Fighting Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Germany

: This paper examines the discourse around anti-Semitism in Germany since 2000. The discourse makes use of the figure of the Jew for national security purposes (i.e. via the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the trope of the “dangerous Muslim”) and the politics of national identity. The article introduces the concept of the “War on Anti-Semitism”, an assemblage of policies about national belonging and security that are propelled primarily by white racial anxieties. While the War on Terror is fought against the Muslim Other, or the War on Drugs is fought against predominantly Latinx and Black communities, the War on Anti-Semitism is ostensibly fought on behalf of the racialized Jewish Other. The War on Anti-Semitism serves as a pretext justifying Germany’s internal and external security measures by providing a logic for the management of non-white migration in an ethnically diverse yet white supremacist Europe. In 2000, a new citizenship law fundamentally changed the architecture of belonging and im/migration by replacing the old Wilhelminian jus sanguinis (principle of blood) with a jus soli (principle of residency). In the wake of these changes and the resulting racial anxiety about Germanness, state sponsored civil-society educational programs to fight anti-Semitism emerged, targeting predominantly Muslim non-/citizens. These education programs were developed alongside international debates around the War on Terror and what came to be called “Israel-oriented anti-Semitism” in Germany (more commonly known as “Muslim anti-Semitism”). Triangulated through the enduring legacy of colonial racialization, the Jew and the Muslim are con/figured as enemies in socio-political German discourses. This analysis of the War on Anti-Semitism has serious implications for our understanding of “New Europe”. By focusing on the figure of the Jew and the Muslim, the implications of this work transcend national borders and stress the important connection between fantasy, power, and racialization in Germany and beyond.


Anna-Esther Younes
University of Amsterdam, Sociology Department ABSTRACT: This paper examines the discourse around anti-Semitism in Germany since 2000.The discourse makes use of the figure of the Jew for national security purposes (i.e. via the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the trope of the "dangerous Muslim") and the politics of national identity.The article introduces the concept of the "War on Anti-Semitism", an assemblage of policies about national belonging and security that are propelled primarily by white racial anxieties.While the War on Terror is fought against the Muslim Other, or the War on Drugs is fought against predominantly Latinx and Black communities, the War on Anti-Semitism is ostensibly fought on behalf of the racialized Jewish Other.The War on Anti-Semitism serves as a pretext justifying Germany's internal and external security measures by providing a logic for the management of non-white migration in an ethnically diverse yet white supremacist Europe.In 2000, a new citizenship law fundamentally changed the architecture of belonging and im/migration by replacing the old Wilhelminian jus sanguinis (principle of blood) with a jus soli (principle of residency).In the wake of these changes and the resulting racial anxiety about Germanness, state sponsored civil-society educational programs to fight anti-Semitism emerged, targeting predominantly Muslim non-/citizens.These education programs were developed alongside international debates around the War on Terror and what came to be called "Israel-oriented anti-Semitism" in Germany (more commonly known as "Muslim anti-Semitism").Triangulated through the enduring legacy of colonial racialization, the Jew and the Muslim are con/figured as enemies in socio-political German discourses.This analysis of the War on Anti-Semitism has serious implications for our understanding of "New Europe".By focusing on the figure of the Jew and the Muslim, the implications of this work transcend national borders and stress the important connection between fantasy, power, and racialization in Germany and beyond.

Keywords: race, Jews & Muslims, Germany, (new) anti-Semitism
We must also resolutely oppose the anti-Semitism of migrants with an Arab background and from African countries.
Preventive means, as well as, all means of repression right up to the possibility of legal eviction from Germany shall be referred to.
(Stephan Habarth, CDU/CSU politician, January 2018 1 ) In other words, the uniqueness of the Holocaust, which is also an important narrative for the culture of remembrance in Germany, as well as for the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, as Joachim Gauck once put it: The Holocaust and the confrontation with it are part of German identity.So if Mr. Mbembe, as a foreign scholar, intervenes in such a debate and also formulates misleading sentences, then he must make that clear.For me, these sentences are also to be interpreted as a relativization of the Holocaust, and in my capacity as anti-Semitism commissioner I feel called upon to intervene in such a debate and then also to express my concern that this may be misunderstood.
That is why I have asked to speak, and I think the debate that is now being held is very right indeed.
(Dr Felix Klein, Anti-Semitism Delegate of the German Government, May 2020 2 ) Since the end of the Cold War, along with the dismantling of major tenets of Bretton Woods now giving free reign for neoliberal rule (Young, 2001: 53), and the growing together of a former divided Europe, a "new" Germany (and by extension also Europe) came into political and legal being from 1991 onward.In 2000, this new political and economic state-entity also restructured its citizenship law after an almost decade-long political debate about this legislation.By then, Germany had also seen a decade of right-wing attacks, including hundreds of deaths of people of color, refugees, and migrants from the end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s.In November 2019, the city of Dresden even declared an official Nazi-state-ofemergency (German: Notstand), which was widely reported in foreign (English) media, but rarely mentioned in German media.
