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Inciting Hatred and Slinging Insults: Exploring the Legal Apparatus of the BRD

Part III: Honor – final part of Jason Oberman’s article


12/04/2025

In Part I and Part II of this series, we took a look at the Volksverhetzung and Beleidigung laws, two of the laws most weaponized to repress the anti-genocide movement in Germany. Acting as the root of both these laws we found something rather peculiar: German honor, or Ehre. And it only gets stranger the deeper we look.

In the search to discover more about this peculiar notion of honor, I stumbled upon another German law that was created to protect Ehre: the second of the Nuremberg Race Laws was titled “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.” This law included prohibitions of Aryan and Jewish intermarriage and sexual relations, employment of young German women by Jewish men, and Jewish people flying the Reich’s flag. It seems that simply being non-Aryan in Germany violates the German Honor Code. And one must be willing to defend even the slightest violation of honor with murder. 

Perhaps the Holocaust itself can be seen through the lens of protection of Ehre. In exploring the German duel, I came across Ehrennotwehr, which, perhaps, could have been an undercurrent of the Nazi genocide.  Ehrennotwehr, emergency self-defence of honor,  was the vicious practice of 19th century Prussian officers; if one’s honor was somehow insulted by a lower class, who was not worthy of the honorable duel, Ehrennotwehr required sudden and extreme violence, even murder, in order to defend one’s higher positionality, avoiding the sometimes lengthy bureaucratic measures of the duel, which usually required a formal invitation, mediation and witnesses. 

Although Ehrennotwehr was technically “reserved for those occasions when the physical integrity of the officer had been violated by a member of the unwashed horde who could not render formal satisfaction [a duel] … liberal interpretations led to its indiscriminate use as an effectual method for teaching any upstart his place.” (McAleer 114) As with the duel, Ehrenotwehr illustrates the idea of achieving purity and protecting honor through the annihilation of the other, an ideology embraced by Prussia, the Nazis, and the modern German state today.

So what is this peculiar German honor, or Ehre, exactly? Where does it come from? 

In the words of scholar Kevin McAleer: “In the final analysis, [German] honor was devoid of clearly conceived ethical content” (48). Ehre seems to be rooted in codes of chivalry practiced by Crusading Knights. These honorable men conducted large scale massacres across Europe and the Middle East, including ethnic cleansing of Jews during the Rhineland Massacre. 

In fact it was only through scapegoating and persecuting Jews that these Crusaders could fabricate honor: “The vices of the knights during the Crusades and their ‘extreme quarrelsomeness and pugnacity, merciless, arrogance and greed, cruelty to the vanquished, lack of a sense of common humanity, faithlessness to those outside the circles of feudal obligation, and frequently impious disregard of religion’ […] could only be transmitted as acts of heroic chivalry on the European mainland, if contrasted to Jewish vices.”

The imaginary Feindbild – the Jew, the Communist, the Palestinian – comes into play here; it is only through creating an imagined enemy that is so unfathomably and deeply dishonorable, one could claim any sort of honor while committing mass murder. This false narrative would have been critical in establishing the honorable nature and justification of the Crusaders’ ethnic cleansing of Jews in aforementioned Rhineland massacre, the genocide of Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia, the Holocaust, and the current German funded genocide in Palestine.

Germany’s own Crusading Knights, the honorable Teutonic Order, were  founded in Palestine to “avenge the dishonoring of God and His Cross and to fight so that the Holy Land, which the infidels subjected to their rule, shall belong to the Christians” (Sterns, 204) They hoped to follow in the footsteps of their peculiar reimagining of the Jewish Maccabees as knights who, in the Order’s words, “defeated and exterminated [pagans] so that they cleansed once again the Holy City which the pagans had defiled” (Sterns, 204). After they failed to ethnically cleanse Palestine, they developed their code of honor while committing atrocious wars of extermination and enslavement in north eastern Europe, laying the genocidal path Hitler would later follow through the Eastern Front. 

