BERLIN – Popular Die Welt columnist Henryk M. Broder launched a piercing attack
on Tuesday against Jakob Augstein, owner and editor of the Der Freitag weekly,
for spreading Nazi-style anti-Semitism on Spiegel Online, the website of the Der
Spiegel magazine, where Augstein blogs.
Writing in his own blog, Die
Achse des Guten (The Axis of Good), Broder, regarded as Germany’s leading expert
on contemporary anti-Semitism, said: “A few days ago, I wrote here that the
editor of Freitag, Jakob Augstein, was a ‘salon anti- Semite.’ Now I have to
correct myself. Jakob Augstein is not a salon anti-Semite, he’s a pure
anti-Semite, an anti-Semitic piece of work, an offender by conviction who only
missed the opportunity to make his career with the Gestapo because he was born
after the war. He certainly would have had what it takes.”
In his Monday
Spiegel Online blog article, titled “To whose advantage is the violence?,”
Augstein wrote: “Fires are burning in Libya, Sudan, Yemen, all countries that
are among the poorest in the world. But the arsonists are elsewhere. The furious
young men burning American, and now also German, flags are just as much victims
as the dead in Benghazi and Sanaa. Who profits from this violence? Only the
crazies and the unscrupulous. And this time also – as if incidentally – the
American Republicans and the Israeli government.”
Broder, who has
testified as an expert in the Bundestag about German anti-Semitism, wrote on his
blog that Augstein’s text showed a “classical anti-Semitic model” that connects
the Nazis and neo-Nazis who argue that “the Zionists cooperated with the Nazis
and accepted the death of millions of Jews in order to establish their
state.”
Broder added that this was the logic behind Augstein’s article
and that he was a “little Streicher,” referring to Julius Streicher, the raging
anti-Semitic editor of the Nazi-era publication Der Stürmer.
According to
observers of German-Israeli relations, Augstein has gone to great lengths to
stoke hostility against the Jewish state. He passionately defended writer Günter
Grass’s poem that blamed Israel as being the main impediment to world peace,
although the majority of German journalists slammed Grass for his biases against
Israel and his pro-Iran position.
In a telephone conversation with The
Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, Broder said commentaries in Der Freitag, Augstein’s
weekly, were packed full of comments supporting anti- Semitism.
Writing
in his blog, Broder taunted Augstein to file a legal suit against him. Augstein
told the Berliner Zeitung on Tuesday that he would not sue, saying, “I very much
value and respect Henryk M. Broder, also in his errors.”
Broder responded
that Augstein had “wimped out.”