World
'Antisemitic' academic to appear in court after saying 'Jews learnt evil from Nazis'
Sucharit Bhakdi has previously attracted criticism for statements he made about the Covid pandemic
May 17, 2023 16:58
Sucharit Bhakdi has previously attracted criticism for statements he made about the Covid pandemic
May 17, 2023 16:58ByRob Hyde
A controversial microbiologist who was exposed as an antisemite is facing criminal charges after he claimed “Jewish people learned how to be evil from the Nazis”.
Sigmount Königsberg, antisemitism commissioner of the Jewish Community of Berlin is pressing charges against Sucharit Bhakdi who belongs to the tiny political party, die Basis (The Basis), which in July 2021, was officially permitted to allowed to stand in the 2021 federal elections.
As part of die Basis party, Bhakdi alleged that under Adolf Hitler, Jewish people experienced evil. They then learned to understand the nature of evil and are now using this knowledge to exercise a worse form of evil in Israel.
He said in a political campaign video: “The people who fled from this land where the arch evil was, and have found their land, have turned their own land into something even worse than [Nazi] Germany was. That is the bad thing about the Jews - they learn well.
"There is no people who learn better than they do. But they have learned evil now - and put it into practice. That's why Israel is now living hell."
Bhakdi, 74, had Thai diplomats for parents and went on to become a well-known German specialist in microbiology and infectious disease epidemiology.
In 1984, he even received an invitation to present a ground-breaking discovery in this field to the Royal Society in London and from 1991 to 2021 he was head of the Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz.
But Bhakdi got into hot water for a series of controversial videos and interviews on the COVID-19 pandemic.
In May 2020, he co-founded the association "Physicians and Scientists for Health, Freedom and Democracy” to oppose the German government's measures to contain the Covid-19 pandemic.
By January 2022, Karin Prien of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) justified the demand to expel a high-ranking party member from the party, on the basis that he had shared one of Bhakdi’s videos which called for a halt to corona vaccinations.
In 2018, Hans-Georg Maassen had been President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. But in 2022, the CDU was so horrified that he had shared Bhakdi's video, and also made "totally unacceptable" statements on vaccination, that they simply wanted him out.
"If a former top official and constitutional protection officer spreads such conspiracy theory nonsense and refers to the anti-Semite Bhakdi, then we as the CDU can no longer tolerate it”, said Prien.
And just a week later, CDU Secretary General Paul Ziemak went even further, saying Bhakdi’s comments had “nothing to do with CDU politics, absolutely nothing.”
“We reject them in the strongest possible terms. Anti-Semitic statements should have no place in our country”, he added.
During lockdown, die Basis party was widely slammed as a form of pseudo-respectable face for the "Querdenker" (Lateral Thinker) anti-vax movement, which was heavily infiltrated by the antisemitic groups.
Here far-right extremists such as the sinister Reichsbürger, ‘Citizens of The Reich’, movement, marched shoulder to shoulder with Querdenker protesters.
And many demonstrators began peddling a twisted narrative about the state anti-Corona measures somehow being on a par with the Nazi persecution of Jewish people.
To rationalise this warped perception, some protesters even dressed up in striped pyjamas worn by Jewish prisoners in Adolf Hitler’s death camps, with the Star of David on their sleeve with the word “ungeimpft” (unvaccinated) written inside.
Bhakdi will appear in court in the northern German port city of Kiel on May 23.