Historian slams German Green Party MP for praising terrorist
A prominent German historian blasted a controversial Green Party MP over his praise of a left-wing terrorist implicated in the attempted bombing of the Berlin Jewish community center and for his role in military training with Fatah against Israel.
The historian, Wolfgang Kraushaar, told Die Welt paper on Thursday “that sounds downright grotesque in my ears” when asked about Green Party politician Jürgen Trittin’s endorsement on Twitter of the antisemitic terrorist Dieter Kunzelmann.
Die Welt journalist Frederik Schindler, during the interview with Kraushaar, said that “after Kunzelmann’s death in May 2018, Trittin tweeted: ‘A great sponti is dead. R.I.P.’ – without saying a word about Kunzelmann’s antisemitism or his training units with Fatah in Jordan.”
The “Spontis” were a group of radical German left-wing activists in the 1970s.
Kraushaar told Die Welt that “one has to wonder why the Greens have not undertaken more to distance themselves from Kunzelmann. After all, he was from 1983 to 1985 a member of the Alternative List, the predecessor of the Berlin Greens. Later, he worked in the law firm of Hans-Christian Ströbele with the processing of his files. There are connections that would have made a distancing from the Greens urgently necessary. This has never happened.”
Kraushaar wrote a book titled, The Bomb in the Jewish Community Center (“Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus”) about Kunzelmann’s role in the attempted bombing in 1969. The bomb was slated to detonate during the remembrance period of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom carried out by Nazis and Germans against German Jews.
Trittin, whose father, Klaus, was a member of the Nazi Waffen SS, opposed the Bundestag’s May resolution that classified the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel as antisemitic.
Numerous Jerusalem Post press queries to Trittin and a spokesman, Lars Kreiseler, in his office were not returned.
The Green Party has been plunged into widening antisemitism scandals since October.
The long-festering issue of antisemitism within the Green Party resurfaced last month in connection with politician Claudia Roth. Roth, who agreed with sanctioning Israeli products in 2013, was accused by the best-selling German paper Bild of making antisemitism “socially respectable,” because of her meeting with an Iranian Holocaust denier.
Germany’s main neo-Nazi party and the Green Party advocated a labeling of Israeli products from the West Bank, Golan Heights and east Jerusalem territories as early as 2012.
Critics speculated that the Green Party simply plagiarized the neo-Nazi legislation to punish Jewish products when they began their advocacy for the labeling in 2013.
The EU’s top court on Tuesday
mandated a label for Jewish products from the territories. The ruling prompted charges of EU-animated antisemitism because the court only singled out Israeli goods among from the more than 100 territorial disputes across the globe for a disciplinary economic measure.
“The #EUGH [the European Court’s German acronym] has judged that products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank + the occupied territories in the #EU must be clearly declared. No more! But not less. For me, it is the right of #consumers to make an informed choice. #Righttoknow,” tweeted Green Party MP Renate Künast on Tuesday.
Künast once invoked a contemporary antisemitic conspiracy theory to describe a German organization as a “Mossad front” that seeks to advance Israel’s security and stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The Green Party has refused to answer Post queries about rising alleged rising antisemitism within its party and ranks.