“Ms Knobloch instrumentalizes the commemoration of the victims of National Socialism in a disturbingly inadmissible way,” the AfD group leader in the Bavarian state parliament, Katrin Ebner-Steiner told German weekly Junge Freiheit.
She described it as a “scandal” that Knobloch abused a memorial service to “defame the entire AfD and its democratically elected group by the worst blanket insinuations”.
The occasion was the speech Knobloch gave in the Bavarian state parliament at a memorial service for the victims of the Nazi regime. In it Knobloch sharply attacked the AfD. Among other things she said: “This so-called alternative for Germany bases its policy on hatred and exclusion and as far as I am concerned, does not share the platform of our democratic constitution.”
She added: “Today and here a party is represented, which makes these values contemptible and downplays crimes of the National Socialists and maintains close connections with the right-wing extremist milieu.”
As a protest against Knobloch’s unfair remarks, the majority of the AfD group left the plenary session. The representatives of the other parties, not surprisingly, gave the President of the Jewish Community a standing ovation.
On Facebook, Knobloch defended her speech. She said she considered the AfD a great danger. “The constant belittling of the Nazi era and the calculated ambiguities of their staff show crystal clear, how they think in this party. Even the report by the Security Service has made clear recently that within the AfD close links to right-wing extremist milieus exist and the party stands extremely unsteady on the ground of our liberal-democratic basic order.”
The Bavarian AfD member of parliament Petr Bystron, however, accused Knobloch of attacking the wrong people. “Mrs Knobloch should rather turn to those who are responsible for the rising anti-Semitism in Germany. And that’s certainly not the AfD,” said Bystron.
It has been statistically proven that immigration from Islamic cultures poses a growing threat to Jewish life in Germany. “Knobloch knows that, too. But she ignores this issue. It’s obviously too hot for her.”
According to a 2012 survey, 18 percent of the Turks in Germany believe Jews are inferior human beings. A similar study found that most of Germany’s native born Muslim youth and children of immigrants have antisemitic views.
In German police statistics more than 90 percent of incidents are counted as “right wing extremism”, but that is because all cases with an unknown perpetrator as well as certain crimes, automatically get classified as as such.
A 2017 study on Jewish perspectives on antisemitism in Germany by Bielefeld University found that a large part of the attacks were committed by Muslim assailants. The study also found that 70 percent of the participants feared a rise in antisemitism due to immigration citing the antisemitic views of most migrants.