Germany: Covid-19 Triggers New Wave of Anti-Semitism

by Soeren Kern • February 24, 2021 at 5:00 am

German police reported a total of 2,275 anti-Semitic hate crimes — an average of six per day — in 2020, according to preliminary data provided by the federal government. The tally represents a more than 10% increase over the number of anti-Semitic crimes reported in 2019... Police were able to identify 1,367 suspects — but only five individuals were ultimately arrested.
It remains unclear why so few perpetrators have faced legal consequences for their crimes, especially when government officials repeatedly claim that fighting anti-Semitism is a top priority. A reason may be that it is politically incorrect to identify the true suspects.
German police, possibly under orders from political authorities, systematically assign unsolved anti-Semitic hate crimes to the far right.
"Why are the majority of anti-Semitic acts attributed to 'right-wing' German perpetrators? One can see a political motive behind this — growing anti-Semitism can be used politically as a weapon 'against the right.'" — Tichys Einblick.
"There has been criticism from experts for a long time that the allocation of the vast majority of anti-Semitism cases to right-wing extremist perpetrators is incorrect and that other groups of perpetrators, for example from Islamist and other Muslim circles, are given too little attention." — Die Welt.
"Even today, anti-Semitism is not just a phenomenon of the right-wing extremist fringes. It reaches into the middle of our society." — German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass.

Some German anti-lockdown protesters have trivialized the Holocaust by putting themselves on the same level as the Jews persecuted by the Nazi regime and by referring to themselves as resistance fighters opposing an allegedly undemocratic government. Some protesters have claimed that the government-imposed quarantines are equivalent to Nazi-era prison camps. Pictured: A demonstrator holds a poster comparing the Citizen Protection Law of Chancellor Angela Merkel's government with Adolf Hitler's 1933 Decree for the Protection of People and State, as police disperse a protest against government measures to limit the spread of coronavirus, on November 18, 2020 in Berlin. (Photo by Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images)

The number of anti-Semitic hate crimes in Germany surged to a two-decade high in 2020, according to new statistics released by the German government. Anti-Semitism in Germany has been steadily growing in recent years, fueled in part by far-left anti-Israel activists and by mass migration from the Muslim world. The problem is now being exacerbated by the Coronavirus pandemic, which far-right conspiracy theorists are blaming on both Jews and Israel.

German police reported a total of 2,275 anti-Semitic hate crimes — an average of six per day — in 2020, according to preliminary data provided by the federal government. The tally represents a more than 10% increase over the number of anti-Semitic crimes reported in 2019, itself a record-breaking year for such offenses. The official numbers represent only the crimes reported to the police; the actual number of incidents is presumably much bigger.

Continue Reading Article