[Marxism] A public stoning in Germany

[David Thorstad <binesi@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10375.shtml
*A public stoning in Germany
Raymond Deane
The Electronic Intifada,/ 6 March 2009
*
Hermann Dierkes is a respected politician with an honorable record of 
campaigning for social and political justice in the German Rhineland 
city of Duisburg. He represented his party Die Linke (The Left Party) on 
Duisburg City Council, campaigning tirelessly on anti-racist and 
anti-fascist issues. Most recently, he was his party's candidate for the 
post of Lord Mayor.

On 18 February 2009 Dierkes addressed a public meeting on the question 
of Palestine. To the question of how to take action against the 
injustice being suffered by Palestinians, he responded that the recent 
World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil had proposed an arms embargo, 
sanctions and the boycott of Israeli exports. He added: "We should no 
longer accept that in the name of the Holocaust and with the support of 
the government of the Federal Republic [of Germany] such grave 
violations of human rights can be perpetrated and tolerated ... Everyone 
can help strengthen pressure for a different politics, for example by 
boycotting Israeli products."

A few days later, Dierkes gave an interview to the /Westdeutsche 
Allgemeine Zeitung/ (/WAZ/), a conservative paper based in the nearby 
city of Essen. He explained the demands of the World Social Forum, and 
requested that the published interview should stress that this had 
nothing to do with anti-Semitism -- a qualification that invariably 
needs to be made in Germany, except when there is suspicion of 
Islamophobia. Predictably, his precautions were in vain; scenting a 
political coup, the reporter published his article without including the 
qualification.

All hell broke loose. In the 25 February edition of /Bild/ -- Germany's 
best-selling and most obnoxious daily paper -- Dieter Graumann, 
Vice-President of the Central Jewish Council, accused him of "pure 
anti-Semitism." /WAZ/ editorialist Achim Beer decried Dierke's "careless 
Nazi utterances," comparing his words to "a mass execution at the edge 
of a Ukrainian forest." Hendrik Wuest, General Secretary of the CDU (the 
Christian Democratic Party), warned that "the Nazi propaganda" emanating 
from Die Linke is "intolerable." Michael Groschek -- General Secretary 
of the local branch of the Social Democratic Party, which shares power 
nationally with the CDU -- played electoral politics with the claim that 
"[a]nyone playing electoral politics with such anti-Israeli utterances 
sets himself outside the rules of the democratic game."

Worse still, Dierke's own party failed to stand by him unambiguously. 
Press spokesperson Alrun Nuesslein opined that if Israel is criticized 
because "the population in the Gaza Strip is collectively punished by 
the ... closure of border crossings, it is equally impossible for us to 
punish the Israeli population" by means of a boycott of Israeli goods, 
particularly "in the context of German history," a mantra with which 
Germans routinely absolve themselves of their historic responsibility 
towards the Palestinians.

Other voices within the party took a more strident tone. Petra Pau, Vice 
President of the Bundestag (German Parliament), said Dierke's words 
"awake unspeakable associations and employ dubious cliches." Left Party 
politicians in Dierke's own area condemned his "anti-Jewish endeavors" 
(Guenter Will) and "anti-Semitic utterances" (Anna Lena Orlowski).

Events took their predestined course, and on 26 February Dierkes 
resigned his position within Die Linke and withdrew his mayoral 
candidacy. In an open letter to his party colleagues, pointing out that 
he had been the victim of "a public stoning" and of a campaign that was 
"a terrible mixture of the gravest insults and defamation, Islamophobic 
hatred, hatred of immigrants, and murder threats," he maintained that 
"[t]he victims of the Shoah and the heroes of the Warsaw Jewish rising 
would turn away with horror [could they see] with what malice and toward 
what ends they are being instrumentalized in order to justify ... the 
undemocratic and murderous politics of the Israeli government."

A quick perusal of the German blogosphere throws up countless 
repetitions of the phrase "/kauft nicht beim Juden!/" -- "don't buy from 
the Jew!" -- a slogan from the Nazi era that no longer serves to defame 
Jews but rather those who seek justice for the Palestinians. However, 
Jews aren't entirely immune from this weapon: in the respected weekly 
/Die Zeit/ (15 January 2009) a certain Thomas Assheuer turned it against 
the Canadian Jewish author Naomi Klein after the British /Guardian/ 
published her call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against 
Israel. Given that Klein had carefully specified that BDS should be 
aimed at Israeli institutions and not individuals, this piece of 
defamation was particularly crass.

It appears that freedom of speech, supposedly one of the proudest 
acquisitions of post-Fascist Germany, is readily suppressed when 
exercised to advocate positive action against the racist, politicidal 
institutions and actions of the Zionist state. Indeed so brutal and 
venomous was the response to Hermann Dierke's remarks, and so 
instantaneous and unanimous the recourse, however ironic, to Nazi 
sloganeering, that it is difficult not to be reminded of the rhetoric 
promulgated by Julius Streicher's vile paper /Der Stuermer/ between 1923 
and 1945 and not to feel that the same atavistic sources that once 
disgorged Jew-hatred are now being tapped in this virulent and unceasing 
campaign against the advocacy of Palestinian rights. The Palestinians, 
after all, stand in the way of the establishment of a racial Jewish 
state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, an eventuality 
that the German establishment deludedly sees as somehow shriving its own 
past crimes.

It has to be said that ordinary German people are, by and large, as 
unimpressed by philosemitic hysteria as they are by anti-Semitism. It 
remains to be seen how those people who have repeatedly voted for 
Hermann Dierkes because they see him as an honest and reliable 
politician -- something as rare in Germany as elsewhere -- will react to 
being robbed of their representative by such a campaign of hatred and 
defamation on behalf of a quasi-fascist state.

Finally, it will be interesting to see if this debacle induces Die Linke 
to reconsider whether it is more appropriate to adopt a principled 
position on Israel than to continue playing to the gallery of rightist 
pressure-groups that have taken upon themselves the task of perpetuating 
unconditional German support for Israel. It is hard to feel optimistic 
about this.

/Raymond Deane is an Irish composer and activist (//www.raymonddeane.com 
<http://www.raymonddeane.com/>//)./

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