BERLIN: Nobel Prize-winning German writer Guenter Grass has attacked Israel as a threat to world peace and said it must not be allowed to launch military strikes against Iran, in a poem that one German newspaper branded ‘anti-Semitic’. Grass, 84, a seasoned campaigner for left-wing causes and a critic of Western military interventions such as Iraq, also condemned German arms sales to Israel in his poem ‘What must be said’, published in several newspapers on Wednesday.
His words were criticised in Germany, where any strong condemnation of Israel is taboo because of the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust. Grass’s own moral authority has never fully recovered from his 2006 admission that he once served in Hitler’s Waffen SS.
Why do I say only now … that the nuclear power Israel endangers an already fragile world peace? Because that must be said which may already be too late to say tomorrow,’ Grass wrote in the poem, published in German in Sueddeutsche Zeitung.Also because we – as Germans burdened enough – may become a subcontractor to a crime that is foreseeable,’ he wrote. (Reuters)