Clemens Heni

Wissenschaft und Publizistik als Kritik

Kategorie: Allgemein Seite 63 von 77

Invitation to my talk in New York City, March 27, 2014 – Critical Theory and Zionism

von

am März 13, 2014

in Allgemein

Critical Theory and Zionism

Lecture, New York, Manhattan, March 27, 12.30 PM

Dr. Clemens HeniBy Dr. Clemens Heni, political scientist, former Post-Doc at Yale (2008/09), currently director of The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA), most recently author of Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon (2013, in English), Critical Theory and Israel (2014, forthcoming, in German)

In his talk, the author will show the relationship of critical theory to Zionism and the Jewish state of Israel. Based on mostly German sources he analyzes the writings on Zionism by the founder of critical theory in 1937, Max Horkheimer, and his fellow theorists like Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Loewenthal. What would Adorno have said about Judith Butler being awarded the Adorno Prize in 2012? What is the relationship of New York City to German-Jewish intellectuals and their take on Israel? Why did the leading scholar of the Frankfurt School promote Butler in New York City? Was critical theory anti-Israel? Or has critical theory become anti-Zionist? If so, why? This talk will provide answers to some of the most troubling questions in regard to critical theory, one of the leading schools of philosophy of the 20th century.

 At the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP)

All interested parties must RSVP prior to the seminar by contacting the ISGAP Coordinator, Jenny Pigott.
Email: jenny.pigott@isgap.org
Phone: (212) 230-1840

All seminar are located in the ISGAP Center.
165 East 56th St.
(on the corner of 56th St. and 3rd Ave.)
New York, NY 10022

Member of European Parliament accuses Israel of “genocide in Gaza and elsewhere”: Philosopher Gianni Vattimo

von

am Februar 11, 2014

in Allgemein

Originally published with the Times of Israel, February 11, 2014

 

Gianni Vattimo (born 1936) is a Member of European Parliament for the Liberal Democratic alliance (ALDE). He is a renowned Italian philosopher, a follower of both Martin Heidegger and Karl Marx. He is a self-declared gay-communist Catholic. He could be a minority rights activist, right? Europe has plenty of homophobic tendencies, and Iran hangs gay men on a regular basis.

Early in 2014, Vattimo co-edited a book on “Deconstructing Zionism. A Critique of Political Metaphysics,” published by Bloomsbury (New York, London, New Delhi, Sydney).  The book is dedicated to leading French philosopher Jacques Derrida, known for his anti-American agenda alongside with his friend Jürgen Habermas in 2003. They were the philosophical supporters of German-French anti-Bush-agitation at the time.

In his contribution to the book, Vattimo admits that his piece is a kind of autobiography: “How to become an anti-Zionist”. He writes about his generation, born around the Second World War, and raised with the idea that Jews deserved a state due to the Holocaust. For him the “myth” of “antifascist resistance” (against the Germans/Nazis) was accompanied and promoted by “American films” about Jews and Israel, which argued in favor of a Jewish state.

Vattimo starts his article with reference to anti-Israeli Ilan Pappé and the encounter with what both call “Nakba” or Palestinian history. Around 1968 Vattimo was a socialist fan of Israeli kibbutzim, ignoring “Nakba” as he recalls. Following conspiracy theories, Vattimo writes about the “unbelievable official version” of the US Government of 9/11. Several thousand of potentially lethal missiles from Hamas launched into southern Israel are called “totally harmless missiles.” For him, Holocaust denier and propagandist of a “world without Zionism,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was and is a hero, who dared to attack Israel, the Jews, and American power.

Vattimo writes:

“Better still: the entire Gaza affair contributed in a decisive way, more than any other aspect of Israeli politics, to the idea (I believe with great likelihood) that against the risk of a return of refugees, which would entail the end of the ‘Jewishness’ of the State of Israel, this situation might see no other solution than the progressive extermination of Palestinian Arabs.”

Gianni Vattimo is a loudspeaker for former Iranian President Ahmadinejad and says:

“As to the idea of making the state of Israel ‘disappear’ from the map – one of the usual themes of the Iranian ‘threat’ – its sense may not be completely unreasonable: it could, and ought, according to us, mean that the State of Israel becomes a secular, democratic, non-racist state, without walls and without discrimination among its citizens.”

Vattimo concludes:

“When Ahmadinejad invokes the end of the State of Israel, he merely expresses a demand that should be more explicitly shared by the democratic countries that instead consider him an enemy.”

For Vattimo, “memory of the Holocaust” “is imposed like a penalty”. He then takes aim at “Nazi hunters” (!) like French philosopher and critique of Heideggerian antisemitism, Emmanuel Faye. Vattimo attacks “Anglo-Saxon” “mainstream thinking of the Atlantic, North American” region and is upset about Chilean philosopher Victor Farias, another critic of Heidegger, for his linking – for good reason – of “Heideggerianism and Iranian Islamic thought”.

Gianni Vattimo’s defamation of Israeli Jews culminates in the following sentence:

“The myth of ‘two states for two peoples,’ another aspect of the Zionist mythology, is all too clearly a way of protracting matters so that it does not appear to be an ongoing excuse by Western democracies to avoid their responsibilities, a way to give Israel the time to continue the genocide, in Gaza and elsewhere, and also to reinforce themselves militarily in every way, including the possession of atomic weapons.”

To accuse Jews of committing “genocide” is the typical antisemitic projection of German and European guilt of the Shoah onto the Jews: as long as Jews today are seen as bad as Nazis, there is no reason to worry about guilt. He is a renowned philosopher but has not a clue about the word “genocide”, the same holds for the word “decimation” (he uses this word as well) when it comes to Israeli policies towards today’s Palestinians. The number of Palestinians is increasing, both in Gaza and the West Bank.

No surprise, then, that Vattimo and his co-editor Michael Marder, co-editor of the US journal Telos, included proponents of the „one state solution” like Duke University’s Walter Mignolo, who was a fellow in sociology at the University of Warwick a few years ago. He was invited by scholar in antisemitism Robert Fine and his colleague Gurminder Bhambra, a follower of “post-Orientalist” enemy of Israel Edward Said (1935–2003). Other authors in the Vattimo/Marder volume are Marc H. Ellis, a “liberation theologian”, “currently a visiting professor at the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica,” feminist Luce Irigaray, post-colonial and feminist scholar Ranjana Khanna (Duke University), political scientist Artemy Magun (European University at Saint-Petersburg), Christopher Wise, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Western Washington University in Bellingham, and Santiago Zabala, a Professor at the University of Barcelona (author of “Hermeneutic Communism,” 2011, co-authored with Gianni Vattimo).

Vattimo and Marder also included Judith Butler in this volume. Her well known anti-Israel article “Is Judaism Zionism?”, was published in a book on “The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere”, including articles by famous philosophers Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas in 2011, based on a huge event with some 1000 people attending at New York University in September 2009. Vattimo himself was honored in 2007 with a Festschrift, among the contributors were Charles Taylor, Umberto Eco, German philosophers Manfred Frank, Wolfgang Welsch, Rüdiger Bubner and American philosophical superstar Richard Rorty (1931–2007).

This is just indicating that Gianni Vattimo is not an outsider at all.

Will any one of his fans criticize this volume about “Deconstructing Zionism?” For Vattimo, “anti-Zionism is synonymous with leftist world politics” – and he embraces it and promotes it via the European Parliament. I do not view Vattimo as a freak, despite his fantastical theories. Rather, he is dangerous, because he represents a highly antisemitic climate among the elites in the humanities, the social sciences and the cultural and political elites in Europe and the Western world. At the EU Parliament, he is a member of ALDE – Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Group – and a member of the Culture and Education Committee of the EU-Parliament. He was an ally of Venezuelan Hugo Chavez and in his contribution to the book he promotes Brazilian pro-Iranian policies:

“That Brazil’s president Lula was among the first ‘Western’ leaders to welcome Iran and Ahmadinejad has an emblematic value that goes far beyond the particular significance of his visit.”

The book “Deconstructing Zionism”, published in 2014 by Gianni Vattimo and Michael Marder, indicates that anti-Zionist antisemitism is on the rise. The ordinary tone of Vattimo also indicates that he has nothing to lose: he knows that the elites in Europe have no problem with his kind of left-wing antisemitism, framed as “left-wing world politics”. No one is shocked that he literally embraces Holocaust denier and antisemite Ahmadinejad and openly welcomes the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. If you want to know anything about the European Parliament, about European philosophy, and European political culture, read this article by Gianni Vattimo. Heidegger would be proud of such an outspoken anti-American and antisemitic approach. Vattimo is very clear: the problem is not the “occupation,” the result of Israel’s victory in June 1967. The problem is 1948, Israel as a Jewish state! That is the anti-Zionist agenda of Judith Butler and her allies in a nutshell.