What’s more, the Teutonic Code of Honor even includes an early form of Beleidigung legislation: the first Book of the Order from 1264 states : “No brother shall call a Christian a traitor or a renegade or an evil smelling bastard, or abuse him in such terms.” (Sterns, 243). Remember this rule of protecting Christians from slander was conceived at a time when the Teutonic Order,  “who for love of honor and the fatherland have exterminated the enemies of the faith with a strong hand” (Sterns, 204). The Order was legislating against verbally insulting Christians while literally attempting ethnic cleansing.

Teutonic Ehre only took on greater heights as time went on. It was so highly esteemed in Germany that both the 2nd Reich (Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Kingdom of Prussia) and the Nazis adopted it: 

“By decree of its leader Heinrich Himmler[…], every SS man had ‘the right and duty to defend his honor by force of arms,’ and in a letter to the SS Legal Service in 1938 he outlined the conventional Wilhelmine guidelines for doing so. What is more, Himmler patterned his own cult of honor, like that of his Wilhelmine predecessors, on medieval archetypes. He modeled his ‘new knighthood,’ his ‘sworn liege men,’ on the ‘brutalized chivalry’ of the Teutonic Knights” (McAleer 210)  

But Teutonic Honor didn’t end with the Nazis: the modern Bundeswehr (German Military) gives out a “Badge of Honor” with the Teutonic Order’s Iron Cross. Antisemitism commissioner Uwe Becker is also a lay member of the order, and one must wonder about the role of Ehre in the “war on antisemitism.”

The German conception of honor has an interesting distinction from other honor codes: it is guided by Standesehre, caste honor (McAleer 35), defined as the collective honor of Germany’s elite class; “Its definition also denoted group solidarity over and against the lower orders, for in every ‘affair,’ or Ehrenhandel, the participants were representing not only their own interests but those of their class.” (McAleer 3) 

For elite men, individual honor and caste honor were therefore indistinguishable (McAleer 35). Therefore, the German notion of Ehre is primarily concerned with hierarchies of power — one can only be honorable if one is above those who are not. We could see clearly how this is also tied into the Christian Crusaders’ ethno-religious honor above Jews, and this honor could have evolved into the honor of the Aryan race over all others. 

The other nefarious element of German honor is its entanglement with the duel. It was the duel itself, that is murderous violence, which distinguished and guaranteed honorable positionality: 

“The duel drew a strict line of division between “men of honor” (Ehrenmänner) and the rest of society, which enjoyed none of the psychic, social, or legal entitlements of honorable status. Among German males, in order to be considered salonfähig—fit for good society—it was necessary that one also be satisfaktionsfähig— capable of dispensing satisfaction in a duel. Highly dangerous rencontres endowed this term with the real substance of character, and so upper class men of honor also pretended a moral supremacy that bolstered their claim to leadership of the German nation” (McAleer 3-4). 

One’s ability to duel determined one’s class and power, and it is through the duel that one could uphold one’s class and power positions. During the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, this was strictly limited to elite white Protestant men who made up about 5% of the population. (McAleer 35). 

These elite German males seemed to be so fearful of being insulted and lose their honor that Professor Karl Binding stated that “the eternal Angst of the German that his honor might be robbed of him by any frivolous fellow, his trembling worry that perhaps already through an upturned nose or a derisive word his whole world has gone up in smoke.” 

Binding even came up with the diagnosis “Ehren-nervosität” — a “chronic nervous affliction of the [upper class], usually characterized by acute and persistent hallucinations that someone was trying to trespass their personal integrity by belittling them.” (McAleer 40). I think many of us have met people on the streets and subways of Berlin, often in uniform, who have this condition. 

As a man of honor, it was seen as infinitely worse to quietly take an insult rather than lose one’s life in a petty pistol duel over a small insult against you or a female acquaintance. As McAleer explains, “This was the greatest infamy in a world where the essence of manhood was affectation of a serene scorn for one’s own puny existence. […] It was and is better to die/kill rather than be seen as a weak insulted person.”(McAleer 42) Given this commitment to murder and death, we can further understand the system of “ethics” which is the bedrock of German culture itself. 