Alongside new geopolitical formations of power during the 1990s, the move away from Cold War politics also witnessed intersecting processes of racializing the figure of the Muslim in Germany (Attia, 2007;Shooman, 2014) and Europe (El-Tayeb 2008, 2011;Silverstein, 2008), which were particularly propelled by 9/11 incitements to a "War on Terror:" Under the umbrella of democracy and a (secular) modern identity then, societal commitments to security and diversity, animal rights, gender equality and tolerance of sexual diversity (Puar, 2011;Haritaworn, 2012;Petzen, 2012) have been artfully mobilized as signifiers of European progress and unification.In Germany, this article argues, the War on Terror fell in line with a war on anti-Semitism primarily targeting "Muslims," leading to even more stigma for various communities of color in Germany.In that vein, Goldberg stresses that "Muslim degradation is deeply discounted against the universalizing currency of implementing security, resisting terrorism, restricting immigration" (Goldberg, 2009: 168).Given the attacks on her person in Germany, Jasbir Puar noted: We need the term anti-Semitism to mean something other than "critical of Israel" because anti-Semitism still exists.Without this important and hardly semantic distinction, the charge of anti-Semitism becomes a strong projection of the history of the Holocaust onto the bodies of "outsiders" like myself, those not directly interpellated by that history, as a classic form of psychoanalytic disavowal; I accuse you of doing what I am afraid I might be doing myself, what I very much so fear doing, what I don't want to do myself.(Interestingly enough, this projection of the accusation of anti-Semitism onto "others" mirrors the production of migrants in Germany as the prime carriers and transmitters of anti-Semitism).(Puar, 2011: 140) The trope of a "new anti-Semitism" transpired as various state/transnational/multiple stakeholder conferences from 2000 onward added a new dimension to the image of the former foreigner, then guest worker, and today's Muslim in Germany: The figure of the anti-Semitic Muslim carved out a special place for the figure of the Palestinian anti-Semite as one of the prime instigators or sources for this predicament with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the prime site upon which anti-Semitism today is lived out.The figure of the Palestinian thus, so the story goes, incites and propels anti-Semitism and manipulates other Muslims, Arabs, Turks, refugees and so on, to do the same.In this narrative, anti-Semitism has moved away from its (white Christian) European legacy of violence based on the fantasy that a few Jews aim at controlling Christians, drinking their blood, manipulating the economy and then eventually parasitically taking over Germany (and so on).Today, in the narrative of the "new anti-Semitism," anti-Semitism is not a racism based on fantasy anymore (although that, too, is still very well alive in Germany).Instead, the "new anti-Semitism" seemingly results from a geopolitical reality, structured by conflict where a settler-colonial nation state (Israel) has repressed the population it wasn't able to expel and then annexed even more land through direct colonial rule (occupation).Hence, Paul Silverstein noted that "the ongoing debate over the 'New Antisemitism' has a politics all to itself that deserves further analysis" (Silverstein, 2008: 26).The latter will be done in the following pages in the case study of national state policies in Germany along with detailed micro-descriptions from civil society networks from Berlin, "the capital of the most powerful of the states that dominate the construction of Europe" (Balibar, 2003: 2).This article thus articulates a critique of hegemonic discourses around a "new anti-Semitism" and will trace its discursive rise to fame from 2000 onward, although much more could be said about the 1990s alone, or the period between 1945 and 1991. 3The article's epistemological scope is transnational and transhistorical (Zimmerer, 2009), it focuses on and reads current German politics through the prism of "race" and uses the "figure of the Jew" as an optic to understand the current entangled (educational) politics of race, migration, refugeedom, and racialization which find their scapegoat in the Palestinian and then by extension the Muslim/Arab anti-Semite.First, I will detail how a new citizenship law fueled debates about belonging and anti-Semitism, in order to then move on to detail how public and civil society educational programs focused on the "new anti-Semitism" targeting Muslims.Then, I exemplify how transnational debates to fight anti-Semitism merged with "War on Terror" narratives in order for German state policies to call upon the nations for an international war/fight against anti-Semitism.Furthermore, this article understands the "global" as "local" and describes the emerging policies post-2000 as reminiscent of the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Terror," which are used to manage (i.e. via criminalization; Alexander, 2010) ethnically diverse white nation states and non-Western post-colonial states.These wars have been fought, in a Fanonian scenario, by postcolonial state elites, civil society actors (non-governmental organizations or NGOs), police and para-/military (primarily in the global south) and private economic interests.This article views, via a thick description of civil society, educational and state policies how the "war on anti-Semitism" resembles these policies by managing, criminalizing, and targeting migrant, refugee, and of color communities with the figure of the Palestinian anti-Semite as its main culprit.The events and structural changes described detail how civil society initiatives merged with a government policy around race and the figure of the Muslim which were discursively already present, but until the end of the 1990s and beginning of 2000s not yet fully institutionalized as a fight against anti-Semitism amongst Muslims.

