The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre on Wednesday slammed Germany's Gunter Grass as a spokesman for anti-Semites after the Nobel literature laureate accused Israel of plotting Iran's annihilation.

"Grass is speaking for a spectrum of ostensibly respectable Germans who harbour anti-Semitic views which which cannot be uttered at home in Germany, but can be directed at Israel, which has become a symbol for the hated Jews," the centre's Israel director Efraim Zuroff said in a statement.

"While attacks on individual Jews as Jews are politically incorrect and generally unacceptable in the Federal Republic, Israel has become the whipping boy for anti-Semitic Germans sick of the Holocaust and seeking to rid themselves of any responsibility for its aftermath," he added.

Grass published a poem Wednesday in which he accused Israel of threatening global security.

The 84-year-old longtime leftist activist wrote in "What must be said" that he worried Israel "could wipe out the Iranian people" with a "first strike" due to the threat it sees in Tehran's disputed nuclear programme.

"Why do I only say now, aged and with my last ink: the atomic power Israel is endangering the already fragile world peace?" reads the poem, which was published in the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

Grass, author of the renowned anti-war novel "The Tin Drum", sparked outrage in 2006 when he revealed, six decades after World War II, that he had been a member of the notorious Waffen SS.

"The outrageous comments by Grass are not unusually surprising, since his moral integrity was totally compromised by his admission of service in the Waffen-SS," Zuroff wrote.

"The Tin Drum he is banging is not the one of moral conscience but of deep-seated prejudice against the Jewish people, the primary victims of German anti-Semitism, racism, and xenophobia."

Israel, the sole if undeclared nuclear power in the Middle East, has said it is keeping all options open for responding to Iran's nuclear programme, which it says is aimed at securing nuclear weapons, posing an existential threat to the Jewish state.

Iran, whose president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad frequently questions Israel's right to exist, has consistently denied that its sensitive nuclear work is aimed at making weapons.

expatica.com