Germany, have you really changed?

Wednesday April 17, 2002 13:59

by Yaakov Katz - Israeli Journalist

Discussion on Germany has not chasnged much since 1945.

At the end of this week anti-Semitic groups around the world will be celebrating the birthday of the Nazi leader, Adolph Hitler. As synagogues burn in France and Jews are beaten in the street in Kiev, it would seem that they will also be celebrating the rejuvenation and rehabilitation of anti-Semitism. Most encouraging for those celebrants, however, will be the recent announcement, made on Holocaust Remembrance Day last week, that Germany is suspending arms sales to the State of Israel at a time when our military is fighting for the lives of our children. The Washington Post reported that officials in Berlin decided on the weapons embargo in order “to protest [Israel’s] military action in the West Bank…”

That “military action in the West Bank,” as it is called, is the armed defense of Jews against genocidal murderers who would do to the Jews today what Germans and their allies did to us almost 60 years ago. It is simple Jew-hatred that motivated those behind the massacre of whole Jewish families attending the Passover seder in Netanya, the bar-mitzvah celebration in Jerusalem, the bat-mitzvah party in Hadera or just going out for food in Haifa. That perverse hatred is also what motivated the perpetrators of thousands of such massacres on the soil of Europe during World War II. Thanks to Germany, most of us Jews now know exactly what the PLO appointed Islamic preacher had in mind when, on Palestinian Authority television, he called on Moslems to “Kill the Jews. Wherever you find them, Kill them!” He had in mind a Moslem-sponsored Second Holocaust. The difference is only one of technical ability.

Where is the German boycott of Arab and Islamic states that support PLO terrorists in their campaign to make the Land of Israel judenrein? Where is the German outrage and suspension of European aid to the PLO, when those monies are funneled to support suicide bombers and anti-Semitic diatribes in the Arabic media? It is utterly absent, yet the moment Jews take the war to the enemy, after almost two years of absorbing more terrorist attacks than any other nation would be willing to, then the voice of Germany is heard. There is something particularly obscene when Germany, patent holder for the original Holocaust, decides to effectively aid and abet the new crop of homicidal Jew-haters by attempting to disarm the Jewish State. Germany will, as in the past, set the tone for the other nations of Europe in their own policies towards the Jews.

Let the leaders of Germany know that the Jews and our allies will not be pressured into allowing any other nation to kill us with impunity. Let the leaders of Germany know that honoring the memory of the Holocaust doesn’t mean just standing with a bowed head beside the eternal flame at Yad VaShem in Jerusalem, it means standing with a raised head to the right of the Jewish people as they defend themselves against an anti-Semitic onslaught. Therefore, as a child of Holocaust survivors and as a soldier in the re-established army of the Jews, I call upon all friends of Israel to boycott German products and services. I call upon the organizers of today’s rally in Washington in support of Israel to publicly declare that Germany, and any other state that denies the right of Jews to defend themselves, has allied itself, again, with those who openly call “Kill the Jews” and then act to fulfill that Hitlerite mission. The German leaders must be made aware that their move to embargo the Jewish state will be met with the economic boycott of Germany by millions of friends of Israel around the world.