Less than 10 years ago, Germany, and especially Berlin, was held up as a beacon of openness and inclusivity in a western world rocked by Brexit and Donald Trump. Angela Merkel’s decision to take in thousands of refugees displaced by the war in Syria boosted her country’s reputation in progressive circles, with many international artists and academics choosing to make the German capital their new home.
Yet the conflict in the Middle East is showing Germany in a new light, highlighting fissures in society and the arts world that until now had been easier to ignore.
As someone living in Germany, the level of state repression I’ve seen towards artists and activists who speak against Israel’s war on Gaza is terrifying. I never thought I’d see such a level of repression in Germany. Artists’ funds are getting slashed left and right. The government is pushing venues to cancel appointments with artists that criticize Israel (including jewish artists/activists). Cultural venues have been closed down by the government for hosting some of these activists (Oyoun Berlin was closed down after renting a space for an evening to the local charter of Jewish Voice for Peace). Activists have been arrested/fined for chants like “From the river to the sea we demand equality” or “Jews against genocide”. There have been countless non-violent activists raided by armed police in the early hours of the morning for their pro Palestine activism. Berlin police has enacted checkpoints in immigrant neighbourhoods. Journalists getting fired for asking the wrong questions. The state of Berlin is now trying to pass a law to allow universities to exmatriculate students on “behavioural” grounds (aka political stances). Politicians actively singling out activists on social media and redirecting insane amounts of hate their way. This place is getting very, very scary.
You really should recheck your sources. F.e. this case here
The state of Berlin is now trying to pass a law to allow universities to exmatriculate students on “behavioural” grounds (aka political stances).
is not “behavioural grounds”, but because some students beat up a jewish student for political reasons and the university wasn’t allowed to expell them due to legal reasons.
If they beat up someone, they should be charged with the crime they did. Why do new crimes need to be invented?
Why do new crimes need to be invented?
This is not at all what they are saying. Such a new law would not introduce a new crime, but be an amendment to the university’s rules so that they are allowed to expel students who committed certain crimes before.
Because a hate crime is different offence from a “normal” crime, duh
Criminal prosecution is not done by universities so if universities want to act on this they need a different legal basis for that.
Maybe more than a new crime it should be an aggravating circumstance. Beating someone for some petty reason and beating someone for political/religoius reasons are different in gravity.
It already is apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_crime#Germany
The German Criminal Code does not have hate crime legislation, instead, it criminalizes hate speech under a number of different laws, including Volksverhetzung. In the German legal framework motivation is not taken into account while identifying the element of the offence. However, within the sentencing procedure the judge can define certain principles for determining punishment. In section 46 of the German Criminal Code it is stated that “the motives and aims of the perpetrator; the state of mind reflected in the act and the willfulness involved in its commission”[44] can be taken into consideration when determining the punishment; under this statute, hate and bias have been taken into consideration in sentencing in past cases.[45]
Yeah, it will definitely not get used against activists. Beating people up is illegal. The persons involved in such things should be handled by the authorities. With that being said, trading your rights for “”“security”“” has always proven to be a stupid idea. Giving universities this power, especially given their track record of shooting down any kind of political dissent, will only end up in power hungry individuals abusing it.
The victim in that assault case has been shoving and grabbing students at the university before. That is of course much less severe than how he was beaten up, but in that discussion about throwing out students for violent behaviour that was conveniently ignored.
The whole discussion only started when he was attacked and it was about denying education to pro Palestinian and in particular Arab and other migrant sudents. It was headed among others by the racist major of Berlin (major in this case is also the head of the state government) who just a year ago won an election on the grounds of demanding police to release the names of suspect teenagers. This demand was made so the public could decide based on the names, if those suspects were “real Germans” instead of maybe “foreigners with a German passport”. This is far-right nationalist ideology and primitive racism.
