Poll: Negative Attitudes Towards Jews Remain In Germany

BERLIN - Negative attitudes towards Jews remain in Germany even while keeping the memory of the Holocaust strong has grown, the American Jewish Committee said Monday in statement releasing new polling data.

About 60 per cent of Germans say anti-Semitism is currently a problem. Of these 17 per cent see it as very serious and 43 per cent as somewhat of a problem, the poll revealed.

This is the third such survey carried out for the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which maintains an office in Berlin, since German unification in 1990.

Almost 60 years after the Holocaust, substantial percentages of Germans voice negative feelings towards Jews, the survey indicated.

Germany's Jewish community has grown to almost 100,000 from a level of 30,000 in 1990 with Jewish immigrants coming from the former Soviet Union since Berlin opened the country to Jewish immigrants in that year. Germany has a total population of 82 million.

Among the negative attitudes found in the survey:
·20 per cent of Germans believe Jews have "too much influence" in German society.

·35 per cent of Germans endorse the view that Jews are motivated by feelings of revenge more so than others.

·40 per cent of Germans contend that Jews exert too much influence on world events.

·52 per cent of Germans assert that Jews are exploiting the memory of the Holocaust for their own purposes.

·17 per cent of Germans "prefer not" to have Jews as neighbors, though more Germans would prefer to not have as neighbors Gypsies, Arabs, Turks, Africans and Poles.

The AJC said anti-Semitism may be even higher than expressed in these survey responses given that the poll also found 59 per cent of those agreeing with the statement that "Many people in Germany are afraid to express their true feelings about Jews."

Regarding the Holocaust, the survey found widespread support for both remembrance and education.

Some 43 per cent of Germans know that the Nazis killed six million Jews during World War II - an improvement over the 1994 survey when 36 percent correctly cited the 6 million figure.

A broad majority of Germans (72 per cent) favor maintaining the memory of the Holocaust with 27 per cent saying it is essential and 45 per cent calling it very important for all Germans to know about the Nazi extermination of the Jews, while 16 per cent says it is somewhat important and 4 per cent say not important at all.

The German parliament's decision to build a national Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin is backed by 49 per cent, with 27 per cent saying they disapprove.

In general, the older the respondent, the more likely they are to express negative attitudes toward Jews and other minorities, the poll indicated.

There is consistent correlation in the poll between higher levels of education and lower levels of prejudice.

Eastern Germans hold significantly more positive views on Jews than do western Germans. This finding may come as a surprise given that eastern Germany had higher rates of neo-Nazi violence during the 1990s.

A total of 1,250 people aged 14 and older were interviewed for the survey carried out last month by the Infratest polling agency.

The polling results have a margin of error of between 1.2 and 2.8 percentage points.

Dennis Miller on palestinians

A brief overview of the situation is always valuable, so as a service to all Americans who still don't get it, I now offer you the story of the Middle East in just a few paragraphs, which is all you really need.

Don't thank me. I'm a giver. Here we go:

The Palestinians want their own country. There's just one thing about that: There are no Palestinians. It's a made up word. Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like "Wiccan," "Palestinian" sounds ancient but is really a modern invention. Before the Israelis won the land in war, Gaza was owned by Egypt, and there were no “Palestinians" then, and the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were no "Palestinians" then. As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the Palestinians," weeping for their deep bond with their lost "land" and "nation."

So for the sake of honesty, let's not use the word "Palestinian" any more to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at our deaths until someone points out they're being taped. Instead, let's call them what they are: "Other Arabs Who Can't Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death."

I know that's a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this, then: “Adjacent Jew-Haters." Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more thing. No, they don't. They could've had their own country any time in the last thirty years, especially two years ago at Camp David. But if you have your own country, you have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way to make a living. That's no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region want: Israel.

They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course -- that's where the real fun is -- but mostly they want Israel. Why? For one thing, trying to destroy Israel - or "The Zionist Entity" as their textbooks call it -- for the last fifty years has allowed the rulers of Arab countries to divert the attention of their own people away from the fact that they're the blue-ribbon most illiterate, poorest, and tribally backward on God's Earth, and if you've ever been around God's Earth, you know that's really saying something.

It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about the great history and culture of the Muslim Mideast. Unless I'm missing something, the Arabs haven't given anything to the world since Algebra, and, by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one.

Chew this around and spit it out: Five hundred million Arabs; five million Jews. Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel as a pack of matches sitting in the middle of it. And now these same folks swear that if Israel gives them half of that pack of matches, everyone will be pals.

Really? Wow, what neat news. Hey, but what about the string of wars to obliterate the tiny country and the constant din of rabid blood oaths to drive every Jew into the sea? Oh, that? We were just kidding.

My friend Kevin Rooney made a gorgeous point the other day: Just reverse the numbers. Imagine five hundred million Jews and five million Arabs. I was stunned at the simple brilliance of it. Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of razor blades and dynamite to themselves? Of course not. Or marshaling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to drive a tiny Arab State into the sea? Nonsense. Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents? Impossible. Or spreading and believing horrible lies about the Arabs baking their bread with the blood of children? Disgusting. No, as you know, left to themselves in a world of peace, the worst Jews would ever do to people is debate them to death.

Mr. Bush, God bless him, is walking a tightrope. I understand that with vital operations coming up against Iraq and others, it's in our interest, as Americans, to try to stabilize our Arab allies as much as possible, and, after all, that can't be much harder than stabilizing a roomful of supermodels who've just had their drugs taken away. However, in any big-picture strategy, there's always a danger of losing moral weight.

We've already lost some. After September 11 our president told us and the world he was going to root out all terrorists and the countries that supported them. Beautiful. Then the Israelis, after months and months of having the equivalent of an Oklahoma City every week (and then every day) start to do the same thing we did, and we tell them to show restraint.

If America were being attacked with an Oklahoma City every day, we would all very shortly be screaming for the administration to just be done with it and kill everything south of the Mediterranean and east of the Jordan. (Hey, wait a minute, that's actually not such a bad id . . . ooh, that is, what a horrible thought, yeah, horrible.)"

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