Anti-Semitic Hate For Sale in Germany

Anti-Semitic books are not permitted in Germany. Authors and publishers of anti-Semitic literature usually face the full brunt of the law, without regard to their nationality. Public presentation of anti-Semitic literature in Germany is simply not tolerated.

Of course, there are exceptions, for instance when the publisher is the Iranian state, as Matthias Küntzel observed at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2005:

"In fact the international publishers in Hall 5 at the Frankfurt Book Fair were not on my program. Having a few minutes before my train was to leave, however, I dropped by and was astonished to see the extent to which Iran was represented in the hall. The Iranian stands seemed to take up as much space as those of all the countries of the Arab League together.

Now, it is well known that the Iranian leadership is dedicated to wiping out the existence of a state member of the United Nations, namely Israel. And it is also well known that to this end, Tehran exports a crude anti-Semitism throughout the world.

Nonetheless, I was astonished how openly this occurred at the Book Fair. ...

There was, for instance, under the heading "Jewish Conspiracy", the text that influenced Hitler's anti-Semitism like no other work: The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", here in an edition published by the "Islamic Propagation Organization" of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Matthias Küntzel presents other amazing examples of anti-Semitic literature at the Iranian stands. I found this quote from one of the books particularly enlightening, from a strictly German point of view of course:

"The numerous footnotes added to the text by the Iranian publisher are particularly interesting. We find, for instance, talk of an "expansion of power" of the Jews during the Second World War ... and of German "resistance" against this "Jewish control"... (emphasis added)

Hmm... German "resistance" against this "Jewish control". Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Goebbels as leaders of the resistance? Freedom fighters, perhaps?

But there are other, more serious questions. Like this one from zombietime:

Is Germany, by blindly adhering to a universal tolerance of all views, unwittingly opening itself up again to a new wave of anti-Semitism -- the very thing that their ultra-tolerant society was created to ensure would never happen again?

The same source also reports on some cozy business deals between Iran and German publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

So, it's strictly business, nothing personal. After all, you wouldn't want to spoil German-Iranian economic relations would you, Israel?

Good old-fashioned anti-Semitic Literature,
as seen at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2005

Note from David: By mistake, we erased a comment from James to our posting. Here it is:
"Gee if that came from the International Book Fair in Frankfurt (Frankfurt's largest fair), was that from

The fictional section
The non-fictinal section
Romance

Medienkritik's readers should also be aware that Germany feels that regulating the German book market is also beneficial to German society...  If you can't burn em, regulate em..."

Comments

[hobo]

Of course there won`t be a public outcry im Germany`s media, there hasn`t been one last year. Even not when Schroeder opened the book fair together with a holocaust denier: http://www.wadinet.de/analyse/iraq/holocaust-denier.htm
Right, who wants to be a fussy eurocentric.

[FranzisM]

North Korea had also been invited, but refused to attend.

[FranzisM]

And next weekend in Berlin: The Al Qods Day Rally

Counterprotests in the recent years have caused the Hisballah sympathizers to change their banners from "death to Israel" to "peaceful coexistence". In contrast, the Frankfurt book fair has the Iranian propaganda without any cosmetic surgery.

[Deist]

Sorry folks ..
I have some problems identifying what exactly it is you criticize now.

Do you criticize that Iran prints such books, or that Germany "allows" such books in the fair or something else i didnt see yet ?

[Mike H.]

@Deist, how 'bout both. Do you think that anti semitism is proper in one venue and not the other?

[euroneuzeit]

In Germany, the publication of such literature is forbidden by law. It is not only strange that few people care about such presentations of anti-Semitic texts at the Book Fair, printed by the Islamic Propaganda Organization of Iran. It is strange that authorities don't care. There is an explicitly paragraph 130 in the StGB (criminal code) named "Volksverhetzung" (incitement of the people). If someone went through the streets and distributed such crap with the Elders of Zion he would most likely find himself in a prison cell and his car and home would be searched for more stuff like that to be confiscated. Unlike the US where this is free speech I think. Here, it is definately not. The thing to be angry about is basically that law is ignored here, maybe in favor of false tolerance. This sort of expression can be found elsewhere too, very openly in the United States. It is forbidden in Germany for good reason. And certainly a state with the openly admitted intention to destroy Israel is not the first one to be excused pointing at free speech.

[Deist]

@euroneuzeit:
" The thing to be angry about is basically that law is ignored here, maybe in favor of false tolerance."
I can understand that. And i would agree. What strikes me however is the way the original article was written. It was asked what this or that person says... Its easy to assume that they simply ignore the books. But everybody should know that a simply call to the police would normally solve that problem, no matter whether the people at "Deutsche Welle" ignore the books or not. The police cant so simply ignore it.

@Mike H.
"Deist, how 'bout both. Do you think that anti semitism is proper in one venue and not the other?"
Whether antisemitism is "proper" or not is actually not the question for me.

[G M Roper]

David, this is especially pernicious in light of the recent "honor killings" in Berlin. Where is the outrage?

Has political correctness trumped common sense?

Note from David: That's the default position in Germany.

[FranzisM]

This is nothing which should depend on some alert guest's spontaneous cellphone call to the police. If the police doesn't by itself monitor the public relations activities of terror-sponsoring governments then there's a national security problem with much broader implications. Either these responsible for this evil propaganda get the Ernst Zündel treatment by default, or the Volksverhetzung law is worth as much as an emergency exit sign in a building without an emergency exit - less than nothing.

What a sad irony that the same Otto Schily who has just been prancing that "freedom of the press in the country does not justify breaking the law" is too cowardly to live up to that principle when it is tested in reality. What a sad irony that Germany is raiding our own journalists when the government leaks documents that expose Iran is a sponsor of terrorism, but does not apply the same standard when the same terrorist-sponsoring Iran is trying to promote the vision of the terrorists into Germany. Looks as if the only wrong of the Nazis had been that they didn't talk about Allah, or more precisely as if even the most pro-Western member of the outgoing government was a closet Khomeinist.

[Deist]

FranzisM:
"This is nothing which should depend on some alert guest's spontaneous cellphone call to the police. If the police doesn't by itself monitor the public relations activities of terror-sponsoring governments then there's a national security problem with much broader implications."
I politely disagree. This is a book fair in a (theoretically) free country and not a state controlled observation room containing criminals.
I think that in order to be consistent with your ideas about iran it would be better to demand that they shouldnt be invited in the first place. (we could perhaps agree on that btw.)

Now that they (and many others) are here it is not the job of the police to control every single incident where "someone" from "some country" with a history of bad conduct might do something. (i hope you agree that this would simply be impossible anyway).

What i find so striking is that the author of the article SAW these books and did NOTHING besides mentioning them in his text blaming everyone ELSE. Obviously he was angry but he didnt feel any "real need" to go to the authorities himself. He asked rethorical questions in his text but didnt address them to the people really.

Strange because it renders his blame for the people of lets say "Deutsche Welle" a bit senseless. He blames some folks for things he didnt do either, not even knowing what they really think or saw !

As for the incident itself.
I dont like the german law censoring such texts anyway. They dont really archieve anything except for the uncontrolled secret spreading of these books.

I think it is very important that everybody reads the protocols once and gets information about its background in order to know what is going on. Only then will people really have no excuse if they remain inactive.

You can always say "i didnt know".... thats the problem in germany. It has been the problem and it remains.

[Cousin Dave]

@Deist:

"What i find so striking is that the author of the article SAW these books and did NOTHING besides mentioning them in his text blaming everyone ELSE. Obviously he was angry but he didnt feel any "real need" to go to the authorities himself. He asked rethorical questions in his text but didnt address them to the people really."

I can absolutely understand your sentiment. It's like the old saying about the Jews, the Catholics, and the trade unionists. However, I will say one thing in the author's defense:

My understanding of the situation is that the anti-Nazi speech laws in Germany have (at least until recently) been considered a "sacred" point of German law -- that is, even scofflaws and petty criminals would not consider going there, and there was widespread support for throwing the book at anyone who did break these laws. Now, we have a situation where this important law is very clearly and obviously being violated, and it's equally clear that the authorities must know about it (there's now way they couldn't), and do not intend to do anything. It's a bit like if you were to come across a bank robbery in progress, and saw the police drive by and just wave to the robbers as they went. It would make you wonder what kind of connections the robbers have. In our situation, we have Iranians who can be a heck of a lot more dangerous than bank robbers, and the police are smiling and waving like all get-out, meanwhile pretending that they don't see anything. I think under the circumstances it would be reasonable for a citizen who wishes to make a stink about it to wonder if he's suddenly going to find that he has no police protection, and is going to get a visit from the guy who says "Nice family you have, shame if anything should happen to them", or whatever the equivalent is in Arabic.

