'Leftists, not neo-Nazis, helped in Munich massacre'

BERLIN – A prominent political scientist has placed the blame squarely on German leftists for complicity in Black September’s murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972.

Writing in the current edition of the German Jewish newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine Wochenzeitung, Dr. Wolfgang Kraushaar sharply disputed a recent Der Spiegel article’s emphasis on the role of neo-Nazis in the attack, calling the news item “blown up” and nothing new.

“It was not ‘Brown [Nazi] help,’ as Der Spiegel writes, but rather a joint work of German Left radicals and Palestinian terrorists.”

Kraushaar, who has written extensively on the German Left’s involvement in attacks on Jews and Israelis, argued in his commentary that though the Munich murders were part and parcel of a merger between German Leftists and Palestinian terrorists, Der Spiegel aimed to portray them as series of murders by the extreme Right.

He criticized the news weekly for pushing a false narrative that ignores the close contacts between German Left radicalism and Palestinian terrorism.

According to Kraushaar, the Spiegel report lacks journalistic accuracy because it identifies the Palestinian-German Left connection as a myth.

Kraushaar is affiliated with the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and authored a widely acclaimed book on the German Left’s role in a plot to bomb the Berlin Jewish community center in 1969.

In last week’s Der Spiegel, the Hamburg-based publication wrote that police in Dortmund sent a notice to Germany’s domestic intelligence agency saying that “Saad Walli, an ‘Arab-looking man,’ met conspiratorially with the German neo-Nazi Willi Pohl” roughly seven weeks before the Munich killings.

Saad Walli was the cover name for Muhammad Daoud Oudeh, a.k.a. Abu Daoud, the principal organizer of the massacre and a leader in Fatah forces in Lebanon and Jordan.

The Assad regime in Syria provided refuge for Daoud and he died in Damascus in 2010.

Kraushaar wrote that “the then-neo- Nazi Willi Pohl had already written 30 years ago in a book that appeared under a pseudonym in Switzerland” about his involvement with Black September in 1972.

“People like Willi Pohl were in reality useful idiots for the Palestinians” and must be viewed as cooperating with left-wing terrorists, Kraushaar wrote.

He cited a list of German leftists who praise Palestinian terrorism against Jews.

Wilfried Böse, a leftist student in Frankfurt in 1969, worked closely with Palestinian activists, and supported the Red Army Faction with weapons and explosives.

“There is serious information” that Böse also supported the terrorists of the Black September in the Olympic attacks,” Kraushaar wrote.

Red Army Faction leader Ulrike Meinhof, for example, celebrated the 1972 murders of Israeli athletes as an expression of “anti-imperialism.”

Critics in Israel and Germany accused Der Spiegel earlier this month of recycling old news about German-manufactured Dolphin submarines having nuclear-warhead capability. The German government has delivered Dolphin-class vessels to Israel since the late 1990s.

Weighed down by a recent scandal with a reporter’s manufactured visit to a German politician’s home, Der Spiegel has been struggling to attract readers.

Commenting on the submarine story, the popular pro-Israel German blogger Lizas Welt tweeted that the “Der Spiegel must have right now a real problem with circulation.”