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.

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