{"id":62634,"date":"2018-07-10T17:05:38","date_gmt":"2018-07-10T15:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=62634"},"modified":"2018-07-10T05:59:19","modified_gmt":"2018-07-10T03:59:19","slug":"17-05-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=62634","title":{"rendered":"German Jewry: A Bleak Future"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>German Jewry: A Bleak Future<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Benjamin Weinthal <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Demonstrators at the annual al-Quds day march in Berlin. (Photo: Montecruz Foto)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

T<\/span>o understand the plight of Jews in Germany, it worth considering a few outbreaks of contemporary anti-Semitism and the largely indifferent response to Jew-hatred from mainstream society.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In early June, a Jewish teen named Jonathan was playing an Israeli song \u2014 \u201cTel Aviv,\u201d sung by Omer Adam\u2014in Berlin\u2019s Bahnhof Zoo subway station. Three Arab Germans heard the words \u201cTel Aviv\u201d and confronted Jonathan and his friends.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the Arab men told Jonathan\u2014after confirming that he was Jewish via an interrogation: \u201cSeventy years of murdering children! I don\u2019t want to hear this Jew s*** here! This is our town, our turf. If I see you here again, I\u2019ll slit your throat, you f***ing Jew.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The German Arabs physically attacked Jonathan and his friends, with one of the men trying to push Jonathan onto the tracks. The assailants fled and the security guards at the station chose not to pursue them. The\u00a0BILD<\/i>\u00a0newspaper published an article drawing attention to the \u201cdisgusting, brutal, anti-Semitic incident.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The attack met for the most part with soggy indifference from Germany\u2019s chattering classes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s government has admitted more than a million refugees and migrants from mainly Muslim-majority countries, where Muslims are steeped in hatred of Jews and of Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

A second telling example of the growing\u2014or perhaps continued\u2014indifference was the April attack by a Syrian refugee on Adam Armush, an Israeli Arab, because he dared wear a kippa (yarmulke) on a Berlin street.<\/span><\/p>\n

The assault triggered headlines in the German and foreign media because there was video evidence of the attack.\u00a0Der Spiegel\u2019s<\/i>\u00a0influential columnist Jakob Augstein blamed the Israeli for having \u201ccome up with the idea to wear the kippa and use it as a provocation.\u201d Augstein\u2014who inherited significant ownership in the Spiegel news organization\u2014has played a key role in mainstreaming media anti-Semitism. The Simon Wiesenthal Center ranked him ninth on its \u201c2012 Top Ten Anti-Semitic\/Anti-Israel Slurs\u201d list for his bigoted statements.<\/span><\/p>\n

Armush told the\u00a0Deutsche Welle<\/i>\u00a0news outlet: \u201cI am not Jewish, I am an Israeli and I grew up in Israel in an Arab family,\u201d adding, \u201cIt was an experience for me to wear the skullcap and go out into the street yesterday.\u201d He said he filmed the attack \u201cfor the police and for the German people and even the world to see how terrible it is these days as a Jew to go through Berlin streets.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For observers of Jewish life in Germany, the anti-Semitic attack on Armush came as no surprise. In 2016, the spokesman for Hamburg\u2019s nearly 2,500-member Jewish community, Daniel Killy, said a breakdown in security in the Federal Republic has created a highly dangerous situation for Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNo, we are no longer safe here,\u201d Killy told the\u00a0tagesschau.de<\/i>\u00a0news outlet. Killy said the collapsing sense of state power, excesses of the extreme right-wing, the loss of political credibility, and \u201cthe terrible fear of naming Islamism as such\u201d have all contributed to creating a climate of insecurity for Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

The response to the attack on Armush was a call for an anti-anti-Semitism protest. \u201cBerlin wears the kippa\u201d was the name of the feel-good rally on April 25 against Jew-hatred. It attracted some 2,000 people, according to press reports. The real number of attendees is believed to have been fewer than 1,500, in a city of 3.7 million. The demonstration took place under conditions that resembled those in a maximum-security prison.<\/span><\/p>\n

A second protest against anti-Semitism in the largely Muslim neighborhood of Neuk\u00f6lln in Berlin had to be called off after a mere 20 minutes because of the anticipated violence of pro-Palestinian counter-demonstrators.<\/span><\/p>\n

