I’m a German. When I was born, World War II had ended just 16 years earlier. I grew up among adults who had all lived through the Nazi era. We children parroted terms without realizing they came from the Nazi lexicon.
As a teenager, I had long hair and tried to come across as rebellious as possible. An older lady commented on this with a remark that was common among retirees at the time: “That wouldn’t have happened under Hitler.” In other words: In the golden age of the Nazis, someone like me would have ended up in a concentration camp—and I would have deserved it.
Back then, I asked myself: How do I think I would have acted during the Nazi era? Would I have let myself be swept up in the general euphoria for Hitler? Would I have gone along with it? Would I have remained silent out of fear? Or would I have resisted?
Now I have the opportunity to prove that I wouldn’t have gone along with it back then. Because today, Jews are once again being stigmatized, demonized, marginalized, and left to fend for themselves. Not even media outlets that I previously considered reputable are speaking out against this. At numerous universities and at anti-Israel demonstrations, there’s a pogrom-like atmosphere in the air that reminds me of reports from the 1920s.
Unlike back then, there is now a country to which Germany’s Jews can emigrate if things get too bad for them here. And it is precisely this country, Israel, that I am now supposed to reject.
Who has poisoned the atmosphere here to such an extent?
These are the most dangerous enemies of the Jews, Israel, and the West today: Islamists prone to violence. Most of them have likely come to us since 2016 among the millions of refugees from Muslim countries. They are supported by their allies from the left-wing scene. Wearing their keffiyehs, they harmoniously demonstrate their reverence for Amin al-Husseini, who introduced the keffiyeh as a symbol of anti-Semitic terror. Or do the left-wing keffiyeh-wearers not even know what they’re wearing?
Genocidal al-Husseini
In the 1930s, al-Husseini—who at the same time established the keffiyeh as an anti-Semitic emblem for the Arabs of Palestine1 —prevented the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, as resolved by the League of Nations. At that time, four-fifths of the former British Mandate territory—present-day Jordan—was already firmly under Arab control. And even of the remaining fifth, the Palestinians would have had to open up only a portion to Jewish immigration as part of a solution—which would not have meant that the Arabs living there would have been expelled. Rather, the plan called for an Arab state and a much smaller Jewish state—much smaller even than today’s Israel—with a mixed Jewish and Arab population2. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Jews could have found salvation that way.
But al-Husseini preferred that Europe’s Jews be murdered by the Nazis. In the 1940s, he lobbied Hitler to extend the Holocaust to the Middle East and spread Nazi propaganda throughout the Arab world, the effects of which are still felt today and are now coming back to us via immigration. (So much for the historically ignorant slogan “Free Palestine from German Guilt.”) In 1948, he incited Arab states to wage war against Israel, with the aim of committing genocide against the Israeli Jews.
The keffiyeh is okay, but the Star of David isn’t?
So these immigrant admirers of al-Husseini and their left-wing accomplices have poisoned the atmosphere in Germany to such an extent that it has become dangerous to wear the Star of David. The very same star that Jews in Germany were forced to wear during the murderous 1940s so that the Nazis could more easily send them to the gas chambers.
So now I’m supposed to let myself be forbidden from wearing this Star of David by the admirers of the Holocaust promoter al-Husseini—the very same al-Husseini who turned the keffiyeh they wear into an anti-Semitic symbol of terror. Is this supposed to become the new normal in the state that is the legal successor to the murderer of six million Jews?
Where I Stand—and Where I Don’t
So why am I setting the record straight here about the lies of Israel’s enemies?
Because I want Jews in Germany to be safe and respected. Because I want us not to marginalize the State of Israel or abandon it. And because I don’t want the enemies of the Jews, of Israel, and of the West to be able to dictate what can and cannot be said in Germany.
My resources are modest. But I want to make my contribution to shaping public opinion, however small it may be.
Footnotes