It is extremely worrying when a move that is designed to combat bigotry looks very much as if it is itself bigoted. Anti-Semitism has once again reared its ugly head in Germany. In the wake of a spate of verbal and physical attacks, Jewish leaders have been advising male Jews not to wear the traditional skullcap, the yarmulke, in public.
The government of Chancellor Angela Merkel has been quick to respond to the concerns of Germany’s small Jewish community. It has appointed a new anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, who has said that current crime statistics do not fully capture all the hate crimes against Jews. Therefore, it has been decided to establish a specific database that will log all anti-Semitic incidents. This will include details, not simply of those convicted of these abhorrent crimes but also of suspects and those who make no secret of their support for racists.
Although no one in Berlin is going to admit this, it seems clear that this new monitoring systems is also likely to pick up data on many members of and voters who back the xenophobic Alternative für Deutschland party which made disturbing headway in last year’s federal elections.
The government’s move does, however, raise two important questions. The first is whether or not it is really wise to produce an exceptional solution for what is already a general crime. Is there not a danger that by establishing a mechanism that specifically targets anti-Semitic bigotry, it will actually serve to enhance the campaign of the vicious racist thugs, who will protest, as their Nazi forebears did in Hitler’s dictatorship, that the Jews of Germany enjoy disproportionate power and influence within the country? Surely it merely requires a sharpening of the existing criminal intelligence database to ensure that gross acts of anti-Semitism are properly picked up and information on those responsible is collected and collated just as it would be for bank robbers, fraudsters and all other common criminals.
But if the Merkel government does indeed believe that a separate monitoring system is necessary for crimes that target the Jewish community, why is it not also planning a similar database for acts of Islamophobia, which all the evidence suggests are also on the increase? In the face of such a question, Berlin goes quiet, officially. But unofficially, government briefers have been saying that those guilty of anti-Semitism include Muslims, meaning Germans of Turkish origin as well as the million plus migrants that Merkel so courageously and correctly welcomed to her country when virtually every other European Union member state was trying to shut the door against this tide of desperate refugees. Some Muslims have indeed been guilty of anti-Semitic acts, but most Muslims in Germany see them as a disgrace.
Berlin’s plan is simply not good enough. What is sauce for the goose ought to be sauce for the gander. To produce a measure that targets only those motivated by hatred of Jews while ignoring the same despicable behavior toward Muslims is clearly wrong. It actually smacks of racism. And as such, it could well undermine the effectiveness of the new campaign to stamp out anti-Semitism. If Germany’s Jewish leaders were wise, they would be protesting that the new database needed to be extended to Islamophobic bigotry, since each of these odious crimes is part and parcel of the same terrible threat.
