German Court: Marxist Party Cooperated with Palestinian Terrorist Entity

The extremist Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) suffered a stinging defeat in a Hamburg court on Friday which ruled that a former German deputy and a weekly Jewish paper can state the far-leftist party cooperates with the Palestinian terrorist group PFLP.

“The international list and MLPD have lied through their teeth to the public and the court. I can now criticize without worry the complicity between the MLPD and the Palestinian terrorist organization PFLP,” Volker Beck, a former Green Party deputy and religion professor, told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.

The international list, which included the PFLP, was a group of organizations that were part of the 2017 Marxist-Leninist Party election alliance.

The Marxist-Leninist Party sought a court injunction barring Beck and the weekly newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine, owned by the Central Council of Jews in Germany, from repeating the assertion that the Marxists campaigned with the terrorist entity PFLP during the 2017 German federal election. The Marxists claimed that Beck and the weekly paper could face a 250,000 Euro penalty for repeating the terrorism allegation.

The evidence revealed at the court hearing in the northern city of Hamburg showed the Marxist-Leninists scrubbed their website of direct connections between the party and the PFLP. According to screenshots from the MLPD website, the “PFLP Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine” was listed as an election partner.

Post reported that the Marxists formed an alliance with the PFLP, the Marxist party erased the PFLP entry and wrote “sympathizers of the PFLP.”

Beck said the Marxist party should be worried because the court ruling could have further legal consequences, including anti-terror law violations that could affect the party's status as a legal party and its assets.

“The MLPD campaigned until September, over a year, apparently in the open for a election alliance with the PFLP. First, when this unified action operation with a terror organization was criticized did it become too hot for the Stalinistic group.The internet was scrubbed,” Beck said. The Marxist-Leninist party adheres to the philosophy of the late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

In a rambling, angry tirade on the Red Flag website – an online far-left outlet affiliated with the Marxist-Leninsts – the Red Flag wrote the “international media covered the incitement” against the Marxist-Leninist party and the “German Bank and Postbank closed the accounts of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany.”

The Post first reported that the New York State Comptroller's Office initiated a probe of Deutsche Bank's accounts with the Marxist party.

Gabi Fechtner ,the chairwoman of the Marxist-Leninist party, delivered a speech last week to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the PFLP's founding. According to the Red Flag website, “a representative of the central committee of the PFLP came directly from the Gaza Strip to report to the MLPD about the situation.”

The EU, US and Israel classify the PFLP as a foreign terrorist organization. Two PFLP terrorists murdered four rabbis in a 2014 attack in the Kehillat Bnei Torah synagogue in Jerusalem's Har Nof neighborhood. The Marxist-Leninist party advocates for the delisting of the PFLP as a terrorist organization. The PFLP and the MLPD promote boycott, sanctions, divestment (BDS) activity against the Jewish state. Germany's interior ministry has declined to outlaw the PFLP in the federal republic.

Germany's intelligence agency monitors the Marxist-Leninist party because it is considered a threat to the country's constitutional democracy.

An article in the bank trade magazine Springer Bank Magazine in December noted in an article titled “Banks act on terror” that “at this time the Deutsche Bank, which has the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) as its client, is exposed to an accusation of terror finance. The potential connection of the MLPD to a terror organization… caused displeasure at the New York authorities.”

New York State has a strict anti-BDS law. Deutsche Bank conducts business with New York State's pension fund. The pension fund bars business deals with companies that support BDS.

Benjamin Weinthal is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @BenWeinthal.

Follow the Foundation for Defense of Democracies on Twitter @FDD.