When someone you know starts doing crazy things, saying wild things, there’s only one question to ask them: “Are you okay?”
There are limits to the common sense expected of a person, even to the reaction expected of them in the face of injustice. When these limits are exceeded and the person fails to show the maturity expected of them, there is not much you can do; after a few questions and criticisms, you turn away. But what if this person represents not only themselves but an entire nation, especially a nation that is a respected member of the international community? What if an expression that exceeds the common sense, rationality, and reaction expected from this country’s collective consciousness and historical accumulation is voiced by an elected politician on behalf of that nation?
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) alliance, which came to power with a narrow parliamentary majority whose future is uncertain, has been led for some time by Friedrich Merz, who, as you may know if you’ve been following, was known for tearing up when Israel was mentioned. Even if he did not make statements supporting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians like Annalena Baerbock, the leader of the Alliance 90/The Greens party, and even if he did not (yet) say in the German Parliament that “Israel can kill civilians in Gaza to defend itself” (October 15, 2024), Merz made a statement that cast doubt on not only his own common sense but that of all German conservatives: Merz said that if Israel is not allowed to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest, Germany will boycott the contest.
During the final years of World War II, Germany exterminated 6 million Jews, representing two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population, by shooting them and gassing them in gas chambers. The Nazis came to power in 1933 with a program to expel non-German peoples from the country and carried out “ethnic cleansing” for 12 years, both in Germany and in other European countries they occupied. However, because Jews had coexisted with other European nations for many years, it was impossible to “cleanse Germany of its Jewish stain,” as Hitler put it. So, in 1941, they sent all Jews—children, women, and men—to concentration camps. Not only the German Nazis, but also Jews in Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Including the mass murders in these countries, 6 million Jews, Roma, mentally and physically disabled Germans were killed, including 1.5 million children.
The United Nations recorded this massacre as the “Holocaust,” a stain on the history of humanity. This stain, of course, is much more on the German people than on other collaborators. But this stain should not have robbed the German people of their reason. Like all other nations, Germans had to know that being the subject of the Holocaust did not give Israelis the right to completely exterminate other peoples, to wipe their homes, villages, cities, hospitals, schools, and roads off the face of the earth.
The “October 7 raid” can never, ever justify the massacre of innocent Palestinian civilians, neither for Israel, nor for the Zionists, nor for the Evangelicals who seek to create a new religion by merging Christianity with Judaism, and of course not for the Germans or the German government. October 7 was not a terrorist act that emerged out of nowhere; Europeans and Americans, who wanted to provide Jews with a “homeland” in Palestine in order to completely remove them from Europe, something Hitler had failed to do with the Holocaust, knew what the Zionists, who had completely taken over the administration of Israel, had been doing to the Palestinians since day one, for 80 years. Subjected to every kind of inhumane treatment, from arbitrary murder to ethnic cleansing, systematic harassment, and forced displacement, the Palestinians were exercising their legitimate right to self-defense against the occupying murderers on October 7, in a state of endless helplessness.
Now the whole world will exclude Israel not only from Eurovision but from any kind of cooperation. It is very painful that Germany is in the hands of a government that fails to grasp this.
Source: https://www.milliyet.com.tr/yazarlar/hakki-ocal/almanya-iyi-misin-7460634
