...It is tempting to ridicule the Hamas Chart[er] as lunacy, just as in the past Hitler’s ravings were ridiculed. However, it is precisely such demonization of Jews as the source of all evil that transforms the murder of Israeli civilians into an act of liberation and that provides the phantasmagorical reason for Hamas’ ambition to destroy Israel. This is why an uncompromising combat against anti-Semitism in Palestine and the Arab world is a key precondition for any genuine peace in the Middle East.

But on precisely this point, German foreign policy under the direction of Joschka Fischer has not merely refused to join the battle. It has deliberately turned a blind eye, proceeding as if hating Jews were a normal feature of the Oriental world – like hookahs or mosques. Consequently, the “red-green” government has not treated the militants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as combatants waging war on Israel. Islamist suicide terror has instead been presented as a false, though, in the final analysis, comprehensible reaction to poverty and hopelessness. “It is not the violence of the second Intifada which has caused the failure of the peace process,” the Green Party member of parliament Christian Sterzing remarked in a discussion of the Fischer proposal, “it is rather the failed political process which has caused the violence.”...