Outrage over German student: Holocaust is same as climate change
"Equating the Holocaust and climate change is absolutely unacceptable," said the Labor Party on Twitter
By BENJAMIN WEINTHALThe site of the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz II-Birkenau(photo credit: REUTERS/KACPER PEMPEL)
A 18-year-old student running as a candidate for the German Left Party in the city of Hamburg on Monday compared the Holocaust with climate change, prompting outrage on social media and from his party."The Nazis are also among the greatest climate sinners because their war of extermination and their tanks have produced huge amounts of CO2," said Tom Radtke on his Twitter feed on the day the world commemorated the liberation of Auschwitz."Many politicians say that this must not be repeated. But what are they doing about the climate holocaust, which is killing millions of people and animals right now?” he added.The Left Party in Hamburg issued a statement on Twitter. "Clarification on the current occasion: equating the Holocaust and climate change is absolutely unacceptable. Whoever does this does not represent the position of the Left. We are now talking to Tom and discussing the consequences."The self-described climate activist Radtke wrote on his homepage that he has been "fighting against climate change for two years and for a radical protection of the environment."The commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz has produced a series of scandals in which German journalists have been accused of belittling the Holocaust and stoking antisemitic resentments.The prominent German Jewish journalist and expert on contemporary antisemitism, Broder, accused the journalist Sabine Müller of blaming Israeli Jews for the cause of antisemitism.Broder, in a video commentary titled "The German Holocaust Concept" on the popular German news and commentary website Die Achse of Good, issued a scathing commentary of the Hesse Broadcasting journalist Müller.Müller wrote on the website of the German public broadcaster Tagesschau (ARD) that the memorial event last week in Yad Vashem was “a missed chance in the fight against antisemitism," suggesting that Israeli Jews were not combating Jew-hatred.Antisemitism experts and politicians have stressed over the years that non-Jews should be leading the fight against contemporary antisemitism. Broder said "For the Nazis the Jews were to blame for antisemitism" and termed Müller's commentary "disgusting."
Blaming Jews for the origins of Antisemitism have been defined by experts as an expression of Jew-hatred.The journalist Marc Felix Serrao, who writes for the Swiss daily NZZ, tweeted that "by the way, Sabine Müller is not alone in the ARD with her views on the Holocaust commemoration in Israel. In the opinion of the BR / ARD correspondent in South America, the critics are only concerned with 'rushing' something against the ÖRR again."Serrao criticized the tweet from the ARD's South America correspondent Ivo Marusczyk.Marusczyk wrote : "Why shouldn't Sabine Müller criticize Netanyahu when he keeps the Shoah survivors waiting in Yad Vashem? The main thing is that you can do something against public law …"In email to The Jerusalem Post, Marusczyk rejected that he was an anti-Semite.Ulf Poschardt ,the editor-in-chief of the large German broadsheet Die Welt, wrote a column that he is ashamed of Müller's commentary.
