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Month: October 2025

Statement by Ramsis Kilani

The appeal against Ramsis Kilani’s expulsion from Die Linke has been postponed. Here is his personal statement


15/10/2025

The decision of Die Linke’s Federal Arbitration Commission in the appeal proceedings against my expulsion from the party by the Berlin State Arbitration Commission has been postponed until the end of November 2025.

The reason for the delay in the decision was a document submitted at short notice the day before today’s hearing by Katina Schubert and Martin Schirdewan, who had requested my exclusion.

Here is my statement:

Die Linke is postponing the decision at a time when an effective, loud, and internationalist Left is urgently needed. 

Even if the current ceasefire offers the population of Gaza a sigh of relief, Trump’s 20-point plan cannot resolve the root causes of violence in Palestine. Occupation, settlement expansion, apartheid, and oppression continue, as does German support for them. Die Linke will have to continue to confront this reality.

The last-minute introduction of a document containing further allegations into my appeal proceedings, which were supposed to concern my right to fair and statutory treatment, has shifted the focus of the matter under discussion.

Voices in solidarity with Palestine

Although the Federal Arbitration Commission made it clear at the beginning of the hearing that this document could not serve as the basis for the negotiations, I was repeatedly questioned about the new allegations.

In contrast, my response to the reasons for exclusion given by the Berlin State Arbitration Commission, which I objected to, played a subordinate role.

This confirms my impression from the proceedings so far that Katina Schubert and Martin Schirdewan, as members of the reformist wing, will use any means to silence voices of solidarity with Palestine.

First response to new allegations

I will comment in detail on the allegations made, but I’ll say this upfront: Unlike the Berlin State Arbitration Commission, which explicitly did not accuse me of antisemitism, Schubert and Schirdewan are once again attempting to imply that I am antisemitic. I categorically reject this.

Schubert and Schirdewan deny me any solidarity within the party. This is particularly absurd because Katina Schubert had already denied me any solidarity within the party before the trial and attacked me in the press.

Furthermore, Schubert and Schirdewan accuse me of not advocating peaceful conflict resolution and non-violence. This, too, is beyond misleading. Of course, as a socialist, I strive for non-violent conditions in every respect. At the same time, as a leftist, I have a responsibility to identify the structural violence and conditions of oppression that underlie the events of October 7 and the genocide in Gaza. In doing so, I do not fall short of international law, which, in a context of violent occupation and oppression, grants the oppressed the right to resist. This applies to the Palestinians as well as to the Kurds and other oppressed people, even if they do not share my socialist principles. 

The fact that Katina Schubert herself does not stand firmly on the ground of complete non-violence and—in contradiction to the party line—supports arms deliveries to Ukraine, demonstrates the double standards of those who support my expulsion.

Equal rights for all

The real issue is the debate about whether it is possible in a pluralist left-wing party to advocate for a democratic one-state solution that enables equal rights for Jewish and Palestinian people. This is important because I am by no means the only one in the party who shares this position.

I am overwhelmed by the solidarity from broad sections of the party. The demonstration we organized together on September 27 was a milestone in making active solidarity with the Palestinians visible in Germany and exposing the federal government’s unwavering support for the genocide. Ines Schwerdtner’s recognition of the genocide played an important role in this. Let us continue to stand together in solidarity with Palestine.

Berlin, October 11, 2025

This statement originally appeared in German on the Sozialismus von Unten website

Red Flag: A haunted house in support of genocide

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin reports from the Nova festival exhibition at the former Tempelhof Airport.


Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC licensing, Oleg Yunakov, Nova Festival Exhibit in New York City

It takes a long time to enter the exhibition at the former Tempelhof Airport, even though it’s quite empty just two days after opening. The square in front of the huge Nazi building is fenced off. You have to pass by police officers, security guards, and Hebrew-speaking men in trench coats. Online tickets and photo IDs must be checked before a meticulous screening with a metal detector.

And you still haven’t made it into “Oct 7 06:29am, The Moment the Music Stood Still, The Nova Music Festival Exhibition.” That is the full name of the traveling show that Berlin mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) brought to Berlin for 1.4 million euros. Before entering, you have to watch a five-minute film about the dance festival near the Gaza border, with young people recounting their euphoria. As the sun rises on October 7, the DJ suddenly turns off the music and shouts “Red alarm!”

