By Peter Tiede
The Chancellor promises Israel comprehensive support, calls Hamas terror “barbaric” and also speaks of “imported anti-Semitism.”
Correct words, they often come from the Federal Chancellor in these days of Hamas’s annihilation terror against Israel and the Jew-hate demonstrations on German streets. Also this Sunday.
There is Olaf Scholz (65, SPD) in the new synagogue building in Dessau (Saxony-Anhalt). 85 years after the old building was set on fire by Nazis and a German citizen mob during the pogrom night of 1938 and the Jewish cemetery was devastated, he calls the new building “luck” and “gift” for short.
And then about the fact that these words are currently stuck in your throat: “But these words ‘gift’ and ‘happiness’ may not quite come to our lips today.”
In parts, the Chancellor’s speech to the festival community, which is largely highly emotional, becomes a political statement that goes beyond this holiday celebrated in terrible times.
Scholz promises Israel comprehensive support. He calls Hamas’ terror what it is: “barbaric.”
► BZ names the most important passages of the Chancellor’s speech:
Scholz promises Germany’s full help to the State of Israel in its fight against Hamas terror. Striking: The Chancellor does not limit aid to certain areas. In other words, he doesn’t rule out any kind of help in the speech.
Scholz’s comprehensive promise of help:
▶︎ “If Israel asks Germany for help in this situation, then we will help.”
The Chancellor makes it explicitly clear: ISRAEL DEFENDS ITSELF! And has every right to:
▶︎ Israel has “the guaranteed right to defend itself against terror.”
Crimes against humanity
▶︎ “Terror that murders innocents. Terror that wants to destroy the Jewish state of Israel.”
▶︎“There can only be one place for Germany in this situation: the place firmly on the side of Israel.”
The terror is not only directed against Israel, said Scholz: ▶︎ “Because terror, in all its brutality and abomination, is directed against humanity itself.”
Heartbroken
The Chancellor about the victims:
▶︎ “We are shocked at how many women and men, babies, children and the elderly have fallen victim to the barbaric – and this word fits here – the barbaric terror of Hamas.”
▶︎“I was able to meet some of these relatives personally during my visit to Tel Aviv.” The Chancellor: “Their pain is heartbreaking.”
Therefore, said Scholz, “the federal government will do everything in our power to ensure that all hostages are released.”
Hatred and agitation against Jews
Scholz on anti-Semitic hatred and inhumane hate speech:
▶︎ “Here, of all places, in Germany. Germans committed the crime against humanity of the Shoah.” The Chancellor then: “That’s why our ‘Never again!’ be inviolable.”
Dessau is the city of the Bauhaus school and great philosophers. Artist stars such as Feininger, Klee and Kandinsky worked here. And this is where the composer and world star Kurt Weill (1900-1950, “Threepenny Opera”) comes from. His father was a cantonist at the old synagogue. The new synagogue in which Scholz will give his speech will bear the family’s name.
Scholz quotes what his son, who emigrated to the USA, once wrote in the face of the Nazi terror against the Jews: “Lethargy is completely inappropriate at the moment.”
Scholz takes the sentence from 1938 into today: “Lethargy is inappropriate.”
▶︎ “Looking away is inappropriate. Silence is inappropriate – when Jews are not safe on our streets.”
▶︎ “When Stars of David are smeared on houses. When incendiary devices are thrown at synagogues.”
▶︎ “When the victims of terror are mocked and the perpetrators are glorified.”
▶︎ “When hatred and violence against Jews are put into perspective with an unbearable ‘yes, but’ – in a perfidious perpetrator-victim reversal.”
Then the Chancellor to everyone:
“Now it’s time, ladies and gentlemen. Now we have to see what ‘never again’ means! Now, we have to show what our ‘never again’ means.”
Then he rolls out a sentence from German domestic and commemorative policy that has almost become a cliché (“There must be no tolerance for anti-Semitism in Germany…”) – to a greater extent than a leading Social Democratic politician has ever done:
▶︎ “… no matter whether this anti-Semitism is politically motivated or religious, whether it comes from the left or the right, whether it has been growing here for centuries or imported from outside became.”
With the last part of the sentence, the Chancellor primarily refers to the migration crisis and the conditions in German metropolitan areas, where entire parts of the city are simply not safe for self-professed Jews to enter.
With a pleading quote from another famous son of Dessau, the great Jewish-German Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), he shows how deeply rooted hatred of Jews was in Germany: “Consider us, if not as brothers and fellow citizens, at least as Fellow human beings and fellow inhabitants of the country.”
The Federal Chancellor: “What a sad finding it is when, even today, Jews still have to doubt over and over again whether this country is also their country.”