Germany’s Prime Minister conveniently leaves out Israel’s xenophobia and racism in Holocaust remembrance speech

By Scotty Reid

Warning his country to safe guard against xenophobia and racism, Prime Minster Frank-Walter Steinmeier joined Holocaust survivors at a ceremony today marking 70 years since the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen that is located near Berlin.

In his remarks, Steinmeier said Germany had an enduring responsibility not to forget its horrific Nazi past and today it must “stand against injustice, against any form of xenophobia and discrimination.”

“Do we want to live in a country where there is still anti-Semitism and exclusion? Where asylum homes are set on fire? Where a young man is beaten up on a Berlin subway because he is a Jew, a country where people take to the streets in packs to rant dull slogans against anything they see as foreign, is that our country?… This is not the open country which the vast majority of Germans want.” Steinmeier said.

He also cited Germany’s long-standing diplomatic relations with Israel, a “Jewish” state created with backing from the UN on Palestinian land colonized by the British. This of course displaced an untold number of Palestinian families leading many to question why Palestinian’s have to pay for Europe’s crimes against Jews.

Steinmeier said that, in view of such horrors, it “seems like a miracle” that Germany and Israel now have a “deep friendship”, marked by 50 years of diplomatic ties and a renewed “flowering of Jewish life” in Germany.

So much for Germany standing against “injustice, xenophobia and discrimination” in Israel. The greatest injustice is that for Germany’s crimes against a religious minority in Europe, with collaboration of course from other European nations, it was the Palestinians who were punished with the creation of Israel on their land. Palestine was a British colony and as colonizers, it has no standing to give consent to turn over Palestine land to create a Jewish state. A case could be made that the British owe Palestinians reparations for the crimes against them because of their former colonizers turning over Palestine to Jewish colonizers.

The xenophobia in Israel, while not the focus of much mainstream coverage, is quite atrocious. Also missing from the headlines is the fact that Israel admitted to running a sterilization program to control African immigrant birthrates but the Black Jewish community, a minority group, suffered a drastic reduction in its birthrate. All of this was done with the goal of maintaining a Ashkenazim (European/German) majority in Israel.

Prime Minster Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s words about standing against injustice, xenophobia and discrimination ring hollow while his country and the rest of the world ignores the fact that Israel is committing grave human rights violations towards Palestinians, African immigrants/refugees and its non-white citizens. The last point highlighted by the recent Israeli elections when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told non-Arab Israelis that his opponents were driving Arab voters to the polls in droves playing upon racist attitudes in the country to win re-election.