Only then do you pass through a black curtain into a cavernous, darkened hall full of party lights—the atmosphere is less like a memorial and more like “the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney World,” in the words of Emily Colucci.

A neon sign saying “Restaurant” is barely visible—this was once an airport. But now the space is full of objects that were left behind when fighters from Hamas and other Palestinian groups attacked the festival: tents, Christmas lights, clothing, burned-out cars, and sand on the ground. During the attack, 378 Israelis were killed, including 344 civilians, and 44 were taken prisoner.

Among the curated debris, screens show gruesome scenes captured in shaky cell phone videos. In the darkness—didn’t this all happen in the morning?—there is a cacophony, with people screaming over the techno hit “Glue” by Bicep. Some people were mowed down while cowering in bunkers. How many of them were killed by the Israeli army has not been established, as the Netanyahu government continues to block any independent investigation.

Many of these video and audio clips are well known from traditional and online media. A bulldozer tears down a barbed wire fence as people cheer. Who built this fence, and for what purpose? Who was trapped here? The exhibition not only ignores the context, but actively hides it.

A map shows where dead bodies were found, but a region marked in red on the map has no name. An introductory text refers to the armed fighters as “angels of death,” but there is no attempt to explain what they were fighting and murdering for. As the author Naomi Klein put it, the exhibition, which has already been in several Israeli and U.S. cities, tells a “simple fable of good and evil.” Immersive techniques help visitors slip into the role of victims. As Colucci put it, it’s a “macabre nightmare version of an Instagram museum.”

For Klein, this form of commemoration, which aims to overwhelm rather than provoke reflection, cannot be separated from Israeli politics. Shoes from the Nova festival are laid out on a table—a clear callback to the Auschwitz memorial cannot be missed. If the massacre were indeed a repeat of the Holocaust, then absolutely any reaction would be justified. But was it?

Klein proposes a completely different analogy: “History is crowded with chapters in which Indigenous peoples, starved and immiserated by colonial oppressions, finally rebel, with those rebellions at times including atrocities.”

The attack of October 7 could be compared to the uprising by the Herero in German South-West Africa in 1904, which began when Herero fighters massacred more than 100 German settlers, including women and children. The German government used this to justify the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples. Any attempt to commemorate these settlers or the German soldiers without mentioning the context, as a politician from the far-right AfD did in Swakopmund, would look suspiciously like genocide denial. 

In an interview in the magazine The Diasporist, Ben Ratskoff, professor of critical theory in Los Angeles, drew attention to a particular difficulty in a German context: “non-Jewish Germans—the beneficiaries of Nazism and the Holocaust—can, through experiencing the exhibition, in fact imagine themselves as a Jewish victim.”

Two politicians from the CDU’s far-right fringe, Wegner and Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer, were present at the opening. Their party was built by Nazi war criminals like Hans Globke. With the help of technology, even they can slip into the role of victims. Thus, responsibility for Antisemitism no longer lies with the Nazi billionaires who fill the CDU’s coffers, but rather with foreign barbarians. Even the Nazi airport can thus be symbolically whitewashed.

The exhibition could have stopped on the afternoon of October 7. But it becomes grotesque when it shows the survivors getting sports therapy and benefit concerts. 

We see the effects of the attack on them—were there no other effects worth mentioning? The Nova festival has been used to justify countless Israeli war crimes, including killing at least 70,000 Palestinians and wounding hundreds of thousands more.

As is always the case with Germany’s Staatsräson, empathy is only offered for certain lives. A wall, stretching for dozens of meters, shows the faces of 378 dead Israelis. How long would a wall need to be to show the faces of over 1,000 Palestinian babies under one year old who have been murdered? How long would a wall for all the victims of the genocide have to be?

The state plans no exhibitions to commemorate Palestinians who have been killed. Quite the opposite: on the day the exhibition opened, Wegner’s police were beating up pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The heavily armed men in black uniforms, brutally assaulting young people, seem almost like “angels of death.” But everything has a political context.

This text was first published in German in nd. It was translated by the author, who made numerous small additions. Nathaniel is currently among the freelancers on strike at The Berliner magazine due to management’s decisions to run ads for the Nova festival exhibition.

Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.

16 October 1968: Tommie Smith and John Carlos celebrate Olympic victory with a Black Power salute

This week in working class history


The 1968 Olympics were always going to be political. The US war in Vietnam was intensifying, and the world was still reeling from the aftermath of the student riots and general strike in France—as well as uprisings in Prague. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, giving new strength to an increasingly militant movement against racism in the US. Then, ten days before the opening ceremony, Mexican security forces massacred hundreds of protesters in Tlatelolco Square.