CITIZENSHIP, BELONGING, AND RACIAL FANTASIES OF THE MUSLIM ANTI-SEMITE
In 2000, a new citizenship law fundamentally changed the architecture of belonging and im/migration in Germany.It came into being after almost a decade-long political debate during the 1990s.At the same time, by the time the new millenium was reached, the politics of security and im/migration had successfully converged around the figure of the Muslim (Schiffauer, 2008;Özyürek, 2005) as the prime scapegoat for social ailments in Germany, as well as in much of Europe.The new citizenship law was first approved in 1999 and came into effect in January 2000.Since Germany stepped back into legal sovereignty (1991), it has been under scrutiny by its fellow European countries for its archaic and ideology-driven citizenship law, which dates back to the Wilhelmenian empire and its colonial "one-drop" blood rule that governed sexuality, marriage and racial categories in German colonial Africa-as well as under Nazi rule later on (Howard, 2008). 4With the passing of the 16-year reign (1982-1998) of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) to hand over power to the Social Democratic Party (SPD), steps were taken to push for a new law during the end of the 1990s.The new citizenship law changed the old Wilhelminian jus sanguinis (principle of blood) to a jus soli (principle of residency) and came into effect in 2000.It reduced the residency requirements from 15 to 8 years with a valid residence permit, proof of gainful employment, no criminal convictions, and the will to give up former citizenship.Applicants also had to take German language tests.Furthermore, an ethical "loyalty oath" was added, requiring the support of "a free and democratic order of the Constitution" (Howard, 2008: 53).
The latter development of legal change vis-à-vis national belonging and citizen's rights coincided with government and civil society initiatives taking action against new anti-Semitism.These discursive manifestations were eventually wed into political criminalization after the refugee influx as well as the new elections in 2017, in which the right-wing nationalist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the third strongest party in Germany (Younes, 2018).As described above, toward the end of 2015, political interpellations to sharpen asylum law around an alleged anti-Semitism of refugees were openly discussed by a variety of wellrooted and mainstream politicians, journalists and civil society actors such as the Central Council of Jews in Germany as well as civil society educational institutions.
The year 2000 also witnessed the second Palestinian Intifada, strengthening national polemics around anti-immigrant polemics and anti-Semitic (German) "Muslims."In the wake of the internationally known assassination of a young boy and his father in Gaza, known as the "Muhammad al-Durrah incident," an arson attack was carried out by two minors of color of Arab background 5 on a synagogue in Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) (nobody was hurt).Then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) famously called for an "Uprising of the Decent" (German: "Aufstand der Anständigen") against right-wing violence and anti-Semitism in Germany and Wolfgang Clement (SPD), prime minister of NRW, issued a 25 000 German Mark (around 15 000 USD) reward for the retrieval of the culprits (Der Spiegel, 2000).By the time this call was made, Germany had already witnessed a decade of racially motivated attacks and murders, the burning down of refugee housing centers, man hunts and killings during the 1990s.With the "Uprising of the Decent," however, national funds were allocated for the establishment of "victims' counseling services" (German: Opferberatungsstellen) in order to coordinate counseling for victims of racist, anti-Semitic or right-wing violence, monitoring of xenophobic, anti-Semitic and right-wing extremist attacks, as well as the collection and distribution of raw data regarding these offenses.In 2001, government ministries heeded Schröder's call and publicized programs for funds dealing with right-wing extremism, xenophobia, and anti-semitism, which eventually funded several initiatives from 2001-2006, with around EU€13 million per year; from 2007-2010 with €19 million under the program "Diversity does Good;" and from 2011 onwards through "Strengthening Tolerance, Building Competence."As a comparison, around the same time, government funds for public schools in Berlin were allocated around €2 billion per year.However, Chancellor Schröder's call was far from implemented nation-wide.For around a decade, only former East Germany made use of such funds to establish victims' counseling services, primarily by civil society organizations run on a notfor-profit basis.Only after 2011 did other formerly West German cities and states also established victims' counseling services. 6Also from 2001 onwards, a self-organized initiative from the "Bildungsbausteine Thüringen" started working on new educational material against the new Anti-Semitism in Germany.
In January 2000, Stockholm hosted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance bringing together 31 countries primarily, but not only, from Europe. 7In the 2017 Independent Antisemitism Expert Report commission by the government it states: The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has held a rapid succession of anti-Semitism conferences in Vienna (2003), Berlin (2004) and Cordoba (2005).Since then, the issue of anti-Semitism has received considerable political attention, and the successor to the EUMC, the Federal Agency for the Protection of Human Rights (FRA), issues annual monitoring reports. 8  The discourse found in these documents alludes to the idea that anti-Semitism is brought over to Europe from the Middle East or, more precisely, from the Middle East conflict; and according to the European Union, this problem is unfortunately only tackled by NGOs and civil society organizations, as opposed to state entities (EUMC, 2006: 20).

