Germany’s appeasement of Islamists has got to stop

What was Berlin’s chief of police thinking, when she warned Jews and gay people to hide their identities in certain parts of the city?

In an interview last month in the Berliner Zeitung, Barbara Slowik said: ‘There are areas of the city, we need to be perfectly honest here, where I would advise people who wear a kippah or are openly gay or lesbian to be more careful.’ She also said that while she didn’t want to blame any one group for this, ‘there are certain neighbourhoods where the majority of people of Arab origin live, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups… and are openly hostile towards Jews’.

The interview has since caused a huge stir in Germany. Sigmount A Königsberg, a leading Jewish-community activist, praised Slowik for ‘so correctly and clearly’ naming the main perpetrators of anti-Semitism in modern Germany. Berlin’s CDU mayor, Kai Wegner, also backed his police chief: ‘She addresses the problems openly, as I expect from her.’ But there has been plenty of outrage, too. The left-liberal Taz newspaper slammed Slowik’s ‘alarmism’ as a gift to right-wingers and conservatives. There is nothing ‘brave’, it argued, in giving voice to what it characterised as anti-Muslim prejudice.

Slowik’s intervention echoes a similarly bleak warning, made several years ago, by the German government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein. In 2019, he said that he wouldn’t advise Jews to wear the kippah ‘everywhere, all the time’ when out in public. His remarks caused widespread shock and outrage, with many arguing that Germans must never allow there to be ‘no-go areas’ for Jews.

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