 

Dr. Clemens Heni is a political scientist and Director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA)

 

We need more Intolerance

von

am Januar 27, 2014

in Allgemein

The Times of Israel, January 27, 2014

Today, January 27, is Holocaust Memorial day. I came across the following statement:

  • The High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President of the Commission, Catherine Ashton, issued the following statement today:

  • “Today the international community remembers the victims of the Holocaust. We honour every one of those brutally murdered in the darkest period of European history. We also want to pay a special tribute to all those who acted with courage and sacrifice to protect their fellow citizens against persecution.On Holocaust Remembrance Day, we must keep alive the memory of this tragedy. It is an occasion to remind us all of the need to continue fighting prejudice and racism in our own time. We must remain vigilant against the dangers of hate speech and redouble our commitment to prevent any form of intolerance. The respect of human rights and diversity lies at the heart of what the European Union stands for. “

 

Who was murdered in the Holocaust? Who were the perpetrators? This is unclear from that statement and Ashton seems to have a personal problem to use the words “Jews have been killed” “by Germans (and their European allies)”.

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt would frame this statement as pure “bullshit” (this is the title of a bestselling pamphlet by Frankfurt). Ashton and the EU want “to prevent any form of intolerance”. In fact we need much more intolerance – intolerance towards antisemitism, often framed as “criticism of Israel”, and anti-Zionism. We need intolerance towards Islamist and Arab Jew-hatred, Holocaust affirmation and Holocaust denial. We need intolerance towards EU policies to single out the Jewish state and products being produced (often by Palestinians, who earn a wonderful living!) in the disputed territories or Westbank. We need more intolerance towards a German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier who attacks the Israeli government over settlements on the occasion of the burial of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon.

Germany just started to put buttons on Israeli products from those territories. This is simply a reminder to “Kauft nicht beim Juden”, plain and simple.

We need more intolerance towards useless speeches and statements like this one. The EU has no problem at all with hate speech as long as it comes from Arab or Muslim extremists, or left-wingers who aim at Israel. Moderate Muslims and pro-Zionist activists are singled out on a daily basis by NGOs, conferences, academic networks, political institutions and the like. EU policies towards Iran are endangering Jews in Israel and abroad and we need more intolerance towards these policies.

And we need more intolerance to this denial of the uniqueness of the Shoah. We know this denial of the unprecedented character of the Shoah by postcolonial scholarship, take Edward Said, Hamid Dabashi, Aimé Césaire or Jürgen Zimmerer, Donald Bloxham, Dirk A. Moses or the Prage Declaration from 2008 (signed by Vaclav Havel and German President Joachim Gauck, among others), which equates those who built Auschwitz and gassed the Jews to those who liberated that concentration and extermination camp, as examples.

Did Ashton mention antisemitism, when she talked about the Shoah today? No. She mentions “prejudice and racism” and misses the point that antisemitism is different. Antisemitism is genocidal and she could have learnt this had she spent any time in her considering the very specific history of Jew-hatred in Europe in general and Germany in particular.

It is shocking that the leading foreign policy representative of the EU does not even mention antisemitism and Jew-hatred on Holocaust Memorial Day. Instead, she uses words dedicated to distorting what the Holocaust was about. As if the Shoah was nothing but disrespect for “diversity”. Probably Ashton follows EU guidelines for all their application processes and she uses the word “diversity” in every single speech she delivers to an equally ignorant audience, used to embracing code words and people who detest any kind of analysis or real remembrance of a specific, very specific history at all.

We need more intolerance towards those who make a great living from distracting attention from the real problems of the Middle East – Islamism, dictatorship, lack of democracy, anti-feminism, scarce water resources, failure to develop a civic political culture, anti-Americanism, to name but some of the core problems in that troubled region – by being obsessed with the one and only Jewish state of Israel.

Therefore, we need more intolerance of useless statements like this one by the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

 

Kritik oder Lifestyle?

von

am November 15, 2013

in Allgemein

Es ist eine anstrengende, große und wichtige Aufgabe, einen bundesweiten Israelkongress zu organisieren. Es ist vor allem eine sehr gute Idee, so etwas zu tun, solange die Welt so antisemitisch und antiisraelisch ist, wie wir es seit Jahren erleben. War der Israelkongress am 10. November 2013 für eine solche pro-israelische Positionierung der richtige Rahmen?

Zuerst einmal ist für einen Intellektuellen die Aufteilung der Welt in „Laboratorien“ oder auch in „Labs“, wo dann schön getrennt Kapitalismus („Ökonomie“ oder neudeutsch „Business“), Religion, Kultur, Politik und „Lifestyle“ behandelt werden, so etwas wie eine Ohrfeige, eine Absage an Gesellschaftskritik, die ihren Untersuchungsgegenstand in seiner Totalität analysiert. Dafür gab es „Datteln für alle“, wie einer der ganz wenigen kritischen Kommentare zum Israelkongress in der „Hauptstadt“ bemerkte.

Es war der dritte Israelkongress, der diesmal nicht in Frankfurt am Main, vielmehr in Berlin stattfand. Es wurde gar nicht erwähnt, warum Frankfurt rechts oder links liegen gelassen wurde, dabei lag das u.a. an der Verleihung des Adorno-Preises an die anti-israelische Agitatorin Judith Butler im Jahr 2012 durch die Stadt Frankfurt. Der Frankfurter Oberbürgermeister Peter Feldmann, der die Entscheidung nicht selbst zu verantworten hatte, blieb gleichwohl – offiziell aus Termingründen, aber offenbar eher aus Protest – der Preisverleihung fern. Das ärgerte die auf die Israelhasserin stolzen Frankfurter aller Richtungen extrem und Feldmann geriet unter Druck. Und so sagte er jüngst sinngemäß, dass er sein Fernbleiben bei der Preisverleihung rückblickend anders sehe…

Wenn also ein Politiker einmal etwas Courage gegen Antisemitismus oder die Diffamierung Israels als Apartheidstaat zeigt, wird er prompt von allen Seiten zurück gepfiffen. Ähnlich verhielt es sich bei einem der ganz wenigen interessanten Momente im öffentlichen Leben der Kanzlerin, als diese sich am 2. Mai 2011 sichtlich erfreut über die Tötung Osama Bin Ladens zeigte, aber von ihrem Parteikollegen und Israelkongressteilnehmer Philipp Mißfelder und einer ganzen Phalanx der deutschen politischen, medialen und kulturellen Elite zurückgepfiffen wurde.

Mehrere auf dem Kongress vertretenen großen Parteienstiftungen (Adenauer, Ebert, Seidel und Böll) unterstützen auf die eine oder andere Weise auch anti-israelische oder antisemitisch agierende bzw. agitierende NGOs. Das wurde durch einen Bericht der bekannten Gruppe NGO Monitor aus Jerusalem unter der Leitung des Politologen Prof. Gerald Steinberg im Oktober 2013 bekannt. In diesem bahnbrechenden Bericht sieht man zudem wie lückenhaft die parteinahen Stiftungen sowie staatliche, kirchliche und weitere Einrichtungen über ihre nahöstlichen Aktivitäten berichten.[i] Es wird durch die empirische Forschung von NGO Monitor exemplarisch deutlich, dass häufig problematische NGOs Unterstützung erhalten. Eine solche NGO ist Miftah. Der Korrespondent aus Jerusalem, Ulrich Sahm, berichtete bereits im April 2013 über einen antisemitischen Artikel, der auf deren Homepage erschienen war und die mittelalterliche antijüdische Blood Libel propagierte. Sahm betonte auch die Unterstützung dieser NGO unter anderem durch die Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS).

War es nun ein Zufall, dass Sahm, der mehrere Texte in der Hochglanzkonferenzbroschüre publizierte und häufig in Deutschland auftritt, auf der Konferenz nicht sprach, aber die KAS prominent und mit einem Stand vertreten war?

Warum meint ein Kongress sich mit politischen Stiftungen umgeben zu müssen, die doch allesamt dafür bekannt sind, wie die oben genannte Untersuchung von NGO Monitor dokumentiert, auch mit den Gegnern Israels auf die eine oder andere Weise zu kooperieren? Wer kann da ein Eintreten für Israel irgendwie ernst nehmen?

Hätte sich Dieter Graumann, Präsident des Zentralrats der Juden in Deutschland und Vizepräsident des Jüdischen Weltkongresses, geweigert, eine sehr kraftvolle und gegen den deutschen Antisemitismus gerichtete Rede zu halten, wenn mehr kritische Köpfe, Gruppen oder Initiativen anwesend gewesen wären anstelle vieler geschwätziger bis peinlicher Christen, Politiker oder anderer merkwürdiger Gestalten?

