July 9, 2014
This article was written by Stephan Kramer.
Of all possible committees, Udo Voigt, Member of the European Parliament of the German neo-Nazi party NPD, has been assigned a seat in the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs.
It is tempting to write off Udo Voigt’s membership in the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs of the European Parliament as a harmless, if bad, joke. But it is much more than that: it is sickening and a slap in the face of all democratic parliamentarians. It makes no difference that the NPD leader’s committee assignment went ahead in accordance with parliament’s formal rules of procedure. A neo-Nazi, whose ideology includes hatred for anyone he considers “foreign,” who espouses both antisemitism and Islamophobia and rejects democracy as such – a neo-Nazi of this caliber has no place in a democratic legislature, much less in a committee that seeks to defend civil liberties. The grotesque assignment of the committee seat to Mr Voigt, who glorifies the Nazi regime and minimizes the Holocaust, does not merely elicit disgust. What is more, it presents a great challenge to all democratic forces, including all Jewish organizations. It must be our top priority to prevent the very idea of a Nazi acting as a guardian of human rights from gaining political legitimacy. Mr. Voigt must show his true face. We have to expose to the European public the true face of this propagandist – who, regrettably, is a Member of the European Parliament – and the aims of his party, which he joined as a young man and now leads, spewing his poison. Finally, everyone has to be made aware of the danger the NPD and its allies represent. I hope -- no, I want to be certain -- that all European democrats will be a part of this campaign to inform the public and confront the NPD politically. As a Jew and a citizen of Germany, I will do my utmost to contribute to this effort. I am certain that true democrats will not be lulled or intimidated by the likes of Udo Voigt, regardless of the prestigious jobs that political circumstances may hand him. Anything else would be shameful. The author is Director of the European Office on Antisemitism of the American Jewish Committee’s Transatlantic Institute (TAI) in Brussels.
