Filmed anti-Semitic attack shocks Berlin

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Europe

An anti-Semitic attack on two Israelis wearing traditional Jewish skullcaps in central Berlin has shocked Germany's political and religious community.

One of the young men, who captured the incident on his smartphone on Tuesday, said he and his colleague were confronted by three Arabic speakers who shouted insults. He said one of the attackers lashed out at him with a belt.

Berlin police in their report said that the suspect later also threatened his victims with a glass bottle.

In a twist to the story, the recorder of the video which went viral on social media, a 21-year-old student called Adam, said on Wednesday that he is an Israeli Arab.

He said he filmed the attack as evidence "for the police and for the German people and even the world to see how terrible it is these days as a Jew to go through Berlin streets."

The incident was described as a "disgrace" for German democracy by a spokeswoman for Chancellor Angela Merkel and by Justice Minister Katarina Barley.

Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Germany "bears a responsibility to protect Jewish life" more than 70 years after the end of the Holocaust in which the Nazis murdered six million European Jews.

In a video interview with Bild newspaper, Adam said the main attacker seemed to have a "Syrian dialect."

The head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Joseph Schuster, told AFP he was "shocked" by the incident, noting that it had occurred in a "bourgeois" area and not in a "majority Muslim quarter."

"This case must be met with the full force of the law," he said.

There has been a spate of reports of anti-Semitic assaults in public spheres and of bullying in schools.

Last week a rap duo accused of anti-Semitism over lyrics comparing themselves to Auschwitz prisoners was awarded a music prize on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Helmut Holter, education minister in the eastern state of Thuringia, said that Judaism was largely only talked about in the context of the Holocaust at school.

Official figures for the first eight months of 2017 showed that nearly 93 percent of reported anti-Semitic crimes in Germany were linked to far-right extremism, according to Reuters.

There have been predictions that the large growth in the Muslim population since Europe’s 2015 migrant crisis could fuel attacks or discrimination against Jews.

Germany recently appointed its first commissioner to combat anti-Semitism which remains a sensitive issue in the country given that more than 6 million Jews were murdered during the Nazi-era Holocaust.

Source(s): AFP ,Reuters