A 21-year-old Israeli-Arab man was struck multiple times with the end of a belt by a Muslim man for wearing a traditional Jewish ‘kippa’ on his head. The shocking attack was caught on tape and quickly went viral.
https://www.facebook.com/mike.delberg/videos/10155388848788309/
Israeli Adam Armoush admitted to local news that he was conducting a ‘social experiment’ by wearing the kippa. Armoush is not actually Jewish but is an Israeli-Arab who did not believe the claims of migrant-fueled rising anti-Semitism in the country. Speaking to a German broadcaster, he said “I’m not Jewish, I’m an Israeli, I grew up in Israel in an Arab family. They kept cursing us and my friend asked them to stop cursing. They started to get angry and one of them ran to me and I knew it was important to film it because there would be no way to catch him by the time police arrived.”
אדם ארמוש, הצעיר שהותקף ברחובות ברלין משום שחבש כיפה, משחזר את התקרית בשיחה עם כאן חדשות @antonia_yamin pic.twitter.com/wxGC1fbT8Y
— כאן חדשות (@kann_news) April 18, 2018
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He said he filmed the attack as evidence “for the police and for the German people and even the world to see how terrible it is these days as a Jew to go through Berlin streets”. […]
The video shows the attacker shouting “yahudi”, Jew in Arabic, and later a bruise on Adam’s torso.
The incident was described as a “disgrace” for German democracy by a spokeswoman for Chancellor Angela Merkel and by Justice Minister Katarina Barley.
Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Germany “bears a responsibility to protect Jewish life” more than 70 years after the end of the Holocaust in which the Nazis murdered six million European Jews.
In a video interview with Bild newspaper, Adam said the main attacker seemed to have a “Syrian dialect”.
“I am very sad but at the same time I’m happy that we were able to achieve something with the video,” he said, speaking fluent German.
“I hope the police will be able to find the attackers soon — the police were very responsive.”
The head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Joseph Schuster, told AFP he was “shocked” by the incident, noting that it had occurred in a “bourgeois” area and not in a “majority Muslim quarter”.
“This case must be met with the full force of the law,” he said.
A number of high-profile incidents in recent months have raised alarm bells about a possible resurgence of anti-Semitism in Germany from both the far-right and a large influx of predominantly Muslim asylum-seekers since 2015.
Merkel created a new position of commissioner to fight anti-Semitism under her new coalition government sworn in last month.
