The Israeli Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor has urged the German government to ban PFLP front group Samidoun from fund-raising in Germany. Likud MK Ariel Kallner and NGO Im Tirtzu have criticized German government funding for anti-Israel NGOs and for defending terrorists in Israeli court. Now it seems the German government is funding an “anti-Hate Speech NGO” that defends anti-Semites in German courts. What’s the story?
In 2016, German advertising manager Gerald Hensel began a boycott campaign against the conservative news site “Axis of Good“, which was co-founded by prominent German-Jewish intellectual Henryk Broder, who was born 1946 in Polish Katowice to Holocaust survivors.
Hensel lost his job at the leading German advertising agency “Scholz & Friends” due to the controversy around his boycott campaign. So he went on to a lucrative career at taxpayer-funded “Non-Governmental” Organizations fighting “Hate Speech” online.
In May 2017 he founded “Hate Aid” with the support of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). “Twitter Files” journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger have identified ISD as one of the main players in the so-called “censorship industrial complex”, which they say is endangering free speech world-wide, as governments outsource unconstitutional censorship to so called “Non-Governmental” Organizations, often with ties to the anti-Israel Open Society Foundations.
In 2018, Anna-Lena von Hodenberg from Soros-funded activist group Campact joined Hensel in running HateAid. Campact received €150,000 from Open Society Initiative for Europe in 2021 to “support HateAid to fight hate online and hold haters accountable.”
On its website, HateAid purports to fight anti-Semitism and “Doxxing” (revealing someone’s personal information online against their will, such as when using an alias). However, HateAid is itself closely tied to several persons themselves accused of anti-Semitism and Doxxing.
In Autumn 2022, for example, HateAid financed a lawsuit brought against Twitter by controversial Baden-Württemberg “anti-Semitism commissioner” Michael Blume. A non-Jew who claims to fight anti-Semitism for the southwest German state, Blume has engaged in a running Twitter battle with several prominent conservative Jewish critics, including Arutz Sheva journalist Benjamin Weinthal, German Jewish activist Malca Goldstein-Wolf and Henryk Broder’s “Axis of Good”, supported by an online hate mob which data analyst Eoin Lenihan wrote about on Arutz Sheva in 2022.
Blume made the 2021 “Global Anti-Semitism Top 10 List” compiled by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. According to a lawsuit by lawyer Joachim Steinhöfel at district court in Hamburg, it is permissible to refer to Michael Blume as “anti-Semitic”.
HateAid also states on the website that it is fighting so-called Doxxing. However, HateAid has been working closely with left-wing journalist Lars Wienand since 2019, who has built a career around doxxing people he disagrees with, and has repeatedly worked with Palestinian PFLP terror group representatives in Germany.
In 2019, Wienand doxxed the Christian Syrian asylum seeker, podcaster and Bundestag employee Kevork Almassian, who was subsequently allegedly attacked with a knife by a Palestinian Arab on the street in Berlin. Wienand then defended his attacker together with Palestinian “human rights” Lawyer Nadija Samour, who has close ties to the PFLP terror group and their front group Samidoun. Samour also defended Palestinian Arab terrorist Rasmea Odeh when she was kicked out of Germany, but is still a member of the City of Berlin’s Migration Council.
HateAid has its Berlin headquarters in the former HQ of the East German dissident movement, the “House of Democracy and Human Rights,” which is also home to Nadija Samour’s office, as well as anti-Israel NGOs Jewish Voice for Peace and International League for Human Rights.
HateAid received €344,000 in 2021 and €88,000 in 2022 from the German Justice Ministry. According to a post by HateAid, it was €600,000 in 2023. Now, HateAid announced the Justice Ministry is canceling its funding for 2024.
HateAid also received €1,564,218 in 2021-2023 from the Family Ministry. According to the Ministry of Family Affairs, it will not be decided until September whether HateAid 2024 will continue to be funded.
HateAid seemingly only backs left-wing causes, as far as its website goes. I wrote HateAid to ask whether they ever support conservatives who are victims of “Hate Speech” online. They have not yet answered.
The German government is technically prohibited by law from funding politically one-sided NGOs, a law it now ignores seemingly at will. Thus the German government seems to only fund left–wing NGOs in Israel which are trying to overthrow the government, and we have never noticed it funding patriotic or conservative Israeli NGOs.
The Justice Ministry, which is run by the centrist, pro-Israel Free Democrats, is seemingly award of this contradiction: “We subject all grants to regular review to ensure they comply with the Neutrality Clause, including HateAid”, the Justice Ministry wrote. We await the results of said review.
How the German Government funds Online Hate and Antisemitism | ערוץ 7 (israelnationalnews.com) / Collin McMahon