For those who still doubt that mainstream journalism has forfeited all claim to respect or credibility, consider the recent coverage of the AfD’s victory in Sachsen-Anhalt and the graffiti threatening Charlotte Knobloch, a prominent German Jewish representative, that was discovered on a Munich park bench afterward.
Regardless of one’s opinion of the protagonists, since when is anonymous graffiti scrawled on a park bench a newsworthy event?
Hundreds of vile graffiti targeting Jews appear daily in German and European cities. Many of them-some found even in our most prestigious universities-are far more depraved, remain untouched, and rarely draw so much as a local reporter’s sigh.
The irony is sharp: the same ugly graffiti that elites now parade as proof that the AfD is poised to act like Nazis actually demonstrates the opposite. If the AfD were Nazis, the euphoria of victory would have produced drunken cheers of “Death to the Jews!"-the sort of slogan that many leftist and Muslim self-styled human-rights champions have shouted across Europe since October 7, very often under the collusive silence of mainstream media.
Full disclosure: politically I feel closer to the AfD than to the parties that are dismantling Germany and that have discredited the European Union (Brexit itself would never have succeeded had Merkel not invited millions of poorly educated men to seek asylum in Europe).
Had I valued career over conscience, I might well have entered the Bundestag on an AfD list: foreign, disabled, grandson of an anti-fascist partisan, Hebrew-University and Yale-educated, fluent in Judaism, Hebrew, and the Arab and Muslim worlds.
I made no effort to join because the party is unabashedly sympathetic to Putin-an affinity that is, in my view, the least patriotic, Christian, or conservative stance imaginable. I have no objection to offering my anti-Nazi credentials for a good cause, but tokenism that assists Putin, especially after his unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine, does not qualify.
At the same time, I am no admirer of Charlotte Knobloch. I respect her personal biography and good intentions, yet I take issue with the way she deploys her status as a Holocaust survivor to speak on behalf of people whose interests often diverge from those of Jewish-community representatives.
Those representatives draw their salaries not from fellow Jews but from German budgets and the goodwill of politicians more concerned with Germany’s image, exports to Iran, and containing the AfD than with the reality that most large German cities are today unsafe for anyone wearing a visible kippah or speaking Hebrew aloud.
I know this from regular attendance at a small Orthodox synagogue in Berlin and from my most recent summer stroll through Alexanderplatz: every major language was audible except Hebrew, which before October 7 had filled the square as freely as Spanish or Italian. It is genuinely chilling to hear a language vanish-not because Israeli tourists now prefer Prague or Tirana, but because those who remain no longer dare speak it.
Charlotte Knobloch does not inhabit this world. She moves under protection and reads newspapers that tell her, day after day, that Germany’s problems are the AfD, climate change, transphobia and Trump-not the incompetence and ideological blinkers of its own leaders, who are transforming a once highly respected country into a humorless banana republic. Frau Knobloch also socializes mainly with Christians and Jews whose understanding of reality, like that of much of Germany’s well-educated middle class, is filtered through journalistic institutions sharing broadly similar values and standards of integrity.
I was once her Facebook friend until she blocked me. The offense? When she expressed alarm at the AfD’s early successes, I had the temerity to point out that she should not blame dark ghosts of the past for problems that supporters of the “Refugees Welcome" movement had deeply aggravated.
So this graffiti episode is, if anything, the most reassuring signal that the AfD does not pose the existential threat to Jews that the media claim. On the contrary: since the Sachsen-Anhalt result, spontaneous expressions of pro-Jewish solidarity from politicians of Muslim origin have multiplied, suggesting that for the first time in many years Muslims grasp that their own future in Germany is tied to the future of Jews.
Before these elections, such statements were rare and vastly outnumbered by vicious attacks on Israel and “Zionists." It was almost self-evident how many were unconcerned that Jewish life in Germany was becoming more difficult and miserable than at any time since 1945.
From the collective-guilt perspective favored by the Intersectionalist Left and Islamism, this vendetta against German Jews was fair game. It is acceptable to assault a Jew in Berlin or Munich for what Israel does in Gaza, the better to encourage everyone to "stand up against injustice."
Heaven forbid, however, that anyone apply the same logic to justify striking a random Arab for eighty years of Palestinian terror against civilians of every religion, or smashing the head of Antifa activists to avenge the starved and dead millions of communism in Cambodia, China, Ukraine, or Venezuela.
This should not surprise us. Just as great minds think alike, shared antipathies, resentments, and disregard for intellectual honesty can induce an entire country to feel more alarm and outrage over a single scribble on a park bench than over many graver episodes among the 2,293 antisemitic incidents recorded in 2025 that were quietly brushed aside because the culprit belonged, alas, to the category of “foreign ideology."
Rafael Castro is a Yale- and Hebrew University-educated independent political analyst. An Italian Noahide, Rafael can be reached at rafaelcastro78@gmail.com