Anti-Semitism is more than resentment. Anyone who promotes him will be shown the door with authorization. Especially in this country he refers to the horror of the Holocaust. Much has happened in the past legislature. There is the “BDS decision” of the Bundestag. Federal and state commissioners “raise awareness” – and one bogus debate chases the next.
Halle narrowly escaped an anti-Semitic massacre in 2019. And yet these debates increasingly appear as a blame game: a lot of life of their own, little measure and meaning. Even before any factual clarification, the case of Gil Ofarim turned out to be an example of an identity politics in which a mindful congregation grants all who present themselves as victims the power to define what is happening.
Accusations no longer need references. External marking alone creates the added value of being one of the good guys. Associated with this is a degradation of knowledge: once one could argue about factual explanations, such as those offered by Adorno: on the ideological structure of anti-Semitism, on its social circumstances, on the dispositions of its bearers. Today, such knowledge serves as a pool of set pieces from which you can help yourself to your taste. The public has turned into the sphere of Twitter denunciation.
It almost seems as if strategic groups of accusations have emerged. In the “Team Neocon” people like Henryk M. Broder prefer eco-friendly products, migrants and those who understand migrants rather than AfD comrades, some of whom sit on the bench. In the summer, a “Left Liberal Team” scandalized an election campaign advertisement as anti-Jewish, threatening Annalena Baerbock with the Ten Commandments. As a representative of this team, the author Carolin Emcke then saw anti-feminist, lateral thinking or climate-denying polemics against herself as a “structural” anti-Semitism – and received the verdict herself whether or not the “comparison”.
Meanwhile, a “team neoliberalism” à la Hans-Werner Sinn defamed criticism of excesses of financial capital as anti-Semitism – the argument originating from the obscure “Team Antideutsche”, which once wanted to distinguish “right” from “wrong” criticism of capitalism. Sometimes the agendas overlap, sometimes they collide. Then you tend to return the coach – and counter a worthwhile verdict like the one against the murmur of Hans-Georg Maaßen about “globalism” with the absurd one against Emcke.
The method of “seeing images” is shared: every symbol that could possibly also be used by anti-Semites – the image of an octopus, a half-sentence with “lifted” – becomes associatively anti-Semitism itself, even if there is no mention of Jews. Since anti-Semitism was and is highly parasitic and stocked up on all kinds of inventory, everything can suddenly be “anti-Semitic”.
Federal Commissioner Felix Klein called the pro-Palestinian philosopher Achille Mbembe anti-Semitic, but not the globalism oath Maaßen, who is a CDU member and is decidedly “for Israel”. If Nemi El-Hassan, the child of Palestinian refugees, is not allowed to host a science program because she was on a questionable demo as a teenager, this is aimed at her solidarity with the Palestinians: The novelty of the 2017-2021 season was that the leading “team for reasons of state” is increasingly also a referee. That leads to little good. A “team of critical clarification” should take over.
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