The Simon Wiesenthal Center decided “not to put neo-Nazi groups on the list,” said head Rabbi Marvin Hier, but European public broadcasters such as the BBC and German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, because they posed the far worse threat.
“Deutsche Welle had to suspend four employees and one freelancer from its Arabic service” because of anti-Semitic and Holocaust-relativising remarks, the Wiesenthal Center said. Deutsche Welle is funded with €390 million a year from the Chancellor’s Office budget.
In Baden-Württemberg, the coalition government of Winfried Kretschmann employs the anti-Semitism commissioner Michael Blume, who likes posts on Facebook that equate “Zionists” with Nazis and supports town twinning with the anti-Semitic regime in Tehran.
Anti-Semitism is exploding in Germany under the current government, the Wiesenthal Center complains. “In June, the federal government confirmed an overwhelming number of anti-Semitic hate crimes in 2020 – 2,275, at least 55 of which involved violence. More than 1,000 anti-Semitic incidents were registered in Berlin in 2020, an increase of almost 20% from the previous year. Samuel Salzborn, anti-Semitism commissioner of the state of Berlin, admitted: ‘One thing is clear: Berlin has an anti-Semitism problem’,” according to the Wiesenthal Centre.
