Yes, I know it’s not kosher to compare Israel to Nazi Germany. But I also know that Israel is guilty of ethnic cleansing since 1948 (Nakba), and of apartheid at least since 1967, when it gained control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The ghettoization of Gaza since 2005 also bears some resemblances with those ugly Nazi times. Except that there are the Jews in the state of Israel that are responsible for these horrors.
As I said more than once in my posts about the Israel-Gaza crisis, and also on Facebook, the German political class and most of the German population have been brainwashed to believe that “Nie wieder” means that, in compensation for the Shoah (and possibly for the various pogroms that took place in the many centuries of Jewish presence in Europe), the state of Israel should be allowed to kill as many Arab Palestinians it wishes. Just because Jews can only be victims, by definitions. They can never be in the wrong. Or, as Hans Kundnani puts it in “Zionism Über Alles”, “The German political establishment has abandoned the belief that the Holocaust gave it a responsibility to humanity and replaced it with a responsibility to Israel alone.” He quotes Susan Neiman (which I also mentioned in a comment, as she wrote about the way in which German guilt about the Holocaust blocks the capacity to feel empathy for Palestinians now dying in Gaza):
Even philosopher Susan Neiman, who five years ago wrote a book celebrating Germany’s memory culture as a model for the United States, now thinks it has gone “haywire.” Neiman speaks of a particularly German “philosemitic McCarthyism”—though since it has often also been directed against Jews who are critical of Israel, like the New Yorker writer Masha Gessen and the artist Candice Breitz, it may be more accurate to call it “Zionist McCarthyism.”
Finally, yes, I said that I fell out of love with Yanis Varoufakis, but it was because of his extreme hatred of NATO. He fails to understand that it was not NATO that created all the wars in the world. He fails to understand that Putin’s Russia is a Nazi country and it has no excuse for invading Ukraine, regardless of the circumstances. He fails to see how the “Axis of Evil 2.0” consisting of Russia, Iran, North Korea and China will shape the unfortunate future of this planet. We can’t blame everything on the Americans!
The German Ministry of the Interior has issued a ban against DiEM25 co-founder Yanis Varoufakis after the police shut down the Palestine Congress that was set to take place in Berlin from April 12 to 14.
This entails not only a ban on entry into Germany, but even a ban on any form of online participation and activity at political events in the country, with the German government going beyond the bounds of authoritarianism.
Yanis Varoufakis was due to give a speech at the Palestine Congress in Berlin on Friday, when German police burst into the venue to disband the event 1930s style. Judge for yourselves the kind of society Germany is becoming when its police bans the following words: (transcript follows) … The video on Palestine that got Yanis Varoufakis BANNED from Germany:
On Friday, April 12, during our Palestine Congress in Berlin, the police invaded the venue, preventing Yanis Varoufakis and other participants from delivering their speeches. Varoufakis went ahead and posted his speech on social media.
On the following day, Saturday, April 13, during our demonstration against the illegal and illegitimate police action to interrupt and cancel our Congress, a police officer approached our organisers, in the presence of the supervising lawyers, to inform them that a ‘Betätigungsverbot’ had been issued against Yanis Varoufakis, Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Salman Abu Sitta – three of the keynote speakers due to appear at the Palestine Congress.
Asked what the precise meaning of the said Betätigungsverbot was, the same police officer answered: “Prohibition to enter Germany but also from participating in conferences via video-link or recorded messages.” The same police officer then added that if any speech is given by “any of these three persons”, physically or by electronic means, the police would forcefully dissolve the demonstration.
At that point, the lawyers present asked the police officer for information of which law the ban on Varoufakis and the other two speakers was based. The police officer replied that it was not a police decision, but a decision by the Federal Ministry of the Interior. When the lawyers asked to be given something in writing about this Betätigungsverbot, he refused. … However, a few hours later, after countless messages of outrage against the actions of the Interior Ministry and the German Police from within Germany and from all over the world, lawyers acting on behalf of Yanis Varoufakis were told by the Berlin police press department (Beate Ostertag) that the police has no knowledge of such a ban against Varoufakis and that they suspect that there was ‘miscommunication’ by the police officer at the demonstration. … More news on Sunday: In response to an enquiry by ntv.de to the Federal Ministry of the Interior as to whether a ban on political activity had been issued against Varoufakis and how it had been derived in the case of an EU citizen, the reply received contains neither a confirmation nor a denial on the matter. And with reference to security circles, according to Stern and Handelsblatt, it is supposed to be an entry ban.
