Itongadol.- Dieter Reiter, the mayor of Munich, told the city’s Jewish community leader on Tuesday that municipal space will not be allocated to anti-Israel events.
There will be “no more city support for such events [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions],” Reiter told Charlotte Knobloch, the head of Munich’s 9,500 member Jewish community.
Aaron Buck, a spokesman for the Jewish community, confirmed on Wednesday Reiter’s statement to Knobloch in an email to the Jerusalem Post.
The Post sent a media query on Wednesday to Reiter’s spokesman seeking clarity on the scope of the prohibition of city-funded anti-Israel events.
Last week, the Post published the first expose on Munich’s government providing tax-payer funded municipal building space for a lecture from German advocates of BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] covering the development and effect of the anti-Israel economic movement.
After Knobloch requested that Reiter intervene to pull the plug on the BDS lecture, he refused, stating, according to his spokesman Stefan Hauf, the mayor“does not have a basis to cancel the event. According to the cultural representative, the event is merely a lecture, and a call to boycott is not planned.”
Knobloch told the Post last week: “The BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] campaign disguises the socially unacceptable ’Don’t buy from Jews!’ as a modernized form of Nazi jargon by demanding ‘Don’t buy from the Jewish State.”’
Critics accused Munich of city-sponsored anti-Israel hate and anti-Semitism.
The head of Israel’s consulate in Munich, Dan Shaham, told the Post on Saturday, “We are sorry that this anti-Semitic BDS group has been allowed to use a municipal room to call for a boycott against Israel, which is by law not allowed in Germany.”
Jenny Becker, a representative from the city’s cultural department, defended the BDS event. She told the Post “From our view there exists a difference between Israel criticism and anti-Semitism.” Critics accuse the cultural department of being a hotbed of stoking hatred of the Jewish State.
Reiter, according to an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, asked the city’s cultural representative to conduct a review of the local government’s sponsorship of anti-Israel events.