Adam Armoush, a 21-year-old student who grew up in an Arab family in Israel, wore a kippa in Berlin as an experiment: Would he be attacked for it? The provocation worked almost immediately: A youngster ran at him on the street in one of the city's poshest areas, swinging a belt and shouting anti-Semitic abuse in Arabic. [...]
For years, the leaders of the German Jewish community have warned that wearing a kippa could be dangerous in Berlin, especially in areas with a large Muslim population. But German police statistics would make it look as though the issue doesn't exist. According to them, 522 anti-Semitic crimes were registered in Germany in 2017, 479 of them committed by "right-wing extremists" -- that is, neo-Nazis. Only 19 incidents were ascribed to "foreign ideology" or "religious ideology" -- tags that could apply to Jew-hatred as practiced in the Islamic world. But Ann-Christin Wegener wrote in a recent study for the state of Hessen's constitutional protection department that the police tended to attribute the crimes to right-wing extremists when they had no clue of the perpetrators' motivations. Besides, she wrote, "right-wing extremist symbols are banned in Germany, a criminal offense to which there is no Islamist equivalent, and crimes committed using the Arabic or Turkish language result in police attention less frequently." The Israeli in Berlin had the advantage of understanding exactly what his attacker was shouting. [...]
The German authorities or society haven't done much about this. To the left, Islamophobia has been a higher priority than anti-Semitism in recent years, and the center-right has been careful about raising the subject for fear of being branded Islamophobic. But in recent weeks, politicians have turned their attention to the Muslim variety of anti-Semitism. After two German rappers, Kollegah and Farid Bang, received the prestigious Echo music award earlier this month -- on Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, to boot -- they were sharply criticized for a song they'd co-authored. In it, Bang, whose real name is Farid El Abdellaoui and who is of Moroccan descent, raps, "My body is more defined than those of Auschwitz prisoners."
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