The mass-circulation Bild paper blasted the German parliament on Friday for its condemnation of the Jewish state for seeking to exercise sovereignty over disputed parts of the West Bank.“Commentary on the decision against Israel’s policy: You treat friends differently,” read the headline of the editorial by Louis Hagen.

The Bundestag (Germany’s federal parliament) is believed to have only singled out one territorial dispute—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—from well over 100 nation land conflicts across the globe.“The Bundestag discussed internal borders in Israel. It is grotesque. Because the outcome of the debate was already certain. The Bundestag presents Israel as a threat to stability in the Middle East. It warns that Israel’s actions have ‘significant effects on the peace process,”’ wrote Hagen.“What peace does Israel endanger? There is no peace in the Middle East that could be endangered,” he added. “As long as Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas and all the other neighbors from Syria to Jordan want to more or less wipe the Jewish state off the map. As long as the ‘moderate’ Palestinian government in the West Bank pays terrorists life-long pensions.”The editorial declared that “unfortunately, we only hear the voice of the German Bundestag when it comes to criticizing Israel. Human rights violations by the Palestinians, in Iran, in Syria, in Egypt – one hears very little of that.”The Bundestag resolution was unanimously supported by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government of the Christian Democratic Union, Christian Social Union, and Social Democratic party. The Free Democratic Party also joined the anti-Israel resolution while the Left party and the Green party sought tougher measures against the Jewish state.

The Bild editorial wrote: “Who benefits from what the Bundestag is doing? Israel – no. The Palestinians, who have been ruled by a despot for 15 years – neither.””We needed a clear commitment to our deep friendship and solidarity with the only democracy in the Middle East. What has now been decided is an embarrassing pretense and not a friendly act. Friends are treated differently,” the editorial concluded.The Bundestag has not condemned Turkey for its occupation of North Cyprus, China for its occupation of Tibet, and Russia for its annexation of Crimea.Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told The Jerusalem Post that the “Bundestag will add its united voice-minus a far right party- to express grave concerns over any extension of Israeli sovereignty.So to Chancellor Merkel’s government and the EU leadership I say: Iran is working to actuate its genocidal rhetoric for a ‘Final Solution’ to destroy Israel. In plain language it’s pursuing a future genocide of the Jewish nation. German Intelligence just released a report confirming Tehran regime’s deep animus towards Jews and deep involvement in stirring up antisemitism, including in Germany.”The far-right party Cooper referenced is the Alternative for Germany party that did not vote for the anti-Israel resolution. The Post first reported on the Berlin intelligence document noting that Iran’s regime is a chief state-sponsor of antisemitism and hatred of Israel.Cooper added that “other than mouthing ‘Never Again’ on Holocaust Memorial Day events, has there been any wall-to-wall consensus in the Bundestag to sanction the Ayatollah for his genocidal, Holocaust denying regime? How about national consensus to actually combat growing antisemitic hate and extreme anti-Israel rhetoric from the far-right, far-left and Islamists, beyond just tabulating the numbers?”“I leave it to Israelis to decide on ‘annexation.’ Since Germany continues to fund UNWRA’s anti-peace curriculum, continues to send checks to corrupt pay-to-slay Palestinian Authority, continues to overwhelmingly vote against Israel during the Merkel Administration at the UN, Germans will have to excuse us if we don’t embrace such blatant hypocrisy and double standards,” Cooper noted.

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/german-top-selling-paper-slams-bundestag-for-grotesque-attack-on-israel-633861

The German government – Chancellor Angela Merkel, Defense Minister Kramp-Karrenbauer and Agnieszka Brugger, a Green MP on the Parliament’s Defense Committee – has moved to disband an elite soldier unit.

Germany’s Special Forces Command (KSK) will be disbanded “over far-right links”, Kramp-Karrenbauer said. “We will give the KSK time to press the reset button,” she added.

Kramp-Karrenbauer announced structural reforms of the KSK unit, which include the dissolution of one of its four combat companies. And should the KSK fail to transform completely by the end of October, it will be disbanded as a whole.

