North Rhine-Westphalia’s Minister of the Interior, Herbert Reul, has attributed partial responsibility for anti-Semitic attacks in Germany to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He said it was “totally likely” that Erdoğan’s sharp criticism of Israel had caused people of Turkish origin to take part in protests in West German cities over the past ten days. “I bet that,” Reul told the Home Affairs Committee of the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament on Thursday, “but I can’t prove that.”

Earlier, Reul had again reported how, in the early hours of Wednesday evening last week, a group of about one hundred people had marched to the synagogue in the centre of Gelsenkirchen. This “anti-Semitic mob”, said Reul, had waved Palestinian and Turkish flags and chanted anti-Jewish chants on that May 12. A police cordon had prevented the crowd from entering the synagogue just in time. Erdoğan had declared on the same day that Israel should be taught a “strong and deterrent lesson”. A few days earlier, he had called Israel a “terrorist state”.

From May 10 to 18, the North Rhine-Westphalian security authorities counted 62 “incidents” with an anti-Semitic background, including insults, threats or the burning of Israeli flags. According to a ministry official, 36 of the 111 suspects have now been identified by name, and most of them are “of Arab origin”.

Reul warned of “strange alliances” of anti-Semitic groups: for example, immigrants from Iraq or Syria were “making common cause” with right-wing extremist “Grey Wolves” from Turkey, Islamists with a migration background were among them, as were German right-wing extremists. What they all have in common, according to Reul, is “a deep hatred of Jews”.

In the plenary session of the state parliament, speakers from all parties assured Jewish citizens of protection and safety. In the debate, head of government Armin Laschet rejected accusations by the AfD that the established parties were ignoring attacks by suspects with an immigrant background: In addition to anti-Semitism from the right and the left, there is “also anti-Semitism from immigrants”, said the Prime Minister.

Interior Minister Reul conceded in the debate that the police would not be able to protect every Israeli flag in the country at all times: “If the flag is burnt, then it’s burnt – then the next one will be put up.” Each city should keep ten in reserve: “But we will not take them down!

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/antisemitismus-nrw-innenminister-erdogan-mitschuld-1.5300075

On Monday night, two central places in the Styrian capital Graz were smeared with Islamic slogans. Both the Styrian Landhaus, the seat of the Styrian parliament, and the St. Mary’s Column, a central sign of Graz’s Christian history, were smeared with the Arabic writing “Allahu Akbar”.

In the course of the investigation by the Styrian Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a 22-year-old man already known to the police was arrested. The Syrian, who according to the police had already been charged with various drug-related offences and resisting state authority, confessed. He also stated that he had written the words because of his religious convictions. In addition to the offence of grievous damage to property, the police are investigating the possible suspicion of membership in a terrorist organisation.

Graz’s city politicians also commented on the Islamist-motivated act of vandalism. Mario Eustacchio (FPÖ), deputy mayor of Graz, called for the problem to finally be tackled at its roots and not to continue to fight the symptoms. “Islamist structures must be consistently dismantled in Austria and immigration from Islamic countries reduced to an absolute minimum! The known Islamist mosques in Graz must finally be closed,” said Eustacchio.

Kurt Hohensinner (ÖVP), the city councillor for integration in Graz, explained his point of view in the newspaper “Kronen Zeitung”: the cause of the extremist acts of vandalism was the current conflict between Israel and Hamas. According to Hohensinner, the city of Graz is particularly committed to educational work in order to prevent extremist tendencies. Furthermore, the ÖVP politician emphasised that he wanted to “take action against any kind of extremism with the full force of the rule of law”.

Graz has long been considered a centre of Islamism in Austria. Half of all mosques are classified as extremist by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. In large-scale raids against the Austrian Islamist scene, Graz has always been in the focus.

https://www.tagesstimme.com/2021/05/20/graz-allahu-akbar-graffiti-auf-landtag-und-mariensaeule-gesprueht

As is well known, the most repulsive euphemisation and trivialisation of the currently rampant anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews on German streets came from Andreas Geisel, Social Democratic Party (SPD) Senator for the Interior in the red-red-green shithole of Berlin, who described the aggressive rowdies and rioters as “experience-oriented” young men. Whoever has such senators in government must truly fear Islam – because, with so much state understanding and “sportsmanship”, they will be allowed to let it all hang out in the future.

