Why are the Jews suddenly so angry with Claudia Roth? In the protest against the guest speaker at Frankfurt's "Jewrovision", something came to the surface that is to be feared that the Minister of State for Culture is still underestimating – namely, that Jewish fellow citizens are slowly getting tired of using terms such as "democracy", "freedom of expression and artistic freedom" and, most importantly for Roth, "Colourfulness" is fobbed off and serious incidents are appeased in this way; and they are fed up with the fact that criticism of Israel is almost a national sport in this country, while the most important art exhibition in the world was temporarily allowed to show pictures that are simply not good to look at.
Why make yourself fond of a child?
The astonishment expressed at the fact that the Central Council of Jews, which, in the form of its president Josef Schuster, had invited Roth, did not want to distance itself from the booing afterwards, which were indeed not very subtle, resonated with disapproval: this had clearly violated diplomatic customs. That's true. But you should take the trouble to understand what must have happened for it to happen at all. Why should the Central Council also make itself nice to a politician who is biased in this respect and could have expected that the reception could be frosty, who could have canceled if necessary?
Hardly any of the Twitter comments on this new embarrassment denied themselves the reference to Roth's earlier trip to Iran, when she maintained a provocatively friendly relationship with people who would most like to destroy Israel. In any case, it is astonishing that at a time when even much minor contact guilt is sanctioned, a politician who has something like this on her mind should step in front of a Jewish milieu and make you so angry. Did she think that her quarrel with the mullahs had already been forgotten?
Diversity as a value in itself
Nor will many Jews have forgotten how carelessly she got into the Documenta disaster and how she did not seem particularly determined even when the anti-Semitic pictures were hung in all seriousness. Demands for resignation are always easily raised; but she is lucky to have survived the matter politically, after such a miscalculation.
It is not solely to blame for Jewish unease. But it is, among the responsible staff, the figurehead of an attitude for which diversity is a value in itself. Logically, something like this will eventually come at the expense of the ability to judge in substantively really important matters that do not tolerate ambiguity. Because of all the colorfulness, you can no longer see what would be better to exclude or at least clearly mark as wrong thinking.
There are things that are just stupid stuff
The invitation now extended to all those who are weary and burdened to enrich the discourse with their stories of suffering and oppression, and to do so on one level, has led to a multitude of, as they say, narratives. Only the Jews are no longer allowed to be victims, because they are so scolding the Palestinians.
In this climate, it was possible for the public to rack their brains for months over whether there might not be any truth to the theses of people like Achille Mbembe or Dirk Moses that Israel was an apartheid state or that the Holocaust was just a fixed idea of the Germans. But there are things that are not enriching and that there is nothing to discuss because it's just stupid stuff.
Conservatives occasionally claim that "multiculturalism has failed" – a rallying cry most of the time. Claudia Roth is mistaken, however, when she thinks that it is enough to refer to diversity and democracy when dealing with anti-Semitism. This principled openness, against which nothing could be said if there were also room for immovable convictions, has now visibly fallen at Claudia Roth's feet, after she already did not have the feeling to notice in the BDS Bundestag resolution of 2019 that everything that even smells of "don't buy from the Jew" is out of the question.
The question is whether the post-colonialist nonsense could take revenge on another occasion, at the latest when the German raison d'être, which can only be pro-Israel, is again up for debate or even at stake.