A three day Palestine conference in Berlin was forcibly shut down after three hours on Friday. Electricity was abruptly terminated in the midst of the presentation by Salman Abu Sitta, the 87 year old author of the authoritative \u201cAtlas of Palestine\u201d.<\/p>\n
Former Greek Finance Minister and leader of DIEM25, Yanis Varoufakis, was prevented from entering Germany to attend the conference. He went on Twitter\/X<\/a> to send a message, \u201cDo you know that the German Interior Ministry has just banned me from entering Germany? Indeed if that were not enough,\u00a0 I have been banned\u00a0 from talking to you via zoom, or indeed through a video message like this, exactly like this. The threat being that I will be tried in Germany for breaking German law. Why? Because of a speech that I published yesterday on my blog calling for universal human rights in Israel-Palestine\u2026 So my question to my German friends, to Germans in general whether you agree with me or not doesn\u2019t matter\u2026 Is this (banning) in your name? Is it something that you feel comfortable happening in your democracy? From my perspective this is essentially the death knell of the prospects of democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Another banned guest speaker was UK citizen Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah. He reported on Twitter\/X<\/a> ,\u201dI have just returned from Germany where I was prevented from entering the country for attending a conference in Germany to give evidence on the war in Gaza and my witness statement as a doctor working in its hospitals. This morning at 10 I landed in Berlin to attend a conference on Palestine where I had been asked\u2026 to give my evidence of the 43 days that I had seen in the hospitals in Gaza, working in both Shifa and al-Ahli Hospital. Upon arrival I was stopped at the passport office. I was then escorted down to the basement of the airport where I was questioned for around 3.5 hours. At the end of 3.5 hours I was told that I will not be allowed to enter German soil and that this ban will last the whole of April. Not just that\u2026 if I were to try to link up by Zoom or Facetime with the conference even if I were outside Germany or if I were to send a video of my lecture to the conference in Berlin, then that would constitute a breach of German law and that I would endanger myself to have a fine or even up to a year in prison.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Abu Sitta further commented, \u201cGermany is defending itself against Nicaraguan charges that it is an accomplice to genocidal war as described by the International Court of Justice. This is exactly what accomplices to a crime do. They bury the evidence and they silence or harass or intimidate the witnesses… This crackdown on free speech is a dangerous precedent\u2026\u00a0 We are watching the first genocide unfold in the 21st<\/sup> Century and for Germany to become implicated as an accomplice in silencing the witnesses of this genocide does not bode well for the rest of the century.\u201d<\/p>\n A large contingent of police invaded the conference and shut off the electricity. Organizers told the reported 250 conference attendees to not provoke the police to violence. Afterward, organizers\u00a0 held a press conference<\/a>\u00a0 reporting on the behaviour of police before and during the crackdown. Even before the conference, police tried to intimidate supporters of the conference and the owner of the conference venue. They threatened the venue owner might not be able to hold events in future if the conference went ahead.\u00a0 An organizer asked, \u201cAre these the methods of the mafia or democracy?\u201d<\/p>\n Western<\/a> and Israeli<\/a> media reported the closure was to prevent \u201canti semitism\u201d or \u201chatred of Israel\u201d.. On this dubious and hypothetical basis, public education about a real ongoing massacre and mass starvation was made illegal.<\/p>\n