2014 may turn out to be the year when Europe’s Jews faced the most sustained attack since the Second World War. Boycotts of Jewish businesses, arson attacks, physical and verbal abuse – all of this is the culmination of a sustained campaign of hatred which began more than forty years ago when a bomb was placed in the Jewish Community Centre in Berlin. The date was 9 November 1969, the anniversary of Kristnallnacht.

The group responsible for the (failed) attack on the Berlin Jewish community was the Tupamaros West-Berlin, a German-Marxist organization, which was trained by Palestinian terrorists in Jordan. A year later, members of the group joined the equally vile Red Army Faction, a violent revolutionary cell that operated in Europe until 1990s.

Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder of the Red Army Faction, equated anti-Semitism with anti-capitalism, and attempted to justify the Holocaust in crude Marxist terms: “Auschwitz,” said Meinhof, “meant that six million Jews were killed and thrown on the waste-heap of Europe, for what they were considered: money-Jews.” Continue reading →