M.Xavier Naidoo could accuse a lot of things in the past, bad-tempered lyrics, right-wing ideas, bad music, but you couldn’t call him an anti-Semite. Two courts had decided that after a consultant from the Antonio Amadeu Foundation had described the politically awakened singer four years ago as an anti-Semite, with the addition that this was structurally verifiable.
At the time, the two courts did not find this entirely out of thin air, but the “structural evidence”, which was based on the two songs “Raus aus dem Reichstag” (2009) and “Marionetten (2017), was the judge’s view of the special pillory effect of the Anti-Semitism allegation too thin. The speaker had to refrain from doing so and turned to the Federal Constitutional Court. Where you can see it differently. The two lower courts, Karlsruhe judged on Wednesday, had underestimated the importance of freedom of expression and did not adequately appreciate the context. The complainant had explicitly assumed that Naidoo was passing on anti-Semitic ideas in connection with the Reich citizenship ideology, from which it emerged that she had not described him as a representative of extermination anti-Semitism in the wake of the Nazi ideology. Naidoo can therefore be described as an anti-Semite with the addition of the thought that he is not one of the worst types.
The argument of the constitutional judges that the complainant’s alleged structural verifiability of anti-Semitism is irrelevant because this is not a factual assertion seems cryptic. But what? Do you just have to add the word “structural” to avoid any responsibility? If you look at the two reference texts anyway, the picture is mixed. In “Marionetten” Naidoo uses conspiracy myths and Reich citizenship ideology, but no unequivocally anti-Semitic clichés. It is different with the angry citizen hymn “Get out of the Reichstag”, in which all the lies and deceit that Naidoo sees as society are explicitly attributed to a “Baron Totschild”. This is part of a corrupt establishment that Naidoo would like to tear to shreds eight years later in the puppet song. The Karlsruhe judges judge those who hand it out in this way, or, in the words of the supreme court: they have to “accept a sharp reaction even if it diminishes one’s personal reputation”. Yes, but it doesn’t justify any form of criticism. A charge of anti-Semitism is not an opinion that does not need to be substantiated. Anti-Semitism, too, is based on the view that there is no need to prove it.