Günter Grass barred from Israel over poem
Byrnzie
Posts: 21,037
Israel's apologists playing the anti-Semitism card yet again.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ap ... rom-israel
The celebrated German author Günter Grass has been declared persona non grata in Israel following the publication of his poem warning that the Jewish state's nuclear programme was a threat to an "already fragile world peace".
...Israeli politicians and commentators said that Grass had disqualified himself from criticising Israeli policies by his service as a young man in the Nazi Waffen SS. Some said the poem was thinly disguised antisemitism, a response predicted by Grass in his poem. Netanyahu issued a statement denouncing the poem and its author.
On Sunday, Israel's interior minister Eli Yishai used a law permitting a bar on entry to former Nazis to declare Grass persona non grata for his "attempt to fan the flames of hatred against the state of Israel and its people, and thus to advance the idea to which he publicly affiliated in his past donning of the SS uniform".
Yishai's statement added: "If Gunter wants to continue to spread his twisted and lying works, I suggest he does this from Iran, where he can find a supportive audience."
Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, added his voice to the storm of criticism, saying Grass's poem was the expression of "egoism of so-called western intellectuals who are willing to sacrifice the Jewish people on the altar of crazy anti-Semites for a second time, just to sell a few more books or gain recognition".
Speaking during a meeting with the Italian prime minister, Mario Monti, Lieberman demanded condemnation from European leaders. "We have witnessed in the past how small seeds of antisemitic hate can turn into a large fire that harms all of humanity."
...Amid the torrent of denunciation, some Israeli commentators said Grass had raised an important issue and that criticism of Israeli policies was routinely portrayed as antisemitism.
Writing on the +972 website, Larry Derfner said: "Günter Grass told the truth, he was brave in telling it, he was brave in admitting that he'd been drafted into the Waffen SS as a teenager, and by speaking out against an Israeli attack on Iran, he's doing this country a great service at some personal cost while most Israelis and American Jews are safely following the herd behind Bibi [Netanyahu] over the cliff."
Gideon Levy, the Haaretz columnist, wrote that Grass and other critics of Israeli policies were "not anti-Semites, they are expressing the opinions of many people".
"Instead of accusing them, we should consider what we did that led them to express it," he said.
What Must Be Said - Günter Grass
But why have I kept silent till now?
Because I thought my own origins,
Tarnished by a stain that can never be removed,
meant I could not expect Israel, a land
to which I am, and always will be, attached,
to accept this open declaration of the truth.
Why only now, grown old,
and with what ink remains, do I say:
Israel's atomic power endangers
an already fragile world peace?
Because what must be said
may be too late tomorrow;
and because – burdened enough as Germans –
we may be providing material for a crime
that is foreseeable, so that our complicity
wil not be expunged by any
of the usual excuses.
And granted: I've broken my silence
because I'm sick of the West's hypocrisy;
and I hope too that many may be freed
from their silence, may demand
that those responsible for the open danger we face renounce the use of force,
may insist that the governments of
both Iran and Israel allow an international authority
free and open inspection of
the nuclear potential and capability of both.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ap ... rom-israel
The celebrated German author Günter Grass has been declared persona non grata in Israel following the publication of his poem warning that the Jewish state's nuclear programme was a threat to an "already fragile world peace".
...Israeli politicians and commentators said that Grass had disqualified himself from criticising Israeli policies by his service as a young man in the Nazi Waffen SS. Some said the poem was thinly disguised antisemitism, a response predicted by Grass in his poem. Netanyahu issued a statement denouncing the poem and its author.
On Sunday, Israel's interior minister Eli Yishai used a law permitting a bar on entry to former Nazis to declare Grass persona non grata for his "attempt to fan the flames of hatred against the state of Israel and its people, and thus to advance the idea to which he publicly affiliated in his past donning of the SS uniform".
Yishai's statement added: "If Gunter wants to continue to spread his twisted and lying works, I suggest he does this from Iran, where he can find a supportive audience."
Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, added his voice to the storm of criticism, saying Grass's poem was the expression of "egoism of so-called western intellectuals who are willing to sacrifice the Jewish people on the altar of crazy anti-Semites for a second time, just to sell a few more books or gain recognition".
Speaking during a meeting with the Italian prime minister, Mario Monti, Lieberman demanded condemnation from European leaders. "We have witnessed in the past how small seeds of antisemitic hate can turn into a large fire that harms all of humanity."
