Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is partially responsible for the anti-Semitic protests taking place in Germany, Joachim Herrmann, the interior minister of the German state of Bavaria said.
“These protests are predominated not by the far right, but rather by those who are Muslim oriented and provoked by the brutal speeches of President Erdoğan and others who believe that clashes must spread to the German streets,” Deutsche Welle cited Herrmann as telling German media on Monday.
Politicians in Germany have called for tougher measures against antisemitism after thousands of people attended what became aggressive protests at the weekend in connection with the escalating violence in the Middle East.
In the most violent protest, in the southern Berlin district of Neukölln, demonstrators who had gathered to show solidarity with Palestinians burned Israeli flags, chanted anti-Israel slogans and flew Hamas banners.
“We are experiencing antisemitic protests and despicable hatred towards Jews in these days, which makes it vital that we take on antisemitism much more decisively,” Paul Ziemiak, the general secretary of the Christian Democrats, told German media.
German lawmakers and religious leaders on Wednesday condemned vandalism against Jewish synagogues, and the desecration of a memorial for another synagogue destroyed by the Nazis in 1938.
All three of the incidents occurred on Tuesday night in the cities of Bonn, Düsseldorf and Münster in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW).
The incidents were reportedly motivated by the current violence in Israel and Gaza.
Interior Minister Horst Seehofer announced on Wednesday that Germany has banned the Islamist organization Ansaar International and several of its sub-organizations.
“The network finances terrorism worldwide with donations,” Seehofer’s spokesman Steve Alter tweeted on Wednesday.
Alter quoted Seehofer as saying: “If you want to fight terror, you have to dry up its sources of money.”
The AfD has taken its most Eurosceptic line yet. That’s good news for democracy.
Could the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) be about to make history? Before the AfD’s party conference had even ended last Sunday, the term ‘Dexit’ – short for a German exit from the EU – was circulating in the press. The reason is the AfD’s programme for September’s elections: ‘We consider a withdrawal of Germany from the European Union and the establishment of a new European Economic and Interest Community necessary’, it says – a demand which has caused more than a little stir.
A Syrian refugee in Germany who stabbed one man to death and seriously injured his partner because he saw them holding hands has gone on trial today.
The man, identified only as 21-year-old Abdullah AHH due to German privacy laws, is charged with one count of murder for fatally stabbing tourist Thomas L, 55, to death on the streets of Dresden in October last year.
He is also facing one count of attempted murder for attacking Thomas’s partner Oliver L, 53, with a different knife but failing to kill him.
Germany’s governing conservative bloc is planning to cut all government ties with groups suspected of supporting political Islamism, according to a report in Die Welt. Large Muslim umbrella organizations may be affected.
The parliamentary group of Germany’s ruling conservative bloc has called for an end to cooperation with groups suspected of supporting political Islamism, the newspaper Die Welt reported on Tuesday.
The bloc, made up of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), proposed cutting all subsidies, support and cooperation with Islamist groups being monitored by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency: the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Angela Merkel may just have pushed through rapid deportation rules as well as a ban on refugees but she is not planning on closing Germany’s doors to migrants forever.
h/t Marvin
Protesters clashed with police in Germany and Croatia on Saturday as new lockdowns were introduced in France, Poland and Ukraine to battle a third wave of coronavirus.
“Fascists in our lecture halls! Dismiss Professor Kinzler! Islamophobia kills,” read the large banners hanging at the University of Grenoble. Activists from the French student union Unef also posted the slogans online.
Five months after the brutal murder of history teacher Samuel Paty, being accused of Islamophobia is not something that is taken lightly in France. Following a debate that sparked outrage at the Grenoble Institute of Political Studies, two professors are under police protection.
The misuse of coronavirus aid to finance terrorist activities was reported by German newspaper Welt am Sonntag.
“In individual cases there is a suspicion of direct terrorism financing,” a source within Berlin law enforcement told the newspaper.
The head of an influential Turkish Muslim association in Germany resigned from his position on Thursday after his antisemitic social media postings were exposed by a left-wing group, vowing at the same time to clear his name.
Mustafa Keskin — the chairman of the branch of DITIB, a Turkish religious group, in the university city of Göttingen — tendered his resignation after his posts on various social media platforms were brought to light by Die Falken (The Falcons), a socialist youth organization.
Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) have placed the Alternative for Germany (AfD) under surveillance, according to local media.
That designation gives state agents more powers for surveillance in certain circumstances, including potentially tapping the party’s communications.
The BfV refused to comment on media reports from Der Spiegel magazine, the DPA news agency and public broadcaster ARD. The Interior Ministry, which oversees the BfV, said it would neither confirm nor deny them.
A pattern emerges…
France bans far-right group Generation Identity
The French government on Wednesday agreed to ban the far-right group Generation Identity, saying the organization incited “discrimination, hatred and violence.”
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin posted the decree to ban GI on Twitter, saying it took into account the group’s “structure and military organization,” adding that GI can be regarded “as having the character of a private militia.”
Berlin’s Senate has announced on Twitter that it has banned the “jihadist-Salafist association Jama’atu Berlin,” also known as Tauhid Berlin.
The tweet Thursday said police in Berlin and Brandenburg had carried out early-morning searches of properties belonging to the group’s members.
A spokesman cited by the German press agency dpa said around 800 police — including special operations commandos — took part in the raids, which targeted the districts of Reinickendorf, Moabit, Wedding and Neukölln. No arrests were immediately reported.
“Why are the majority of anti-Semitic acts attributed to ‘right-wing’ German perpetrators? One can see a political motive behind this — growing anti-Semitism can be used politically as a weapon ‘against the right.'” — Tichys Einblick.
… A 2017 survey of German Jews by the University of Bielefeld found that 60% of anti-Semitic attacks were said to have been carried out by Muslims, compared to 19% by far-left extremists and 19% by far-right perpetrators. Muslims were also said to be responsible for 81% of anti-Semitic attacks involving physical violence. The survey found that 70% of German Jews believe that mass migration from the Muslim world has fueled anti-Semitism in Germany.
Nevertheless, German police, possibly under orders from political authorities, systematically assign unsolved anti-Semitic hate crimes to the far right. In one well-known case, police blamed far-right extremists for chanting the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil” at an Islamist al-Quds rally in Berlin.
