During an anti-Israel protest in Germany, police broke into an apartment building which had an Israel flag hanging in front of its window. You can watch the video of the removal below the fold.

About 10,000 people showed up in Duisburg, Germany, for the protest, most of whom immigrants. They were clearly angry and even more so when they saw the Israeli flag. They started shouting angry slogans and, when the police finally broke into the apartment and removed the flag, happily chanted “Allahu Akhbar” (God is Great – quite an infuriating context to be use this sentence in as far as I am concerned for obvious personal reasons).

As TigerHawk explains, there are couple of reasons why the cops may have decided to remove the flag:

1. ” First, these German cops want to suppress expressions of support for Israel.” Since “[t]his strikes me as a bad public relations and an offense to international human rights law,” we can probably dismiss this possibility.

2. “Germans have such contempt for the ability of the Muslim demonstrators to control their emotions that they do not trust them to respond non-violently even to such a benign symbol as a flag in a window. Not only are these German cops pandering to the racism of the protesters, but they themselves are racist in their obvious assumption that Muslims will resort to violence at the slightest provocation.” This explanation has a lot of merit to it; I see this happening on a regular basis here in Europe. Many liberals opposed the publishing of the so-called Muhammad cartoons because they feared that no Muslim could control himself. The same goes for movies that are critical of Islam – this is quite sad, in my opinion, because most Muslims can most certainly control themselves and because the backwards ones will never learn to deal with criticism and, yes, insults if they are constantly sheltered from it. Being a citizen of a democracy means you may run into things you’d rather not run into. That’s part of being a modern human being.

A reader of TigerHawk adds another possible explanation:

3. “[T]hat they really saw themselves as a neutral party seeking to remove a potential problem in a preventative strike, and felt comfortable exercising this option as an all-powerful authority… For this, you have to recall two things. 1) many Europeans think that even the possibility of being offensive is a bad thing, unless you’re targeting a well-known exception, like American heads of state. 2), this is Germany, which until a few years ago did not even have police brutality laws.”

Especially the first ‘thing’ mentioned by the reader is, I think, likely correct: many Europeans believe that “the possibility of being offensive is a bad thing” which has to be prevented at nearly all cost.

What we saw today in Germany is, I think, a combination of numbers 2 and 3: the German police officers present thought the protesters would not be able to control themselves and, second, they acted as many Europeans act when confronted with a situation in which one party may be offended by the actions of another; instead of promoting tolerance simply removing the (possible) offensive object.

In either case, the action taken by the police is troubling. They should, if necessary, have formed a circle around the building to protect its inhabitants and they should have made clear to the protesters that they may have targeted Jews in such a way from 1933 to 1945, but that Germany is a liberal democracy now in which all groups are respected, accepted and protected.

Watch the video: