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.
They’re not protecting ‘Jewish people’. They’re protecting Israel. There’s a massive difference.
They’re protecting Israel by persecuting hate crimes committed inside of Germany?
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.
By calling every war crime genocide you are removing the meaning from the word. What Israel is doing with mass civilian bombardment is terrible, but not genocide. Read about what happened to the Armenians, the Hutu, and the Jews for comparison. Another point to consider: the USA killed 20% of the Korean population through bombardment in the Korean war, and even that isn’t considered a genocide.
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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.
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.
Not really. Israel is an ethnostate, they’ve declared it themselves. Genocide and oppression are guaranteed so long as it continues to be one.
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.
it is funny how you don’t even react to anything I wrote and just say I am wrong and I believe in israeli propaganda.
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.
Oh yeah, tell that to Assyrians from Nineveh plain. Or even NK Armenians.
Sober up a bit, this piece of text doesn’t make any sense.
My point is that in a majority Jewish country, the population and the government aren’t randomly going to decide to "throw the Jew down the well. But it’s happened in many other countries.
Eh, why the hell not? They’ll just redefine who’s a Jew, and will throw down the well those who don’t fit.
That central rabbinate of theirs can already decide that for proselytes and even people who’ve been with some other religion. Cause that’s used in Israel’s right of return laws, and they don’t want Christians of Jewish ancestry getting citizenship, for example.
It’s actually interesting how that state decided to implement some kind of judenrat to manage centrally things which in Judaism are not supposed to be managed centrally.
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.
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.