What is clear is that, following the outcry, German authorities decided they had dug themselves into a deep hole of farcical authoritarianism. And that it was time to whistle in the wind.
Yanis Varoufakis and MERA25 Deutschland wish to thank the thousands of lawyers, parliamentarians, activists, journalists and citizens who wrote messages in support and whose vocal opposition to the German authorities forced them on the defensive.
Irish Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Clare Daly criticised the German authorities for disrupting a Palestine Congress event planned in Berlin on 12 April.
Daly said German authorities’ cutting of electricity, preventing the online connection, banning speakers from entering Germany and shutting down the bank accounts of the Jewish Voices for Peace, one of the co-hosts, is “one of a long line” of “suppression of pro-Palestinian voices” that is “taking place all across the European Union”.
Hundreds of German police blocked streets around the Palestine Conference in Berlin last week, erecting barricades around the venue.
The conference was organised by a group of civil society activists, including Palestinian and Jewish groups to highlight and oppose Germany’s role in Israel’s war in Gaza.
German police shut down the Palestine Congress, a vital event to unite activists around a ceasefire for Gaza. They detained participants, including Jewish activists; they deported a Palestinian speaker. And then they banned our own Yanis Varoufakis, not only from making political speeches in Germany, but also from doing so over Zoom (!).
These authoritarian moves make it clear: Germany is intent on silencing anyone who speaks out against its complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
So for our livestream this week, Yanis Varoufakis and colleagues who attended the Palestine Congress will be dissecting this brazen act of state repression against Palestinian solidarity. What lessons can we draw? How has the reaction been? And what could all this mean for the future of free speech and pro-Palestine activism in Germany, and around the world?
“The SWR released her from her moderation duties after she repeatedly expressed extreme political positions on her private social media account,” said the broadcaster. Fares moderated the digital dialogue format “MixTalk” at SWR.
NOTE: Apparently, the German public is not outraged by this decision. For these Dummköpfe, what she did was Antisemitismus. I mean, the only countries one is allowed to boycott are Russia, Iran, and North Korea. You’re an extremist otherwise, and even antisemite if Israel is criticized. Wow, so many prominent American Jews must be Antisemitic by these fucked-up German standards! Because there are quite a lot of Jews who strongly criticize, and some even call to boycott Israel for what Bibi’s government is doing not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank.
Heck, a group of Nobel peace prize-winners, prominent artists and activists, including Jews such as Noam Chomsky and the late Stéphane Hessel, a former French diplomat and Holocaust survivor who was co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, called for a boycott of Israel as early as in 2012, also in relation to Gaza, and the humanitarian situation back then was infinitely better! (Also, read the English Wikipedia page for Norman Finkelstein.)
Either Germany is completely fucked-up as a democracy, or SWR and the people in BW are dumbshit. Maybe both.
Now, to protect the state of Israel from negative opinions, when are you going to put Helen Fares in jail? Or in a KZ, that would be nicer.
■ LATE EDIT: Some more references to people who support the Palestinian people and harshly criticize Israel. Yanis Varoufakis is not a Jew, but Jon Stewart is one. Also, Jeffrey Sachs is a Jew, and he said to Al Jazeera English, “We’re seeing a massacre in front of our eyes … most likely, a genocide.” And here’s a couple of Jews who have criticized the politics of Israel for decades. I won’t give links to them speaking on Al Jazeera English; instead, I’ll quote from Wikipedia:
● Norman Finkelstein was born in New York City to Jewish Holocaust-survivor parents. … Finkelstein rose to prominence in 2000 after writing his book The Holocaust Industry, in which he claims that some exploit the memory of the Holocaust as an “ideological weapon” to provide Israel “immunity to criticism”. A critic of Israel, he was denied entry to Israel and banned from entering the country for ten years in 2008. Finkelstein has called Israel the “Jewish supremacist state”, and views it as committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people. … When asked [in 2009] how he, as the son of Holocaust survivors, felt about Israel’s operation in Gaza, Finkelstein replied: “It has been a long time since I felt any emotional connection with the state of Israel, which relentlessly and brutally and inhumanly keeps these vicious, murderous wars. It is a vandal state. There is a Russian writer who once described vandal states as Genghis Khan with a telegraph. Israel is Genghis Khan with a computer. I feel no emotion of affinity with that state. I have some good friends and their families there, and of course I would not want any of them to be hurt. That said, sometimes I feel that Israel has come out of the boils of the [sic] hell, a satanic state.” The Anti-Defamation League has called Finkelstein an “obsessive anti-Zionist” filled with “vitriolic hatred of Zionism and Israel.” Of being called an anti-Zionist, Finkelstein has said: “It’s a superficial term. I am opposed to any state with an ethnic character, not only to Israel.” Finkelstein believes that the main reason the conflict isn’t resolved is “the refusal of Israel, backed by the United States government, to abide by international law, to abide by the opinion of the international community.” … In an interview with Emanuel Stoakes, he answered the question “Do you unequivocally condemn Palestinian attacks against innocent civilians?” as follows: “It is impossible to justify terrorism, which is the targeting of civilians to achieve a political goal. But it’s also difficult to make categorical statements of the kind you suggest. I do believe that Hezbollah has the right to target Israeli civilians if Israel persists in targeting civilians until Israel ceases its terrorist acts.” Finkelstein has said that Hamas and Hezbollah have the right to defend their countries from what he sees as Israeli aggression, and that both Israel and Hamas are guilty of targeting civilians. Israel, he claims, indiscriminately kills Palestinians, which he says is the same thing as targeting civilians. There is an equivalence between these groups and Israel, he argues: “If Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, if you want to make that claim, I won’t argue with you so long as you say further that Israel is a terrorist organization by probably, at least, 25-fold greater.”
● Ilan Pappé [Israeli historian and professor at the University of Exeter, author of several books including “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”]: Pappé was born in Haifa, Israel. Prior to coming to the UK, he was a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa (1984–2007) and chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa (2000–2008). … Pappé is one of Israel’s New Historians who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have offered an unconventional view of Israel’s creation in 1948, and the corresponding flight and expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in the same year. He has written that the expulsions were not decided on an ad hoc basis, as other historians have argued, but constituted the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, in accordance with Plan Dalet, drawn up in 1947 by Israel’s future leaders. … He blames the creation of Israel for the lack of peace in the Middle East, arguing that Zionism is more dangerous than Islamic militancy, and has called for an international boycott of Israeli academics. Pappé supports the one-state solution, which envisages a unitary state for Palestinians and Israelis. His work has been both supported and criticized by other historians. Before he left Israel in 2008, he had been condemned in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament; a minister of education had called for him to be sacked; his photograph had appeared in a newspaper at the centre of a target; and he had received several death threats.
Such Jews WOULD BE CANCELED IN GERMANY, because the quantity of shit in the heads of the German politicians is infinite, and because the public has been brainwashed to believe that, in compensation for the Shoah, the state of Israel (which did not exist back then) should be allowed to kill as many Arabs as it wants to.
In a recent interview with Rania Khalek, Yanis Varoufakis recounted how a SPD politician compared Gaza to the Nazis and said that he, as a German, condones the fact that hundreds of thousands of children were killed by the Allies in the context of defeating Hitler, so it’s also justifiable to kill children in Gaza!
APRIL 10, EURONEWS: While Biden keeps being noncommittal about Netanyahu (“I think what he’s doing is a mistake. I don’t agree with his approach.”) without cutting the military aid to Israel, the UN’s special rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese boldly says that the EU must suspend its economic ties with Israel: “this is not an option, it’s an obligation because Article 2 of that association agreement foresees the suspension in case of violations of human rights.” The formal suspension of trade relations should extend to “private corporations registered under national jurisdictions of EU member states.”
