Empathy for anti-Semitic and anti-American Angstlust

“[T]hey are symbols of pride and wealth and arrogance. To put up such buildings is the most extreme sort of arrogance, and vulnerability is thus built into them. And the attacks against these buildings – by way of these attacks, one can erase one’s own feelings of powerlessness and one’s own humiliations and transform them into the powerlessness and humiliation of one’s opponent….And that evokes [sic.] drastic and dramatic reactions and bellicose reactions, and that’s what makes it so dangerous and so disastrous to attack and to destroy precisely these symbols.”

Who said that? What? “Adolf Hitler or maybe Mohamed Atta,” you say? Just because of that slip: “they are” in the beginning? No! It was “Wolfgang Benz: the historian and director of Berlin’s Institute for Research on Anti-Semitism,” of course, in a public German discussion in Berlin that took place shortly after the jihadistic attack on the Twin Towers.