Germany to file criminal complaint against anti-police columnist
Left-wing daily has faced accusations of antisemitism, defending Palestinian terrorism against Israel
By BENJAMIN WEINTHALFlag of Germany(photo credit: FDECOMITE/FLICKR)
Germany's Interior Minister Horst Seehofer announced on Sunday that he will file a formal criminal complaint against a left-wing columnist for writing that the country’s 250,000 police officers should be tossed on the trash heap where they belong.Seehofer, who ordered that all activities of the terrorist movement Hezbollah be outlawed in late April, told the mass-circulation daily Bild on Sunday: “As federal interior minister, I will file a criminal complaint tomorrow against the columnist for the unspeakable article in the taz about the police.”He said that the words of Hengameh Yaghoobifarah in her column leads to the “excesses of violence, just as we have seen it now in Stuttgart. We cannot accept that."Gangs smashed stores and attacked police in the southern Germany city of Stuttgart. An estimated 400 to 500 people attacked police after a drug check was made. Many of the rioters wore hoods and masked their faces.Yaghoobifarah, a 29-year-old German woman, wrote a column last week titled “All cops are incapable of working.”She laid out a scenario in her column in which the police force would be abolished and asked: "In which industries can ex-cops still be let in?"She continued that there is "only one suitable option" as a workplace for police officers – "the landfill."Yaghoobifarah concluded that “Not as rubbish people with keys to houses, but on the heap where they are really only surrounded by waste. They certainly feel most comfortable among their own kind.”The German police unions DPolG and GdP filed criminal complaints against the taz for “inciting hatred.”The taz’s editor-in-chief Barbara Junge expressed regret about the commentary. “A column, however satirical it may have been, that can be understood as if police officers are nothing but rubbish, went wrong. I'm sorry," Junge wrote in the taz.
In 2017, The Jerusalem Post reported that the progressive paper taz was accused of stoking antisemitism, spreading Nazi conspiracy theories and defending Palestinian terrorism against the Jewish state.Sigmount Königsberg, the commissioner on antisemitism for Germany’s largest Jewish community in Berlin, told the Post in 2017 that taz’s former Israel-based correspondent “Susanne Knaul legitimizes terrorism.”Knaul sparked outrage over her commentary arguing that “Jerusalem is not Berlin” when evaluating the morality of vehicular terrorist attacks that took place in both cities. It is a “fact that there are reasons for the desperation that motivates Palestinians to suicide attacks,” she wrote. Knaul cited the “occupation” and “injustice” as ostensibly legitimate reasons to murder Israeli soldiers.In 2017, a Palestinian drove his truck into a group of Israeli soldiers, murdering four of them in attack that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said was “part of the same pattern inspired by the Islamic State.” In December 2016, an Islamic State supporter rammed his truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people, including Israeli Dalia Elyakim.The taz frequently offers space in its paper for writers who defend the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. The Bundestag classified BDS as an antisemitic movement in 2019.The taz and Junge declined to answer comment about the accusations levelled against the paper at the time.
