A Berlin court has convicted a pro-Palestinian activist of condoning a crime for leading a chant of the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at a rally in the German capital four days after the Hamas attacks on Israel, in what her defence team called a defeat for free speech.
The presiding judge, Birgit Balzer, ordered 22-year-old German-Iranian national Ava Moayeri to pay a €600 (£515) fine on Tuesday, rejecting her argument that she meant only to express support for “peace and justice” in the Middle East by calling out the phrase on a busy street.
Balzer said she “could not comprehend” the logic of previous German court rulings that determined the saying was “ambiguous”, saying to her it was clear it “denied the right of the state of Israel to exist”.
Good old Germany, going back to the days of the State deeming some races as superior and having special laws to punish and silence those critical of the actions, no matter how murderous, of those the German State has deemed to represent a superior race.
You can take the NAZIsm out of Germany but you can’t take the profound racism and the authoritaristic tendencies out of the heart of the German Power Elites.
The only thing the Germans learnt from the Holocaust is that the Jews are entitled to carry out their very own Holocaust.
The non-racist lesson they could have taken from the Holocaust is: “Never again shall be this be done to anybody”
Instead the German elites (who, remember, were brought up in the very same time and environment as the NAZIs, with for certain many who quietly sympathized with some NAZI views) very openly chose for their country to learn a different lesson, one that preserves the Racist view of Human Beings: “Never again shall Germans do this to Jews”
This “lesson” in Racist format then anchors the utterly immoral and anti-Humanist idea that for Germans a Genocide is unimportant if not done by actual Germans and if done by people claiming to represent Jews, then Germany has a moral obligation to support them.
The Humanist version of the lesson, on the other hand, is wholly incompatible with closing one’s eyes to Genocide, much less to supporting those committing Genocide, no matter what the ethnicity of the mass murderers or their victims.
Complete BS.
You know that was 100 years ago don’t you. Our politicians aren’t that old. Practically unheard of to have someone old enough to not have had exposure to the 68 movement.
“Openly”? I suppose you have receipts for that? Why, if that’s the case, did the first deployment of German troops outside of Germany after the war regard stopping a genocide where Jews very much were not involved?
I guess that’s why we stopped sending weapons to Israel. There’s not going to be Israeli security without Palestinian freedom, there’s not going to be Palestinian freedom without Israeli security. We understand that, and have always worked behind the scenes, diplomatically, with developmental aid, you name it, to actually solve the conflict like that. Then, after the fucker killed Rabin, first Israelis were all like “now we’re doubling down on peace!” – and then it deflated. People gave up, even the leftists began to buy the right’s vision of peace – aka “antagonise Palestinians until they give up”. Netanyahu happened. I guess it would be wrong to talk about Israel sliding into fascism, they’re not unified enough for that – but fascists are still given free reign. And, with any luck, they’ll be reigned in again. Bibi certainly isn’t popular.
Don’t expect any grandstanding from Germany over this. We’d very much rather slink back, smile awkwardly, wait for Israeli civil society to regain their composure and sanity, and then be able to resume the peace project, without having to patch up things first.
The way in which Germany “repudiated NAZIsm” and “made up for their crimes” was defined way back in the 50s and that hasn’t been updated as made clear by the use, still today by German politicians of the phrase “Never again shall Germans do that to Jews” (or equivalent: plenty of politicians in Germany openly talk about Germany’s obligation to support the Jewish People) rather than, as I pointed out, the Humanist version (of acting to prevent and stop Genocide) which is the one which would be expect in Modern Days.
This is not unique to Germany, as all over the West modern liberal politics remains riddled with ethnic prejudice: looking at people as members of ethnicities, determining how deserving of better or worse treatment they are by their ethnicity rather than from their actions and beliefs as human individuals, and presuming positive or negative traits for all people of a given ethnicity. It’s just that nowadays they call benefiting people for belonging to certain ethnicities “positive discrimination” and the list of ethnicities which are discriminated for and against is different than before. The racist foundation of looking at, judging and acting towards human beings based on their ethnicity, is alive and well, and the biggest change was in the list of ethnicities deemed “good” and those deemed “bad”.
