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Grass smears in ‘Times’, plus new translation of his ‘I’ve had it with the West’s hypocrisy’ poem

Gunter Grass
Gunter Grass

Below we have an improved translation of the Gunter Grass poem about breaking silence on Israel’s nuclear threat.

Meanwhile, The New York Times is treating the Gunter Grass poem as an artifact of his service in the Nazi SS as a teenager. “Story inadequate and tendentious by omission, without being exactly false,” writes a friend. “The headline calls it a poem ‘against Israel.’ It is not against Israel. It is against the sale of a German submarine to Israel which is capable of launching nuclear weapons. It speaks against ‘the burdensome lie’ of silence. Silence in general, about wrongs one knows of; and specifically German silence in the face of Israeli wrongs, because of the preemptive operation of self-censorship through an accurate awareness of guilt. It asks: why should Germany not speak the truth now, precisely because of its self-knowledge of the wrong of wars of aggression.”

At the Times, Nick Kulish and Ethan Bronner:

Others said that it was not a coincidence that Mr. Grass so often found himself at the center of controversy, but that controversy was instead his goal in the first place.

“He wrote this poem knowing from the way he wrote it that there would be condemnation,” said Frank Schirrmacher, co-publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who was interviewing Mr. Grass when he made his revelation about the Waffen-SS membership. “He needs the condemnation to move on to the next step, which is to say that it is impossible in Germany to criticize Israel.”

Mr. Grass, the author of plays and essays as well as novels and poems, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. He admitted that he was a member of the Hitler Youth as a boy and believed at the time in the group’s aims, but long claimed that he was drafted into an antiaircraft unit, never mentioning the Waffen-SS until he was 78.

In the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Anshel Pfeffer, a weekly columnist, devoted his Friday essay to Mr. Grass under the headline “The Moral Blindness of Günter Grass.”

“Logic and reason are useless when a highly intelligent man, a Nobel laureate no less, does not understand that his membership in an organization that planned and carried out the wholesale genocide of millions of Jews disqualified him from criticizing the descendants of those Jews for developing a weapon of last resort that is the insurance policy against someone finishing the job his organization began,” Mr. Pfeffer wrote.

More from my smart friend: “The Grass is a true and sober statement. It’s just wrong of Tom Segev to say that Meir Dagan has told Israelis everything they could get from the Grass poem. Who in Israel has spoken of the sale by Germany to Israel of a new submarine?”

Segev: Former Mossad director Meir Dagan, for example, shares the same opinion as Günter Grass. He is also opposed to an Israeli attack on Iran. He talks about it almost every day. There is a very lively discussion about this issue in Israel.

Der Spiegel: Grass also names a reason for his silence: the threat of being accused of anti-Semitism.

Segev: Meir Dagan has never been accused by anyone in Israel of being an anti-Semite. And it has been a long time since people in Germany were not able to criticize Israel — even if some in the Israeli government might regret that fact.

My correspondent: “Who has spoken of the scandal of European and American silence  on the subject of Israel’s possession of hundreds of nuclear weapons? Who has signaled the danger of Israeli use of nuclear weapons? It is not true, either, that there is no ‘incitement’ in Israel.'” Segev again:

And it is not as if there is incitement against Iran in Israel. There is even a peace campaign on Facebook.

My correspondent: “Barak, Netanyahu, Lieberman and a half  dozen others have been inciting panic-fear in remarks made almost every day for months now.”

And Idrees Ahmad has posted this translation of the Grass poem by Michael Keefer and Nica Mintz of Günter Grass’s “Was gesagt werden muss”:

Why have I kept silent, silent for too long
over what is openly played out
in war games at the end of which we
the survivors are at best footnotes.

It’s that claim of a right to first strike
against those who under a loudmouth’s thumb
are pushed into organized cheering—
a strike to snuff out the Iranian people
on suspicion that under his influence
an atom bomb’s being built.

But why do I forbid myself
to name that other land in which
for years—although kept secret—
a usable nuclear capability has grown
beyond all control, because
no scrutiny is allowed.

The universal silence around this fact,
under which my own silence lay,
I feel now as a heavy lie,
a strong constraint, which to dismiss
courts forceful punishment:
the verdict of “Antisemitism” is well known.