CIVIL SOCIETY AND STATE EDUCATION, AND ISRAEL-ORIENTED ANTI-SEMITISM
The educational material and NGO work that came about due to the newly allocated funds for civil society initiatives against anti-Semitism developed from 2003/4 onward, when the money started being handed out for the allocated civil society programs.The Intifada-along with terrorism and Islamism-was indicated in official and NGO documents as the paramount event leading to a "new anti-Semitism" in Europe-primarily amongst its attendant Muslim population.Local civil society training programs, conversations with trainers during my (PhD) ethnography (2010)(2011), educational organizers as well as German state institutional reports of 2002and 2003(BMFSFJ, 2003) and 2008(Deutscher Bundestag Drucksache, 2008a, 2008b).In 2009, a special report on anti-Semitism was commissioned and presented to the parliament and government in 2011 by the "Expert Anti-Semitism Circle" (Expertenkreis Antisemitismus, 2011) and then again in 2017 (Deutscher Bundestag Drucksache, 2017: 12).An EU report of 2005 9 on anti-Semitism also indicates the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000 as one of the "main events" for the increasing, as it is also called, of "Israel-oriented Anti-Semitism" (BMI, 2011).
In Berlin, the racialization of public space also took shape during the same time.Post-9/11 and in the wake of the Second Intifada, teachers from public schools in the migrant quarters of Kreuzberg and Neukölln started complaining about the anti-Semitic remarks of their students, saying they were facing an "anti-Semitism problem" (Spiegel Online, 2002).The first reports attempting to tackle the phenomena were published in 2002 and 2003, with one in Berlin called "Democracy Threatening Phenomena in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg and Possibilities of Intervention: The Outline of a Problem" (ZDK, 2003).The report opens up categories such as "Anti-Semitism in Islamic Societies" and delves into a rising Islamism post-9/11 in Kreuzberg, 10 merging the War on Terror with the war on anti-Semitism in the body and psyche of the Muslim anti-Semite.Also noteworthy is the use of the term "Sozialraum" (social space), which already took hold back in 2002/3.The word "Sozialraum" is traditionally known to prevail in the fields of education and street work, yet, tying social problems such as Islamism, or sexism and homophobia, to a place where primarily people of color live, also means not only racializing this space given the already existing narratives, but also demonizing it in an already racialized public discourse by adding anti-Semitism to the equation of inadmissible behavior and thought.The reports go on to highlight issues such as homophobia in Muslim communities, gender discrimination and anti-Semitism amongst Muslims.
After the first project funding calls and their successive reports, the government responded by initiating a program for the establishment of Antisemitismus im Kontext von Migration und Rassismus (Anti-Semitism in the Context of Migration and Racism) (AMIRA 11 ) in Berlin.AMIRA was formed (and quickly vanished again) in order to be responsible for extracurricular youth education outside of schools, working with "youth with a migration background" against anti-Semitism.At the same time, in Berlin in 2003, the Kreuzberger Initiative Against anti-Semitism (KIgA) was founded in order to provide "political education for the society of migration."Officially, KIgA's role was to focus on issues of anti-Semitism and "Islamism prevention" in Muslim communities in Kreuzberg/Neukölln, as opposed to AMIRA, which was responsible for working along the same tropes inside schools in Berlin.Today, only KIgA remains, offering civil society workshops as well as working in schools.They added Islamism prevention/ deradicalization with Muslim youth to their fight against the new anti-Semitism and also continue taking trips to Israel with Muslim youth to tackle anti-Semitic stereotypes.Government funding for projects fighting anti-Semitism has increased considerably since 2000.
Over the years, several programs concerning a new anti-Semitism have emerged in the German civil society landscape.One of these civil society initiatives published a report called "Ethnocentrism and Anti-Semitism Amongst Youths with Migration Background: Appearances and Pedagogical Praxis in a Society of Immigration" (Greuel & Glaser, 2012).One article therein ironically supports the thesis that anti-Semitism training for white Germans is being replaced-in monetary support, number and scope-with projects for youths with a "Muslim background."Greuel lists 18 projects, of which eight projects were tailored to a "Muslim target audience" (German: muslimisch geprägte Zielgruppe), seven project targeted "general prejudice," two targeted anti-Semitism without any specific target group, and one was for Turkish ultra-nationalists (Greuel, 2012).There is also an effort to produce these workshops with a leadership constituted by either "Middle Eastern-background staff" or else those who are "trained" and "sensitized" to work with the specific "target-group," so that they are able to understand the emotive dynamics and socialization processes of Muslims.In other words, this process-locating opinions and behavior in an entire racialized ethnic group-mirrors the production of the "Muslim anti-Semite abject."The "non-specified target audience" are mainly white Germans.After 2015, increasing numbers of initiatives were taken to also educate young (Muslim) refugees.In educational or academic material on the new Anti-Semitism, that works directly in the social non-profit sector (KIgA, 2011;Amadeo Antonio Stiftung/AAS, 2011a, 2011b, 2012;Jikeli, Thoma, & Stoller, 2007), Muslims have been defined as "carrier groups" of this new Anti-Semitism.