...Amid the torrent of denunciation, some Israeli commentators said Grass had raised an important issue and that criticism of Israeli policies was routinely portrayed as antisemitism.
Writing on the +972 website, Larry Derfner said: "Günter Grass told the truth, he was brave in telling it, he was brave in admitting that he'd been drafted into the Waffen SS as a teenager, and by speaking out against an Israeli attack on Iran, he's doing this country a great service at some personal cost while most Israelis and American Jews are safely following the herd behind Bibi [Netanyahu] over the cliff."
Gideon Levy, the Haaretz columnist, wrote that Grass and other critics of Israeli policies were "not anti-Semites, they are expressing the opinions of many people".
"Instead of accusing them, we should consider what we did that led them to express it," he said.
What Must Be Said - Günter Grass
But why have I kept silent till now?
Because I thought my own origins,
Tarnished by a stain that can never be removed,
meant I could not expect Israel, a land
to which I am, and always will be, attached,
to accept this open declaration of the truth.
Why only now, grown old,
and with what ink remains, do I say:
Israel's atomic power endangers
an already fragile world peace?
Because what must be said
may be too late tomorrow;
and because – burdened enough as Germans –
we may be providing material for a crime
that is foreseeable, so that our complicity
wil not be expunged by any
of the usual excuses.
And granted: I've broken my silence
because I'm sick of the West's hypocrisy;
and I hope too that many may be freed
from their silence, may demand
that those responsible for the open danger we face renounce the use of force,
may insist that the governments of
both Iran and Israel allow an international authority
free and open inspection of
the nuclear potential and capability of both.
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
Seriously, how much longer will people continue to pander to this bullshit?
it speaks volumes that this man with a pen and paper or a keyboard is somehow dangerous or a threat because of what he wrote. i think what he is asking in that poem is a completely reasonable request. if israel wants to go to war over a suspected iranian nuclear weapons program, why on earth can't israel's nuke program, that they have never formally admitted having nuclear weapons, not be held to the same scrutiny as those that they are seemingly hell bent on attacking??
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
But yeah, sorry, as far as I'm concerned, any opinion on Israel espoused by Nazis (or former Nazis) is kinda auto-disqualified. I would prefer Israel not preemptively attack Iran, but what this Grass fellow has to say about it, I couldn't care less.
I believe that it was all voluntary throughout the entire war. I could be wrong... You were a badass (to the party) if you joined the SS in Nazi Germany.
that said, i am not sure how strict or lax those criteria were in 1945 when they were having old men and children defending berlin.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Those old men and children were forced into the Heer. They were the ones surrendering while the SS continued to fight until death. I know the proof of ancestry requirement was dropped later on.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
"what a long, strange trip it's been"
Because I thought my own origins,
Tarnished by a stain that can never be removed,
meant I could not expect Israel, a land
to which I am, and always will be, attached,
to accept this open declaration of the truth.
to acknowledge his past at the beginning , I think , gives what he writes more weight. I see nothing antisemetic in this at all. States very simply that the politicians in BOTH Israel and Iran need to be more open about these programs for the worlds sake.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
From Wiki for those who are wondering if Grass was an SS:
"Grass attended the Danzig Gymnasium Conradinum. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst. In November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, he volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine, "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered, in a negative way, civic Catholic lower middle class.[8][9] However, he was not accepted by the Navy and instead was drafted into the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg.[10] With the Panzer Division he saw active combat from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945, captured in Marienbad and sent to an American prisoner-of-war camp. His homecountry was taken over by Soviet and Polish administration and he thus was not able to return home, finding refuge in western Germany.
His military service became the subject of debate in 2006, after he disclosed in an interview and a book that he had been conscripted into the Waffen SS while still a teenager.[11]"
Until the bit where he was drafted to the Panzer division, which mainly consisted of conscripts, he was in the 'normal' army. Wounded and captured after 5 months....
Grass was not a Nazi or SS, as 'we' generally understand SS or Nazi.
And that is entirely possible. The Waffen were your soldiers, fighters. They fought like an army.
The Allgemeine SS were the ones that ran the camps and acted more as guards than actual soldiers.
This Grass fellow won the Nobel prize for literature.
This may come as a shock to you, but not all Nazis were bad people. Most were, but some were just misguided and had no idea of what was happening to the Jews.
I take it you've heard of Oscar Schindler? He was a member of the Nazi party. Would you dismiss his opinions out of hand because of that?
