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BERLIN POLICE RAID & SHUT DOWN PALESTINIAN CONFERENCE YANIS
VAROUFAKIS BANNED FROM GERMANY  
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Amy Goodman interviews Yanis Varoufakis
April 16, 2024
Democracy Now!
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_ As Germany intensifies its crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices, we
speak with Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, one of the
planned speakers at a conference in Berlin last weekend that was
forcibly shut down by police. _

Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, A prominent British-Palestinian surgeon who
volunteered in Gaza hospitals during the first weeks of the
Israel-Hamas war said he was denied entry to Germany Friday to take
part in a pro-Palestinian conference, AP photo/Hussein Malla file

 

As Germany intensifies its crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices, we
speak with Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, one of the
planned speakers at a conference in Berlin last weekend that was
forcibly shut down by police. The Palestine Congress was scheduled to
be held for three days, but police stormed the venue as the first
panelist spoke. Germany’s Interior Ministry had also banned some
conference speakers from even entering the country, including
Varoufakis, the Palestinian British surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah and the
Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta. “This is not about
protecting Jewish lives and Jews from antisemitism. It’s all about
protecting the right of Israel to commit any war crime of its
choice,” says Varoufakis.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: As the official death toll in Gaza nears 34,000, we begin
today’s show looking at Germany’s intensifying crackdown on
pro-Palestinian voices. On Friday, police in Berlin shut down a
three-day Palestinian conference just moments after it began. In
addition, Germany’s Interior Ministry banned several speakers from
even entering Germany or addressing the Palestine Congress conference
remotely. The Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta opened the
conference, but his remarks over a live stream were cut short when
Berlin police raided the conference site.

SALMAN ABU SITTA: We have never seen before these daily scenes, one
massacre after another, homes demolished over the heads of the
occupants, bodies pulled from under the rubble, surviving child with
all his family killed. We have never seen before people deliberately
denied food and water, children starved to death and killed when
rushing to get food. We have never seen before all means of life
systematically destroyed — hospitals, clinics, schools,
universities, libraries, ancient monuments, mosques, churches,
universities, cemeteries, bakeries, apartment build—

CONFERENCE ORGANIZER 1: Live stream, we ask you — so, for all
people on the live stream, the police is standing right in front of
us, and they ask us to stop the video.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZER 2: They are — they’re even trying to take
away this microphone!

AMY GOODMAN: That was a live stream capturing the moment when German
police raided and shut down the Palestine Congress conference in
Berlin just minutes after it began.

On Friday, German authorities also detained and questioned the
Palestinian British surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who had flown into
Germany to speak at the Palestine Congress. Dr. Abu-Sittah, who is the
nephew of Salman Abu Sitta, who we just watched interrupted, spoke to
Middle East Eye after he was barred entry.

DR. GHASSAN ABU-SITTAH: Upon arrival, I was stopped at the passport
office. I was then escorted down to the basement of the airport, where
I was questioned for around three-and-a-half hours. At the end of
three-and-a-half hours, I was told that I will not be allowed to enter
German soil, that I will — and that this ban will last the whole of
April. And not just that, that if I were to try to link up my Zoom or
FaceTime with the conference, even if I was outside Germany, or I were
to send a video of my lecture to the conference in Berlin, then that
would constitute a breach of German law and that I would endanger
myself to having a fine or even up to a year of prison.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Palestinian British surgeon Dr. Ghassan
Abu-Sittah, who had flown into Germany to speak at the Palestine
Congress but was denied entry to Germany. German authorities defended
the decision to shut down the Palestinian conference, citing German
laws against so-called hate speech. When Dr. Abu-Sittah came out of
Gaza, we interviewed him, and you can go to democracynow.org to see
that conversation
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We’re joined right now by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis
Varoufakis. He was also banned from entering Germany and barred from
engaging in any political activity there. Varoufakis is a leader of
the pan-European progressive movement DiEM25, which helped organize
the Palestine Congress.

Welcome to _Democracy Now!_ Yanis Varoufakis is the former finance
minister of Greece. His most recent book is _Technofeudalism_; _What
Killed Capitalism_ is the subtitle. Yanis Varoufakis, can you explain
what happened in Berlin?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: To give you a vignette, Amy, of the absurdity, which
would have been funny if it wasn’t so tragic, of what went on,
during the morning, just before the police burst in, as you described
so accurately, there was a young man who — an attendee of the
congress, a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace, which together with
the MERA25, DiEM25, we co-organized the Palestine Congress. And this
young man, as he approached the police cordon — there were
two-and-a-half thousand policemen preventing our attendees from
attending the congress. Anyway, he was approaching, and he had a
little placard that he had written with his own hand, and it read
“Jews against genocide.” And for that, he was apprehended,
arrested, manhandled. And while the police were manhandling him, he
turned around humorfully, or half-jokingly, and said to them, “Would
it have been all right with you if it said 'Jews in favor of
genocide'?” at which point, of course, they were far more angered
and manhandled him even more fiercely. I’m conveying this to you,
Amy, and to our listeners and viewers because this shows the absurdity
of the whole thing.

