Document comes days after government published dossier of 'secular Palestinian extremist' symbols, such as the watermelon and the Handala cartoon

The German government last week published a new brochure on what it believes to be antisemitic codes and symbols.

Over 80 pages, the brochure catalogues a list of concepts, terms and images ranging from Nazi-era propaganda to contemporary symbols against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Intended audiences for the brochure include teachers, “who can use the booklet as supplementary material in the classroom”, and other educational staff, who can use it as a “guideline to help recognise any anti-Semitic remarks in the working environment”.

Germany is one of the key supporters of Israel’s genocide, despite its own history of committing genocide against Jews, Slavs and Roma during the Second World War, and in Namibia in the early 20th century.

  • acargitz@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    2 hours ago

    I could potentially imagine a world in which the document is a good faith attempt at having an extremely nuanced discussion about the ways that antisemitic tropes might seep into otherwise legitimate pro-palestinian discourse. And that would have been a very useful document indeed. I could bring myself to imagine such a world if the BfV had a similar document that does an equally thorough job at uncovering all the ways anti-Palestinian racism, islamophobia and jewish-supremacist and genocidal language enters the pro-Zionist discourse. But instead, what this document does do, is to always put Palestinian resistance in scare quotes, to always frame pro-Palestinian advocacy as suspect and illegitimate. There is no context in which Palestinian grievances are taken seriously, at face value. Instead we get this document, a monument of BfV’s actually extremist anti-Palestinian frame-setting.