You ever heard of a man named John Rabe? He's regarded as the Schindler of China. He saved the lives of approx 250,000 people during the rape of Nanjing by the Japanese.
Did you vote for George W Bush? If so, is your conscience clear today considering that you supported a President with the blood of millions on his hands?
Maybe the opinions of anyone who voted for that idiot shouldn't be given any weight today?
As for Gunter Grass, it's already been established that he was drafted into the SS.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zei ... -3,00.html
"It was not a misdeed on my part. I was drafted, as many thousands of others were. I didn't volunteer for the Waffen-SS. The end of the war liberated me from the pledge of blind obedience. After that, I knew that I would never take an oath again."
And he even opposed German reunification on the grounds that Germans still deserved to be punished for their part in WWII:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/featur ... kenos.html
'[Grass believes that] Germany still owes a debt to humanity,[...] namely the one it incurred as perpetrator of the Holocaust. Germany’s division is the price it pays for Auschwitz. [He believes that] division symbolizes Germany’s guilt and ever-present acknowledgment of its wrongdoing.'
Anyway, this is clearly just another excuse for Israel to brandish the Antisemitism card, as they will do at every available opportunity in an attempt to deflect criticism of their crimes. An attack on Iran would be a crime of massive proportions, but somehow we're being led to believe that opposing such a crime makes you an anti-Semite.
I agree, B, why bother with facts when you've got really strong opinions and assumptions?
remember how everyone came together after 9/11 and you were considered "unpatriotic" and told to get the fuck out of the country if you did not support the wars in afghanistan and iraq? the same thing happened in germany, only you were forced to comply by the barrel of a luger...if not they murdered you or put you in a camp for treason...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
The idea that Germans didn't know about the holocaust (and the other atrocities committed by the Nazis) is also not true. I was in Berlin a few years ago and distinctly remember a very good museum exhibition that dealt with the fact that the holocaust was essentially common knowledge within Germany. The exact scope and horror of it may not have sunk in, but the fact that Jews (and other undesirables) were being systematically killed was no secret.
I don't think Grass is an antisemite. I don't entirely agree with his position, but it's certainly a legitimate position to take.
The "Israeli" response is, as the article notes, not uniform. What many of you are presenting as the monolithic "Israeli" reaction is the response of a bunch of the rightwing nutbags and idiots who are in the current governing coalition. Eli Yishai and Avigdor Lieberman are bat-shit crazy. They certainly do not represent the Israeli mainstream.
....Perhaps it reads better in the German, or perhaps Grass is simply T.S. Eliot’s inferior in anti-Semitic poetry, but put aside the poem’s aesthetic shortcomings and consider the idea advanced in the first two lines: That Israel, which in reality is contemplating targeting six to eight nuclear sites in Iran for conventional aerial bombardment, in fact wants to annihilate the Iranian people in a “first strike.”
This is, of course, delusional. Not even the Iranian regime seems to believe this. To make yourself believe that Israel is seeking to murder the 74 million people of Iran, you must make yourself believe that the leaders of the Jewish state outstrip Adolf Hitler in genocidal intent.
.....
Grass isn’t the only prominent European to perform a complete inversion of cause-and-effect in his attempt to demonize Israel.So let’s be clear: Israel is contemplating an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities because the Iranian regime openly labels Israel a cancer that must be eradicated and because Iran is the prime sponsor of Muslim terrorists who seek Israel’s physical elimination. The goal of an Israeli attack would be to deny the Ayatollahs the means of bringing that about. (Whether this is a wise course of action, for Israel or for the U.S., which is also contemplating an attack, is another matter.)
That's why I'm here. To help.
I see you chose to edit my post and pick out just one sentence while ignoring the rest. Oscar Schindler was a Nazi. Was he also a supporter of the camps then in your opinion?
No it doesn't, as has been proven here again and again, and as you must be fully aware by now.
It's not called helping, it's called trolling.
Good. I hope so.
Questions periodically arise about whether or not Iranian President Ahmadinejad's statement that he wants to see Israel "wiped off the map" really means, in the original Farsi, that he seeks the elimination of the Jewish state. I republish here, then, a handy list of Ahmadinejad's statements on the subject. Judge for yourself what he hopes to see happen to Israel:
October, 2005: "Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine... I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world. But we must be aware of tricks."