Ein Kongressteilnehmer aus der ex-DDR raunte mir unvermittelt schon bei der bloßen Vorstellung einer der Diskutantinnen am Nachmittag, Anetta Kahane, Vorsitzende der Amadeu Antonio Stiftung, zu, dass diese z.B. „Hakenkreuze auf jüdischen Grabsteinen“ doch übertrieben darstellen würde, „um mehr Geld für ihre Arbeit zu bekommen“. Dieser Mann sieht sich als Freund Israels und der Juden, er feierte dieses Jahr drei Wochen lang seinen 60ten Geburtstag in Israel, wie er versicherte. Tolle Freunde Israels! Vielen Gruppen, Vereinen, Firmen und Organisationen scheinen vor allem die Farben schwarz-rot-gold am Herzen zu liegen, und Israel dient als Vehikel um deutsch-nationale Symbolik sozusagen koscher zu liebkosen.

Antisemitismus hat in den letzten Jahren in teils extremer Form zugenommen. Graumann verwies vor allem auf die Agitation gegen die Beschneidung. Diese Hetze wurde bekanntlich nicht nur von der FAZ, vielmehr auch von marginalen, selbsternannten Israelfreunden aus abstrusen (und häufig zu Unrecht als ‚antideutsch‘ klassifizierten) Teilen der linken Szene unterstützt und angefeuert. Er sagte, dass diese unfassbar ordinäre, vulgäre und Juden sowie das Judentum diffamierende Debatte im Sommer 2012 Juden in Deutschland gezeigt habe, wie wichtig Israel gerade auch für die Juden in der Diaspora ist. Ein Zufluchtsort für alle Fälle! Wenn es je zu einem Verbot der Beschneidung kommen würde, wäre dies das definitive Ende jüdischen Lebens in Deutschland – und Israel die Rettung, so Graumann. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist es so unerträglich und perfide dass die linke Publikumszeitschrift Konkret in einem Artikel im Sommer 2013 das jüdische Rückkehrrecht als zentralen Bestandteil der Konzeption Israels als jüdischem Staat in Frage stellte.

Auf dem Israelkongress wurde dem DGB-Vorsitzenden und Vorsitzenden des Internationalen Gewerkschaftsbundes, Michael Sommer, der Arno-Lustiger-Ehrenpreis verliehen. Sommer ist ein außerordentlich engagierter und kämpferischer Freund Israels, was auch in seiner Dankesrede deutlich wurde, wo er sich gegen Boykottaufrufe gegen israelische Waren aussprach und auch betonte, dass er innerhalb der Gewerkschaftsbewegung nicht selten konfrontativ den Israelfeinden begegnen muss. Doch sicherlich hätte Michael Sommer diesen bedeutenden Preis auch in Gegenwart von mehr pro-israelischen Wissenschaftlern, Intellektuellen, Linken, Liberalen, Gewerkschaftern und Ungläubigen und weniger deutschnationalen Christen oder äquidistanten Parteienvertretern oder Stiftungsfunktionären entgegen genommen. Auch das Jüdische Forum für Demokratie und gegen Antisemitismus aus Berlin lädt immer wieder Politiker_innen ein und verspricht sich davon irgendwelche Resultate. Es geht immer um Floskeln und wohlfeile Worte. Analyse und Kritik, wissenschaftliche gar, ist selten willkommen.

Folklore, kochen und geschwätzig moderieren wird gegen Antisemitismus nichts ausrichten können, so gut das auch gemeint sein mag. Israelisch kochen muss niemand davon abhalten, gegen den jüdischen Staat Israel anderweitig aktiv zu sein. Kulturalismus versus Ideologiekritik? Primär muss es um eine Kritik der Forschung und der politischen Kultur gehen, ansonsten wird es darauf hinauslaufen, Parallelwelten zu haben, die am politischen Klima wenig bis gar nichts ändern werden.

Was dieses Land bzw. Europa und der Westen braucht sind Leute die öffentlich kritisieren, dass und warum dieses Land oder ganz konkrete einzelne Unternehmen etc. mit gefährlichen Regimen kooperieren oder warum seit Jahren problematische NGOs Steuergelder der deutschen Bundesregierung (via die Parteienstiftungen z.B.) und anderer deutscher Einrichtungen erhalten oder warum Zentren für Antisemitismusforschung und Jüdische Museen antiisraelische Redner oder den Antisemitismus diminuierende jungdeutsche Forscher einladen oder beschäftigen. Das Jüdische Museum geht soweit wie viele den Holocaust und die Vorgeschichte des Holocaust verharmlosende Ideologen und behauptet, den Muslimen von heute würde es durchaus so gehen wie den Juden in den 1930er Jahren während des Nationalsozialismus, so der Direktor dieses weltweit seit längerem in die Kritik geratenen Museums, Michael Blumenthal.

Diese Zentren, Museen, NGOs oder postkolonialen, multikulturalistischen, post- bzw. antizionistischen Events und Forscher_innen werden sich weder durch christliche Gebete, Start-Up-Unternehmen im Bereich Hirnforschung oder IT-Technologie und auch nicht durch köstlichen Matsch aus dem Toten Meer oder Rotwein von den Golanhöhen irritieren lassen. Eine Kritik gerade der Aktivitäten des Jüdischen Museums Berlin, das pars pro toto für das gesamte links-deutsche kulturelle Establishment in der BRD steht, wäre enorm wichtig gewesen auf einem pro-israelischen Kongress.

Besonders abstoßend war das Auftreten von evangelikalen Missionaren im Umfeld des „Marsch des Lebens“, der von der Tübinger Offensiven Stadtmission (TOS) 2007 initiiert wurde. Die TOS schreibt über sich selbst: „Die TOS bekennt sich zu Gott, dem Vater, zu Jesus Christus, dem Sohn Gottes als Retter und Herrn der Welt, und zum Heiligen Geist.“ Diese zwischen Lachhaftigkeit und Antijudaismus oszillierende Ideologie, die den Holocaust in seinen unerträglichen „Märschen fürs Leben“ benutzt um christliche „Gnade“, „Versöhnung“, ja „Heilung“ und „Jesus Christus“ als Herr und Retter zu propagieren, wurde wie selbstverständlich auf dem Israelkongress und der Kongressbroschüre promotet und goutiert.

Es braucht weiterhin einen Raum, wo die wissenschaftliche und politische Analyse und Kritik des Antisemitismus bundesweit ein Forum bekommt.


[i] Es wurden folgende Stiftungen und Einrichtungen bezüglich ihrer Unterstützung von NGOs in Israel bzw. den Gebieten der Palästinensischen Autonomiebehörde untersucht:

Political Foundations:

 

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

Heinrich Böll Stiftung

Friedrich Ebert Stiftung

Willy Brandt Center Jerusalem

Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung (FNF)

Konrad Adenauer Stiftung

Hans-Seidel-Stiftung

 

Independent Development NGOs

 

Medico International

 

Church organizations

 

Brot für die Welt – Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst

MISEREOR

 

Governmental organizations

 

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GIZ)

Erinnerung, Verantwortung, Zukunft (EVZ) Remembrance, Responsibility and Future

Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (IFA).”

Antisemitism in UK Academia

von

am November 2, 2013

in Allgemein

JSA banner

In October 2013, the first issue of the fifth volume of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA) was released. Im it, you find my article about Antisemitism in UK Academia.  You find the article here. Among others, I deal with the following scholars:

– Arnold Toynbee
– Dave Rich
– Jacqueline Rose
– David Feldman
– Zygmunt Bauman
– Steven Beller
– Tony Judt
– Timothy Garton Ash
– David Cesarani
– Eric Hobsbawn
– Robert Fine
– Gurminder K. Bhambra
– Donald Bloxham
– David Seymour

 

My conclusion?

 

The Jihadist attacks in London on July 7, 2005, did not at all change the minds of most British academics in the humanities and social sciences. Instead of analyzing Islamist antisemitism, anti-Western ideology, terrorism, and Jihad, denial of the Iranian threat as well as of Islamist antisemitism and Islamism as a whole is prevailing.

The strange increase in research centers, consortiums, and events regarding antisemitism are indicating a hijacking of serious scholarship by newcomers who have no interest in analyzing antisemitism; instead, the obfuscation or affirmation of antisemitic tropes is prevalent, often based on post-colonial and post-Orientalist ideology (following Edward Said), Holocaust distortion, and anti-Zionism or post-Zionism.

 

Antisemitism in UK Academia

von

am Oktober 28, 2013

in Allgemein

“Antisemitism in UK Academia,” Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2013, 4401–4415

Ignoramus et ignorabimus: German sociologist Peter Ullrich will never know if left-wing antisemitism really exists

von

am Oktober 16, 2013

in Allgemein

The Times of Israel, October 16, 2013

The Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at Technical University in Berlin has generated a long list of controversies in recent years, take the views of its former head Wolfgang Benz for example. In 2011 he was followed by historian Stefanie Schueler-Springorum, a newcomer in the field of research on antisemitism.

