Germany Turns to U.S. Playbook: Deportations Target Gaza War Protesters

theintercept.com Germany Turns to U.S. Playbook: Deportations Target Gaza War Protesters

Four Gaza protesters in Germany are set for deportations despite objections from an immigration official that none were convicted of crimes.

Berlin’s immigration authorities are moving to deport four young foreign residents on allegations related to participation in protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, an unprecedented move that raises serious concerns over civil liberties in Germany.

The deportation orders, issued under German migration law, were made amid political pressure and over internal objections from the head of the state of Berlin’s immigration agency.

The internal strife arose because three of those targeted for deportation are citizens of European Union member states who normally enjoy freedom of movement between E.U. countries. None of the four has been convicted of any crimes.

“What we’re seeing here is straight out of the far right’s playbook,” said Alexander Gorski, a lawyer representing two of the protesters. “You can see it in the U.S. and Germany, too: Political dissent is silenced by targeting the migration status of protesters.”

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I haven't been clear. Yes, deportations are wrong (even though my heart really wants fascists out of the country), and yes, it's alarming that at least half of the victims are trans/queer.
- i agree entirely with you. i think the only way for Germans to get rid of fascism is to start tackling their white supremacist culture.
  
  That's true for all of Europe. But first, we'll need to get our shit together and fend off agitprop from Russia, China, and, in the future, the US.
  
  I've lived all over Europe and once upon a time I naively expected that people in the country of Nazism would nowadays be the most sensitive to racist thinking and acting of all, and hence the least racist of all, but that's not at all my experience.
  Germany and Germans justifying the racist practices of their own power elites and the fast slide back to authoritarian practices, with whataboutism and "legality" (as if most of the worst actions of the Nazis weren't things they first made sure to make legal) is, frankly, scary as fuck for any European who is not a far-right Muppet, not least because it shows the moral and ethical distance between mainstream German politics and the AfD is paper thin.
  Most of Europe isn't supporting the mass murder of children by a nation because of the ethnicity said nation claims to represent and most of Europe hasn't made it legal to deport people who weren't tried and found guilty of something, and that Germany, of all nations, who did what they did almost a century ago and spent the time since telling us "Never again!" are back to the level of racism that knowingly sends wepons and ammo to a nation mass murdering chidren justifying that support with the ethnicity of the people of that nation, and is passing Fascist legislation to deport people without trial, is really making them stand out from the rest of Europe when it comes to Racism and Fascism.
  Your peers in Europe on the Racist and Fascist scales are the likes of Hungary, not the Scandinavians or even the French.
  
  Well the Holocaust really fucked up any hope for the entity that followed Nazi Germany to have a reasonable relationship with an entity that claims to be a Jewish state. Nevertheless there are alt right movements in almost all Euro nations that need to be dealt with.
  
  I suspect the problem was that the attempt at making amends was framed in a way that kept the Racism alive and well (i.e. the duty of making amends was framed as being towards an entire ethnicity rather than being towards the actual people who were victims, their families and their descendants - so kept treating people as ethnics but a specific ethnic group is now "good ones" rather than "bad ones"). This both explains the repeated loud proclamations of "unwavering support for the Jewish People" and the complete and total lack of similar support for other etnicities targetted by the Nazis with the Holocaust, such as the Roma People (more commonly known as Gypsies).
  That the making of amends was itself structured within a Racist thinking framework isn't exactly surprising given than the whole thing was done back in the 50, which was still very Racist by modern day standards, and that pretty much all of the Nazi "middle management" as well as the Nazi-supporting wealthy elites were kept in their places (it's easy to get old Fascists to loudly proclaim their disavowing of the last regime, but changing the actual way they look at their fellow human beings in the privacy of their minds is something much harder).
  The surprising part (certainly it was hugelly surprising for me, who used to have a very good opinion of the country less than a decade ago) is that in its way to the XXI century Germany has not in fact evolved along with the rest of Europe away from a mental framework that sees ethnicity as more relevant than character.
  Absolutelly, all Western nations have problems with the Far-Right and its favorite practices (Racism, Fascism, Might is Right, Nationalism and so on), to a less or greater level depending on the country, but the vast majority of countries in Europe had actually, before this period or moral and ethical regression started a decade ago, gone far further amongst the population in general in disassembling the ideological foundations of Racism and Authoritarinism supporting that kind of crap, than Germany.
  
  The "making of amends", the historical processing of what the hell happened with honest effort, didn't happen in the 50's, it started in the 70's during and after the student protests. The processing of these crimes is an almost impossible task, its execution was and is far from perfect, its intended lessons apparantly start to wane, but I'll not slam the efforts done by so many people.
  I also wonder if you ever visited Eastern Europe if you think the vast majority of countries in Europe have overcome "the ideological foundations of Racism".
  edit: And btw. German Sinti and Roma, descendents of the victims you refer to, don't want to be referred to as "Gypsies".
  