Albanese added that the conditions for suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement were in place before October 7th and the triggering of the war in Gaza, given Israel’s long history of establishing settlements and the “continuous announced annexation of the occupied Palestinian territory” was already a war crime.
Wow. Francesca Albanese would lose her job with SWR, if she had one.
I don’t care about Helen Fares personally, but it’s a matter of principle. But let me give you some more links on the topic:
Translation from the linked Süddeutsche Zeitung article:
“It is important to SWR,” the broadcaster now explains, that this post “was not created in the context of employment for SWR.” Helen Fares was “pointed out that moderators of a debate format have a duty of neutrality to protect the independence and credibility of the program.” She missed this neutrality on social media. Journalists are allowed to have a political opinion, but “the independence of the SWR and every single employee” must not be impaired or called into doubt. “The SWR believes that this principle has been violated in this specific case.”
According to the app itself, “No Thanks” was developed by Ahmed Bashbash, currently living in Hungary. Contacted by DW, he said he was a Palestinian from Gaza. Bashbash said he lost his brother “in this massacre” and that his sister died in 2020 because she did not receive medical support from Israel in time. “I made it in behalf of my brother and my sister who I lost because of this brutal occupation, and my goal is to try to prevent what happened to me to happen to another Palestinian,” Bashbash told DW by email.
He compiled the list of companies that allegedly support Israel with the help of the websites “Boycotzionism” and “Ulastempat.” The Boycotzionism website advertises with the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which is sometimes interpreted as antisemitic. Some see the phrase as a slogan that denies Israel’s right to exist.
The app was only for a short time suspended by Google, and now it’s available once more.
But if “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is to be considered as antisemitic, what can be said about Netanyahu’s Likud Party, whose original Party Platform said, “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”? Even today, as per Wikipedia, “The 1999 Likud Party platform emphasized the right of settlement [… and] they claim the Jordan River as the permanent eastern border to Israel and it also claims Jerusalem as belonging to Israel.” Also,
The ‘Peace & Security’ chapter of the 1999 Likud Party platform rejects a Palestinian state:
The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river. The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state. Thus, for example, in matters of foreign affairs, security, immigration, and ecology, their activity shall be limited in accordance with imperatives of Israel’s existence, security and national needs.
That’s seggregation. Apartheid. And the rejection of the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords!
Back to that bloody app. It’s a stupid one. I gave it a try, and I noticed that it does not blacklist only the products made in Israel or made by Israel companies, but it asks you to boycott all products made by any company that has or had even the slightest connection to the state of Israel! That’s probably more than half of everything on planet Earth!
For instance, Meta Mucil is to be boycotted because Procter & Gamble has established an office in Tel Aviv, “20 minutes away from Google’s office,” and because P&G considers Israel to be “THE startup nation.” Bulgari is to be boycotted because Bernard Arnault has invested in an Israeli cybersecurity firm. And you shouldn’t use Vaseline because Unilever made sure their ice cream range is available in Israel!
But I never said Helen Fares was right in recommending this app on her Instagram account. She also has a TikTok account, and, to me, whoever has a TikTok account is stupid by default. She likes hip-hop—one more proof of stupidity. But freedom of conscience and freedom of speech should be inalienable!
Interlude
Of course, the freedom of speech isn’t protected in Europe as much as it is in the United States. In Europe, each country has a law that punishes the denial of the Holocaust. There is only one truth under the Sun that needs the protection of the law! One can say that “1 + 1 = 3” (or, as the joke says, “2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of two and very small values of five”; although, in a relativistic mechanics context, I’d say that “2 + 2 = 3 for extremely large values of two”), and there’s no law against that. Or that Alexander the Great, Charlemagne and Napoleon Bonaparte never existed. No problem. Just don’t say that the Nazis didn’t kill 6 million Jews. OK, maybe 5.8 million would be acceptable, but not 4 million. Oh, you feel like saying there were 12 million? That’s fine, I guess. Oh, and the laws “against hatred” have been interpreted so liberally lately in countries like France, Britain, and Germany, that freedom of speech is no longer a reality.
