Amid the unfolding scenes of horror following "Israel’s" terrorist attacks on Lebanon last week, prominent German Zionists did not waste time in taking to social media and voicing their real-time joy and glee at the carnage caused by the controlled explosions of booby-trapped communication devices targeting members of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon - Hezbollah and countless civilians.

“Next level fight against terrorism!” cheered Ulf Poschardt, the editor-in-chief of WeltN24, part of the right-wing Axel Springer SE media company, on X, while Jan Fleischhauer, a former columnist for legacy news magazine Der Spiegel whose self-promoting disposition is best described by the saying: “Seize the day with the unearned confidence of a mediocre white man” made light of the fact that many male victims were injured in the lower abdomen, mocking them in clumsy English with the words “Blow of the balls.”

Volker Beck, a former Green Party member and current president of the pro-Zionist German-Israeli society (DIG), put out a tweet featuring two vile memes, one of a pager displaying the message: “Your 72 virgins are waiting” and the other showing a masked man in military gear holding carrier pigeons in his arms, titled “Hezbollah’s new Head of Communications.” Beck himself captioned his mockery of what can only be described as Lebanon’s October 7 with the words “My favorites".

Apart from delighting in the physical and emotional pain of others, these vulgar posts glorify acts of terrorism and potential war crimes and therefore constitute prosecutable criminal acts under Germany’s penal code. It appears they have since been deleted by their respective users.

Rarely have I come across such unabashedly racist manifestations of misanthropy and moral degeneracy, emanating from people who most likely view themselves as humanists and – in the case of Beck – even anti-racist. “Look at how these disgusting German so-called journalists and lobbyists are making fun of the suffering in Lebanon” wrote a Palestinian friend and colleague who had forwarded me Beck’s Islamophobic post.

There were so many of these depraved expressions of unbridled Schadenfreude from Germany’s so-called intelligentsia in the immediate aftermath of the attacks which maimed thousands of people, hundreds of whom are in critical condition, that the cat is now once and for all out of the bag. Not historical “guilt”, but virulent anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia have been the true motivation behind Germany's ironclad support for "Israel’s" almost year-long war on Gaza, which the Zionist regime has recently escalated to the occupied West Bank and now to the entirety of Lebanon.

In the words of the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention which released a particularly candid statement of condemnation after the attacks: “Israel is a genocidal state that is completely out of control and supported by a Western world that is too racist and Islamophobic to care.”

“Too racist and Islamophobic to care” particularly applies to Beck, a queer, die-hard Zionist who has a history of pro-"Israel" pinkwashing and once compared a hijab-wearing Palestinian woman featured on the cover of the supplement magazine in the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT to Adolf Hitler. According to the Berlin-based organization Palestine Speaks, Beck has “repeatedly made racist statements which glorify violence in relation to Gaza and Palestinians” going on to say that the “trivialization, endorsement and denial of a genocide and the support for collective punishment of an entire population by means of starvation are criminal offenses.”

The day before "Israel’s" heinous attack on Lebanon, which failed to elicit a single word of condemnation from "Israel’s" two largest military backers, the US and Germany, Beck was invited to speak at Berlin’s Technische Universität (TU) on the subject of antisemitism, a word that has lost all meaning in Germany since October 7 as it is almost exclusively used as a weapon against Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims in order to silence their opposition to "Israel’s" genocide in Gaza.

Over one hundred protesters gathered in front of the university library where the controversial event took place and were met by Berlin’s notoriously belligerent and anti-Palestinian police force. Two people were arrested simply for exercising their democratic right to assemble freely. Footage posted to Instagram by user @abdallahxbln shows one person being violently led away by a horde of officers clad in heavy riot gear, a sartorial choice not informed by necessity but meant to intimidate and manufacture the false impression that peaceful protesters somehow pose a threat to public safety.

Social media accounts like those of activists Salah Said, @mudiblick, and Yasemin Acar, to name a few, have meticulously documented how the German security state has been terrorizing members of the Palestine solidarity movement for almost a year now, egged on by Germany’s liberal white supremacist media and woefully antiquated colonial academia. Both routinely collaborate with the police in smearing demonstrators as antisemitic and violent for their principled stance in trying to stop a genocide which has German complicity written all over it.

Black abolitionist academic Vanessa E. Thompson has aptly summed up the fascistic reality and climate of fear in post-October 7 Germany in a co-authored paper titled “Policing Palestine Solidarity: Moral Urban Panics and Authoritarian Specters in Germany”:

“Since the October 7th Hamas-led attack and the ongoing destruction of Palestinian life and culture by the Israeli army, however, moral urban panics over Palestine solidarity stoked by the media, the entire political spectrum, and mainstream civil society have promptly led to an anti-Palestinian crackdown rendering especially Palestinian and Jewish members of solidarity movements targets of harassment, intimidation, denunciation, and arrests by German police in the name of ‘fighting antisemitism.’”

The glee-laden reactions to "Israel’s" terrorist attacks on Lebanon coming out of Germany are the latest manifestation of the country’s unambiguous hatred toward Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians, irreversibly laid bare by Germany’s almost year-long and unwavering support for the Zionist regime’s colonial war of extermination in Gaza and concomitant authoritarianism at home.

Germany in 2024 is a place where Israeli terrorism is celebrated and Palestine solidarity is terrorized.