  • On November 8–9, 2013, Schueler-Springorum, the Jewish Museum Berlin, and the foundation Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future (EVZ) will hold an international conference dedicated to antisemitism in Europe today.
  • Among many very troubling speakers at this event, one new German voice will be heard: Peter Ullrich.
  • Ullrich, born 1976, is a sociologist, and recently employed as a co-worker in a project of the Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA).
  • In October 2013, he published a book (in German) by well-known publishing house Wallstein dedicated to the analysis of left-wing antisemitism, Germans, Israel, Palestine, and remembrance of the Holocaust.
  • In his book, Peter Ullrich attacks political scientist Samuel Salzborn (born 1977), who is a professor at Goettingen University, and historian Sebastian Voigt, for their criticism of left-wing antisemitism.
  • In 2011, Salzborn and Voigt published an article about troubling tendencies in the party of the Left in Germany, Die Linke. For example, two Members of Parliament and one former Member of Parliament, Inge Höger, Annette Groth, and Norman Paech, respectively, were on the Mavi Marmara in May 2010. This terror vessel was part of the so-called Gaza Flotilla, dedicated to ending the blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza strip and to destabilizing Israel.
  • Salzborn and Voigt analyzed the failure of the party Die Linke to fight antisemitism, including anti-Zionist antisemitism.
  • In his small book, Ullrich defames all kind of institutions, authors and scholars against antisemitism in Germany, including political scientist Matthias Kuentzel, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, headed by Anetta Kahane, and historian Wolfgang Kraushaar, known for his criticism of left-wing antisemitism.
  • Scholars like Ullrich no longer deny any debate about antisemitism and the left. On the contrary, and what is even worse, they use this topic to deny the real existence of antisemitic incidents like the Mavi Marmara. He says maybe some people “tolerated” antisemitism on that ship, but at the end of the day it is all “grey” (he loves “grey zones”).
  • Ullrich even joined several panels with Annette Groth, MP of Die Linke, who was on the Mavi Marmara.
  • People like Ullrich deal with troubling topics like the left and antisemitism in order to silence critics of anti-Zionism and Jihad.
  • In his book he mentions several antisemitic incidents, but then trivializes the dimension of each of these incidents in the next sentence or paragraph.
  • Even the participation of MPs of Die Linke in the Gaza Flotilla is not proof for him that antisemitism is prevalent among the members and representatives of that very party (both Groth and Höger were re-elected MPs in September 2013!).
  • The EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism, adopted in 2005, states: “Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the State of Israel taking into account the overall context could include: Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”.
  • German sociologist Peter Ullrich rejects this statement. As his book is promoted by the Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA), they seem to share his scandalous view.
  • By the end of his book, on page 184, Peter Ullrich and his co-author in that chapter, Alban Werner, argue that the EUMC working definition on antisemitism cannot be used in each case the EUMC lists. For example, and crucially, Ullrich points to the following: to frame “denying Israel’s right to exist” as antisemitic, as the EUMC working definition does, is “without substance,” or meaningless. Why? Ullrich says that too many groups of people are denying Israel’s right to exist, including Hamas, right-wing extremists, ultra-orthodox Jews, and distinguished scholars and authors (probably like Ullrich himself) who deny Israel’s right to exist due to their “universalist” philosophy, based on the rejection of any nation-state.
  • According to Ullrich’s unscholarly and biased view, it might be antisemitic to deny Israel’s right to exist if such a statement is accompanied by antisemitic conspiracy myths (Hamas), or racial Jew-hatred (neo-Nazis) etc.
  • To deny Israel’s right to exist in our times is not antisemitic as such, in Ullrich’s (and the ZfA’s) view.
  • In fact the denial of Israel’s right to exist as such is a core element of today’s antisemitism.
  • It is unscholarly in nature to reject the statement that the denial of Israel’s right to exist is antisemitic. As Israel is the Jewish state, it is antisemitic to reject Israel as a Jewish state.
  • There is a connection between Hamas, right-wing extremists, and left-wing or liberal cosmopolitan anti-Zionists in particular.
  • This is the red-green-brown alliance.
  • Why is Ullrich saying that there is no substance in that part of the EUMC definition? Because he does not want cosmopolitan anti-Zionists to be put in the same box as Hamas or right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis.
  • Ullrich is but the latest example of hijacking serious scholarship on antisemitism, including anti-Zionism.
  • He will be on a panel at the November 8–9, 2013, conference of the ZfA, the EVZ Foundation and the Jewish Museum Berlin, dealing with “Criticism of Israel or Antisemitism?”
  • As shown, denying Israel’s right to exist is not antisemitic in Ullrich’s view.
  • Therefore he himself, supported by the institutions involved, promotes antisemitism, according to the EUMC working definition of antisemitism.
  • Let me use the famous bon mot of 19th century German physiologist Emil Heinrich du Bois-Reymond, adopting it ironically for today’s analysis of antisemitism: “Ignoramus et ignorabimus” (“we do not know and will not know”, aiming at the limits of scientific knowledge) – German sociologist Peter Ullrich will never know if left-wing antisemitism really exists…

Breakfast with Voltaire and Kant? About Tunisian-French philosopher Abdelwahab Meddeb

von

am September 19, 2013

in Allgemein

Times of Israel, September 19, 2013

 

On September 12, 2013, in the leading German weekly Die Zeit, prize-winning Tunisian-French poet, philosopher and university professor in France, Abdelwahab Meddeb (born 1946 in Tunis) argued against Islamism. On the same page there is an article by co-editor of Die Zeit, Josef Joffe, on the Syrian crisis.

Meddeb is in favor of a possible “world government” following German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who in 1795 wrote his so-called political testament, “Perpetual Peace.” Meddeb writes about a “cosmopolitan world government,” and he is following mainstream liberal and academic discourse in North America, Europe, and even worldwide.

To be sure, Meddeb is an anti-Islamist, he really and honestly detests Salafi and Wahhabi Islamism, in particular, and religious fundamentalism in general. But there is a remarkable and truly (and sadly) future-oriented ideological trope in his thinking, which we can find in the entire post-colonial, and cosmopolitan debates around the globe, and in particular in Europe, the Middle East and North America. In his interview with Die Zeit he argues that a Syrian civil war could result in the emergence of several “micro-states” based on religion, ethnicity and language. He asks himself “Who has a cui bono,” or who would be the winner or who would profit in such a “scenario?” “Israel,” he answers himself, because Israel is based on a “religious, ethnic and language identity.” Israel “could live in harmony with such an environment of [Syrian] micro-states,” he claims.

Remember: You simply have to mention Kant, cosmopolitanism, and world government, to be up to date. In addition, mention Hannah Arendt, another German philosopher, and you are a super trendy scholar. If you have by birth a so-called hybrid identity, in the best case an Islamic legacy in your family and a European touch, too, your career is made from the very beginning. Europeans in particular embrace this kind of Arab-Muslim-European identity, which can only be matched by anti-Israel Jews. However, Meddeb presents such a wonderful bilingual French-Arab and religious (Islamic) identity and he mentions both Kant and Arendt in his short interview with Die Zeit. He is truly fashionable.

The core point of Meddeb’s well chosen remark about Israel is his reference to Kant at the very end of that interview. Here you have the true European speaking to his fellow Kantian colleagues, journalists, and fans.

In June 2002, Meddeb gave a speech in Germany about 9/11. In it, he mourned the decline of Islam in recent centuries and decades. He is against terror, of course, but his main argument and interest is the history of Islam. Before, between October 19 and December 9, 2001, he wrote his book “La Maladie de l’Islam,” “The Malady of Islam.” In it he argues against Islamism and he was not at all happy on 9/11, contrary to his fellow Muslims and Arabs. He does not like them. But he tries, to some extent, to understand them or to put them in the broader picture.