But now, when my own country,
guilty of primal and unequalled crimes
for which time and again it must be tasked—
once again, in pure commerce,
though with quick lips we declare it
reparations, wants to send
Israel yet another submarine—
one whose specialty is to deliver
warheads capable of ending all life
where the existence of even one
nuclear weapon remains unproven,
but where suspicion serves for proof—
now I say what must be said.

But why was I silent for so long?
Because I thought my origin,
marked with an ineradicable stain,
forbade mention of this fact
as definite truth about Israel, a country
to which I am and will remain attached.

Why is it only now I say,
in old age, with my last drop of ink,
that Israel’s nuclear power endangers
an already fragile world peace?
Because what by tomorrow might be
too late, must be spoken now,
and because we—as Germans, already
burdened enough—could become
enablers of a crime, foreseeable and therefore
not to be eradicated
with any of the usual excuses.

And admittedly: I’m silent no more
because I’ve had it with the West’s hypocrisy
—and one can hope that many others too
may free themselves from silence,
challenge the instigator of known danger
to abstain from violence,
and at the same time demand
a permanent and unrestrained control
of Israel’s atomic power
and Iranian nuclear plants
by an international authority
accepted by both governments.

Only thus can one give help
to Israelis and Palestinians—still more,
all the peoples, neighbour-enemies
living in this region occupied by madness
—and finally, to ourselves as well.

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No non-Jew will ever be in a position of saying something meaningful to a Jewish person. Gunter Grass is just another false god that should be exterminated.

It doesn’t matter if you saw with your own own eyes the country of your birth being turned to ashes because of somebody’s bad idea. What you have to say is of no interest whatsoever.

Until a Jewish person has that experience of watching his own country turned to ash for the very same reason, there is nothing to be learned. In fact, we don’t care about Gunter’s bleatings at all. He’s just a piece of pascal lamb that won’t disturb anyone very much longer.

Zionism is like a giant machine for chopping off anyone who stands a little taller than the rest. Carter goes, Dershowitz stays. Grass goes, Mandela goes, Tutu goes, anyone who dares to question the orthodoxy. It’s hard even to remember their names. So the result is a monoculture of mediocrity. Everyone is rightly terrified that a mis-step can easily – no, will almost certainly result in unbearable pressure.

When somebody or other gets to decide whether or not Peter Beinart can be interviewed on KPFA for goodness sake by somebody who is not orthodox, it seems we are in the grip of an iron headlock, not just a lock step as our President likes to say, but our mental spheres have been occupied to such an extent that we can’t even talk about a clearcut path that could lead to nuclear holocaust.

To see grown men pretend that for 50 years Gunter Grass fooled them, that if they had only known about his activities as a 17 year-old, they would have certainly dismissed as the “tainted” ravings of anti-Semite sworn to the destruction of every Jew on earth such works as the Tin Drum. Now come on ! These people claim to be so easily hoodwinked !

I feel sorry for our children.

I think GG knew what he was doing. His poem was bound to be noticed, but would receive so VERY much more notice if tagged as anti-Semitic!

These days, everyone knows the hair-trigger likelihood that enthusiasts for Israel’s war-making and territorial expansion (which must, must remind GG of the 1930s in Germany, what with the armed German aggression in those days against most of Europe aimed at securing “lebensraum”) will land like a ton of bricks on a cleverly crafted criticism of Israel if made by an ex-SS (although no Israeli would think of apologizing for Israel’s election to premier of former terrorists such as Begin and Shamir and Sharon).

Germany has two things (w.r.t. Jews) to apologize for: the Holocaust (which they have apologized for) and their failure to stand up to the USA and openly and noisily criticize Israel’s wars and its territorial expansionism and its malign mistreatment of Palestinians (something Germany has not done, even though a leader of the EU).

“Israel first”

and then these great american journalist will wonder later why the american public turned no them, and the jewish american community will think it just came out of nowhere, evidence of the anti semitic gene in the white european gene pool.

Israel first is an apropos appellation for the ad hominem smear mongers whose job it is to discredit the messenger in order to diminish the value of the message and to keep their peeps in the dark.

Israel first

Very predictable. Ethan Bronner lead the Times smear campaign against Jimmy Carter when Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid came out.

There is a really good article by Jakob Augstein on Spiegel Online:

Why We Need an Open Debate on Israel

This is what Grass’ wants.