Jakob Augstein. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A journalist for the German news magazine Der Spiegel was accused of providing a platform for hatred against Jews and Israel by the head of the European Jewish Congress (EJC).

Dr. Moshe Kantor said journalists like Jakob Augstein “over the last few years have used their columns to promote hate and fear of the Jewish State and the Jewish People,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

“Obviously they are not the same thing,” he added, “but when the age-old canards that were used against Jews for hundreds of years appear to be directly replicated against the Jewish State this should tell us something about the dangerous lines which these people are treading. If these people are using the same unoriginal attacks against the Jewish State as were used against the Jewish People then we have a right to defend ourselves in exactly the same way and call this hatred for what it is.”

Augstein was recently featured in the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of the top 10 anti-Semitic or anti-Israel slurs of 2012 for writing that “with backing from the U.S., where the president must secure the support of Jewish lobby groups, and in Germany, where coping with history, in the meantime, has a military component, the [Benjamin] Netanyahu government keeps the world on a leash with an ever-swelling war chant.”