A Deutsche Welle video report on the decision featured the testimony of a soldier within the ranks: “Someone made a joke about Jews. It was about long noses, things like that. Then someone else said, ‘What’s that, mate? You’re saying there are still Jews? I thought we’d eradicated them all. We’ll have to have another go at that.‘”

Defense policy spokesman for the AfD parliamentary group, Rüdiger Lucassen, criticized the dissolution of the elite unit Command Special Forces (KSK). “There is reason to fear that the measures that have now been announced will impair the operational readiness of our special forces in the long term,” said Lucassen.

At the same time, he accused Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (CDU) of failing to lead the Bundeswehr. The failure of the military and political leadership ultimately led to serious disciplinary offenses. “With good leadership, military training and the required duty of care of the superiors, a military association does not have to be dissolved.”

His party colleague and Berlin AfD parliamentary group leader, Georg Pazderski, complained last week that the dissolution of the second command company of the KSK would ignite completely unfounded general suspicions against all soldiers. “Kramp-Karrenbauer is weakening the troops, which are already struggling, by another low moral blow and is negligently jeopardizing Germany’s security.”

Kramp-Karrenbauer said that every KSK soldier had to decide whether he wanted to remain in the army by making the right political choices. A special representative will report by October on whether the steps ordered by Kramp-Karrenbauer were be implemented.

The greatest enemy of the Bundeswehr is now its own leadership it seems. The social upheavals that have shaped the public climate since the beginning of the migrant crisis, have also gripped the armed forces, testing the relationship between superiors and subordinates. Deviating opinions have been considered undesirable since the notorious defense minister Ursula von der Leyen’s remark about an “attitude problem” in the troops.

Again and again there has been talk of vast “right-wing networks” within the Bundeswehr, for which no proof has been provided so far except for one or two incidents outside the norm. And contrary to the regular assertion that the troops are “not under general suspicion” (according to the military commissioner Eva Högl), this serves to massively restrict soldiers’ rights.

A new law is being imposed stating that soldiers found guilty of a breach of duty can now be dismissed more easily during their first eight years of service and no longer within four years as before. This means a doubling of the “trial period” during which a soldier can be removed by the personnel office while not being entitled to a trial before the military court.

In addition, the period in which a soldier can be disciplined for an offense will be increased from six to twelve months and significantly higher fines will be mandatory in the future.

In reality, this means that allegations of alleged transgressions by individual soldiers no longer need to be substantiated.

While Kramp-Karrenbauer believes she has found an effective tool in the “fight against extremism”, the Bundeswehr Association called it “unfair and disproportionate”. The association sees the rights of its members sacrificed in favor of a media campaign.

This will be reinforced by a funded “reporting culture” in which soldiers spy on others and report in secret to superiors. To enforce this new Stasi-like system, the government will make use of questionable civilian sources such as the neo-Marxist Amadeu Antonio Foundation.

freewestmedia.com/2020/07/05/germanys-female-leaders-disband-elite-special-forces-unit/

The United States abolished slavery 150 years ago, and has affirmative action for minorities. It is the country that elected a Black president, Barack Obama — twice! Yet, a new movement is toppling one historic monument after another one, as if the US is still enslaving African-Americans. Activists in Washington DC even targeted an Emancipation Memorial, depicting President Abraham Lincoln, who paid with his life for freeing slaves.

Today slavery still exists in many parts of Africa and Middle East, but the self-flagellating Western public is obsessively focused only on the Western past of African slavery rather than on real, ongoing slavery, which is alive and well — and ignored. For today’s slaves, there are no demonstrations in the streets, no international political pressure, and virtually no articles in the media.

“We must not forget that Arab-Muslims have been champions in this field,” Kamel Bencheikh, a Muslim poet, wrote in Le Matin d’Algerie.

“Emirs and sultans bought entire convoys of young black ephebes to make into eunuchs to guard their harems. And this continued with Ottoman emperors…. Even today, Mauritania and Saudi Arabia are still housing their own Ku Klux Klan. Slavery is still the order of the day in Nouakchott [Mauritania]. As for Riad, all you have to do is find out about young Asian girls that the potentates hire as maidservants”.

An investigation by BBC Arabic found that domestic workers in Saudi Arabia are even being sold online in a slave market that is booming.

According to Bencheikh, George Floyd’s death was an opportunity for many in Europe to turn a respectable fight into an unimaginable depravity.