So it is clear what goals are aimed at with the demand to throw students out of universities if they are suspect of a crime. If it would be put in place it would be used to remove “foreigners” from universities, not to remove “good kids who have made a mistake”.
What I want to say: Those cases are complex, have a lot of nuance and it is totally not ok that @febra@lemmy.world is going around and doing propaganda totally distorting the complexity of those cases.
But in that complexity it is also not yet clear, if the attack was an actual hate crime, with the goal to harm the victim because he is jewish.
some students beat up a jewish student for political reasons and the university wasn’t allowed to expell them due to legal reasons
You mean they can’t expel students for bigotry-related violence? I call bullshit.
They can’t expel people for things they do off campus. That is true. However it also shouldn’t be the case, as we had our wave of “red scare” persecutions of people in the 70s, destroying peoples lives based on often farbicated charges against people who were considered “too left”.
Denying people access to education based on criminal charges is a slippery slope and in the current environment it is likely, that these will solely be used for political persecution.
Also it should be noted that the claim, that the attack was bigotry related is made by the victim and his supporters, with the victim having a history of violently engaging pro palestinian protestors on campus, ripping off posters that remembered killed palestinian women and children and repeatedly demanded all pro palestinian voices to be banned from campus.
The police didnt classify it as a hate crime so far and the claims of it being a hate crime are made on the allegation that jewishness and pro-israel and pro-zionism stances are identical. (Which is in itself antisemtic and used to repress jewish people in Germany who are critical of zionism)
Denying people access to education based on criminal charges is a slippery slope and in the current environment it is likely, that these will solely be used for political persecution.
Didn’t consider that. That’s an excellent point.
Also it should be noted that the claim, that the attack was bigotry related is made by the victim and his supporters, with the victim having a history of violently engaging pro palestinian protestors on campus, ripping off posters that remembered killed palestinian women and children and repeatedly demanded all pro palestinian voices to be banned from campus.
Yeah. Knowing that, it DOES stink…
that jewishness and pro-israel and pro-zionism stances are identical. (Which is in itself antisemtic and used to repress jewish people in Germany who are critical of zionism)
Absolutely.
You might call bullshit, it is bullshit, but sadly it is a fact. See this german article here: https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2024/02/berlin-hochschulgesetz-universitaet-gewalttaeter-sanktionen.html
My school German is quite rusty, you wouldn’t happen to have an English language article?
Activists have been arrested/fined for chants like “From the river to the sea we demand equality” or “Jews against genocide”.
I don’t doubt that they don’t know any nuance in anything that contains “From the river to the sea" but who was arrested for “Jews against genocide” and on what grounds?
Do you have a source for that?For repression in Berlin in general:
https://jewishcurrents.org/an-anti-palestinian-crackdown-across-europe
Open letter of Jewish people condemning the supression by the German government, German and English Version:
https://taz.de/Offener-Brief-juedischer-Intellektueller/!5965154/
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/freedom-for-the-one-who-thinks-differently/
Recent arrest of jewish activists for peace, German and English version:
https://www.theleftberlin.com/police-brutality-at-palestine-solidarity-sit-in/
Sorry, but I couldn’t find a single reference to “Jews against genocide” in any of these.
Also, open letters and opinion peaces by activists are by definition not neutral sources.I’m not saying that police are necessarily acting correctly, but do you have any evidence that someone was arrested for “Jews against genocide”?
https://twitter.com/derJamesJackson/status/1741488229201658142
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/10/germany-gaza-protests-crackdown
The problem is that German mainstream media is not covering these topics and had a ridicilous pro Israel bias until the last few weeks since it becomes impossible to ignore the deliberate starvation of people in Gaza and the continued genocidal rethoric of the Israeli government in regards to invading Rafah.
The problem is that German mainstream media is not covering these topics
Well English media don’t seem to provide any proof for the original claim either.
Your first link shows a picture of a lady with a “Jews against genocide” sign flanked by two police officers.
