PFLP Celebrates Jubilee Year in Berlin

Supporters and a senior official of the internationally designated terrorist organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine held a celebration in Berlin of 50 years since the group’s founding.

The German left-wing extremist organization “Youth Resistance Media” posted a video on YouTube showing supporters and what were likely members of the PFLP at Monday’s event calling for “Death to Zionism” via with the use of “rifles.”

Dr. Elvira Grözinger, the head of the German section of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that the “presently prevailing and growing pogrom atmosphere against the Jews as ‘Zionists’ and the Israel-related antisemitism in Muslim circles in Germany are only made possible because there are German supporters like these still-existing Stalinist fanatics and other ignorant contemporaries.”

Grözinger, who organized a conference held in Berlin last week on German antisemitism, added, “When the democratic state does not immediately start to enforce the existing laws against hate speech and incitement against the Jews living here, these forces calling for terror will remain active.

And the Jews, when unprotected, will know the answer – it will not be a pleasant one for the declining democracy in a once so an exemplary country.”

The US, Israel and the EU classify the PFLP as a terrorist organization. Israeli MKs such as Yair Lapid from Yesh Atid and Bundestag deputies have urged Germany’s Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière to ban the PFLP in Germany.

Two members of the PFLP murdered five men in a November 2014 attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood.

The Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany announced on Thursday that a “representative of the central committee of the PFLP came directly from the Gaza Strip” to meet with the party.

Gabi Fechtner congratulated PFLP supporters on the terrorist organization’s 50th anniversary. Her party has called for the PFLP to be delisted as a terrorist entity.

After the Post reported on the PFLP connection to the Marxist party, Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Postbank closed in November all the accounts of the Marxist-Leninist Party.

When asked by the Post whether the German Interior Ministry plans to clamps down on the PFLP and Hezbollah in Germany, Rogel Rachman, the head of Israel’s public diplomacy at the embassy in Berlin, said the German government knows Israel’s position. Rachman spoke last Sunday at the conference on Antisemitism in Germany organized by SPME, the German Foreign Ministry and the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

He declined to comment further on discussions between Berlin and Jerusalem over the push by lawmakers in both countries for Germany to outlaw Hezbollah’s entire organization and the PFLP.

Writing in the embassy’s newsletter in June, Rachman urged Berlin Mayor Michael Müller to ban the annual al-Quds Day March organized in his city by Iran’s regime and Hezbollah supporters and members.

Rachman wrote that the mayor’s decision to allow the al-Quds march was “not to be tolerated and wrong as wrong can be. Today, like every year, tens of thousands of haters of Israel are demonstrating under the disguise of anti-Zionism for the destruction of Israel… It [al-Quds Day] deals with a hate festival where flags of various terrorist organizations are waved.”

German authorities allowed the PFLP terrorist Leila Khaled to deliver talks in Germany in 2016. Khaled was a key member of the terrorist cell that hijacked TWA Flight 840 in 1969. A year later, she participated in the attempted hijacking of EL AL Flight 219.

The PFLP works closely with the head of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign in Germany, Doris Ghannam.

She delivered talks in support of the PFLP anniversary in 2014.

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.