In March 2003, the German Foreign Ministry established an online platform called Qantara, which means “bridge” in classical Arabic, as a response to the 9/11 attacks in the United States and the hostility towards Muslims in the West that it generated. The professed aim of this independent portal, run by the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle, was to “bridge” the cultural differences between the West and the Islamic world and to provide a neutral platform for interreligious dialogue.
The portal, which publishes content in English, German and Arabic, operated successfully for over 20 years without any editorial oversight from the German government. That all changed when it began publishing content critical of Germany's anti-Semitism debate over the Gaza massacre. Earlier this year, it was announced that Kantara would be restructured and its management transferred from Deutsche Welle to the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – IFA), part of the German Foreign Ministry.
The ministry claimed the measure was “purely” structural and unrelated to the site's editorial policy or performance, but German Foreign Minister Annalena Baabock refuted this claim, suggesting in an interview that concerns about the content published by Kantara, particularly anti-Semitic content, were a factor in the decision.
Following this announcement, 35 members of Kantara's editorial staff published an open letter to Mr. Baerbock, expressing doubts as to whether the IFA had the necessary editorial capacity to successfully continue this complex project, which had been painstakingly built up over many years and had become a major source of information for those interested in the Middle East and its relations with Europe. The letter was ineffective, and the entire editorial staff resigned in protest.
On July 1, management of Kantara, which now has no editorial staff, was transferred from Deutsche Welle to IFA. IFA said the portal will remain under its editorial control until new editor-in-chief Jannis Hagmann forms a new editorial board and officially starts work in the coming weeks.
This transitional period in Kantara is a unique opportunity to observe and evaluate the German government’s true views on the Middle East and its people, given that German officials are now openly editing a policy that is touted as Germany’s “bridge” to the Islamic world.
Prior to the change in management, Kantara was well-regarded in Germany and throughout the Middle East region for its objective, informative and in-depth reporting and analysis on the Middle East and the Islamic world at large.
However, this is no longer the case. Now, under the editorial direction of the IFA under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kantara seems focused not on initiating intercultural and interreligious dialogue and debate, but on confirming the German government's prejudices and preconceptions against Muslims, especially Palestinians, through its poorly researched and edited opinion pieces.
Perhaps the best example of Kantara’s new editorial policy, and therefore the German government’s true view of the Middle East and its people, is an opinion piece published on July 25th entitled “Crisis Communication and the Middle East: Like and Share.”
An op-ed by Moroccan-German author Sineb El Masrair that appears to be an analysis of media coverage of Israel's war on Gaza argues that Palestinians are inherently violent and anti-Semitic people who lie about their suffering, history, culture and political motivations in order to smear Israel and destabilize Western democracies.
Without providing any evidence or supporting arguments, the report authoritatively asserts that Palestinian journalists covering the genocide are Hamas operatives in disguise, that the images of death and suffering in Gaza are “staged,” that Palestinians hate the Zionist occupying forces on their land only because of “Islamic anti-Semitism,” that there is no actual famine in Gaza, and that international media are deliberately withholding photos of the “packed market stalls and barbecue areas” in the Gaza Strip.
For example, the author claims that hunger in the Gaza Strip “did not exist, and does not exist, according to the recently released Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report.” Of course, the report linked to in the article clearly states that “while the entire Gaza Strip is classified as emergency (IPC Phase 4), more than 495,000 people (22% of the population) continue to face severe levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 5).” The IPC defines Phase 5 as “famine” in a fact sheet, stating that this ranking only applies to areas where “at least 20% of households face extreme food insecurity, at least 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition, and two out of every 10,000 people die daily from total hunger or the interaction of malnutrition and disease.”
According to Kantara and the government official who now heads the company, a famine identified by the IPC may not be a true famine if it is happening to Palestinians and being fuelled by Israel.
This is not the only blatant distortion of facts in the article. The author also claims that “Islamic anti-Semitism” is the reason why Palestinian Muslims resisted the Zionist occupation of their territory, adding that “unlike Germany, the Middle East itself has never come to terms with its Nazi past.”
This is clearly an Orwellian lie that has no place to be repeated in any serious journalistic publication. What is there to suggest that the Middle East actually has a “Nazi past” that must be confronted? Of course not. Nazism is an exclusively Western, and especially German, ideology that has no basis or connection to the Middle East or the Muslim populations there.
Muslims in the region are not prejudiced against Jews or Judaism (which itself was born and codified in the Middle East and has thrived under Muslim rule in various countries in the region for centuries), but against the Zionists who rule Israel and who for decades have killed Muslim loved ones, stolen their land, and confined them to high-security slums.
The article goes on to state that “the Palestinian issue has been used to destabilize democracies in Western countries.”
The author, like the German government, seems upset that people around the world, including in Germany, are opposed to Israel's attempt to wipe out an entire people.
So does the instrumental use of the “Palestinian problem”, whatever that means, destabilise Western democracies? Or does encouraging and defending the mass murder of Palestinians destabilise them? After all, the mass murder of innocent people, or providing financial, legal and diplomatic cover for that murder, is incompatible with the self-professed values of the West, such as respect for human rights and international law. Perhaps this is why this article tries to argue that the devastation in Gaza that we are all watching in real time is somehow “staged”. The German government needs to stage this devastation in order to continue to tell its citizens that it has the moral high ground.
With one article, published under the editorial control of an agency under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the German government has burned a “bridge” with the Islamic world. The fact that this article is still published on Kantara, after a huge backlash from its intended readership, without any correction or clarification (even the most blatant “there is no hunger” lie corrected), shows that Germany has lost all interest in starting a dialogue with the Islamic world. Germany wants this platform to basically abandon all journalistic integrity and publish content that supports its government's foreign policy at all costs.
Why is this?
Since Israel began its genocide in Gaza ten months ago, the opinions, ideas and aspirations of the Muslim world and the broader Global South seem unimportant to the German government. Not interested in any dialogue or debate, Germany wants only one thing for the region: to clear the burden of the Holocaust in the eyes of other Western countries by unconditionally defending Israel and viewing those who resist Israeli abuses as modern-day Nazis. Thus, Germany calls Palestinians, and by extension all Muslims who defend them, “Nazis.”
In a recent interview, Kantara's incoming editor-in-chief, Jannis Hagman, said that once he and his team officially begin work, “there will be no interference in terms of content from either the IFA or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
He called El Masrair's proposal “infuriating” and said: “Under the new Kantara team, this article would never have been published in this way.”
Perhaps he will be right. And once a new team takes power, Kantara will return to its former self, and El Masrair's articles will no longer be featured on its homepage. But once a bridge is burned, it takes time and a lot of effort to repair. Kantara now faces an uphill battle to prove it is more than just a government propaganda outlet.
But whatever the future holds, this transitional period in Kantara and the El Masrair article have already taught us a lot about the German government and its approach to the Middle East: that it sees Israel as just and moral despite its genocide, sees Muslims as an anti-Semitic, simple-minded but manipulative group, and is determined to destabilize Western democracies.
And this is indeed valuable information in understanding and countering Germany's response to Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, however upsetting it may be.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
