German official deletes antisemitic tweet equating Jesus with the Palestinians
The director of Germany’s Near and Middle East department at the foreign ministry deleted a tweet widely criticized as antisemitic because it compared the repression of Jesus to the Palestinians.
By BENJAMIN WEINTHALUpdated: JANUARY 6, 2019 03:13People walk past the seat of the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, Germany, March 1, 2018.(photo credit: REUTERS/FABRIZIO BENSCH)
The director of Germany’s Near and Middle East department at the foreign ministry deleted a tweet widely criticized as antisemitic because it compared the repression of Jesus to the Palestinians.On December 25, The Jerusalem Post asked the director Christian Buck for an explanation with respect to his December 24 tweet that stated: “A couple are expelled from their homeland in the Middle East and are on the run. They find shelter in a tent [UNRWA]. They do not lose hope, nor the support of wise kings. Sounds familiar? Merry Christmas from the Foreign Ministry’s Middle East team.”Buck did not respond to the Post’s query.In response to Buck’s tweet, Aras-Nathan Keul, an executive board member of the youth organization of the German-Israel friendship society, wrote, “No. Mary and Joseph, who were Jews, did not flee, but went to Bethlehem to be counted, and Bethlehem was by the way also a Jewish city.”Keul’s tweet was re-tweeted 125 times and liked 784 times.Israel Hayom reported on Thursday both in its English online edition and Hebrew-language paper that Buck deleted his tweet. The paper wrote, “Antisemitic tweet by Christian Buck, director for Near and Middle East and North Africa at Berlin’s Foreign Ministry, is removed following outrage.”According to the news agency, “the German Foreign Ministry official recently posted an antisemitic tweet in apparent defense of the UN’s aid agency for Palestinian refugees, of which Germany is a top sponsor.”Keul criticized Germany’s role in financing United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in a follow-up tweet to Buck’s: “The fact that it makes a massive contribution to keeping the problem alive and not distancing itself sufficiently from antisemitism will probably be overlooked.”With respect to the historical accuracy of Buck’s anti-Israel tweet, Israel Hayom wrote, “The comparison between the persecution of Jesus and his family, first by King Herod and then by the Romans, and the situation of the Palestinians in the Middle East is common in antisemitic circles. In recent years, with the encouragement of the Palestinian Authority, anti-Israel circles have been increasingly portraying Jesus as a Palestinian even though he was a Jew and was persecuted as one.”Germany’s foreign ministry has been engulfed in a number of anti-Israel policies over the last year.German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s foreign ministry, run by the social democrat Heiko Maas, authorized its UN ambassador to condemn the Jewish state 16 times at the UN in 2018. The Post reported exclusively that Merkel launched a campaign in 2018 to convince Central and Eastern European countries to not relocate their embassies to Jerusalem. Merkel has also refused to join US sanctions against the Iranian the regime, the top international state sponsor of terrorism, according to the US State Department.
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