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Dispatch from Berlin: "Mr. Bush, Remember Nuremberg. Death by hanging"
Reminiscences from Jeff Gedmin, Head of the Aspen Insititute and apparently the only American in Germany (incl our invisibile Foreign Service corps) to publicly advocate for the Bush admin's Iraq policy.Gedmin considers that since 2002 it has been simultaneously the most interesting as well as the worst time to be an American in Berlin. He expressed public support for the war in Iraq in German newspaper columns and in television interviews. In a methodological approach to assessing today's confused situation, Gedmin believes that vignettes often illuminate it best. They put key issues more in focus than detailed analysis might do. "As a Catholic I was struck by the amount of virulently anti-Semitic hate letters and email I received. There were many dozens of items. I was called a 'Jewish war criminal,' a 'Jewish pornographer.' Pardon my language, but more than once, these texts stated that I was a 'Jew fucker' or 'a son of a whore, who should be covered with napalm.' "During the last two years in Berlin I was publicly insulted, heckled, and refused service in a restaurant because I supported the war to remove Saddam Hussein. Once I was sitting on a bench in Berlin, in front of the famous Adlon Hotel. Three young men recognized me as someone who supported this war, and heckled me from a distance. They were nicely dressed twenty-something youngsters in polo shirts, not skinheads. They said, 'You're not wanted here. You don't belong here. Why don't you get out of this country?' It made a deep impression on me. "The debate about Iraq in Europe generally and in Germany specifically struck me. The German chancellor said that even if the United States acts multilaterally or with a UN mandate, Germany will not participate in the war. One socialist minister in his cabinet, Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, compared George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler. A leading Social Democratic parliamentarian compared the American ambassador in Berlin to a Soviet one. Two German ministers marched in the streets calling the Americans war criminals and chanting 'no blood for oil.' "A senior Foreign Ministry official claimed that America was becoming a police state at home. Another accused us of imposing a Brezhnev doctrine on the European Union. Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said that Germans were tired of being a satellite of the United States. All this before we had made any decision about what to do in Iraq. "I remember passing the American embassy on Unter den Linden and seeing a sign hanging out there for weeks from protesters, which read: 'Mr. Bush, remember Nuremberg. Death by hanging.' It leaves me to believe that part of this debate about Iraq - and maybe much of it - had to do more with containing the United States than with whether Saddam Hussein should be removed." Posted by: lex 2004-12-16 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=51406 |