Matthias Küntzel

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Matthias Küntzel (born 1955), is a German author and a political scientist. He is a research associate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

1 Career
2 Work
3 Banned from the University of Leeds, England
4 Books
5 Publications (selection)
6 Notes
7 External links

[edit] Career

From 1984 to 1988, Küntzel was a senior advisor of the Federal Parliamentary Fraction of Germany’s Green Party. In 1991, he received his doctorate, summa cum laude, in Political Science at the University of Hamburg. His thesis Bonn & the Bomb. German Politics and the Nuclear Option, London: Pluto Press was in English in 1995. In 2004, he has been named a research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since 2001, his main field of research and writing have been anti-Semitism in current Islamic thinking, Islamism, Islamism and National Socialism, Iran, German and European policies towards the Middle East and Iran. Among others, he wrote for The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal and Internationale Politik. In 2006 he became a member of the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East .

[edit] Work

In 2003, he delivered the Keynote Address at the Conference on "Genocide and Terrorism – Probing the Mind of the Perpetrator" at Yale University. In 2004, he was a panelist at the "Lessons & Legacies VIII International Conference on the Holocaust: From Generation to Generation" at Brown University. In 2005, he discovered antisemitic tracts at the Iranian stands at the Frankfurt Book Fair: an incident he wrote about in the Wall Street Journal. He was a panelist at the 2006 Paris conference "Les démocraties face au défi islamiste" (The democracies in the face of the Islamist challenge) organised by the Center for Security Policy and L’institut pour la Défense de la Démocratie. He organized the 1999 conference "Die Goldhagen-Debatte: Bilanz und Perspektiven" (The Goldhagen-Debate: results and perspectives) of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Germany, with Daniel Goldhagen, Andrei Markovits, Wolfgang Wippermann, Jürgen Elsässer, et al. at Potsdam/Germany.

[edit] Banned from the University of Leeds, England

On March 14, 2007, Küntzel was due to address University of Leeds in England on the topic ‘Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East.’ However, several hours before the talk was due to take place, the talk was unexpectedly cancelled due to "security concerns," following protest e-mails from some of the university's Muslim students.^[1] Dr. Küntzel said he had given similar addresses (at Yale University, as well as universities in Jerusalem and Vienna) around the world and there had been no problems. "I know this is sometimes a controversial topic," he said, "but I am accustomed to that and I have the ability to calm people down. It's not a problem for me at all. My impression was that they wanted to avoid the issue in order to keep the situation calm. My feeling is that this is a kind of censorship." Dr. Küntzel also said that the contents of emails described to him did not overtly threaten violence but "they were very, very strongly worded". He added: "It's stupid, because I also talk about Christian anti-semitism." Members of the German department at Leeds accused the university of "selling-out" academic freedom.^[2]

[edit] Books

Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, Telos Press, New York, 2007.
Djihad und Judenhaß: über den neuen antijüdischen Krieg, Ça Ira, Freiburg, 2002
Der Weg in den Krieg. Deutschland, die Nato und das Kosovo (The Road to War. Germany, Nato and the Kosovo), Elefanten Press, Berlin, 2000
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Goldhagen und die deutsche Linke oder: Die Gegenwart des Holocaust (Goldhagen and the German Left or: The Presence of the Holocaust), ed. Matthias Küntzel, Ulrike Becker, Klaus Thörner et al., Elefanten Press, Berlin, 1997
Bonn & the Bomb: German politics and the nuclear option, Transnational Institute (TNI), Pluto Press, London; Boulder, Colorado, 1995.
Bonn und die Bombe: deutsche Atomwaffenpolitik von Adenauer bis Brandt, Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt/Main; New York, 1992