“So, on the Place de la République in Paris or the Avenue Louise in Brussels, there are vengeful thugs, fed with hatred, taking advantage of the allotments that these two countries offer them, and attacking the past of those who enabled them to free themselves from their dictatorships…

“In France and Belgium, we do not execute apostates, crucify heterodox people, throw stones at unfaithful women, spit at heretics…

“… this anti-racism is biting its tail to turn into racism. You only have to see the angry crowd, the drool on their lips, to realize that we are dealing with people who have come to insult the white man guilty of having had, more than a hundred years ago, inappropriate gestures or shameful thoughts, and to insist, like the wolf in La Fontaine who said to the lamb: ‘If not you, then your brother’… Totalitarianism is among us again”.

He calls it a “Stalinism of communitarianism (sectarian politics) that makes itself into an indigenous victimization”. People who fled from Bouteflika and Gaddafi, the oppressors and tyrants of Kinshasa and Niamey, “come and spit incomprehensible hatred in Paris or Brussels”.

Bencheikh’s article shows just one brave group of dissidents in the Islamic world who are defending the West better than the Westerners are doing. These dissidents love freedom of expression and conscience; they know the difference between democracy and dictatorship; they enjoy religious tolerance, pluralism in the public sphere, and they outspokenly criticize the practice of Islam from which they fled. They also know that arousing historic and racial resentment is a dangerous game. For political Islam, their voices are revealing and devastating. For Western multiculturalism, they are “heretical” and annoying. Le Figaropointed to this paradox: “Seen by their communities as ‘traitors’, they are accused by the elites in the West of ‘stigmatizing'”.

In The Spectator, Nick Cohen, explained:

“In the liberal orientalist world view the only ‘authentic’ Muslim is a barbarian. A battery of insults fires on any Muslim who says otherwise. They are ‘neo-conservatives,’ ‘native informants,’ and ‘Zionists’: they are as extreme as jihadists they oppose, or, let’s face it, worse…”.

Like Bencheikh, Algerian author Mohammed Sifaoui reminds all of us that “Mauritania, in North Africa, is the most slavery-supporting country in the world today. Qatar in the Middle East is as well, just as much, [as is] Saudi Arabia, under the banner of the Guardians of the Holy Places of Islam”.

The author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who fled her homeland of Somalia and now live in the US, writes:

“What the media do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you. We have our problems and we need to address those. But our society and our systems are far from racist”.

Black, female and gay, the apex of “intersectionality.” According to Andrew Sullivan:

“‘Intersectionality’ is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, it’s a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity — such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. — but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power. “

For the intersectional activists, the US is the world’s biggest oppressor. Not Saudi Arabia or Iran. Hirsi Ali, who fled Somalia and experienced female genital mutilation, knows about oppression better than anti-statues activists. According to Hirsi Ali, writing in The Wall Street Journal:

“When I hear it said that the U.S. is defined above all by racism, when I see books such as Robin DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ top the bestseller list, when I read of educators and journalists being fired for daring to question the orthodoxies of Black Lives Matter—then I feel obliged to speak up… America looks different if you grew up, as I did, in Africa and the Middle East”.

Writing in Le Monde and Le Point, Algerian writer Kamel Daoud indicted this hypocrisy. “There is an instinct for death in the air of the total revolution”, Daoud notes.

“According to some, the West is guilty by definition, we find ourselves not in a demand for change but, little by little, in [a demand for] destruction, the restoration of a barbarity of revenge”.

Daoud calls these “anti-Western Soviet-style trials”.

“It is forbidden to say that the West is also the place to which we flee when we want to escape the injustice of our country of origin, dictatorship, war, hunger, or simply boredom. It is fashionable to say that the West is guilty of everything”.

In Le Point, Daoud states that “with the great announcement of antiracism, the Inquisition returns”.

Daoud has been accused by twenty leftist academics, in an appeal in Le Monde, of “orientalist clichés” and “colonialist paternalism”. This new accusation of racism serves publicly to shame, mark and disqualify a politician or an intellectual who comments with too much frankness on the damage of multiculturalism.

Zineb el Rhazoui, a Moroccan-born anti-Islamist French journalist facing death threats, recently said:

“The only racism I suffer from comes from North Africans. For the Algerians, I am a Moroccan whore. For Moroccans, I am an Algerian whore. For both, a ‘whore of the Jews'”.

