Our regular contributor Karl Pfeifer has been targeted by a particularly insidious form of the blood libel. “To accuse me, to have participated in a ‘massacre’ is part of a projection customary in many German circles. The best-known and by far the most widely held example of projection of guilt is the defamation of Israel as the ‘Nazis of today.’ This is one of the most objectionable forms of antisemitism after Auschwitz,” Karl writes. Read his full account here.
What made me angriest when I read about the attack on Karl Pfeifer was the assumption made by those cowardly German academics that being a Zionist made one automatically guilty of something.
I found this astounding especially coming from German professor who should know better.
It seems that being an academic makes one more not less susceptible to antisemitic beliefs and attitudes.
More antisemitic reactions in Germany:
“‘Why Israel’ film canceled after violent German leftist protest”
Nov. 22, 2009
Benjamin Weinthal , THE JERUSALEM POST
“Prominent French Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzmann expressed “shock” last week that German leftists in Hamburg had violently prevented the showing of his debut documentary film, Why Israel, about the role of the Jewish state as a homeland for refugees.
In late October, the 1973-produced film was scheduled to be shown at the B-Movie cinema, but roughly 50 left-wing activists from diverse anti-Israel groups affiliated with the anti-Zionist International Center B5 barred visitors from entering the movie house.
In Why Israel, Lanzmann - perhaps best known for his groundbreaking documentary Shoah - depicts Israelis who found refuge in Israel after the Holocaust.
The movie house said in a statement that it had been compelled to cancel the film screening and a podium discussion because “we were threatened with violence.” “
Sorry here is the link to the above news account:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1258705154390&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
In Germany of all places… Shameful.
Of course “In Germany of all places…”
Christopher Caldwell (Weekly Standard, June 5, 2002) on same:
“For anyone who inhabits Western culture, the Holocaust made that culture a much more painful place to inhabit – and for any reasonably moral person, greatly narrowed the range of acceptable political behaviour. To be human is to wish it had never happened. (Those who deny that it did may be those can’t bear to admitit happened,) but it did. If there is a will-to anti-Semitism – then the Arab style Judeophobia, which is an anti-Semitism without the West’s complexes, offers a real redemptive project to those Westerners who are willing to embrace. It can liberate guilty, decadent Europeans from a horrible moral albatross. What an anti-depressant! Saying there was no such thing as the gas chamber is, of course, not respectable. But the same purpose can be served using what Leo Strauss called the reductio ad Hitlerum to cast the Jews as having committed crimes identical to the Nazis’. They must be identical, of course, so the work of self-delusion can be accomplished. We did one, the Jews did one. Now we’re even-steven”.
It is because, as Nick Cohen explains in “What’s Left”:
[b]eyond the release from the burden of the past, lay the relief of letting out repressed emotion…. Once … a figure or group became an approved object of hatred, pent-up feeling burst over it. “
@Jacob Arnon@
I am not sure, those anonymous antisemites at AJZ Bielefeld are academics. As far as I know they belong to an “antiimperialist” extreme left sect.
They want to reply to the accusations against them at a general assembly of their youth center on December 1.
In the meintime Haaretz published my comment on
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1130957.html
and the Berlin leftwing weekly Jungle World the comment of Alex Feuerherdt on
http://jungle-world.com/artikel/2009/48/39846.html