After all, the “hunger for experience” must be satisfied – and when words once again turn into deeds and “Jews slapping” once again becomes the new normal, then perhaps Geisel can explain when enough has been “experienced” or what is still allowed to go. 93 police officers, whose employer is Geisel, were injured by the hatemongers on Sonnenallee in the district of Neukölln alone, 65 people were temporarily arrested – because Geisel in this case, in contrast to previous Anti-Corona demonstrations, looked away and did not want to take any “disproportionate” measures – such as bans on gatherings or water cannons.

And logically, of course, this super-hypocrite with an active GDR and Socialist Unity Party (SED) past has no problem with broken rules of distance and masking. He criminalises some for demonstrating for basic rights, questioning the appropriateness of dictatorial restrictions on freedom in the name of a hyped-up “pandemic” or merely reciting the Basic Law in public, and lets his officials crack down with “White Russian” severity. While others, as the newspaper Bild resignedly states, are allowed to loudly chant “Bomb Tel Aviv” and “Shit Jews”, throw stones at synagogues and police officers and threaten journalists – and the Senator of the Interior declares them, with a wink, to be “experience-oriented” young Arab people.

For once, even the prominent union officials of the two rival police unions, which belong to different political camps, were in agreement this time: Rainer Wendt of the German Police Union could only shake his head about Geisel – and declared: “This is the usual trivialisation of an unteachable interior senator”. His counterpart Jörg Radek of the police union found similarly critical words for Geisel: “Such excuses trivialise the violence in view of the many injured.” It remains the case what the online portal Jouwatch already demanded yesterday: This interior senator must resign immediately; even for a state-sabotaging and scandalous government like the one of Berlin, such a person cannot be tolerated one day longer. Maybe Geisel will apply for a job as head of security in Gaza – there, even more “experiences” are guaranteed.

Berlin als “Erlebnispark” für Judenhasser: SPD-Geisel gerät zunehmend unter Druck

Armin Laschet ( Christian Democratic Union, CDU), Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia and candidate for chancellor of the CDU/CSU, has called for the flag of the Islamist Hamas to be banned in Germany. “We have banned the flag of the PKK because it is a terrorist organisation,” he said in a parliamentary question time on recent anti-Semitic riots. “The Hamas flag has not been banned until today.”

“Therefore, this flag, which stands for terrorism, must also be banned. It must not be displayed on German streets,” said the CDU federal leader. A law change is now necessary, he said.

Laschet accused Hamas of making many people living peacefully in the Gaza Strip “hostages for its terrorist activities”. At the same time, Hamas was harming the Palestinian Authority.

Last week, there had been anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli riots in several cities in Germany and also in North Rhine-Westphalia, including Gelsenkirchen, Solingen, Düsseldorf, Münster and Bonn. The trigger is the escalation of the conflict between Palestinians and Israel.

https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2021-05/armin-laschet-forderung-verbot-hamas-fahne-terrorismus-antisemitismus

There is a reason why those who make use of these maps avoid examining their provenance or proving their accuracy: The maps are egregiously, almost childishly dishonest. But they have become so ubiquitous that it is worth taking the time to examine them, and what their dishonesty can teach us about the Palestinian cause and its supporters.

In whatever form they take, the “Land Loss” maps show very little variation. The standard version looks something like this:

Sometimes, a fifth map is added, this one dated 1920, showing the entirety of what was once British Mandatory Palestine in a single solid color, labeled “Palestinian.” This accomplishes the seemingly impossible and makes the series of maps even more dishonest than before.

Whether made up of four or five maps, the message of the series is clear: The Jews of Palestine have been assiduously gobbling up more and more “Palestinian land,” spreading like some sort of fungal infection that eventually devours its host.

There are some outright lies in these maps, to be sure. But the most egregious falsehoods transcend mere lies. They emerge from a more general and quite deliberate refusal to differentiate between private property and sovereign land, as well as a total erasure of any political context.

This final point is especially crucial. It goes to the question of whether the Palestinians actually “lost” this land and the context of that alleged “loss.” We could quite easily, for example, make a panel of maps showing German “land loss” in the first half of the 20th century. It would be geographically accurate but, without the political context, it would tell a completely misleading story amounting to a flat-out lie. And that is precisely what these maps are: A lie.

