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.
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”?
Blogs, letters, and articles about letters are very weak sources. They’re on the level of opinions. Do you have anything better?
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?
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.
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.
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)
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
I would say that’s because that society has found some degree of ideological security, an indulgence paper even, in supporting some dogmatic formalized single face of the Jewish people. Since that imagined document sort of shields them from necessity to look honestly at crimes much worse, I’d say quite a lot of things may happen to people who try to dismantle it, especially if they are Jewish. It’s much more inconvenient to be accused of supporting fascism from that direction, after all.
