Germany is a hotbed of academic antisemitism

Via The Algemeiner - author Clemens Heni:

Columbia University Iranian studies scholar Hamid Dabashi has become the darling of German academia. It’s no coincidence that he exemplifies academic hatred for Israel and the trivialization of German crimes and the Holocaust.

Columbia’s Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Dabashi has experienced a flurry of speaking engagements at German universities and organizations. In May 2015, he was invited to speak at Freie Universität Berlin. On November 26, he spoke at the Institute for Foreign Affairs, which is financed by the German Foreign Ministry, the state of Baden-Württemberg, and the city of Stuttgart in the Southwest of Germany. The event was hosted by the Berlin Social Science Center. The day before, Dabashi spoke at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, associated with the Party of the Left, which has become known for several antisemitic scandals in recent years. In May 2016, Dabashi will be one of the keynote speakers at the “Third Bremen Conference on Language and Literature in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts.”

Germany is a hotbed of academic antisemitism, particularly in the fields of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies. Germans are particularly pleased with non-European scholars, such as Dabashi, who will defame Israel and downplay the crimes of the Holocaust. French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch analyzed this new antisemitism as early as 1971 in his piece, “Forgiving?” (“Pardonner?”), in which he noted the need of Germans to accuse Jews of being “like Nazis.” Turning their former victims, the Jews, into perpetrators diminishes the Germans’ unprecedented crimes. Scholarship labels this the “inversion of truth.” It can also be framed as “secondary anti-Semitism,” a form of post-Holocaust antisemitism. Denying Auschwitz is for beginners.

Dabashi calls his new book, Can Non-Europeans Think? (April 2015), part three of his “Intifada trilogy.” In it, Dabashi promotes the trope, popularized by anti-Israel activist Ilan Pappé, that Israel is committing an “incremental genocide“ of the Palestinians. Palestinian sources themselves admit that the populations of Gaza and the West Bank have grown in recent decades, rendering this definition of “genocide” particularly perfidious.

As I demonstrated in my 2013 book, Dabashi wants to destroy the Jewish state of Israel, which he calls a “racist Apartheid state.” He supported German former Waffen SS member and Nobel Prize Laureate Günter Grass after he’d written a nasty anti-Israel poem portraying Iran as a victim of Israeli aggression.  (...)

The government-sponsored German Institute for Foreign Affairs and other leading universities would never host a known neo-Nazi who claims that Israel is an “apartheid state,” that Auschwitz was a mere “crime” on par with the 2014 Gaza war, and that the Iranian threat does not exist. However, a non-European like the Iranian-born Dabashi is not only welcomed, but embraced by German audiences for two reasons: hatred of Israel and the distortion of German crimes and the Holocaust.

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