'The following day, demonstrators gathered on a sliver of Tiergarten across the street from the Bundestag where, for the previous week, the protest camp Occupy Against Occupation had been running. The police presence was high: at one point they banned the use of Arabic, even for prayers. Police vans lined Scheidemannstraße for most of Sunday. In the early evening, following a performance on the lawn by a Gazan musician whose song lyrics included the legally contested phrase ‘from the river to the sea’, members of the Kriminalpolizei charged the lawn in search of the rapper.

[...]

‘There was no communication, only chaos,’ one of the speakers told me afterwards. A police officer later explained that Salman Abu Sitta was banned from speaking in Germany, which was the reason the police cancelled the entire congress and ordered everyone to leave, making several arrests and removing some people by force. An officer outside shrugged as attendees pressed him with questions about the legality of cancelling the conference: ‘I’m just following orders.’'

Right... so the slogan 'from the river to the sea' is 'legally contested' and cause for the pigs to charge in to (presumably) arrest an artist, but a phrase from an official which has an actual historical resonance within the country just pops out with no comment or fuss, no public shaming of the one echoing nazi justifications for a racist clampdown which bears striking resemblance to the fascist repression in the past. Mind boggling. They actually tried to ban a language?? F*ing hell, they're losing the plot over there.

jeers,
I