Apparently, there are issues that do not fit in certain German concepts of freedom of press and opinion; it is the same perspective that denies the right of Palestine to exist. Photo: Reuters
In mid-April, former Greek Finance Minister and Professor of Economics at the University of Athens, Yanis Varoufakis, was due to speak at a Congress on Palestine to be held in Berlin.
In the planned speech, he would comment on his answer to a German journalist's question, as to why a Congress about Palestine.
"Because we cannot count on the silenced, who are also massacred and starving, to tell us about the massacres and famine," he replied.
The German Ministry of the Interior banned Varoufakis from entering the country, and when the Congress was in session, the police broke into the building with some 2,000 troops, and demanded that the direct transmission of the meeting, organized by none other than the Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, be interrupted.
The British-Palestinian physician Ghassan Abu Sitta, a plastic surgeon in various war scenarios, including the bombed hospitals of the Gaza Strip, was supposed to participate in the same Congress; but upon arrival at the terminal, "they stopped me at passport control, escorted me to the basement of the airport, and interrogated me for about three and a half hours".
They then put him on a plane, back to London, before notifying him that the ban on entry to Germany would be extended for the whole of April. "And not only that: that if I tried to establish communication via Zoom or Face Time, even if I was outside Germany, or if I sent a video of my paper to the Berlin Congress, that would constitute a breach of German law, and I risked being fined or sentenced to up to a year in jail."
Invited to the French Senate for a conference, three days ago Abu Sitta experienced the same scene at Charles de Gaulle airport. France refused him entry, given a request for a one-year ban, made by Germany, under the Schengen area.
The "democratic" German view of freedom of opinion had rudely censored in its country the perspective on the Israeli genocide in Palestine held by Varoufakis and Abu Sitta. It would do everything possible to "protect the French" from such opinions.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the number of arrests of students and professors protesting against the Palestinian massacre in more than 60 American universities exceeds 2,000 people. At Columbia University, the trigger for the wave of demonstrations, the testimonies of the extreme police violence could only be told, in their full dimension, by the journalism students, who have just received recognition from the Pulitzer Prize Board, for communicating what a "model state of freedom of the press" prohibited the traditional media from reporting.
For Biden, the violent ones are not the police, but the students, whom he called "anti-Semites", but he did not criticize -as neither did the mainstream media- that the police did not intervene when pro-Israeli groups broke in to dismantle the camps with blows.
The repulsion has been international, and as part of it, in Cuban universities, since last Thursday, students have staged several public acts in defense of the massacred Palestinian people, and in support of students in the United States who are repressed for aligning themselves with the same cause.
Daniela Cabrera Monzón, a very young journalist of the Granma newspaper, reported, on the front page of the May 3 edition, the uprising of her peers throughout Cuba.
On that same date, Press Freedom Day, 8 161 kilometers from Berlin, the German Embassy in Cuba, and through the Facebook account of that legation, consummated a gross act of interference and flagrant violation of international standards for diplomatic relations, by altering the text and photo on the front page of Granma with erasures typical of (un)classified documents, even on the name of Palestine. "There is not much to see here," the publication added.
Knowing that the anti-Cuban chorus, mostly based in the United States and Europe, would immediately echo the manipulation, the vulgar media operation was careful not to cover up the name of the journalist, nor the faces of the women, young people and students in the photo, in order to expose them to the frontal hatred of that fauna that, in order to wage war against their country, aligns itself even with those who have made it clear that, for Palestine, they only want one solution: to wipe it off the map.
The arrogance is more powerful than the natural sensitivity of not choosing those names and those images for such an act of disrespect. What will a young Cuban-Palestinian see when he sees how this act of solidarity in which he was, is manipulated just to say that in Cuba there is no freedom of the press?
The marks on the cover - which look too much like the ones that in the Holocaust were placed on the door of Jewish homes - have been hung, in fresh ink, over the names of Varoufakis, Abu Sitta, Daniela, and thousands of students in the United States.
"We cannot count on the silenced to tell us of their suffering," Varoufakis had said, quoting Hanan Asrawi.
As far as I know, that's censorship, but this German perspective says no, it's freedom of the press, of opinion.
