German Jewish leader 'threatened' after criticizing far-right AfD
The five-year-old AfD, the country's biggest opposition party, opposes multiculturalism and Islam
A Jewish community leader in Germany said Thursday she had been targeted with threats and hate mail "almost by the minute" since criticizing the far-right AfD party.
Charlotte Knobloch had Wednesday called, in a speech about Holocaust victims, the Alternative for Germany a threat to democracy, sparking a walk-out of AfD regional politicians.
A day later, Knobloch, 86, told a local newspaper that "since then, I have received coarse verbal abuse, threats and insults by email and telephone almost by the minute".
"The danger the party and its supporters spell for our liberal democracy has become more than clear and this shows more than ever that the democrats in our country must stand united against them," she told the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper.
Knobloch, a former leader of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, now heads the community in the Bavarian city of Munich.
She added that she "had expected the AfD to use the Bavarian state parliament for self-promotion -- I just hadn't expected a row of such proportions".
In her speech Wednesday, Knobloch attacked the AfD for scorning democratic values, belittling the crimes of the National Socialists and “maintaining close ties to the extreme right-wing milieu.”
“This so-called alternative for Germany bases its policy on hatred and exclusion and it is not grounded – not only in my view – on the basis of our democratic constitution,” the Jewish community leader said.
Parliamentarians from the other factions applauded, while the right-wing lawmakers, including the AfD leader in Bavaria, Katrin Ebner-Steiner, got up and left the plenary hall. Only four AfD MPs remained in the room.
The five-year-old AfD, the country's biggest opposition party, opposes multiculturalism, Islam and the immigration policies of Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom it labels a "traitor".
One of its most radical figures, Bjoern Höcke, has sparked outrage with statements on Germany's Nazi past, calling Berlin's Holocaust monument a "memorial of shame" and urging a "180-degree shift" in the country's culture of remembrance.
Referring to the infamous Höcke's infamous statement, Knobloch stressed that “anyone who drags our remembrance culture through the mud, for example, by speaking of the 'monument of shame', is blind – not only to the past, but also blind to the future.”
In the past, Knobloch lamented the AfD’s attempts to recruit Jewish voters, calling it a party “where anti-Semites feel at home.” She also argued that the AfD must be referred to as a “Nazi party,” since its platform “can be summarized in the words: Jews out.”