Mick Hartley

An interesting article in Tablet by August Hanning, a former director of German intelligence. His main argument is what he calls an inconvenient truth – but surely an uncontroversial one by now – that it's the intersection of left-wing activists and Muslim migrants that's the primary source of antisemitism in Germany today, rather than neo-Nazis.

He gives a useful brief history of Jews and right-wing antisemitism as well as the current situation in Germany…and then there's the left:

In addition to Israel-related antisemitism since Oct. 7, 2023, there has been an increasing number of statements on the left wing of the German political spectrum that represent forms of secondary, so-called guilt-deflecting antisemitism. The slogan heard on parts of the left, “Free Palestine from German guilt,” suggests that German guilt for the Holocaust blinds the German public and government to Palestinian suffering.

In the perspective of left-wing antisemitism, Israel is not seen as a refuge for Jews who survived the Holocaust. Rather, it is a criminal enterprise inspired by the demons of nationalism and ethnocentrism, which allegedly led German Nazis to perpetrate the Holocaust. The descendants of victims of Nazi persecution are therefore reinterpreted as perpetrators allegedly pursuing a “final solution to the Palestinian question.” Actual or perceived mistakes of Israeli policy are attributed to genocidal lusts on the part of “the Jews” worldwide, which can in turn be presented as the tragically misdirected consequences of the Nazi genocide.

It's difficult not to see this as a projection of German guilt over the Holocaust onto Israel. And what better target for this projection – what better cleansing of this burden of guilt – than to target the actual people who were the victims of the Nazi Holocaust? It's Holocaust Inversion with a German twist.

Such harsh criticisms of Israeli policy, sometimes shading into overt antisemitism, have become a fixture of leftist movements in Germany. While some of the leftist antisemitism now resurfacing in Germany has its roots in the leftist radicalism of 50 years ago, some of it has a more recent origin in the mainstream left’s electoral courtship of political Islamists and Muslim immigrants—leading to an acceptance of movements and discourse that would have formerly been unacceptable in both the cultural and the political spheres….

The prospective growth of a large population of young Muslims who may be religiously or politically inclined toward hatred of Jews and Israel poses a particular problem for Germany in light of the Holocaust. Since the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel wave of 2002 and the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, many young Muslims have been conspicuous in Germany as “antisemitic activists.” These activists have been at the forefront of mobbing attacks on Jewish students, displaying antisemitic symbols on university campuses, and even physical assaults on Jewish students in grade schools….

A Germany in which antisemitism is culturally and politically acceptable should be entirely unthinkable. Sadly, it is not.