A spokesman for the opposition Green Party announced that its Bundestag faction will hold a special debate on Israel and the Middle East next month at which charges that the party has anti-Semitic tendencies will be thoroughly aired.
The Greens at the moment are embarrassed by their choice of author Luise Rinser as their candidate for President of the Federal Republic, a symbolic rather than political office. Key members of the party’s Bundestag faction have said privately that they had not read Rinser’s books, particularly one titled” Mirjam,” which is said to contain anti-Semitic overtones.
Her negative views about Jews and Judaism became an issue in the Israeli media, and the Israel Embassy here is taking a closer look at alleged anti-Semitism within the Green Party, which grew out of a movement of pacifists and ecologists in recent years.
The Greens apparently were impressed by Rinser’s record of opposition to the Nazi regime and brushed aside evidence that she was initially pro-Nazi. During the Nazi era her writings expressed admiration for Hitler. But she had a falling-out with the party and was jailed.
Rinser gained prominence in post-war Germany as a leftwing author who stressed feminist issues, the search for peace and the need to protect the enviroment. But leftwing intellectuals detected anti-Semitism in her writing, for example her claim that her studies of the origins of Jewish thought revealed some of the worst evils of modern society. The Greens apparently missed this, or preferred to disregard it when they selected her as their candidate for the Presidency.
PARTY MEMBER REFUSED ENTRY INTO ISRAEL
The party is also involved in a bitter controversy over its delegation, now visiting the Middle East, which the Israeli Ambassador here labeled “anti-Semitic.”
One member of the delegation, Brigitte Heinrich, who is also a member of the Parliament of Europe, was refused entry into Israel when the delegation arrived there today, via Jordan. According to a report from Tel Aviv, Heinrich was stopped at the Allenby Bridge and returned to Amman.
According to Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Roni Milo, Heinrich was banned because she served a 21-month prison sentence for aiding Palestinian and German terrorists. She was convicted by the high court in Kar Isruhe of smuggling arms to terrorists in West Germany.
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