Neo-Nazis plan Gaza 'Holocaust' vigil in Berlin

Local Jewish leader sees new alliance between Nazis and German-Palestinians.

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL, JPOST CORRESPONDENT
neo nazis 88 (photo credit: )
neo nazis 88
(photo credit: )
The National Democratic Party (NPD), a German neo-Nazi party, announced on its Web site Monday that it will hold a solemn vigil on January 27 in downtown Berlin to "stop the Israeli holocaust in the Gaza Strip." Hatred of Jews and Israel has over the years, particularly since the Second Lebanon War in 2006, unified diverse political groups in Germany, ranging from members of the German Left Party to pro-Hizbullah and pro-Hamas Islamists, to the NPD. Members of the Left Party, which is the fourth largest party in the Bundestag, with 54 deputies, marched in anti-Israeli demonstrations over the last three weeks in which protesters called for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews and Israelis. According to an announcement on the NPD's Berlin chapter Web site on Monday, "efforts striving for a cease-fire, which are supposed to calm the world population, cannot conceal that the Israeli war is about a campaign of extermination. We are defending ourselves against foreign rule in our own land and recognize the right of the Palestinians to their own state without Israel's patronizing and dominating behavior." The NPD is represented in a number of local city councils in Berlin districts and scored state-level victories in the state parliament of Saxony in 2004 and 2008, as well as in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in 2006. "Joint hatred of everything Jewish is unifying neo-Nazis and Islamists... German-Palestinians protestors unashamedly admitted that they would vote for the NPD during the next election," Charlotte Knobloch, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, warned in her speech at a pro-Israel rally earlier this month in Munich. Knobloch noted that the alliance between Nazis and the Palestinians was not new and that in 1941 Adolf Hitler met the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, to secure his support for the Holocaust.