[Berlin’s cultural senator has announced that public funding for
artists will depend on a loyalty oath for Israel. This has nothing to
do with fighting antisemitism -- its a smokescreen to cover the German
establishments antisemitism. ]
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GERMAN ELITES ARE REDEFINING ANTISEMITISM SO THEY CAN BE THE VICTIMS
 
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Nathaniel Flakin
January 12, 2024
The Left Berlin
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_ Berlin’s cultural senator has announced that public funding for
artists will depend on a loyalty oath for Israel. This has nothing to
do with fighting antisemitism -- it's a smokescreen to cover the
German establishment's antisemitism. _

, Photo Montecruz Foto (2017), license Creative Commons: Attribution
Share Alike.

 

On Monday, up to 1,000 artists and cultural workers protested in front
of the Berlin parliament. The city’s cultural senator, Joe Chialo of
the conservative CDU, has declared that in order to get public funding
artists and cultural institutions will need to sign a loyalty oath for
the State of Israel, as well as distance themselves from
“extremism” and support Israel’s “right to exist.” Chialo
believes that the German capital’s cultural scene is full of
“hidden antisemitism.” His first action to stop “hidden
antisemitism” was shutting down the cultural center Oyoun — they
had dared to provide space for an event by the Jewish anti-war
group _Jüdische Stimme_
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This is a disturbing redefinition of the term “antisemitism.”
Historically, it has referred to hatred against Jews. According to the
German government, however, now any critic of Israel is guilty of
antisemitism — just as any supporter of Israel can be a victim of
it. This regularly leads to the same bizarre situation: a German
politician accusing a Jew of antisemitism. 

I first witnessed this seven years ago. Jutta Dittfurth is a scion of
the House of Dittfurth, an aristocratic clan that was heavily involved
in the Nazis’ crimes. Today she is an unremarkable right-wing
influencer, yet decades ago she was something of a leftist. As
recently as 2014, she was speaking at Berlin’s Revolutionary May
Day. Not long after that, she declared that the May Day protests had
been the site of “antisemitic attacks.” What she meant was that
she, a German aristocrat, had defended the State of Israel — and she
had been criticized for this by an Israeli Jew. Thus, Dittfurth was
“presenting herself as a victim of antisemitism
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German elites have convinced themselves that they “get”
antisemitism in a way that Jews simply can’t. They seem to have
gained enlightenment through genocide. An example: When _Der
Spiegel_ did a bizarre takedown of Greta Thunberg
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the only climate activist in the entire world they could find who
didn’t support Palestine was Luisa Neubauer, a leader of Fridays for
Future in Germany. Neubauer was ready to accuse the entire climate
movement of antisemitism. How does she know? Is she particularly close
to Jewish culture? Has she been a scholar of anti-Jewish
discrimination? No, the only qualification she referred to is that
her great-grandfather
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dynasty was an SS member who donated huge sums to the Nazi party.
Inheriting a ton of money from Nazis seemingly offers a unique
education in liberal humanist values.

This absurd redefinition now has a basis in German law, since the
Bundestag adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. More than 100
Israeli and international civil society groups have objected
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this standard, and even the author had said it is being
inappropriately weaponized
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yet the German government claims it understands antisemitism better
than anyone else.

You don’t have to be a lawyer to see that the IHRA text is
“bewilderingly imprecise
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It defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may
be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” A “certain perception”
could be anything or nothing. Particularly useful to German elites is
the idea that antisemitism can be “directed toward Jewish _or
non-Jewish_ individuals” (emphasis added).

The IHRA definition is accompanied by eleven examples, some of which
are uncontentious: “holding Jews collectively responsible for
actions of the state of Israel” or “accusing Jewish citizens of
being more loyal to Israel” are two obvious forms of antisemitism.
Yet further examples claim that calling the Zionist state racist or
undemocratic is equally antisemitic — meaning that Jews around the
world protesting on the streets right now are also Jew haters. The
IHRA definition describes Israel as the expression of “the Jewish
people’s right to self-determination,” thus equating Israel with
all Jewish people. Therefore, according to the IHRA definition, the
IHRA definition is antisemitic. Given all these logical absurdities,
actual scholars of antisemitism have developed a clearer definition
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antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

Is the German state simply being overzealous in its crusade against
antisemitism? A week ago, a German newspaper revealed that Horst
Seehofer supported a revisionist historical association
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decades. The ZFI systematically attempted to relativize the crimes of
the Wehrmacht and even cast doubt on the facts of the Holocaust.
Seehofer, Germany’s former interior minister, is a member of the
CDU/CSU, just like Chialo. I reached out to Chialo office’s for
comment on this disturbing case of antisemitism. I got no response. As
far as I can tell, no politicians have demanded consequences —
Seehofer hasn’t even apologized.

The talk of  “hidden antisemitism” is a smokescreen for the
deep-seated antisemitism of Germany’s elites. Let’s look at two
more examples from the CDU. One of the early leaders of the CDU was
Hans Globke, who in 1936 had helped author the Nazis’ Nuremberg
Laws. CDU chief Konrad Adenauer protected numerous Nazi war criminals,
including Globke. Until today, the party gets big piles of money from
the Quandt family, the billionaire heirs of Nazi war criminals. In a
very recent scandal, when Nazis and AfD members got together for
a secret meeting to plan the “remigration”
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people, they were at a hotel owned by CDU member Wilhelm Wilderink,
who has provided space for numerous far-right events.

Looking at the list of people affected by censorship and cancellation
in Germany, it’s hard to miss the fact that Jewish artists and
intellectuals are massively overrepresented. This redefinition of the
term “antisemitism” is helping the government attack Jewish life
in Germany
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Chialo isn’t interested in antisemitism, whether hidden or open. If
he were, he could look at his own party. But this entire campaign is
about silencing critics of imperialism, both of German imperialism and
its Israeli ally. It’s an attempt to put a liberal veneer on
traditional German racism.

_Nathaniel Flakin is a historian and journalist from Berlin. He
published the anticapitalist guide book Revolutionary Berlin
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well as a biography of the Jewish resistance fighter Martin Monath
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parent and on the autism spectrum._

_The Left Berlin is a community of international progressives in
Berlin. We run an online journalism project hosting a range of
left-wing perspectives in English, as well as collaborating on
progressive campaigns and events in the city. The site is run by a
team of volunteer editors, writers and translators.  This project
emerged from the Berlin LINKE Internationals and maintains close links
but the site has editorial autonomy and attempts to reflect a range of
debate on the left._

* Germany
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Fascism
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* Racism
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* anti-Semitism
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