In March 2003, the German Foreign Office launched an online platform called Qantara, which means “bridge” in classical Arabic, in response to the September 11 attacks in the United States and the hostility they sparked in the West against Muslims. The stated aim of this independent portal, run by German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle, was to “bridge” cultural differences between the West and the Muslim 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, apparently without any editorial guidance from the German government. However, this changed when it began publishing content critical of German debates on anti-Semitism in the context of the Gaza genocide. Earlier this year, it was announced that Qantara would be restructured and its management would be transferred from Deutsche Welle to the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen – IFA), which is affiliated with and funded by the Federal Foreign Office.
The ministry claimed the decision was “purely” structural and had nothing to do with the editorial direction and production of the site. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, however, contradicted this claim, suggesting in an interview that concerns about Qantara’s content, particularly anti-Semitism, played a role in the decision.
Following the announcement, 35 members of Qantara’s editorial staff published an open letter to Baerbock, expressing their doubts about the IFA’s editorial capacity to carry out this complex project, which had been painstakingly built up over many years and had proven to be a valuable source for those interested in the Middle East and Europe’s relations with it. The letter had no effect and the entire editorial staff resigned in protest.
On July 1, the management of Qantara, which no longer had any editors, was transferred from Deutsche Welle to the IFA. The IFA said the portal would remain under its editorial direction until the new editor-in-chief, Jannis Hagmann, formed a new editorial board and officially began work in the coming weeks.
This transitional period at Qantara represents a unique opportunity to observe and assess the German government’s true views on the Middle East and its peoples, as state officials now openly edit a platform presented as Germany’s “bridge” to the Islamic world.
Prior to the change in leadership, Qantara was respected for its objective, informative and in-depth reporting and analysis on the Middle East and the wider Islamic world, both in Germany and in the region itself.
This is no longer the case. Today, under the editorial direction of the IFA, affiliated with the Foreign Office, Qantara seems to focus not on initiating intercultural and interreligious dialogue and discussion, but on confirming the German government’s prejudices against Muslims, especially Palestinians, through poorly researched and poorly written opinion pieces.
Perhaps the best example of Qantara’s new editorial stance – and by extension the German government’s true view of the Middle East and its people – is an opinion piece titled “Crisis Communication and the Middle East: Like and Share,” published on July 25.
The editorial, which purports to analyze media coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza, written by Moroccan-German author Sineb El Masrar, portrays Palestinians as an inherently violent and anti-Semitic people who lie about their suffering, history, culture and political motivations to defame Israel and destabilize Western democracies.
He authoritatively claims, without evidence or anything resembling an argument, that Palestinian journalists reporting on the genocide are Hamas agents in disguise, that the images of death and suffering in Gaza are “staged,” that Palestinians hate the Zionist occupiers of their land only because of “Islamic anti-Semitism,” that there is in fact no famine in Gaza, and that the international media intentionally do not publish photos of “packed market stalls and barbecues” in the Gaza Strip.
The author claims, for example, that famine in the Gaza Strip, “according to the recently released Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report, did not and does not exist.” Of course, the report linked to in the article clearly states: “While the entire territory (of the Gaza Strip) is classified as Emergency (IPC Phase 4), more than 495,000 people (22% of the population) continue to face catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 5).” The IPC defines Phase 5 in its fact sheet as “famine” and specifies that this classification is only assigned to an area when it “has at least 20% of households facing extreme food insecurity, at least 30% of children suffering from acute malnutrition, and two out of every 10,000 people dying each day from sheer hunger or the interaction of malnutrition and disease.”
It appears, according to Qantara and the government officials who currently control it, that even the famine confirmed by the IPC is not really a famine when it affects the Palestinians and is facilitated by Israel.
The article’s blatant distortions of fact don’t stop there. The author also argues that “Islamic anti-Semitism” is the reason why Palestinian Muslims resisted the Zionist takeover of their lands. She adds: “Unlike Germany, the Middle East itself has never come to terms with its Nazi past.”
This is, of course, an Orwellian lie that has no place in serious journalism. What suggests that the Middle East actually has a “Nazi past” that it needs to confront? Of course, nothing. Nazism is an exclusively Western – and specifically German – ideology that has no basis in or connection with the Middle East and the Muslim populations living there.
Muslims in the region are not prejudiced against Jews and Judaism – which itself was born and codified in the Middle East and flourished under Muslim rule in various countries in the region for centuries – but against the Zionists in power in Israel, who have been killing their kin, stealing their land and confining them to heavily guarded ghettos for decades.
“The Palestinian question has been used to destabilize Western democracies,” the article continues.
It seems that the author, like the German government, is annoyed by the fact that people all over the world, including in Germany, are opposing Israel’s attempt to exterminate an entire people.
So is it really the instrumentalization of the “Palestinian question,” whatever that term means, that is destabilizing Western democracies? Or is it rather the facilitating and defending of the genocide of Palestinians that is destabilizing them? After all, killing innocent people en masse—or providing financial, legal, and diplomatic cover for the carnage—is not in line with the self-proclaimed values of Western democracies, such as respect for human rights and international law. Perhaps this is why the article attempts to demonstrate that the devastation we are all witnessing in real time in Gaza is somehow a “staged” event—the German government needs this staged event to continue telling the population that it has the moral high ground.
With this article, published under the editorial control of an institute affiliated with the Foreign Ministry, the German government has cut its “bridge” with the Islamic world. The fact that the article is still online on Qantara, without any correction or clarification – even to correct the most blatant lie about “no famine” – after a significant negative reaction from its supposed target audience, suggests that Germany has lost all interest in initiating a dialogue with the Islamic world. It wants the platform to abandon virtually all journalistic integrity and publish content that supports – at all costs – the government’s foreign policy.
Why is this so?
Since the beginning of the Israeli genocide in Gaza ten months ago, the opinions, thoughts and aspirations of the Muslim world and the entire South no longer seem to interest the German government. It is not interested in any dialogue or discussion, it only wants to continue its current foreign policy towards the region, which is concerned with only one thing: purifying itself of the burden of the Holocaust in the eyes of other Western nations by defending Israel unconditionally and presenting those who resist Israeli abuses as modern-day Nazis. Thus, it labels the Palestinians, and by extension all Muslims who defend them, as “Nazis.”
Qantara’s new editor-in-chief, Jannis Hagmann, said in a recent interview that he and his team, once they officially start work, will not allow themselves to be “interfered with in terms of content, either by the IFA or the Foreign Office”.
He said he was “annoyed” by El Masrar’s offer and that “the article would not have been published in this form under the new Qantara team”.
Perhaps he will be right, and once the new team takes over, we will see a return to the old Qantara, where articles like El Masrar’s would not have found a place on the home page. Yet once a bridge is burned, it takes time and considerable effort to rebuild it. The platform must now fight to prove that it is more than a government propaganda outlet.
In any case, this transition period in Qantara and the El Masrar article have already taught us a lot about the German government and its approach to the Middle East. They have shown us that the German government regards Israel as a just and moral entity even when it commits genocide, and Muslims as simple but manipulative anti-Semitic hordes, determined to destabilize Western democracies.
And this, disturbing as it is, is valuable information if we are to understand and counter the German response to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
