“You’ve been murdering children for 70 years. Berlin is ours now, and you won’t listen to crappy Jewish music here,” Arabs shouted at a German Jewish teen.
By: Eldad Beck/ Israel Hayom via JNS and United with Israel
Arab assailants attacked a German Jewish teenager who was listening to Israeli music on his mobile phone on Saturday at the Zoologischer Garten train station in western Berlin.
The attackers cursed the teen, identified only as a 17-year-old Berlin native called Jonathan, and threatened to kill him. When his non-Jewish friends came to his defense, they were hit by the attackers, and one sustained cuts to his face and hand from a broken bottle that required hospitalization.
“My friends and I were about to change trains,” the teen told Israel Hayom. “We saw that we would have to wait a long time for the next train, so we went to a nearby shop to buy bottles of beer. I was playing the song ‘Tel Aviv, Ya Habibi, Tel Aviv’ [a hit song by Israeli singer Omer Adam] on my phone when suddenly a group of young Arab men approached me, surrounded me and started yelling at me, ‘Music in Hebrew? You’ve been murdering children for 70 years. Berlin is ours now, and you won’t listen to crappy Jewish music here.’ ”
Jonathan said he tried to calm his assailants, moving away from them and going down into the underground station with some of his friends. But the Arab youths followed him and continued to make threats.
“If I had a knife I would finish you” and “if I ever see you again, you’re dead” were among the threats he heard.
When Jonathan’s friends tried to defend him, the assailants yelled at them, “You lousy Germans. You don’t have a right to say anything,” and began hitting and punching them, including with broken bottles.
The attack was caught on film by the train station’s security cameras. The police were called to the area but arrived after the attackers fled.
According to Jonathan, the police initially did not take the incident seriously.
Israel’s Kan News reported Monday that the police are now calling it an “anti-Semitic” act after viewing the security tapes.
Mounting Muslim Anti-Semitism in Berlin
Last month, a 19-year-old Syrian assaulted an Israeli-Arab wearing a skullcap in Berlin.
The victim, Adam Armush, caught the April 17 assault in a video showing the attacker whipping him with a belt while shouting “Yahudi!” — Arabic for “Jew.”
The incident fueled concerns about anti-Semitism in Germany and drew condemnation from Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Armush, a 21-year-old student, is actually an Israeli Arab who wore the head covering to see if it was safe to don the Jewish religious symbol on the streets of an upper-class Berlin neighborhood.
“I am not Jewish, I am an Israeli and I grew up in Israel in an Arab family,” Armush explained. “It was an experience for me to wear the skullcap and go out into the street yesterday.”
A week later, thousands of Germans donned Jewish skullcaps and took to the streets in several cities to protest the anti-Semitic attack in Berlin and express fears about growing hatred of Jews in the country.