Arabs threaten other Arabs for speaking the truth about real racism and Islamization. They are the invisible victims of racism in France. Rhazoui claimedthat “France is one of the most tolerant and least racist country in the world” and that real threat is not racism, but communitarism [importance placed on groups rather than individuals], denounced as well by French President Emmanuel Macron.

The Iranian writer Abnousse Shalmani, born in Tehran but now living in Paris, said to Le Figaro:

“The new anti-racism is racism disguised as humanism (…) What resonates in this discourse is the prison of victimization….It implies that every white person is bad — as witnessed by the recent debunking of the statues of Victor Schoelcher, father of the abolition of slavery, in Martinique — and that every black person is a victim”.

While the economist Thomas Piketty, in Le Monde, invited the West to make amends for its colonial past, the Franco-Senegalese author, Fatou Diome, calledfor the abandonment of a discourse on decolonization:

“It is an emergency for those who do not yet know that they are free. I do not consider myself colonized. The catchphrase on colonization and slavery has become a business”.

The “ideology” is simple: colonialism is supposedly still at work, people from formerly colonized countries continue to be oppressed, in particular Muslims who are said to be targets of a “racist” and “Islamophobic” hate. In this view, “White Western males” are always the oppressors, and the minorities are always victims.

A prominent anti-racism campaigner, Rokhaya Diallo, has said that France is “racist” in an opposition between “the dominator” and “the dominated”. It is a view that sees racism everywhere, especially where it does not exist. It has also produced many of the disasters of multiculturalism throughout Europe by making it impossible to criticize the consequences of mass immigration and Islamist separatism. The French author Pascal Bruckner has called this stance “imaginary racism“. It is a penitential creation that leads the public in the West — even though presumably no one in the West either was a slave or had a slave — to believe that anti-Western hatred is deserved.

The border between this Marxist view, in which someone always has to be a victim, has become porous with Islamism. In the movement named after Adama Traoré, the “French George Floyd“, you will find an alliance of organizations such as SOS Racisme and Muslim Salafists. Human rights organizations also rally with the “Union of Islamic Organization of France”, considered fundamentalist.

Manuel Valls, the former French prime minister, in an interview with Valuers Actuelles magazine said, “Human rights associations have been lost and have opened the doors to Tariq Ramadan”. This instead of taking the side of the many great Muslim reformers. Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:

“Reformers such as Asra Nomani, Irshad Manji, Tawfiq Hamid, Maajid Nawaz, Zuhdi Jasser, Saleem Ahmed, Yunis Qandil, Seyran Ates, Bassam Tibi and Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari must be supported and protected… These reformers should be as well known in the West as Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Havel were generations earlier.” Instead, so-called human rights associations, politicians and the media have chosen to back political Islam.

By contrast, a group of 12 writers put their names to a statement in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo warning against Islamic “totalitarianism”.

“After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all”.

Among the 12 signatories, eight came from the Islamic world.

These anti-Islamist Muslim intellectuals were not born free; they fled dictatorships for democracies, where they still suffer death threats and abuses, but where they are far freer and prouder of the West than those Westerners who know only freedom but now practice a dreadful feeing of guilt — mostly for things they did not do.

The West not only turns its back the new slave markets; the UN Human Rights Council actually welcomes states such as Sudan, where tens of thousands of women and children from mostly Christian villages were enslaved during Jihadi raids; Kenya and Nigeria, where the police last fall rescued hundreds of men and boys chained in an Islamic school; Pakistan, where Christians are condemned to servitude, and Mauritania, where two in every 100 people are still held as slaves. It is the same UN Human Rights Council that now, thanks to pressure by African countries, wants to investigate “systemic racism in the US”. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo noted:

“If the Council were honest, it would recognize the strengths of American democracy and urge authoritarian regimes around the world to model American democracy and to hold their nations to the same high standards of accountability and transparency that we Americans apply to ourselves”.

It is high time for the United States to stop funding the United Nations. The United Nations is being used to perpetuate injustice, not stop it.

Real slave traders and racists — those who believe Western societies and values should not exist at all — most likely look at the current Western self-flagellation and cheer their approval.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16195/slavery-africa-middle-east

If you’re going to accuse Robert the Bruce of being racist, why not the little mermaid?