Before the Olympics, the Olympic Project for Human Rights—a group of Black athletes—called for a boycott unless its four demands were met: remove white supremacist Avery Brundage as head of the International Olympic Committee, hire more Black coaches, expel South Africa and Rhodesia from the Games, and restore Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight boxing title (stripped after he refused to fight in Vietnam).

The boycott didn’t gain much traction, but Black athletes were not going to be silent. On 16 October, the second day of the Games, Tommie Smith won gold in the 200 metres, while John Carlos took bronze. Before stepping onto the winner’s podium, Smith and Carlos each wore one black glove. As the Star-Spangled Banner played, they raised their fists in a Black Power salute. They wore no shoes to symbolise Black poverty, and beads and scarves to protest lynching.

The press was outraged. The Los Angeles Times accused Smith and Carlos of making a “Nazi-like salute.” The Chicago Tribune called it “an act contemptuous of the United States” and “an insult to their countrymen.” Brundage—who had approved the Nazi salute at the 1936 Berlin Olympics—ordered both athletes to be expelled from the Olympic Village. They were ostracised, forced to leave Mexico, and pursued by the FBI.

By taking a stand, Smith and Carlos became heroes to millions of downtrodden Black US-Americans. But racism persists—inside and outside sport. As Carlos later reflected, Black athletes “thought that winning medals would supersede or protect them from racism. But even if you won a medal, it ain’t going to save your momma. It ain’t going to save your sister or children. It might give you 15 minutes of fame, but what about the rest of your life?” Their struggle continues.

News from Berlin and Germany, 15th October 2025

Weekly news round-up from Berlin and Germany


NEWS FROM BERLIN

Police beat Left Party politicians

Two Left Party members of the Bundestag experienced police violence. They were following demonstrations in Berlin as parliamentary observers. On October 7, North Rhine-Westphalian MP Lea Reisner watched a Gaza demonstration near Alexanderplatz. A video that circulated on social media shows Reisner being punched in the face by a police officer, before he disappears into the crowd of his colleagues. On October 12, another confrontation in Wedding broke out between police and Lower Saxony MP Cem Ince. A video footage is also circulating, showing a police officer from behind the politician making several striking movements toward him. Source: taz

“They want to increase their presence on the streets”

Young, militant, and action-oriented—this is how the members of the right-wing extremist Berlin youth group “Deutsche Jugend Voran” (DJV) present themselves on their social media channels. Recently, they have increasingly appeared alongside members of “Die Heimat,” the successor party to the far-right NPD, as Stephan Kuhlmann from Mobile Beratung gegen Rechtsextremismus Berlin (MBR), observed. It is not yet clear though whether the party “Die Heimat” and the DJV will merge. However, according to Kuhlmann, members of “Die Heimat” are pushing for the rapprochement once “they want to become more visible again and increase their presence on the streets.” Source: t-online

NEWS FROM GERMANY

“Germany has let us down”

Six years ago, on October 9, 2019, a right-wing extremist attempted to storm the synagogue in Halle. The attacker failed to get through the entrance door and then shot and killed passer by JanaL. and guest Kevin S. at the nearby “Kiezdöner” restaurant. As he fled, he injured several other people, some seriously. Christina Feist, one of the survivors, complains the German authorities are not taking her and other victims seriously. She speaks of her mental health struggle, and of how complicated it was to have her related costs (partially) reimbursed by the German state. Source: taz

Peine district council decides on mandatorywork for asylum seekers

Asylum seekers in Peine, in the Lower Saxony, will be required to work in future. The district council’s decision is based on a motion by the CDU and FDP parties. According to the HAZ newspaper, the motion was passed by a majority vote. The district administration has criticised the decision once hundreds of the 850 asylum seekers currently in Peine cannot be required to work because they are minors, employed, single parents, pregnant, or enrolled in integration courses. In addition, the administration estimates that the program would cost up to €250,000 per year. The Refugee councils and the Pro Asyl association had previously rejected compulsory work for refugees, too. Source: ndr

