A German foundation has said it will no longer be awarding a prize for political thinking to a leading Russian-American journalist after criticizing as “unacceptable” a recent essay by the writer in which they made a comparison between Gaza and a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe.
The hypocrisy of the Heinrich Böll Foundation (and the German government in general) is incredible.
Here you have a Jewish person who is a journalist and a renowned political thinker who was being given the award for being someone who “reports on power games and totalitarian tendencies as well as civil disobedience and the love of freedom”.
They 100% have the position, right, and accuracy to be comparing the state of Gaza currently to the WWII ghettos.
Edit: Something else to note. The Foundation made this statement "“But Masha Gessen’s views should not be honored with a prize intended to commemorate the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt”.
And I can’t help but laugh. Do they not know Arendt’s past stance on Israel? She was literally one of the first world-renowned Jewish anti-Zionists.
She literally compared the Likud party to the Nazis!
This is the real, actual cancel culture, and usual suspects are silent, as expected.
Hannah Arendt prize for political thought
Genocide Expert Award Rescinded After Genocide Expert Compares Genocide To Genocide
I‘m German, currently living in Switzerland and when I recently visited Germany I was appalled by the amount of unconditional support for Israel, for example a HUGE (maybe 10x10m?) israeli flag on the offices of the Grünen party and official posters calling for solidarity. I don‘t even think this is stemming from (however undifferentiated and misguided) historical considerations, rather than geopolitical considerations. Also on the subject of the article, I think that‘s a pretty apt and carefully done comparison.
As just some asshole in America, the fierce blind support here seems to come from one of two places:
1- good old racism. just like the Irish, Italian, etc before them, jews have their “white card” with the bigots especially when the “enemy” are darker.
2- Religious nuts who think war around the holy land = the second coming and are going to root for anybody who keeps the war flowing.
I feel this really is because of plucking the historical guilt strings and “if you’re against Israel’s actions you’re an anti-semit”
But I am not in the know of the local German situation, so might as well be a wrong impression
Pretty much. It’s incredibly tiring
I wonder if in 100 years we’ll be looking at Israel like we look at Nazi Germany nowadays.
Well, if history is indeed cyclical, then in a 100 years Palestinians will have their own ethnostate and oppressing a different peoples. My guess is Kurds. /s
Not likely. Conjuring new nations out of former colonies isn’t really doable anymore.
100 years from now the MENA region will be uninhabitable due to climate heating and I doubt that anyone will want to visit it in some spacesuit.
That’s not what any of the worst case scenario in climate studies I’ve seen seem to think, what are you basing it on?
Just posting a whole big pile of stuff and saying ‘the answers probably in there somewhere and you can’t disagree until you’ve been thought it all’ is something conspiracy theorists and idiots do.
The first paper doesn’t agree with your claim so it’s pretty obvious you didn’t even read it yourself.
This is not a big pile, these are only 8 peer-reviewed papers. This is a tiny snack on a coffee-cup plate.
I read many papers every day, and I intentionally posted some that don’t 100% back up what I said so you can have more nuance.
He’s not wrong. Been saying this since week 1 of this new stage of the conflict. Others have been saying this for decades.
According to the German newspaper Die Zeit, which broke the story, the prize will still be presented to Gessen, though “in a different setting”, and on Saturday instead of Friday. It remains unclear who will present it, what they will be presenting and whether Gessen and other invited guests still plan to attend.
In the paragraph the HBS draws attention to, Gessen wrote that “ghetto” would be “the more appropriate term” to describe Gaza, but the word “would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”
On X/Twitter, they wrote that no German media representative had tried to contact them, despite the story being widely reported in German media on Thursday.
Supporters of Gessen, who is Jewish, and whose grandfather and great-grandfather were among family members murdered by the Nazis, have been quick to point out the irony of suspending a prize awarded in memory of Arendt, the German-born Jewish-American historian, philosopher and antitotalitarian political theorist who coined the phrase “the banality of evil”, in connection with the trial of leading Nazi Adolf Eichmann, which she covered as a journalist for the New Yorker.
In an open letter written with Albert Einstein and other Jewish intellectuals in 1948, Arendt had, Gessen pointed out, even compared the Israeli Freedom party to the Nazis after they used racially motivated violence against civilians.
“I am aware that this type of comparison, especially in Germany, is quickly seen as relativising the Holocaust. That’s why it’s so important to me that such a differentiated and intelligent thinker like Arendt didn’t shy away from this comparison,” Gessen told the newspaper.
Referring to people in Germany being wary of challenging “the logic of German memory policy” for fear of being accused of antisemitism, they added: “The problem is that criticism of Israel is often seen as antisemitic, which I think is the real antisemitic scandal. This overlooks the actual antisemitism.”
Good timing, I was literally editing my original comment to note that when you posted at the same time!
Thank you!
Great minds think alike, hahaha