The police entered the building, the venue, a few minutes before I was
due to deliver my talk via video link. As a result, what I did was I
recorded my talk, and I posted it online from Greece, from Athens,
where I’m even now. And the next day, I found out that a ban, as you
put it, was slapped on me by the German authorities, a ban that harks
back to laws against Nazism, a law that has only been used recently
for ISIS operatives. That was used against me.

Allow me just to briefly say that the rationale behind this is the
Germans’ _Staatsräson_, the logic or rationale of the German state,
to protect Jews, which is of excellent rationale. I wish every state
had it, each one of us had it, to protect Jews. Except that this is
not about protecting Jewish lives and Jews from antisemitism. It’s
all about protecting the right of Israel to commit any war crime of
its choice, in the final analysis.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Yanis Varoufakis, the federal interior minister
of Germany not only applauded the police action, but she described the
event, the conference, as an Islamist conference. What do you think of
that characterization of the Palestine Congress?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Isn’t it remarkably farcical that our Jewish
comrades who helped us co-organize, put together this congress have
been dismissed as Islamists? Let me be clear: There were no Islamists
in this. And in any case, the reason why our congress has been so,
let’s say, unpopular with the German political system is because the
German political spectrum — and this is not just the government;
this is also the opposition, including some members of the left, I say
with deep regret, some of my former comrades — they insist on
equating acts of terror, atrocities against civilians — which every
soundly thinking person in the world should condemn, and I condemn, of
course, and so do all the organizers of this congress — equating,
however, violence against civilians with a principled resistance to an
apartheid state which is part of a project of systematically
ethnically cleansing the population of the Palestinians. That is what
they do not want.

They do not want a congress like ours, especially one that includes
progressive Jews. That is the main thing that they detested, that they
were Jewish demonstrators, Jewish activists, Jewish intellectuals,
Jewish speakers with us, with one voice, saying one thing, one thing
alone: equal political rights, civil liberties, from the Jordan River
to the Mediterranean Sea. I’m neither a Jew nor a Palestinian. I
don’t have a view as to how this will be accomplished. But I think
every single human person on this planet has an obligation — not a
right, an obligation — to demand, from the river to the sea, equal
political rights. And the German political establishment does not want
to listen to this. They simply want to associate anyone who opposes
Netanyahu’s government, or any government in Israel that perpetrates
genocide, essentially, to be associated, to be stigmatized as an
antisemite, which, by the way, it is the antisemite’s greatest dream
come true.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, Germany has also banned the display of the
Palestinian flag. How do you think the suppression of pro-Palestinian
protest in Germany — has that spread to other countries in Europe?
What’s your sense of what’s going on throughout the rest of the
continent?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Not formally. The Palestinian flag has not been
banned formally. But I can tell you that even here in Greece, anyone
who is sporting the colors of Palestine walking on the street risks
— seriously risks — being assaulted by ultrarightists, being
arrested, apprehended by police for some pretext. The bourgeois,
liberal, democratic rights and principles have all been sacrificed on
the altar of enabling Israel to complete the genocide which is
carrying out — that it’s carrying out not just in Gaza but, as we
heard before in the news bulletin, in East Jerusalem and in the West
Bank. In the same way that in the 1930s we all had an obligation, a
duty, an ethical commitment — or should have had one — to support
Jews and to show our solidarity to the Jewish people who were
suffering from the Nazi regime, from the Croat Nazi regime, from the
Greek fascists and so on, we have a duty today to end the genocide in
ancient Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: Yanis Varoufakis, as a former finance minister, a vocal
critic of austerity, how do you perceive Germany’s position on the
war on Gaza in light of its significant arms sales to Israel? I mean,
you have Nicaragua taking Germany to the International Court of
Justice, saying that by providing weapons for Israel to carry out this
war, that it’s engaging in crimes against humanity or war crimes.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, Amy, it’s interesting and, I think, not
coincidental that on the Monday before the invasion, the incursion by
the German police into our Palestinian Congress in the venue in
Berlin, I happened to be in Milano, in Italy, in Milan. And I was
giving a speech to a gathering of hundreds of financial analysts, the
top, the _crème de la crème_ of European financial experts. And in
it, unbeknownst to me of what was going to happen later on that week,
I outlined dire prognostications about the long-term damage inflicted
upon Germany and Germany’s social economy by decades of austerity,
combined with impressive largesse finances, what you call in the
United States quantitative easing. And, you know, I was really
surprised, because here I am, a lefty, addressing a gathering of
hundreds of financial experts. Those hard-nosed financiers actually
applauded me. And afterwards, they came to me, and they said that they
agree with what I was saying. And I have to tell you that when that
happens, I get really worried, because if these hard-nosed financiers,
many of them German, came to me and they said that they agreed with my
prognosis that the German business model is kaput, is in dire straits,
I start feeling very uncomfortable.

So, I think there is a connection, because here you have a political
system in Germany which understands in its bones that the economic
dominance that the German industrial model had within the European
Union for so many decades is now waning. And when such a regime feels
threatened, feels that its economic prowess and authority and
dominance is waning, it’s really very easy for that to translate
itself into movements that essentially fan the flames of increasing,
and increasingly farcical, authoritarianism.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United
States License [[link removed]].

 

* Germany; Anti-Semitism; Palestine Congress; Yanis Varoufakis
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