Referring to your film “American Radical”, I recently saw a scene from it which has become especially famous for your excellent response and handling of the situation, namely the “Crying Girl” scene, on youTube. I then read several hundred of the comments and was utterly aghast for several reasons.

Unfortunately, the great majority of the viewers have completely misunderstood the scene. The common consensus is that she is German-Jewish crying ‘crocodile tears’ for Holocaust victims. Nothing could be further from the truth. She is clearly German, this is apparent from her accent. But not Jewish – which becomes obvious with her opening remarks to you, where she breaks down and starts to sob after stating what offense you caused with remarks about Nazis to GERMANS. I can only assume that these comments were made by foreigners; no-one familiar with Germany or her people would ever see her as anything other than only German. Nor would anyone European follow this quite daring assumption of youTube viewers, considering that for obvious reasons there are NO young, under-25, GERMAN Jews (the G/J population at present is around 108,000. An absolutely negligible percentage of the whole German population of nearly 80 million).

The reason and motivation of the young lady in voicing her distress with “Nazi and German” statements is that as most young Germans, she is a carrier of the heavy burden of eternal guilt. Guilt from her ancestors, her people, who committed incomprehensible evil. Which evil horrifies her more than anyone, and for which all dislike of THEM is perfectly justified. But not of HER. SHE is not a Nazi. She has nothing to do with this, she is very different, times have changed, things have changed, Germans have changed. All of this you are not acknowledging, in fact, you are negating it. This is what cuts her to the quick and really does wound her deeply – she herself feels accused of being a Nazi. This is most awfully unfair, so she needs to tell you about all the changes, all the hard work towards redemption that has been done, in order to then gain your APPROVAL. To be given validation and praise for NOT being a Nazi. In other words, her tears are really FOR HERSELF – she does not understand how you cannot understand the ‘new situation’, why you seemingly do not differentiate between ‘then’ and ‘now’, leaving her truly hurt at being so maligned. Her speaking to you is not remotely connected to the subject of your lecture, the Palestinians, it is all about her. Instead of talking about the past and reminding her of suffering Palestinians, what you should have said is: “Kudos, little redhead – I applaud you for feeling like any normal person would”.

The 2nd thing I was aghast about, as well as utterly revolted by, is the sheer, unbelievable, horrendous HATRED and naked anti-Semitism in far too many of the comments. The most horrible insults and disgusting, vile, violent suggestions are freely made. This terrible hatred so plainly visible is seriously frightening, it literally makes one fear for this world. It also lets one understand the constant, deep-seated fear and ever-lasting paranoia of a Dershovitz or Foxman – reading these poisonous outpourings, one begins to see why so many Israelis and her screeching apologists are of the “We are under attack, anything to survive” mindset. I was shocked to see that there are indeed still some propagating such evil. Ironic to think that those commenters could never, ever proclaim only 10% of their sickening hate speech IN GERMANY – seeing hate speech is thankfully a crime here, they’d be arrested right after the first volley. As they should be.
It goes without saying that the language used is just as outrageous and repulsive. Nothing against the odd swear word, but the vulgarities merrily thrown at each other here boggle the mind. In the end one comes away feeling that instead of a serious discussion of the subject, it is used as an opening for a despicable hate-fest.
It is a terrible shame that this particular scene containing more than one very serious message has been so sadly misconstrued and at least on youTube only serves as fodder for the most appalling bigots.