Cacophony

Today, an article was published at FrontPage, which tickled my contradictoriness:

Israel's Unsung Ally
By Myles Kantor
FrontPageMagazine.com April 25, 2006

When someone supports your ability to exist, insult is an inappropriate response.

In February 2005, German president Horst Köhler spoke before the Israeli parliament in his native language. Some Israeli politicians like health minister Dani Naveh and Knesset president Hemi Doron objected to Köhler’s German address and did not attend.[1]

Other Israelis showed more etiquette and diplomatic perspective. Former Israeli ambassador to Germany Avi Primor noted:

First of all, the relations between Israel and Germany are such that this kind of a question shouldn't arise at all. And secondly, the German language is not only the language of the Nazis, but was a very important language before the Nazis and is a very important language after the Nazis. It was a very important language for the Jewish people.[2]

Primor’s initial observation is at the heart of the Israeli legislators’ unseemly behavior. Since Israel’s formative years, Germany has figured centrally in the Jewish state’s development and defense—yes, the same country that Adolf Hitler subjugated and through which he sought the destruction of world Jewry[3] with fellow Austrians like Adolf Eichmann, Alois Brunner, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner.[4]

A good indicator of Germany’s profound contributions to Israel is the alarm shown by anti-Zionists. For instance, Mark Weber of the “revisionist” Institute for Historical Review writes:

It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of the program [reparations West Germany agreed to pay in 1952]: the five power plants built and installed by West Germany between 1953 and 1956 quadrupled Israel's electric-power-generating capacity. West Germans laid 280 kilometers of giant pipelines (2.25 and 2.5 meters in diameter) for the irrigation of the Negev (which certainly helped to 'make the desert bloom'). The Zionist state acquired 65 German-built ships, including four passenger vessels.[5]

A contributor to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram comments:

During the 1950s, the Federal Republic became one of Israel's most generous arms suppliers in the hope of atoning for the Holocaust. Since then, successive German governments, ironically, have spread further death by channelling countless weapons to Tel Aviv. German arms played a decisive role in cementing Israel's military supremacy in the 1967 War. Nor did legal constraints matter much to former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who first promised to supply Israel with the Dolphins in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, despite Israel's amply-documented violation of human rights during the first Intifada.[6]

The Dolphins referred to are advanced submarines that enhanced Israel’s naval strength.[7]

In addition to being Israel’s second largest trading partner,[8] Germany in recent years has been a refuge for Jews. Nearly 200,000 Jews from former Soviet states have immigrated to Germany since 1990.[9]

There have of course been low points in German-Israeli relations, 1972 and 1973 especially. Arab terrorists massacred Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in September 1972; Germany then made ill-prepared rescue attempts[10] and released two of the perpetrators after a Lufthansa hijacking in October.[11] During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Germany denied America use of its territory to facilitate rearming Israel after Syria and Egypt’s aggression.[12]

Presently, however, Germany is a reliable ally of Israel. In March, Russian leader Vladimir Putin hosted Hamas members in Moscow,[13] and Venezuela under Hugo Chavez has indicated willingness to do so.[14] Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, refuses to deal with the Arab neo-Nazis[15] and has compared Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler after he called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”[16]

“I say it as a German chancellor: A president who questions Israel’s right to exist, a president who denies the Holocaust cannot expect to receive any tolerance from Germany,” Merkel said in February. German defense minister Franz Josef Jung affirmed that Germany is “completely on the side of Israel” in March during a visit by Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz.[17]

Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon recognized Germany’s solidarity. He said in May 2005, “Germany is leading the fight against anti-Semitism in Europe.”[18]

“It saddens me to see so many Jews who have no idea how much Germany has helped both the State of Israel and the Jews of the former Soviet Union,” remarks Rabbi David Kent of the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights in New York. One hopes Jews will become increasingly aware and appreciative of Germany’s support for Jewish life.

To read the footnotes, click HERE.

My reply to the author: As a gentile, German born and based, I strongly oppose the views you express in your column, like I oppose those of a remarkable number of other American Jews on Germany, among them Dennis Prager. You are simply wrong – no let me rephrase that: dangerously naive.

Do you really not know what is going on here? Synagogues have been set on fire, Jewish cemeteries are, and always have been, desecrated on a regular basis, incidents difficult to keep track of because of local importance only. The novel Death of a Critic, a nasty antisemitic attack by novelist laureate Martin Walser on Germany's renowned literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the latter a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz, is a top seller here. German revisionist historians have started a long time ago already (the infamous Historikerstreit was, notabene, a child of the Eighties), to identify Germany's responsibility for WWII AND the Holocaust not as crimes against humanity, but as early confrontations with Communism. German Jews are advised not to wear anything that would identify them as Jews for safety reasons.

But all that has become everyday yawn stuff in the meantime. What about the more recent goings-on?

Germans ban Lukaschenko from attending the soccer World Championships but when it comes to Iran's Ahmadinejad they are making nothing but politically correct noises. German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble: "Naturally he can come to the matches. It won't be a simple matter because of the things that he has said in the past that are simply unacceptable. But my advice is we should be good hosts. We want to be better."

Unacceptable? In my book, the last tax increase or immigration laws submitted by the opposition may be "unacceptable" but to call a second holocaust "unacceptable" is... what?

Or what about that: By chance I came across the website of a Christian organisation that goes by the name of Open Bethlehem. Its main and, so it seems, only purpose is to assist Arabs to go on murdering Jews in the Holy Land. One can write messages on a virtual wall there. Predictably, German participation is lifely. After all, each and every crime, real or perceived, committed by Jews reduces the German guilt. Have a look at the writings and try not to be nauseated. The anti-terrorism wall in Israel is compared time and again with the Berlin Wall and Germans of all political hues are suddenly and temporarily against it as long as it serves as a useful comparison and "proves" that Jews are no better than Germans.