Therefore, he also argues against the West, and, most prominently, against America and against some Jews, the ‘bad ones,’ the Zionists, while he quotes other Jews rather positively. A cosmopolitan against Zion, really? Yes, particularly because he is a secular, open-minded man, a cosmopolitan, Meddeb is promoting troubling tropes, I believe. Take his reference to famous French philosopher Voltaire from the 18th century. In his book “The Malady of Islam,” he quotes Voltaire who said that a “reasonable intolerance” would be intolerance towards the “Israelites” who try to go back home to Zion. Writing in the mid 18th century, Voltaire has ever since been infamous for his antisemitic tropes. But well-educated Meddeb refers to Voltaire close to the end of his 250 pages book on 9/11 and “The Malady of Islam.”  He is rationalizing the murder of 9/11 at least in part, for example when referring to Ariel Sharon as someone who was involved in “war crimes” (in 1982), when there is no connection between those accusations and 9/11 at all or to the ideology of Bin Laden, al Qaida and Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood that was established in 1928 in Egypt by Hasan al-Banna. In many of his articles, like during the Gaza war in January 2009, both sides are equally horrible, cruel and disgusting: Hamas is as bad as Israel. At the end, Israel is even worse, of course, because it is Goliath, not David, in his view, and he argues that those rockets from the Gaza strip did not do much harm at all, killing just a very few Israelis, but the retaliation of Israel was horrible. German newspapers like the left-wing Frankfurter Rundschau and newspapers and online pages in other languages published and printed his anti-Hamas and anti-Israel article.

The rejection of Israel as a Jewish state is the core of the problem. We are facing two huge movements: on the one hand, we have Islamism, including Shia-style terror from Hezballah and of course the Iranian threat, Sunni-style Islamism by the Muslim Brotherhood or by Turkey, or Saudi-style antisemitism, and of course Qatar-style mainstreaming of Islamism via public relations.

On the other hand, we have European-style cosmopolitanism Kantian-style, promoted by almost the entire liberal or left-wing and mainstream academia on every single campus in Europe, in EU institutions, in trans-national governments, and by philosophers like Abdelwahab Meddeb, who oppose Saudi-style Islamism, the language of hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood or of Yusuf al-Qaradawi while embracing the more tender aspects of Islamic history in their view. They are obsessed with portraying Islamic history as nice without ignoring the more troubling aspects. But they are perhaps even more obsessed with Immanuel Kant or Voltaire and the rejection of Jewish re-settling in Zion, the land of King David.

Meddeb has been published by leading German papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit, he has been interviewed by leading radio stations in Germany and his books and talks have been reviewed very positively. Kantian Muslims are heroes in Europe. And they are an almost completely overlooked danger to the Jewish state of Israel.

This is also the reason why another German philosopher, Hannah Arendt, is so famous and extremely trendy. Today you are an outsider at EU universities and at European collogues on contemporary political thinking or on political philosophy if you are not a full-bearded hipster and if you are not always referring to Arendt, or Kant, or their followers like Judith Butler from Berkeley and Seyla Benhabib from Yale, the latter having just been awarded prestigious prizes in Germany last year. Being a student today is simple. You do not need researching many years with thousands of books on your bookshelves at home. Today, at EU or North American campuses you need essentially four things to succeed: an Apple MacBook, an I-phone, a book by Kant, and one by Arendt …

We have to emphasize the close connection between Zionism and free thinking. It is not cool to quote Kant and Arendt all day long or to refer positively and with a smile to Voltaire’s prejudice and “intolerance” towards Zion. It’s vice versa: it is cool to be a Zionist.

The really dramatic story goes like this: we have to start thinking that some of our allies in the fight against Islamism and Jihad are our enemies when it comes to defending Israel as a Jewish state. If we fail and just focus on fighting Islamism and have night-long vibrant debates about the importance (and, yes, it is important!) of the Western world, of free thinking and writing, of being nice and friendly to everyone everywhere (call it “hospitality”) we might wake up and have breakfast with a happily secular fellow who quotes Voltaire’s “reasonable intolerance” towards Zionism from the 18th century.

And this seems to be the story of philosopher Abdelwahab Meddeb. The cultural and scholarly elite in Germany and Europe is eager to embrace him. And there is a French and a German reason for that. Voltaire. Kant.

 

The Obsession to fight the Jewish state – The binational option, from Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt to Micha Brumlik and Judith Butler

von

am September 3, 2013

in Allgemein

The Times of Israel, September 3, 2013

On September 9 and 10, 2013, the Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at Berlin’s Technical University, together with the huge German Foundation on “Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future”, which spends up to seven million Euros a year for events (and spent over 70 million Euros since its inception in the year 2000), the group “Berlin-Kreuzberg Initiative against Antisemitism (Kiga)” and several other organizations as well as a German ministry of the Federal Government, will held a conference in Nuremberg on the Middle East conflict and its perception among immigrants in Germany.

The ZfA and its former head Wolfgang Benz have been criticized in recent years for promoting research on “Islamophobia” instead of Muslim antisemitism. In addition, Benz has been questioned about his silence about the Nazi legacy of his PhD advisor Karl Bosl, who awarded Benz a doctorate in 1968. In 1964, Bosl had compared the Holocaust to the expulsion of Germans from the East, and during Nazi Germany Bosl was on the payroll of the SS, an active historian in Nazi circles, and a member of the Nazi party NSDAP. Wolfgang Benz even collaborated with hardcore Islamist activists from the German online project Muslim Market and gave those pro-Iranian antisemites a very friendly interview in November 2010. Muslim Market is among those groups that organize the pro-Iran, pro-Hezballah and anti-Israel al-Quds rallies every year at the end of the Muslim month of Ramadan. On their homepage Muslim Market promotes the boycott of Israel with a scratched-out Star of David. Is this an appropriate place for the best known German scholar on antisemitism to be interviewed?

Then, in 2012, the new Center head since summer 2011, historian Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, appointed Edward Said follower and anti-Zionist Islamic studies scholar Achim Rohde. I analyzed the problematic tropes of Rohde’s scholarly approach and he left (or had to leave) the ZfA in 2013. Schüler-Springorum, though, is far from being an expert on research on antisemitism, let alone Israel, the Middle East, or the history of anti-Zionism. She has not published a single book on antisemitism so far, which is remarkable for the head of the leading European institute for research on that topic.

A speaker at the event in Nuremberg will be Islamic studies scholar and journalist Alexandra Senfft. In November 2012 she interviewed Wolfgang Benz and welcomed his new book on “How fear of Muslims threatens our democracies” – a strange topic for a scholar on antisemitism who is silent on jihadism and Islamist Jew-hatred. Senfft even mentioned that Benz frequently is interviewed by Muslims and Muslim journals in Germany but she had no problem and did not mention Benz’ interview with the hardcore Islamist and antisemitic Muslim Market. Senfft argues against critics of antisemitism like Holocaust survivor Ralph Giordano and journalist Henryk M. Broder because they are critics of “Islam,” in fact they are critics of Islamist antisemitism in particular and Islamism in general.

One of the best known speakers at the September 9 event, invited by Schüler-Springorum and her allies, is Professor Micha Brumlik, a pedagogue by profession. Brumlik has been known in recent decades as a critic of some forms of antisemitism in Germany. But he is even better known today for his kosher stamps for antisemitic agitators like Judith Butler who received the very prestigious Adorno-Prize of the city of Frankfurt in 2012. Butler calls Israel an apartheid state, she supports the anti-Jewish Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and she is in favor of German-Jewish philosophers Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and Martin Buber (1878–1965). Both Arendt and Buber agitated against a Jewish state of Israel and favored a binational Israel.

In the July issue of the leading left-wing German monthly, Konkret, Brumlik promoted a “Plan B.” In his article he argued against Israel as a Jewish state and followed Buber’s plans for a binational Israel. Konkret and Brumlik went so far as to say that Jews may not have a principled right of return to Zion – rather humanitarian and economic aspects should regulate immigration to Israel/Palestine.

Brumlik and Konkret are not stupid, they are not pro-Hamas or pro-Hezballah, they are rather critics of Islamist antisemitism and the Iranian threat. Konkret is even known as one of the very few self-declared pro-Israel journals in Germany. If it is pro-Israel to plead for a binational state – then you can imagine the anti-Zionist climate in Germany.

A few days after Brumlik’s piece was published by Konkret, I wrote a critique of this anti-Israel article. I said that this approach for a binational Israel, coming from a well-known Jewish professor and a self-declared pro-Israel monthly, is perhaps more dangerous than anti-Israel hatred coming from all kinds of hardcore right-wing or left-wing circles. I said that Brumlik and Konkret are perhaps more dangerous thanks to their distinguished style, their clear and calm strategy for this “Plan B” aiming at a binational Israel and rejecting Jews’ principled right of return.

Konkret became rather angry about my critique and attacked my person in a nasty and completely unprofessional way in the following editorial. Such attacks against pro-Israel scholars are normal when it comes to typical extreme right-wing or left-wing hate mongers, but Konkret always pretended to be pro-Israel. But well, Martin Buber was pro-Israel, too. He was a Zionist and this is the problem we are facing: what is Zionism?

This is a strategic question, going beyond the actual debates and conflicts.