TRANSNATIONAL ALLIANCES OF MERGING THE WAR ON ANTI-SEMITISM WITH THE WAR ON TERROR
Recent attempts at emancipatory discourses centering on gender, homosexuality, crime and anti-Semitism have primarily focused on migrant quarters, bodies and cross-border mass movements for social, legal and political reasons.These various discourses around the figure of the Jew and a new anti-Semitism have enabled race to function transnationally, stretching from the Middle East and Afghanistan to Germany, from the past to the present, from white European culture to non-European culture.At the same time then, when those new borders are erected inside the German nation, older borders are manifested outside of Europe, clearly mirroring its new borders.Indeed, the figure of the anti-Semitic Muslim is noteworthy today because it re/ articulates old Christian European anti-Semitic "conspiratorial racialization" (Zia-Ebrahimi, 2018) fantasies of about the contamination of society, of political infiltration, destabilization and imposed violence or take over, as well as of a demise of European/German/Western culture.Given the tropes detailed in this section as well as above, it is also noteworthy that this kind of anti-Muslim racism can thus legitimately be seen as what Edward Said already in 1978 called the "strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism" (Said, 1978: 27): "The transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same" (ibid, 286).
In terms of its transnational influence and constitution, most of the definitions of anti-Semitism that brought about the conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism on a national and local (Berlin) level, as well as on the European policy level (Expertenkreis Antisemitismus, 2011) are similar to definitions of anti-Semitism by Israeli politician Nathan Sharansky 12 and his 2004 "3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization."Therein he describes what he calls, "the New Anti-Semitism" and its connection to Arab and Islamic anti-Semitism.In the article's first paragraph he explains how to recognize this new anti-Semitism and advocates a definition of it as "aimed at the Jewish state . . .advanced in the name of . . .human rights" (Sharanksy, 2004: 3).He also gives a clear definition of each of the 3Ds. 13In 2011, in the wake of Arab uprisings in the Middle East, Sharansky was featured in an interview, calling for the democratizion of the Middle East: Drawing on recent events, Sharansky highlights the Arab world, on the one hand, which is subsumed with a strong identity but just now discovers it also needs freedom; and Europe, on the other hand, which now learns that to protect its freedom from enemies it has to recover its lost identity.(Jerusalem Post, 2011) Interestingly, in his first article on the 3Ds, Sharansky goes on to argue that "the borders between anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Westernism have become almost completely blurred" (Sharansky, 2004: 3).The definitions of anti-Semitism prevalent in most policy definitions, as well as on a German policy level or within the EU in 2003 when the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) developed a "working definition" of anti-Semitism, bore many resemblances to Sharansky's definition-sometimes differently worded, sometimes directly invoking the words of "double-standards," "demonization" and "delegitimization," usually, however, geared toward de-Judeofying and universalizing the experience of anti-Semitism and weaving it into a general European imperial politics and experience.In this vein, Esther Romeyn writes: A number of scholars have pointed out, in this regard, that the designation of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism as the paradigmatic historical experience of racism not only salvages the "white mythology" of contemporary Europe's universalist claims to moral exemplarity, but paradoxically also "buries" race.The adoption of the norm of "color-blindness", instituted in the name of the anti-racist struggle for tolerance, has made race in Europe a disappearing act: the continued existence of racially-based inequalities is not merely denied, but also erased through the elimination of racial designations in social and cultural processes and analytical frameworks (in avoidance of the charge of racism).(Romeyn, 2014: 80) These mentioned incitements to public policy, however, stand in direct contradiction to police and intelligence statistics (Younes, 2016): there were around 43.6 anti-Semitic physically violent attacks per year in Germany between 2001and 2015(Migration Voter, 2018).In 2016, there were 28 attacks plus two attempted murders (30 violent attacks in total); in 2017, there were 28 physical attacks-usually, with around 95% of them committed by rightwing (leaning) white German individuals.In comparison, there were almost 2000 attacks on refugees in 2017 alone, around 900 attacks on German Muslims, along with more than 100 attacks on refugee aid workers in Germany, most of them right-wing motivated (Younes, 2018).Furthermore, in the first 210 days of 2017, there were also 205 politically motivated criminal acts (including shootings) against parliamentary politicians who supported refugees, the right of asylum and anti-racism policies.There are also no reliable correlations between the refugee influx and the numbers of anti-Semitic attacks.In fact, the only correlation with regards to "foreigner" (migrants and/or people of color) criminal but non-physical offenses can be found during the wars in 2009 (Operation Cast Lead) and 2014 (Operation Protective Edge) (Migration Voter, 2018).Furthermore, there are no government statistics concerning anti-Muslim racism preceding 2017, simply because the category did not exist.However, given the current data, we know that most attacks stem from (white) right-wing extremists.Right-wing motivated crime accounted for around 1006 criminal and physical crimes per year from 2008-2016(BfV, 2020)).Furthermore, there are also no statistical correlations between anti-Semitic violence and the refugee influx, or of any other kind of "Islamist intellectual world" posing any real threat for the democracy of Germany.Rather, given the statistics, the threat to democracy is numerically located in the attacks on refugees, Muslims and people of color, refugee aid workers and parliamentarians that work to achieve a more pluralistic democratic Germany.The overall and, most importantly, the glaring gap between the two numerical comparisons should be evident.Indeed, it rather seems that the anti-Semitism allegations against people of color and "Muslims" are grounded in transnational racializing fantasies in a diversifying Europe amidst a global refugee crisis along with the War on Terror and war on anti-Semitism.

