New anti-Semitic cartoon attacking Israel. Photo: “Süddeutsche Zeitung.” Winston Churchill famously quipped of Russia: “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Twenty-first century Germany is, instead, a question mark—especially regarding its relationship to the present and future of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish hatreds. Simon Wiesenthal Center Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper cites a new cartoon (belatedly apologized for) in Germany’s largest mass-circulation daily, the Munich-based “Süddeutsche Zeitung,” depicting Israel as “a ravenous Moloch” as classic anti-Semitism “grotesquely beyond the pale of legitimate criticism.” Let’s put this cartoon in context: First, the good news: • The Bundestag has voted overwhelmingly for a resolution vowing to support the fight against anti-Semitism as well as Germany’s special relationship with Israel. It mentioned Israel-related anti-Semitism, but with no recommendations to combat Muslim extremists. The emphasis was on better education against prejudice, without concrete actions except aid to Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, which supports Holocaust survivors. • A Cologne regional appellate court ruled in May, 2012, that religious circumcision of male children is a criminal offense. Deutsche Kinderhilfe, a German child rights organization, warned that circumcision may violate the UN’s “Convention on the Rights of the Child,” and the German Association for Pediatric Medicine condemned “nonmedical” circumcisions. In July in Berlin, a criminal complaint (later dismissed) was lodged against Rabbi Yitshak Ehrenberg for “causing bodily harm.” But in December after Jewish, Muslim, and Christian groups protested, the Bundestag approved a new law legalizing circumcisions. The ledger’s negative side: • The German government in January, 2012, acknowledged polls showing 20 percent of the German population harboring anti-Semitic views. Another recent poll, released by “Stern” magazine, found that most young Germans are vaguely aware that Auschwitz was “a concentration camp,” but that 21 percent 18 to 29 years olds do not know that Auschwitz was a death camp and nearly a third are unaware that it’s in Poland. This follows earlier polls showing 53 percent of Germans view Jews as “more loyal to Israel” than their own country, and 65 percent see Israel as the “biggest threat” to world peace. • Hamburg’s Al-Quds Mosque was terrorism central for some of the 9/11 hijackers, and the high levels of anti-Semitism among Germany’s Muslim population have been linked to that city’s Iranian-sponsored Islamic Center. Hezbollah has 950 members in Germany, with 250 in Berlin; they use as a front organization the Orphans Project Lebanon (“Waisenkinderprojekt Libanon”) in Göttingen. • This year, Germany’s leftist Green Party was behind the parliamentary push forcing the conservative government of Angela Merkel to announce that only products produced within the pre-1967 borders will be allowed to carry the label “made in Israel.” As far back as 1983, the party’s “Green Calendar” headlined “Israel, the gang of murderers” and called for a “boycott of goods from Israel.” In concert with the EU boycott, Germany’s action will certainly be leveraged by anti-Israel BDS activists to gather support for the boycott of all Israeli goods—akin to the 1980s anti- South African Apartheid campaigns. The German boycott conjures up horrific memories of when Nazis shouted: “Kauf nicht bei Juden!” (Do not buy from Jews!). • According to the European edition of the “Wall Street Journal,” Germany—Europe’s leading exporter to Iran—has “enough economic leverage with Iran” to stop it enriching uranium, which it refuses to use. • Germany’s extreme right may deserve credit for anti-Semitic hate crimes spiking in 2011, while declining through most of the rest of Europe. Neo-Nazis were mainly responsible for violence including terrorist-motivated bank robberies and the murder of eight Turks, one Greek, and a policewoman. The extreme right National Democratic Party (NPD) denounced Barack Obama’s election as the result of a pernicious “alliance of Jews and Negroes,” and successfully fought attempts to outlaw it following revelation of links with Neo-Nazi “terror cells.” • The most significant political forms of new anti-Semitism are “Red-Green alliances” that involve the extreme right-wing and left-wings converging around a shared anti-Semitic agenda under an anti-Israel banner. Some German observers have coined a new term—”Querfront”—for this political “crossover” phenomenon. The “Süddeutsche Zeitung,” in the spotlight for a new scurrilous anti-Israel cartoon, previously published Günter Grass’s anti-Semitic poetry. A teenage SS member and then outspoken leftist, Grass now condemns Israel’s “genocidal plot” against Iran while exculpating Germany’s “willing executioners” as innocent victims of the Second World War. Another left-wing ideologue, Hermann Dierkes, appeared on YouTube in 2010 at a Berlin Conference, “Marx Is a Must,” calling Israel’s demand for the right to exist as “petty” when compared to demands to end South African apartheid. On the right, the NPD holds “holocaust vigils” in solidarity with Palestinians, and urges its followers to join the annual Berlin al-Quds March (Jerusalem “Liberation Day”). Eighty years after the Nazi seizure of power, historical memory in Germany is very much up for grabs. Germany’s World War II “Revisionist” historians include Ernst Nolte who argues that Nazi death camps were merely versions of Stalin’s gulags. Some of Germany avant-garde artists not only celebrate the death of Holocaust memory, but mock Hitler’s victims. In addition to exhibits treating Palestinian terrorist attacks as “performance art,” a recent Berlin Biennale Art show featured Polish artist-provocateur Artur Zmijewski’s film, “Berek,” depicting a group of smiling, naked people playing a game of tag in a Nazi gas chamber. According to Zmijewski: “The murdered people are victims—but we, the living, are also victims.” The copyright which the Bavarian state government has used to prevent German publishers from reprinting “Mein Kampf” is set to expire. Of course, the publication ban has never really been effective in our Internet age when editions of Hitler’s genocidal musings are instantly available from download, not only in German, but in Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Despite laws against Holocaust Denial, there are limits to what Germany can do. However, Germany needs to do a better job of inoculating against Nazi revivalism on both right and left, and also to prevent hi-tech exports to Iran’s “Islamofacists.” Malte Spitz, a member of the Green Party’s executive committee, authored an opinion piece in the latest Sunday “New York Times” explaining why Germans have fallen out of love with Barack Obama. They may have good reasons, but—before excoriating the American President—perhaps they should look in the mirror and practice a bit of soul searching.