‘When will the struggle begin against that sacred cow Israel?’
Book shines spotlight on German leftist anti-semitic terror of 1960s and ‘70s
BERLIN – The extension of Hitler’s antiSemitism dressed up as pro- Palestinian ideology in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s plays an important role in a new book on terrorism and anti- Semitism in the Federal Republic.
The book’s title is a quote from leftwing terrorist Dieter Kunzelmann: “When Will the Struggle Begin Against that Sacred Cow Israel?” and is splashed across the hardcover edition of the massive tome. The subtitle reads “On the anti- Semitic Roots of German Terrorism.”
The nearly 900- page book by Dr. Wolfgang Kraushaar hit bookstores and magazine shops on Friday, triggering riveting reviews in the German media about the origins of leftist anti- Semitic terrorism.
Kraushaar is a political scientist at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.
Die Welt headlined its article on Friday, “The repressed murder of Jews during the 1970s.”
“Why is this chapter of German history not well known?” the article asks in connection with Kraushaar’s book. “In 1970, 55 people died within 11 days caused by bomb package attacks, an arson attack and attempted plane hijackings.” The goal of the attacks, writes Mara Delius, from Die Welt, was to kill “Israelis and Jews.”
The arson attack took place at the Jewish community center in Munich and the attempted hijacking of an El Al flight at the Munich- Riem airport. A Palestinian terrorist group detonated hand grenades and killed a young Israeli passenger. Nine other people were severely wounded.
The German government did not prosecute the Palestinians and expelled them from Germany. The explanation for the release: The authorities said they “wanted to contribute to a relaxation of the situation in the Arab world.”
Kraushaar, 64, is no stranger to investigations into German extreme leftists and their terrorist campaigns against Jews and the State of Israel since the late 1960s. He wrote a book analyzing Kunzelmann’s reported plan in 1969 to blow up the Jewish community center in West Berlin. The 2005 book The Bomb in the Jewish Community Center reconstructs Kunzelmann’s terror- animated anti- Israel writings and activities.
Kunzelmann and a group of leftist Germans aimed to detonate the bomb on November 9 – the memorial day for the victims of the Nazi- sponsored Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938 against Jewish businesses – when roughly 250 people were in attendance in the community center.
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, an Israeli expert on modern European anti- Semitism, wrote in 2006: “The importance of Kraushaar’s book thus goes far beyond elucidating an early anti- Semitic and potentially murderous crime of the German extreme Left. It shows how intimidation motifs and acts of violence, which since have threatened many democratic societies, partially originated in the contacts between left- wing European intellectual circles, extreme leftists and Palestinian terrorists.”
Kraushaar sharply criticized a 2012 Der Spiegel report that sought to rewrite the 1972 Munich Olympic murders as a product of neo- Nazism. He placed the blame squarely on German leftists for complicity in Palestinian Black September’s murder of 11 Israeli sportsmen at the Olympic Games.
Writing in the German Jewish newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine Wochenzeitung, Kraushaar said the Der Spiegel article’s emphasis on the role of neo- Nazis in the attack is “blown up.”
“It was not ‘ Brown [ Nazi] help,’ as Der Spiegel writes, but rather a joint work of German Left radicals and Palestinian terrorists,” Kraushaar wrote.