I see no arrest and at least at that moment in time she is still allowed to show her sign.Link two contains these passages:
Her banner, which said she was ashamed to be German and that there was a “genocide” taking place in the densely populated Palestinian enclave being bombarded by Israel.
Police let her and her sign go, and she joined the march.At about 4pm, police pushed into the crowd and, to calls of “shame, shame”, pulled Monika Kalinowska out.
Her sign, written in red, read, “Israel is a terrorist state.”
After she was frisked and her identification checked, she was told there was nothing wrong with her sign – even though it was confiscated – and she was allowed to leave. She could pick up the sign the next day, police said.Again, I’m not defending police here but the claim was that people were arrested, so I want to know who got arrested and for what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest
An arrest is the act of apprehending and taking a person into custody (legal protection or control), usually because the person has been suspected of or observed committing a crime. After being taken into custody, the person can be questioned further and/or charged. An arrest is a procedure in a criminal justice system, sometimes it is also done after a court warrant for the arrest.
I think you might confuse it with detention, where the police would keep you in jail for a limited time.
As for who and what, from the article:
The officer who briefly removed Kalinowska from the protest told Al Jazeera that there was no formal list or any particular guidelines to follow.
“Really, I just use my intuition,” he said. “If I see something I think is bad, we go and get it.”
And this is indivative of the wider problem here. Police can harass and attack protests without having to uphold a legal standard. So even if there is no legal basis to what they do, just storming into the protest and dragging someone out is used as an intimidation and punishment without crime tactic. It is always a violent act where not only the person apprehended, but also the protestors around them are physically attacked.
I admit, it might be a language problem.
taking a person into custody (legal protection or control)
What does taking into custody mean then?
Is police taking someone aside for 2 minutes to ask some questions an arrest?
Because then I don’t understand the outcry over it, particularly compared to far more heavy-handed police action that definitely does happen every now and again.
Blogs, letters, and articles about letters are very weak sources. They’re on the level of opinions. Do you have anything better?
So you think the pictures and videos that show the speaking activist being detained by the Police have been staged with the police? You think that recognised organizations who rely on their tax exemption would make false allegations against the government that could deny their tax exempt status and practically kill their work through that?
Pictures and videos are evidence of a single event each, not evidence of systematic opression
Any organisation can make statements which can be argued to be statements of principle, of opinion, or similar, and not face any consequences. Tax-exempt status is removed if they start working for profit, not if they work in the direction of their political beliefs.
They can and will lose their tax exempt status or have it threatened if the government argues them to believe “extremist” for which false allegations would be an indication.
Losing the tax exempt status based on broad allegations have happened to the VVN-BdA the Association of people persecuted by the nazi regime, federation of antifascists. Based on it being mentioned in the “constitution protection report” of the interior intelligence in Bavaria the finance office of Berlin has revoked its tax exempt status in 2019. The organization was targeted as “leftist extremists” as they have a decisive anti-fascist stance, given that the organization has been founded by Holocaust survivors and their descendants are organized in it.
https://taz.de/Aberkennung-der-VVN-Gemeinnuetzigkeit/!5645383/
if the government argues them to believe “extremist”
Considering not even the openly neonazi AfD are classified as extremist they can feel quite safe from that. Also, well done moving the goalposts.
The fact remains that expressing statements furthering their political interests carries zero consequences. Which is a good thing, without this democracy wouldn’t work. It also means that your sources are closer to opinions than to facts. Got any peer-reviewed studies perhaps?
We are already at war. Not with our bodies, but the victims are our money and minds for now.
Crime against jewish people is on the rise in Germany, as are neonazis. Hate crimes against jews were also rising before the Gaza war, by the way.
If Germany didn’t try to protect jewish people it would mean they learnt nothing from the past.
The chancellor has said the safety and security of Israel is Germany’s raison d’êtat.
Before I get downvoted to hell by Gaza sympathisers, let me add that Israel is currently committing massive war crimes against the Palestinian people and those responsible must be tried and punished in an international court of law.
