Worldcrunch har oversat Broders artikel, der stammer fra Die Welt:
‘A Well-Meaning, Educated Anti-Semite’ – Günter Grass Slammed For Israel-Iran Poem
Op-Ed: The 84-year-old German Nobel laureate’s new poem entitled “What Must Be Said” accuses Israel of plotting to destroy Iran, while acknowledging the risk of being dubbed anti-Semitic. Grass’s long-hidden stint as a teen member of the Nazi SS doesn’t help his case.
By Henryk M. Broder
Günter Grass has written a poem called “Was gesagt werden muss” (What Must Be Said) that was published Wednesday in Germany by the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily. It starts off like this:
“Why do I keep quiet, I’ve been holding back too long…”
From these opening lines, some readers might think that the 84-year-old German Nobel literature laureate is finally about to explain why he kept quiet for so long about his stint with the Nazi SS. But that’s not the case: the moralizing poet has moved on. This time it’s about an immediate concern to us all. It’s about sheer survival.
Mere HER i Worldcrunch.
Opdatering:
An Open Letter to Günter Grass
April 8, 2012 – by David P. Goldman
Herr Günter Grass:
By now you must be tired of hearing how shameful it is for a former SS man to denounce Israel as a threat to world peace at a time when the government of Iran (among others) publicly threatens to annihilate the Jewish state. It is obscene to suggest, as you did in your diatribe “What Must Be Said,” that Israel might “annihilate the Iranian people.” Now that we have that out of the way, I would to set you straight about your own country’s tragedy. It’s all your fault. Well, perhaps not exactly your fault, but the fault of your way of thinking and of people who thought like you. I am not talking about your enthusiastic service to the Nazis. I am going to surprise you.
People tend to forget that you hate Germany and the Germans almost as much as you hate Israel and the Jews. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the disgusting German Democratic Republic collapsed, you will recall, you pleaded with your government to give this monster another lease on life — not to reunify Germany, but to keep the GDR intact. As I used to tell my German friends before Wiedervereinigung, if you Germans had been as smart as us Jews, you would have gotten your own national homeland right after the war, like we did. But you hate the Germans so much that you did not want them together in a single state. That doesn’t make us Jews feel any better, but your consistency is duly noted.
Mere HER i PJ Media.
Gunter Grass Shouldn’t Be Barred From Israel
by Alan M. Dershowitz – April 9, 2012
The decision by Israel’s Interior Minister to bar German writer, Gunter Grass, from entering the Jewish state is both foolish and self-defeating. Grass wrote an absurdly ignorant and perversely bigoted poem comparing Israel to Iran and declaring Israel to pose a great danger to world peace. He also warned Germany that by selling submarines to Israel, it is becoming complicit in a crime against humanity.
These wrong-headed views deserve to be rebutted on their demerits, as Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, did quite effectively in his public response to Grass, by exposing his “shameful moral equivalence between Israel and Iran, a regime that denies the Holocaust and threatens to annihilate Israel,” by pointing out that “it is Iran, not Israel, that threatens other states with annihilation,” and that it is Iran who supports the Syrian regime’s crackdown of its people and “stones women, hangs gays and brutally represses tens of millions of its own citizens.” Grass’ poem has also been effectively critiqued by Israelis across the political and literary spectrum. That is as it should be in an open, vibrant democracy, accustomed to rancorous public debate. But a great nation, committed to freedom of expression and dissent, should not bar a critic, even a critic as bigoted as Grass, from its territory.
Mere HER hos Gatestone Institute. The Huffington Post her.
Günter Grass Goes From Bad to Verse
by Bruce Bawer on Apr 9th, 2012
The only surprising thing about the anti-Semitic “poem” that Günter Grass published last week, and that has created an international firestorm, is that he waited so long to write such a thing. Anti-Semitism, after all, is all the rage these days among left-wing European literary intellectuals (excuse the multiple redundancy), and Grass has always prided himself on being in the forefront of these trends, not being a Johann-come-lately.
Who is Günter Grass, you ask? For decades after the 1959 publication of his first and most famous (and highly overrated) novel, The Tin Drum, he was described by admirers as the conscience of postwar Germany. His detractors had other words for him: smug, arrogant, obnoxious. Even Richard Gilman, a writer for the left-wing The Nation whom one might have expected to celebrate the guy, complained in 1982 about his “lofty, hectoring tone,” stating: “Today there is no writer more swollen with self-importance…than Gunter Grass, who has begun to think of himself as identical with the fates of German literature, German politics, and German mores.” John Updike, for his part, saw Grass as a “cautionary case” for politically engaged writers: “he can’t be bothered to write a novel; he just sends dispatches…from the front lines of his engagement.”
Mere HER i FrontPageMagazine.
Opdatering 12. april 2012:
The First Death of Günter Grass
Bernard-Henri Lévy – April 11, 2012
There is North Korea and its autistic tyrant, equipped with a by and large operational nuclear arsenal.
There is Pakistan, armed with warheads — no one knows how many, nor precisely where they are located, nor what guarantees we have that they will not, one day, fall into the hands of groups linked to Al Qaeda.
There is Putin’s Russia, which, in the space of two wars, has accomplished the exploit of exterminating a quarter of the population of Chechnya.
There is the butcher of Damascus, whose body count so far is at 10,000 and whose criminal stubbornness threatens the region’s peace.
Mere HER i Huffington Post. Kan også læses her hos Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Andre kilder: The Jerusalem Post, The Jerusalem Post, The Washington Post, Israel Hayom, The Telegraph, The Tablet,
Opdateret.
Seneste kommentarer