Germany: Munich’s Schmock restaurant closes due to Israel-hate

From the Jerusalem Post:

The Jewish owner of Munich’s Schmock Israeli restaurant announced on its website its closure after 16 years because of rising anti-Semitism in the Bavarian capital.

Florian Gleibs pulled the plug on the restaurant last week because of the mushrooming anti-Israel agitation in the city since the IDF’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

“People from the educated, well-off middle class have decided to hold me responsible as a representative of Israel, according to the motto: ‘What you people are doing is nothing different than what we Germans did back then [in the Holocaust],’” he wrote.

In response to anti-Israel tirades, he placed a large sign in the restaurant’s window reading: “We are not involved with politics.” The hostility toward him and his restaurant continued, Die Welt reported.

Gleibs, 45, is not Israeli. He attended a boarding school in Haifa for two years when he was younger.

He told Die Welt he “sees antisemitism as more emotional now than before [the 2014 war].” Gleibs said he personally experienced “people on the streets screaming ‘Jew, Jew, cowardly swine, come here and fight alone.’” According to the Die Welt article, “antisemitism is, in truth, disguised as criticism of Israel.”

Markus Schäfert, the spokesman for Bavaria’s domestic intelligence agency – the rough equivalent of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) – said “anti-Zionist antisemitism pretends to criticize Israel but, in fact, rejects Israel’s existence.”

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