Anti-Semitism is still alive in Germany 70 years after the Holocaust (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views
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Seventy years after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is still alive in Germany -- and apparently getting worse.
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So concerned are Germany's lawmakers, they've just established a high-level commissioner post to fight discrimination against the Jewish community.
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Even after decades of rigorous political education and intense, self-critical soul searching, 9% to 10% of Germans express classic anti-Semitic feelings, according to a 2017 report commissioned by the Bundestag. Many more, up to 50%, harbor more mild anti-Semitic prejudices.
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The issue was catapulted to the foreground this year when, in protest against US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, demonstrators -- some waving Palestinian flags -- burned Israel's flag beneath Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and in migrant-rich neighborhoods.The ugly outbursts and a spike in anti-Semitic incidents -- insults, assaults, graffiti -- come against the backdrop of the far right's ascendance across Europe. Xenophobic populists now sit in the German parliament, too.
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the small-scale triumphs of a new nativist party called the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, Germans strike me as uniquely conscious of the atrocities that a dictatorship carried out in the name of their nation -- and its meaning for the present.
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And on the street, Jews in Germany are increasingly vulnerable: In the first half of 2017, for example, anti-Semitic crimes crept up from 654 to 681, according to German government figures. Germany's Interior Ministry says that 93% of those anti-Semitic hate crimes were perpetrated by right-wing extremists.
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The right-wing nationalists of AfD predictably rejected it out of hand, convinced as they are that Germany is self-destructively obsessed with the Nazi past.
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In light of the evidence -- and discounting the AfD's dark fantasies -- I stick to what I thought was written in stone, namely that schoolroom curricula, in high schools and immigrants' integration classes, should include on-site experiences to Nazi-era sites that are linked to in-class readings and films.