Anti-Israel comments made by the German journalist and publisher Jakob Augstein do not belong on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's 10 worst anti-Semitic statements of 2012 list, the head of Germany's Jewish community, Dieter Graumann (pictured right), has said. Despite Augstein's "horrible, hideous" articles on Israel, the inclusion of Augstein trivialized all the others on the list, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany told the weekly news magazine 'Focus' in an interview. However, Graumann also said that Augstein stoked anti-Semitic resentment with his comments.
The annual list compiled by the Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center also includes Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff, European soccer fans, the far-right parties of Ukraine, Greece and Hungary, and Nation of Islam founder Louis Farrakhan, as well as the country of Norway for honoring the creator of a notoriously anti-Semitic website.
Augstein, 49, is the publisher of the leftist weekly magazine 'Der Freitag' and a columnist with the widely read web-based news service 'Spiegel Online'. He has been accused of anti-Semitism for writing in his columns that "the Jews also have their fundamentalists, the ultra-Orthodox Haredim ... They are cut from the same cloth as their Islamic fundamentalist opponents. They follow the law of revenge."
In a column on the unrest and violence in Libya, Sudan and Yemen, Augstein had asked: "Whom does all this violence benefit? Always the insane and unscrupulous. And this time it’s the US Republicans and Israeli government." Last April, the writer also defended Nobel Literature Prize laureate Günter Grass for a poem in which he had charged Israel, and not Iran, with being the main danger to world peace.
Graumann said Augstein's comments might be distasteful, incite to hatred and feed stereotypes, but "I don't agree with this ranking." The inclusion of Augstein in the ninth position, with such neighbors as "the disgusting Nazi parties in our European partner countries of Hungary and Greece" served to trivialize the entire issue, the Jewish leader said.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, defended his decision to include Augstein in an interview with the German broadcaster ARD. The Wiesenthal Center cited German Jewish columnist Henryk M. Broder as calling Augstein "a pure anti-Semite ... an offender by conviction who only missed the opportunity to make his career with the Gestapo because he was born after the war.”
In Germany the debate about Augstein has made big headlines in recent weeks, with most commentators defending the journalist. Jakob Augstein is the adopted son of the late Rudolf Augstein, the founder and co-owner of the country's most influential news magazine, 'Der Spiegel'. Augstein and his ciblings still hold a share of 24 percent of the magazine.
