Reporters on the Job: Letter from Germany

Benjamin Weinthal is the Jerusalem Post correspondent in Germany. In addition to covering Germany, Benjamin reports on Austria and Switzerland. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of New York University where he received a BA in Philosophy.  He earned a Master of Philosophy in European Culture and Literature from the University of Cambridge in England.

BERLIN - The topsy-turvy events of 2008, including an unprecedented German-Israeli diplomatic crisis provoked by Chancellor Angela Merkel administration's decision to approve a more than 100 million euro trade deal to build three gas plants in Iran, consumed my reporting at the time; this deal reflected the common phenomenon in Germany, where I live and work, of playing down anti-Semitism worldwide, including Iran's genocidal threat to Israel and dictatorial Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's persecution of his country's small Jewish community.

A deeply moving, but highly disturbing, Jerusalem Post column by this paper's editor-in-chief David Horovitz in late February 2008 (When Jewish communities lose their voices), which dealt with rising anti-Semitism in Venezuela, stoked by Hugo Chavez, reminded me of my attempt to draw attention to the precarious situation of Venezuela's Jews and Chavez's state-sponsored anti-Semitic campaign. A little over a year before David published his column, I found myself in the position of the messenger who is attacked for blowing the whistle on a reporter's anti-Semitic article. I had uncovered a journalist writing freelance articles for the main German Jewish paper while simultaneously filing an anti-Jewish article for a hardcore anti-Israeli leftist German daily.

Chavez's anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli rhetoric had set off alarms among Jews world-wide since 2004. In one speech,  Chavez claimed that "Some minorities, descendants of the same ones who crucified Christ ... took all the world's wealth for themselves." He accused Israel of a "new Holocaust" during the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and formed an intense alliance with Iran's Ahmadinejad.
 
At the time, I was involved in a media project monitoring left-liberal German press coverage of anti-Semitism and Israel. Junge Welt (Young World), a fanatically anti-Israeli daily and a relic of the former anti-Zionist East German state, published a report by its Latin America correspondent Harald Neuber on a visit by then-Argentinian Senator and first lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (now Argentina's president) honoring the 40th anniversary of the Venezuelan Jewish community's umbrella organization CAIV. Venezuela is home to an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Jews, who make up less than 1% of Venezuela's total population of 28 million.

A sample of some of the passages in the Junge Welt article on March 29, 2007 revealed that Neuber and the editors of the reactionary left-wing daily have what Americans sometimes euphemistically call a 'Jewish problem'. Neuber wrote: "Conservative Jewish organizations, like the Simon Wiesenthal Center (CSW) in Buenos Aires, had already accused the Venezuelan head of state of 'anti-Semitism' in 2005 because he criticized Israel. A familiar pattern."

The article spoke of "the rich eastern part of Caracas, in which the Hebrew Center is located," and maintained that "The attendees (CAIV) left no doubt of its fundamental opposition to a government for which redistribution of wealth is a main goal." "Ultimately," the writer continued, "the social question splits both sides, probably also because some of the biggest business families are organized in the CAIV. And they are not in fact supporters of the Chavez government."

Neuber's article is a model of the oft-cited phenomenon of anti-Semitism from the Left. The text crudely presented Jews as the class enemy of Chavez's form of Venezuelan socialism. The article is riddled with class warfare language, pitting the tiny Jewish community as a hindrance to Chavez's march toward socialism. The Pavlovian reflex of painting "the charge of anti-Semitism" as more dangerous than actual anti-Semitism is the standard tactic of the modern European Left.

Incredibly, Neuber was writing for Germany's most respectable Jewish paper Die Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung (JAZ) at the same time that he was employed at the anti-Zionist Junge Welt. The JAZ is published by the 105,000 member Central Council of Jews in Germany and in an article under his byline covering the same CAIV 40th-anniversary celebration appeared in the March 29 issue of JAZ. Not surprisingly, Neuber's JAZ article omitted the anti-Jewish passages contained in his Junge Welt report from March 29.

I had written occasionally for JAZ, a pro-Zionist paper, and notified the editor-in-chief, Christian Böhme, about the different text versions. Böhme, who in late 2005 had become the first non-Jewish editor-in-chief of the weekly, which has a circulation of roughly 15,000, informed me that Neuber was an "upstanding" journalist and took no further action. After repeated stonewalling from Böhme, I asked the Central Council of Jews, the weekly;s publisher, for an explanation. Böhme responded to my e-mail to seek recourse outside of the editorial department with a curt, hostile e-mail: "I see your note as an almost insulting threat! I believe that any further cooperation is thus at an end."

I was not the only one to find Böhme's response disturbing. A number of academics and journalists were deeply unsettled by Böhme's reaction to my whistle-blowing. Henryk M. Broder, a prominent German-Jewish journalist for Spiegel online and former contributor to JAZ, thereupon wrote to Böhme: "Now that eight Indians have chased down 500 indigenous Germans, shouting 'Germans out of Germany,' nothing can surprise me, not even the fact that you employed a staff member of an anti-Semitic rag and showed the door to another colleague who called your attention to this odd situation. Of course, you have the right to do this. And I have the right to tell you that I am no longer available to work for the JAZ."

Broder, famous for his acid pen and razor-sharp polemical essays and articles, turned the racist attack of 500 Germans, who hunted down 8 Indian immigrants through the streets of the small East German city of Mügeln in the summer of  2007, on its head to drive home the absurdity of shooting the messenger.

The popular Austrian online Jewish news site Die Jüdische (www.juedische.at) and its chief editor, Samuel Laster, reported on the clash between Broder and the JAZ, taking the position that the Central Council should exercise its influence to resolve the scandal. Dr. Dieter Graumann, Vice President of the Central Council of Jews and Böhme's "boss" at JAZ, intervened and overruled the editor. Graumann, never one to back away from a fight over left-wing anti-Semitism, directed Böhme not to employ journalists who write for Junge Welt and Junge Freiheit, a more "intellectual" right-wing weekly obsessed - like its left-wing counterpart - with bashing Jews and Israel. Both newspapers have been monitored-because of extremist content-by the Verfassungsschutz (Germany's Federal office for the protection of the constitution) - comparable with Israel's domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet.

When I wrote Böhme this past week asking if he agreed with Dr. Graumann's decision and whether he viewed the Junge Welt as anti-Semitic, he declined to comment. He answered my question with a question: Why are you interested in an incident that occurred over two years ago? I pressed further. He issued this statement: "For us, the matter is thus settled. Further, there is no anti-Semitism at the Jüdische Allgemeine. The newspaper sees itself as a campaigner against all forms of anti-Semitism."

His statement speaks volumes about Germany's impotence in combating contemporary anti-Semitism, hatred of Israel, and Islamic and Left-wing anti-Semitism in Germany. The fight is against the nebulous concept of anti-Semitism and not anti-Semites or anti-Semitic media. In short, the preoccupation is with anti-Semitism but without anti-Semites. 

A number of German journalists are marred by one-sided, shoddy and biased coverage of Israel and Jews. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, all that's necessary for anti-Semitic reporting to triumph, is for good editors to do nothing.