All of these things can be true at the same time:
a) Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity
b) Hamas has committed crimes against humanity
c) Israel has a right to existence and to security
d) Palestine has a right to existence and to security
I don’t get how some people feel they have to pick only two out of these four.
Israel has no right to exist though. The existence of Israel is dependent on settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.
Before you say “if Israel has no right to exist then neither does the United States, Canada, Australia, etc.” then I have to agree.
c) Israel has a right to existence and to security
This has no right to be true. First, a state does not have an intrinsic right to exist. A state is a social tool, crafted to help humans survive and thrive, in coexistence as how it came to be. If tools turn out to be primarily used for war and suffering, they are no longer tools for the betterment of humanity. You can argue Israel stealing more land is a betterment for their people, but the animosity caused during the process is eventually reflecting on the people benefiting from the betterment, both as outside perception and as shifting the thinking of the Israeli people about what is better for humanity, and it is not a good way to go forward.
The State of Israel is a malfunctioning machine that is spewing out more poison than it is manufacturing goodness. Malfunctioning machines need to be repaired, and if they can’t be, disabled and discarded/recycled, not kept active and doing harm saying they have a right to exist.
If we reject the UN and international law, as you appear to be doing by denying Israel’s right to exist as defined in the two state solution, we basically go back to the right of the strongest. Putin would agree with you.
A couple presumptions you make are the very causation for today’s problems:
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UN, which deep-seated inequality and over-representation ingrained to it right from its very beginning as giving substantial privileges to 5 WWII winner imperialist powers as permanent members with unconditional veto power, even on resolutions that question their validity, which they have been abusing for as long as the UN existed , as infallible authority.
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The international law, which is used by the aforementioned powers to keep the status quo after they drew the borders and partitioned the world according to their greed, and still circumvent to further their agendas without facing repercussions, as infallible, just and fair compromise and authority.
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Two-State solution with current borders implied. The original and rejected two-state solution that was forced upon Palestinian territories as peaceful division, that also meant to leave the Arabs with bleak desert and give all the shores and fertile lands to Jewish people, which also gave way to acceptance of way fairer division of land with populations and prosperity in consideration, ended in Zionist terrorists causing a contemporary (mainly cultural) genocide. Later attempt at two-state solution was prefaced with Zionist terrorists giving back the occupied land and agreeing to the fairer share of the land, which didn’t happen. The idea behind recognizing both Palestine and Israel as states never came to fruition, mainly due to Israel wanting unfair share that would result in a de facto infeasible Palestinian statehood. Israel statehood’s only fair foundation is bloodied by their own hands by forcing their statehood with stolen land, off-driven Arabic people, and cultural genocide. Hard to accept such poisonous machines as a useful tool.
One more thing: The strongest already ousted the previous strongest, demonized them and made them the only focus, all the while making the current rules to ensure their own prosperity. They are also making sure these rules continue to be obeyed by the less powerful by enforcing them with waepons of war and purpose-built indirect weapons like exploitative economic implementations.
Lastly, Putin has a lot of people like you that think harmful tools be kept harming people for the sake of keeping the tool/machine on. Putin also has his own circumventions of a just and fair, reason and rules based world order, and subsequently suck dick together with all the democratically-elected de facto western hegemons and the ancestral eastern tyrants.
Please don’t put words into my mouth. I have never made any qualitative claims about the UN and international law.
Also, to put the word infallible and any political organisation into the same sentence is absurd, hardly warranting a response.
Original claim is “all of the below can be true: […] c) Israel has a right to exist.”
My counterpoint is a Israel is a state, states are tools, tools don’t have a right to exist, and harmful tools shouldn’t be kept working so they continue harming people.
Your counterpoint to mine is “If we reject the UN and international law by rejecting Israel’s right to statehood, we go back to the rule of the strongest.” by which the underlying implication is going backwards in human rights development and betterment of humanity.
