Madam/Mister Speaker,Dear Colleagues,
Ezekiel the prophet had a vision in exile, by the rivers of Babylon, far from home. He saw a valley full of bones brought back to life by God.
And God said: „These bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, ‚Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts‘ …Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.“
Jewish sovereignty, the Jewish national idea, does not just come from the 20th century: it has always been there, laid out in the millennia-old national myth of the Jews, the Old Testament.
The Jews are a nation. And like every nation, they have the right to have a sovereign state.
But Israel's sovereignty is still not fully recognized by Germany. A sovereign state has the right to freely choose its capital. But Merkel denied the Jewish state this right. What's more, she threatened our eastern EU partners when they wanted to move their embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Merkel babbled on about "Israel's security" as a "German reason of state" and eagerly pursued the so-called culture of remembrance. But empty phrases and ‚Stolpersteine‘ are of no use to the living Jews. On the contrary, they distract from the threats to contemporary Judaism.
Henryk Broder aptly remarked that, in our country, Jews are “beloved all the more the more dead they are.”
But what are the real threats to Judaism today, 75 years after the founding of Israel?
When the Iranian mullahs publicly call for the annihilation of the so-called "Zionist ulcer," you remain silent. And when the United States announced the end of the nuclear deal with Israel's archenemy, you wanted to save the deal and railed against Trump. Against the same Trump who finally recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital!
Unfortunately, the current Socialdemocratic-led government is following in Merkel's footsteps. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard is still not listed as a terrorist organization. And it’s unheard-of that Chancellor Scholz, silently and smiling, stood next to Mahmud Abbas while the latter was agitating, full of hate, against Israel.
Germany's reputation in Israel has suffered massively during the last decade. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
The current German government should finally draw its conclusions from the recent anti-Semitic outbursts in the ethnic enclave Berlin-Neukölln: The official police crime statistics are refuted. Because every single survey conducted among German Jews proves that anti-Semitism today primarily comes from Muslims. And anyone who refuses to accept this simple truth should not pretend to be a friend of the Jews.
MP Jurgen Braunis human rights spokesman for the Alternaive for Germany (AfD), a rightist German pollitical party that opposes open immigration to Germany, in the Bundestag.