The frontman of British punk rap band Bob Vylan was denied entry to Germany, detained at the Berlin airport, and ultimately deported to the United Kingdom last month due to his pro-Palestine statements.
German federal police justified deporting the band’s vocalist on June 15, referencing a performance at the Glastonbury Festival in England in 2025 where Bob Vylan led a chant of “Death, death to the IDF,” or the Israel Defense Forces.
A police file on Robinson-Foster obtained by The Intercept alleges that he disseminated antisemitic narratives and Hamas propaganda that could “radicalise certain segments of the [German] population” and serve as “ideological justification” for terrorist groups or individuals. It also says that Robinson-Foster poses a threat to Germany’s public security and public order. Allowing him into the country would cause “considerable reremovedtional damage” by creating the impression that Germany was making “no effort to prevent the spread of the propagated antisemitism and the associated calls to violence.”
the issue is that by framing calling the end of the apartheid enforcement mechanism of an ethnostate as discrimination, Germany has normalized and sanewashed a genocidal ethnostate. further, the tying of Jewish identity in Germany to the modern settler colonial project of Israel is harmful to the Jewish diaspora: it does the opposite of Germany’s stated aims. there are many kinds of Jew in the world, but by deferring all discussion of Jewish identity to an Ashkenazi supremacist entity, Germany has committed themselves to a political position of only recognizing those Jews who are themselves the most like Germans from the ~1600 years of central European contact.
the only part of your comment i really accept as a useful reframe is that it sounds like you’re right. this isn’t a free speech crackdown. you haven’t had the freedom to hear about the true meaning of Jewish identity in at least 90 years, and so you switched, as a society, from the militaristic anti-semitic position that Jews have no place in your modern society to the militaristic zionist position that Jews have no place in your modern society.
While I agree that the current official stance on Israel is insane, it is not the majority opinion in Germany.
Do we still have a problem with Antisemitism? Sadly yes, especially now since some people project the behaviour of Israel on German Jews which is absolutely crazy. But I would argue that the overwhelming majority has a positive or neutral view on Judaism.
You sound like you have met too many crazy people from my country. But the loudest people are often not the majority. There are regular surveys on issues like these and I would classify your interpretation of German society as a fringe theory.
They would likely make themselves more known if they weren’t
A. Afraid to speak up due to Germany’s fascist speech laws, and B. Weren’t brainwashed into thinking their country is right to beat and arrest people for saying things the country considers offensive.
Sadly people like you who defend Germany’s speech control laws are ultimately in the same league as the Zionists apologizing for Israel.
my issue is the context under which you and i are having in the first place. Bobby Vylan has been labeled as making calls for violence for calling for the dissolution of the enforcement arm of a genocidal occupying force. while there may be elements that do not find this tolerable, overall the people are either complicit through their inaction or are glad for this to be what their government is doing, just as the issue in the united states, russia, or israel as global fascism is on the rise is a mixture of enthusiastic participation or apathetic inaction. we’re much deeper into Martin Niemöller’s poem than people seem to be realizing…
So would you say feddit.org is full of extremist Germans?