A former leader of the Green Party in Germany won a court ruling last week enjoining a party colleague from quoting an anti-Semitic comment he allegedly made during a telephone conversation.
Hans-Christian Strobele was forced to resign as one of the three co-chairmen of the ecology-minded party for publicly expressing the view last January that Israel itself was responsible for the Iraqi Scud missile attacks on its territory during the Persian Gulf War.
The Green activist never denied making that statement. But he brought former colleague Christian Vogt-Moykopf before a Berlin court for having repeated his telephone conversation comment that he would “put up with 1 million Jewish dead to prevent an escalation of the war.”
The court refused to accept the taped conversation as evidence, on grounds that it had been illegally taped.
The affair within the German Green Party mirrors one that took place among its colleagues in France, where the spokesman of the Lyon branch of the French Greens was quoted as blaming the Jews for the Gulf war.
There, Jean Briere was temporarily suspended in April following publication of his anti-Israel, anti-Semitic remarks.
But the decision to suspend him was reversed on a technicality in early June at a national meeting of the Greens in Paris.
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