CALLING UPON THE NATIONS: FIGHTING ANTI-SEMITISM IN GERMANY TODAY
German states should ensure that the possibilities of § 54 (1) no. 5 of the Residence Act are consistently applied to foreigners who call for anti-Semitic hatred.It is the will of the German Bundestag [Parliament] to counter the call for hatred against sections of the population and the endangering of peaceful coexistence by intellectual arsonists early on by classifying this behavior as a particularly serious expulsion interest.
(German Parliamentarian Draft, Die Zeit, 2018) 14   Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, some Western European countries have started to understand their own complicity in 20th-century anti-Semitism. 15However, most of the time, the events used to understand race in Europe remain spatially as well as temporarily confined to Europe and1933-1945.Today, the combination of these time and spatial references is also a baseline for the transnational alliance of European states.Much of the geopolitics cumulated in 2000, which was also the time of the meeting of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in Stockholm, summarized by German scholar Assmann: fifty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, there was agreement that the murder of six million European Jews should become a common memory and, in turn, that this memory should inform the values of European civil society and serve as a reminder of the obligation to protect the rights of minorities.(Assmann, 2006: 13) Once Europe's l'enfant terrible, Germany is today the harbinger for European identity formation at its very geopolitical and economic heart.By spearheading the European talks on how the collective European memory of a shared past should look, Germany clearly positions itself in a Western narrative, demarcating its geopolitical difference from Eastern and Southern Europe through responsibility for the Holocaust (Littoz-Monnet, 2012).By tying a supposedly deviant European history of genocide to the very core of its new identity, Germany could now clearly position itself in the West of Europe, having done away with its stagnating East-West binary status.The contradictions generated by the discursive imperative of the Holocaust informing values of identity and belonging in Europe and Germany have, however, created new identities that do not belong (Littoz-Monnet, 2012;Espiritu & Wolf, 2013;Grosfoguel, Gordon, & Mielants, 2009;Lerman, 2002;Klug, 2004;Langbehn & Salama, 2011): On the one hand, through the acknowledgment of the Holocaust, Germany self-identifies as having overcome the troubles of race; on the other hand, although there has been a considerable increase in (white-on-brown/black) racism, especially right after reunification in 1991, it is today non-white Germans or the newly arrived refugees that, according to public discourse and not according to statistical facts, are the biggest danger for the resurgence of racism (anti-Semitism).As such, Esther Romeyn observes in the case of the Netherlands that "the transformation of the horrors of the Shoah into a universalist moral 'uplift' story of an ongoing fight of the human 'spirit' against intolerance" fundamentally instrumentalized the Holocaust to validate new European immigration policies for "securitization and disciplinary integration" (Romeyn, 2014: 79).
Forming "a national-popular collective will" on the basis of fighting anti-Semitism (or drugs, or terror) then affectively produces "an experience of intimate communal aversion [against] the barbaric, uneducated, and savage practices that we as a civilized nation cannot allow to occur within our borders" (Povinelli, 1998: 577-578).These dramatic wars connect the feelings of a white consumer citizen to the imperial policies of a white nation/-state, as well as, to the global perils of geopolitics, which by now mirror homo sapiens' fight for survival in rapidly changing social and ecological landscapes.In the present future, tolerance is only given to specific racisms, not to others: Almost two decades after the manifestation of the migrant-anti-Semitism discourse in 2000, namely in January 2018, and ten days before national Holocaust Remembrance Day, the German parties of the CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP, and the Greens 16 passed a resolution of "Fighting anti-Semitism in a determined way" (Deutscher Bundestag Drucksache, 2018).In 2008, a similar proposal was already made, back then however endorsed by all parties and named "Being determined to fight anti-Semitism, continuing support for Jewish life in Germany in a sustainable manner" (see Deutscher Bundestag Drucksache, 2008a, 2008b, 2013).Both resolutions document the making of a "global threat", clearly located outside of the Western world, but still operating inside the latter.
