UNMIA

Video by Llanushkah

By Robert Kellner

My grandfather, August Friedrich Kellner, was a local court official in Germany during WWII. He was the chief justice inspector in the district court in Laubach, a small town in the Vogelsberg mountains north of Frankfurt. He spoke out against the Nazis and in March 1940 was called to account for his statements and almost sent to a concentration camp. After that harrowing experience he confined himself to writing down his thoughts in a diary that he titled “Mein Widerstand” (which can mean both “My Resistance” and “My Opposition”). His writings do not deal with the mundane daily events of life, but rather challenge the falsehoods of Nazi propaganda and record the inhuman atrocities committed by the Nazis. The entries in the diary read like today’s headlines, and Friedrich Kellner’s solution for the terrorism of his own time may be the answer for the terrorism confronting our generation.

Some of the diary entries refer to the murder of Russian prisoners of war, and to the execution of civilians as reprisals for resistance to German occupation. There are also entries verifying the deliberate genocide of the Jews and the Poles, …

David Harris, the director of the American Jewish Congress, was invited recently to address the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin to respond to the appearance the previous month of Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of The Israel Lobby. We present the text of his address here…

Last month, this Council was addressed by two American academics who recently authored a book entitled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. The book, and the articles that preceded it in the London Review of Books and on the website of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, have received some attention both in the United States and Europe.

Let me assure you: I have no interest in selling books for Professors Walt and Mearsheimer. I’m not here to add to what some would describe as the “controversy” surrounding their book. I’m here because the Council graciously invited me to balance their perspective with a different one.

I have been asked to address this distinguished audience about the so-called Israel lobby in the United States—or, more generally, about the place of Israel in America. It’s my pleasure to do so.

The argument in The Israel Lobby is complex, and describing it here …