Impunity runs wild as Germany roiled by antisemitism scandals

Germany’s governing left-wing coalition and a number of the country’s elite institutions have been rocked by antisemitism scandals involving stripping Israel of its right to exist and promotion of Hamas and Hezbollah. 

Aydan Ozoguz, vice president of the Bundestag and member of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), shared, in October, a post from the US-based antisemitic group Jewish Voice for Peace that depicted a building, apparently in Gaza, on fire with the caption: “This is Zionism.”

Israel’s ambassador to Berlin, Ron Prosor, declared that the post “indirectly questions Israel’s right to exist.”

After outrage on social media, Ozoguz deleted her post and apologized. The 57-year-old said, “I realized that the shared post hurt the feelings of fellow citizens who stand up for peaceful coexistence,” adding, “That was not my intention and I deeply regret that.”

The main opposition party in the Bundestag, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), urged Ozoguz to resign.

In 2020, this reporter first revealed that Ozoguz was a member of the advisory committee of an antisemitic pro-BDS group—the German-Palestinian Society—that called for the eradication of Israel. Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor who is the president of the Munich Jewish community, told me at the time that Ozoguz and the Green Party MP Omid Nouripour should resign from the advisory committee. The anti-Israel MPs refused to throw in the towel. Neither Ozoguz, who is of Turkish origin, nor Nouripour, who was born in Tehran, faced any consequences. Ozoguz was promoted to vice president of the Bundestag and Nouripour became co-chair of the Green Party, which is part of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition.

The intense clash between the CDU and SPD over Ozoguz prompted Jens Spahn, a former CDU health minister, to compare Ozoguz to a certain former president of the Reichstag, the Bundestag’s predecessor, saying: “It is a shame that for the first time since Hermann Göring, we may be meeting again in the German Bundestag, discussing things, and someone is sitting there and presiding against Israel and against Jews. That is unacceptable and that’s why she has to resign.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an institution named after the legendary Nazi-hunter, told i24NEWS that the “Bundestag is representing all of Germany. It would be more than appropriate that she should resign because of her extreme anti-Israel views at a time when Israel is fighting for its existence on many fronts.” He added that Ozoguz’s post has stained German democracy and the Bundestag. “If she won’t resign, the president of Bundestag should remove her,” he said.

“To allow a person with such anti-Israel views in 2024 in the Bundestag mainstreams antisemitism at a time when antisemitic crimes are on the rise and signals to the Muslim population that it is acceptable to not only hold such views but to act on them,” Cooper said, stressing this is not a left-right issue and constitutes a “direct threat to the Jews of Germany.”

Ozoguz is from Hamburg, which is also home to the Körber Foundation, a think tank that has been hosting and promoting pro-Iranian regime antisemites and anti-American terrorists, according to critics.

Körber hosted Iran’s former ambassador to Germany, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, earlier this year. Mousavian likened Israel to Nazi Germany on his X account and supports two German-designated terrorist movements, Hamas and Hezbollah. He also endorsed the fatwa ordering the murder of British-American writer Salman Rushdie. Mousavian reportedly oversaw the assassinations in Europe of 24 Iranian dissidents in the 1990s. Mousavian, a Princeton University researcher, denies any role in Iran regime-sponsored terrorism.

A group of German-Iranians and Germans protested outside the Körber Foundation’s offices in June against Körber’s affiliation with Mousavian. “Germany should permanently declare Mousavian persona non grata,” Rabbi Cooper said.

The Körber Foundation also hosted the Iranian official Saeed Khatibzadeh in 2019.

Khatibzadeh is affiliated with the Tehran regime’s Holocaust-denying Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS) think tank. In 2006, the IPIS organized a conference for a global who’s who of Holocaust deniers. Kurt Adolf Körber (1909-1992), a former Nazi who exploited concentration camp inmates to advance the Holocaust and the Third Reich’s war goals, founded the pro-Islamic Republic of Iran foundation. The Körber Foundation has refused to cut ties with Iran’s regime and Mousavian.

In a shock to many observers of rising Jew-hatred in Hamburg, Stefan Hensel, the city's first antisemitism commissioner, has also refused to urge Körber to pull the plug on its relationship with Mousavian and the world’s leading state-sponsor of lethal antisemitism and Holocaust denial, the clerical regime in Iran.

The list of outbreaks of antisemitism, where impunity runs wild in Germany, is long. The president of the Technical University of Belin, Geraldine Rauch, liked posts equating Netanyahu with the Nazis and charging Israel with committing a genocide in Gaza. Rauch refused to resign.

The German-Israel Friendship Association (DIG), a pro-Israel organization on paper, allows politicians to be members who promote antisemitic BDS campaign measures against Israel. Take the example of Ruprecht Polenz, the former CDU politician and DIG member, who urged the EU to sanction Jewish products from Judea and Samaria with a labelling system. Polenz is president of the German Association for East European Studies.

Bodo Ramelow, the Left Party’s Minister-President of the state of Thuringia, endorsed a Swiss company’s targeting of Israeli products for punitive labelling as a “legitimate measure.” The controversial head of the DIG, Volker Beck, who imposed a boycott on the Israeli Zionist organization, Im Tirtzu, declined to comment about the pro-BDS activities of DIG members, Polenz and Ramelow.

Michael Blume, the commissioner tasked with fighting antisemitism in the state of Baden-Württembeg, blamed Israel’s self-defense war against Hamas terrorists for the massive explosion of antisemitism in Europe. Two German courts decision stated Blume can be termed antisemitic. Blume has refused to resign.