  True, I never lived in Eastern Europe, only in Northern, Western and Southern Europe.
  Are you telling me that Eastern Europeans commonly support groups mass murdering children along racial lines if the ethnicity of the members of the group doing the mass murder is deemed more important than other ethnicities?
  Because that's some pretty extreme Racism (as race-based discrimination goes, it's pretty hard to beat actually sending weapons to child mass murders and justifying it with one's "unwavering support" of their ethnicity), whilst the most extreme Racism I'm aware of in EE is in ex-Jugoslavia between mainly Serbs, Croats and ethnic Albanians which was also a Genocide but didn't leave tens of thousands of dead children, bombed out hospitals, a long list of murdered journalists and a list of babies murdered just in the first 6 months which is 17 pages long, not even close.
  Even the stuff that happened following the break up of Jugoslavia did not get anywere as bad as what Germany supports in Gaza very overtly because of the ethnicity of the Genociders and I'm not aware of any present day EE nation like Germany supporting outright Genocide openly because of the ethnicity of the genociders (though from what I've heard there's a lot of Racism in Hungary, though I believe they fall short of supporting mass murdering of children if done by those of the "right" race).
  In this Germany is almost in a class of its own (though not quite: it's there together with Brexiter Britain and Trump's America, hardly stellar company).
  PS: Re-read how I named the Roma People, "Roma people" and how my use of the word "Gypsies" is very clearly framed as a clarification for those who do not know the proper name of that people. I expected that the way I wrote would make it pretty clear that the proper way to refere to them was "Roma people", but guess I was wrong in that.
  
  No, I’m saying there are parts of Europe that are just as casually racist as East German hinterlands. I wouldn’t equate the government’s stance on the war to the general sentiments in the public. I think it’s just not that high of a priority for most people, kinda understandable considering all the shit that‘s going on, nationally and internationally. The October 7th attack was the first time for years that this war got extensive media coverage.
  
  Oh, casual Racism is a plague all over the World and, worse, some of the countries which supposedly have gone beyond it, really just changed the lists of "good"/"deserving" races and "bad"/"undeserving" races and called the discriminatory behaviour anchored in those new lists "positive", as if treating people differently depending on their race is a good thing as long as it's only for certain races but a bad thing for others.
  Racism is always a coin with two faces - there are always some who are presumed to, due to their ethnicity, be relatively better people and thus treated in a relatively better way, and others who due to their ethnicity are presumed to be relatively worst people and treated in a relatively worst way - and just because one goes around empasysing the "positive" side of treating some better due to their race doesn't make the thing any less Prejudiced, Discriminatory and unjust.
  The boundary between Racism and not-Racism is not defined by which are the races for which you will treat individuals better and which for which you treat individuals worst, or even on the focusing on positive treatment for some races (the modern spin on Racism) rather than negative treatment for other races (the Fascist spin on Racism), it's defined by judging and treating or not people differently depending on their race.
  To eliminate Racism you need to eliminate the way of thing thinking that is the foundation of Racism: that the character of people, their worth and the treatment they deserved depends on their ethnicity.
  "Positive" Discrimination doesn't eliminate Racism, it just moves the unfair, Racist, treatment to favour different ethnicities - a different list of ubermenschen and untermenschen rather than just treating all as equally being menschen.
  Whilst you (rightly!) point out and criticize the casual racism all over the place done with the traditional (Fascist) spin on racism, you seem to be totally oblivious to the Racism with the modern neoliberal spin which is just as unjust, prejudiced and discriminatory (hence just as Racist) as practiced in Germany, where it is systemic and even weaved into the structures of power (exactly as shown in this news story, with people being deported without trial for being against it), and the powerful activelly practicing discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and suppressing criticism of it with laws that bypass the Courts, is a far, FAR worse situation than merely the powerless being casually racist.
  The takeover of Israel by a nakedly ethno-Fascist regime which has started a full-blown Genocide along ethnic lines of proportions and cruelty exceeded only by the Holocaust, is what shined a harsh light on the reality that the whole business of presuming things and treating people based on their ethnicity is wrong even when you spin it as "positive", and Germany was so far down into Racism with that modern neoliberal spin that the country, unlike many other countries in Europe which also previously supported Israel, has been unable to pull itself out of it when it de facto transformed into support of a very extreme form of Fascist-style Racism.
  
  Thanks for the lesson, but to be clear: I'm not oblivious to positive racism and don't support the authorities' actions from the news article. I just think it's a combination of multiple factors why support for Israel is as high as in Germany, and I think none of those is an instrinsically hightened disposition for racism.

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