Europe

At the sit-in I attended in February 2024 against the bloody propaganda peddled by Axel Springer, which participates in illegal investments in settlements in the West Bank, I was made to watch a policeman choke my wife until the blood drained from her face and she struggled to breathe. She was then accused of assault and resistance in a country whose police force has been under years-long scrutiny by Amnesty International, other human rights organizations and various bodies of the United Nations for widespread excessive brutality, corruption, abduction of minors and removal of freedom of expression and assembly.

In these moments, my line of vision was replaced by a portal of time, melted between today and the 1940s, flooded by fury and the chill of fascism, as I sat on the same ground where my family’s blood is less than a century dry. As my wife was dragged away by her feet by the German cops, I ran after her, screaming in panic, the last thing I saw being her red face with the white-knuckled hands of a German police officer wrapped around her neck. As I tried to reach her, another cop tried to cut me off. I grabbed the cop’s wrist, snapped her arm to her side, and smacked her square in the face.

Thereafter, I was tackled by 4 or 5 officers, pulled out of the demonstration and quickly went into a state of catatonic shock, thinking that the German state could have just killed my wife. We were locked in a police van and thankfully reunited in the next hour or so, then thrown into jail for 6-7 hours and repeatedly denied the opportunity to call a lawyer. (This is, sickeningly, a resoundingly tame breach of German law as far as Berlin is concerned. The Berlin police are a force that enjoys weekly, sometimes daily, savage attacks on demonstrators – as well as the medics who attempt to reach them to provide care – until they are bloodied on the sidewalks or beaten unconscious behind closed van doors for sport.)

I make no apology for the blind rage that consumed me in response to this psychological, generational and institutionalized torment. My and my community’s participation in an act of entirely justified, legitimate civil disobedience should not have been necessary, save for the genocidal complicity of the German state in the extermination campaign in Palestine. I am not sorry for responding with rage to watching and experiencing violent domination by unreconstructed Zionist police officers in the face of the annihilation and slaughter of our siblings in Palestine. Rage is the righteous defense of those left with nothing else to reach for but their own humanity.

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.