Taking each map in turn, it is easy to demonstrate that the first one is by far the most dishonest of the lot. As far as I have been able to determine, it is based on a map of Jewish National Fund (JNF) land purchases dating roughly from the 1920s. The JNF was founded to purchase land for Jewish residents and immigrants in then-Palestine, and was partly funded through charity boxes that were once found in almost every Jewish school and organization in the West. Ironically, this map often adorned those ubiquitous boxes.

http://www.thetower.org/article/the-mendacious-maps-of-palestinian-loss/

The German government has announced a ban on the Salafist-Islamic association Ansaar International after accusing the purported aid organization of using donations to finance terrorist groups across the world.  

Germany’s Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) announced the ban earlier this month on the same day that authorities across ten federal states carried out raids against people and properties associated with the Islamic organization and its various offshoots, German newspaper Die Welt reports.

“To fight terror, one must dry up its sources of money,” said Seehofer.

According to a statement released by the interior ministry, around 1,000 police officers took part in the operation which saw evidence — including €150,000 euros in cash — seized across various locations in Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Berlin, Brandenburg, Hamburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, and Hesse German.

Alongside Ansaar International, the German government also banned groups linked to the Dusseldorf-based NGO, such as the Somali Committee for Information and Advice, the Änis Ben-Hatira Foundation, the Frauenrechte ANS Justice eV association, Umma Shop and Helpstore Secondhand UG, and Better World Appeal.

Seehoer said that these groups “spread a Salafist world view and finance terror around the world under the guise of humanitarian aid.”

Up until its recent ban, Ansaar International operated under the pretense of supporting various humanitarian projects for Muslims around the world. On its website, the Salafist NGO claims to provide humanitarian aid to individuals impacted by war and other crises by building and funding the construction of orphanages, schools, and medical centers. The organization is said to have collected €8 million to €10 million in donations in 2018.

Germany’s Interior Ministry insists, however, that the funds raised by Ansaar International are done so with the intention of funding foreign terrorist groups like the Palestinian Hamas, as well as the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab and Jabhat al-Nusra, located in Somalia and Syria, respectively.

“Financial support, even for what at first glance appear to be charitable activities, secures the terrorist groups’ power and dominance in the respective region, facilitates the recruitment of activists, and saves the terrorist group money, which in turn can be used to carry out the crimes it plans,” the interior ministry said.

“The network finances terrorism worldwide with its donations,” Seehofer’s spokesman Steven Alter wrote on social media.

The ministry, which insists that the banned organizations are “enemies of a world order that protects the human dignity of people of different faiths are created continuously”, also believes the organizations are working to send children from Germany abroad to help “internalize Salafist-extremist content there and to bring it back to Germany”.

Joachim Herrmann, the interior minister for the federal state of Bavaria, also commented on the bans and raids, saying: “This is a serious blow against terrorist financing and Salafist missionary work in Germany.”

The actions taken by German authorities this month come after the Düsseldorf Prosecutor General’s Office first began investigating the Salafist NGO in April of this year. That month, police searched the apartments of three individuals, aged between 32 and 40, including a Düsseldorf-based lawyer, who are suspected of financing terrorism.

https://rmx.news/article/article/germany-bans-islamic-ngo-over-alleged-terrorism-financing

Unknown perpetrators have spray-painted Islamist slogans on two central monuments in Graz. Both the Landhaus, the seat of the Styrian parliament, and the St Mary’s Statue were spray-painted with the words “Allah-Akbar”.

“Graz has long had the reputation of being the centre of Austrian Islamism. Half of all mosques in Graz are classified as radical by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The acts of vandalism at two symbolic places in the centre of Graz are the consequences of years of denying the problem. For years, the Freedom Party has been demanding that the problem finally to be tackled at its roots. Islamist structures must be consistently dismantled in Austria and immigration from Islamic countries reduced to an absolute minimum,” said Graz Deputy Mayor and Freedom Party chairman Mario Eustacchio.

“The closure of Islamist mosques in Graz that was announced by the Minister of the Interior after the terrorist attack in Vienna has not happened yet. The warnings of the security authorities must finally be taken seriously! There must be an end to further ignoring the justified cries for help by the authorities. The increasingly self-confident appearance of Islamists in public spaces must finally be stopped,” concluded Eustacchio.

https://www.ots.at/presseaussendung/OTS_20210519_OTS0108/fp-eustacchio-allah-akbar-graffitis-auf-landhaus-und-mariensaeule-sind-ergebnis-einer-gescheiterten-willkommenspolitik