Germany's Far-Left Left Party Faces Charges of Anti-Semitism

Well, yeah.

And this is a surprise?

At Der Speigel, "A Map without Israel: Germany's Left Party Faces Charges of Anti-Semitism" (via Memorandum):

Swatiskas intertwined in the Star of David, a map of the Middle East with Israel missing, boycotts of Israeli products: Germany's far-left Left Party, many feel, has a growing anti-Semitism problem. The issue threatens to divide the party.

Germany's far-left Left Party has been struggling for months to have its voice heard on the national political stage. Falling membership numbers, shrinking support and a very public leadership battle this spring have all left the party struggling to find relevance.

Now, though, the party is facing yet another challenge. For years, the Left Party -- a partial outgrowth of the East German communists -- has been criticized for harboring anti-Semitism and being overtly critical of Israel. Just recently, Left Party floor leader Gregor Gysi pushed a resolution through the party's parliamentary faction stating: "In the future, the representatives of the Left Party faction will take action against any form of anti-Semitism in society."

The party, the resolution read, will no longer participate in boycotts of Israeli products, will refrain from demanding a single-state solution to the Middle East conflict and will not take part in this year's Gaza flotilla.

That resolution, however, did not sit well with the party's left wing. The group protested against being "muzzled," complaining that Gysi's declaration was "undemocratic" and "dangerous," as Left Party parliamentarian Annette Groth complained. And Gysi, formerly head of the party, gave in. This week, he plans to compose a further resolution on anti-Semitism.

He provided a hint at what it might contain in a recent interview with the leftist paper Neues Deutschland. "I don't see a problem with anti-Semitism in the Left Party," he said. "I am not a fan of the inflationary use of the term 'anti-Semitism.'" Gysi himself is from a family that has Jewish roots, several members of which were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

Yet More Strife

More pragmatic members of the Left Party are up in arms. "A further resolution on the subject ... wouldn't solve a single problem, rather it would create new ones," said Raju Sharma, a Left Party parliamentarian who is also the party's treasurer. Michael Leutert, also a member of Germany's federal parliament, the Bundestag, is concerned that the issue could plunge the party into yet more strife.

Still, it seems unlikely that the Left Party will be able to quickly silence the debate. On Monday, Dieter Graumann, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, wrote a guest commentary for the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung in which he accused Left Party members, particularly those from western Germany, of "downright pathalogical hatred of Israel." He also wrote that the "old anti-Zionist spirit from East Germany still stains the party."

There are many within the party who agree. Chief among them is Benjamin-Christopher Krüger, a founding member of a Left Party working group which aims at rooting all forms of anti-Semitism out of the party. "We have an anti-Semitism problem," he said.

A recent study by the University of Leipzig quoted in the daily Frankfurter Rundschau would seem to support Krüger's claim. The study said that positions hostile to both Israel and Jews are "increasingly dominant within the party" and critics of anti-Semitic positions are "increasingly isolated."

Several recent incidents bear witness to the problem. In April, the website of the district chapter of the Left Party in the western city of Duisburg featured a swastika entangled with a Star of David. The symbol linked to a pamphlet which called Israel a "rogue nation" and called for a boycott of Israeli products. The Duisburg Left Party chapter distanced itself from the pamphlet and claimed that the site had been illegally manipulated -- but the head of the Duisburg Left Party has long supported a boycott of Israeli products.

In May, Inge Höger, a member of the Bundestag from the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, appeared at a Palestinians in Europe conference attended by numerous Hamas sympathizers. She was wearing a scarf printed with a map of the Middle East that did not include Israel. Höger claimed that she was handed the scarf and didn't want to be impolite.

More at the link and at Memeorandum.

At least the German Left Party is debating the issue, and looking to rid itself of the vile hatred.

Not so in the U.S.

The Democrats revile Israel, the Obama administration is working toward the destruction of the Jewish state, and longtime affiliates of Barack Obama continue to promote the cause of Israel's delegitimation. See, "PASTOR WRIGHT, OBAMA'S MENTOR OF OVER 20 YEARS, CALLS ISRAEL "ILLEGAL, GENOCIDAL," URGES BLACKS TO DISAVOW THEIR COUNTRY."

RELATED: From Mark Steyn, at National Review, "Hate Couture."

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Falls on May 1st this year, the same day as international workers' solidarity day. There's some profound puzzle in that coincidence, but I'll unravel it later. Jeff Jacoby, of the Boston Globe, lost family members in the Holocaust, and he writes: "A demon gone, but evil remains":

The Germans slaughtered 1.3 million human beings in Auschwitz, of whom 1.1 million were Jews. Six of those Jews were my father’s parents, David and Leah Jakubovic, and their children Franceska, Zoltan, Yrvin, and Alice. Gassed to death in 1944, they represent 1 one-millionth — 0.000001 — of the 6 million European Jews annihilated in the Holocaust.

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, it hardly needs to be said that mass murder didn’t end with the defeat of the Third Reich. In the decades since 1945, innocent men, women, and children beyond number have been massacred — in Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, in the Soviet gulag and North Korean slave camps, in Rwanda and Bosnia, Sudan and Syria, Congo and Uganda. Yet even in an epoch that has shattered every record for bloodiness and barbarity, the Holocaust is unique. What sets it apart from other campaigns of butchery is not its body count or its brutality or its genocidal nature. Nor is it the rapidity with which it was carried out, or the international indifference against which it unfolded.

The destruction of European Jewry stands alone because it was not a means to any end. The “Final Solution’’ was an end in itself. Jews were not murdered by the millions in the context of a struggle for power or land or wealth. There was no political or economic rationale for wiping out the Jews; they had nothing the Nazis coveted, and Germany gained nothing by their deaths. There was only the maniacal ideology of eliminationist anti-Semitism — the determination to track down and kill anyone born of Jewish ancestry. “It was precisely this — the fact of being born — that was the mortal sin, to be punished by death,’’ the historian Yehuda Bauer has observed. “That had never happened at any time — or anywhere — before.’’

RTWT. No need to guess where today's evil resides.

Who Was Worse, Hitler or Stalin?

At New York Review, "Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?":

In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people, tens of millions it was often claimed, in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.

Discussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between, say, 780,862 and 780,863—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives. Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations.

Ultimately, folks'll have to assess this essay themselves, given the nature of the discussion. The author, Timothy Snyder, isn't as clear as he should be, given that he's claiming the Nazis killed more than the Soviets. But the basic gist is that the Soviet numbers have been revised downward. And does it matter at this point, despite the discussion of the marginal enormity of one more single death out of the 100s of thousands or even millions? Only God knows the suffering of each of the families that lost loved ones. It becomes a metaphysical thing, at some point. And despite the author's numerical exegesis, I'm not convinced that Stalin's modernization planning and ruthless political liquidation programs are of the same kind of totalitarianism that resulted in the Holocaust. It's all depressing, and if folks recall Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, the permissive causes (especially anti-Semitism) were found all across Europe following the turn of the 20th century. Beyond this, I'm leaving it to the experts. At least in reflecting on these things, the last thing that comes to mind is the GOP's budget balancing programs today. Progressive Democrats are hoisting signs emblazoned with STALIN, HITLER, WALKER. And the effect --- beyond sheer stupidity --- is simply to illustrate how fleeting is the left's legitimacy and its grip on the social welfare state in early-21st century America.