After two days of silence, German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned antisemitic demonstrations that took place in Germany during the weekend. “We oppose all forms of antisemitism and xenophobia.” she told reporters on Monday. “The state has to use all available legal measures” against such acts, she added.
Merkel’s condemnation failed to address the issue of the Muslim demonstrators shouting “death to Jews” and “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is coming again” in Arabic — alluding to the annihilation of the Jewish population of Khaybar, an oasis in Saudi Arabia, at the hands of Muhammad and his conquering army. The main demonstration took place at Berlin’s historic Brandenburg Gates, just a stone’s throw away from the Holocaust Memorial.
“It’s shameful when such open hatred of Jews is on display on the streets of German cities,” said Government spokesman Steffen Seibert, also refraining to specify the culprits. “Our laws on freedom of expression and assembly guarantee everyone a right to peaceful protest, but this right is no free pass for anti-Semitic atrocities, for incitement and violence,” he added.
Members of Merkel’s cabinet and Germany’s public broadcasters remained focused on the burning of Israeli flags during the weekend demonstrations, but skirted away from mentioning the rising of antisemitic death chants, let alone identity of the miscreants involved.
While Chancellor Merkel promised to “use all available legal measures”, the leading German newspaper Die Welt reported that no action was being taken against those who chanted “death to Jews” in Berlin over the weekend, claiming the local police were ‘helpless’.
“The fundamental right to freedom of protest is paramount. Offenses of considerable extent must take place [for the police] to break up the gathering,” said spokesperson for the Berlin Police, Thomas Neuendorf.
Some seven decades after the Holocaust, public calls for the exterminating Jews apparently do not count as offenses of “considerable extent” in Germany anymore.
Writing for the German newspaper Die Welt, commentator Ulf Poschardt described the recent antisemitic outbursts as an expression of “ethnic, naive antisemitism of the Muslims”. Poschardt is not the only one to misdiagnose the character of the growing Muslim antisemitism in the country. The spokesman for the Berlin Police described the Muslim gangs chanting “death of Jews” were “behaving emotionally.”
Islamists calling for the annihilation of Jews while standing next to Holocaust Memorial in Berlin are neither “naive” nor behaving “emotionally”. They aren’t reacting to President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital either, which in spite of its historic significance is a mere a statement of fact.
Despite grossly misdiagnosing the true character of Muslim antisemitism, Die Welt’s Columnist Poschardt summed up the growing antisemitic trend in the country correctly:
With the migration of tens and thousands of refugees from the Middle- and Near East, antisemitic attitudes have received new and powerful resonating spaces. Not a week goes by in which Jews — who are not wearing Kippah — are attacked, spat at, kicked and humiliated. “Jew” is a “normal” term of abuse in underprivileged neighborhoods.Kids with Jewish roots deny these or must change schools after a process of tortuous bullying. This is relativized in a macabre way by teachers and parent representatives, who blame it partially on the situation in the Middle East.
Germany’s tiny and dwindling Jewish population has been a regular target of Muslim antisemitism. These recurring attacks have forced the community’s leaders to urge German Jews to refrain from wearing Jewish symbols in public.
“Jew hatred has exploded in Internet,” reported the German newspaper Bild Zeitung on Monday, citing research carried out by Professor Monika Schwarz-Friesel of the Technical University of Berlin:
In last ten years, the volume of antisemitic comments have tripled and have become qualitatively more aggressive. At the same time, the tendency to relativize, defend and deny can be witnessed in the society, as well as heightened indifference and lack of empathy, Schwarz-Friesel says. [Author’s translation]
“More than 85 percent of antisemitic comments are connected to the Jewish State,” Professor Monika Schwarz-Friesel reveals, quoting empirical data.
It isn’t that Chancellor Merkel or the country innocently sleep-walked into this disaster. Jewish leaders, educators, law enforcement officials have been warning of inevitable disaster for quite some time.
In November 2015, at the beginning of the Migrant Crisis, Josef Schuster, head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews — a umbrella organization of the German Jewish community, had urged Chancellor Merkel to reconsider her decision to allow uncontrolled migration from Arab and Muslim countries, cautioning that many of the migrants were coming “from cultures in which hate towards Jews and intolerance are fixed components.
Needless to say, Chancellor Merkel and rest of the political establishment chose to ignore those warnings.
Video: Demonstrators in Berlin chanting ‘Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning’ on Saturday
[Cover image via YouTube]
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