There is the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) and his followers. Herzl was not religious but desperate for a Jewish state. Others, like Achad Ha’am (1856–1927) preferred a cultural Zionism, urging Jews to become more Jewish in an inner, philosophical or religious and cultural way. This awakening of being Jewish was also a main element of Martin Buber’s approach in the early 20th century. Buber was a strong Zionist but did not want a Jewish state at all. Like Arendt, who was much younger than him and less religious, he was in favor of a homeland for Jews, but not a Jewish state. Sounds strange to today’s ears? This convoluted logic is behind today’s proposals for a binational state. And this is what we have to struggle with, in the next years and decades.

Influential German historian Dan Diner from Leipzig and Tel Aviv Universities argued for a binational Israel in his super PhD (habilitation) in 1980, too. I am not sure if this is still his point of view, but I fear it is. Historian Siegbert Wolf, known for books on Buber or anarchist and friend of Buber, Gustav Landauer (who was killed by sadistic, antisemitic, nationalistic and anti-socialist pre-Nazi German soldiers in 1919), argued for a binational Israel as well and referred to Diner. Like Diner, Konkret or Brumlik, Wolf is not stupid at all. He is aware of the Nazi collaboration of the leading Arab and Muslim politician at the time, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini, and refers to pro-Israel and anti-Islamist critics of the Mufti like political scientist Matthias Küntzel, and historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers. Despite these facts, Wolf supports antisemitic and so called post-Orientalist superstar Edward Said (1935–2003) and his plea for a binational Israel. Wolf’s pro-Buber article was published by the official German Martin-Buber-Society in 2011.

Butler likes the idea of a binational Israel, and therefore she refers to Arendt and Buber. For Butler, though, in her anti-Israel book from 2012, “Parting Ways. Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,” Buber was still a problem, because he was in favor of Jewish “settler colonialism” and Jewish immigration to Palestine (prior to 1948). In fact, Buber wanted limited immigration even after the Shoah. In 1947, together with the co-founder and later President of Hebrew University, Judah Magnes (1877–1948), he wrote a pamphlet “Arab-Jewish Unity,” a “Testimony before the Anglo-American Inquiry Commission for the Ihud (Union) Association.” In it, they argued against a Jewish state of Israel and wanted a limited immigration of 100,000 Jews a year, in order to not disturb the Arabs.

In 1958, Martin Buber wrote that the “philosophy of violence” of the “national socialist evil” kept on “having an effect” “in a part of our people,” the Jewish people. This (antisemitic) comparison of Jews to Nazis was remembered, quoted and not at all criticized in 1961 in an afterword to a big study by Hans Cohn on Buber, written by the Brit Shalom member (1925–1933), co-founder of the Leo Baeck Institute and first editor of its Yearbook (1956–1978), Israeli journalist Robert Weltsch (1891–1982). Cohn’s book with Weltsch’s afterword appeared in a second printing in 1979, published by the Leo Baeck Institute New York, with a foreword by German historian Julius H. Schoeps, today head of the 1992 founded Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies (MMZ) in Potsdam.

As historians and co-editors of the “New Essays on Zionism” in 2006, David Hazony, Yoram Hazony, and Michael B. Oren, observed, there is a need to justify Zionism in our times after the Cold War, an era that for Israel was relatively harmless, predictable, and largely free of today’s jihadist threat. Thanks to “European ideology,” they wrote, the “future of mankind” is seen “in the dissolution of state sovereignty.” Therefore Zionism, political Zionism and not spiritual or cultural Zionism, to be sure, needs philosophical, historical, political and religious justification.

We have to confront European and German ideology of Immanuel Kant and the end of the nation-state in the late 18th century. Kant is still very influential in philosophy and politics alike, take Yale’s Seyla Benhabib as an example. In 2012 she was awarded a prize in Germany, despite her outspoken anti-Zionist articles in recent years and her friendship with Judith Butler. Even pro-Israel young scholars embrace Benhabib and are unwilling or unable to decode the dangerous ideology of Kant, and his followers in the anti-nation-state tent.

Israel is a Jewish state and has to be a Jewish state and has to be accepted as a Jewish state. Israel as a Jewish state with unlimited immigration could have saved hundreds of thousand Jews, if not millions. Jews have by far the longest and most intense relationship to Zion and the territory of Israel. Jerusalem is of minor importance to Islam, just take the Quran as an example. Finally, no one in the humanities and social sciences is questioning the Muslim character of almost all Arab states, or of Iran.

Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, perhaps today the two most influential Jewish anti-Israel-as-a-Jewish-state celebrities in the humanities and social sciences from the 20th century, did a bad job. They attacked and defamed the very idea of Israel as a Jewish state in the 1940s, take the time frame from 1942 until 1948, when the Holocaust happened and the Biltmore conference in May 1942 in New York City argued in favor of a Jewish state of Israel.

The question is not only if someone is pro-Israel, but also what kind of Israel. What do people refer to when they are in favor of Israel – a cultural Zionist or spiritual Judaistic Israel with no Jewish majority, a binational Israel? Or, a political Zionist Israel, the Jewish state of Israel?

It is a scandal that proponents of a binational Israel and authors who attack critics of antisemitism and Muslim antisemitism are invited to that conference to be held in Nuremberg, September 9, 2013.

Finally, even among self-declared friends of Israel there is a huge gap of knowledge about the history of Zionism and Israel as a Jewish state. There is much work to be done for serious scholarship.

Banalisierung des Bösen: Hannah-Arendt-Preis für die Trivialisierung des Holocaust 2013

von

am August 23, 2013

in Allgemein

Banalisierung des Bösen: Hannah-Arendt-Preis für die Trivialisierung des Holocaust 2013

Von Dr. Clemens Heni, Direktor, The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA)

 

Am 22. August 2013 gab die Senatsverwaltung der Freien Hansestadt Bremen bekannt, dass der von ihr gemeinsam mit der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung ausgelobte Hannah-Arendt-Preis für politisches Denken an den 1969 geborenen amerikanischen Historiker Timothy Snyder geht. Snyder ist weltweit bekannt geworden durch sein 2010 veröffentlichtes Buch Bloodlands, mit dem er die Geschichte des Zweiten Weltkriegs und des Holocaust neu zu schreiben versucht. Die Bremer Senatsverwaltung schreibt:

 

In seinem Buch „Bloodlands. Europa zwischen Hitler und Stalin“ habe Snyder, so urteilte die Jury, ein vergessenes und verdrängtes Kapitel der europäischen Geschichte aufgeschlagen, über das Europa über ein halbes Jahrhundert nach dem Geschehen noch immer uneins sei. Es ist die Frage, wie das Ineinandergreifen des deutschen Genozids an den europäischen Juden, an der polnischen Elite sowie an anderen „slawischen Völkern“ und die Stalinsche Politik der Hungersnöte sowie der Vernichtung ganzer ethnischer und sozialer Gruppen zu beurteilen sei – und wie das Geschehen in die europäische Gedächtniskultur eingehen könne. „Unabhängig von den Kontroversen unter Historikern und politischen Denkern, die das Buch und sein Autor ausgelöst haben, berührt Snyder substantielle Fragen, die den Kern des europäischen Vereinigungsprojekts betreffen“ , so die Jury. Snyders streitbare historische Analyse trage damit zu einer neuen öffentlichen Debatte um die politische Gestalt Europas bei.

Die Jury für diesen Preis setzt sich wie folgt zusammen: Prof. Antonia Grunenberg (Berlin/Oldenburg), Dr. Otto Kallscheuer (Sassari/Berlin), Marie Luise Knott (Berlin), Dr. Willfried Maier (Hamburg), Prof. Karol Sauerland (Warschau), Joscha Schmierer (Berlin), Prof. Christina Thürmer-Rohr (Berlin).[i]

 

Timothy Snyder

Das Elend und die Antiquiertheit der Studie Snyders wird schon im Vorwort von Bloodlands unumwunden deutlich; geradezu lapidar spricht er davon, dass die “meisten deutschen Juden, die Hitler 1933 die Wahlen gewinnen sahen, eines natürlichen Todes starben”:

Hitler was an anti-Semitic politician in a country with a small Jewish community. Jews were fewer than one percent of the German population when Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and about one quarter of one percent by the beginning of the Second World War. During the first six years of Hitler’s rule, German Jews were allowed (in humiliating and impoverishing circumstances) to emigrate. Most of the German Jews who saw Hitler win elections in 1933 died of natural causes.[ii]

Wenn die meisten deutschen Juden, die 1933 in Deutschland lebten, gar nicht ermordet wurden, warum dann diese ‚enorme Erinnerungskultur an die Shoah‘, möchte der Nachwuchshistoriker insinuieren. Mehr noch: Jeder dieser soeben zitierten Sätze aus Bloodlands benennt Hitler. Diese Obsession Snyders mit der sog. Great Man Theory von Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts ist auffällig und zeigt, dass er wissenschaftsgeschichtlich nicht auf der Höhe der Zeit ist.

