Lorenz Salomon Beckhardt is Jewish himself. However, he only found this out in young adulthood, as his parents, as Shoa survivors, wanted to enable him to grow up without worries(?). Today Beckhardt is a staff member of the broadcaster WDR and, among other things, editor of the science magazine “Quarks”. Above all, however, he is a valiant campaigner against the right-wing.
This irrepressible will to fight anyone who is politically right-wing in relation to WDR, Annalena Baerbock and Lusia Neubauer may well have been his motivation for sending out this tweet yesterday, which was, however, deleted by Twitter a few hours later for violating community standards:
Because, in the fight against the right-wingers or even against alleged Nazis, even as a child of survivors of the Shoah, one may use a wording that is often used contemptuously by anti-Semites. The term philosemitism was often used in standard works of the precursors of National Socialism to disparage friends of the Jewish people, their religion and culture. “Judenfreund” was regarded as a swear word that could hardly be made more offensive.
This makes Beckhardt’s use of it all the worse. Obviously, the German left is now willing to use any means to fight the enemies of its pseudo-open society. And in Beckhardt’s view, Hans-Georg Maaßen (former President of the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Ed,) is undoubtedly one of them.
Will this tweet have consequences for Beckhardt? Most certainly, but probably none less than the Grimme Prize or the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany!