Israeli officials have slammed the German Protestant Academy in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg for hosting a conference that features leading German boycott activists, who expressed support for the Islamist terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, Benjamin Weinthal reported in The Jerusalem Post on Saturday.
“By merely looking at the list of persons invited to the seminar, it is quite clear that is an event whose aim and purpose is Israel hatred under guise of a pseudo academia,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon told the newspaper. “It is particularly distressing that such an event takes place in Germany.”
The Protestant Academy, which is located in the town of Bad Boll, invited as a speaker the Left Party MP Christine Buchholz, who in the past defended the “legitimate resistance” of Hezbollah against the Jewish State. According to Buchholz, “The demonization of Hezbollah is the part of the ideological conduct of war. The Left should not participate in it.” The U.S., Israel, the Arab League and Canada all proscribed Hezbollah’s entire organization a terrorist organization.
Another politician slated to speak at the conference is former Left Party MP Annette Groth, a leading supporter of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. Groth was aboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara in 2010, which sought to break Israel’s UN-declared legal naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
The Protestant Academy has a long history of engagement with anti-Israel activists. In 2010, the institution invited a Hamas speaker from Gaza to one of their conferences. A year later, the academy hosted a boycotts conference to discuss “Economic measures against the occupying power Israel.” Manfred Budzinski, from the diehard boycotts-supporting Catholic NGO Pax Christi, played a leading role in the organization of the anti-Israel events in 2010 and 2011. Budzinski is moderating a panel at this weekend’s event.
A spokesman for the Protestant Church in Baden-Württemberg told the newspaper that the state’s Bishop, Frank Otfried, “rejects the request and approach of the BDS movement,” adding that “The situation in Israel and in the Palestinian territories requires continued work on a good solution.”
Reinhard Becker, a spokesman for the Protestant Academy, however, defended the conference because there is “increasingly less freedom in Germany for civil society actors in questions of the Middle East.”
Becker charged that the academy’s director, Jörg Hübner, opposes boycotts against the Jewish State, but guards the work of the academy to support dialogue. When asked by the Post if the Protestant Church in Württemberg, the German Protestant Church, and Hübner consider Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations, they declined to comment.
A spokesman for the Protestant Church in Germany said the organization does not support boycotts against Israel and clarified that the decision to go ahead with the event lies with local church authorities.
Three German intelligence agencies recently determined that the boycotts movement is anti-Semitic in nature.
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