Reply #33

Grass having repudiated the entire poem. I do know that Grass has said he should have phrased it differently, to specify that he meant the Israeli government rather than Israel as an entirety.

The question remains...why is it anathema to say that Israel's nuclear weapons program is potentially dangerous? Should Israeli nuclear devices automatically be morally privileged over those of any other nation, and should their use, if they are used, be considered more intrinsically acceptable than any others?

And should everyone in Germany, even though the war ended almost seventy years ago, be automatically required to abstain from ANY criticism of Israeli security policy? Is it fair to hold all Germans, for all of eternity, responsible for the Holocaust, and even if it is, does that mean that all Germans have a special obligation to unquestioningly approve of ANYTHING the Israeli government justifies as being necessary for "security" or "self-defense"?

After all, everything every tyrant in history did was justified by every tyrant through the invocation of one of those categories.