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”.
The only thing the Germans learnt from the Holocaust is that the Jews are entitled to carry out their very own Holocaust.
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.
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.
who, remember, were brought up in the very same time and environment as the NAZIs
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.
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”
“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?
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.
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.
