 |
| Irena Wachendorff, Alibi Jew |
Alibi Jew: A Jew or person of Jewish descent who can be called
on to support an individual’s or group’s antisemitism or extremist anti-Israeli position.
An example: Back in 2008, the NDP called for Canada to participate
in Durban 2. Organized by the UN, Durban 1 and 2 were supposed to be world
conferences on anti-racism. Instead, Durban 1 singled out Israel for condemnation
and spread outright Jew-hatred, with copies of the Elders of Zion and other
material more commonly found at neo-Nazi book fairs distributed.
With Iran one of the principle organizers, Durban 2 promised to
be another antisemitic conference, and Canada announced it wouldn’t be going –
a position that initially received all party support.
However, the large majority of NDP members who hate Israel
forced the party to reverse its stance. To provide an alibi for supporting an
anti-Jewish hate fest, the call went out from NDP party headquarters: Find some
Jews who support the Durban conference! Which wasn't so hard. Several dozen Canadians with a Jew or two in their family history have devoted their lives to providing alibis to anyone dedicated to wiping Israel off the map.
Fortunately, though, Tom Mulcair led a counter-revolt and forced the NDP to abandon it's support for this antisemitic conference.
In the future, the NDP may have less need for alibi Jews. The large majority of NDP activists still hate Israel, but Saint Jack Layton, who never had a bad word to say about the Israel-haters and antisemites in his party, has gone to that socialist heaven in the sky and Tom Mulcair now runs the NDP. Mulcair hasn't tried to root out the haters, but mostly he's gotten them to shut up.
(More about the battle for the soul of the NDP here.)
Irena Wachendorff: The German Alibi Jew
We all have dreams. Uncle Junior wanted to screw Angie
Dickinson, my mother wants to work in a funeral home, and Irena Wachendorff just wants to be Jewish and the
daughter of Holocaust survivors so she can criticize Israel. Is that so wrong?
Up until now, Wachendorff has
made a decent career of being an alibi Jew. The job is easy: If someone is
accused of antisemitism, alibi Jews are brought in as defending witnesses. It’s
the old “some of my best friends are pantomimes” routine, with an
added speaking part for friends. In a country like Germany, where the Jewish
community is only sporadically visible, being an alibi Jew can be a good gig.
If all anyone ever talks about is how Israel
is the root of all global evil, people might start to ask questions. This is
when the accused is able to point to the supportive alibi Jew, who in turn is
able to point to his or her family history or just basic Jewishness and say
something like: “What the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians is what the
Nazis did to my parents.”
As an alibi Jew, Irena Wachendorff presents herself as the whole
package: Her mother was in Auschwitz—“I grew up with the number on her arm”—her
father a tzadik (a man who keeps all 613 commandments) who
escaped to England. Irena herself was in the IDF during the Lebanon War. Today
she’s a “German-Jewish poet” who lives in Israel six months every year to
support an Arab-Jewish kindergarten. The rest of the year, she’s in Germany to
act as the hazzan (prayer leader) of her congregation
and to send violins to Gaza.
Newspapers have written about her work as an activist and she’s
been interviewed on local TV. She frequently talks to schoolchildren about her
parents’ fate. Wachendorff is also quite active in discussions on the Facebook
page of leading politician Ruprecht Polenz, chairman of the foreign council of
the German parliament, who has come under attack for perceived “anti-Israel”
feelings. Polenz often points to Wachendorff when he needs support, which she
will gladly supply:
“I think I should only take
seriously someone who 1) was in the IDF, 2) has lived in Israel for at least
two years and 3) is even Jewish. Hello…anybody here???”
Anybody here
indeed. Because Irena Wachendorff is none of those things. Via some genuine
journalism, writer Jennifer Nathalie Pyka found out the true story.
Upon being asked, Wachendorff’s mother says she was never in
Auschwitz—“my husband was though.” Probably not as an
inmate: He wasn’t an Orthodox Jew but a Protestant officer of the Wehrmacht.
A speaker of the Israeli army can find no record of an Irena
Wachendorff having ever been in the IDF. During the Lebanon war, Irena
Wachendorff acted in various productions in local theaters in the Rhine region.
The kindergarten she supports does exist, but there is no evidence of her ever
having visited it. And finally, she isn’t a member of her alleged congregation.
This is not without precedent. Every couple of
years, some fake Jew is revealed. What makes this case so interesting is that a
leading German politician was fooled. Polenz has released a statement saying
that he’s not responsible for the third party’s opinion, that he still supports
this dubious Jewish-Arab kindergarten and he’s disgusted with this prying into
Wachendorffs private life: “This is like an Ariernachweis [certificate of being
Aryan] in reverse.”
It is Polenz’s association with Wachendorff
when it comes to discussing Israel that turned this into a story, however. As
Pyka says, “Instead of offering arguments, Wachendorff talked only about her
background and her experiences in the IDF.”
Wachendorff still
clings to most of her story, but is she just suffering from some dissociative
fugue? Pyka isn’t sure but has called a follow-up article “The Protocols of the Loon of Remagen,” Remagen being
the hometown of Wachendorff.
After the initial article,
Wachendorff wrote on Facebook that she had deliberately spread false
information about herself as to protect her family and her congregation. When
the Jerusalem Post called her some days later, she said
that she doesn’t really remember what camp her mother was in exactly and that
she isn’t too sure whether that’s a number on her arm or something else. After
that, she deleted her Facebook profile and hasn’t been heard from since.
But in the meanwhile, says Pyka, Wachendorff used “Six million dead Jews to serve
her own publicity,” for personal and commercial gain and to damage Israel."
However, the greater villain in all this is Ruprecht Polenz, senior deputy in
the Bundestag, head of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee, and Wachendorff’s biggest fan. Coincidently,
Polenz also feels warmly toward Iran and last year welcomed a group of Iranian
lawmakers to Berlin.
In addition to being under fire for defending
Wachendorff, critics accuse Polenz of allowing his Facebook site to be turned
into a magnet for jihadists, raging antisemites, haters of Israel and extremist
leftists. On Polenz’s Facebook, writers posted “that rich, industrial Jews
planned the genocide on the Jewish people in order to create Israel.”
In another entry,
Darwisch Salman Khorassani wrote that if “USREAL [Israel and the US] attack, I
will register as a suicide bomber. Not from Islamic motives but from pure
humanistic motives.”
Charming.
