Czech politician who relies on hatred ties himself in knots over the ultra-right terrorism in Germany

Stephan Balliet is an ultra-right terrorist. He drove a car to a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle, Germany, where about 80 people were celebrating the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).

He fired his homemade weapons at the closed doors of the synagogue, threw Molotov cocktails at them, and placed explosives next to them. When, thanks to the security measures taken by the congregants, he did not manage to get inside, he murdered a random passer-by.

Then he drove away. He stopped at a kebab place and, in an attempt to shoot dead as many Muslims and other people who “support them by eating kebabs”, he began to fire his weapons again.

Fortunately, some of his weapons failed, so he killed just one victim there – his second. Police found four kilograms of explosives in his car.

Balliet had bragged about his actions and opinions on the Internet. He uploaded video footage of his attack there that was filmed with a camera on the helmet he wore at the time.

He also wrote his own manifesto, which is apparently in fashion among these Nazis (Breivik wrote one too). In that document, Balliet writes that he wants to kill as many “enemies of the white race” as possible – meaning Jews, Muslims, and left-wingers.

It’s all the same to him that many Jews, left-wingers and Muslims also happen to be “white”. In his document he considers what the best way would be to carry out a massacre in a synagogue, but he was equally prepared to attack a mosque, or a building where the Antifa movement might be located.

In the document he uses a hateful expression of the ultra-right, the “Zioinst-occupied Government”. He also denies the Holocaust, says he hates feminism, and claims that all he believes evil is the fault of the Jews first and foremost.

Anybody who knows the fate of the Jewish people in the European diaspora will add, ironically:  “Who else?” The manifesto closes by calling for the mass murder of Jewish people.

Police registered 1 799 antisemitic crimes in Germany last year, 19.6 % more than in 2017, when they registered 1 504. The extreme right is behind the vast majority of such felonies (89.1 %).

Why is the number of hate crimes committed by those opposed to democracy rising? In Germany, this is very clear.

Democratic politicians from the conservative CDU/CSU and from the Social Democratic Party (SPD) are correctly accusing the ultra-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party of being responsible, among other factors. German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) said the AfD is abetting the dissemination of hatred against Jewish people through its rhetoric.

Bavarian State Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) said: “The first thing is that we must protect ourselves against these horribly violent people, and the second thing is there are spiritual arsonists here, including recently some representatives of the AfD who have attracted attention to themselves in a shameless manner.” He specifically named the boss of the AfD in Thuringia, Björn Höcke.

The AfD boss called the Holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin a “monument to shame” and said it was necessary to make a 180-degree change of direction in the politics of commemorating the past. A former German Foreign Minister, Sigmar Gabriel (Social Democratic Party – SPD) tweeted that “The Halle attack demonstrates that radicalization of language leads to radicalization of actions.”

Gabriel had already previously called the AfD Nazis. The head of the Social Democratic club in the Federal Parliament, Rolf Mützenich, said that he believed the Halle attacker was a right-wing terrorist who felt encouraged by representatives of the AfD, among others, who belittle and deny what the reign of Nazi terror perpetrated.

The AfD naturally denies being to blame – how else could they respond? According to them, this rising hatred is not about its own constant espousal of its particular opinions.

One of our own little pollinators of hatred here in the Czech Republic is named Tomio Okamura, and he is proficiently following in the footsteps of Czech President Miloš Zeman. Like the AfD, Okamura is now doing his best to accuse entirely other culprits as being behind the terrorism in Germany.

Okamura posted the following to his Facebook profile as an immediate reaction to the terrorist attack:  “Whoever the perpetrator of this attack turns out to be, it is a fact that the Jews in Western countries, including Germany, are facing growing terror from radical Muslims above all. This is a consequence of the Islamicization of Western Europe and Islam’s own intolerance. Even if the perpetrators of this attack turn out to be neo-Nazis, it is a good idea to recall that close collaboration has happened between the Muslims and the Nazis before in history. Specifically, there was collaboration between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Adolf Hitler. Muslim SS units were also created…”

Of course, as a Czech wannabe fascist, Okamura does not collaborate with Muslims – on the contrary, he hates them. Exactly none of the contemporary European ultra-right extremists collaborate with Muslims.

The truth lies somewhere else, therefore – as is always the case with any of Okamura’s statements, which are not just absolutely incompetent and so stupid as to be horrifying, but which mainly disseminate hatred and thereby encourage violent people to carry out their intended actions. It doesn’t matter that political right-wing extremists such as the AfD and Okamura are now doing their best to wiggle out of being associated with this terrorism.

The blame clearly falls on the heads of those politicians who consider the dissemination of hatred to be normal – because they themselves commit it. Moreover, it doesn’t matter which EU Member State these politicians come from, they’re all working on the same thing:  To create chaos and a negative atmosphere in the EU and to thereby either bring about its collapse, or to dominate it – however the Devil decides.