Almost a third of AfD voters are right-wing extremists, according to a survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation last year. The party agitates against foreigners and refugees, and according to a study, repeatedly uses antisemitic clichés.
According to the handout of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), antisemitism belongs to the “programmatic core” of the AfD. The party’s “alleged solidarity” with the Jewish community and Israel only serves as a vehicle for its “racist and anti-migration propaganda,” said the director of the AJC Berlin, Remko Leemhuis. The handout is entitled:
»Mobilizing Resentment. For the analysis of antisemitism” (Die Mobilisierung des Ressentiments. Zur Analyse des Antisemitismus).
In the AfD and its electorate, “despite some lip service to the contrary, hostility to Israel, Holocaust relativization, antisemitic conspiracy and antisemitic images occupy a prominent place,” said the author of the handout, political scientist Lars Rensmann from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Israel is being instrumentalized by the AfD primarily for an “anti-Muslim stance,” said Rensmann. However, the AfD does not represent a consistently pro-Israel position. In tweets from the federal party and its representatives, Israel is repeatedly associated with antisemitic clichés such as that of the “money Jews”.
The AfD also repeatedly launched “targeted campaigns” against prominent Jews in Germany, Rensmann continued. For example, the chairman of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, Anetta Kahane, was portrayed in Twitter posts by AfD MP Petr Bystron as the “Jewish embodiment of the supposedly corrupt dictatorial elite”. The journalist Michel Friedman was also in the focus of AfD representatives.
Especially in the corona pandemic, conspiracy theories received a great boost, said Rensmann. Constructions like that of »a› corrupt globalized elite ‹(…), who would be behind the Corona crisis and a› large population exchange ‹, belong to the imagination mobilized by right-wing populists to which the idea of the Jewish or› Talmudist ‹is based. World conspiracy can join «.The antisemitism commissioner of the federal government, Felix Klein, spoke of an “important analysis” with a view to the study commissioned by the AJC. “Conspiracy stories such as population exchange” spread by AfD politicians are “one hundred percent compatible with antisemitic resentments”.
For antisemitism is not only directed against Jewish people, but is “an expression of a deeply anti-democratic attitude”. Hatred of Jews is a core component of right-wing ideologies and right-wing populism.
Leemhuis called on the “democratic parties” to take a stronger stand against Islamist antisemitism and thus deprive the AfD of the opportunity to use this topic politically for itself.
