Germany: Repression at pro-Palestine-rally
featured image: same banner as at the rally in Bremen, Germany, seen at a demonstration in Hamburg, Germany. Source: demvolkedienen.org
We hereby publish an unofficial translation from Germany, on recent attacks of the State against solidarity with the Palestinian cause:
Bremen: Repression at Palestine-demonstration
On December 17, in Bremen, a demonstration to support the people of Palestine, which faces war-crimes and mass-murder, aiming at annihilating it, took place once again. As long as this injustice continues, the voices raised against it will not be silenced, as the demonstration has shown. As eye-witnesses report the police of the social-democratic governed city of Bremen strives evermore for repression of different kind. As reported two participants inside the demonstration were cornered and identity-checked by the police, violating the law of assembly (the assembly was not suspended and therefore it remained under the protection of the law of assembly), and they were charged with allegations of “Volksverhetzung” (a law against stirring up the people, usually used against racists and fascist because of antisemitism; translators note) – degraded to an extreme arbitrary flexible law for the repression. The pretense was a banner reading “It is right to rebel!” in German and Arabic. Banners with the same slogan appeared in the past weeks in Bremen and other cities, since the struggle of the people of Palestine reached a new level, again and again at demonstrations and other circumstances.
In the past weeks the German State using §130 of the criminal law, the so-called “Volksverhetzung”, unfettered a series of repression against whole sections of the German population. Originally the paragraph was used when Nazis shouted racist or antisemitic slogans or denied or relativized the Holocaust. But since the foundation of the FRG this paragraph was modified and sharpened around seven times. Just last year, a massive change and extension was sanctioned, even some constitutional-lawyers doubt the lawfulness of these changes. Meanwhile, according to the new version, “public accordance, denial or harsh relativization of genocide, crimes against humanity and war-crimes” could be charged. This explains why representatives of the current government were very quick declaring the counter-offensive of the Palestinian resistance in early October as supposed war-crimes, but the same way miscalling all the massacres and real war-crimes (e.g. collective punishment, usage of banned weapons etc.) committed by Israel as “self-defense”. This way §130 turned into an “anti-international-solidarity”-law, a law directed against the liberation struggle of the peoples of the world. It fits that the ancestor of §130 in the constitution of the Reich from 1871 was called “class-struggle-paragraph”, directed against “stirring up the class”. This continuity is shown clearly nowadays. In the past week several house-raids based on “Volksverhetzung” have been conducted, the latest on Friday.
