The Berlin police prevented the holding of a three-day pro-Palestinian congress this Friday due to the participation by videoconference of a speaker whom he had been banned from activities in Germany, as confirmed to EFE by a police spokesperson. The spokesperson indicated that as a result of the interruption the event had undergone a “legal examination”after which the police made the decision to suspend the rest of the congress, which was to continue until Sunday.

On their social networks, the police stated that “there is a risk of giving way again to a speaker who in the past has already expressed himself in public in an anti-Semitic manner and praising violence.” The mayor of Berlin, the conservative Kai Wegner, thanked the police for having acted with determination in the face of what he defined as an “act of hate.” “We have made it clear what the rules are in Berlin. We have made it clear that hatred of Israel has no place in Berlin. “Whoever does not stick to it will feel the consequences,” he wrote on the social network X.

For weeks German politicians and media had warned of the supposed risk that the event –dubbed the ‘congress of Israel haters’ on the one hand, the press – served as a platform for crimes of an anti-Semitic nature. Several German political and civil society organizations had demanded that the congress or at least foreign speakers be banned from entering the country to prevent Berlin from becoming “the center of the glorification of terror.”

The city-state authorities deployed a force of 2,500 police officers, with instructions to intervene in the event of a possible crime. According to journalists and activists present at the congress, the intervention that caused the interruption of the event was that of the Palestinian author Salmán Abu Sittawho had also previously been prevented from entering the country.

“Silencing a witness”

Also the British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassán Abu Sitta, rector of the University of Glasgow, reported that he had been rejected at the Berlin airport. “The German Government has forcibly prevented me from entering the country. Silencing a witness to the genocide before the ICJ (International Court of Justice) adds to German complicity in the ongoing massacre,” said Abu Sitta, rector of the University of Glasgow, through his X account.

The organizers, for their part, criticized that the police had banned the event “for no reason” and announced that in the course of the events a Jewish activist was detained by the agents. The objective of the congress was precisely to denounce the alleged repression by the German authorities of voices critical of Israel’s war in Gaza and the staunch defense of Tel Aviv’s actions by the German Government.

The former Spanish minister was scheduled to speak at the congress this Saturday. Irene Montero, head of Podemos’s list for the European Parliament. “Complicity with (Benjamín Netanyahu) and the genocidal State of Israel also implies criminalizing solidarity with Palestine, as is happening right now in Berlin,” Montero stated on his social networks.