Germany threatens Electronic Intifada founder with jail for talking about Palestine

Oppressive pro-Israel regime that has been beating up peaceful anti-genocide protesters tries to intimidate pro-Palestine journalist

The German government, which has been violently attempting – and failing – to suppress protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including beating up some of the many Jewish human rights protesters helping to organise the demos and marches, has threatened Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abunimah with prison and a large fine for speaking out about Palestinian freedom and human rights.

Journalist Abunimah was scheduled to speak via Zoom to the Palestine Conference in Exile, organised by supporters of Palestinian rights in Germany, but the German regime sent him a ‘legal order’ not to do so. He ignored it – and in a withering speech laid out his damning indictment of Germany’s contempt for human rights and its complicity in Israel’s genocide, as well as mapping its history of supporting the wrong side in genocides as well as, of course, committing the Holocaust of Jews, Roma and other ‘undesirable’ groups.

But Abunimah did not stop there. He also listed some of the ways in which Germany had not ‘de-nazified’ after the Second World War and even built its intelligence service from a group run and largely staffed by former nazis – and he called for leading German politicians to be tried for complicity in genocide for their support for Israel’s mass murder in Gaza. Below are some excerpts from his speech:

Earlier today I received anotice from the German authorities informing me that I’m prohibited from speaking to you today and threatening me with criminal penalties including fines and up to one year in prison if I defy this order…

…Obviously since I’m in the United States I’m beyond thejurisdiction of the Berlin regime, I assume that they could still open a criminal proceeding against me in Germany and try to harass me in thatmanner but whether I were in physically in Germany or not my response would be exactly the same: I do not take orders from a regime that is an accomplice in genocide and I take inspiration from the words of Martin Luther King Jr who wrote in 1963 while he was jailed in Birmingham Alabama for civil disobedience against the white supremacist regime here in the United States. He wrote the following and I quote “There are just laws and there are unjust laws I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws, one has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws; conversely one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws” …and of course I take inspiration from that…

…as we all know the jackbooted thugs of the Berlin regime raided the conference, cut off the electricity and shut it down in the most brutal and authoritarian manner. They imposed an entry ban on the great Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who had spent 43 days treating victims of the German-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza, but the Berlin regime stopped him at the airport and deported him… Of course I’m not the only one to face this fascistic repression from the regime in Berlin and I’m aware that others face even more unjust persecution by these undemocratic thugs.

I want to express my solidarity with everyone in Germany being persecuted by this regime, beaten in the streets and silenced in the press and in universities when you speak out against the German-backed Zionist genocide. I want particularly to express my solidarity with Palestinians and their Jewish comrades in Germany being persecuted by the authorities for standing up for Palestinian rights and liberation. Germany is a country today where Jews are targeted arrested beaten and banned for speaking out against the totalitarian racist fascist genocidal ideology of Zionism, it is a country where Palestinians face state-sanctioned hatred and incitement simply for being Palestinian; it is a shocking and painful reality but I want you to know that people all over the world stand with you and we look forward to the day when the darkness lifts from over Germany and Europe and we witness the dawn of democracy and freedom….

…There is the myth which you are now no doubt all taught in your schools that after the war there was a process of denazification and uh that Germany got rid of its past and built a future based on democracy, human rights, tolerance and European integration. Of course any person who came from Turkey or Morocco or even southern Europe during the 1950s until the 1970s to provide the labour for the so-called Wirstschaftswunder (‘economic miracle’) would have known very well that Germany never purged itself of deep and pervasive racism, only that the identity of the targets of this age-old hatred had changed.

But let me focus on the so-called denazification which was in fact very shortlived and very shallow. Very quickly after the war the United Statesbrought many top Nazis back into the government of West Germany in the context of the Cold War against the the new enemy, the Soviet Union… perhaps most notoriously Kurt Kiesinger, who was Chancellor of West Germany in the 1960s, had been an active Nazi during the Hitler government, this was revealed by the journalist Beate Klarsfeld who showed how Kiesinger had close ties to Hitler’s foreign minister Von Ribbentropp and to Joseph Goebbels the head of the German government’s propaganda Ministry…

…many of the institutions of modern Germany were founded by or with Nazis. The first president of the German intelligence service the BNR was Reinhard Gehlen who worked for the Nazi regime for the entire period from 1933 to 1944 and was the head of Hitler’s anti-soviet intelligence organisation. Following the war Gehlen continued to operate the so-called ‘Gehlen Organisation’, a secret anti-communist organisation closely affiliated with the CIA. The Gehlen organisation was made up of many senior Nazis. In 1956 the government of West Germany formally turned the Gehlen Organisation into the BND… and hired many veterans of Hitler’s SS and SD…

[Because of their complicity in the Gaza genocide] I therefore use this platform to call for Annalena Baerbock and Olaf Schultz among others to be investigated charged and tried under the genocide convention for incitement to genocide along with their other wilful and knowing criminal acts of complicity and participation in the ongoing Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people.

We must also note here that the regime in Berlin is intervening at the international criminal court to block arrest warrants for the genocidal war criminals Benjamin Netanyahu and his war minister Yoav Gallant. This is particularly perverse since the ICC is born out of the legacy of the Nuremberg trials which brought some of the Nazi leaders to justice after World War II. Of course I say some since the others were given senior positions in the West German government.

…When Germany sends weapons to Israel today it is to perpetrate genocide, to advance settler-colonialism, racial supremacy and oppression. What a travesty it is to claim that these horrible crimes are being done as any sort of atonement for Germany’s crimes during the Holocaust. By supporting another genocide, this time against Palestinians, Germany is spitting on the memories of the Jews it murdered during the Holocaust by trying to criminalise support for Palestinian Liberation. Germany aims to legitimise oppression by spreading atrocity propaganda and lies. Germany is assisting and attempting to justify the extermination of Palestinian men women and children but history is not on Germany’s side and it’s it is not on the side of Zionism. The world is rising up in solidarity with the just Palestinian struggle for liberation and for a future where Palestine is a decolonised land of freedom, justice and equality for all who live in it, regardless of religion or ethnicity. Nothing is more certain than this: from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

Watch Abunimah’s full speech below:

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