To put things in perspective, roughly 150,000 people marched in Berlin in 2015 against a planned free trade deal between the United States and Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Germans frequently invoke the phrase \u201cnip it in the bud\u201d at Holocaust remembrance events when referring to anti-Semitism. Dead Jews trigger widespread commemoration events across the country, but the fight to stop anti-Semitism against living Jews limps\u2014at best\u2014on both legs. A detached observer might ask of modern Germany: Have we learned anything from the Holocaust?<\/span><\/p>\n

The third example of the pernicious indifference to post-Holocaust anti-Semitism regards the annual al-Quds Day march in Berlin. Protesters took to the streets on June 9 in greater numbers than in previous years, to call for the destruction of the Jewish state, at the rally in the heart of the city\u2019s bustling shopping district.<\/span><\/p>\n

Police said that roughly 1,600 protesters turned out to urge the obliteration of Israel. The number of pro-Israel counter-protesters paled in comparison, totaling some several hundred. The commissioner from Berlin\u2019s 10,000-member Jewish community responsible for combating anti-Semitism issued a public call for mobilization. Civil society, trade unions and the mainstream democratic parties ignored him.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, created al-Quds Day in 1979, as a worldwide demonstration designed to negate Israel\u2019s existence. The al-Quds Day rally in Berlin attracts a motley assortment of Hezbollah and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) members, Iranian regime supporters, neo-Nazis, Islamists and run of the mill haters of the Jewish state.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are 250 Hezbollah members in Berlin, according to the city\u2019s domestic intelligence agency. Across the Federal Republic, a total of 950 Hezbollah operatives recruit members and raise funds for their lethally anti-Semitic activities. It is worth noting that Hezbollah operatives blew up an Israeli tour bus in Burgas, Bulgaria in 2012, killing 5 Israelis and their Bulgarian Muslim bus driver. A total of 32 Israelis were injured in the terrorist attack.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chancellor Merkel has ignored requests from President Barak Obama, President Donald Trump, the U.S. Congress and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to outlaw the entirety of the Lebanese terrorist organization in Germany. She refuses to fathom the dialectical interplay between Hezbollah-sponsored anti-Semitism in Germany and an acute increase in Jew-hatred in her country.<\/span><\/p>\n

Germany, in sharp contrast to the the United States, the Arab League, the Netherlands and Canada, has classified only the Shi\u2019ite Hezbollah\u2019s so-called \u201cmilitary wing\u201d as a terrorist organization.<\/span><\/p>\n

The massive rise via migration in the number of Sunni-animated radicals also heightens the dangers for Germany\u2019s Jews. According to statements from Germany\u2019s interior ministry in April, the number of Salafists\u2014members of hardcore Sunni extremist groups\u2014in Germany has doubled since 2013. There are now 11,000 Salafists in the country\u2014up from 5,500 in 2013, according to ministry records.<\/span><\/p>\n

All of this helps to explain the entrenched\u2014and rising\u2014anti-Semitism in Germany. The stakes are high for the country\u2019s small Jewish community of roughly 100,000.<\/span><\/p>\n

Josef Schuster, the head of Germany\u2019s Central Council of Jews, warned Jews, following the attack on Armush, \u201cagainst showing themselves openly with a kippa in a big-city setting in Germany, and to wear a baseball cap or something else to cover their head instead.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Jews cannot appear in public without hiding their identity. As a result, they have been increasingly turning inward, to avoid conflict with German society over anti-Semitism and Israel. Most of Germany\u2019s pre-Holocaust Jewish population immersed itself in \u201chyper-acculturation,\u201d to use the phrase of the Oxford University German studies professor, Ritchie Robertson. But, significant parts of the post-Holocaust community, which largely consists of Jews from the former Soviet Union, have engaged in hyper-isolation and a striking denial of the coming storm.<\/span><\/p>\n

A\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/i>\u00a0expos\u00e9 from April 3 on anti-Semitism merely scratched the surface of what is unfolding in German schools. A Jewish boy named Solomon, the paper reported, was forced to change schools after fellow students threatened to kill him. According to the report, \u201cSolomon\u2019s parents, who until recently hosted a Syrian refugee, took no action until their son came home with bruises.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