In 2008, in time with the 70th anniversary of Crystal Night (Reichskristallnacht) of November 9, 1939, the German parliamentarian fractions of the CDU/CSU, SPD, the Greens, as well as the Left (albeit separately), issued an anti-Semitism request and motion, stating that Jewish life in Germany has to be cared for not only for Jews, but for the sake of German democracy: "For Anti-Semitism is not only a threat for our Jewish citizens, but also for our basic values of democracy, diversity, as well as our respect and ensuring of human rights" (Deutscher Bundestag Drucksache, 2008).In this discursive maneuver, the fate of the racialized figure of the Jew came to stand in for a white German self-image of cultural diversity, human rights, social peace, and respect as well as democracy.The argument goes: Whoever attacks Jews, also attacks German national ethics-not the other way around, as it would rather make sense and be also more inclusive for all potential minorities.However, from collapsing anti-Semitism into an anti-democratic demeanor, German democracy comes to stand in for Jews and Jews come to stand in for German democracy; meaning, if the Jews vanish, Germany vanishes.
This discursive maneuver of the resolution brings separate narratives together and re-/ interpellates a geopolitics of racial stigmatization: The 2008 resolution, for instance, evokes former Iranian president Ahmadinejad as an anti-Semitic figure and then moves on to state that anti-Semitism goes hand in hand with anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism.Next to Ahmadinejad, Hamas and Hezbollah are marked as inherently anti-Semitic and the threat of a new anti-Semitism is attested to come from this "Islamist intellectual world" and is hence a "global threat."The 2018 resolution-born of another geopolitical moment-rather focuses on the new realities of Muslim refugees and a growing BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel) movement.It includes appointing a minister responsible for anti-Semitism/Jewish affairs (Antisemitismusbeauftragte/n) to coordinate activities across the different national ministries and states-which would in fact add to another already existing special representative within the Foreign Ministry, who is responsible for dealing with Jewish organizations (internationally) and issues pertaining to anti-Semitism. 17While the resolution names anti-Semitism as a general problem, it also highlights there is "a special breeding ground" (German: besonderer Nährboden) in Africa and the Middle East, which seems to allude to the recent wave of refugees, as well as, attendant German Muslims and blacks.The resolution continues in sub-category 3 to ask if the burning of an Israeli flag (in public, during demonstrations) could be summoned by criminal law, or in 6 it calls for a legal strengthening of the ability to expel foreigners on the basis of anti-Semitism, whilst 7 strongly opposing the global BDS movement and demands that jurisdiction verifies if BDS could qualify for general hate-speech and incitement against a people (German: Volksverhetzung) and thus become liable before the law.In 16 it demands regular reports on the state of anti-Semitism that shall regularly be discussed by the parliament, as well as (in 17) a European-wide effort of countries and institutions to cooperate in the fight against anti-Semitism.
Moreover, in the re-modeled 2018 version document, the Bundestag (except the Left and the right-wing AfD) endorsed the decision of the government to accept the anti-Semitism definition of the International Alliance of Holocaust Remembrance, which states: Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.Rhetorical and physical manifestations of Antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.(IHRA, 2016) In this definition, the actual threat of anti-Semitism is defined primarily as a "feeling of hatred" toward Jews, and not as a fantasy of scapegoating a powerless minority in terms of political, cultural, and economic access and representation, as it should do if it were to do justice to a legacy of critical race theory.The definition instead takes social power and a real and existing political conflict (such as the Israeli conflict with Palestinians) out of the equation and instead relegates anti-Semitism to the domain of affect solely, which is here treated as untainted and unbound by politics, history, or geopolitical power.The document thus does not mention historically grown, politically exploited, and socially manufactured ways of discrimination based on fantasy, physical incarceration/exclusion, economic exclusion, or even targeted mass-/ killings, which have for the most part defined anti-Semitism for more than 500 years.Finally, the second sentence then also paradoxically enables non-Jews to be affected by anti-Semitismmove similar to making a white person the subject of anti-black racism, such as making Rachel Dolezal black: Imagine you live in a country where white non-Jewish Christians are the victims of anti-Semitism.
In both resolutions, the racialized figure of the Jew, interpellated by a German community of faith and fate, indeed came to stand in for a white German self-image attached to un-debatable Israel solidarity, for human rights and democracy.Moreover, both documents have unapologetically also managed to formulate national demands of securitization and deportation vis-à-vis already racialized minority groups affected by past-and-present transnational policies of war.