In contrast, as much as I hate the fact that the Amendments to the US Constitution are treated as if they were Moses’ Tablets of the Law, the First Amendment happens to protect even the right to express controversial and offensive views, such as Holocaust denial, except in specific contexts like incitement to violence or defamation. But such an incitement has to be real, not imaginary. And the protection is only against any interference from the Government; private entities can still “cancel” you, ask you to use imaginary pronouns, and the like.
In France, the 1973 Pleven law has been interpreted in recent years so that people including Jean-Marie Le Pen, Brigitte Bardot, Alain Soral, Éric Naulleau, Dieudonné, Renaud Camus, Richard Millet, Éric Zemmour, have been criminally tried and condemned, no matter if they were considered to have been antisemitic or Islamophobic. (Michel Houellebecq was almost tried for Islamophobia, but the complaint had been retired in extremis, and I’m surprised that Michel Onfray is still unscathed.)
In Scotland, the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which came into effect on April 1, 2024, creates a new offense of “threatening or abusive behavior which is intended to stir up hatred” on the grounds of age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity, and variations in sex characteristics, and carries a maximum sentence of seven years in prison. The changes mean “stirring up hatred” would only be considered an offense if it was intentional. J.K. Rowling, who rightfully considers that only a woman can be pregnant, criticized the law, and she has challenged the Scottish authorities to arrest her under this law. However, the police said that “stirring up hatred” would only be considered an offense if it was intentional, and declined to arrest her. Still, this has not addressed the issue at hand: can people still express the common-sense idea that biological sex is everything that matters in (duh) matters of sex, and that only a woman can bear a child? A recent motion in the European Parliament addressed the reproductive rights for “women, girls and all persons who can be pregnant“!
In this complete madness derivative of the “woke” movement (of which I am also a victim), should I still be surprised that someone cannot encourage people to boycott some products, and that a famous economist and politician is restricted from entering Germany?
I guess not.
A last case
But there is one more case I want to tell you about, in the context of the principle that even people who are wrong should be able to express themselves! Because there should be no Ministry of Truth.
A Brussels gathering of hard-right, nationalist European politicians was disrupted on Tuesday after police moved in to try to force its shutdown.
Officers were acting upon an order issued by the mayor of the Saint-Josse Ten Noode region of the Belgian capital on public safety grounds.
The move has been criticised by Belgium’s Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, who described the police’s intervention as “unacceptable.”
“Municipal autonomy is a cornerstone of our democracy but can never overrule the Belgian constitution guaranteeing the freedom of speech and peaceful assembly since 1830,” De Croo said.
“Banning political meetings is unconstitutional, full stop,” the Prime Minister added.
The likes of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, French far-right candidate Eric Zemmour and former Polish Prime Minsiter Mateusz Morawiecki were all due to speak at the two-day National Conservatism (NatCon) conference in Brussels, which had struggled to secure a venue willing to host them in the Belgian capital.
Brexit Party founder Nigel Farage was addressing the crowds at the Claridge venue in the Saint-Josse Ten Noode neighbourhood when police arrived with an order to close down the event around 12.30 CET on Tuesday.
A Euronews reporter was on the ground as a police officer told the event organisers that “the authorities have decided to shut down the event,” and that he was present on-site to enforce that decision. The officer added that he had a three-page document outlining the grounds for the closure, which had been requested by the local mayor.
The National Conservatives are an alliance of politicians, public figures and scholars typically associated with the populist right that espouse both conservative and nationalist values, known for their strong Eurosceptic and anti-immigration stance. … Emir Kir, the mayor of the Saint-Josse Ten Noode neighbourhood of Brussels, confirmed on social media platform X that he had ordered a halt to the event to “guarantee public safety.”
“The far right is not welcome,” Kir said.
Well, freedom of speech is not welcome in Europe, either.
One final note
I’m afraid that my posts about the Israel-Gaza crisis are a bit confusing, especially as most of them have more contents in the comments than in the posts themselves, and the search feature of the blog doesn’t cover the comments. Whoever would take the time to examine those comments would find, among the links to various articles, dozens and dozens of links to interviews and documentaries on YouTube. Don’t ignore them.
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