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Olaf Scholz after Mahmoud Abbas put the Holocaust into perspective: how self

2022-08-18T11:59:49.598Z


After the botched press conference with Palestinian President Abbas, Chancellor Scholz referred to the sensitivity of Germans to the topic of the Holocaust. How selfish! It goes under what that means for Jews.


Enlarge image

Chancellor Scholz on the terrace of the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus: Communicatively disconcerting

Photo: Christoph Soeder / picture alliance / dpa

Olaf Scholz is not considered a quick-talking or impulsive politician.

However, if he wants to interrupt people because he is reluctant to hear what they are saying, then he is perfectly capable of doing so.

And when he does, it's always been newsworthy.

At a DGB rally on May 1 in Düsseldorf, he defended the German government's line on the Ukraine war in an unusually passionate manner against loud demonstrators who called him a warmonger.

At the Catholic Day at the end of May, he discredited an intervention by climate activists from the stage as "black-clad stagings […] by the same people" who would remind him "of a time that was long ago".

Luisa Neubauer then accused him of relativizing the Nazi regime.

Scholz firmly rejected this accusation.

The ambiguity of his statement seemed communicatively strange.

What happened on Tuesday at the joint press conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was rhetorically all the more disturbing because this time the problem wasn't what Scholz had said, but: what wasn't.

Abbas was asked by a journalist whether he wanted to apologize to Israel and Germany on behalf of the Palestinians fifty years after the 1972 Munich Olympics attack in 1972 and whether he wanted to contribute to the complete investigation of the hostage-taking - whereupon he unmistakably described a fifty-fold holocaust in an abominable nonsense whataboutism to Israel accused the state of being committed in Palestinian locations since 1947: »50 massacres, 50 holocausts«.

The use of this term in relation to Israel's actions, even in the plural, is particularly monstrous, since the uniqueness of the Holocaust is relativized fiftyfold with a lack of openness.

While Scholz had stressed shortly before that he did not consider the term apartheid used by Abbas to be correct in the case of Israel,

ruled in this bizarre Holocaust comparison - silence.

Whereupon the press conference ended abruptly.

Is this now well-known, professionalized phlegm of the chancellor so potent that even with a clear relativization of the Holocaust, one shouldn't even expect one of the most basic reactions that the majority of German rulers are probably capable of?

Is an immediate contradiction too much to ask for the resolutely dispassionate Scholz?

Passivity – but as politics?

Lack of reaction as the most diplomatic reaction?

The "FAZ" journalist Patrick Bahners made a note worth considering on Twitter in this matter.

He wrote that as a chancellor one had to take into account the German speaker position and the need for diplomatic tact: "In the reflex of not wanting to automatically instruct a guest as the German head of government about the correct meaning of the term Holocaust, one should also be able to see something positive." And in another tweet he specified what he meant by this positive: "Reluctance to teach third parties about lessons from German history."

Is it conceivable that these two political roles caused Scholz's silence?

On the one hand the role of the polite host who does not interrupt his guest, on the other hand the role of the German who does not give a foreign politician historical tutoring about the crime committed by the Germans?

In 1939, the British politician and diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson, who also took part in the Paris Peace Conference in Versailles in 1919, published a standard work on diplomatic communication entitled »Diplomacy«, a handbook on communicative negotiation skills.

It reads:

»The negotiator [i.e.

H.

the diplomat] must not only avoid showing irritation when confronted with the stupidity, dishonesty, brutality or presumption of those with whom he has the unpleasant duty of dealing;

but he must refrain from all personal animosity, fondness, exuberance, prejudice, vanity, exaggeration, dramatization, or indignation.”

This political stoicism may be diplomatic, but there is so much more at stake in this case than politics.

It's about truth.

The point is that in a crude historical distortion, the industrialized mass extermination of Jews should not be played down and the perpetrators should not be made victims;

this is about something that is greater than diplomatic etiquette and hospitality, something so important that whenever necessary it must be defended loudly, boldly and, if necessary, undiplomatically.

What is the point of the always emphasized reason of state, to which one rightly invokes and reflects in Germany in the spirit of »Never again!«, if in a simple,

That Scholz represents this reason of state is beyond question and goes without saying.

However, anyone who considers protocol and diplomacy more important than objecting to a public lie also accepts re-traumatization of the victims of National Socialism and their descendants.

Isn't Scholz also the chancellor of these German citizens?

The fact that government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit is now taking the blame for this lack of reaction because he prematurely ended the conference doesn't make things any better.

It is and remains the responsibility of the Federal Chancellor to react to such a scandal, even if it is an afterthought with an appropriate apology.

Instead, Scholz only explained on Tuesday evening to the picture and on Wednesday on Twitter: "Especially for us Germans, any relativization of the Holocaust is unbearable and unacceptable."

Regardless of the fact that relativizing the Holocaust is always and everywhere unacceptable, what kind of absurdly self-referential sentence is that on so many levels?

First the trivialization is left uncommented and then regretted how much such a statement plagues Germans in particular, yes, especially for them it is unbearable.

Just how bad this burden must be for Jewish Germans and non-German Jews is lost in the »Especially for us as Germans!«, which tries to sound fussy and honest.

Yes, it must be particularly hard when, as the German chancellor, you constantly have to endure Holocaust relativizations in silence and suffering.

So even if you take the possible explanations for why Scholz did not react immediately seriously - blackout, diplomacy before reasons of state, minutes of the press conference, a hasty government spokesman, lack of responsiveness, "My dog ​​ate my democratic reflexes" - that would always remain the case yet another fabulous inability: an adequate reaction that doesn't sound as if it had been fished out of the Documenta crisis communication wastebasket.

Source: spiegel

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