EU’s labeling of Israeli products originated with Neo-Nazi, Green parties

The EU’s top court has been engulfed since Tuesday in an antisemitic legal scandal because of its singling out of Jewish, Israeli products from the disputed territories for a punitive labeling system. Critics say the legal ruling is discriminatory.

What has been omitted from the rage over the alleged European Union discriminatory ruling is that Germany’s main neo-Nazi party and the German Green Party advocated a labeling of Israeli products from the disputed West Bank, Golan Heights and east Jerusalem territories as early as 2012 for the Nazi party NPD and for the Greens in 2013.

“The #EUGH [the European Court’s German acronym] has judged that products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank + the occupied territories in the #EU must be clearly declared. No more! But not less. For me, it is the right of #consumers to make an informed choice. #Righttoknow,” tweeted Green Party MP Renate Künast on Tuesday.

Künast once invoked a contemporary antisemitic conspiracy theory to describe a German organization as a “Mossad organization” that seeks to advance Israel’s security and stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

“They [the Germans] have a lot of experience of labeling and they should know better, ” Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter, told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday. He called the EU ruling “sheer hypocrisy” because Israel is singled out, and said it is “reminiscent of dark times in Germany” and the Nazi boycott of Jewish products and businesses.

Nathan Gelbart, a prominent Berlin attorney and pro-Israel advocate responded to Künast on Twitter, writing “Hello Renate What about the right to know for products from (really) occupied Western Sahara or from occupied North Cyprus? And what is glued to products of Arab farmers from the West Bank? Right to hypocrisy.” …

Henryk M. Broder, a popular German-Jewish journalist, who has testified about contemporary antisemitism in the Bundestag, wrote a column at the time titled “Two Souls, One Thought” in the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, noting that the Green and Nazi parliamentary initiatives to demarcate Israeli products are “at their core identical.”

Both initiatives use the historical model of the German Nazi regime boycotts of Jewish businesses starting on April 1, 1933, and invoking the mass slogan: “Germans defend yourselves. Do not buy from Jews!” Broder wrote.