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Comments (0)A German gay advocacy group is hosting 11 Israeli teens who survived a deadly attack a year ago on a center for gay youth in Tel Aviv.
Two youths were killed in last August’s attack on the Agudah center for gay, lesbian, transsexual and bisexual youth. Eleven people were wounded, four of them critically.
This week, the Israeli teens are being hosted by a new program called Rainbow, initiated by Maneo, a Berlin-based GLTB hotline. Members of Maneo visited Israel earlier this summer, according to a report on Deutschland Radio, and devised the program as a demonstration of solidarity with the survivors of the Tel Aviv attack.
The visitors—including Ayala Katz, whose son, Nir Katz, was killed in the Tel Aviv attack—were to meet with members of the Berlin and Cologne Jewish
communities, with public officials and advocates from the GLTB communities in both cities. One aim is to exchange ideas about how to educate the general public and law enforcement regarding tolerance and prevention of violence.
Participants in the trip will also have a chance to visit gay bars in both cities, Deutschland Radio reported.
Organizers held a ceremony in Berlin honoring the memories of the two people murdered last year, Nir Katz, 26, a counselor at the center, and Liz Tarboushi, 17.
Maneo director Bastian Finke told Deutschland Radio that his group had contacted friends in Tel Aviv shortly after the attack, and suggested the “Rainbow” invitation for the following year.
EU Criticism of Israeli Justice Rankles
Israel’s Foreign Ministry has slammed the European Union’s foreign policy chief for criticizing an Israeli court’s conviction of a Palestinian protest leader.
Abdallah Abu Rahmeh, an organizer of the weekly Friday protests at Bil’in of the West Bank security fence, was convicted Tuesday in an Israeli military court of inciting protesters to attack Israeli soldiers and for holding protests without a permit. He will be sentenced next month. The 39-year-old schoolteacher has been jailed since December.
EU representatives attended every day of the trial, and the body’s foriegn policy chief, Catherine Ashton, released a statement Wednesday expressing concern at the conviction, saying, “The possible imprisonment of Mr. Abu Rahmeh is intended to prevent him and other Palestinians from exercising their legitimate right to protest against the existence of the separation barriers in a non-violent manner.”
“The EU considers the route of the barrier where it is built on Palestinian land to be illegal,” it quoted her as saying in a statement.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said Ashton “should respect the ruling of the Israeli justice system, and refrain from casting aspersions on a legal system that is lauded worldwide by its peers,” the Jerusalem Post reported.
“In Israel, where even those who openly support Hamas and Hezbollah enjoy freedom of speech, such accusations sound particularly hollow. Moreover, interfering with a transparent legal procedure of a democratic country is not just highly improper, but is hardly consistent with promoting European values,” Palmor said.
Internet Extremism Growing in Germany
Right-wing extremism on the Internet is increasing in Germany, including hateful material in disguise, a watchdog group said.
The Jugendschutz organization released its annual report on youth protection, which was compiled together with the Central Agency for Political Education and Online Advisors Against Right-Wing Extremism.
Stefan Glaser, a lead researcher for Jugendschutz told Die Welt newspaper that, for example, songs from a CD with radically anti-Semitic lyrics are among the YouTube offerings that may attract the unsuspecting. Glaser described the CD marketed online as “Merkel’s Bedtime Stories for Children aged 3-8,” and bearing the image of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which actually contains 21 songs with lyrics that deny the Holocaust or call for the murder of blacks and Jews. Some of the songs are on YouTube.
According to the study, the number of right-wing extremist contributions from Germany to Internet platforms aimed at school children or music fans—Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social networking tools—rose from 750 in 2007 to about 6,000 today.
Glaser suggested this estimate represents the tip of the iceberg.
The total number of neo-Nazi websites in Germany rose by 800 in the past year, bringing the total number of sites to 1,872 in the country. According to a report in the Deutsche Welle news agency, this number includes several hundred sites connected with the right-wing extremist National Democratic Party of Germany, which remains a fringe party with a small but vociferous following.
Glaser said his group is trying to educate young Internet users to recognize and reject hate sites. Jugendschutz, which was founded in 1997 by the youth ministers of all German states, has managed to have several sites banned in Germany or blocked in their source countries.