Der Spiegel's negative profile of climate activist Greta Thunberg accuses her of antisemitism (she held up a "free Gaza" sign) but is really an exercise in tone: patronizing yet anxious, exhaustive yet insubstantial, crafted to marginalize naive and misguided young people while reassuring serious adults that their radical movements and political idée fixes (especially the climate movement) are going nowhere. It is a Big Gun, 5000 words long, with six named authors maintaining an editoral Dreamworks face throughout.
The article works for English-speaking readers to illustrate how criticism of Israel or the IDF is treated by German media as antisemitism in actu, as part of the nation's "special responsibility" to atone for the Holocaust. But the big pull quote in it, the one Der Speigel's editors chose to illustrate the article with, its zen stick, is comically revealing for a publication founded in 1947:
German media loves to make a show of looking into the abyss, but their mirrors are always smoked. This atonement is all schuld, no chesed.
UPDATE: Sometimes Twitter is still good.
Correction: The Der Spiegel article has six named authors, not five.
