Majority of Antisemitic Crimes in Germany Related to ‘Foreign’ or ‘Religious’ Ideology

There have been hundreds of antisemitic “politically motivated crime” cases in Germany since the Hamas terror attack against Israel this year, and the majority of them are attributed to “foreign ideology” or “religious” causes.

The German government has released new hate crime statistics after a request for information by the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) faction in Parliament, revealing that over 700 such crimes have been registered since the Hamas terror attack in October.

Broadsheet newspaper Die Welt reports of the known causes for such attacks particular causes and nationalities stand out in “most” cases, revealing that among politically-motivated antisemitism, the majority of cases are attributed to “foreign ideology” or “religious” ideology. The majority of known perpetrators are German passport holders, although to what extent these offenders come from a “migration background” is not recorded, the paper states.

Following the German group, the most likely nationalities to be involved in antisemitism are Syrians followed by Turks, it was said. Spokesman for the AfD group which requested the data Gottfried Curio pointed to the preponderance of Syrians in the statistics, noting that while Syrian passport-holders made up one per cent of the national population, they appeared to be responsible for 14 per cent of the recorded political antisemitism.

Curio said, Welt reports, that: “The proportion of Syrian… is far higher than their proportion of the total population… The connection between the extent of the anti-Semitism that is now breaking out and the migration movement since 2015 has been proven.”

The German government, meanwhile, noted that antisemitism was a common thread in several extremist positions which brought together otherwise totally unrelated groups. They are reported to have said: “Israelphobia and even anti-Semitism are ideological components of Islamists , secular extremist Palestinians, Turkish and German right-wing extremists as well as parts of the German and Turkish left-wing extremists. The common enemy image of Israel means that all of these actors, some of whom are ideologically fundamentally different, can sometimes be found at the same meetings without any further cooperation taking place.”

The fresh figures follow claims in November by an antisemitism monitoring group that such incidents were up 320 per cent in just weeks following the Hamas terror attack against Israel. The German government criticised the “barbaric terror” of Hamas and warned against the sudden rise of antisemitism in Germany after decades of successfully driving it out, with chancellor Olaf Scholz saying: “I am deeply outraged by the way in which antisemitic hatred and inhuman agitation have been breaking out since that fateful October 7, on the internet, in social media around the world, and shamefully also here in Germany.”