Last year, Michael Blume, the commissioner for combating anti-Semitism in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, came under fire for a series of anti-Israel statements, including one condemned as anti-Semitic by Natan Sharansky. Benjamin Weinthal notes that this sort of problem seems endemic to Germany’s various state and federal officials charged with countering bigotry against Jews. For instance:

Nearly all sixteen German states have commissioners assigned to combat anti-Semitism. The city-state of Berlin has five. In North Rhine-Westphalia there are 22 commissioners, and a federal commissioner exists along with an EU counterpart.

The commissioner of the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, Gerhard Ulrich, who served as a Protestant bishop for northern Germany, preached sermons laced with contemporary anti-Semitism. Ulrich sees the Jews as warmongers—in language that recalls the Hitler movement blaming Jews for a global war: “Therefore we cannot accept it when a modern state invokes this God and His promises when war is waged,” he declared.

Ulrich reduced the cause of conflict and suffering in the Middle East to one country: “The name ‘Israel’ is burdened with the horror and misery of this Middle East war.” He also likened Israel’s security barrier, which has prevented Palestinian terrorism, to the former East Germany’s Berlin Wall.

Sadly, German officials and the EU state apparatus will likely ignore calls to change their behavior. To [quote the interwar German-Jewish journalist Kurt] Tucholsky, “Here the one pointing out the filthiness is perceived as much more dangerous than the one producing the filth.”

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.