By Ludwig Watzal

The “Simon Wiesenthal Center” (SWC) in Los Angeles was once famous for tracking down former Nazi criminals. This was long ago. The institution still derives its reputation from its former purpose. Today the SWC annually publishes a “hit list” of the most “anti-Semites” in the world.

Third place in their “Anti-Semitism” list was awarded to the Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff, who using his caricatures depicting the crimes of the Israeli occupation forces against the Palestinian people is always correct in his evaluations of the issue.

Among the ‘winners’ is once again, a German, Jakob Augstein, publisher of the weekly “Friday”. As always, Augstein always responds polititely to this “honor”: “The SWC is an important, internationally recognized institution.For its work in addressing and fighting anti-semitism, the SWC all my respect. It is all the more distressing when this struggle is weakened. This is necessarily the case when critical journalism is defamed as a racist or anti-Semitic.”

Augstein’s violation of the dogmas, which the “Israel Lobby” has used to protect Israel from criticism of its brutal occupation regime, the permanent violations of Palestinian human rights and the violations and disregard for international law. Those, like Augstein, Latuff and many others, who still dare to point at these violations are slandered as “anti-Semites”.

Such absurd “honors” should only be noted with a shrug. An enlightened public can only indignantly turn away from such institutions, who clearly live in a different universe. These “awards” show clearly that these lobbyists raise no factual arguments, otherwise they would not have to slander and defame critically thinking journalists.

In 2011 this type of critical approach brought Hermann Dierkes similar “honours”. A witchhunt was organized against him in Germany to finish him off politically. This succeeded in part, because many media outlets put their service at the disposal of those in support of the campaign organizers. They did so instead of keeping a critical and objective distance while reporting. Instead they subscribed to a type of campaign journalism approach.

Criticism of Israeli government policy is more than necessary because the Netanyahu government violates democratic and other Western values by colonizing another people for the past 45 years, by depriving them of their liberty, discriminated against their citizens and treating them as second-and third-class citizens. They robbed them of their land and their freedom of movement, walled them in, besieged them and from time to time the Israeli military machine attacks as took place in 2008/09 and 2012 in Gaza. If criticizing this is “anti-Semitism”, then there is something wrong in the West.