Denmark woke up on Friday to the words “racist fish” scrawled across the base of the “Little Mermaid”, the bronze statue honouring Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale that perches on a rock in the sea off a pier in Copenhagen.

Police said it had not yet identified the perpetrators. The 107-year-old sculpture, which is visited by one million tourists each year, has been vandalised before, including by anti-whaling campaigners and pro-democracy activists, twice suffering decapitation.

What’s racist about her? Except perhaps perceived race?

We’re far beyond any rational use of racism. The Black Lives Matter hate campaign has gone after statues of abolitionists, the Emancipation Memorial, and, in Europe, has swung into attacks on random statues, like Robert the Bruce, and the Little Mermaid, simply because the racist hate group is low on material and European countries have a lot more history.

So sure, every statue is racist now. Under critical race theory, it all upholds white supremacy which is defined as pretty much civilization. So it all must go.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/07/every-statue-racist-now-daniel-greenfield/

During his Mount Rushmore speech on Friday, Donald Trump said he signed an executive order to create a “National Garden of American Heroes” which will feature statues of famous Americans.

It’s the president’s response to the mob action in tearing down statues of American icons like Andrew Jackson and George Washington. The executive order reads:

These statues are silent teachers in solid form of stone and metal. They preserve the memory of our American story and stir in us a spirit of responsibility for the chapters yet unwritten. These works of art call forth gratitude for the accomplishments and sacrifices of our exceptional fellow citizens who, despite their flaws, placed their virtues, their talents, and their lives in the service of our Nation.

Section 1 of the order lays out the purpose: that we owe our “present greatness to its past sacrifices” and since “the past is always at risk of being forgotten, monuments will always be needed to honor those who came before.” The order points out that the Virginia legislature honored George Washington with a monument in 1784, realizing even then the value of his service.

 In our public parks and plazas, we have erected statues of great Americans who, through acts of wisdom and daring, built and preserved for us a republic of ordered liberty.

Not so “ordered” now, which is the reason for the executive order.

To destroy a monument is to desecrate our common inheritance.  In recent weeks, in the midst of protests across America, many monuments have been vandalized or destroyed.  Some local governments have responded by taking their monuments down.  Among others, monuments to Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Francis Scott Key, Ulysses S. Grant, leaders of the abolitionist movement, the first all-volunteer African-American regiment of the Union Army in the Civil War, and American soldiers killed in the First and Second World Wars have been vandalized, destroyed, or removed.

To accomplish the task of creating the garden, the president has named an interagency task force, headed by the Interior secretary, to draw together those in government, in the arts and humanities, and preservationists to guide the effort. Within 60 days, the president wants some kind of plan, including recommendations about where the garden should be located.

Interestingly, Trump is going to invite local and state governments to contribute to the garden.

(iii)  consider the availability of authority to encourage and accept the donation or loan of statues by States, localities, civic organizations, businesses, religious organizations, and individuals, for display at the National Garden.

The list of “heroes” is partial, but revealing.

To accomplish the task of creating the garden, the president has named an interagency task force, headed by the Interior secretary, to draw together those in government, in the arts and humanities, and preservationists to guide the effort. Within 60 days, the president wants some kind of plan, including recommendations about where the garden should be located.

Interestingly, Trump is going to invite local and state governments to contribute to the garden.

(iii)  consider the availability of authority to encourage and accept the donation or loan of statues by States, localities, civic organizations, businesses, religious organizations, and individuals, for display at the National Garden.

The list of “heroes” is partial, but revealing.

The National Garden should be composed of statues, including statues of John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, George S. Patton, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, and Orville and Wilbur Wright.

It’s going to be a lot of fun watching liberals try to add their own “heroes” to the garden.

But that’s one reason this garden will not open in our lifetime. And the challenge to the mob is so direct that if it did open, the statues would need an army of park police to guard it.

No matter. The idea is the proper response to vandals and other barbarians who seek to tear down the past and destroy it.

pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/07/04/trump-hits-back-at-statue-destroyers-by-creating-a-national-garden-of-american-heroes-n604070

Assault, theft, two years imprisonment for child abuse – Hamid A. (47 years old) already has 25 records in his criminal file. The Afghan was sentenced on Thursday to four years in prison for his last crime, the rape of a senior citizen in Delitzsch. However, the man should not have been allowed to be here any longer.

