Beating the Tin Drum Against Israel

Berlin

One of Germany’s most famous novelists penned a pro-Iranian regime and anti-Israel poem Wednesday in German and Italian daily newspapers, declaring the Jewish state the greatest threat to global security and denying the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

The 84-year-old Günter Grass, the winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature and a lifelong Social Democratic party activist, wrote that “the atomic power Israel is endangering the already fragile world peace.” In addition to his literary fame, Grass, a fierce opponent of President George W. Bush’s tenure, is considered by the chattering classes to be a political actor whose statements carry moral weight.