His transfer to a new school \u201cchanged little.\u201d The\u00a0WSJ<\/i>\u00a0reported that \u201ca teacher said Solomon should try to avoid provoking the Palestinian student who was his most violent tormentor.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In the same month as the report on Solomon, the 15-year-old German-Jewish student Liam R\u00fcckert told the Berlin newspaper\u00a0BZ<\/i>\u00a0that he planned to relocate to Israel to continue his education, due to rampant, Muslim-animated hatred of Jews in the Berlin public school system.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI want to go to a boarding school like my brother in Israel. I already visited him and he is doing well there,\u201d R\u00fcckert said. His mother, Billy, is from Israel and taught her sons Hebrew.<\/span><\/p>\n

The lack of political will\u2014and the impotence of German security forces\u2014to rope in the tsunami of anti-Semitism could result in more cases of aliyah from the country.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Jews find it increasingly difficult to live with dignity in Germany, we may see a revival of interest in the thinking of the great Zionist leader Ze\u2019ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), whose clarion call for aliyah as an existential necessity proved prescient. Jabotinsky, who was filled with pessimism about the future of Diaspora Jewry, would not have surprised by the fragmented and anxiety-filled state of German Jewry today.<\/span><\/p>\n

The sexual assault and murder of the 14-year-old German-Jewish girl Susanna Feldman on the night of May 22 was allegedly committed by the Iraqi migrant Ali Bashar. German police claimed that there was no evidence that Feldman\u2019s Jewish background played a role in the crime. Question marks are warranted over the police statement as well as regarding a stunning lack of robust German journalistic curiosity concerning anti-Semitic incidents.<\/span><\/p>\n

And in Cologne, after a series of mass rapes and sustained sexual assaults against women during New Year\u2019s 2015\/2016 festivities, the authorities in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where the city is located, described the celebrations as \u201cpeaceful.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The crimes of rape and sexual assault of women were not limited to Cologne during the New Year\u2019s period and were committed by men largely from Afghanistan and Arab countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

Germany\u2019s woefully inadequate system for classifying anti-Semitic crimes is also cause for alarm. As anti-Semitism rises in the country, the authorities continue to classify Islamic-animated anti-Semitism as a \u201cpolitically motivated right-wing extremist crime.\u201d A telling example, cited in\u00a0Die Welt,<\/i>\u00a0was an outbreak of Hezbollah-related anti-Semitism that was registered as right-wing extremism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Supporters of the Hezbollah terrorist organization participated in an anti-Israel march during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Twenty Hezbollah supporters yelled the Nazi slogan \u201cSieg Heil\u201d (Hail Victory) at a group of pro-Israel activists in Berlin. The \u201cSieg Heil\u201d call violates Germany\u2019s anti-hate law and was designated as a far-right extremist crime.<\/span><\/p>\n

The result is German whitewashing of the leading cause of lethal anti-Semitism in Europe:\u00a0jihadi<\/i>-based eliminatory anti-Semitism.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Holocaust survivor Charlotte Knobloch, who is head of Munich\u2019s Jewish community, said in 2017: \u201cThe Muslim associations have for decades not only done nothing [to combat anti-Semitism], rather they have allowed anti-Semitic hate preachers from Muslim countries to bring their anti-Jewish ideology into German mosques and into the heads of young Muslims.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Germany\u2019s tiny Jewish community\u2014100,000 among a population of over 82 million in the Federal Republic\u2014is in dire straits today and faces an increasingly precarious future. Chancellor Merkel and mainstream German society would do well to remember the words of the British historian Sir Ian Kershaw: \u201cThe road to Auschwitz was built by hate but paved with indifference.\u201d Acute indifference is now the norm in Germany.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Benjamin Weinthal is a research fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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German Jewry: A Bleak Future Benjamin Weinthal Demonstrators at the annual al-Quds day march in Berlin. (Photo: Montecruz Foto) To understand the plight of Jews in Germany, it worth considering a few outbreaks of contemporary anti-Semitism and the largely indifferent response to Jew-hatred from mainstream society. In early June, a Jewish teen named Jonathan was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62634"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62634"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62646,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62634\/revisions\/62646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}