Austrian president Heinz Fischer is worried about Israel…
Karl Pfeifer
Austria has not called back the Jews after its Liberation in 1945. Only very few Jews returned and had to confront a vicious anti-Semitism during several decades. Today there are about 7.000 Jews and 400.000 Muslims living in Austria.
As far as anti-Semitism is concerned, there was not much difference between the conservative ÖVP and the Socialists. We all remember when Bruno Kreisky who protected former SS members and launched at the same time harsh and personal attacks against Simon Wiesenthal. Heinz Fischer did do his level best to participate in those attacks. The Kreisky-Wiesenthal affair remained a domestic Austrian scandal. Three years after Kreisky’s retirement began the Waldheim affair. The former secretary of the United Nations who was in 1986 candidate for the Austrian presidency had concealed his past as a 1c officer who was present at the scene of crimes committed in Yugoslavia and Greece by the Wehrmacht. The scandal started with revelations of his past in the liberal Vienna weekly “profil” and it confronted Austria with most of Western opinion.
Austrian president Heinz Fischer is one of those sleazy Sunday speakers who will always say what his listeners expect to hear. Now that there are already more than 180.000 dead in Syria and Christians and minorities are forced by IS to convert to Islam or lose their life, Fischer did say, what the public expected him to say. He attacked Israel.
Politicians, academics, students, and decision-makers came together in the Tyrolean village of Alpbach to discuss new ideas and solutions to European and global problems. Heinz Fischer launched at the Alpbach forum a scathing attack on Israel. He complained that the number of victims show “a considerable, if not extreme disproportion”.
He regurgitated the common place that not every criticism of Israel or the number of victims can be „raised to the level of anti-Semitism“.
The German Jewish painter Max Liebermann said in 1933 “I cannot eat as much as I would like to vomit”. Reading what President Heinz Fischer said, I have the same feeling.
