In other words, Grass apparently believes that international law should apply to both Iran and Israel, an offense that the Times depicts as "placing Israel and Iran on the same moral plane."
The issue of Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal has been a sensitive -- almost unmentionable -- topic in the U.S. press as Israel ratchets up war threats against Iran for allegedly harboring ambitions to build a nuclear bomb (although its leaders have disavowed such an interest and have let in international inspectors to check).
But Gunter Grass is now being turned into a global pariah for suggesting that Israel and Iran should live under the same set of rules. Egad! Moral equivalence!
Like others who have dared to criticize aggressive Israeli policies toward Palestinians and other Muslims, Grass also is facing hyperbolic denunciations and ad hominem attacks, including references to his brief service at the end of World War II as a 17-year-old German assigned to the Waffen SS.
Grass had tried to join the German navy but was pressed instead into the Waffen SS, which the Nuremberg Tribunals later declared guilty of war crimes although absolving 17- and 18-year-olds, like Grass, who were forced into this military arm of the Nazi Party at the end of the war.
Still, Israel's Interior Minister Eli Yishai referred to that distant piece of Grass's personal history in announcing Israel's decision to ban Grass from the country. "Grass's poem fans the flames of hatred against Israel and the Israeli people, thus promoting the idea he was part of when he donned an SS uniform," Yishai said.
The heated debate that has swirled around Grass has increasingly ignored what the Nobel Laureate actually wrote, focusing instead on whether he's an anti-Semite or simply an eccentric old poet long past his prime. The Times article about Israel banning Grass was typical because it picked up the attack themes against the poet without quoting from his poem.
While ignoring Grass's actual words, the Times article by Ethan Bronner and Nicholas Kulish from Jerusalem summarized the poem in the most negative terms, accusing Grass of "echoing language and themes that have long stirred anti-Semitism."
But the Times offered no examples of these alleged offenses beyond the poet's supposed crime of suggesting an equivalence between Israel and Iran regarding international law being applied to both countries' nuclear programs.
The Actual Poem
Here is the translation of Grass's controversial poem, "What Must Be Said":
Why do I stay silent, conceal for too long
What is obvious and has been
Practiced in war games, at the end of which we as survivors
Are at best footnotes.
It is the alleged right to the first strike
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