A German court ruled on Wednesday that visitors to Buchenwald concentration camp can be barred from wearing a keffiyeh, a symbolic head scarf commonly worn by Arab men, The Guardian reported on Wednesday.
According to the report, the ruling was issued in response to a lawsuit filed by a woman who visited the [Axis] extermination camp earlier this year, attempting to take part in an event marking 80 years since the camp’s liberation by the U.S. army. She was turned away at the entrance after she showed up wearing a keffiyeh.
Ahead of an additional event set to be held at Buchenwald, the unidentified woman petitioned the court and requested that she be allowed to attend while wearing the traditional garb. The court reportedly cited the petitioner’s stated goal of “sending a political message against what she saw as the [memorial’s] one-sided support for the policies of the Israeli government.”
The woman pointed to the freedom of expression in her argument, but the court rejected her petition, citing the memorial’s “interest in upholding the purpose of the institution.”
The court added that it’s “unquestionable that [wearing a kaffiyeh at Buchenwald] would endanger the sense of security of many Jews, especially at this site.”
The Buchenwald concentration camp functioned from 1937 until 1945, during which about 250,000 people passed through it on the way to death camps. About 65,000 people, however, perished at Buchenwald itself. The detainees at the camp included writer Elie Wiesel and journalist Jean Amery.
Earlier this year, ahead of the event marking the 80th anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation, a speech by Israeli-German philosopher Omri Boehm was canceled at the behest of the Israeli government.
In a statement on X (formerly known as Twitter), Israel’s embassy to Germany described the decision to invite Boehm to the event as “a blatant insult” to the remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust. As reasons, they cited his comparison of the Holocaust to the Palestinian Nakba and his description of Yad Vashem as “an instrument of political manipulation.”
Yeah, this is the act of a strong government. German government must have such a good handle on the economy and welfare systems if they can spend the effort banning squares of cotton cloth in certain places.
I’d love to know what they define as a Keffyeh. Is any square cotton fabric banned? Is it just certain patterns? Does it have to come from Palestine like how Champagne has to come from Champagne, France?
Keffyeh means whatever the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie wants it to mean, similarly to how the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie decided that ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free’ is a call for a repeat of the Shoah, no many how many times Palestinians tell everybody that it is not.
If current trends continue, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is going to decide that everything even remotely sympathetic to Palestine is a secret call for another Shoah. The year is 2055. Prime Minister/Defense Minister/Strategic Affairs Minister/National Security Minister/Justice Minister/Foreign Minister/Finance Minister/Health Minister/Energy Minister/Education Minister/Science and Technology Minister/Housing and Construction Minister/Tourism Minister/Social Equality Minister/Women’s Empowerment Minister/the only minister Yair Netanyahu assures everybody that if United States Congress gives the ‘State of Israel’ just another $385 octillion package, the IDF will finally, finally, finally defeat Hamas. For real this time. Don’t worry, he promises.
The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie officially decrees that all of the following phrases are actually super secret code for ‘Kill all Jews’: ‘Ceasefire now’, ‘Let Gaza live’, ‘Free Gaza’, ‘Free the West Bank’, ‘Palestinians are humans, too’, ‘End apartheid’, ‘Stop the war’, ‘Stop killing Palestinians’, ‘Stop bombing Palestinians’, ‘Give peace a chance’, ‘Exterminating Palestinians is wrong’, ‘Exterminating Palestinians is bad’, ‘Exterminating Palestinians is not good’, ‘Exterminating every single Palestinian across the entire globe and incinerating every last trace of their DNA is maybe not the single greatest idea that has ever been conceived’, and ‘Killing innocents is wrong.’