[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Mathias Döpfner is chairman and CEO of the media company Axel Springer. He is horrified at how Europe has failed Israel, and turned on the Jews of the world at their moment of greatest pain. More of his commentary can be found here: “Opinion | Europe Failed Israel,” by Mathias Döpfner, Politico, October 7, 2025:
A few weeks ago, I met Ofir Amir in Berlin. He is the co-founder and producer of the Nova Music Festival in Israel. Like me, Ofir is from Offenbach am Main before emigrating to Israel. Now he is organizing an exhibition that will be shown at various locations around the world, including Berlin, to commemorate the events and, above all, the victims of Oct. 7.
We talked about that day, the massacre, which Ferdinand von Schirach described in precise and unbearable words in WELT: “Videos show two dead Israeli female soldiers who were apparently shot directly in the vagina. One photo shows the body of a woman who had nails hammered into her thighs and groin area. A festival visitor testified that she hid under a tree during the massacre and covered herself with grass because she had been shot in the back. She said she saw a woman’s pants being pulled down to her knees. A man stood behind her and raped her. Every time she tried to pull away, he stabbed her in the back with a knife. According to the witness, another woman was raped by a terrorist while another man cut off her breasts with a box cutter. In Be’eri and Kfar Aza, the bodies of women and girls were found in six houses. They were naked, mutilated and bound. On that day, 1,139 people were murdered. Among them were 695 civilians, including 36 teenagers and children. A first responder testified before the Knesset that he had seen the severed skulls of three children.”
Ofir himself was seriously injured by shots to his legs. He survived only because he was able to hide and then simply got lucky. Now he is trying to cope with the trauma by organizing his memories.
Since this conversation about the events of Oct. 7, I keep asking myself how Ofir Amir can bear what happened after Oct. 7. How he can bear that victims are turned into perpetrators and perpetrators into victims. That more and more often, it is concealed who started this war, what is action and what is reaction. How he can bear it that justified criticism of decisions made by an Israeli government is mixed with deep-rooted hatred of Jews and that, as a result, instead of an obvious global wave of compassion and solidarity, a global wave of cold-heartedness and increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism has emerged. How he can bear what I can hardly bear, even though I am neither a victim nor a relative of victims.
Specifically: How do Ofir and millions of Jews around the world bear the fact that cookies were distributed and celebrations were held on the streets of Berlin on the evening of Oct. 7 and thereafter? That the people of Tehran celebrated the attack with public fireworks? That there was no distancing of the civilian population in Gaza, but instead cheering and desecration of Jewish corpses, which was then proudly captured in photos and videos and shared on social media?
How can Ofir bear that only a few weeks after the massacre, long before discussions about the appropriateness of Israeli retaliatory measures had begun, a representative survey by Harvard University found 60 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believed that the “killing of 1,200 Israelis was justified by the perceived grievance of the Palestinians”? Or that in an open letter signed by 144 Columbia University professors, the Hamas attack was described as “the exercise of the right of resistance of an occupied people against a violent and illegal occupation”? In a survey by The Economist, one in five young Americans aged 18 to 29 believed that the genocide of six million Jews was a myth….
In 2025, Jews will also be killed in Washington and Manchester because they are Jews.
What will happen in Gaza during this historic week in Oct. 2025, whether Donald Trump will succeed where Europe failed to end the dying through a policy of solidarity and strength, is still unclear. What is clear, however, is that when it really mattered, Europe and large parts of the free world failed. The old anti-Semitic propaganda poison is still working: Once again, the Jews are to blame for everything. Even for their own murder….
Amen, Herr Döpfner. Sie haben absolut Recht.
