(December 9, 2021 / JNS) Annalena Baerbock’s career as the first female foreign minister in Germany was introduced to the Jewish community with a Jewish-inspired hiccup. In her Hanukkah greeting on Twitter, she wrote: “With the light of the Hanukkah candles, the light beam of diversity, democracy and human dignity is magnified. They enrich us all.”
Whether or not the Maccabees’ battle against the Syrian-Greeks stands for diversity and democracy is a question left for historians. But Twitter doesn’t argue that Baerbock seems to have copied the tweet of her co-leader, Robert Habeck, who used the exact terminology last Hanukkah.https://2c3238d6f02e7b1fe852d9c025d09107.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Baerbock has already been beleaguered with plagiarism charges. She apologized for not properly attributing passages of her book, Now. How We Renew Our Country. Her credibility had already taken a hit when reporters discovered that she exaggerated on her résumé, falsely listing membership with the German Marshall Fund and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. To top it off, she was criticized for not disclosing all her income.