Ahmet S. smiles. Shakes his head. Looks at the ground, grins, looks up again, tilts his head to the side, watches the video that the judge is currently showing. You can see the images of his arrest on October 21, 2023, the handcuffs, his screams, the fixation to the ground. Then the 21-year-old defendant says: “That was police violence.”
He is the victim here, that is what they are supposed to mean. A friend took the film with his cell phone camera. What he did not film: his friend Ahmet S. shouting anti-Semitic slogans beforehand. According to the prosecution, S. is said to have shouted “Fucking Jews!” and “I’ll fuck all Jews!” at participants in a vigil for Israel. After the terrorist attack on October 7 in downtown Hamburg, they showed solidarity with the Hamas hostages and the invaded country.
Ahmet S. probably had to let out what was in his head, but in the Hamburg District Court the young man denied having said such a thing. “None of that is true,” he says.
But demonstrator Andreas N. can still remember the scene clearly. “He stood right in front of me and shouted ‘fucking Jews,'” says the 69-year-old witness. “The kind of thing people like that say.”
The district courts in Germany have had a lot to do these weeks to process such Jew-hater cases. Since October 7, when Hamas invaded Israel, murdered, mutilated and raped thousands of people, took hundreds hostages and gave free rein to their unbridled hatred of the Jewish state, people in this country have also felt encouraged to finally say publicly what they think of Jews.
At the end of May, the Federal Criminal Police Office announced that anti-Semitic crimes had reached a new high last year with 5,164 offenses, including 148 violent crimes. The massive increase (in 2022 there were 2,641 crimes, including 88 violent crimes) is mainly due to the increase after October 7, 2023, it says. In the first quarter of this year, there were already 793 anti-Semitic crimes. The Federal Association of Research and Information Centers on Anti-Semitism (Rias) counted 39 anti-Semitic incidents per day in Germany in the weeks following the Hamas massacre.
The President of the Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, said that many Jews would no longer identify themselves as such in public out of fear. The BKA figures were a “huge and mental burden”. And Felix Klein, the Federal Government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, demanded that “the state and society must not allow any spaces in which hatred of Jews goes unchallenged”.
At least in one case, which was also heard in Hamburg at the end of May, Klein’s wish seems to have been fulfilled.
Cetin D. appeared before the St. Georg District Court on a Tuesday at the end of May, charged with insult and incitement. The 21-year-old drunkenly shouted slogans such as “You fucking Jews” and “I’ll fuck all Jews” as well as “Palestine is right” early on a Sunday morning.
Cetin D. already has several previous convictions for theft and assault, no completed vocational training and no job. He sits at the table without a lawyer and says that he “can’t remember anything” – unfortunately. Cetin D. can be seen on the S-Bahn footage: He runs through the carriage, his face is distorted, he appears to be shouting.
Early on a Sunday morning, a colorful mix of night owls are likely to be sitting on the train between the Reeperbahn and Hauptbahnhof stations. But one young man is not indifferent to how Cetin D. behaves. He calls the police, tipsy himself – and they fish the drunken screamer out of the train. The police have switched on the body cameras, and when the judge plays the recordings in the courtroom, the man in the film repeats the hate slogans in front of the officers.
There is nothing to deny here. But the defendant always says, “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember”. He wants to apologize, says Cetin D. He is “actually not the kind of person who would do something like that”.
The prosecutor asks him how it came about. “I have nothing against Jews,” claims the defendant. But then why did he shout such slogans, the prosecutor wants to know. Cetin D. shrugs his shoulders. He says he is sorry.
How does the state punish such a person? The representative of the Hamburg Public Prosecutor’s Office also asks himself this question. “The defendant is at a crossroads. It is difficult to find an appropriate legal consequence,” he says – and demands a fine of 1,120 euros, which can be paid in installments of 30 euros per month. The judge then imposes this on Cetin D.
But anti-Semitism also takes place in educated circles. In Munich on Monday, the imam Mohamed Ibrahim withdrew his appeal against a penal order that fined him 4,500 euros for condoning criminal offenses. The background to this is a Facebook post from October 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas attack on Israel. At the time, he had written: “Everyone has their own way of celebrating October.” He had put a smiley face behind it.
“In doing so, you expressed that you approved of the murder and hostage-taking by Hamas in hundreds of cases, and that the terrorist attack was certainly a cause for celebration for some people,” said the penal order, which the Bavarian judiciary’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Andreas Franck, read out in court.
But no, it has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism, the Muslim cleric insisted. He wrote this post at midday and at the time he had only heard “that the Palestinian resistance had managed to achieve success against Israel”. He assumed that it was a purely military action and “that the Palestinians were trying to assert their rights”. There were “many groups in Palestine that are resisting”. “If there is an occupation, you can act against the occupation”, Ibrahim stressed, drawing a parallel to Ukraine’s right to defend itself against Russia.
Ibrahim did not want to allow any further misunderstandings to arise and withdrew his appeal against the penalty order in court. He has been allowed to preach in his mosque again since November after a one-month suspension.
In the case of Ahmet S. from Hamburg, the truth is not discovered so quickly: the trial will continue on June 20 with further witness interviews. Whether he will receive the acquittal he was hoping for is questionable given the number of witnesses for the prosecution. The prosecutor put it this way to the defendant: “What you are saying is completely unbelievable.”
