A flyer that was distributed in a tram in Cologne asked the rhetorical questions “Do we really only have a Corona problem? Or don’t we actually have predominantly a Jew-problem?” while listing Angela Merkel as a Jewess of Polish origin connected to B’nai B’rith, Jens Spahn as “gay Jew” connected to the Bilderberg conference, Heiko Maas as a Jew and leading censor and Christian Drosten as pro-government virologist and Jew “according to his phenotype”. It closes with the words that “the more Jews in politics and media, the worse the conditions”.

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This narrative uses the antisemitic themes claiming that the Jews control politics and the media, and are therefore responsible for social and political conditions seen as undesirable.

As such, it directly blames Jewish people for the problems related to Covid-19, proposing that they are responsible for censorship or misinformation, and part of an all-controlling conspiracy. In Germany, as coronavirus conspiracy theories have proliferated,  so have ntisemitic ones. This has lead to antisemitic worldviews which in turn can lead to attacks on Jews or those deemed Jewish or connected to Jews.

Viewed as part of a “Jew problem”, individuals can become targets of violent attacks. In societies that believe such a narrative, Jewish communities will face disadvantages in all fields, as they did during the time of the National Socialists in Germany.

Besides scapegoating and blaming a minority such as Jews, conspiracy theories make it impossible to have a discourse about controversial topics in democracies. They fuel movements directed against liberal and democratic norms and institutions.

Based on the acknowledged facts, it can be pointed out that the persons in question (Merkel, Spahn, Maas, Drosten) are in fact not Jewish. B’nai B’rith is a Jewish organisation that honored chancellor Merkel for humanitarian merits. Jens Spahn took part in a Bilderberger conference, but this has nothing to do with Jewishness but rather with elitism. The Network Enforcement Act (Netz-DG) is about combating hate speech and fake news in social networks and was passed by the democratically elected Bundestag in 2017. Christian Drosten is an independent expert who has agreed and disagreed with various measures of the government.

References

Tweets für den Staatsanwalt (article on haGalil.com about the flyer and the legal repercussions for those who shared it on social media; the flyer is shown as part of a screenshot of a tweet)

Visuals

The flyer shared on Twitter for educational reasons