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.

-16 points
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7 points

Perhaps you shouldn’t speak for >80 million people and rather refer to the government. But even then you’re full of shit. The weapons industry? Yeah, they’re a sick bunch of assholes. Loving genocides? Fuck off. Germany is one of the few countries owning up to their past mistakes.

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-15 points

Being complicit Genocide isn’t owning up to any mistake.

A German saying Germany is owning up to their Genocide by committing another one really goes to show what time it is in Germany right now.

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-1 points
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A main reason why it’s taboo to call the war in Gaza “genocide” is that it’s a carbon copy of propaganda from original Nazis and Neo-Nazis. We have yearly neo-nazi marches to “memorize” the bombing of Dresden and other Allied attacks against German cities. Now, obviously from a modern standpoint these “strategic bombings” were a war crime. And so were the limitations on food supplies into Germany after the second world war. But that doesn’t change that there was no genocide. The Allies didn’t try to wipe us out. They just behaved like humans who are attacked do. and humans who were atacked are rarely kind. We also remember that the things done to us were were neglible compared to what our regime would have done if it had won.

So when we see Gaza we essentially see something similar to what happened to our grandparents. A population felt wronged, allowed fascists to take over and start a war and then suffered when the facists lost their war.

Now, there’s some important differences, Hamas fortunately never made remotely as far as the Nazis (one could say we see what should have happend in 1933 here) and fortunately the IDF isn’t using fire bombings (otherwise there’d be no Palestinians left, strategic bombing took hours to kill tens of thousands, not months), but there’s a lot of similarities here. Hence learning from our past means that we have to recognize that violence is unfortunately needed to stop regimes run by fanatics. and that this violence will always hurt countless inncocents and that even the better side will commit atrocities.

That of course doesn’t change that Israel should be continued to be pressured towards minimizing suffering - and that is done - Germany takes part in food aidrops and has condemned things like settlements for many years, but all that doesn’t change that Israel being the winning power is by a huge margin the lesser evil here. Hence when the choice is binary the Israeli government is supported against groups like Hamas.

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0 points

Mate, you should try some other hobbies. You’ve made hundreds of posts on this topic, yet I bet you haven’t got the slightest clue on what this entire conflict is about.

Let me tell you that I absolutely hate what is going on and I absolutely don’t think we should keep supporting Israel with weapons as long as they’re violating the Geneva convention. And there are plenty of Germans with the same mindset. But we also know it’s not a one-sided conflict.

I’ll go ahead and block your toxic ass. People like you like to be loud on the internet but won’t do shit in real life.

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3 points
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Alright. Time to make AI art without boundaries then. /S

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27 points
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Crime against jewish people is on the rise in Germany, as are neonazis. Hate crimes against jews were also rising before the Gaza war, by the way.

If Germany didn’t try to protect jewish people it would mean they learnt nothing from the past.

The chancellor has said the safety and security of Israel is Germany’s raison d’êtat.

Before I get downvoted to hell by Gaza sympathisers, let me add that Israel is currently committing massive war crimes against the Palestinian people and those responsible must be tried and punished in an international court of law.

All of these things can be true at the same time:

a) Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity

b) Hamas has committed crimes against humanity

c) Israel has a right to existence and to security

d) Palestine has a right to existence and to security

I don’t get how some people feel they have to pick only two out of these four.

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0 points

Israel has no right to exist though. The existence of Israel is dependent on settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.

Before you say “if Israel has no right to exist then neither does the United States, Canada, Australia, etc.” then I have to agree.

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-1 points

c) Israel has a right to existence and to security

This has no right to be true. First, a state does not have an intrinsic right to exist. A state is a social tool, crafted to help humans survive and thrive, in coexistence as how it came to be. If tools turn out to be primarily used for war and suffering, they are no longer tools for the betterment of humanity. You can argue Israel stealing more land is a betterment for their people, but the animosity caused during the process is eventually reflecting on the people benefiting from the betterment, both as outside perception and as shifting the thinking of the Israeli people about what is better for humanity, and it is not a good way to go forward.

The State of Israel is a malfunctioning machine that is spewing out more poison than it is manufacturing goodness. Malfunctioning machines need to be repaired, and if they can’t be, disabled and discarded/recycled, not kept active and doing harm saying they have a right to exist.

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-4 points

Ok, now do Palestine

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3 points
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The State of Palestine hasn’t been doing more harm than good, at least in a way that it isn’t repaired or kept in check, like continuous genocide and land-grab, is it? You can argue it is run by terrorists and thus it is a malevolent tool, but nevertheless its harm is contained via use of other tools like anti-missile systems and proper border defense. I don’t see anyone equipping Palestine with such defensive weapons, which they can use to defend lives and land against Israel while not having to resort to guerilla tactics that necessarily involve offensive strategies for defense.