Through exploring this strange German Ehre, perhaps we can see another aspect of Germany’s support of Israel. It may be a long shot, but bear with me.  As we learned from evaluation of Volksverhetzung law, human rights in Germany entails applying German notions of “human dignity” or honor to certain populations or persons. These populations, therefore, must also fall into a strict and violent hierarchical code as well. 

Through the lens of German Ehre, the Palestinian people insulted Israel through the October 7 attacks and as the German political elite and mainstream media seems to be unable to distinguish between Israel and Jewish people, Palestine therefore insulted Jews as a whole. Since Jewish people are awarded “human dignity” in modern Germany, so we are told, Jews are therefore required to defend their honor. As the German state and mainstream media, through horrific anti-Palestinian racism and persecution, has implied that Palestinians, as non-Aryan Arabic people, occupy a lower racial positionality compared to white Ashkenazi Jews, Ehrenotwehr, honorable self-defense, or extermination, is an order. It must be quick, extreme, brutal, and absolute.

As the Nuremberg Laws imply, genocide is the way a country defends honor against ‘inferior races’, and it is actually a requirement to uphold the honor of the ethno-nationstate. We should also note that Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of Zionism, valued Ehre enough to suggest that the duel might help the social position of European Jews (Schorske 160). Furthermore, Suad Hanine Shatou-Shehadeh, in her Doctoral Thesis from Columbia University, beautifully articulates in great detail how Honor is one of the fundamental bedrocks of the Zionist movement.

As was previously revealed in the Teutonic Order’s Rule Book of 1264, we discovered that the German white christian elite have long dreamed of a vision of Jews as being honorable through commiting genocide in Palestine; they had viewed the Maccabees as honorable Knights who “exterminated” pagans and “cleansed” the Holy Land (Sterns, 204). Now Zionism has begun to fulfill this vision, and the German ruling class is one of its most voracious supporters.

Because of their close ties, Germany’s honor is bound up in the honor of Israel (recall Israel is Germany’s Staatsräson). This means that Jews who refuse this challenge, who do not defend their Ehre, and oppose Zionism or simply Israeli state policies, are scorned with great hatred and resentment. They have thrown away their honor and insulted the honor of the German state, its Staatsehre one might say, by anointing them with that Ehre and “human dignity” in the first place. They are reduced to the dishonorable class and deserve punishment for insulting more honorable Jews and the German state as a whole

Moreover, given that the notion of “salonfähigkeit”, or being fit for good society, is dependant on one’s ability to support and participate in murderous violence against those who ‘insult’ your honor, we can further understand why only those people who support genocide against ‘dishonorables’ compose the German elite and ruling class. 

And if, as Whitman suggested, honor was democratized to be a privilege and responsibility of all people in Germany (catalyzed through, if you recall, the Nazi expansion of Beleidigung to protect all Aryans), all people in Germany must also follow the German Ehre code, and can therefore only be fit for society when they actively support the extermination of ‘honor insulters’.

Through this three part series, we have therefore discovered that modern Germany not only has laws that are distinctly anti-democratic, but it also has created a legal, ethical, and societal framework to require its population to avidly support genocide and ethnic cleansing of those whos mere existence insults the honor of the state.

© Jason Oberman, all rights reserved, 2025

Works Cited

  • McAleer, Kevin. Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-De-Siecle Germany. Princeton University Press, 1994.
  • Schorske, Carl E. Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Vintage Books, 1981. 
  • Shatou-Shehadeh, Suad Hanine. The Zionist Quest for Honor: France and Jewish Zionist Ideology and Subjectivity. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2021.
  • Sterns, Indrikis. “The Statutes of the Teutonic Knights: A Study of Religious Chivalry“. Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1969. 

Whitman, James Q. “Enforcing Civility and respect: Three societies” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 109, 2000, pp. 1279–1398, .

Red Flag: What Does the Liberation of Buchenwald Mean Today?

