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Telegraph
4 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
This is how Leftist Israelophobia morphs into unabashed anti-Semitism
When Horst Mahler, lawyer, terrorist and anti-Semite, died last month at the age of 89, that nemesis of Germany had become little more than a deranged demagogue who had lost a leg to diabetes and was fatigued by years in prison. Such is the derangement of the times, however, that Mahler – a member of the notorious hard-Left Baader-Meinhof gang who later converted to neo-Nazism – is more relevant in death than he ever was in life. With sensible politics around the world challenged by anti-Western fervour, this is increasingly Mahler's moment. Across the political extremes, his hallmarks are familiar today: conspiratorial thinking; a pathological hatred for the United States, the West and all our old certainties; a cleaving to utopian radicalism; and a loathing for both Israel and the Jews. Since October 7, this omnidogma has accelerated its advance, reaching for influence in our schools, universities, throughout the arts and media, in our formerly great northern towns and cities, on the streets, in the digital universe and through the benighted corridors of Lanyardistan. It reached a bloody nadir in Washington DC last May, when two young Israeli diplomats were gunned down in the name of 'Palestine', and in the firebombing of elderly Jews in Colorado by an Egyptian national a few weeks later. In Britain, it has prompted death chants at Glastonbury and the sabotage of RAF aircraft by the bourgeois radicals of Palestine Action, not to mention relentless street unrest. But its spirit has also inspired the far-Right, with figures like the American firebrand Tucker Carlson and European insurgent parties Alternative für Deutschland and Rassemblement National indulging an animosity towards Israel, fondness for the erstwhile Assad regime and adoration for Vladimir Putin. Anything, in other words, that hurts us. Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump's director of national intelligence, is a prominent denizen of this swamp. She clashed with the president over the American attack on Iran. Closer to home, former BNP leader Nick Griffin has appeared on a podcast produced by 5Pillars, the Islamist website. This convergence of radicalisms, which takes hatred of the Jews and packs it with contempt for liberal Western values, could now perhaps best be described as the 'Horst Mahler complex'. More than anybody else, Mahler's life story demonstrated that the gap between far-Left and far-Right is bridged not by shuffling round the horseshoe but by a simple sidestep. Mahler was born in 1936 to a Nazi dentist – why were so many Nazis dentists? – in Haynau in Lower Silesia, a town now called Chojnow in southwestern Poland. Devastated by the fall of the Third Reich, in 1949 his father took his own life and probably attempted to poison his three sons (Mahler's older brother, Klaus, prevented them from taking the suspicious tablets). As an adult, Mahler became a lawyer and a leading exponent of the trend to cast Western capitalism as the continuation of Nazism. For him, bloodshed was a means of purging the crimes of the older generation in the fires of revolutionary fervour. He became a key figure in the Baader-Meinhof gang, which was responsible for 34 murders and some of the most spectacular terrorist atrocities in post-war history. Inevitably, theirs was a virulent Israelophobia. Mahler underwent terrorist training in Jordan with the Palestinian faction Fatah, which now rules in Ramallah. He also represented an activist shot by German police while protesting a visit from Iran's Shah in 1967. Progressives sided with the exiled Ayatollah. In 1970, Mahler was arrested carrying a loaded pistol while wearing a wig and false beard. In prison, he renounced violence, but in the coming years embraced neo-Nazism, envisioning fascism as a means to fulfil the aims of the hard Left: the defeat of American Jewish capitalism. The Holocaust, he now said, was 'the actions of God, not those of humans'. He performed a Sieg Heil in front of a Jewish journalist and claimed that Hitler was 'the saviour of the German people'. Mahler also praised the 9/11 attacks. In 2005, he accepted an invitation by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to an international conference promoting Holocaust denial. Mahler's pathetic demise may have gone largely unmourned, but it did not represent the death of his spirit. In this age of radicalism, the Horst Mahler complex is more of a threat to the West than ever before.