What about that: In a recent SPIEGEL ONLINE international (DER SPIEGEL is Germany's best known newsmagazine – a household name) article the authors commented on Hamas: "Still, it is highly unlikely that Hamas leaders would embezzle EU funds. Unlike the officials of the former ruling Fatah movement, Hamas's devout Islamists are considered largely immune to corruption. Instead, they are more likely to misappropriate the EU funds to further their religious cause." Those unspeakable Schmocks call it "corruption" when a politician gets undue discounts on air tickets, uses the department's car pool once too often or palms off a daily as an intern, but find by-passing funds for humanitarian and educational purposes to a genocidal death cult quite acceptable because it isn't for oh-so-filthy material profit.

You see, that is SO German! Committing crimes is alright as long at it is not for money but out of "idealism" and for a Higher Order, however depraved the latter may be. That is why the Germans will never see that the Holocaust was wrong because it was, to them, a great idealistic deed. And it was, wasn't it? Without it, Germany would have very probably won WWII and after all those German sacrifices the Jews didn't even have the good grace to vanish completely from the face of the earth but survived and made a success of their little country just to spite the Germans and their efforts.

You think I am exaggerating? After all, there aren't any Nazis anymore in Germany.

Yes, there are only a few pathetic Nazis left. And they serve as a GREAT obfuscator (is smokescreen the word?) when it comes to "prove" how well we are dealing with our past.

No -- "Nazis" have become unimportant. Now we have politicians like Angelika Beer, German Greens MEP who thinks that Iran is "a fascinating country with a young well-educated society". Yes, the same Angelika Beer who finds the delivery of two submarines to Israel "irresponsible". There is the Greens' sortof "elder statesman" Hans Christian Ströbele who recently blamed in a TV chat show the United States and co-guest Richard Perle of planning an attack on Iran with nuclear weapons. The very Ströbele, who thinks that Iran has the right of using nuclear technology. Ströbele who thinks that, if Iran is banned from having nukes, Israel ought to be too. Yes, that very Ströbele who described Iraq's missile attacks on Israel during the first Gulf War as "the logical, almost unavoidable outcome of Israel’s policies", thus following the old and cherished school of thoughts, which maintains that antisemitism is the Jews' fault anyway. New, too, is the recurring fast forming Grand Coalition of politicians of almost all colours when it comes to not selling weapons to Israel.

And there is the ubiquitous, disgusting cynicism of the Left, namely to decry "antisemitism" and "Nazis" yet to actively support another genocide of Jews by helping the cause of their sworn enemies under the pretence of "peace" activism, a Left, whose icon, our Nobel Laureate Günter Grass, has called the former Communist German Democratic Republic a 'comfortable dictatorship' ('kommode Diktatur'). (On more German hypocrisy regarding Vergangenheitsbewältigung see my blog entry Barking up the Wrong Tree as an Art Form.)

Do you think it is mere chance that the 9/11 perpetrators had previously lived in Germany of all countries? I remember from my time at university in the early Seventies that Leftist co-students supported, even hid, Palestinian Arabs who were peripherally involved in the murder of the Israeli team members in Munich 1972. It was a more or less "open secret". The city (Bochum) was mentioned as one of the cities where Al Quaida cells had nestled pre-9/11.

Are 30 years of hosting the enemies of America and the Jews too bizarre a picture? I don't think so.

Today, Spielberg's sorry effort "Munich" is all the rave here, as is Michael Moore.

Have you already forgotten the EOS Gallup poll from October 2003? When asked which countries posed the greatest threat to world peace, 69 percent of Austrians and 65 percent of Germans chose Israel over Iran or North Korea.

Talking about polls, one-third of Germans under the age 30 believe the U.S. government was involved in the 9/11 attacks, as do about 20 percent of Germans in all age groups according to a survey performed for the weekly Die Zeit.

All unimportant nutcases? Well, take Andreas von Bülow, former German Defense Minister and Minister of Technology. He went public to say the US government carried out 9/11. His book is (are we amazed?) a bestseller here.

If you think that Germany has changed you are wrong, plain and simple. Nothing has changed. Germany no longer has the power to enforce the "race" policy of the Nazis and, although open manifestations of Nazism are outlawed, the cultural belief system, the basic of of German identity, has remained. Why, do you think is Germany one of the major sponsors of the "Palestinians"? It is nothing but the continuation of a tradition of cooperation between the Nazis and the Palestinian Arabs. Auschwitz did not change the Germans for the better, the opposite is true. Now they owe the Jews and, as we all know, guilt breeds resentment.

As long as Germany is accountable to the United States, open antisemitism is bad for business – hence the maniacal antiamericanism here, a classical displacement activity if I have ever seen one.

Why, do you think, is Germany so meekly submitting to the Muslim threat and dhimmitude? Because it allows for staging a seemingly new, liberal society, open to freedom and diversity (here we are back to Interior Minister Schäuble and his "We want to be better") by replacing the murdered Jews with Muslims and at the same time assuring that those few Jews will be unable to gain any importance again, however minor, by the presence of those very Muslims.

Why do you think the phrase "fighting racism and antisemitism", when the two phenomena have NOTHING WHATSOEVER in common, has acquired axiomatic value here? There are three reasons for that: Smokescreen, smokescreen and smokescreen.

Germans will only remain "reliable allies" of Israel as long as the United States are there to control them and any song better remains unsung.