According to research by the tabloid BILD, his asylum application had already been rejected 21 (!) years ago, on April 29, 1999. But deportation? Nope!

Instead, the responsible Central Immigration Office (ZAB) in Chemnitz issued a toleration order – and extended it 12 times. The last toleration expired in November 2019. About two months later, on January 9th, he attacked Christiane B. (83 years old) while he was drunk (2 per thousand) at a railway underpass in Delitzsch, pushed her to the ground and raped the elderly woman.

While the ZAB is still examining a BILD inquiry on this matter, Peter Hartmann, the public defender of A., provides a possible reason: “He simply does not have any kind of papers.

Before the trial A. had given different aliases and dates of birth. A court spokesman: “Sometimes he claims he is an orphan and a bomb tore his parents apart. “Suddenly he has seven siblings and his parents are officials in Kabul.” An expert opinion came to the conclusion that he is obviously a pathological liar (“pseudologist”). This is probably also how he manages to deceive authorities.

The most recent judgment against A. is not yet final. This is also the last chance for the time being to get rid of the man.

“At present he is still in custody. This is an extremely favourable time for deportation”, a prison expert told the tabloid BILD. “If he goes into custody, he will serve the four years here.”

bild.de/regional/leipzig/dresden-aktuell/leipzig-asylantrag-vor-21-jahren-abgelehnt-warum-ist-der-noch-hier-71679464.bild.html?fbclid=IwAR33VmM1fZKcg0lFATdqwU3YTBUgQH3nZsNyv0qgKY0TyXIVxWFU9_vHNo8

Almost all anti-Semitic crimes in Germany in 2019 were committed by right-wing extremists, according to a recently published government report, “Politically Motivated Crime in 2019.” In the report, “politically motivated crimes” are divided into right-wing crimes, left-wing crimes, crimes motivated by foreign ideology, crimes motivated by religious ideology and unassigned crimes.

According to the report, anti-Semitic crimes were 13% higher in 2019 than in 2018, with 2,032 anti-Semitic crimes committed in 2019, the highest number in Germany since 2001. According to the report, 93.4% of those crimes were committed by right-wing extremists.

“The biggest threat is still the threat from the right,” Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said following the release of the crime report. “We must remain alert and tackle it. It is an order of magnitude that accompanies us with concern, with great concern.”

The German government’s new report flies in the face of major EU reports: In November 2018, the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) published a report, “Antisemitism – Overview of data available in the European Union 2007–2017,” which quoted the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) as stating that in 2017:

“The main perpetrators of antisemitic incidents are ‘Islamists’ and radicalised young Muslims, including schoolchildren, as well as neo-Nazis and sympathisers of extreme-right and, in some cases, extreme-left groups”.

Germany was among the countries surveyed.

In another major survey conducted by the FRA and published in December 2018, “Second survey on discrimination and hate crime against Jews in the EU”, it was concluded that:

“With respect to the most serious incident of anti-Semitic harassment, on average, across the 12 Member States surveyed, the most frequently mentioned categories for perpetrators were: ‘someone else I cannot describe’ (31%); ‘someone with an extremist Muslim view’ (30%); ‘someone with a left-wing political view’ (21%); ‘work or school/college colleague’ (16%); ‘teenager or group of teenagers’ (15%); ‘an acquaintance or friend’ (15%); ‘someone with a right-wing political view’ (13%)”.

Germany was among the 12 member states surveyed.

In 2017, the Interior Ministry of Germany published a report by the Independent Expert Group on Antisemitism — a group constituted in September 2009 based on a decision of the German Bundestag — about antisemitism in Germany. According to the report:

“[In] the survey conducted for the [Independent Expert Group on Antisemitism in] 2016 among Jews in Germany … ‘a Muslim person/group’ is mentioned by far the most frequently regarding… verbal insult/harassment, physical attack… followed by ‘a person unknown to me’… only then follow in equal numbers left-extremist and far-right persons/groups. For this difference between the classification of the recorded crimes in the PMK… [the annual report about politically motivated crime] and the perception on the part of the persons concerned, there is currently no plausible explanation.”