July, 2006: "Nations in the region will be more furious every day. It won't take long before the wrath of the people turns into a terrible explosion that will wipe the Zionist entity off the map...The basic problem in the Islamic world is the existence of the Zionist regime, and the Islamic world and the region must mobilize to remove this problem. It is a usurper that our enemies made and imposed on the Muslim world, a regime that prevented the progress of the region's nations, a regime that all Muslims must join hands in isolating worldwide."
August, 2006: "Our position on the Middle East is clear. We want the root of tensions to be removed. During these sixty years what was the root of massacres, crimes and conflicts?...The solution is clear and nothing has changed."
October, 2006: "This regime (Israel) will be gone, definitely..."You (the Western powers) should know that any government that stands by the Zionist regime from now on will not see any result but the hatred of the people...The wrath of the region's people is boiling... You should not complain that we did not give a warning. We are saying this explicitly now..."
November, 2006: "The great powers created the Zionist regime to extend their domination in the region. Every day this regime is massacring Palestinians...As this regime goes against the path of life, we will soon see its disappearance and its destruction."
December, 2006: "The Zionist regime is on the slope of disappearance and the freedom movement and the struggles of the Palestinian people have more success every day...It is the religious duty of all Muslims to stand by the Palestines...The continued crimes of the Zionist regime will only accelerate the downfall of this fake regime."
December, 2006: "I want to tell [Western counties] that just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and does not exist anymore, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out and humanity will be free."
June, 2007: ''God willing, in the near future we will witness the destruction of the corrupt occupier regime..."
June, 2007: ''In Lebanon, the corrupt, arrogant powers and the Zionist regime did all they could in an unfair 33-day war. But after 60 years [Israel's] greatness fell apart...The countdown to this regime's destruction started through the hands of Hezbollah's children...We will witness the destruction of this regime in the near future thanks to the endeavours of all Palestinian and Lebanese fighters.''
August, 2007: "Our support (for the Palestinian people) is unconditional. As for the Israelis, let them go find somewhere else."
August, 2007: "The Zionist regime is the standard bearer of invasion, occupation and Satan...When the philosophy behind the establishment of a regime is in question, it is not unlikely that it will find itself on a course of decline and dissolution."
October 5, 2007: "Canada and Alaska have vast lands, why don't you relocate them over there and keep helping them over there with (aid of) 30 to 40 billion dollars per year for building a new existence over there?"
November, 2007: "It is impossible that the Zionist regime will survive. Collapse is in the nature of this regime because it has been created on aggression, lying, oppression and crime..."
January, 2008: "I advise you to abandon the filthy Zionist entity which has reached the end of the line... It has lost its reason to be and will sooner or later fall. The ones who still support the criminal Zionists should know that the occupiers' days are numbered."
February, 2008: "World powers have created a black and dirty microbe named the Zionist regime and have unleashed it like a savage animal on the nations of the region."
March, 2008: "Gaza is the beginning, the real issue is elsewhere. They should know that both in the prelude and in the real thing they face a defeat and this time they will be uprooted."
April, 2008: "The time has come to see the weakness and collapse of the Zionist regime and its supporters. They are doing everything in order to save it, but they will not succeed."
May, 2008: "Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken... Today the reason for the Zionist regime's existence is questioned and this regime is on its way to annihilation...has reached the end like a dead rat after being slapped by the Lebanese."
June, 2008: "(Israel) has reached the end of its function and will soon disappear off the geographical domain."
B, I'm surprised you didn't already know that, given how "knowledgeable" you are on this particular subject.
In all seriousness, I'm impressed by how widely read you are on Israel-Palestine, but it strikes me that all your sources are of the same ideological slant. I think you are reading sources that largely conform to your preconceived notions, which has left something of a gap in your knowledge.
In some ways, the continuing row over his call for the complete destruction of Israel must baffle Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. All he did, after all, was to turn up at a routine anti-Zionist event and repeat the standard line—laid down by the Ayatollah Khomeini and thus considered by some to be beyond repeal—that the state of Israel is illegitimate and must be obliterated. There's nothing new in that. In the early '90s, I can remember seeing, in the areas around Baalbek in Lebanon that were dominated by Hezbollah and Amal, large posters of the by-then-late Khomeini embellished (in English) with the slogan, "Israel Must Be Completely Destroyed!" And I have twice been to Friday prayers in Tehran itself, addressed by leading mullahs and by former President Rafsanjani, where the more terse version (Marg bar Esrail—"Death to Israel") is chanted as a matter of routine; sometimes as an applause line to an especially deft clerical thrust.