Nathaniel Flakin’s Weekly Column for The Left Berlin


11/04/2025

On April 11, 1945, as U.S. troops approached Buchenwald, the resistance groups inside the concentration camp launched an insurrection. The secret leadership committee, made up of prisoners of different nationalities, handed out weapons to the inmates who proceeded to storm the gate house and the guard towers. Most of the SS guards had fled a few hours earlier — the rest were disarmed. When the U.S. army reached Buchenwald, they found a camp under the control of its prisoners.

In the following days, a wave of declarations were published. The most famous, the Oath of Buchenwald, ends with the line: “The eradication of Nazism as well as its roots is our guiding principle.”

Yet this document, influenced by Stalinist ideology, was contradictory. It thanked the “allied Armies of the Americans, English, Soviets and all Freedom Armies.” Yet these so-called Freedom Armies had done very little to save Europe’s Jews or other victims of the Nazis. Military commanders had refused to bomb the railroads leading to Auschwitz, for example, which could have saved countless lives. Throughout the war, the U.S. government had refused entry to Jewish refugees from Europe.

The Western allies were not interested in defending freedom and democracy — they were fighting for their own capitalist interests and colonial empires. At the end of the war against Nazi Germany, these “Freedom Armies” were carrying out massacres in Indochina, Algeria, India, Indonesia, etc.

A much more realistic assessment of the situation came from the Trotskyist prisoners, who published a Declaration of the International Communists of Buchenwald. They explained that the roots of fascism lay in the capitalist system, and demanded that the bourgeoisie pay for its crimes: “Expropriation of the banks, heavy industry and the large estates! Control of production by the unions and the workers councils!”

Today, 80 years later, the legacy of the Buchenwald resistance is more relevant than ever. A far-right party is topping the polls in Germany, with 24% of votes. Even more ominously, the new government of the CDU and SPD has committed itself to carrying out the AfD’s program. They want to eliminate, in practice, the right to asylum, a right that was established as a consequence of the German state’s crimes. 

Last Sunday, there was an official ceremony at Buchenwald, including nine survivors of the camp. Omri Boehm, an Israeli-German philosopher and a descendent of Holocaust survivors, was invited to speak and then disinvited after a campaign by the Israeli embassy. Boehm is not a leftist, a socialist, or an anti-Zionist. He defends Kantian universalism that includes human rights for all. He could probably be compared to early liberal Zionists like Martin Buber, as he has proposed a binational state for Jews and Palestinians with equal rights for all.

Yet in the eyes of Israel’s far-right government, even liberal Zionists are traitors and antisemites, and they managed to get Boehm excluded. As much as the Zionist state claims to represent all Jews, they are eager to erase the entire history of Jewish universalism, including figures such as Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, and Albert Einstein.

A young human rights activist closed her speech at the ceremony with a call to end the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. This was met with a sharp rebuke from the Buchenwald memorial, who say that reference to any other genocide amounts to an “instrumentalization” of the Holocaust. But isn’t it the other way around? Isn’t the camp being “instrumentalized” by an Israeli government with a far-right agenda?

The Oath of Buchenwald calls for a struggle against fascism — it includes nothing about defending a colonial project to build an an apartheid state. Today, Israel’s government is backing far-right parties in Europe with fascist roots.

The memory of the victims of Buchenwald — including Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, socialists, communists, etc — demands that we struggle against fascism and every form of oppression. Following their example, we need to unite across borders in the struggle for self-liberation. And as the Trotskyists’ statement reminds us, this means fighting against the system that brings forth fascism: capitalism.

Red Flag is a weekly column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel Flakin has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears on Friday at The Left Berlin.

Activism within the Queer Community – Attitudes and Engagement

Invitation to take part in my survey


09/04/2025

I am a PhD student at the SFU in Berlin researching how queer/ LGBTQIA* individuals define activism, and how they interact or have interacted with this concept it in their personal lives. I started out my PhD with the intention of researching online activism and social dynamics in online spaces, but soon decided to move my focus away from specifically online interactions. I instead started trying to materialise my many layers of interest in how activism works more broadly.

