Merz's statement on anti-Semitism: And he missed the mark again

Friedrich Merz is known for choosing absolutely the wrong words. And he did it again: Anti-Semitism is the “most perfidious form of xenophobia,” said the Chancellor at a Berlin CDU election campaign event on Thursday evening in the Konrad Adenauer House. You just want to shake your head. Because there are so many problematic things in this one sentence.

Anyone who calls anti-Semitism “xenophobia” is saying, whether intentionally or not: Jews in Germany are different. They are “foreign” here. This doesn't even have to be meant in a derogatory way - but it draws a line between the collective "we" and the "others", the Jews. A strangeness that has been known for a long time; science calls it othering.

Of course, with the term “xenophobia” itself, Merz shows how far he is from what is the bitter reality for many people in this country: anti-Semitism and racism are real, happen every day, across all areas of life. But the anti-Semite who attacks a woman with a Star of David necklace in Berlin with a broken bottle does not ask her whether she is really Jewish or about her nationality - just as the racist who drives his car towards a group of minors in Weißenfels, brakes just in front of them and then declares that "this is not their country". And last but not least, no one is helped when Merz sets up a hierarchy of misanthropy: anti-Semitism is worse than racism is worse than...

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It's an election campaign - and parties across the party landscape are making a name for themselves by being the last bulwark against anti-Semitism. “Anti-Semites hate this trick: vote for the CDU,” says Stefan Evers in Berlin. While his CDU is in the middle of an affair about funding for combating anti-Semitism that was illegally awarded and without sufficient scrutiny. Meanwhile, the leadership of the Berlin Left declared after the latest anti-Semitic attack: “We as the Left will not accept that.” While their own party comrades applaud a rapper who glorifies the terror of the PFLP at a campaign rally.

What kind of world would that be in which the fight against anti-Semitism and every form of misanthropy would actually be waged because minorities have a right to live in security and dignity. Instead, everyone makes it their priority - but that doesn't help those affected.