Greece: New finance minister empathizes with Palestinian suicide bombers

Via Times of Israel:

The new finance minister of Greece has been accused of harboring anti-Semitic views and expressing empathy for Palestinian suicide bombers.

In 2005, Yanis Varoufakis was suspended from a radio show for what the station called the promotion of anti-Jewish stereotypes. Varoufakis, who at the time was an economics professor at the University of Athens, defended himself a few years later by stating that in his criticism of Israeli policies he was merely basing himself on reports in the Israeli daily Haaretz.

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During his weekly broadcast at the Australian state-owned radio station SBS on August 29, 2005, Varoufakis had claimed that Israel used the blockade of Gaza as part of “a strategy for retaining a large part of the West Bank” and called the West Bank security fence a “concrete monster,” according to his blog.

“The fact that my comments were supported by reports in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz was not deemed a sufficient defense against the charge of anti-Semitism,” he wrote in December 2010 about the incident.”

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Last week, German daily Die Welt published a report (German) to the effect that Varoufakis, and other members of the new Greek government, are radical anti-Zionists. According to the article, written by Thomas Weber, the director of the University of Aberdeen’s Center for Global Security and Governance, Varoufakis “connects with Israel first and foremost ‘sadism’ and ‘crime.’”

On Australian radio, Varoufakis was “full of empathy for suicide attacks against Israelis,” Weber alleged.

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And yet, observers of Greek politics and attitudes toward Jerusalem indicated this week that Varoufakis’s views are no reason for concern. 

“It sounds to me like typical left-wing criticism against Israel, so I am not surprised. Varoufakis likes to be controversial and loves to have media attention,” said Emmanuel Karagiannis, a Greece-born senior lecturer at the Department of Defense Studies at King’s College London. “But foreign policy issues are not really his area of expertise.”