My contact with the idea of activism was shaped by my upbringing and the many conversations I have had with friends and acquaintances over the years discussing political topics. These conversations, especially ones with people who are more informed, more personally active, or know more about an area of the world than I do, have been very enriching and important to me. At the same time they have become the subject of my scientific curiosity.

Who had made their points in what way? What were the arguments and strategies, the points in common, the disagreements? How did people name the collection of their world views? Did these definitions differ between people? What was the significance of being called a communist, anarchist or Marxist-Leninist? How were groups and projects assessed when their labelling didn’t match up with one’s own? Where were lines in what people consider legitimate and illegitimate action?

While all of these questions popped up and were slowly crystallising in my head, I found myself more and more also focused on the issue currently most central to myself (as often happens with psychological research projects):

How come some people found a “way in” to social or political areas of action and some ended up stuck hoping they were helping in some way? How did people wind up associated with certain groups, or finding their way into different activities? What effects did these activities have on the world? Did they make the people doing them feel enriched, hopeful? What reasons were people identifying when they felt they couldn’t/didn’t want to make the step into being active themselves?

As I am a queer person and the majority of my friends use this label or would place themselves within the LGBTQIA* umbrella, I felt that my curiosity about activism at large has been strongly intertwined with my curiosity about queerness. A lot of texts I read emerged from the fields of gender studies or queer studies, and many of the lived experiences of the people around me were shaped by intersectional experiences of oppression. The awareness of being part of a minority and experiencing discrimination shaped many discussions and world views. Inside of my own in-person group as well as on the internet and in larger community spaces, discussions about the intricate political aspects of queer identities were prevalent.

Who received more privilege and why, and was this distinction even important to make? Were queer issues tied to other discriminated/ oppressed groups? And if yes, in what ways and what was to be done about it? How could solidarity between people with different identities and issues work? Was queerness inherently political, and if yes what did “queerness” and “political” even mean to the people discussing the question?

Most of these above-mentioned topics have been widely discussed and analysed across many disciplines throughout the years, as well as being thought about and figured out anew by every queer individual and friend group. I do not expect to be able to solve any of these discussions with my work.

Through my PhD project, I am only trying to condense all my questions into one project and get a multilayered pool of answers to better understand how all the factors play together to shape individuals’ interactions with the topic.

The final motivator for my project is, paradoxically, the feeling of being stuck and unable to become more politically active. Talk about not knowing where to start or not feeling qualified/ oppressed/ knowledgeable enough is everywhere I look on social media and in personal chats with friends. The worsening political situation is leaving many people feeling scared, angry and hopeless without the feeling of being able to engage meaningfully and make a change. At the same time, it seems that many people who are struggling and would like to find a way to start find it difficult to get in touch with people who are already more active and ask for guidance.

The final form of my project was developed to reflect the connection and layeredness of all the aforementioned topics.

  • I want to understand what activism means to others, so the survey explores personal definitions of activism and what activities fall under it.
  • I want to understand what helps people take agency, so the survey explores obstacles that people encounter while trying to work towards being politically active, as well as support systems and strategies that people found to break through.
  • I want to understand what role queer identities, communities and discourse around queerness plays, so the survey explores nuances of belonging and personal identities.
  • I want to understand how systems of oppression affect people trying to break through, so the survey explores factors such as economic situation, health, mental capacities and experiences of discrimination.

Hopefully the answers to these questions will shed light onto the phenomenon in general, but will also help support those that wish to engage (more). In future steps of this project, I hope to make my results available to organisations and anyone else looking for information about entry barriers to activism.

To be able to do all of this, we need your input! Experience with activism is not necessary!

As a first phase of this project, we have created an online questionnaire of about 20-30min with a mix of open and closed questions. If you identify as queer or part of the LGBTIA* community in any way and would like to share with us your views on the topic, please follow this link.

In the second phase, we will conduct in-depth qualitative interviews to really dive into the nitty-gritty of how each individual person navigates their own complex situation and how their decisions shape their interaction (or lack thereof) with activism.