In June 2019, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), published a report on “Anti-Semitism in Islamism,” the purpose of which was “to raise public awareness of Islamist anti-Semitism”. The report states:

“The record of these events shows that anti-Semitic incidents with an Islamist background are not uncommon in Germany. For the period from January to December 2017 alone, more than 100 incidents were recorded, ranging from anti-Zionist sermons to anti-Semitic graffiti to verbal and physical attacks against individuals. Probably this is just the proverbial ‘tip of the iceberg'”.

Which surveys should be believed? Did all Islamist anti-Semitism just disappear overnight?

Presumably not. German statistics on anti-Semitism, however, have been the object of criticism for quite some time. Die Welt wrote in May 2019:

“The majority of [antisemitism] cases in Berlin are attributed to right-wing extremists — without evidence… For a long time, experts have criticized the attribution of the majority of cases to far-right perpetrators… and that too little attention is paid to other groups of perpetrators, such as those from Islamist and other Muslim circles”.

According to a May 2019 article in the German Jewish news outlet Jüdische Allgemeine:

“In surveys of Jews in Germany who were victims of anti-Semitic acts, 62 percent of [victims of verbal] insults and 81 percent of [victims of] physical attacks identified Muslims as suspected perpetrators. Nevertheless, ‘Sieg Heil’ calls at an anti-Semitic Al-Quds demonstration in Berlin in July 2014 were registered as a politically motivated crime with right-wing extremist motives in the police statistics.”

The newspaper also quoted Felix Klein, the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Anti-Semitism, as saying:

“I hear from the Jewish communities that the subjective perception of the threat posed by Muslim anti-Semitism is greater than is reflected in the crime statistics.”

The Independent Expert Group on Antisemitism, mentioned above, also criticized Germany’s statistics in its 2017 report, “Anti-Semitism in Germany – current developments”:

“In the police, the old concept of extremism continues to act as a guiding factor, which makes it more difficult to identify prejudice-motivated crimes that go beyond ‘the classic pattern of far-right crime’. In particular, this concerns the attribution as ‘right’-[wing] as soon as references to National Socialism can be seen. This does not take into account that while Nazi symbols are a general, anti-Jewish means, they are also generally defamatory… [and] used by perpetrators who are not far right-wing politically. Xenophobic and anti-Semitic crimes are basically always attributed to the… right when no further specifics are recognizable (e.g. only the words ‘Jews out’) and where no suspects are known. This may create… a distorted picture of the motivation behind the crime and the group of perpetrators.”

Yet, despite problematic evidence and flawed statistics, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer is still claiming that virtually all anti-Semitism comes from the far-right. Why?

The rise in anti-Semitism to the highest level in nearly two decades also raises a different issue: Germany has some of the strictest hate speech laws in Europe. In October 2017, Germany adopted a new censorship law, the NetzDG law. It is a draconian measure that requires social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, to censor their users on behalf of the German state. Social media companies are obliged to delete or block any online “criminal offenses” such as libel, slander, defamation or incitement, within 24 hours of receipt of a user complaint. Social media companies are permitted seven days for more complicated cases. If they fail to do so, the German government can fine them up to 50 million euros for failing to comply. The law served as inspiration for France’s recently passed Avia Law.

In addition, German law enforcement agencies have completed no fewer than five “Action Day against Hate Postings” specifically to crack down on internet “hate speech”.

Despite all these measures, anti-Semitic crime in Germany is the highest it has been in the past two decades. This news alone should raise concerns in Germany that hate-speech laws such as the NetzDG, while severely limiting free speech, are not working. It should also concern other EU countries, such as France, that are looking to Germany as an example to follow.

That, however, is not happening. In January, Germany announced new crackdowns on free speech, ostensibly to fight antisemitism, as previously reported by Gatestone. In March, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance — the human rights monitoring body of the Council of Europe — published a report that found that Germany, despite its repressive laws, was still not doing enough about hate speech and that:

“… action is required in several areas to effectively prevent and combat hate speech. These encompass awareness-raising, prevention and counter speech, support to victims, self-regulation, the use of regulatory powers and, as a last resort, criminal investigation and punishment”.

Germany seems unable to change course. In the meantime, anti-Semitism keeps escalating.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16098/germany-antisemitism