CONCLUSION
Indeed, in an almost cynical twist of history, more than 500 years after the Spanish Reconquista and the expulsion of the multi-lingual and multi-ethnic Muslim empire along with its Jewish subjects, 18 Jewish and Muslim lives are again bound up in their fate on European lands.This time, however, as this article argues, they are not treated as two equally suspicious subjects of Spanish colonial rule, but as two dichotomist adversaries under European imperial tutelage (Said, 1978: 28; see also Librett, 2014;Hess, 2000;Zia-Ebrahimi 2018). 19 The incitement to a "Muslim anti-Semitism" discourse bears resemblance to already existing transnational war-like rhetoric such as the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Terror" that enabled continuing imperialist politics in Central and South Americas, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa, as well as against black people, Muslims, and Latinos in the United States.It also transports old narratives of conspiratorial anti-Semitism.All three wars have also normalized the policing, mass-surveillance, and imprisonment of Muslims on Western soil(s) and beyond.Along with a new citizenship law and the rising challenges of a "multicultural" Germany, the transnational War on Terror also narratively collapsed into the European-led, but not European-only, "war on anti-Semitism," starting in the mid-1990s but taking on policy relevance from 2000 onwards with primarily Muslims, Arabs, and in fact Palestinians as the main targets. 20In this vein, Romeyn writes: This rhetorical warfare was inflected by the new geopolitical realities.After 9/11, the idea of the new antisemitism as essentially "anti-Zionism" fit in with the scenarios of religious war and a clash of civilizations that were pushed to explain the conflict.(Romeyn, 2020: 10) What all three "wars" have in common is that they locate the origin of Europe's or American social ailments in the non-Western world, as well as in the migrant and people of color communities within the West.Furthermore, social interpellations against drugs, terror or anti-Semitism work well to connect the micro-cosmos of the private sphere to a larger public via the trope of "passionate dramas and experiences."Indeed, as this article has argued, given the seeming "rhetoric of war" in the two Bundestag resolutions for instance, they could also be understood as incitements to war, a war that so far is declared as a "war on anti-Semitism."ENDNOTES 1 Die Zeit, CDU und CSU wollen antisemitische Zuwanderer ausweisen.Zeit Online.. January 6, 2018.My own translation.Last accessed May 27, 2020.
2 "The Causa Achille Mbembe"-Serious allegations and dispute over some passages.René Aguigah in conversation with Felix Klein and Andrea Gerk, Deutschlandfunk Kultur.Online Radio (in German), April 21, 2020.My own highlighting and translation.www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/die-causa-achille-mbembeschwere-vorwuerfe-und-streit-um.1270.de.html?dram:article_id=475092&fbclid=IwAR3T4mK0o8nFAxGocGUh9riyF7BxiDUbfdyVD_6gDzBj3LZa8UR_CtADqlA 3 1991 was the official year of German reunification with the ratification of the 2+4 treaties. 4Originally, each independent German state had its own jus domicili (principle of residence).This, however, conflicted with homogenizing trends to build a German state, and thus, jus sanguinis (principle of blood) was adopted, first by Bavaria in 1818, then distributed through the Prussian citizenship law of 1842, and finally consolidated as German law with the emergence of the German Reich in 1871 and concretized by the German Nationality Law of 1913.See Howard (2008). 5One of them was a stateless Palestinian youth and his friend was Moroccan German. 6This imbalance in data collection has resulted in a distorted picture of racism and other forms of discrimination and violence in Germany.This distortion is, for instance, consistent with the common discourse of East Germany being the prime location for right-wing extremism, racism, and anti-Semitism. 7None-European countries are, amongst others: Argentina, Canada, Israel, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States of America.International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance website, last accessed, May 27, 2020.
8 https://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/18/119/1811970.pdf,p. 12. 9 The entire working definition can still be found on the homepage of the European Forum on Antisemitism, last accessed on June 2, 2015: www.european-forum-on-antisemitism.org/working-definition-of-antisemitism/english/Some of the crucial wordings for which it was eventually taken down are the following: "Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.// Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.// Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis."The homepage of the European Forum on Antisemitism remains unchanged, albeit showing the change in European policy.One can thus still read that "This 'working definition' was adopted in 2005 by the EUMC, now called the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) and disseminated on its website and to its national monitors.Units of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) concerned with combating antisemitism also employ the definition.The US State Department's report, Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism, released earlier this year, makes use of this definition for the purpose of its analysis."After an initial introduction one can click on one of the 32 translations of the "working definition" in various languages.
18 "The fact remains, however, that the discovery of America was the result of what was intended to be the last crusade against Islam…European colonial expansion began simultaneously with the institution of the Catholic Inquisition that replaced centuries of Islamic multiculturalism.It was a symptomatic beginning" (Young, 2001: 21).
19 "That anti-Semitism and…Orientalism resemble each other very closely is historical, cultural, and political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood" (Said, 1978: 28).