Telegraph
15-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The students who went from robbing banks to killing their prime minister
As if the 1970s were not grim enough, with the hangover from the ' Swinging Sixties ', the oil price boom and international recession, the decade also brought a wave of terrorism. Britain had the IRA, the Germans Baader-Meinhof, Latin America had the Uruguayan terrorist movement Tupamaros, and the United States the (by comparison) rather amateur Symbionese Liberation Army. Most grew out of student radicalism in 1968, itself the product mainly of protests against America's involvement in the Vietnam War. After reading Professor Foot's magisterial and gripping account of the Brigate Rosse – The Red Brigades – one realises the former student radicals who pursued proletariat revolution in Italy after 1970 were among the most fanatical on the planet. They were hard-core Marxists who believed in a class struggle that was by definition (their definition) an armed struggle. The Brigades formed in Milan, and generally flourished in the car industries of that city and of Turin. However, when the BR's net widened to attacks on politicians and bureaucrats, rather than on industrialists, it focused more on Rome. Foot describes the fanatics who formed the Brigades, and their remarkable stupidity. As he says, they were fighting for the overthrow of a state whose workings they did not understand, and without the slightest idea of the state that would replace it. The generally grim conditions in factories such as Fiat and Alfa Romeo, or Pirelli tyres, presented the BR with an army if not of active supporters, but of those sympathetic to the rhetoric of 'the revolution' and of 'armed struggle'. In December 1969 an explosion in Milan that killed 16 people, executed by the neo-fascist paramilitary Ordine Nuovo, was in Foot's view responsible for radicalising a whole generation of Italians, and created a climate in which the BR could act with approval against a supposedly common enemy – the capitalist and imperialist oppressor. It soon established a large and appreciative audience for its terrorist acts against this enemy, not just in Italy but around Europe, especially among student radicals as moronic and narcissistic as the leaders of the BR. However, the BR soon over-reached. Feeding on its own propaganda that the absence of brutality created an impression of powerlessness, it chose to inspire fear by engaging in random acts of violence. Having begun in 1970 with attacks on property – incendiaries at the homes of industrial managers – they then moved on to 'proletarian expropriations', or what the less high-minded might call 'robbing banks'. The next step was to attack people. Italy had an epidemic of kidnaps by organised crime groups in the early 1970s, and the BR saw no reason not to jump on that bandwagon. At first the kidnaps were short: long enough for brigatisti to berate the victim (usually an industrialist or minor official) and then release him in an appropriately humiliated state. Then the abductions became longer; photographs were issued with pictures of the anxious victim, with pompous, slogan-filled texts warning the oppressors of the plan to 'punish one in order to educate 100'. Perhaps having learned from the IRA, they widened their repertoire by kneecapping opponents, starting with an apparently harmless Christian Democrat. Eventually, and inevitably, came assassination or, as they preferred to term it, 'execution'. The first victim was Francesco Coco, a Genovese magistrate, and the attack also killed his bodyguards. By then the Italian state was on the trail of the BR, and the first mass trials took place in 1976, the year of Coco's murder. In 1978, the BR would commit its most notorious crime. Aldo Moro had crowned a long and distinguished career in Italian politics, in which he had served as foreign minister, by twice serving as prime minister. Moro's rule was characterised by precisely the sort of relative stability the BR deemed inimical to the revolution. Worse, Moro had sought to broaden the democratic base in Italy by opening talks with the Communist Party. The story, sadly, is well known. He was kidnapped in Rome on March 16 in an attack in which his five bodyguards were killed. There followed many rumours about what contact there was between the BR and the state in negotiating Moro's release. He wrote to colleagues and indeed to the Pope, letters which (like so much else) did not emerge for years, or even decades. Foot, who is entirely scrupulous, points out that even today not every facet of this outrage is known. On May 9, 55 days into his captivity, Moro was executed and his body found in the back of a car. It was the beginning of the end for the BR, which ran up the white flag a decade later. By the time of the Moro murder trial in 1983, the party was turning on itself, as many members grew up and realised the sheer evil of the relentless misery the brigatisti had inflicted on so many harmless Italians; by the end they were killing just because they could. Foot is exemplary in his scholarship and detail. He gives an utterly fascinating insight into how these murderous purveyors of odious claptrap were allowed the clout they had. There is never an excuse for terrorism, which perhaps is the most important thing this superb book teaches us.
