GERMANY: As Germany remembered the victims of the Holocaust yesterday, a Frankfurt judge grappled with a conundrum: can one Jew accuse another of anti-Semitism?
Leaders of Germany's Jewish community have described as "unprecedented" the row between two friends-turned-enemies - firebrand journalist Henryk Broder and Abraham Melzer, publisher of The End of Judaism, a critique of contemporary Israeli politics.
The book, by Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer, draws parallels between Nazi Germany and modern-day Israel and compares the situation of Jews in 1930s Germany with the situation of Palestinians today.
After the book was presented at the Leipzig Book Fair last year, Broder called the author and publisher "two Jews playing Adolf" and accused them of "judeophobia".
Melzer went to court to prevent these remarks being repeated by his former friend, whom he said was "wallowing in anti-Semitic excrement".
Melzer says he is proud to be Jewish and proud of Israel, but not its politics.
"To be compared with Hitler is a catastrophe for every Jew," he said to the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.
Broder lodged an objection against the court application, saying it infringed his rights to free expression, all the while keeping up the tirade on his website. He said that Meyer "fills a hole [in the book market] with brown dirt" and "makes points that sound like a sweaty brownshirt smells".
In a column headlined "Heil Hajo", he attacked the elderly author as a "kosher anti-Semite" and a "career survivor".
In court, Broder discussed the history of anti-Semitic Jews, drawing on the 1930 work The Jewish Self-Hate by philosopher Theodor Lessing.
"Jews can be everything that non-Jews are," he told the court, adding that "some are sometimes also anti-Semites. Jews are perfectly normal people."
Before yesterday's verdict, however, he told a German newspaper that he felt the idea of an anti-Semitic Jew was beyond the trial judge.
Yesterday the court forbade Broder from repeating his assertion that Meyer and Melzer were "authorities on advanced judeophobia" but said he was entitled to say they were "two Jews playing Adolf".
Broder immediately announced an appeal, giving new life to a trial that has broached publicly the otherwise taboo topic of where criticism of Israel ends and anti-Semitism begins.
The trial has also boosted sales of The End of Judaism.
As the Frankfurt judge delivered her verdict yesterday, politicians in Berlin said Germans would always be ready to learn lessons from their history and prevent another Auschwitz from happening.
"With dismay we have had to note that today even heads of state describe the Holocaust as a 'fairytale' and make anti-Semitic remarks," said Norbert Lammert, the Bundestag president.
His clear reference to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad came during a Bundestag ceremony marking the liberation of Auschwitz 61 years ago.
Earlier in the day, German authorities rescinded for six months the passport of Horst Mahler, a leading member of the extreme-right National Democratic Party (NPD), to prevent him attending a Holocaust denial conference in Iran.