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.”
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