Wolf Biermann lays it on the line
Thank god for blogging, where you can just gush and not worry about measured prose and proper balance. Therefore: for pete’s sake, read Wolf Biermann’s most excellent and impassioned speech, Germany betrays Israel. That’s all. Just read it.
It’s a shortened version of a speech he gave in Israel last month. The German original was published in Die Zeit, Deutschland verraet Israel.
Even this shortened version is long (Germans aren’t necessarily known for being pithy), but it’s one of the best things I’ve read on the topic in ages. Absolutely to the point — and I write this in full acknowledgement of my own stance of opposing the war. But the way things are going now, I think Biermann is right.
Some excerpts:
As I see it, it was a mistake for Germany not to line up with the Americans and the British in the war against Iraq in 2003. I would go as far as to say that the French president Chirac and his little German pal, the false pacifist Bundeskanzler Schröder, bear much of the blame for the Iraq war of the Americans and the British against Saddam Hussein’s terror regime. The war three years ago might possibly have been avoided, because the dictator might have stepped down had the West spoken with one tongue and threatened with one fist. Yes I think that the Germans and the French are to blame for the fate of this monumental racketeer. Because their appeasement policies suggested to Saddam Hussein that he might be able to save his bacon with his totalitarian tricks, live on as bloody-minded dictator. Saddam was not expecting that Bush and Blair would be so naive as to launch into war without their most vital allies Chirac and Schröder. He lacked the imagination to picture himself leaving his perfumed kitsch palace for a stinking hole in the ground, followed by an iron cage in court and finally the gallows.
(…)
The simpler-minded average German sides with the Arabs. There is much under-the-breath muttering, growling and whining of that old chorus: the Jews are to blame for everything! And when faced with reflex accusations of anti-Semitism, today’s Jew-haters reply coolly: “Surely one can criticise one’s friends!” The Germans have a steely eye on the Jews in Israel, and a moist eye on the Arabs in Palestine. But the German romantic sympathy for the Islamists in the Middle East conflict has its reasons. In the German mind, the Arabs are maniacs, immature third-class citizens, quite beyond the reaches of humane Enlightenment. This German sympathy is a form of patronising contempt. The gushing respect for foreigners is nothing but self-satisfied arrogance. The multi-culti rhapsodising of my peers is, in my opinion, the flip-side of the sinister racism of yesteryear. [emphasis added]
When the money-minders of the EU regularly transfer alms to the Palestinians, they do so with their eyes shut to the fact that the hard-boiled mass murderers of the Fatah are only really arguing with the fanatical mass murderers of the Hamas over details in the final solution to the Jewish question, because they are all agreed on one thing: Israel must be destroyed!
(…)
The slogan “The Jews are to blame for everything” is obviously as ineradicable as the idiotic prejudice that all Jews are highly intelligent. The Jews were and remain, even in the opinion of the Elite-Pack, to blame for everything. The Jews are to blame for bomb-belted Hamas and Hisbollah suicide killers. The Jewish Neo-Cons in New York drove the bigoted simpleton George Bush into the war against Saddam Hussein. The Jews and their global power politics are to blame for the Iran’s nuclear programme. The money Jews in the stock exchange with the aid of the the IWF are to blame for driving the poor countries into the debt trap. This idiotic logic is also applied by educated imbeciles who also shift blame on the Jewish war profiteers for making the German taxpayer fork out to send expensive war ships to Lebanon. The know-it-all version: we have to protect the Jews from the Jews.
Balanced reporting on the Middle East conflict is for the popular Germany weekly Stern, a fig leaf the size of a finger nail. And the most influential magazine in the West, Der Spiegel, is bending to the anti-Israel mood in Germany, and reinforcing it at the same time with a supposedly balanced tone and a lot of eye winking. Even most of the reporting on the radio and various TV channels are singing with false voices and true feeling, just like the German harp maiden in Heine’s Germany: A Winter’s Tale.
And meanwhile Israel is burning under a sky of rocket missiles. The Jews are sitting in bunkers again, or fleeing from North to South. But the country is small. The Arab missiles are flying ever further and hitting every more accurately. Lebanon is burning under a sky of bombs from the blindly confused super power Israel. Standard German commentary: “And all that for a few kidnapped soldiers.” And where the elders of Zion were the child-eaters of the old days, the Israelis are the child-killers of today, who want to bomb a Christian-Muslim civilisation back to the stone age. When in actual fact it’s the Arabs who want to wipe out Israel and then go on to destroy Western civilisation.
In case there’s any doubt whose side he’s on — the human side — Biermann also adds this:
And there’s no way I’m an enemy of the suppressed Arab peoples whose minds are rotting under totalitarian military dictatorships, degenerating in godless theocracies. I can’t cut them out of my humanity – even the fanaticised Intifada kids and their grief-stricken, cheering hero-mothers and all the illiterate men, dancing with joy in West Jordan for every false martyr. But the Palestinians are being cut out of humanity by their Arab brothers and sent into mortal combat. The huge, rich Arab countries surrounding Israel with their vast resources of fertile land, earthly treasures and ancient high culture should invest their oil billions to bring a peaceful life to these poor wretches. [Read the whole speech here…]
You said it, Wolf Biermann.
And he can sing, too. I think I’ll dig out one of his old records and play it now.
Given what I’ve seen in multi-culti Canada since my return here in 2002, I think Biermann really nails it when he accuses the defenders of allegedly non-judgemental multiculturalism of an inverted racism — or elitism. At the risk of taking Biermann off-topic, but also because I think the mendacity he addresses is so pervasive and underlying, I’ll add this: I have experienced tax-payer funded bureaucrat youth workers preach (and assume) the position that one has to create “youth-friendly” language because (1) youth are incapable of understanding regular English (we’re talking about youth up to the age of 25!) and because (2) it would be “privileged” of educated people to speak in normal English, given that youth are youth, i.e., too stupid to understand normal English. Meanwhile, these same sociology-trained professional “outreachers” are constructing reports in the worst sort of passive-voice English, the sort of language that makes a person’s ears bleed and their teeth vibrate and hurt in the very bone of things — i.e., the kind of language that should be forbidden by all that’s right and good — while at the same time they agitate, in the name of non-judgemental multiculturalism, for a new language, namely the above-mentioned “youth-friendly English” (whatever the hell that means — and Orwell is spinning in his grave).
One wonders how economics factors into it all: if I had a cushy job in the field, I’d probably look for strategies to cement my position, too.
Wolf, you’re no slouch when it comes to dialectical thinking and all that marxist analysis entails: the money trail leads not just, as the politically-correct lefties would assume, to the higher-ups, but it also points to the feathered nest of all the little bureaucrats, that petit-bourgeois pack of enablers, that keep the machine humming right along.
Bashing Israel and being on the side of the oppressed Palestinians (regardless of how the powerful Arab states have turned them into dumb pawns) is the most egregious example of stupidity run amok, but once you start paying attention, it’s amazing how a grey goo that enables relativist idiocy has infiltrated every aspect of civil life.
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