Nazis murdered my family in the Holocaust. Now Germany is punishing me for protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Nazis murdered my family in the Holocaust. Now Germany is punishing me for protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
mondoweiss.net
Nazis murdered my family in the Holocaust. Now Germany is punishing me for protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34074324
Unfortunately this is consistent with what i have witnessed at many demonstrations in Germany. Police deliberately seeks to escalate tensions by random acts of heinous violence. In particular women and minors are targeted as the police relies on the basic human decency of people not to stand by idly when a group of men is violating a women or minor. Once people try to step in, all hell breaks loose as the police now gets to storm into demonstrations beating anyone and everyone, shoving people over and on their way back collecting the people that fell for arrest. This often includes chocking them, police sitting on their backs to prevent them from breathing, beating them further as they are already surrounded and restrained by 4-6 police officers.
I have seen Antizionist-Jewish activists, who publicly identify as Jews and wear a kippah being beaten and dragged into arrest using pain grips
Despite dozens of videos showing the police violence after every demonstration, despite emergency services sometimes having to set up tents as a "field hospital" to treat the large number of casualties amongst the demonstrating people, German mainstream media subsequently reports the demonstrators as violent and rarely talks about any police violence. Particularly problematic is the Axel Springer Verlag, who has their "reporters" closely cooperating with the police in Berlin to make sure they get the right scenes in to claim violence against the police. This includes their "reporters" to insult and provoke demonstrators to escalate tensions themselves. At one demonstration i saw a "reporter" groping a minor. Despite numerous witnesses telling the police what happened and where the perpetrator was sitting after, the police refused to arrest him, or even question him.
EDIT: The Axel Springer reporter i mean is "Iman Sefati". Instead of his behaviour being questioned by his colleagues he is paraded around as a hero and victim of violent extremists in German mainstream media. He is of Iranian descent and as his father was executed by the Iranian regime, he is a key figure to the narratives of what are "good" and "evil" immigrants in Germany.
I mean, everyone who pays attention knows how spinger is absolute trash. Has been since the founding of the FRG. Unfortunately, the morons who read it don't die out. They thrive on stupid and mentally lazy people. I wish I knew how to change that.
BILD circulation is down 80% since 1998. Obviously all print media has lost readership, but for example Spiegel is only down by 38% since then. Most other newspapers do a lot better then BILD in retaining readership, but BILD is so massive that they remain a power.
Is this Berlin specific? If so why is Berlin specifically so bad and other jurisdictions not as bad?
It certainly seems to be a disproportionate issue in Berlin.
Berlin has the largest Arab population and a relatively stronger "radical" left compared to other cities. Berlin also has the largest Zionist population in Germany and Zionist lobby organizations are most present in Berlin, both for historic reasons and as Berlin is the capital city.
The current mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner is a Machiavellian opportunist and a Ethno-nationalist. He won the last state level elections after he called for police to release the first names of juvenile suspects, so that people could judge if those juvenile suspects were "real Germans" or "just German citizens". The current government also is reactionary in many other aspects such as stopping the expansion of public transport and bicycle infrastructure, slashing funding for social programs and cultural institutions and the like. The claim that it would bring order to the notoriously dysfunctional public administration of Berlin at the same time keeps being disappointed, while the cost of living also keeps exploding.
So you have a racist and repressive government, which has allied with and tokenized the Zionist lobby early on, in particular the Axel Springer media, and is failing in most regards of governance. It has a vested interest in presenting itself as successful and Berlin under threat from "Islamist migrants" and "extreme leftists", against which is protects the city. This meets a large population of people who suffer directly as their friends and relatives are being slaughtered and a left scene that won't relent easily to government repression, most notably at two of the three large universities. The left scene in Berlin is also more international, so the "antideutsch" pro-Israel "left" is relatively weaker, albeit not less confrontational.
I hope this gives an idea, of the factors coming into play. In regards to general police violence against progressive causes, Berlin police is bad, but we see similar from police in other states of Germany. So i think the terrible state of the Berlin police does not explain, why things are worse in Berlin, because other police in Germany is equally terrible.
One final notion: While we saw student encampments and later occupations at the Freie Universität and Humboldt Universität escalate, we did not see similar at the Technische Universität. The President of the Technische Universität has been more open to dialogue with students and not thought escalatory measures, when the FU and HU had the police evict peaceful protest camps. (which turned out to be unlawful iirc.)