Germans barking up their favourite wrong tree - once again!

Today, another minor brouhaha was caused by one of those cherished "racist" incidents over which all Gutmenschen do-gooders love to drool and slaver like Pavlovian dogs in fits of politically correct "dismay" to prove how ver' ver' much we have changed. Never mind that it was an antisemitic incident and antisemitism has nothing whatsoever to do with racism, but to concede that would make an end to all the nice politically correct relativising efforts to suggest that antisemitism is just another sort of xenophobia.

Two 15- and 16-year old pupils at a secondary school in the town of Parey in the federal state of Sachsen-Anhalt had forced a third pupil to carry a placard saying: "Ich bin im Ort das größte Schwein, ich lasse mich mit Juden ein" (I am the biggest swine round here and shack up with Jews) in the schoolyard, which evoked unpleasant memories of the real thing (see above) -- one of those things of which we feel disgust that grows proportionally to the length of time that has passed since.

DER SPIEGEL, the mother of all politically correct German media, informs us:

Sachsen-Anhalts Innenminister Holger Hövelmann (SPD) nannte die öffentliche Demütigung des Schülers einen "abstoßenden Vorgang". Hövelmann betonte: "In diesem Stil haben NSDAP und SA Menschen nach ihrer Machtübernahme 1933 öffentlich gedemütigt. Es ist erschütternd, dass Heranwachsende in unserem Land glauben, sie könnten sich heute so etwas wieder erlauben." Der Minister kündigte eine intensive Aufklärung durch die Polizei und eine enge Zusammenarbeit mit dem Kultusministerium an.

Sachsen-Anhalt's Minister of the Interior Holger Hövelmann (SPD) called the public humiliation of the pupil a "disgusting incident". Hövelmann stressed: "This is the manner in which NSDAP and SA publicly humiliated people after their takeover 1933. It is a harrowing thought that the young in our country believe that they are now again allowed to do something like that." The minister announced an intensive clarification by the police and close cooperation with the Ministry for Culture.

Whatever that may imply.

To hammer home the point of a "racist" incident, DER SPIEGEL doesn't even stop at just falsely calling it that, but additionally compares it with the racist taunts the Black German national player Gerald Asamoah has to suffer in football stadiums. I'm not translating the entire drivel, just trust me.

Shades of the case of Marinus Schöberl are looming, who had been murdered by three young men near the small East German town of Potzlow in July 2002 because he was a "Jew". Marinus was not Jewish but bore various markers of "otherness", among them the fact that he wore his hair long and dyed blond.

There is a strong probability that neither the youths in Parey nor Marinus' muderers have ever met a Jew. And that exactly is one of the major differences between racism and antisemitism: The former resentment needs concrete, available targets to develop, the latter doesn't. It is there even without a tangible object, always has, always will, irrespective of what Jews are, do, don't do or look like. And we can't have that or can we?

And hey! Even though those young perpetrators may belong to the Neo-Nazi scene -- they may as well have gotten their picture of "Jews" from the German mainstream Leftist media, which is, after all, national Socialist.

Read/seen/heard any good lies about the Middle East conflict lately?

The Parey case is investigated on the grounds of coercion.