Boycott Erdoğan and TRT

Statement by the Fatal Hata Collective


To all Friends and Comrades around the World,

Following the arrest of the Mayor of Istanbul on March 19th and the ensuing demonstrations, students in Turkey have called for a boycott of universities. Following this, a call for boycotting pro-Erdoğan brands and institutions has started—led by students and developed by the opposition. While most mentioned companies operate in Turkey, some are also active within the international community.

Most importantly Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), the state’s TV and radio channel, is entirely instrumentalized by the Erdoğan regime. TRT World in particular, and some other branches of TRT, have gained a following for their coverage of the genocide in Palestine. This is in complete contrast with the propaganda used to sustain the oppression of all minorities and opposition groups in Turkey; they regularly attack women and LGBTIQ+ groups in Turkey, the Kurdish opposition, workers’ organizations, unions, and so forth. 

Erdoğan, while rhetorically using the Palestinian plight for his benefit and profit, does not shy away from aiding Israel: Azerbaijan State Oil Company (SOCAR) goes to Israeli occupation through Turkey to fuel the ongoing genocide. Moreover, nine activists from the 1000 Youth for Palestine (Filistin İçin 1000 Genç) initiative who voiced dissent regarding this issue at a TRT World event have been detained in Turkey, and two of them, who are Palestinian, are facing charges to be deported from the country.

We invite you to unfollow TRT and its affiliates from social media and block them to limit their reach. Since the target companies and channels of the boycott were announced, the importance of the call has already been proven economically and politically. Companies are losing their stock value, and the targeted media is desperately trying to prove their innocence. Join us to put pressure on TRT!

All dictators everywhere must fall!

Anti-Palestinian Racism in the Reporting on the Barbakh Family

Statement by Pallies, Palestine Speaks and the Arrest Press Unit


07/04/2025

How German Media Criminalize Palestinians

For several months now, Berlin has been experiencing a targeted smear campaign against Palestinian refugees, in particular against the Barbakh family from Gaza. The reporting on this family is a shocking example of the systematic anti-Palestinian racism that has long become normalized in Germany’s mainstream media.

Instead of truthful reporting, media outlets such as WELT, BILD, FOCUS, BZ and Berliner Zeitung produce a racist narrative in which this Palestinian family is broadly criminalised and portrayed as a security threat. The Barbakh family is stylised as a projection for societal fears—while the reality in Gaza, occupation, apartheid, and genocide are largely ignored.

In recent months, the reporting of these media houses has repeatedly contributed to the public stigmatisation of the family – not based on facts, but by completely disregarding any journalistic standards. In the articles, a threat is constructed from a family – a so-called ‘Gaza clan’ – a racist cipher that mixes and criminalises origin and political attribution. WELT writes of ‘Hamas incitement in Berlin living rooms’, FOCUS fabulates of a ‘clan family from Gaza terrorising Berlin’. Evidence? None. Instead, rumours and generalized suspicion are reformulated as truth.

What supposedly turns a family into a ‘clan’ is never explained. Rather, the tabloid-style, unserious, and racist reporting presumes that the racist narrative of ‘Arab clans’ needs no definition, as it is already firmly anchored in the imagination of a right-wing discourse.

This reporting does not follow journalistic ethics, but serves political purposes: Palestinian life is to be delegitimised and pushed out of the public sphere in order to legitimise, among other things, the Israeli state’s crimes under international law and to maintain support for genocide and ethnic cleansing.

A Textbook Example of Racist Reporting

1. Dehumanization through Language

    Terms like “Gaza clan” or “agitators in the most negative sense” (WELT) strip members of the Barbakh family of all individuality. FOCUS fantasizes about a family “terrorizing Berlin.” BILD writes about a “whining clan member.” The people disappear behind racially charged labels—Gaza, clan, terror.

    2. Collective Guilt and Guilt by Association

      Several reports hold the entire family responsible for the alleged actions of individuals. The principle of guilt by association is stretched to the extreme: anyone from Gaza or anyone who knows people from Gaza is automatically associated with Hamas—regardless of actual political stance. It is implied that merely living in Gaza or having contact with Palestinians

      automatically indicates proximity to Hamas. The fact that most residents of Gaza no longer have a livelihood due to Israel’s genocidal violence is of no interest. Political complexity is sacrificed in favour of a racist simplification.