No, what worries me more about Ahmadinejad is his devout belief in the return of the "occulted" or 12th imam and his related belief that, when he himself spoke recently at the United Nations, the whole scene was suffused with a sublime green light that held all his audience in a state of suspended animation. This uncultured jerk is, of course, only a puppet figure with no real power, but this choice of puppet by the theocracy is unsettling in itself. So is Iran's complete lack of embarrassment at being caught, time and again, with nuclear enrichment facilities that have never been declared to the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
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However, words and details and nuances do matter in all this, so I was not surprised to see professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan denying that Ahmadinejad, or indeed Khomeini, had ever made this call for the removal of Israel from the map. Cole is a minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community. At one point, there was a danger that he would become a go-to person for quotes in New York Times articles (a sort of Shiite fellow-traveling version of Norman Ornstein, if such an alarming phenomenon can be imagined), but this crisis appears to have passed.
Cole continues to present himself as an expert on Shiism and on the Persian, Arabic, and Urdu tongues. Let us see how his claim vindicates itself in practice. Here is what he wrote on the "Gulf 2000" e-mail chat-list on April 22:
It bears repeating as long as the accusation is made. Ahmadinejad did not "threaten" to "wipe Israel off the map." I'm not sure there is even such an idiom in Persian. He quoted Khomeini to the effect that "the Occupation regime must end" (ehtelal bayad az bayn berad). And, no, it is not the same thing. It is about what sort of regime people live under, not whether they exist at all. Ariel Sharon, after all, made the Occupation regime in Gaza end.
There are two separate but related matters here. For a start, let us look at the now-famous speech that Ahmadinejad actually gave at the Interior Ministry on Oct. 26, 2005. (I am using the translation made by Nazila Fathi of the New York Times Tehran bureau, whose Persian is probably the equal of Professor Cole's.) The relevant portions read:
Our dear Imam [Khomeini] said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. … Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. … For over fifty years the world oppressor tried to give legitimacy to the occupying regime, and it has taken measures in this direction to stabilize it.
Ahmadinejad then denounced the recent Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over Gaza as a sellout and added, "If we get through this brief period successfully, the path of eliminating the occupying regime will be easy and down-hill."
Not even Professor Cole will dispute that, in the above passages, the term "occupying regime" means Israel and the term "world oppressor" stands for the United States. (The title of the conference, incidentally, was The World Without Zionism.) In fact, Khomeini's injunctions are referred to twice. Quite possibly, "wiped off the map" is slightly too free a translation of what he originally said, and what it is mandatory for his followers to repeat. So, I give it below, in Persian and in English, and let you be the judge:
Esrail ghiyam-e mossalahaane bar zed-e mamaalek-e eslami nemoodeh ast va bar doval va mamaalek-eeslami ghal-o-gham aan lazem ast.
My source here is none other than a volume published by the Institute for Imam Khomeini. Here is the translation:
Israel has declared armed struggle against Islamic countries and its destruction is a must for all governments and nations of Islam.
This is especially important, and is also the reason for the wide currency given to the statement: It is making something into a matter of religious duty. The term "ghal-o-gham" is an extremely strong and unambivalent one, of which a close equivalent rendering would be "annihilate."
Professor Cole has completely missed or omitted the first reference in last October's speech, skipped to the second one, and flatly misunderstood the third. (The fourth one, about "eliminating the occupying regime," I would say speaks for itself.) He evidently thinks that by "occupation," Khomeini and Ahmadinejad were referring to the Israeli seizure of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. But if this were true, it would not have been going on for "more than fifty years" now, would it? The 50th anniversary of 1967 falls in 2017, which is a while off. What could be clearer than that "occupation regime" is a direct reference to Israel itself?
One might have thought that, if the map-wiping charge were to have been inaccurate or unfair, Ahmadinejad would have denied it. But he presumably knew what he had said and had meant to say. In any case, he has an apologist to do what he does not choose to do for himself. But this apologist, who affects such expertise in Persian, cannot decipher the plain meaning of a celebrated statement and is, furthermore, in need of a remedial course in English.
Not trolling, educating.
It is impossible not to hear echoes of Hitler's Final Solution in such threats. After Auschwitz, the Jews cannot afford not to take them seriously. It cannot gamble with its very existence.