Just a suspicion

Seydi and Aysel Özer were murdered in Dietzenbach 25 years ago. Investigators suspected the family, but without any evidence. Also, as Kahraman Özer, son and brother of the victims, remembers, the police “didn’t even search the crime scene properly. Even the weapon was later found by someone else.” The family´s lawyer has recently asked investigators to broadcast the murder case on the television program “Aktenzeichen XY… Ungelöst.” However, the public prosecutor’s office refused, arguing no new investigative leads could be expected. And Özer has been trying to get the victims´ personal belongings back from the police. The family was told that those items could “no longer be traced.” Source: taz

Hamburg wants to lock children away again

Twelve years have passed since Hamburg’s Social Affairs Senator, Detlef Scheele (SPD), announced the construction of a secure home. However, things can get more worrying. On a meadow on Klotzenmoorstieg, the construction of a new home, “Casa Luna”, has begun discreetly. There, children ages nine and up will be housed, even under detention for the initial phase. Critics point out that, despite a need for action must be taken seriously once children are being shuffled between youth welfare services and youth psychiatry, they argue that “Casa Luna” merely creates a “special unit” for the children, removed from their usual environment. Source: taz

Bundeswehr: compulsory service by lottery

The Bundeswehr demands more recruitment. People who previously only had to accept an invitation to medical examination mightbe able to be drafted into service if the military’s personnel growth targets are not met. This will be done by lottery. Matthias Miersch (SPD) asserts that this will only be used “third in line” once it is expected that service has been made attractive enough with pay increases. But ultimately, if that doesn’t produce the desired result, the rest will come into play. Whether that would be compatible with the constitutional principle of equal treatment is not a concern to this government. But there are still courts which can over turn such decisions. Source: nd-aktuell

Germany strips Palestinian of citizenship after he commemorated Hamas

One day after his German passport arrived, ‘Abdallah’ posted a picture of Hamas fighters with the caption ‘heroes of Palestine’. Soon afterwards, he received a letter from Germany’s interior ministry saying his citizenship had been revoked, according to ‘Bild’ newspaper. The country has gone further than most European countries to punish support for Hamas and curb pro-Palestinian support out of what it sees as a historic obligation to Israel and to right the wrongs of its Nazi past. It’s not clear if he will be deported, given that Germany does not recognise Palestine as a state. Source: telegraph

Help Haneen Koraz Empower Voices Through Art

Fundraiser for @animator_haneen’s animation workshops for children and women in Gaza


“The last scene stuck.” On the 7th of October, Saturday, we were all preparing to film the final scene of an animated film dealing with the issues of girls with hearing disabilities during the workshop. Meet Haneen Muhammad Koraz, Trainer and maker of stop motion cartoon films. She has worked in the field of visual arts since 2012 at the Theater Days Foundation. She participated in many local and international festivals and won many artistic awards for producing cartoon films with different topics. She won third place in the Partners Short Film Competition for producing a film for the Gaza Municipality and third place in the One Minute Film Competition with the Sawa Foundation. She participated in the International Animated Cinema Festival, In Kairouan – Tunisia. She recently received the Al-Taawoun Award for Excellence in the Cultural Sector 2022, “One Day We Will Be,” for producing “Studio Without Voices” for making cartoon films. In addition, she received grants for projects and initiatives from institutions inside and outside Palestine that support the idea of ​​making hand-made cartoon films.

From Haneen- I deeply believe that every person has the right to express himself freely, and that art, making and learning cartoon films is one of the means of free expression, audio-visually, for all segments of society. I tried to change the reality, even if just a little, for the children and women in the tents I have conducted workshops specifically for children. Children and women draw, color, discuss, play, learn using the photography program, photograph scenes, write stories that express their suffering and reality, draw cartoon characters, and record their voices on film. They have created many cartoon films. There is a film called “Queens” that talks about the suffering of children in the tent, how they live, and how they overcome the problems of water and fire, bringing firewood and bread, and not playing. The women made a film called “Red Autumn,” which talks about how the women left their homes, belongings, and rooms and migrated to other regions for fear of war, and how they lost their valuables and memories during the period of displacement.

I am Belal Koraz, the brother of Haneen. I currently live in Virginia, USA. I created this fundraiser as a way to try to get help to Haneen so she can continue her work that is so important at a time like this.

To ease the minds of any persons wanting to donate, once we receive the donations, I will wire transfer from my bank directly to my sister in Gaza. Thank you for your support at such a heartbreaking time.

You can donate to the fundraiser for Haneen here. There will be an exhibition including several of Haneen’s works in bUm on Tuesday, 21st October, 2025.