      3. Cultural Racism

        Language, clothing and origin are instrumentalised to mark ‘foreignness’. The Barbakh family is not portrayed as part of this society, but as an ‘other’, dangerous element that must be controlled, monitored or deported.

        The media campaign against the Barbakh family is emblematic of structural anti-Palestinian reporting

        Media such as WELT, BILD, FOCUS, BZ, and Berliner Zeitung disregard journalistic, ethical and legal boundaries – and do not even stop at minors. They use the family’s Palestinian origin as a projection surface for racist stereotypes. This fuels anti-Palestinian sentiment among the public.

        Violation of Privacy Protection for Extraordinary Vulnerable Youth: Faces and Names Are Published

        Children and adolescents from the Barbakh family are also criminalised by the reporting. Guidelines on how to deal with children and adolescents in journalism are disregarded in the reporting. Their faces are shown uncensored, personal details are revealed and political statements are taken out of context.

        Violations of the Press Code and Child Protection Directive

        The German Press Code has clear guidelines on the protection of children and adolescents:

        “The aim is that, during interviews with children and adolescents, their well-being, protection, and safety, as well as their rights to participation, are respected by those conducting the interviews.”

        The guideline of the child protection directive from the network for the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is also clear:

        “Before the child consents to an interview, they must be informed about the aim and the planned topics of the interview, as well as the child’s right to withdraw their consent at any time.(…) Before the interview begins, it must be made clear that the child only has to speak if they feel comfortable and that they can withdraw consent at any time.”

        These standards are regularly ignored by newspapers such as the BZ, FOCUS, Berliner Zeitung and BILD when it comes to writing tendentious and stigmatising hate pieces against refugees from the Barbakh family.

        For example, the Berliner Zeitung recently published an article by Carola Tunk in which she rambles about how she searches for an underaged refugee from Gaza in Neukölln, whom she describes in a lurid manner in the headline as “Gaza Mohammed” of the “Barbakh clan.”

        Such a dehumanisation of minors not only reflects racist projections, the author’s entire ‘research’ is also in direct contradiction to the press code, which clearly states that the identity of minors must be particularly protected (German Press Code Section 8) and that the consent of the parents or guardians of minors must always be obtained.

        In addition, the press code stipulates the protection of the dignity of children and adolescents (Section 9), a rule that newspapers such as the Berliner Zeitung, BZ, BILD and FOCUS disregard when it comes to stigmatising young people who are regularly arrested by the police solely because of their participation in protests against the genocide.

        Participation in demonstrations, which is also permitted for refugees in a democracy and should be protected by freedom of assembly and freedom of expression, is reinterpreted as ‘criminality’ in the anti-Palestinian agitation.

        Stalking of Minors on Social Media and in the Streets by Berliner Zeitung

        Not only do the aforementioned newspapers now seem to consider it normal to approach Palestinian children and adolescents without the consent of their parents or guardians, in violation of all journalistic guidelines, the Berliner Zeitung author Carola Tunk (as she herself describes) repeatedly ignored the clear statement of the minor concerned and his friends that they did not want to speak to her.

        In blatant violation of press law, she wrote to him several times on social media, where she asked him personal questions and tried to find out where the minor was. However, the author did not make it clear what she actually wanted to write about in any of her attempts to speak to him.

        This practice is not only profoundly immoral, but also a blatant violation of the Press Code, in particular:

        • Section8 (Protection of Personality): The identity of minors must be specially protected.
        • Section 1 (Truthfulness): The reporting is one-sided, distorted, and full of speculation.
        • Section 9 (Protection of Honor and Dignity): Children are violated in their dignity and deliberately stigmatized.

        “Anyone conducting interviews with minors should therefore not only obtain the minor’s consent but also that of their legal guardians—ideally in writing for evidence. (…) Consent should cover both the interview itself and any additional aspects—such as recording or publishing the interview.”

