not at all represented by the likes of ISIS; and that random acts of terrorism have nothing to do with Islam.  German officials and the media bend over backwards to conceal the dramatic rise in rapes, attacks, and murders perpetrated by Muslim migrants.  Following the Cologne sexual attacks on New Year’s Eve, in which 1,200 women were assaulted by groups of men described as Arab or North African, the North-Rhine Westphalia government ordered a cover-up to include elimination of the word “rape” from police reports.  Of the 2,000 men involved, the authorities identified only 120, and they were given suspended sentences of a year or less.

In a further demonstration of disdain for the Jewish state, Germany opposed relocation of the American embassy to Israel’s legitimate capital.  In 2017, it led a successful effort to single out Israel for criticism and push a UNESCO resolution to reject its sovereignty over Jerusalem.  Also, Germany stands accused of violating an alleged deal for Israel to run unopposed for a non-permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

At a time when German authorities are failing to protect Jewish citizens and deal effectively with rampant anti-Semitism, accommodating the demands of Muslims, whitewashing refugee crime, targeting Israel for reprobation, and issuing often unrealistic and one-sided ultimatums, Germany continues to court the forces that publicly declare their goal of annihilating the Jewish State.