Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor slammed a rally of mainly five hundred German Muslims who on Saturday blasted calls for the obliteration of Israel and Jews in Berlin.
Prosor wrote on Twitter in German: “These idiots abuse Germany’s freedoms and unreservedly call for the annihilation of Israel and the Jews. They flout democratic values in [Gemany], not only crossing every possible red line, but also ‘spitting in the brown [fascist] well from which they drink.’”
The reportedly antisemitic march unfolded in two Berlin neighborhoods with a large Muslim presence, Kreuzberg and Neukölln, and centered on the current controversy on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Palestinians barricaded themselves in al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in violation of the rules of the religious compound.
The organization democ posted a video of the antisemitic rally and wrote participants are chanting “death to Jews” and “death to Israel” and yelling “antisemitic slogans and glorifying terrorism.”
The German Jewish expert on antisemitism, Henryk M. Broder, wrote last week that Berlin’s commissioner to combat antisemitism, Samuel Salzborn, seems to have misguided priorities in the city-state’s fight against antisemitism. Broder wrote in his column for the large daily broadsheet, Die Welt, that Salzborn spent the last two years largely focused on renaming streets that had been originally named after antisemites.
Germany’s system of antisemitism commissioners to combat Jew-hatred has been plagued by scandals. The Simon Wiesenthal Center urged commissioner Gerhard Urlich from the state of Schleswig-Holstein to resign due to his alleged antisemitic sermons against Israel while serving as Bishop of the Protestant Church for northern Germany. A court in Hamburg declared that the commissioner for the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg, Michael Blume, can be termed antisemitic due to his attacks on German Jews and one of Israel’s Zionist heroes, Orde Wingate, a founder of the IDF.
Martin Arieh Rudolph, chairman of the Jewish community in Bamberg, Bavaria, issued a public letter last month, criticizing the head of the Green Party in Baden-Württemberg’s parliament, Andreas Schwarz, as well as Blume, for their failure to tackle Islamic-animated antisemitism in the state. Rudolph lambasted Blume for his alleged incompetence.