        In its decision of 18 March 2025, the Press Council’s Complaints Committee itself had already ruled that the BILD and BZ articles “Gaza clan smuggles Hamas supporters to Berlin” of 22 October 2024 violated the Press Code and had issued a statement of disapproval and recommended that the editorial offices print them. This has not yet happened. On the contrary, the aforementioned media continue to pursue their smear campaign against the Barbakh family regardless.

        Criminalization through Semantic Construction

        The portrayal of the Barbakh family is based on a discursive mechanism of demonization, in which political reality is replaced by racist fantasies:

        • “Clan” instead of family
        • “Gaza” instead of origin
        • “Hamas” instead of political diversity
        • “Terrorism” instead of resistance, escape, or trauma processing

        Double Standards and Complicity with State Repression

        While German media criminalise Palestinians, their reporting on the crimes committed by the Israeli military in Gaza remains one-sided to tendentious. The same public that defames the Barbakh family remains silent about the systematic destruction of their homeland: about the widespread bombings by Israel, the sealing off of the Gaza Strip, the targeted deprivation of water, food, and electricity, and the destruction of medical infrastructure and supplies. The ongoing genocide is ignored by the aforementioned media outlets—while its survivors in Germany are labeled a threat.

        Not a single article asks: What does it mean to have to watch the destruction of one’s own homeland from afar? What does trauma, displacement, and loss mean? Instead, their names and faces serve the aforementioned newspapers as vehicles for a smear campaign that fuels racist domestic politics.

        The journalistic goal is not information, but dehumanization

        Journalists and editorial offices produce a narrative in which Palestinians do not appear as people with legitimate political positions, but as a potential danger that should be ‘neutralised’.

        Deportations as an Instrument of Anti-Palestinian Repression

        The media attack on Palestinian families like the Barbakhs does not happen in a vacuum. It goes hand in hand with an increasingly brutal deportation policy that specifically targets Palestinians – including survivors of an ongoing genocide.

        Berlin is now deporting Palestinian refugees, although German administrative courts have regularly deemed deportations to Greece inadmissible for years because conditions of reception there violate basic human rights standards. The German government has been trying to ignore this case law for around a year. In addition, since November 2023, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has imposed a decision halting asylum applications from Gazans on the absurd grounds that the situation in the Gaza Strip is ‘extremely dynamic, confusing and difficult to assess’.

        The German deportation policy is therefore not only an expression of racist migration policy, but also an active means of political intimidation.

        Whether the Barbakh family, children and young people at demonstrations or politically active Palestinians – they are all portrayed in the German media not as people with political awareness and legitimate concerns, but as security risks.

        This reporting is not enlightenment—it is an attack on fundamental rights.

        Children and young people are being doxed. Families are stigmatised. Human rights are violated. Meanwhile, Israel’s crimes are accepted. The newspapers in question act as an ideological instrument of a state that shows solidarity with a settler colonial power – and not with the victims.

        We Demand:

        • The retraction of all named articles that incite anti-Palestinian racism
        • Publication of a correction
        • Public apology to those affected by the racist media coverage
        • Immediate protection of underage Palestinians from media doxxing
        • An end to the racist criminalisation of Palestinian families
        • An independent review of reporting by BILD, WELT, FOCUS, B, and Berliner Zeitung
        • Consequences for media professionals who violate the Press Code
        • A public debate on anti-Palestinian racism in German editorial offices
        • Recognition of Palestinian voices as part of the democratic public sphere

        Contact: palestiniansandallies@proton.me

        📧 berlin@palaestinaspricht.de

        📧 arrestunits-berlin@proton.me

        Signed by:

        • Pallies
        • Palästina Spricht Berlin
        • Arrest Press Unit
        • as well as the lawyers of various affected members of the family
          • Lawyer Nevin Duran
          • Lawyer Nadija Samour
          • Lawyer Viktor Riad
          • Lawyer Benjamin Düsberg