BERLIN–The Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper falsely claimed tens of thousands of Israelis had fled to Germany because of the policies of the Netanyahu administration, the German Press Council has determined.

The council’s 5-to-1 vote to uphold their initial ruling against the largest broadsheet newspaper in Germany is the latest act in a long-running media dispute playing out with high-powered lawyers and media experts.

The case began in 2014 and the decision was made public in the first week of January. It was obtained by the Jerusalem Post late last week.

Honestly Concerned, a Frankfurt-based pro-Israel media watchdog group, filed a complaint alleging Thorsten Schmitz, a Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) journalist, falsely stated in his article that “tens of thousands of Israelis fled” their country and sought refuge in Germany.

Honestly Concerned prevailed in the initial complaint. The SZ won a reversal last year. Now, Honestly Concerned appears to have secured a final victory.

The Press Council in its new decision wrote Schmitz “violated the journalistic accuracy requirement” of the German press code “by not proving the number or noting that the figure is a disputed estimate.”

According to the decision, “it must be clear to the reader how valid statistical information is. Such a presentation was lacking for the reader in this article.”

Attorney for Honestly Concerned Dr. Katy Ritzmann from the law firm FPS argued Schmitz’s statistical information was “unsubstantiated, speculative, without a factual foundation, and contradicted the journalistic requirement for accuracy.”

Estimates of the number of Israelis living in Germany vary. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees reported a total of 11,655 Israelis living in Germany in 2013. In 2012, 11,244 Israeli citizens lived in Germany.

Ritzmann said Schmitz’s contention Israelis are fleeing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Government cannot be defended as a personal opinion because the claim concerns the number of émigrés, who either exist or do not exist. She further argued Israelis who relocated to Germany were motivated by multiple factors, and their full range of motives could not have been limited to Israeli politics exclusively.

The newspaper provided the Press Council with a statement from Schmitz before their decision. In it he reiterated “tens of thousands of Israelis” fled from conditions in their country for which Israel’s prime minister was responsible. Schmitz argued many Israelis used European passports and were not counted in statistics.

SZ claimed Honestly Concerned employed an incorrect definition of the world “flee.” The paper said the word “flee” could be understood to mean to avoid an unpleasant or unmanageable living situation. According to the newspaper’s interpretation, departure from a location does not necessary mean it was dangerous there.

The newspaper offered evidence trying to show Israelis are leaving home because of high consumer prices, citing the chocolate “Pudding Debate,” where Israelis protested against the fact chocolate pudding was much cheaper in Germany than in Israel. Former IDF officer Naor Narkis started an online protest against the high cost of Milky pudding in Israel and called on Israelis to “make aliya” to Berlin.

Ritzmann countered Narkis had returned to Israel and the pudding debate took place during the 2015 Knesset session.

Schmitz did not return Post telephone calls and emails. Peter Lindner, who oversees SZ online where Schmitz’s article appeared, did not respond to Post email and telephone queries either.

Dr. Elvira U. Grözinger, a member of the German chapter of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, said: “Thorsten Schmitz is a biased, anti-Israeli journalist. After complaining about him to the SZ–no response–I unsubscribed from the paper. I gave his reports from Israel as a reason for that, and I am sure that we were not the only readers who did that because of him.”

SZ has a history of publishing allegedly anti-Semitic cartoons and articles as well as a racist cartoon about migrants in Germany.

In 2012 SZ published the late Nobel Prize for literature winner Günter Grass’s anti-Israel poem “What Must Be Said.” The poem was widely criticized in Germany as anti-Semitic because it depicts Israel as the greatest danger to world peace. In 2013 the paper published a caricature of Israel as a demon and in 2014 it depicted facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a hook-nosed octopus gobbling up the world–an allusion to Nazi propaganda portrayals of Jews.

The SZ editor responsible for the placement of the demon cartoon, Franziska Augstein, attempted to convince an American-Jewish organization not to file a Press Council complaint against the newspaper. The organization filed a complaint alleging anti-Semitism and the SZ was forced to apologize for its anti-Semitism. SZ apologized this month for an allegedly racist and sexist cartoon depicting a black migrant assaulting a white woman.

Henryk M. Broder, a leading expert on modern German anti-Semitism and a columnist at the daily Die Welt, first exposed Schmitz’s failed methods of journalistic verification. At a packed reading in Berlin for his new book, “That is Really Insane,” Broder, who has testified in the Bundestag as an expert witness on anti-Semitism, said SZ is the “most anti-Semitic and reactionary newspaper” in Germany.

Full story here.