Zachary Gallant

The AfD has been trying to polarize Jews against migration, mostly of Muslims, [for a long time]. This has long been a strategy. The AfD talks about “imported antisemitism.” In my first years in Germany, my closest friends were from countries that Germany accuses of being the sources of imported antisemitism. I have noticed German antisemitism being a significantly more dangerous entity than imported antisemitism.

What I think is vital, when Germans talk about imported antisemitism, is to talk about the year 1941 and the decision by Adolf Hitler to support Iraqi independence against British colonialism, in a German colonial move to gain Iraqi resources and undermine British and French wartime maneuvers. Hitler’s decision to support Iraq led to Nazi propaganda being translated into Arabic and widely dispersed through mass amounts of money and printing presses into organizations throughout the Middle East, through Iraq, through the Muslim Brotherhood.

This was the first time in Arabic history that exterminationist antisemitism entered the Arabic language. There had been antisemitism. I’m not going to deny that, but the idea of the Jews as a race that needed to be exterminated was something the Germans translated into Arabic and spread widely. When we talk about imported antisemitism from that space, it’s only because of what Germany brought there in the 1940s. It created a whole new kind of antisemitism.

When Julius Streicher was in the dock in the Nuremberg trials, he declared that the model for antisemitism was Martin Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lies.” The antisemitism in that is just astounding. Antisemitism has been sitting deep in German culture for over five hundred years; it didn’t need to be imported.