Every year the large and well-known as well as internationally visited Frankfurt Book Fair takes place in Frankfurt. This year the book fair was opened in the sign of the current events and the political line of the German imperialism by speeches of politicians and functionaries who expressed their solidarity against Israel and defamed the national resistance of the Palestinian people as terrorism. For this event, the Green Minister of State, Cladia Roth, traveled to the event as a substitute for the gangster Chancellor Scholz, who was busy expressing Germany's support for the genocide of the Palestinian people to the Israeli war cabinet.
The appearance of the postmodern would-be philosopher from the Frankfurt Book Fair's "Guest of Honor" country then caused a furor. Slavoj Zizek from Slovenia also gave a speech during the opening ceremonies in which he condemned the attacks by Hamas and the national resistance as terrorism. The "scandal", however, was Zizek's harmless and toothless statement that one should also listen to the Palestinians and consider their background in order to understand the conflict. Immediately afterwards, Zizek obediently added that the Israeli state of course has every right to defend itself, which in reality means nothing other than the right of the Israeli state to defend the colonization and oppression of the Palestinian people. This did not save him however in that with the Palestinian topic - one must say it without exaggeration - uniformly switched bourgeois politics and media landscape from the fact that he earned several heckling and several visitors demonstratively left the hall.Hessen's state anti-Semitism commissioner Uwe Becker of the CDU first stormed out of the hall only to come back and interrupt Zizek in front of and on stage. Frankfurt's SPD mayor Mike Josef made it clear what the situation was like with freedom of expression on the issue of Palestine in the FRG these days, saying literally "There must be no two opinions in Germany about the Hamas attack." Afterwards, Jürgen Boos, the director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, felt compelled to appease and said that it is important to listen to each other even if one does not share the opinion of the other.
Another event that is making headlines in this context of the national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people and the book fair is the exclusion and censorship of the Palestinian author Adania Shibli. She was supposed to receive an award from the LitProm association at the Frankfurt Book Fair for her novel "Minor Detail", which has been recited all over the world. According to its self-description, the LitProm association has made it its task to distribute books from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Arab world. This award ceremony and tribute has now been postponed to an unknown time by this very association. Why this? Well, because according to "protests" by German journalists, the book spreads anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic thinking. How far the hatred and delusion of the bourgeois media against the Palestinian liberation struggle have gone in the meantime becomes clear when one deals with the contents of the book. The novella is set in the time of the Nakba around 1948-49, that is, the beginning of the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by the establishment of the state of Israel. In the book, which is based on historical facts, the rape and murder of a Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers is narrated from a multi-person perspective. The author, who also holds an Israeli citizenship, should not be chosen, according to the opinion of the bourgeois journalists of this country, among other reasons, because it would be a "wrong signal" in times of resistance of Hamas and other forces of the Palestinian people. This censorship shows very openly that even people with Israeli passports who are not in line with Zionism and the policy of German imperialism and who denounce the crimes and terror of Israel are forbidden to speak out. In contrast, by the way, the Frankfurt Book Fair has had no problem providing an international stage for fascists for years. Following this decision not to select Adania Shibli, more than 1000 writers, authors and artists, including several Nobel laureates, sent an open letter to the Frankfurt Book Fair in which they wrote that the Book Fair has a responsibility to create a space where Palestinian writers can express their thoughts, feelings and reflections in these cruel times and not to censor these writers.
On the street, however, all possible solidarity actions for the Palestinian people are covered with bans and reactionary violence, as in the rest of the FRG. A demonstration announced last Saturday in Frankfurt, which was organized by the groups "Migrantifa Rhein-Main", "Palästina e.V." and "Studis gegen rechte Hetze", was banned by the city of Frankfurt in advance with backing from the Hessian Ministry of the Interior. The applicant of the demonstration, Aitak Barani filed an urgent application against it with the administrative court in Frankfurt. In order to justify her decision and to resist the public agitation against the demonstration she had registered, she wanted to hold a press conference on the same day. She had to do this in the open street because the police forbade her to use a hostel for this purpose, claiming that she would need a special permit for a press conference. At this press conference, Aitak Barani was then arrested and taken away by the police in front of running cameras of the public broadcasters. What for?She had literally said, "For me, this breaking out of the open-air prison is a successful resistance action. There is no terror of Hamas, there is no terror of PFLP", also she called the naming of the mentioned groups as terror organizations by bourgeois media as "part of the war that is waged against the Palestinians" and doubted Zionist sources that demonstrably spread lies about various alleged massacres, as it was the case with the babies allegedly beheaded by Hamas fighters. These justified positions of Aitak Barani are reason enough for the Frankfurt police to arrest a Demonstration registrant during a press conference for incitement of the people and approval of criminal acts.
Later in the day, the demonstration was then banned again by the Administrative Court in Kassel on the complaint of the City of Frankfurt. Hessen's CDU Minister of the Interior Peter Beuth said in the context of these events, as already mentioned, that the Hessian Ministry of the Interior had asked the city of Frankfurt to ban the demonstration. In the event that such demonstrations are allowed by the courts against the will of the Hessian Ministry of the Interior, the Interior Minister made it clear that the police will nevertheless act "low-threshold" and quickly against these demonstrations. A quite open admission that the political will of the executive from the Ministry of the Interior counts more in the end than the fundamental right to freedom of assembly granted by the courts. A demonstration in solidarity with Israel and its terror against the Palestinian people, on the same day, was meanwhile "of course" allowed without ifs and buts. The demonstration was organized by the Jewish community of Frankfurt, which was "shocked" and " horrified" when it seemed in the meantime that the pro-Palestinian demonstration could be allowed. At this point it must be said that just like Christian churches and Muslim mosque associations, Jewish communities are not religious associations existing in a vacuum free of class struggle and politics, but many communities also act in the service of the ruling class and above all in the sense of Israel and pro-Zionist.Meanwhile, Hessen's anti-Semitism commissioner, who had already covered himself in glory in the book fair case, described the actions of the Palestinian resistance against their occupiers as cold-blooded murders of Jews, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was not too stupid to seriously describe the left-wing and progressive Palestinian organization "Samidoun" in an article as quasi "radical Islamic ideologues", who would equate German Jewry with Israel and accordingly call for violence against Jewish institutions in Germany. This is just one of many inflammatory articles against Samidoun, which are even threatened with a ban by gangster Chancellor Scholz himself. Ironically, the Zionist movement tries to equate Jewish people and Judaism with the Israeli state and propagate Israel as a de-facto State-made Judaism, which is why, according to this argumentation, the rejection of the existence of Israel would supposedly also be the rejection of Judaism.
On the Saturday in question, October 14, despite the ban, up to 1,000 people gathered in various places in downtown Frankfurt to demand an end to the genocide in the Gaza Strip and to express their support for the Palestinian people. These gatherings were then attacked by police in some places and dispersed with the threat of using water cannons. A total of 12 people were arrested in the process for attempted prisoner release and assaulting police officers, among other charges. One cop was off duty after allegedly being bitten on the leg by a demonstrator, according to bourgeois media.
Meanwhile, just the last two days prove that the masses throughout the FRG and also in Hessen will not let anyone take away their right to support the national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people.
