It happened two years ago. The Nova Festival was attacked. By Hamas terrorists. More than 1,200 people were murdered, many abducted. Two years later I’m still standing here wondering how Berlin didn’t collectively lose its mind when a techno festival was massacred. They stayed silent, unlike with Ukraine. At least for two weeks. (9/11 stayed untarnished longer.)
By mid-October, people preferred talking about “genocide”, “colonialism”, “apartheid” and “police state”, but not about the murdered festivalgoers, not about the raped women, not about the antisemitic hatred driving the terror.
Instead, parts of the scene publicly discredited themselves.
Funny enough, two years later some protagonists are still invited to events like the “Day of Club Culture” or even win awards, ironically for “social cohesion”. No surprise when people like Wanda Gaimes sit on the jury, whose stance was explained in detail in the article “FCK Zionist – How Hate Entered Berlin’s Clubs”.
The climate has gone completely off the rails.
People now seriously criticize mentioning the Hamas attack at all when discussing the Middle East conflict. That’s supposedly “whataboutism”. Oh, really. Should we then also leave out the attack on Poland in 1939 when talking about World War II?
People hate being reminded of facts or anything that disrupts their moral performance.
The mechanism is well-known.
The strategy of spiraling into rage and conspiracy mirrors the behavior of the anti-lockdown crowd during Covid or AfD propaganda. Same pattern: maximum outrage, zero facts, maximum self-righteousness. The attitude: when reality and morality clash, reality is obviously the real problem.
In October 2023, in a text about the total absurdity of a slogan like “Free Palestine from German guilt”, I listed six points to keep the picture as nuanced as possible. Today it reads like an echo on both sides – on the AfD as well as on pro-Palestine activists. A rough translation goes like this:
Jewish Israelis can only live in safety and freedom if Palestinians can also live in safety and freedom.
Translated into pro-Pali/AfD logic: Palestinians can only live in safety and freedom if Israelis are forcibly remigrated.
Most Israelis do not feel represented by the current Israeli government.
Translated into pro-Pali/AfD logic: We live in a dictatorship where truth is suppressed by state media and secret services.
Even before October 7, Israelis in Neukölln couldn’t simply speak Hebrew or wear a kippah.
Translated into pro-Pali/AfD logic: Surely one is still allowed to say “Zionist pigs”… it’s just criticism of Israel.
Many Israelis criticize Netanyahu’s policies and expansionism.
Translated into pro-Pali/AfD logic: We are the majority. We will not be silent. The official numbers are lies.
Benjamin Netanyahu is as much of an asshole as Viktor Orbán or Donald Trump.
Translated into pro-Pali/AfD logic: Problematic. The AfD loves these guys because they’re corrupt right-wing populists. Pro-Palis hate them because of their solidarity with Israel. But all are united by ideological radicalism.
Sadistic killing has nothing to do with decolonization.
No translation possible. Point 6 is openly questioned by some pro-Palestine activists. They call it “legitimate resistance” and “standing shoulder to shoulder with the martyrs”. It’s a global outrage industry that chants in Italian, Spanish or English at Berlin demos, proving that Jew-hatred doesn’t only come from Arab or far-right environments, but also from people who look like they’d happily dance at festivals, just not in Israel.
I’m not writing this to mark nationalities, but because it’s striking how strongly this protest aesthetic is carried by an internationalized Berlin scene. Many of the loudest voices come from European or Latin American backgrounds with little connection to German history, but a strong sense of “visibility”. It’s a livestream of one’s own good conscience.
I already pointed this out in December 2023:
“99% of the comments are in English. (Why can an English-speaking infrastructure exist in Berlin without being labeled a parallel society?) I think many young people from other industrialized countries bring a lot of ignorance and no culture of historical memory. And so they see the Hamas massacre as a decolonial struggle or believe Israel is only supported by Germany because of Nazism, that Palestinians are the ‘Jews of today’.” Source
At this point, it isn’t even about Israel anymore. Israel has become the involuntary PR department for the Palestinians. Without Israel as an enemy image, no one would care about the Palestinians. It’s all about nurturing one’s own outrage. The thrill of finally being allowed to be angry. The good feeling of being on the “right side”, even if one doesn’t really know what that side even means. In a complicated world, outrage becomes the simplified emotional compass.
You could call it the emotional narcissism of activism. It’s about being right. It’s about affective hygiene: the holy-fucking cleansing through moral fury. That fury is self-sufficient. Israel is just a projection screen, as Corona, climate, gender or capitalism were before.
Outrage as a substitute religion in a godless society, a new form of collective rapture that has nothing to do with insight and everything to do with agitation. Like those guys who flog themselves with thorn whips.
We’re dealing with a scene that loses itself in its own frenzy, incapable of ambivalence, incapable of silence, driven by the urge to admire itself in the mirror of morality. Maybe that’s the tragedy of our time: we confuse conviction with affect and call it awareness.
and then