 

Heute wird nicht mehr nach ‚großen Männern der Geschichte‘ geforscht, vielmehr nach strukturellen Beziehungen, nach ideologischen, alltäglichen, kulturellen oder religiösen und vielen anderen Spezifika und Entwicklungen. Bezüglich des Zweiten Weltkriegs wird ganz entgegen Synder seit Jahren in der Forschung ein Schwerpunkt auf die einzelnen Täter gelegt, auf Einheiten der Wehrmacht, der Schutzstaffel (SS, Waffen-SS), des Sicherheitsdienstes (SD), der Polizeibataillone etc.

 

Doch schockierend an diesem zentralen Satz aus Snyders Buch Bloodlands ist die Eiseskälte mit welcher er über die deutschen Juden schreibt. Für ihn geht es nicht darum, dass sich die deutschen Juden nicht vorstellen konnten, in Eisenbahnwaggons gepfercht, tagelang transportiert und dann an der Rampe selektiert und in Gaskammern vernichtet zu werden. Pogrome waren aus der Geschichte des Judenhasses seit Jahrhunderten bekannt. Doch der Zivilisationsbruch, den Auschwitz darstellt, war präzedenzlos, ohne Vergleich in der Geschichte. Für Snyder alles kein Problem, er geht über das Schicksal der deutschen Juden hinweg, machten sie doch für ihn geradezu läppische 0,25 Prozent der deutschen Bevölkerung 1939 aus. Für einen Mann der großen Zahlen, für einen, der mit 14,5 Millionen Toten jongliert und rot und braun ganz kategorial gleichsetzt, sind so wenige Menschen, 165.000 deutsche Juden, so gut wie nichts.

 

Entgegen aller wissenschaftlichen und historischen Kenntnis behauptet Snyder sodann, der Zweite Weltkrieg habe am 1. September „with friendship between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union”[iii] begonnen. Er leugnet also die Alleinverantwortung der Deutschen und des Nationalsozialismus für den Beginn des schrecklichsten Krieges in der Geschichte der Menschheit. Da klatschen nicht nur die NPD und die autonomen Nationalisten, auch in nationalistischen Kreisen in Osteuropa wie in Litauen, wo Synder gern gesehener staatsoffizieller Gast ist, wird gejubelt.

 

Der litauische Außenminister (li.) und Timothy Snyder im Mai 2012

Der Historiker der Yale University, die schon bessere Zeiten gesehen hat, hat sich kaum neue oder unbekannte Quellen angeschaut. Er setzt vielmehr Bekanntes völlig neu zusammen und erfindet ein Gebiet, das zwischen den baltischen Staaten und der Ukraine auf der Nord-Süd-Achse sowie zwischen Polen und dem westlichen Russland (also vor allem Weißrussland und Ukraine) auf der West-Ost-Achse liegt: Bloodlands. Snyder geht es um folgende Verbrechen[iv]:

  • Hungersnot in der Ukraine 1932/33: 3 Millionen Tote.
  • Stalins Großer Terror 1937/38: 700.000 Tote
  • Tötungen von Polen durch Nazis und Sowjets 1939–1941: 200.000 Tote
  • Von den Nazis hervorgerufener Hunger 1941–1944: 4,2 Millionen Tote
  • Racheaktionen der Nazis: 700.000 Tote
  • Von den Nazis ermordete Juden: 5,4 Millionen

 

Insgesamt spricht der Historiker von ca. 14,5 Millionen Toten in diesem imaginären „Bloodland“.

Dabei fällt jeder Holocausthistorikerin und jedem Holocausthistoriker schon der Name Bloodlands (=Blutländer, oder blutende Länder) als völlig abwegig auf, da die Vernichtung in den Vernichtungslagern der Deutschen im SS-Staat schon sprachlich derealisiert wird: Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek, Belzec, Auschwitz-Birkenau stehen für die industrielle Vernichtung der europäischen Juden, für Vergasungen und gerade nicht für ein blutiges Schlachtfeld. Die blutige Vernichtung der Juden in den Wäldern und Feldern im Osten ist ebenso seit Jahrzehnten analysiert, nicht zuletzt von Daniel J. Goldhagen im Jahr 1996 in dessen Dissertation an der Harvard University über Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

Der Historiker Efraim Zuroff, Leiter des Jerusalemer Büros des Simon Wiesenthal Centers (SWC), kommentierte die Entscheidung der Senatsverwaltung von Bremen und der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung im persönlichen Gespräch mit dem Autor sarkastisch als „exzellente Wahl“. Damit werde ein „Wissenschaftler, der die lokale Kollaboration mit den Nazis in Osteuropa herunterspielt“ einen Preis erhalten, „der nach einer Wissenschaftlerin benannt ist, die ihre osteuropäischen Brüder und Schwestern verachtete“, osteuropäische Juden, die „von genau diesen begeisterten lokalen Nazikollaborateuren ermordet wurden“:

What an excellent choice! The scholar who downplayed local collaboration with the Nazis in Eastern Europe will receive a prize named for a scholar who despised her Eastern European brethren who in many cases were murdered by those same zealous local Nazi collaborators. How fitting.[v]

Der Historiker Thomas Kühne von der Clark University (Massachusetts) stellt Snyder in Beziehung zur extremen Rechten und zur deutschen Geschichtspolitik seit Nolte.[vi] Kühne zeigt, dass Snyder bezüglich der geschichtswissenschaftlichen Forschung nicht up to date ist, wenn er sich primär auf ‚große Männer‘ bezieht:

Notwithstanding decades of research that has shown that major parts of all ranks of the Wehrmacht willingly and voluntarily joined in genocidal warfare, Bloodlands presents the German army as a mere tool n Hitler’s hands, as if the soldiers had no choices.[vii]

Der Leipziger Historiker Dan Diner kritisiert Snyder und stellt heraus, dass unterm Stalinismus jeder zu “dem anderen” gemacht werden konnte, während der Nationalsozialismus die Juden als den Feind bestimmte, rassisch gedacht.[viii] Dieser Unterschied ist einer ums Ganze.

Der Historiker Dan Michman von der israelischen Holocaustgedenkstätte Yad Vashem kritisiert Snyder ähnlich scharf.[ix] Der Historiker Kenneth Waltzer von der Michigan State University meint, dass Snyder den nationalsozialistischen Antisemitismus herunterspielt und damit den Kern der deutschen Volksgemeinschaft verfehlt.[x]

Timothy Snyders Infamität und Abwehr der Präzedenzlosigkeit des Holocaust geht soweit, dass er der westlichen Welt gleichsam vorwirft, nur deshalb Auschwitz und die Shoah zu erinnern, weil in Auschwitz die ‚bourgeoisen‘ Juden ermordet worden seien, die kapitalistischen und nicht die armen osteuropäischen:

The metonym of anonymity is of course Auschwitz, which Adorno once thought should prevent us from writing and presumably from citing poetry, and Diner faults me for underestimating. The gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau become widely known precisely because, unlike most important German killing sites, they were associated with a labour camp which Jews and others survived. Auschwitz is where Jews from (in Cold War terms) Western countries were killed, and thus Auschwitz was preserved as a memory during the Cold War. It helped that victims of Auschwitz were more likely to be bourgeois and thus suitable targets of comfortable identification, much more so, say, than Yiddish-speaking Jewish workers from Poland or Russian speaking Soviet Jews. But Auschwitz is in numerical terms only a fraction of the horror: five sixths of the Holocaust happened elsewhere, and, crucially, earlier.[xi]

Der englische Historiker Richard Evans, bekannt durch seine Kritik an Ernst Nolte und seiner Analyse des Historikerstreits[xii], ist schockiert über Snyders Bloodlands[xiii]. Neben der Kritik an vielen kleineren handwerklichen Mängeln in der Studie kommt Evans zum Kern: die Banalisierung des Holocaust. Die spezifische antijüdische Dimension der Shoah kommt nicht vor, weder die Demütigung und das Quälen der Juden vor ihrer Ermordung noch die ideologische Dimension, dass für die Deutschen im Nationalsozialismus die Juden der „Weltfeind“ waren und nicht die Slawen oder andere.[xiv]

Eine der bislang umfangreichsten und detailliertesten Kritiken an Timothy Snyders Bloodlands hat der Historiker Jürgen Zarusky vom Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) in München publiziert, die mittlerweile auch in polnischer und russischer Sprache vorliegt.[xv] Wie die Historiker Jörg Baberowski und Anselm Doering-Manteuffel würde Snyder behaupten, dass sowohl Hitler als auch Stalin “kollektive”, “ethnisch” definierte “Feinde” eliminiert hätten.[xvi] Dabei hatten weder die ukrainische Hungersnot 1932/33[xvii] noch der Große Terror[xviii] unter Stalin eine essentialistisch ethnische Dimension und selbst der Stalinsche Antisemitismus unterschied sich vom Rassen-Antisemitismus im NS.

