‘If Gaza Burns, Berlin Burns’ Says Graffiti at Berlin Town Hall Arson Attack

Buergeramt, Rathaus Tiergarten, Mathilde-Jacob-Platz, Moabit, Berlin, Deutschland (Photo
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Oliver JJ Lane

Germany’s state security agency is investigating a suspected politically motivated arson after Gaza-related slogans were left at a Berlin town hall that was subjected to an attempted arson attack.

Berlin fire brigade responded with 30 firemen to Tiergarten town hall, a city centre district, where local residents reported hearing glass breaking, a fire burning on the ground floor, and people fleeing the scene. A spokesman for the town said the blaze “could have led to a larger fire” but it was controlled in time thanks to the fast reaction of those living nearby, the brigade saying: “We were able to quickly extinguish the fire”.

Furniture inside the town hall, which is covered with scaffolding during restoration work, was damaged reports Die Welt.

Graffiti at the scene was subsequently discovered, which contained what the German Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism called “anti-Israel slogans and threats”. The messages included ‘If Gaza Burns, Berlin Burns’, and ‘Warning Berlin, We’ll Let it Burn’.

German newspaper Tagesspiegel reports a police spokesman who said initial findings suggest a Molotov cocktail started the fire and that the investigation is treating the fire and the wall writing as linked. The relationship between the two acts is “obvious”, the spokesman said. Consequently, the state security agency has taken over investigating and is considering an act of political arson.

The paper also cites the remarks of Berlin’s anti-Semitism commissioner Samuel Salzborn, who said if the suspicion about arson is proven then “a focus must be placed on the part of the police on the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel escalations of the last few weeks and months”

Hatred is being directed against Jews in Germany, Salzborn said, but violence was also being directed at “central elements of democracy”. The attack against a town hall is an extension of the violence seen at protests, he said.

Antisemitism is, after years of decline, again resurgent in Germany, and particularly since last year’s deadly Hamas terrorist attack against Israel. In December a report found there had been hundreds of antisemitic “politically motivated crime” cases in Germany since the attack, and the majority of these were found to be attributable to “foreign ideology” or “religious” causes.

Just this year a Synagogue was fire bombed in a German city, and an Auschwitz memorial was disrupted at the German-built death camp in Poland.

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