Pandering to subtle German anti-Semitism

BY BENJAMIN WEINTHAL
BERLIN - Remember the late British Jewish actor Marty Feldman's role in the 1974 comedy film Young Frankenstein? He plays Dr. Frankenstein's hunchback assistant Igor and moves his hump from shoulder to shoulder to deliberately perplex his boss.The controversial American Jewish political scientist Norman Finkelstein's attempt to secure locations last week in Munich and Berlin to deliver anti-Israel lectures recalls Feldman's shifting hump.Finkelstein, whose scheduled talk ­ "One year after the invasion of the Israeli army in Gaza and the responsibility of the German government in the starvation of the Palestinian population"­ generated protests and cancellations last week, resulting, like Igor's hump, in a perpetual shift of venue. Initially, he was scheduled to speak in the Trinitatis evangelical church in Berlin, with organizational and financial support from the political foundations of the Green Party, Left Party, German-Palestinian organizations, and a fringe group of anti-Zionist Jews.Finkelstein was denied entry to Israel in 2008 because of his pro-Hizbullah solidarity activity in Lebanon. According to a February New York Times review of a documentary on Finkelstein, he waved a banner during a protest against the First Lebanon War in 1982, urging "Israeli Nazis" to "stop the Holocaust in Lebanon."The Heinrich Böll Foundation, affiliated with the Green Party, pulled the plug on its involvement and said in a statement: "We regret our decision... and because of careless, insufficient research we made a fiercely bad decision. Finkelstein's behavior and his theses take place, in our view, not within the framework of justified criticism."
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