[Matt]

I also find it hard to understand the inaction of the German police and prosecutors, who are letting anti-Semitic hate literature be displayed in public, contrary to German law. This is not taking place in someone's apartment or some other private location, but rather in the country's leading publishing trade fair. How much more open, public, and brazen could it be?

Also, no one forced the organizers of the fair to permit this kind of display. Do they take no responsibility for what is shown to the public on their own premises? Even in the U.S., which does not have a law comparable to Germany's, the organizers of the fair would come under unofficial pressure from the public to put a stop to such hate-mongering. Apparently, this is not happening in Germany.

[FranzisM]

@Deist - Who is invited to the Frankfurt book fair is not a choice of the government. And learning about the Iranian participation does not require the police to intrude your privacy. (Intrusions do happen however, e.g. see the trial of the al-Tawhid terror cell which was discovered by wiretapping of al-Zarqawi's phonecalls from Iran.) This can be learned from the papers.

And if Iran to you is just "some country with a history of bad conduct" then you have a weird sense of priorities. How many governments are there in this world that have a track record of terrorist attacks in Germany and run ballistic missile programs that threaten us? If the Frankfurt book fair had featured David Irving and Fred Leuchter, the police certainly would have learned it from the papers and have acted accordingly.

As for your question why the photographer had not called the police himself, he implied in the article that he did not want to miss his train. And maybe he doesn't like the Volksverhetzung law either and thinks the real problem is the double standard that is made between traditional Nazism and Islamic Nazism.

[fuchur]

via Gudrun Eussner:
The Frankfurt Book Fair contacted the county prosecutor of Frankfurt about accusations against Iranian exhibitors at the fair.

According to visitors of the fair that ended on Sunday, some of the exhibited material was anti-Semitic.
"We could not verify the accusations and therefore contacted the county prosecution" (J. Boos, leader of the book fair)
According to informations from the county prosecution, an investigation was launched on Tuesday.

(roughly translated from this press release (German))

[Matt]

I see nothing comforting abou this referral to the police. What exactly does it mean that the book fair management "could not verify the accusations"? Does that mean that the Iranians put away the hate literature for five minutes while the fair organizers viewed their booth? Or does it mean that the organizers indeed saw the literature, but were unable to decide on their own whether whether pamphlets referring to a global Jewish conspiracy constitute anti-Semitism? Why couldn't the organizers demand the removal of such material themselves? Do they need the threat of prosecution to force them to do what common decency requires?

[Deist]

@FranzisM:
"Who is invited to the Frankfurt book fair is not a choice of the government. And learning about the Iranian participation does not require the police to intrude your privacy. (Intrusions do happen however, e.g. see the trial of the al-Tawhid terror cell which was discovered by wiretapping of al-Zarqawi's phonecalls from Iran.) This can be learned from the papers."
I neither said anything about it being a choice of the government nor did i say anything about intruding ones privacy.

But again i would remind you that the police doesnt run around all day long searching everyone for potential antisemitism. Its all a matter of telling them.

"And if Iran to you is just "some country with a history of bad conduct" then you have a weird sense of priorities."
For german (police) authorities it is nothing more than that. If it were for me then they wouldnt have participated in the fair in the first place.
What a country iran is can be easily seen by simply having a look at the newest "news":
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20051027-012613-4057r.htm

"As for your question why the photographer had not called the police himself, he implied in the article that he did not want to miss his train.And maybe he doesn't like the Volksverhetzung law either and thinks the real problem is the double standard that is made between traditional Nazism and Islamic Nazism."
To be honest i think (provided it is true) the first statement alone is already a double standard without end !

Anyway ... at least new information has come up and that does tell a tale ...
A leader of a book fair who cant verify accusations as simple as "country X has an antisemitic book titled "xyz"".... really who believes that ? I mean it should be obvious that of the folks that pointed fingers at least one would have had the brains to name some titles.
This rather smells like a silly excuse of the leader of the fair. Didnt want to spoil next years fair perhaps or simply didnt want to get accused for not doing anything.
It is of course now very convenient that an investigation was launched long after the fair was over .... very convenient...

Such a bastard !

[IGout]

Here's a simple test. Next year display some books entitled "Protocols of the learned elders of Islam" and see how long it takes for the Korrect-thinking police to show up.

[Olaf Petersen]

Anti-Semitic Hate For Sale in Germany? Well, after all, Germany is one of the few countries, where amazon.com doesn't sell these books. Hitler's Mein Kampf has Sales Rank # 3,897 at amazon.com...

Anti-Semitic Hate For Sale Worldwide.