Friday 17th December 2021
Israel often instrumentalized
Study: AfD program clearly anti-Semitic
The AfD defends Jews effectively, preferably against attacks by Muslims. Anti-Semitism is part of the party’s “programmatic core”. This is shown by a study and gives numerous examples. Many conspiracy myths are given a boost in the pandemic.
According to a new analysis, anti-Semitism is part of the “programmatic core” of the AfD. The party’s “alleged solidarity” with the Jewish community and Israel only serves as a vehicle for its “racist and anti-migration propaganda,” said the director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Remko Leemhuis, in Berlin. The handout presented on Friday is entitled: “Mobilizing Resentment. Analyzing Anti-Semitism”.
In the AfD and its electorate, “despite some lip service to the contrary, hostility towards Israel, Holocaust relativization, anti-Semitic conspiracy and anti-Semitic images occupy a prominent place,” said the author of the handout, political scientist Lars Rensmann from the University of Groningen.
Israel is being instrumentalized by the AfD primarily for an “anti-Muslim stance”, Rensmann said. However, the AfD does not represent a consistently pro-Israel position. In tweets from the federal party and its representatives, Israel is repeatedly associated with anti-Semitic clichés such as that of the “money Jews”.
The AfD also repeatedly launched “targeted campaigns” against prominent Jews in Germany, Rensmann continued. For example, the chairman of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, Anetta Kahane, was portrayed in Twitter posts by AfD MP Petr Bystron as the “Jewish embodiment of the supposedly corrupt dictatorial elite”. The journalist Michel Friedman was also in the focus of AfD representatives.
Corona crisis as an alleged population exchange
Especially in the corona pandemic, conspiracy theories received a great boost, said Rensmann. “The right-wing populist construction of a ‘corrupt globalized elite’ and the hostile image of an imagined liberal globalist world government behind the Corona crisis and a ‘large population exchange’ belong to the world of ideas mobilized by right-wing populists to which the idea of the Jewish or ‘Talmudist world conspiracy’. ”
The anti-Semitism commissioner of the federal government, Felix Klein, described “conspiracy narratives such as population exchange” spread by AfD politicians as “one hundred percent compatible with anti-Semitic resentments”. Because anti-Semitism is not only directed against Jewish people, but is “an expression of a deeply anti-democratic attitude”. But he said that hatred of Jews in general is a core component of right-wing ideologies and right-wing populism.
That is why the analysis is so important, because: “The goal of right-wing populists is to mobilize authoritarian attitudes and nationalism, along with the so-called line-of-mind mentality that calls for an end to the German culture of remembrance and the confrontation with the National Socialist past”, so Small. Leemhuis called on the “democratic parties” to take a stronger stand against Islamist anti-Semitism and thus deprive the AfD of the opportunity to use this topic politically.