In March 2008, former chancellor Angela Merkel uttered an innocuous word that fifteen and a half years later would become the moral justification for two successive German governments to aid and abet "Israel’s" war of extermination in Gaza, occupied Palestine: “Staatsräson”, meaning “reason of state.”

Singing revisionist praises to the Zionist project in front of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, she derived from Germany’s “special historical responsibility” for the Jewish holocaust in Europe a moral imperative to safeguard “Israel’s security.”

“[T]his historical responsibility is part of the reason of state of my country,” Merkel proclaimed, thus retroactively birthing a nomenclature for decades of (West) German diplomatic and military support for "Israel’s" brutal history of ethnic cleansing, military occupation and apartheid.

As "Israel’s" genocide by bombs, bullets and forced starvation intensifies and the IOF is set to invade Gaza City in what Palestinian Youth Movement describes as a “campaign to bring the entirety of the Strip under the total subjugation of the Zionist army”, chancellor Friedrich Merz reiterated his government’s continued support for the Israeli regime in a TV interview earlier this month.

Weighted knuckle-gloves

Nowhere is Germany’s enforcement of its über-Zionist Staatsräson more visible than on the streets of the capital Berlin, home to the largest Palestinian community in Europe, where the city-state’s police have gained unparalleled notoriety for their brutal crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests.

Every other day, deeply disturbing video footage of aggressive officers in riot gear manhandling peaceful anti-genocide protesters with a reckless abandon that only a culture of impunity can embolden is posted to social media by those who are meticulously documenting Germany’s post-October 7 free-fall from a minimum-standard democracy to a quasi police state.

In yet another scandalous escalation of Berlin’s thuggish state brutality against pro-Palestine protesters, shocking social media footage shows police beating an Irish activist bloody at a civil disobedience action on August 28 against "Israel’s" deliberate killings of Palestinian journalists.

 

 

 

 

 

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Far from ensuring public order and safety, as should be policing’s purpose in any civilised country, Berlin’s badge-wearing goon squads violently arrest non-violent people of conscience, be they men, women, children, or disabled, simply for exercising their right to freedom of speech.

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The police’s confrontative combat gear, which includes weighted-knuckle gloves, is indicative of their violent mandate and penchant for hooliganism. Prohibited in some jurisdictions and classified as dangerous weapons, the gloves used by Berlin police are filled with quartz sand and can inflict severe injuries.

In a recent aggravated battery case involving an individual who used this type of glove to beat his victim, Germany’s highest appellate court ruled that twenty blows with weighted-knuckle gloves are indicative of attempted murder, reports the news website Legal Tribune Online.

Lawless law-enforcement

Despite Germany’s Staatsräson being a political philosophy with no legal responsibilities arising from it, Berlin police continue to interpret it as the law of the land in their nihilistic and racist fight to crush public opposition to "Israel’s" German-backed annihilation of the Palestinian people.

The German insanity of treating the traditional liberation slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as antisemitic hate speech or even as a trademarked symbol of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation in Germany, is a case in point.

Despite numerous court rulings that say it is not a criminal offence to express these words in speech and writing, police in Berlin continue to arrest people who do so.

Two instances illustrate just how far post-October 7 policing has gone from enforcing laws to breaking them and even making them up, thus violating the separation of powers that distinguishes democracies from autocracies in the state’s attempts to criminalise anti-Zionism.

On July 30, prominent human rights defender Yasmin Acar was acquitted by a Berlin court for using the slogan “From the river to the sea.” The presiding judge even praised Acar’s political activism as “highly esteemed.”

This did not stop police from arresting supporters who had gathered in front of the courthouse for chanting the exact same slogan.

This absurdity is not accidental. Unfazed by the court’s ruling, the Berliner Polizei doubled down in a widely condemned public service announcement posted on X ten days later, implying that they would not obey the law in the context of Palestine solidarity.

“The slogan ‘From the river to the sea’ is deemed a criminal offence by Berlin’s public prosecutor’s office. Please refrain from this expression. We are obligated to prosecute crimes and take appropriate police-related measures,” the statement read.

In functioning democracies, prosecutors are supposed to make decisions based on legal standards, not act as self-appointed law-makers. But Germany is no functioning democracy anymore: Fanatic adherence to "Israel", even as it perpetrates a colonial genocide which knows no red lines other than the gleefully spilled blood of native Palestinians, has seen Germany swiftly regress toward its authoritarian ways of yore.

As for Berlin’s uniformed street-brawlers who make up the lowest echelons of the police hierarchy and are thuggishly enforcing the red herring of “Israeli security” at Palestine liberation protests while "Israel" wipes Palestinians off the face of Gaza’s once fertile earth, their gross misconduct shows just how far the already oppressive institution of policing has gone rogue, its behaviour more apropos of a criminal organisation than of a law-enforcement agency.

In light of this post-October 7 hyper-metamorphosis, the “Ganz Berlin hasst die Polizei!” (All of Berlin hates the police) chants protesters strike up whenever another one of theirs is brutalised by Staatsräson’s cowardly foot soldiers, have become the relatable soundtrack of resistance to German complicity in "Israel’s" genocide in Gaza and to the reawakening of fascist muscle memory at home.