“Mr. Lanz, we should actually change places for two minutes…”
FDP defense expert Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (65) had a minute-long exchange of blows with TV presenter Markus Lanz (54) on Thursday evening – and really rounded it off!
Reason for the Strack-Zimmermann attack: the anti-Semitic swear statements by TV philosopher Richard David Precht (58) in a joint podcast with Lanz.
The FDP politician was a guest on Lanz’ talk show and spoke about the open hatred of Jews and Israel on German streets. “We see images from Berlin and other cities: deep hatred towards Israel, anti-Semitic excesses on the streets of people who, some of them, immigrated to Germany decades ago – but who come from a culture where this is absorbed with their mother’s milk,” Strack-Zimmermann opens.
She then draws a direct reference to Precht’s anti-Semitic swear statements.
Strack Zimmermann: “If on the one hand the mob is raging in the streets, but on the other hand the bourgeois center or the intellectuals in this country start to work with such stereotypes – which is tough anti-Semitism, which I personally don’t accuse you of – then we should We all look at what is not only on the streets, but also in the salons of this society.”
In a recent edition of the ZDF podcast “Lanz & Precht,” Precht rambled about how their religion would prohibit Orthodox Jews from working – “excluding a few things, like diamond trading and a few financial transactions.” A statement that is not only false, but also anti-Semitic. On Sunday, ZDF announced that it had removed the passage from the podcast.
Strack-Zimmermann was outraged by these statements and accused Precht of saying “such an anti-Semitic platitude without even blushing.” But the politician also directly attacked the moderator: “They then said ‘Yes, yes’, and then the topic continued.”
Lanz defended Precht: He didn’t say that, he also apologized and clarified the statements. Lanz didn’t want to draw a direct line between what was happening on the streets and the podcast.
Strack-Zimmermann: “We have seen this narrative on public television in the last few days”
And Strack-Zimmermann goes even further, directly attacking the public broadcasters!
“We have seen this narrative on public television in the last few days: Hamas makes a press statement and then it says ‘Israel has bombed a hospital’. Israel is trying to clarify that it wasn’t,” said Strack-Zimmermann.
Lanz interrupts her and says she needs to operate with the right facts.
Strack-Zimmermann cannot be dissuaded: she wants to know “how quickly it was triggered on social networks.”
Lanz intervenes again and makes it clear: “It wasn’t us” – a blow to the ARD and Daily News! Lanz explains: “Many colleagues said ‘according to Hamas information’, and there was an addition. Some have used terms like ‘presumably.'” He just wanted to say all that to put the whole thing in the right context.
And Lanz adds: “And the second thing is – important in this context, because it has somehow become fashionable in your party to put public broadcasting in the spotlight: It is by no means the case that this only happens in public broadcasting. What happened to legal television.” Public broadcasting may have greater relevance and therefore greater responsibility. He just wanted to say: “Other people have done that too.”
Lanz continued: “You know what kind of world we live in: It’s about speed, it’s about enormous speed. Yesterday we had someone from the BND here who said: If we had worked like this before, I would have chased someone straight out of the hallway who came around the corner with such half-baked information and said that we now know exactly what it was like. But the sovereignty of interpretation over narratives is something that is used to win wars, including propaganda wars, in people’s minds these days.”
Strack-Zimmermann wants to step in, but interjects: “That’s exactly the point!”
The fact is: In the “Tagesschau” on Wednesday evening – around 24 hours after the hospital explosion – it was said that it was “unclear who is responsible for it”. And: “Hamas reports almost 500 dead and hundreds injured.” At this point, all the evidence already pointed to the fact that a Palestinian rocket had hit the hospital – and not the Israeli Air Force, as Hamas claimed. And in the ARD Focus, terrorist statements were also put against the statements of the democratic state of Israel.