I’m assuming your first thought at the next response would be the pedantic “But Israel produces its own defensive Iron Dome and nobody gives it to them. So should the decades-long oppressed and deliberately-impoverished Palestine do while under the most heavy bombardment since WWII !. That shows the difference between how civilized world and 3rd world savages deal with threats.”.

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2 points

If we reject the UN and international law, as you appear to be doing by denying Israel’s right to exist as defined in the two state solution, we basically go back to the right of the strongest. Putin would agree with you.

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2 points
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A couple presumptions you make are the very causation for today’s problems:

  1. UN, which deep-seated inequality and over-representation ingrained to it right from its very beginning as giving substantial privileges to 5 WWII winner imperialist powers as permanent members with unconditional veto power, even on resolutions that question their validity, which they have been abusing for as long as the UN existed , as infallible authority.

  2. The international law, which is used by the aforementioned powers to keep the status quo after they drew the borders and partitioned the world according to their greed, and still circumvent to further their agendas without facing repercussions, as infallible, just and fair compromise and authority.

  3. Two-State solution with current borders implied. The original and rejected two-state solution that was forced upon Palestinian territories as peaceful division, that also meant to leave the Arabs with bleak desert and give all the shores and fertile lands to Jewish people, which also gave way to acceptance of way fairer division of land with populations and prosperity in consideration, ended in Zionist terrorists causing a contemporary (mainly cultural) genocide. Later attempt at two-state solution was prefaced with Zionist terrorists giving back the occupied land and agreeing to the fairer share of the land, which didn’t happen. The idea behind recognizing both Palestine and Israel as states never came to fruition, mainly due to Israel wanting unfair share that would result in a de facto infeasible Palestinian statehood. Israel statehood’s only fair foundation is bloodied by their own hands by forcing their statehood with stolen land, off-driven Arabic people, and cultural genocide. Hard to accept such poisonous machines as a useful tool.

One more thing: The strongest already ousted the previous strongest, demonized them and made them the only focus, all the while making the current rules to ensure their own prosperity. They are also making sure these rules continue to be obeyed by the less powerful by enforcing them with waepons of war and purpose-built indirect weapons like exploitative economic implementations.

Lastly, Putin has a lot of people like you that think harmful tools be kept harming people for the sake of keeping the tool/machine on. Putin also has his own circumventions of a just and fair, reason and rules based world order, and subsequently suck dick together with all the democratically-elected de facto western hegemons and the ancestral eastern tyrants.

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-2 points

They don’t, but you are making it seem as if Israel’s right to exist and security is not endangered much less than that of Gazans, and as if Hamas’ crimes are in any way comparable.

That is, your are lying without actually saying a direct lie, which is a valid combination, really not unusual for Germans I might add.

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-1 points
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You are putting words into my mouth in order to be able to disagree. Also, I’m not German. You might want try to keep the racist stereotyping in check.

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5 points

Fair, that’s naturally easier to do when the stereotype or the target is unusual.

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25 points

They’re not protecting ‘Jewish people’. They’re protecting Israel. There’s a massive difference.

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0 points

They do both and there’s a lot of overlap between those. Israel was founded and untortunately continues to be needed as a save haven for a group that is persecuted in a lot of places in the world.

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-3 points

there is not a massive difference. jewish and israeli identity are intertwined. Many jewish people sought refuge in israel because they had nowhere else to go. European jews after WW2 or arab jews in the late 40s/50s who were expelled out of muslim countries, for example. And again, defending israel’s right to exist is not the same as defending the israeli government or the war crimes the idf commits.

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1 point
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Jewish and Israeli identity are intertwined

No, they are not. But that is exactly what Israeli propaganda is trying to make you believe.

And because German politicians and media are cowards, they simply repeat Israeli propaganda when it comes to issues concerning the Jewish people or Israeli issues.

For this reason, the following Jews and Jewish organizations have probably never been invited to a German talk show or as experts on Jewish or Israeli issues:

Gideon Levy, Breaking the Silence, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Max Blumenthal, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Simone Zimmerman, Jewish Currents, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JJP), IfNotNow, Naomi Klein, Judith Butler, Never Again Action, Independent Jewish Voices (IJV)

Watch them, read them.

I am convinced that this bias in German media is one of the main reasons for the increasing anti-Semitism in Germany.

When the only Jews you are shown are ardent supporters of an oppressive apartheid state that commits genocide and/or ethnic cleansing, and when that state presents itself as the core of Jewish identity, it is just too easy to conflate Jewish and Zionist and Israeli identities.

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5 points

Not really. Israel is an ethnostate, they’ve declared it themselves. Genocide and oppression are guaranteed so long as it continues to be one.

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4 points

They’re protecting Israel by persecuting hate crimes committed inside of Germany?

