'When will struggle begin against that sacred cow Israel?'
By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT
02/24/2013 02:14
Book shines spotlight on German leftist anti-Semitic terror of 1960s and ‘70s.
WOLFGANG KRAUSHAAR Photo: Wikimedia Commons
BERLIN – The extension of Hitler’s anti- Semitism dressed up as pro-Palestinian
ideology in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s plays an important role in a new book
on terrorism and anti-Semitism in the Federal Republic.
The book’s title
is a quote from left-wing terrorist Dieter Kunzelmann: “When Will the Struggle
Begin Against that Sacred Cow Israel?” and is splashed across the hardcover
edition of the massive tome. The subtitle reads “On the anti-Semitic Roots of
German Terrorism.”
The nearly 900-page book by Dr. Wolfgang Kraushaar hit
bookstores and magazine shops on Friday, triggering riveting reviews in the
German media about the origins of leftist anti-Semitic
terrorism.
Kraushaar is a political scientist at the Hamburg Institute
for Social Research.
Die Welt headlined its article on Friday, “The
repressed murder of Jews during the 1970s.”
“Why is this chapter of
German history not well known?” the article asks in connection with Kraushaar’s
book. “In 1970, 55 people died within 11 days caused by bomb package attacks, an
arson attack and attempted plane hijackings.” The goal of the attacks, writes
Mara Delius, from Die Welt, was to kill “Israelis and Jews.”
The arson
attack took place at the Jewish community center in Munich and the attempted
hijacking of an El Al flight at the Munich-Riem airport. A Palestinian terrorist
group detonated hand grenades and killed a young Israeli passenger. Nine other
people were severely wounded.
The German government did not prosecute the
Palestinians and expelled them from Germany. The explanation for the release:
The authorities said they “wanted to contribute to a relaxation of the situation
in the Arab world.”
Kraushaar, 64, is no stranger to investigations into
German extreme leftists and their terrorist campaigns against Jews and the State
of Israel since the late 1960s. He wrote a book analyzing Kunzelmann’s reported
plan in 1969 to blow up the Jewish community center in West Berlin. The 2005
book The Bomb in the Jewish Community Center reconstructs Kunzelmann’s
terror-animated anti-Israel writings and activities.
Kunzelmann and a
group of leftist Germans aimed to detonate the bomb on November 9 – the memorial
day for the victims of the Nazi-sponsored Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938 against
Jewish businesses – when roughly 250 people were in attendance in the community
center.
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, an Israeli expert on modern European
anti-Semitism, wrote in 2006: “The importance of Kraushaar’s book thus goes far
beyond elucidating an early anti-Semitic and potentially murderous crime of the
German extreme Left. It shows how intimidation motifs and acts of violence,
which since have threatened many democratic societies, partially originated in
the contacts between left-wing European intellectual circles, extreme leftists
and Palestinian terrorists.”
Kraushaar sharply criticized a 2012 Der
Spiegel report that sought to rewrite the 1972 Munich Olympic murders as a
product of neo-Nazism. He placed the blame squarely on German leftists for
complicity in Palestinian Black September’s murder of 11 Israeli sportsmen at
the Olympic Games.
Writing in the German Jewish newspaper Jüdische
Allgemeine Wochenzeitung, Kraushaar said the Der Spiegel article’s emphasis on
the role of neo-Nazis in the attack is “blown up.”
“It was not ‘Brown
[Nazi] help,’ as Der Spiegel writes, but rather a joint work of German Left
radicals and Palestinian terrorists,” Kraushaar wrote.