Gunter Grass and the mute left

[Ken Burch]

41. He just wrote a poem.

That's ALL the man did. At most, he was guilty of a bit of rhetorical overkill.

That poem is not a threat to Israel's survival.

And I'm sorry, but I can't let you call the man a Nazi, the most vile insult in any language, just because you disagree with him on this issue. Gunter Grass has spent over sixty years holding his country AND himself accountable for what happened in the war. That far outweighs what he did for less than a year as a teenager-in a situation in which he was conscripted and had no alternative but to join up-just like Helmut Kohl, who was given a total pass on the issue by the Israeli government and its apologists. It wasn't Gunter Grass that got Reagan to put wreaths on the graves at Bitburg, or who led his party(in opposition)to vote against removing the statute of limitations for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. It wasn't Grass who led a party that welcomed former(and sometimes not-particularly repentant)Nazis into its parliamentary ranks. It was Kohl's party, the Christian Democrats. But that was ok, because they were "pro-Israel".

If he backed Israeli missile strikes on Tehran(strikes you KNOW would have to cause significant loss of innocent civilian life, because it goes without saying that Ahmadinejad wouldn't have isolated the targets Bibi wants to hit)you'd forgive him for anything he did in the war, even(I strongly suspect)if he'd been a guard at Belsen.

The poem was badly written and stretched too far, but it doesn't make Grass evil. It just makes him a not particularly good poet.

And the fact is, with the fourth-largest war machine in the world, Israel isn't in any danger from anybody, anywhere.