Inspired by Trump’s America, anti-Palestinian authoritarianism in Germany is escalating
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Timo Al-Farooq
- 9 Apr 2025 12:48
5 Min Read
Timo Al-Farooq exposes how Germany and the US are weaponizing immigration and international law to suppress Palestine solidarity, revealing the West's deepening hypocrisy and erosion of legal norms.
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With its latest escalatory attacks on Palestine solidarity and shameless double standardism, Germany continues to abandon all pretence of believing in the universality of human rights. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)
Emboldened by the Trump regime’s McCarthyite persecution of anti-genocide activists and other authoritarian excesses, Germany, "Israel’s" most fanatic acolyte in Europe, is escalating its unlawful attacks on Palestine solidarity and further sacrificing its democracy for the sake of the Zionist entity.
As US Secretary of State Marco Rubio continues to use a provision of the Cold War-era Immigration and Naturalisation Act to hunt down, detain and deport foreign students and academics for expressing pro-Palestinian views, authorities in the German capital Berlin have also expanded their weaponisation of immigration law against Palestinians to include citizens of the Global North.
Deporting the Berlin 4
On March 31, The Intercept reported that the city state’s government ordered the deportation of three EU citizens and a US national for participating in the occupation of Berlin’s Free University in the fall of 2024, despite none of the individuals being convicted of any crime.
Without offering proof, authorities are accusing Shane O’Brien, Roberta Murray, Kasia Wlaszczyk, and Cooper Longbottom of antisemitism and supporting terrorism, all too familiar and frivolous charges that Zionists and their backers routinely fabricate in order to delegitimise opposition to "Israel’s" brutal settler colonialism and war of extermination against the Palestinian people.
The case of the Berlin 4, as the activists are already being referred to on social media, raises serious due process concerns and also violates the EU’s freedom of movement rules. Not to mention the fact that the legal reasoning behind three of the deportation orders is not even a legal one, as they invoke Germany’s pro-"Israel" Staatsräson, a political concept, as justification.
“I find these orders to be clearly unlawful and see in them the political attempt to attack the Palestinian movement by way of migration law,” Alexander Gorski, a lawyer who is representing two of the four accused, told left-wing newspaper Junge Welt.
Refusing to uphold the law
Trump’s open defiance of various court orders and his ruling clique’s thinly veiled contempt for the judiciary has many in the US worrying about a “constitutional crisis,” defined by one law professor as a scenario in which one branch of government “blatantly, flagrantly and regularly exceeds its constitutional authority — and the other branches are either unable or unwilling to stop it.”
In post-October 7 Germany, the wilful failure to curtail what has been called “executive disobedience” in the service of "Israel" has also reached alarming levels.
In March, the Brussels-based Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) filed a criminal complaint in Germany against Barel Kriel, a tank commander in the Israeli military, for his involvement in serious war crimes in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Despite the damning visual and testimonial evidence submitted, German prosecutors refused to open an investigation.
The case highlights Germany’s selective application of international law. In 2022, a German court in the city of Koblenz had no trouble in applying the principle of universal jurisdiction as enshrined in the country’s Code of Crimes against International Law (VStGB) when it sentenced a Syrian national to life in prison for crimes against humanity.
Germany’s refusal to investigate its own citizens for committing well-documented war crimes, many recorded and posted to social media by Kriel himself, is therefore doubly troubling, but perfectly in keeping with the West’s infamous Palestine exception to human rights.
“Germany has both the jurisdiction and the legal obligation to investigate. By failing to do so, it is signaling that some perpetrators of war crimes enjoy protection—not because of the law, but because of geopolitics,” said Dyab Abou Jahjah, chairman of HRF.
Dismantling the rules-based international order
One should not forget that Chancellor-elect Friedrich Merz has vowed to disregard the country’s legal obligations under the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute when he promised to find ways for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to travel to Germany despite the ICC arrest warrant against him.
The fact that EU member Hungary’s authoritarian ruler Viktor Orbán did exactly that, roll out the red carpet for a wanted war criminal who is perpetrating in Gaza what is being referred to as a holocaust, is yet another nail in the coffin of the global multilateral system.
The lack of genuine outrage from German leaders who never tire of attacking Orbán for his cozy relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin is emblematic of how the selective application of universal norms and values is compounding the collapse of what is affectionately called the “rules-based international order.”
Alon Mizrahi, an Arab Jewish commentator who left "Israel" over the genocide it is perpetrating in Gaza, wrote on X, “Zionism and American imperialism have rendered international law null and void. Everyone is allowed to do as they please to anyone. The post-World War II masquerade is truly over.”
With its latest escalatory attacks on Palestine solidarity and shameless double standardism in applying international law, Germany continues to abandon all pretence of believing in the universality of human rights. By doing so, it is once again confirming to have learned absolutely nothing from its much ballyhooed “Never again” lessons of the past.
