Berlin Police Violence Against Female Protesters
On the International Women’s Day, the Berlin police displayed their disregard for women’s rights again, using brutal force against female protesters who were drawing attention to the continued disregard of women’s rights in Palestine by Israel and the inaction of the German government. The livestreamed and US and German-backed genocide is a forbidden topic. Those who bring it up are met with repression.
Police Violence
Video footage shows police officers, out of control and shouting, repeatedly punching female protesters in the face, some of them with gloves that seem to be reinforced with padding. One officer is seen choking and punching a woman who is already on the ground, yelling at the helpless woman. Another video shows police officers in full uniform dragging a woman across the floor.
In their vague report, the police failed to mention the extent of their own violence. As expected, they instead listed allegations of misconduct by the protesters, without providing any evidence to support these claims, despite having their own camera teams and film recordings. This is a common police practice.
When German media could no longer ignore the violence videos, they seized on the police’s justifications, with the public broadcaster rbb even forgetting to use the correct gender and absurdly suggesting that the police only beat men. Was it too embarrassing for the station to report on women being beaten by police in uniform?
Planned Violence
It can be inferred from the police’s statement that the real intention of the police was to target the protesters, as they had already warned the demonstration leaders about a “propalästinensischer block” of over 250 people, some of whom were “highly emotional.” The police had announced that they would “consequently and with a low threshold of intervention” pursue “any criminal acts from this block.”
In other words, the police were looking for an excuse to crack down on the protesters and they found it in the “propalästinensische” slogans, such as “From the river to the sea..”. As usual, the police left unclear what they meant by “israelfeindliche Sprechchöre.” They made it clear, however, that criticism of Israel would be met with violence.
The police then took swift “police action” which included the use of pepper spray, fist fights, arrests and more. The police’s report vaguely mentioned “resistance, breaches of the peace, attempted prisoner liberations and physical attacks” including “punches, kicks and bottle throwing.”
Unsubstantiated Police Claims
The problem with the story is that the police, unlike the protesters, did not provide any evidence to support their claims, despite the police’s own statement that they would ensure a “lückenlose Beweissicherung in Bild und Ton.” Experienced protesters or those who accompany unwanted demonstrations – such as the protests against the Corona measures – have good reasons to mistrust police reports.
I could list dozens of cases where the police concealed, distorted, or invented events on a demonstration. A classic example is a demonstration in Dessau, Saxony-Anhalt, in 2012 to commemorate the 2005 death of Oury Jalloh, a black African man who was killed in a police cell in Dessau. Although the slogan “Oury Jalloh – das war Mord” (Oury Jalloh – that was murder) had previously been deemed protected by freedom of opinion by a court, the police had no interest in it. Without warning, they kettled the demonstration, stormed it, tore down the signs and beat protesters at random. Although the two organizers did not carry any signs and verbally tried to de-escalate the situation, the police beat them to the ground, with one of them ending up in the hospital with a bloody and unconscious face. The injured person later identified the police officers who had beaten him and there were video recordings of the event. However, the police responded as usual: they filed a counter-complaint and the court acquitted the police officers, convicting the injured person of resisting the police with a four-digit fine. The police’s press releases were largely found to be false, but it did not bother the court that the police’s claims were unproven. The state’s truth is always given a bonus.
Female Victims of Genocide
Speaking of film material, there is an abundance of it documenting Israeli war crimes in the Palestinian territories, often by Israeli soldiers themselves who have uploaded the footage to the internet. It is hard to deny that the Israeli “revenge campaign” is openly directed against the civilian population. And that is, unlike what many media suggest, a topic for the International Women’s Day.
At least 50,000 people have been killed and over 100,000 injured in the Gaza Strip, with two-thirds of the victims being women or minors. The West Bank is also being bombed into a wasteland, with hundreds of extrajudicial murders and a thousand forced expulsions since the end of 2023, all on the account of the occupying army. Of course, women and children, whom Israel and German media like to dehumanize as “collateral damage” or “human shields” are suffering the most.
Israel is also not “only” kidnapping Palestinian men, but also women and minors and leaving them to rot in its torture prisons, often without trial. And for nearly two weeks now, the US-backed military state has blocked all supplies of food, water, medicine and fuel to the Gaza Strip. Israel has also cut off all power supplies.
This is not only a violation of international law, but for anyone with a clear mind, a mass murder with a warning. And with feminism, it has absolutely nothing to do, if women are forced to watch their children die of dirty water or are left to crawl through the rubble of their destroyed homes, completely forgetting about hygiene and privacy. Female victims are conveniently forgotten.
Beating for the State
German media are not usually interested in this. They accompany the genocide at a distance and call it “objective.” Not only do they give more credibility to Israeli propaganda and German police reports than to eyewitness accounts and even video footage.
The press often sacrifices fundamental journalistic standards: Just as they stigmatized critics of the Corona measures as “Nazis” and “conspiracy theorists” and peace activists as ” Schwurblern” or “Putintrolls” they now construct unwanted people as “antisemites” often in a coded manner, so that the police can then beat them up, regardless of their gender, without any consideration for human rights.
Even if one does not agree with the intentions of the female protesters, it must be noted that high-armed men have beaten up unarmed women because they did not like their opinions – and this, in part, as shown by the videos, in a martialislly ecstatic manner.
Once again, the political and media talk of gender equality, which still fails to achieve equal pay, is reduced to a mere political slogan, used, negated, or even misused for hate speech, for example, against Muslims. The Berlin police officers, however, should be described as what they are: violent woman-beaters and genocide deniers in uniform, who enforce the German state’s interests with fists and truncheons.