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A THUG PROTESTS
By MICHAEL KELLY
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February 12, 2003 -- "Excuse me. I am not convinced."- German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, lecturing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Munich last week, after Rumsfeld's argument for war against Iraq.
MR. Rumsfeld may have convinced the leaders of 18 European nations, but not you, Mr. Fischer. It's personal: The question of failing to convince must be seen in the context of who we have failed to convince. Sometimes "who" explains "why."
Mr. Fischer, who are you?
You are the foreign minister of Germany. You have been that since 1998, when Germany's left-wing Greens Party, of which you are a leader, won enough in the polls to force the Social Democratic Party into the so-called Red-Greens coalition government.
But for the formative years of your political life, you were no man in a blue government suit. You were a man in a black motorcycle helmet. That is what you were wearing that day in April 1973 when you were photographed, to quote the New Left historian Paul Berman, "as a young bully in a street battle in Frankfurt."
The photos showed you, Mr. Fischer, inflicting a "gruesome beating" on a policeman named Rainer Marx: "Fischer and other people on the attack, the white-helmeted cop going into a crouch; Fischer's black-gloved fist raised as if to punch the crouching cop on the back; Fischer's comrades crowding around; the cop huddled on the ground, Fischer and his comrades appearing to kick him."
As Berman reported, Mr. Fischer, you rose in public life as an important figure in the anti-American, anti-liberal, neo-Marxist, revolution-minded German radical left of the generation of 1968. This was the left that produced and supported the Baader-Meinhof Gang (or Red Army Faction), which, as Berman wrote, "refrained from nothing," including "kidnappings, bank holdups, murders."
You were not a terrorist yourself, but you were a good and active friend to terrorists, weren't you, Mr. Fischer?
In 2001, the German government put on trial your old friend Hans-Joachim Klein, who had been an underground "soldier" in the Revolutionary Cells, an ally of the Red Army Faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Revolutionary Cells helped in the murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972, and Klein himself took part in a 1975 joint assassination operation with Carlos the Jackal in which three were killed.
In 1969, you attended the meeting of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in which the PLO resolved that its ultimate aim was the extinction of Israel - that is to say, the extinction or expulsion of the Jews of Israel. In 1976, Revolutionary Cells terrorists led by your Frankfurt colleague, Wilfried Boese, hijacked an Air France plane to Entebbe. The hijackers intended to murder all the Jewish passengers on that flight, but were killed by Israeli commandos.
So, that's who you are, Mr. Fischer, the man we haven't convinced. You are the man for whom Munich wasn't enough, the man who needed Entebbe to convince him that Jew-murder was wrong. You ask to be excused. You have been excused.
By MICHAEL KELLY
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February 12, 2003 -- "Excuse me. I am not convinced."- German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, lecturing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Munich last week, after Rumsfeld's argument for war against Iraq.
MR. Rumsfeld may have convinced the leaders of 18 European nations, but not you, Mr. Fischer. It's personal: The question of failing to convince must be seen in the context of who we have failed to convince. Sometimes "who" explains "why."
Mr. Fischer, who are you?
You are the foreign minister of Germany. You have been that since 1998, when Germany's left-wing Greens Party, of which you are a leader, won enough in the polls to force the Social Democratic Party into the so-called Red-Greens coalition government.
But for the formative years of your political life, you were no man in a blue government suit. You were a man in a black motorcycle helmet. That is what you were wearing that day in April 1973 when you were photographed, to quote the New Left historian Paul Berman, "as a young bully in a street battle in Frankfurt."
The photos showed you, Mr. Fischer, inflicting a "gruesome beating" on a policeman named Rainer Marx: "Fischer and other people on the attack, the white-helmeted cop going into a crouch; Fischer's black-gloved fist raised as if to punch the crouching cop on the back; Fischer's comrades crowding around; the cop huddled on the ground, Fischer and his comrades appearing to kick him."
As Berman reported, Mr. Fischer, you rose in public life as an important figure in the anti-American, anti-liberal, neo-Marxist, revolution-minded German radical left of the generation of 1968. This was the left that produced and supported the Baader-Meinhof Gang (or Red Army Faction), which, as Berman wrote, "refrained from nothing," including "kidnappings, bank holdups, murders."
You were not a terrorist yourself, but you were a good and active friend to terrorists, weren't you, Mr. Fischer?
In 2001, the German government put on trial your old friend Hans-Joachim Klein, who had been an underground "soldier" in the Revolutionary Cells, an ally of the Red Army Faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Revolutionary Cells helped in the murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972, and Klein himself took part in a 1975 joint assassination operation with Carlos the Jackal in which three were killed.
In 1969, you attended the meeting of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in which the PLO resolved that its ultimate aim was the extinction of Israel - that is to say, the extinction or expulsion of the Jews of Israel. In 1976, Revolutionary Cells terrorists led by your Frankfurt colleague, Wilfried Boese, hijacked an Air France plane to Entebbe. The hijackers intended to murder all the Jewish passengers on that flight, but were killed by Israeli commandos.
So, that's who you are, Mr. Fischer, the man we haven't convinced. You are the man for whom Munich wasn't enough, the man who needed Entebbe to convince him that Jew-murder was wrong. You ask to be excused. You have been excused.
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