Skip to main content

ei: A public stoning in Germany

ei: A public stoning in Germany: "Events took their predestined course, and on 26 February Dierkes resigned his position within Die Linke and withdrew his mayoral candidacy. In an open letter to his party colleagues, pointing out that he had been the victim of 'a public stoning' and of a campaign that was 'a terrible mixture of the gravest insults and defamation, Islamophobic hatred, hatred of immigrants, and murder threats,' he maintained that '[t]he victims of the Shoah and the heroes of the Warsaw Jewish rising would turn away with horror [could they see] with what malice and toward what ends they are being instrumentalized in order to justify ... the undemocratic and murderous politics of the Israeli government.'

A quick perusal of the German blogosphere throws up countless repetitions of the phrase 'kauft nicht beim Juden!' -- 'don't buy from the Jew!' -- a slogan from the Nazi era that no longer serves to defame Jews but rather those who seek justice for the Palestinians. However, Jews aren't entirely immune from this weapon: in the respected weekly Die Zeit (15 January 2009) a certain Thomas Assheuer turned it against the Canadian Jewish author Naomi Klein after the British Guardian published her call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Given that Klein had carefully specified that BDS should be aimed at Israeli institutions and not individuals, this"

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Broken Spring?       : Information Clearing House

Broken Spring?       : Information Clearing House This is a sequel to my June 2011 article, ‘After the spring’, on the upheavals in the Arab world. It is an article that has been painful to write, because it brings bad tidings and offers a pessimistic analysis of the upheavals, at least in the short term, in a number of Arab countries. The outcomes and potential outcomes of these uprisings have also acquired new, very significant dimensions. These include a complex entanglement with the accelerated preparations for a possible attack on Iran, and a poisonous, sectarian aspect that could have the consequence of ripping Syria and the Middle East apart.