Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor slammed a rally of mainly five hundred German Muslims who on Saturday blasted calls for the obliteration of Israel and Jews in Berlin.
Prosor wrote on Twitter in German: “These idiots abuse Germany’s freedoms and unreservedly call for the annihilation of Israel and the Jews. They flout democratic values in [Germany], not only crossing every possible red line, but also ‘spitting in the brown [fascist] well from which they drink.’”
The reportedly antisemitic march unfolded in two Berlin neighborhoods with a large Muslim presence, Kreuzberg and Neukölln, and centered on the current controversy on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Palestinians barricaded themselves in al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in violation of the rules of the religious compound.
The Post viewed video footage of the Saturday march against Israel in which “Free Palestine” was chanted.
The organization democ posted a video of the antisemitic rally and wrote participants are chanting “death to Jews” and “death to Israel” and yelling “antisemitic slogans and glorifying terrorism.”
The Post sent press queries to Germany’s Federal commissioner for combating antisemitism, Felix Klein, and his counterpart on the European level, Katharina von Schnurbein.
In response to the Post query, von Schnurbein sent the Post her tweet after publication of the Post article, stating “Hate speech is not free speech! Hate speech is an abuse of freedom of expression and is punishable in the EU. Hate speech against Jews is not only painful & unacceptable, it should be condemned in the strongest possible terms and must be punished. No2Antisemitism SafeguardDemocracy.”
Combatting antisemitism in Germany
The German Jewish expert on antisemitism, Henryk M. Broder, wrote last week that Berlin’s commissioner to combat antisemitism, Samuel Salzborn, seems to have misguided priorities in the city-state’s fight against antisemitism. Broder wrote in his column for the large daily broadsheet, Die Welt, that Salzborn spent the last two years largely focused on renaming streets that had been originally named after antisemites.
Broder lampooned the result of Salzborn’s work because only two streets from 10,000 in Berlin were renamed and the two streets involved not well-known antisemites. Streets named after hardcore and prominent Jew-haters like the composer Richard Wagner and Christian Protestant leader Martin Luther remained intact. While Islamic-animated antisemitism and violent Jew-hatred in Berlin remain a chief problem, critics note that Salzborn was focused on a low-level priority.
The two streets named after antisemites Georg Maercker (1865-1924) and Karl Elkart (1880-1959) were renamed.
Germany’s system of antisemitism commissioners to combat Jew-hatred has been plagued by scandals. The Simon Wiesenthal Center urged commissioner Gerhard Urlich from the state of Schleswig-Holstein to resign due to his alleged antisemitic sermons against Israel while serving as Bishop of the Protestant Church for northern Germany. A court in Hamburg declared that the commissioner for the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg, Michael Blume, can be termed antisemitic due to his attacks on German Jews and one of Israel’s Zionist heroes, Orde Wingate, a founder of the IDF.
Martin Arieh Rudolph, chairman of the Jewish community in Bamberg, Bavaria, issued a public letter last month, criticizing the head of the Green Party in Baden-Württemberg’s parliament, Andreas Schwarz, as well as Blume, for their failure to tackle Islamic-animated antisemitism in the state. Rudolph lambasted Blume for his alleged incompetence.
Israeli Gen. Amir Avivi and the Simon Wiesenthal Center took Klein, the German Federal commissioner, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz, to task for omitting Palestinian and Iranian regime antisemitism in their national strategy to fight antisemitism. The European commissioner von Schnurbein has over the years refused to urge the EU to classify all of the lethal antisemitic entity Hezbollah as a terrorist organization in Europe.
The annual al-Quds Day rally in Berlin will not take place this April. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, launched al-Quds Day in 1979, calling for the destruction of Israel. Al-Quds is the Arabic word for Jerusalem.
The Berlin al-Quds Day demonstration has been held nearly every year since 1996. The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper told the Post on Monday that “al-Quds Day is an Iranian invention and is antisemitic not only anti-Israel. It is designed to create and increase hatred of the Jewish people and its 3,000-year connection to Jerusalem.”
Björn Bowinkelmann, a spokesman for the German interior ministry, sent the Post on Wednesday a tweet from Nancy Faeser, Federal Minister of the Interior and Community. Fraser wrote: “We do not tolerate hatred towards Jews. In Germany in particular, we have a special duty and responsibility to decisively combat antisemitism.”