Viel Freude bei offenen wie klammheimlichen Sympathisanten von Vertriebenenideologie sowie bei Mitgliedern von Vertriebenenverbänden sowie der Vorsitzenden des Bundes der Vertriebenen (BdV), Erika Steinbach, dürfte Snyders Agitation gegen die Sowjetunion und ihre Verbündeten nach sich ziehen, wenn Snyder die Vertreibung von Deutschen nach Ende des SS-Staates als „ethnische Säuberung“ und Teil von Stalins vermeintlichem „ethnischem Modell“ erklärt.[xix] Die Deutschen als Opfer in einem Buch über den Zweiten Weltkrieg und den Holocaust: das liegt im Trend, der Zeitgeist ruft.

Das Herunterspielen des Antisemitismus ist der Kernpunkt des Buches von Bloodlands. Zarusky zeigt, dass für Snyder der Holocaust nur eine Reaktion Hitlers auf den verloren geglaubten Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion spät im Jahr 1941 gewesen sei.[xx] Diesen schwerwiegenden analytischen Fehler Snyders analysiert Zarusky, wonach es lediglich einen Wechsel der Feindbilder der Nazis gegeben habe, weg von den Slawen (UdSSR, Polen etc.) und hin zu den Juden.

Doch genau dieser Geschichtsrevisionismus kommt in Deutschland, beim Bremer Senat und der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung an.

2005 erhielt die damalige lettische Präsidentin Freiberga den Hannah-Arendt-Preis für politisches Denken. In ihrer Dankesrede erwähnte sie mit keinem Wort den Holocaust, was der Historiker Jürgen Zarusky 2012 wie folgt einordnete:

 Das ersparte ihr auch die Erwähnung der Tatsache, daß von den 66.000 lettischen Juden die zur Zeit der deutschen Besatzung ermordet wurden, 15.000 Opfer des Erschießungskommandos des lettischen Polizeioffiziers Viktor Arajs wurden. [xxi]

1997 hatte der heutige Bundespräsident Joachim Gauck diesen Hannah-Arendt-Preis erhalten.

Alles passt ‚wunderbar‘ zusammen und wurde 2007 – wen wundert’s? – durch  Antizionismus als Element des Hannah-Arendt-Preises für politisches Denken ergänzt, denn mit Tony Judt wurde ein Historiker geehrt, der auf brachiale Weise antiisraelisch agitierte und 2003 schrieb, dass „Israel schlecht für die Juden sei“[xxii]. Es ließen sich weitere antizionistische Texte zitieren, in denen Judt  z.B. auf den Israelhasser und ‚Postorientalisten‘ Edward Said rekurrierte. Snyder war ein sehr enger Freund von Judt, was die Jury aus Bremen im Jahr 2013 bemerkte.

Es gibt eine ‚wunderbare‘ Bebilderung dieser Hannah-Arendt-Preis-Posse. Bundespräsident Gauck, Preisträger und Super-GAUck, erhob Anfang Juli 2013 mit süffisantem Lächeln die Rot=Braun-These in symbolischer Politik zur Normalität: Mit dem estnischen Präsidenten Toomas Hendrik posierte er vor einem revisionistischen Denkmal im „Museum der Besatzung“ in Estlands Hauptstadt Tallin. Hinter ihnen ein Tor, dessen einer Pfeiler einen roten Stern ziert (und somit alles „Linke“ oder „Rote“ und nicht ‚nur‘ die Sowjetunion, was schlimm genug wäre), den anderen Pfeiler schmückt das Hakenkreuz. Das ist die Ikonografie des Geschichtsrevisionismus der Mitte der europäischen Gesellschaften. Ernst Nolte ist längst Mainstream.

Timothy Snyder hätte hier sicher auch gerne dabei gestanden. Der nun 90jährige Ernst Nolte würde anerkennend nicken und kann zufrieden auf seinen letztendlichen Sieg im Historikerstreit blicken.

 


[i]               Mitglieder des Vorstandes des Vereins Hannah-Arendt-Preis für politisches Denken e.V. sind: Prof. Antonia Grunenberg, Peter Rüdel, Ole Sören Schulz, Prof. Eva Senghaas-Knobloch.

[ii]              Timothy Snyder (2010): Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York: Basic Books, viii-ix.

[iii]             Timothy Snyder (2010a): Echoes from the killing fields of the east. The second world war is often seen through western allies‘ eyes. But the real geopolitics – and worst atrocities – scarred the east, 28. September 2010, http://
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/27/secondworldwar-poland (eingesehen am 10. Juni 2012).

[iv]             Siehe dazu die Analyse und Kritik an Timothy Snyders Bloodlands von Dovid Katz (2011): Review Article. Detonation of the Holocaust in 1941: A Tale of two Books, East European Jewish Affairs, Jg. 41, Nr. 3, 207–221.

[v]              Efraim Zuroff in einer E-Mail vom 22. Mai 2013.

[vi]             Thomas Kühne (2012): Great Men and Large. Numbers: Undertheorising a History of Mass Killing, Contemporary European History, Jg. 21, Nr. 2, 133–143, 134–135.

[vii]            Kühne 2012, 138.

[viii]           Dan Diner (2012): Topography of Interpretation: Reviewing Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, Contemporary European History, Jg. 21, Nr. 2, 125–131, 130.

[ix]             Dan Michman (2012): Bloodlands and the Holocaust: Some Reflections on Terminology, Conceptualization and their Consequences, Manuskript [wurde im Journal of Modern European History, 2012, publiziert]; Danke an Dan Michman, der mir seinen Artikel vor der Veröffentlichung zukommen ließ.

[x]              Kenneth Waltzer (2011): Review of Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 188–194, 192, online at http://defendinghistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Kenneth-Waltzers-Review-of-Snyders-Bloodlands-in-Holocaust-Studies.pdf (visited June 19, 2012).

[xi]             Timothy Snyder (2012): The Causes for the Holocaust, Contemporary European History, Jg. 21, Nr. 2, 149–168, 154–155.

[xii] Richard Evans (1989): In Hitler’s Shadow. West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past, London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. Publishers; Richard Evans (1991): Im Schatten Hitlers? Historikerstreit und Vergangenheitsbewältigung in der Bundesrepublik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp; Richard Evans (2000): Expert Report by Professor Richard Evans. Irving VS. (1) Lipstadt and (2) Penguin Books. Expert Witness Report by Richard J. Evans FBS, http://www.phdn.org/negation/irving/EvansReport.pdf (visited October 10, 2012)

[xiii]           Richard Evans (2010): Who remembers the Poles. Review of Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder, London Review of Books, 4. November 2010, 21–22.

[xiv]           Evans 2010, 22.

[xv]            Jürgen Zarusky (2012): Timothy Snyders „Bloodlands“. Kritische Anmerkungen zur Konstruktion einer Geschichtslandschaft, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeit­geschichte, Jg. 60, Nr. 1, 1–31. „Krovavye zemli“ Timoti Snajdera: Kritičeskie zamečanija i k konstruirovaniju istoričeskogo landšafta [= russische, leicht gekürzte Version des Aufsatzes „Timothy Snyders ‚Bloodlands‘. Kritische Anmerkungen zur Konstruktion einer Geschichtslandschaft, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 60 (2012), S. 1–31.], erschienen am 03.02.2013 auf der Internetplattform „Uroki istorii“ von „Memorial“, http://urokiistorii.ru/media/book/51683; „Skrwawione ziemie“ Timothy Snydera. Krytyczne uwagi na temat konstrukcji krajobrazu historycznego [= polnische Version des Aufsatzes „Timothy Snyders ‚Bloodlands‘. Kritische Anmerkungen zur Konstruktion einer Geschichtslandschaft, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 60 (2012), S. 1-31.], in: „Studia Litteraria et Historica”. Pismo Instytutu Slawistyki Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1/2012, S. 1–32, http://www.slh.edu.pl/content/skrwawione-ziemie-timothy-snydera.

[xvi]           Zarusky 2012, 2–5.

[xvii]          Zarusky 2012, 6.

[xviii]         Zarusky 2012, 10.

[xix]           Zarusky 2012, 13.

[xx]            Zarusky 2012, 21.

[xxi]           Jürgen Zarusky (2012a): Europäische Erinnerungskonflikte um den deutsch-sowjetischen Krieg – geschichtspolitische Spannungsfelder nach 70 Jahren, in: Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte, 16. Jg., Heft 1, 45–73, hier S. 65.

[xxii]          Tony Judt (2003): Israel: The Alternative, 23. Oktober 2003, http://www.
nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/oct/23/israel-the-alternative/ (eingesehen am 23. Mai 2012)

 

 

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