Mainz – Josef Braml sees himself as a US expert – and as is usual for “US experts” in Germany, his everyday life essentially consists of ranting about neoliberalism and Trump. He is therefore the ideal guest for the ZDF morning magazine with Dunja Hayali on Friday. Braml is supposed to comment on the trip to Israel by US President Biden, who announced there that he would essentially continue the pro-Israel policy of his predecessor.
A real German US expert finds something like that dreadful, really dreadful.
He warms up: “If the US and Israel agree that Iran should not get a nuclear weapon, then we can expect worse things to happen.” I don’t think you can spontaneously imagine anything worse than poor Iran losing its beautiful atomic bombs are detonated.
This time, however, Braml overdid it even for public-law relations. “I don’t think the Palestinians expected much anymore. America has long since given up its role as an honest broker,” he analyses. According to Braml, these foreign policy events have mainly domestic reasons. As a non-US expert, one is amazed! But Braml quickly shares his wisdom with the viewer.
Braml explains these “domestic reasons” as follows: “It’s not just the Jewish lobby, but also the Christian right. They have a certain expectation of salvation and Jerusalem plays a very important role there.”
Please? On German public television, the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory of the infiltration of US politics by an alleged “Jewish lobby” is openly played out in a pot with “Christian right-wing” promises of salvation?
Dunya Hayali reacts skillfully, of course: smiling, she announces the transition to the next topic. In parting, she wishes the US expert, who has once again been declared as such, a good day. Let’s continue with the program.
For public service broadcasting, this is no longer an isolated case. The fight against Israel fits perfectly into the left-wing, anti-Western worldview. In purely linguistic terms, too, polemics seem to know no limits here. Allegedly, criticism of Israel has nothing to do with antisemitism. Oddly enough, one does not even make the detour to speak of the “Israeli lobby”, but straight away from the “Jewish”. Something like this goes unchallenged on ZDF. Because anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists are always just the others.
