The WerteInitiative – jüdisch-deutsche Positionen has filed a criminal complaint against the operator of the website “www.judas.watch”. We have also informed and consulted the Federal Government Commissioner for the Fight against Antisemitism, Dr Felix Klein, and the antisemitism commissioner at the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office, Claudia Vanoni, who are likewise involved in this case. For this purpose we handed our detailed research files over to the public prosecutor. The proceedings were discontinued.
In the course of our political work we became aware of the website “www.judas.watch”. In its own words, the purpose of the site is to name “anti-white traitors, agitators and subversives” and to run a kind of public database on them. The persons listed are sorted by field of activity and by country.
The site is also explicitly anti-Semitic, because it seeks to demonstrate “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 records activities as well as alleged or actual relations between the individual persons and organisations, seeking thereby to show how much influence Jews supposedly wield behind the scenes – in Germany too.
A site of this kind poses a direct threat with incalculable consequences for all the persons named – but especially for the Jews who are specially marked. Taken as a whole, it fulfils the offence of incitement to hatred under German law.
In addition to the criminal complaints of individually affected Jewish Germans who are among those listed on the website, WerteInitiative – as a civic association of Jewish Germans with a wide reach into the Jewish community – wants its complaint to lend these concerns additional institutional weight. We want the page to be blocked, at least in Germany, and the operators to face criminal prosecution wherever possible.
Furthermore, after many months of experience with the German Network Enforcement Act (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz), we conclude that it needs to be revised and amended. We are concerned not only with the individuals affected by hatred and hate speech; from a Jewish perspective we also need to make our coexistence more secure for the general public and to counter clearly those forces that are disrupting our society.
