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German police on Friday banned a vigil intended to honor the memory of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh who, according to Palestinian government, was killed last week by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank. (See AL JAZEERA JOURNALIST’S DEATH: KILLED DURING ISRAELI RAID IN OCCUPIED TERRITORY.)
The vigil was organized by Jüdische Stimme, a pro-Palestine Jewish organization, and was intended to take place in Berlin. The group said they were informed by German police that the vigil would not be permitted, according to The New Arab.
Police in Berlin told the website that officials were concerned about other events in the city, including five Nakba Day demonstrations that brought an “immediate risk” of “inflammatory, anti-semitic exclamations” and “glorification of violence.”
Nakba Day lands on 15 May and is the founding of the state of Israel that led to about 700,000 Palestinians being banished.
Al Jazeera reported that the German media said Jewish people had been subject to anti-Semitic insults last month at a pro-Palestine protest in the city.
Wieland Hoban, the Jüdische Stimme chairman, told the outlet that Berlin wants to prevent Palestine solidarity as much as it can to prove that Germany is in complete support of Israel.
“They’ll take a handful of teenagers saying anti-Semitic things and use that to discredit thousands of people who want to demonstrate peacefully,” he said.
Hoban said Germany maintains a special responsibility towards Israel “because of the Holocaust.”
“People like us, as Jews, are constantly having to explain to Germans that they are not helping us by supporting the oppression of Palestinians,” he said. “The killing of Palestinian journalists is an attempt to kill information, to kill truth, which is exactly what the Berlin police are doing by suppressing demonstrations,” Hoban added.
TRENDPOST: The Trends Journal has been reporting on the tension boiling over in the region. (See “SHOOTING BREAKS OUT IN ISRAEL: REVENGE OR TERRORISM?” “APARTHEID STATE OF ISRAEL CLAMPING DOWN ON PALESTINIANS” and “AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: ISRAEL’S TREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS AMOUNTS TO APARTHEID.”)
Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American, was in Jenin on Wednesday reporting when she was shot during a raid by Israeli forces, according to reports. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas attended her memorial and rejected Israel’s offer for a joint investigation into her killing.
He said he will take the case to the International Criminal Court.
“We rejected, and continue to reject, the joint investigation with the Israeli occupation authorities because they committed the crime and we do not trust them,” Abbas said. “We will go immediately to the International Criminal Court to track down the killers.”
Video also emerged from her funeral that appeared to show Israeli police shoving and assaulting some of the mourners, which also attracted international criticism.
Israeli police say they will hold an investigation into what happened at the funeral.
Police “will hold a comprehensive investigation into what happened during the funeral over the next day, in order to produce lessons from the incident. These lessons will be presented to the police commissioner and then to me,” Israeli Minister of Public Security Omer Bar-Lev said in a statement to CNN.
Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, was also critical of Israeli police at the funeral and also called the family of the deceased reporter, The Times of Israel reported.
Blinken earlier said he was “deeply troubled” by the actions of Israeli police, and his department called for a transparent investigation.
TREND FORECAST: The death of Shireen Abu Akleh has been quickly forgotten in Western media, since any condemnation of Israel’s egregious, illegal, and murderous acts are condemned as “anti-Semitic.”
However, while this condemnation has become the accepted narrative of the media, and politicians since Israel’s 20th century inception, Israeli heritage is from Kazakhstan, a central Asian nation which borders Georgia, Russia and Mongolia and whose capital is over 4,000 miles from Israel’s.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary says Semites are, “a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs.”
Indeed, “southwestern” Asia is not “central” Asia and Arabs are Semites. Therefore, a condemnation of Palestinian Arabs by Israel is then, according to the definition, would be “anti-Semitic” … but that truth is prohibited in the U.S./NATO world of hypocrisy.
The New York Times, understanding the sensitivity of the story, tweeted, “Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist for Al Jazeera, was shot and killed in the West Bank early Wednesday, the Palestinian health ministry said. The circumstances surrounding the shooting were not immediately clear.”
The paper was accused of protecting Israel because by that point, reports strongly pointed to Israeli police as the culprit.
One user responded to the paper’s tweet, “It’s clear!!!! Aljazeera journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh was shot and killed by Israeli occupation forces this morning in her press vest, while she was covering an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank town of Jenin. SHAME ON YOU!!!!!”