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How 'Israel’s' war on Gaza is fuelling Islamophobia in Germany

  • Timo Al-Farooq Timo Al-Farooq
  • Source: Al Mayadeen English
  • 4 Jan 2025 21:14
  • 1 Shares
6 Min Read

A sharp rise in Islamophobic violence in Germany following "Israel's" war on Gaza underscores deep-rooted racism and political manipulation by Berlin. Reports highlight how anti-Muslim sentiment is weaponized to silence Palestine solidarity, escalating tensions and systemic discrimination.

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  • Even without the western-backed Israeli horrors committed in Gaza on a daily basis for the last fifteen months, the toxicity of Islamophobia in Germany runs deep. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Mahdi Rtail)
    Even without the western-backed Israeli horrors committed in Gaza on a daily basis for the last fifteen months, the toxicity of Islamophobia in Germany runs deep. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Mahdi Rtail)

Since "Israel" launched its savage genocidal onslaught on Gaza, Germany’s political elites and their grovelling minions in the Eurocentric mainstream media have been framing anti-genocide protests and the broader Palestine solidarity movement as intrinsic threats to Jewish life in Germany.

Using hegemonic national discourse’s invented phenomenon of an “imported antisemitism” allegedly originating in the Muslim-majority Middle East and which has found its way to Europe through immigration to back this nefarious claim, this unsavoury expression of anti-Arab and Islamophobic racism has had a deleterious effect on Muslims in post-October 7 Deutschland.

Gaza’s anti-Muslim backlash

Within six months after the start of the war, anti-Muslim hate crimes in Germany had more than doubled, with police recording 630 attacks against Muslims and mosques in the country, compared to 610 attacks in all of 2022, according to figures disclosed by the German government.

The scourge of anti-Muslim violence in Germany persisted unabatedly in 2024. According to data released by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), there were 469 Islamophobic attacks in the country until the end of September, mostly against women and religious institutions.

This number is believed to be much higher, as many cases remain unreported due to the victims’ legitimate distrust of structurally racist authorities to properly follow up on their criminal complaints, and the fact that many violent incidents are not categorised as Islamophobic due to said racism.

The European Islamophobia Report (EIR) 2023 published last month confirms this worrisome trend and correlation between rising anti-Muslim hatred and what it refers to as the “Gaza Conflict,” saying that the war “exacerbated Islamophobic rhetoric, framing pro-Palestinian solidarity as extremism, leading to protest bans in countries like Germany, France and Denmark,” according to the EIR’s website.

It is no coincidence that Germany is listed first, given the fact that nowhere in the western world is anti-Palestinian repression as vicious as in Europe’s largest economy. A host of disturbing, not to say disturbed, behavioural patterns attest to this questionable honour, among them the weekly police brutality at anti-genocide rallies, the defunding of pro-Palestine cultural institutions, de-facto employment bans against critics of "Israel’s" genocidal conduct, and the criminalisation of symbols of Palestinian identity and resistance.

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The report itself highlights these “racist shifts in discourse in all areas of life”, going on to say that due to "Israel’s" war on Gaza, “Muslims and other marginalized groups experienced a level of violence, discrimination, and hostilities unprecedented in recent German history.”

Fudging the numbers

Germany’s fealty to the Zionist entity has led to a culture of obsessive-compulsive philosemitism at home, a compensatory strategy to atone for its Holocaust guilt by which Jewish life is over-prioritised and granted what the idiosyncratic German language calls Welpenschutz (literally: puppy protection).

This has allowed the roughly 90,000 members of the Federal Republic’s Jewish community to occupy a disproportionately large space in political and public discourse that belies their small demographic size, while Germany’s 5.5 million Muslims eke out a pitiful existence as subordinate citizens with limited discursive clout, knowing full well that their lives matter less than those of their Jewish compatriots in the eyes of mainstream German society.

According to the police statistics mentioned above, there were 5,154 antisemitic attacks in 2023. This suspiciously high number has been arrived at by a simple legerdemain out of the pro-Zionist box of tricks: By broadening the definition of what constitutes Jew-hatred on the basis of the controversial IHRA working definition of antisemitism which allows any criticism of "Israel" to be construed as inherently anti-Jewish, German authorities have severely reduced the threshold for what is classified as antisemitic.

Based on these artificially inflated numbers, the Zionist-majority German parliament passed a controversial resolution in November aimed at repressing Palestine solidarity under the guise of “fighting antisemitism.” Titled "Never again is now: Protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany”, the move was widely criticised by civil society groups as unconstitutional, racist and Islamophobic.

Over a hundred Jewish intellectuals and artists living in Germany even published an open letter denouncing the then draft resolution as “dangerous” to Jewish life, going on to say that it would “chill free expression, isolate Germany from the rest of the democratic world, and further imperil ethnic and religious minorities, particularly our Arab and Muslim neighbors who have already become the targets of brutal police violence.”

Fallout from the Magdeburg attack

Even without the western-backed Israeli horrors committed in Gaza on a daily basis for the last fifteen months, the toxicity of Islamophobia in Germany runs deep. The EIR 2023’s report on Germany finds that the problem of German Islamophobia “extends far beyond official numbers”, exacerbated by the ruling centre-left coalition government’s implementation of “a restrictive and repressive migration policy” as a concession to the far-right AfD party.

The political fallout from the car-ramming attack on a Christmas market in the city of Magdeburg which killed five people and injured scores is the most recent example of how easily anti-Muslim sentiment in Germany can be galvanised into agitative action against migrant communities: Despite the suspect being an Islam-hating and "Israel"-adoring Saudi national with deep sympathies for the AfD, the latter still managed to successfully portray him as a radical Muslim and mobilise a 1000 protesters at an anti-immigration rally three days after the attack.

With snap federal elections scheduled for February 23 and the AfD currently polling at 19 %, post-WW2-Germany’s first mainstream right-wing party could be a numerically viable coalition partner for the centre-right opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) who are dominating the polls by a commanding margin, their rhetoric and policies often indistinguishable from those of the AfD.

Should Friedrich Merz, the CDU’s top candidate for the chancellorship, who has referred to Palestine solidarity rallies as “antisemitic riots” and has a history of making Islamophobic comments, indeed become Germany’s next leader, the country’s Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians could soon be facing even harder times than they are already experiencing now.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Mayadeen’s editorial stance.
  • war on Gaza
  • Palestine
  • Israel
  • Germany
  • Islamophobia
  • anti-semitism
  • Gaza
Timo Al-Farooq

Timo Al-Farooq

Freelance journalist and political commentator with a B.A. in Asian and African Studies.

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