Were you championing that we reject UN and international law, and go back to the rule of the strongest? Or were you just stating that UN and international law attached Israel an undeniable right to statehood? How do you make a connection with this to what I’m saying being possibly liked by Putin, without making any implications, then?
Please explain yourself.
Oh man, you’re confused. Let’s take it step by step.
The existence of a state is recognised theough the UN. UN rrcognises your state? It exists. Like France. It’s not recognised? It doesn’t exist, like Northern Cyprus, or South Ossetia. This is how international law works. We don’t have to argue whether it is a good system - but we can certwinly agree that it is better than the previous one, where militarily strong states imposed their will upon their neighbours. Like Putin is trying and failing now, or like the British and Spanish empires did centuries ago. If it is “right of the strongest”, we shall have wars.
If you reject the UN, you are arguing for war, because that is the only other option we have.
Get it now?
UN is a political entity as you have hinted before in your previous comment. A state existing can best be measured by its acceptance through the UN usually, but even then one of the 5 imperialist powers can veto a state’s recognizance proposal on their whims, and this completely nullifies it as a dependable metric. It comes to the example “All animals are equal, but some are more equal.” from Animal Farm without any complexity governing it at all. It just doesn’t cause many wars currently, although it does not help ease the stressful atmosphere. And where it causes war and suffering due to some imperial power on the other side of the planet exerting undue and unfair power over the peaceful talks between the sides, it becomes hell on Earth.
It is not better than the previous system if the already powerful can exert influence and claim interest in a local conflict it is not anywhere nearly part of. The strong still strongarm land-grab and killing, without the borders on the map not changing to their own name, but their pawns’. Adding a subterfuge element to it does not make the lives of the victims of the exploited region any more better, just suffocates through removal of oxygen rather than outright stabbing. In the case of Palestine, openly turns it into a concentration camp.
If only the US didn’t veto any remotely fair resolution, or failing that proposals for heavy military sanctions against Israel for its genocide, the world could easily have ended this conflict decades ago. US could keep aiding Israel with technology and supplies related to prosperity rather than for one-sided war. Israel could still be a major powerhouse if their sugar mommy wanted, without having to actively expand land and kill innocent babies all around.
How is simply asking for Israel’s statehood to be questioned and scrutinized, in the light of its continued genocide and invasion throughout generations and leaders, is asking for war? No such nation has a right to exist!
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Germans love themselves some good ol Genocide. Willing to use their previous Genocide as an excuse for a new one even.
Reminder that 30% of the weapons for israel’s Genocide come from Germany.
Swedish institute’s research finds American arms make up 69%, another 30% come from Berlin; all IAF manned aircraft are US-made, aside from one French-built helicopter
Perhaps you shouldn’t speak for >80 million people and rather refer to the government. But even then you’re full of shit. The weapons industry? Yeah, they’re a sick bunch of assholes. Loving genocides? Fuck off. Germany is one of the few countries owning up to their past mistakes.
Being complicit Genocide isn’t owning up to any mistake.
A German saying Germany is owning up to their Genocide by committing another one really goes to show what time it is in Germany right now.
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Mate, you should try some other hobbies. You’ve made hundreds of posts on this topic, yet I bet you haven’t got the slightest clue on what this entire conflict is about.
Let me tell you that I absolutely hate what is going on and I absolutely don’t think we should keep supporting Israel with weapons as long as they’re violating the Geneva convention. And there are plenty of Germans with the same mindset. But we also know it’s not a one-sided conflict.
I’ll go ahead and block your toxic ass. People like you like to be loud on the internet but won’t do shit in real life.
Wow you’re so cool you don’t care about Genocide and post about other things. And people that post about Genocide have no life!
Consider not being a Genocide apologist. Imagine acting like Genocide is normal. Not surprising it comes from a feddit.de user
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Alright. Time to make AI art without boundaries then. /S
