Ethnic Cleansing in Germany: A Symposium
INTRODUCTION
Germany is a contradiction—a democracy with a constitution which guarantees freedom of religion and conscience, a signatory to international human rights treaties protecting the same freedoms, yet criticized for religious discrimination in no less than eleven recent reports by international human rights agencies.
Dogged by xenophobia, right-wing violence and intolerance, the German government is failing to fulfil its obligations under human rights covenants. It has been criticized for human rights abuses by the U.S. State Department in each one of the Department’s annual human rights reports since 1993. Members of religious and ethnic minorities have been banned from political parties, dismissed from their jobs, excluded from professional and trade associations, denied bank accounts, ostracized in their communities, beaten up and subjected to other forms of discrimination solely because of their minority affiliation. And the German government has been either actively engaged in or tacitly consenting to these abuses.
Because of its economic power and influence, Germany’s authoritarian attitude towards minorities is spreading to other parts of Europe. As a major human rights report released this year described the situation, “In Germany, democracy is used as an ideology to impose conformity. It has been dismaying to discover that the state, and some of its politicians and people, are using what we know from the past to be well-worn paths of discrimination and of intolerance.... Although the objection to new religious movements is often expressed as criticism of their methods, it is at bottom a rejection of their freedom of thought which stimulates hostility and restrictions on their organizations and activities.”
On June 30, 1997, at University Synagogue in Los Angeles, a group of concerned human rights leaders and Holocaust scholars convened a symposium to discuss problems relating to “Ethnic Cleansing” in today’s Germany. This publication is an edited transcript of their presentations.
The views presented by the symposium participants are a reflection of a growing sentiment that forthright action to end the escalating trend of human rights violations against minorities in today’s Germany is urgently needed.
– Tal Pechner
Tal Pechner is an Israeli educator, translator, and author of “Escalation of Discrimination & Xenophobia Against Minority Religions in Today’s Germany—A Historical Comparison to Religious Intolerance During the German National-Socialist Era (1933-1945)” and “History of Zionism and the Holocaust,” a text for Israeli students. A graduate of the University of Bar-Ilan in Ramat Gan, Ms. Pechner gave many lectures over a 15-year period at the Yad-Vashem Museum of the Holocaust, the largest such museum in the world.
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