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6 points

They’re not persecuting hate crines. That’s the entire point of the article. They’re withdrawing funding and bringing legal charges against people who accurately describe the situation in Gaza as a genocide committed by a racist settler colonial state.

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-2 points

Most of Israel’s population are either fleeing persecution in other middle Eastern countries or descended from people who fled persecution in the middle east. Both Christians and Muslims have the luxury of having entire continents where they are the majority of the population. Whenever Muslims get persecuted Iran and Saudi Arabia and the majority of the middle east/ north Africa/ se Asia will stand behind them. With Christians Europe and the Americas. The only country where Jews are in the majority is Israel. It’s the only place in the world where the Jewish people are guaranteed protection by a government. So yeah actually protecting Israel and the Jewish people are one and the same.

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2 points

For centuries, the Jews in the Middle East had lived in peace with their Muslim, Christian, Druze or Yazidi neighbors.

Many of them had sought refuge in that region many generations earlier at the invitation of Turkish and Arab rulers after being brutally expelled from the Iberian peninsula by Christians.

But strangely, as soon as a small minority of European Jews with typical European arrogance, ignorance and zero respect for the local culture began to present themselves as the only legitimate representatives of worldwide Jewry and to expel (almost) all Arabs (except the Jewish ones) from Palestine with brutal violence, tensions arose between the resident Jews and the non-Jewish majority society in the neighboring Arab states.

Who could have guessed something like this? BOO! Ugh! Evil, barbaric, backward, anti-Semitic Arabs!

But simultaneously it was a big relief for the Zionist government of early Israel. Even if it was only backward Arab Jews who came, second-choice Jews so to speak, they were urgently needed to get the new state up and running without Palestinians.

There simply weren’t enough European Jews left to replace the attainted and expelled native Arabs. But remembering their own expulsion plus the corresponding brainwashing and birth rate, the Arab Jews actually became the spearhead of aggressive Zionism.

There are many peoples on earth who don’t have their own state. Regardless of religion, however, no one would come up with the idea of ​​supporting one of these peoples in its attempt to choose a country, expel the native people and establish its own state on their land.

The idea per se is only not totally ridiculous for those being stuck in the racist European ideology of the 18th or 19th century.

Apart from that, people have always persecuted, fought and massacred each other, completely independent of religion.

Zionists began immigrating to Palestine over 100 years ago. They did NOT do ANYTHING of what we rightly expect of immigrants today. That is to say, they did not adapt to the culture of the locals or at least learn the local language any more than other European immigrants to other countries in the world have ever done. The Europeans in general still do not do it up to this day, to be honest, we only demand it of those who want to immigrate to our countries.

Since 1967, Israel, as an occupying power, has been the government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in practice and under international law. This means that all the duties that a government has, you know, increasing the benefits and preventing harm, etc., are the duties of the State of Israel towards the people of the occupied territories.

In the 67 years since the Six-Day War, has Israel done anything to fulfill these duties? What did Israel do during this time to avert harm to the population of the occupied territories and, for example, to improve the prosperity, security, freedom, health care and educational opportunities of the people living there?

In fact, it was the changed awareness and the changed policy in those states where Jews had been particularly intensely persecuted that significantly improved the security of Jews worldwide after the Second World War. And it was (and is) the racist expansionist policy of the Zionists and the State of Israel that reduces this increase in security, both in the State of Israel and for Jews worldwide.

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2 points

It’s the only place in the world where the Jewish people are guaranteed protection by a government.

They failed massively on this part on last September. Not only did they ignore several countries warning then but they actively moved soldiers from protecting the border to Gaza to the Westbank to help in their illegal settler campaign. And even after being engaged in massive battles in Gaza they KEEP fucking things up in the Westbank, ensuring that the people there will continue to hate Israel. And that’s by no means a new development but they have been doing so for decades.

So yeah, they are doing a really shitty job at protecting their people.

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8 points

With Christians Europe and the Americas.

Oh yeah, tell that to Assyrians from Nineveh plain. Or even NK Armenians.

It’s the only place in the world where the Jewish people are guaranteed protection by a government. So yeah actually protecting Israel and the Jewish people are one and the same.

Sober up a bit, this piece of text doesn’t make any sense.

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7 points

Free speech should not include inciting violence or hatred. Germany is well aware of the negative impacts that unchecked incitement leads too. It’s interesting to see how they’re walking this line in the face of the competing political forces in the country but it’s good to see people standing up against hate in general.

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1 point
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-3 points

Yup. Free speech should be free. Ai monitoring known terrorists is how one remains a free society. Looks like the US needs to invest in the technology and deploy it on campuses ATM.

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1 point

I wonder if they would do that against zionist terrorists attacking protestors rn. Even the police isn’t responding so it’s highly unlikely US will implement this.

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0 points
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