Criminal complaint against an anti-Semitic hate-site / Limits of the Network Enforcement act / Need to reform

The WerteInitiative – jewish-german positions has filed a criminal complaint against the operator of the website “www.judas.watch”. We have further informed and been in consultation with the federal commissioner for combatting antisemitism, Dr. Felix Klein, and the anti-semitism commissioner at the Prosecutor’s Office Berlin, Claudia Vanoni, who are also involved in this case. For said purpose we had handed over our detailed research files to the prosecutor. The proceedings were stopped.

In the course of our political work we were made aware of the website “www.judas.watch.” In their own words, the purpose of the website is to call out “anti-white traitors, agitators and subversives” by name and run a kind of public database on them. The listed persons are sorted by field of activity and country.

The site is also explicitly anti-semitic, because it wants to show the “Jewish influence” in the world. It lists Jews by name and marks them with a yellow star of David in front of their name. The website lists activities as well as alleged or actual relations of the individual persons and organizations amongst each other and wants to thereby show, how much influence Jews allegedly have behind the scenes- also in Germany.

A site like this poses a direct threat with incalculable consequences for all named persons – but especially for the specially labelled Jews. In its entirety it fills the offense of sedition (acc. to German Law).

In addition to the criminal complaints of individually affected Jewish Germans who are of those listed on the website, the “WerteInitiative”, being a civic association of Jewish Germans with a wider outreach into the Jewish Community, wants its complaint to add an additional institutionalised weight to the concerns. We want the page to be blocked – at least in Germany, and the operators subjected to criminal prosecution, if possible.

Furthermore, after many months of gaining experiences with the German “Network Enforcement Act”, we find that it has to be revised and amended. We are not only concerned with the individuals affected by hatred and hate speech, but we also need to, from a Jewish perspective,  render our coexistence more secure for the general public and to clearly counter forces that are disrupting our society.