Europa / Europe and the EU + EEA

Blaming migrants for the rise in anti-Jewish crimes shows a breathtaking lack of self-awareness

It could have been a Mitchell and Webb sketch – a man with a very German accent and a distinguished Nazi grandfather complaining: “These foreigners, coming over here, importing their antisemitism.” Only this was not a comedy. The man was Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and he was making his complaint last month in an interview with Fox news in the US, attributing rising antisemitism in Germany to “the big numbers of migrants we have within the last 10 years”. How did Merz manage to miss the joke – apart from by being German of course?