(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted a German poet who wrote that Israel is a threat to world peace.
In a statement, Netanyahu condemned German Nobel laureate Gunter Grass for his "shameful moral equivalence," the Times of Israel reported.
"Gunter Grass’s shamelful moral equivalence between Israel and Iran, a regime that denies the Holocaust and threatens to annihilate Israel, says little about Israel and much about Mr. Grass," Netanyahu said.
Grass, 84 and the winnter of the 1999 Nobel Prize in literature, published a poem Wednesday in which we writes that Israel is "endangering world peace" and criticizes the German government for its support of the Jewish state.
In 2006, Grass acknowledged that he had served in a division of the Waffen-SS.
On Thursday, Grass responded to criticism of his poem, telling a German television station that his critics had not bothered to look at the poem and were interested only in a campaign to ruin his reputation.
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