Germany and other countries would never have supported “The Jews” if they had not remained racists: they would have supported those who were the victims of Germany as well as their families: nobody is inherent deserving of being supported by Germany if they lived far away all their lives and were not impacted by the actions of Germany, just because they belong to the same ethnicity as most victims of German actions. By exactly the same logic people who are NOT Jews and yet were impacted by the actions of Germany deserve support independently of their ethnicity. Curiously, people of Roma ethnicity - an ethnic group which was also a prime target of the NAZIs - did not at all receive the level of support as was extended to anybody who was merely a member of the Jewish ethnicity even if not affected by past German actions: even in the duty of compensation by the German state for past crimes, their racialized view of human beings and discriminatory views for different ethnicities resulted in extremely racist practices, the pinnacle of which was visible when Israel, by then entirely under control of an ethno-Fascist ideology, went full throttle on their ongoing Genocide of Palestinians and the German State kept “unwaveringly” supporting them.
Also a distinctive thing for Germany (at least in Europe) is the ongoing authoritarian streak that was already visible before all this, displayed in the tendency to keep civil society under surveillance and having broad, easily abused, free speech suppression laws under the guise of stopping the resurgement of Nazism.
The field in which AfD grew kept being plowed for a long time in Germany: it’s only normal that the architecture of discrimination that sustained a quiet, systemic, “benevolent” (claiming to be “positive”) racism would eventually and once again give birth to the loud, obnoxious and malevolent kind.
Can you even produce the purported original German that sentence is supposed to be a translation of. One thing I can tell you with confidence: It sure as fuck won’t be catchy.
The general slogan is “Nie wieder”. Sometimes lengthened to “Nie wieder Krieg” (never again war) or “Nie wieder Faschismus” (never again fascism).
Where “full throttle” means “stop weapons exports”. Got you. Very coherent.
…can be chalked up squarely up to neoliberalism. Why, if this is all due to stuff that did not change since the 50s, is the AfD so much stronger in the east than in the west? Again, very coherent of you.
There’s a very simple explanation here: You decided, for some reason, that Germany is racist AF and are working backwards from there to justify that conclusion. Literally grasping at straws.
When the politicians rant on and on about an ethnicity, any ethnicity, they’re racists: people’s ethnicity is wholly irrelevant for non-racists.
Such racism is further confirmed if they support special treatment for certain countries because of the dominant ethnicity of those living in those countries. Again, people’s ethnicity is wholly irrelevant for non-racists, double so when it comes to the treatment of others.
Yet constant reminders of the dominant ethnicity of Israel and of the duty to support that ethnicity is what you see in Germany, quite uniquely in Europe even though there is some level of racism going on everywhere in it.
If you don’t think treating people and countries differently depending on their ethnicity - literally discrimination based on ethnicity - is Racism, then you’re either a Racist yourself or an ultra-nationalist so deep into the rabbit hole of “defending” your Fatherland that words have no meaning anymore.
Beyond that, my opinion is not about Germany as a whole, it’s about it’s political elites, a large part of its Press and a segment of it’s population: to believe that “all Germans are this or that” whilst claiming to be against ethnic discrimination would be incredibly hypocrite of me so I try to avoid falling into such tribalist traps - I see the State acting in some ways, I see politicians and some of the Press shaping opinion in that direction and I see a lot of people who grew up being unwittingly indoctrinated by the normalization and even legal-encoding of such ways of thinking about other human beings and who hence got certain ideas on their minds, which doesn’t mean that they’re bad people or “all like that”, not even close.
I ask you again: Can you even produce the purported original German that sentence is supposed to be a translation of. Can you show recipes for “politicians ranting on and on about an ethnicity”.
Reducing Jews to Israel is literally anti-semitic, hope that’s not what you’re doing there. That said yes Germany is supportive of Israel – that doesn’t mean that we condone crimes committed by Israelis, or support or condone Israel backing up those crimes. Never have. Germany has always considered settlers and settlements a serious problem towards peace, which is what we’d actually want to see in that area.
But I guess that’s too much nuance for you. You want to rant on and on about an ethnicity.
Times of Israel - Sholz: Berlin will always stand beside the Jewish state
As you yourself wrote, “reducing Jews to Israel is literally anti-semitic” (which I fully agree with, by the way) making Sholz anti-semitic, which dovetails with the point I was making that the German political elites are Racist: even in their attempts at positive discrimination they can’t stop themselves from the anti-semitic ethno-Fascist trope of equating Israel with the Jewish People.
You should not equate jewish people with Israel. There are lots of Jews who are against Israel, and even more who are opposed to Israel’s genocide.
I know that Israel itself tries to equate Israel with Judaism and Jews, but it smacks of anti-semitism.
It’s the wretched German government who are equating Jewish people with israel.
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2024/03/02/an-unorthodox-approach-we-disrupt-the-idea-of-jewishness-to-which-germans-are-attached/