Nine months into the new parliament’s four-year term, the MPs sent to Berlin by the Alternative für Deutschland have proven just as disruptive as previously feared: Just last weekend, the AfD caucus’s parliamentary leader Alexander Gauland, speaking at a conference of the party’s youth organization, aggressively proclaimed that, "Hitler and the Nazis are but a speck of bird sh*t in more than 1,000 years of successful German history."
Later at the same convention, the delegates jointly performed all three stanzas of the German national anthem, including the notorious lines closely identified with the Nazi period: "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles." [...]
The AfD, alas, is anything but a friend of the Jews: While the party makes a point of embracing Israel and portraying itself as a bulwark against anti-Semitic Muslims, it not only fails to address its own indigenous Jew-hatred - as evidenced by Gauland’s egregious Nazi relativism - but also directly attacks pillars of the Jewish faith, through intermittent calls to outlaw circumcision and ban ritual slaughter. The AfD is a self-declared "ally" that does not solve any of our - very real - problems but only creates a number of new ones. [...]
In a time when hatred of Israel on the left and among Muslim and Arab immigrants joins forces with traditional right-wing and populist Jew-hatred, civic protest against anti-Semitism matters more than ever.
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