On 30 January, Uwe Becker – the so-called commissioner for Jewish life and the fight against anti-Semitism in the German state of Hesse – demanded that the organization Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East (Jewish Voice, for short) should be banned. Pointing out that it is already classed as “a certified extremist organization by the Verfassungsschutz” (Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, equivalent to the FBI), he called it “not a voice of peace, but a voice of hatred” because it “vilifies [Israel] as a terrorist state.”
The timing of Becker’s rant is piquant in view of the near-simultaneous paperback publication of Germany’s Jewish Problem by Wieland Hoban, Anglo-German chair of Jewish Voice, a book in which these (mostly non-Jewish) commissioners feature prominently and unflatteringly.
Hoban is a prolific translator of texts by, among others, Theodor Adorno, Peter Sloterdijk and Jürgen Habermas – ironically enough, German philosophers not known for progressive views on Palestine.
He is also a composer, in which capacity he witnessed Germany’s cancel culture firsthand in 2018 when his proposal for an Israel-critical composition provoked Björn Gottstein, the then director of the Donaueschingen Music Festival, to explain that “although [he] gave composers a free hand in their use of political content, he would not tolerate any criticism of Israel.” As a fellow composer and activist, I wrote about this in The Electronic Intifada at the time. (more...)
Holocaust remorse rings hollow in Germany
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