The frontman of British punk rap band Bob Vylan was denied entry to Germany, detained at the Berlin airport, and ultimately deported to the United Kingdom last month due to his pro-Palestine statements.
German federal police justified deporting the band’s vocalist on June 15, referencing a performance at the Glastonbury Festival in England in 2025 where Bob Vylan led a chant of “Death, death to the IDF,” or the Israel Defense Forces.
A police file on Robinson-Foster obtained by The Intercept alleges that he disseminated antisemitic narratives and Hamas propaganda that could “radicalise certain segments of the [German] population” and serve as “ideological justification” for terrorist groups or individuals. It also says that Robinson-Foster poses a threat to Germany’s public security and public order. Allowing him into the country would cause “considerable reputational damage” by creating the impression that Germany was making “no effort to prevent the spread of the propagated antisemitism and the associated calls to violence.”
Well, this specific action of the German authorities is a wonderful example of how a bit of creative interpretation can be used to apply legislation which is supposedly anti-hate to actually support extreme racist violence.
It’s not the anti hate-speech legislation (which, by the way, the UK also has) that makes Germany against free speech, it’s claiming IN CONTRADICTION TO MANY JEWISH PEOPLE than the nation station of Israel represents the Jewish People and hence that voicing a want for the army of the nation state of Israel to be stopped WHEN THEY ARE COMMITTING A GENOCIDE, INCLUDING TARGETING CHILDREN is hate speech.
It takes a disturbing amount of very intense, very purposeful twisting, distortion, selective interpretation and even denialism of the agency of the very people one claims to be protecting, to shove the square peg of the wanting the destruction of a military actively mass murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians into the round hole of hate-speech.
It’s the actual actions of the authorities of Germany which show their opposition to speech which does not align with their political interests.