Ayoon Wa Azan (A War Criminal Attacks a Novelist)

Günter Grass, Germany’s most famous poet and novelist after the Second World War, published earlier this month a political poem in which he accused Israel to be a threat to world peace, and called for its nuclear arsenal to be inspected before Israel launches an attack on Iran. Our newspaper Al-Hayat published the poem and covered the details of the story. The material available about it is enough to fill an encyclopedia, so I anticipate that many books about the poet and his poem will come out in the coming months. I limit myself in this controversy to a brief comment before I continue with other points closely related to it. Günter Grass is the author of The Tin Drum. He is 84 years old, and a Nobel Prize winner back in 1999. In his poem, he reproaches himself for having remained silent until now, when he is at the end of his life and has nothing to fear. Benjamin Netanyahu castigated Grass very sharply. In other words, a fascist war criminal railed against a man who happens to be a novelist, a poet, a playwright, a painter and a sculptor. Grass was also attacked by Bernard-Henri Levy, a Jewish French pseudo-philosopher who is best known for being an apologist for Israel, i.e. its daily crimes against the Palestinians. BHL attacked the poet and his poem, but failed to notice the fact that Israel has so far killed around 1500 Palestinian minors since 29/9/2000, or to notice B’Tselem’s report in March 2012 which mentioned that Israel killed 115 Palestinians in the previous year, including 18 teenagers and 37 civilians, of whom 14 were assassinated in a manner worthy of criminal gangs. More impudent than the above is the fact that the Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai barred Günter Grass from entering Israel. This Yishai is a member of the religious party Shas, whose spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef wants the whole world to be the servants of the Jews because the latter are a master race, just like Hitler once thought the Aryan race was. Before the German novelist and his poem, we witnessed their following impudent deeds: - In 2007, a book entitled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt was published. They are both university professors who subsequently came under sustained frenzied campaigns, of which I have many examples but have no space for here. Thus, the war cabal and the state of racism attacked Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago where he was in charge of the international security policy program, and Walt, Professor of International Relations at the Kennedy School of Government, of which he was once the Dean, at Harvard University. - Another university professor of the highest caliber possible who is constantly coming under unrelenting attacks is Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of Law at Princeton University, and the fact that he is Jewish does not seem to spare him from these attacks. His crime is that he is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, and that he condemns Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, which he also documents and records. - In the United States, there is a moderate pro-Israel Jewish lobby named the J Street Lobby, headquartered in Washington. J Street is coming under attack from the neocons and the American Likudniks every day because it seeks peace between Israel and the Palestinians. When the lobby criticized the killing of civilians in Gaza by Israel, the gang of evil responded by claiming that those killed were ‘terrorists’, so let the reader return to what I wrote above about B’Tselem’s report. - The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) comes under similar attacks on par with J Street, because UNRWA criticizes ‘Israel’s self-defense’, according to what the Likudnik magazine Commentary said. So killing teenagers in their homes is self-defense, Israeli style. - Two other Jewish men, who are among the foremost authorities in their fields, came under racist attacks because they are moderate and oppose the war. The two men are the journalist Seymour Hersh, who holds a record in the number of press scoops since the My Lai massacre to date, yet I read titles like ‘the Deceits of Seymour Hersh’ when they are deceit incarnate, and Peter Beinart, author of ‘the Crisis of Zionism’, and the book’s title is self-explanatory. I have run out of space, although I have a body of material many times bigger in size than what I wrote above. This includes a book by Jay Nordlinger, a man with Likudnik leanings, entitled ‘Peace, They Say’ in which he attacks the entire Nobel Prize institution. The book was published before Günter Grass’s poem, which I fully support, came out. I add also that Israel itself is an ongoing crime against humanity.