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“People are praying for the IDF in synagogues”

Interview with Wieland Hoban about his new book “Germany’s Jewish Problem”

Phil Butland
24/08/2025

Hi Wieland. Thanks for talking to us. Could you briefly explain who you are and what you do?

I’m a composer, translator and author, and chair of the ‘Jüdische Stimme’. A book of mine is coming out soon. It’s the paperback version of a book that came out at the end of last year in eBook format, with a different publisher, and a different title.

The book was originally published by Battleground books and was called “German Apartheid Politics”. The paperback edition is called “Germany’s Jewish Problem: Genocides Past and Present” and will be published by OR Books.

Which of the titles do you prefer?

I suppose they have a slightly different angle. The original title is maybe slightly more insider-directed. It touches on a lot of things, but doesn’t spell out exactly what we’re talking about. The word apartheid is about support for the apartheid state of Israel, but there is also apartheid in the unequal treatment of the Palestinians in Germany and their supporters.

I guess the paperback publisher felt that the title needed to be more obvious, to grab the reader. They’re a bigger publisher, so they think a bit more in this way.

“Germany’s Jewish Problem” is quite provocative, and is a formulation that could be used by someone with antisemitic intent. But this is a left wing publisher that has also brought out several books by Norman Finkelstein. So it’s clear that it’s about what’s problematic about the way Germany deals with Jews and Jewish history.

What slightly concerned me at first was that the Palestine connection is more hidden, but the subtitle of “Genocides Past and Present” touches on that. I think it’s a well chosen title. It’s a different flavour, different angle, but I think it works.

It is most definitely more provocative, for better or worse. Could you explain what you think Germany’s Jewish problem is?

Well, I wrote a whole book about it! But it’s a collection of articles written over more than four years. They all circle around the issue of Palestine-Israel, but also German perceptions of Jews, German perceptions of the whole Palestine issue, memory culture, and the ways this is connected with general racism. Experiences from my activist context also flow into that.

The book’s perspective is clearly located in Germany. That’s where I live and what I’m mainly commenting on. There are two articles focused purely on Palestine, because they’re about a trip I took there in 2022. But the rest are about German perceptions – the aftermath of the Holocaust and the near annihilation or exile of Germany’s Jewish population.

This created a huge gap in society that people may not immediately think about when they consider this huge mass murder. Of course, there was killing, there was violence, but there’s also this erasure, this very big gap, this lacuna that was left over.

Practically every synagogue you walk past is now a former synagogue. Some of them have been turned into museums, or maybe you can get a tour of them once a week. But Jewishness was erased as a presence that’s not just physical, but forms a part of the country’s culture and discourse.

Even with a government-initiated influx of Jews from post-Soviet countries. It’s been very difficult to establish any sense of normality in relations between Jews and non-Jews in Germany. There’s often a kind of over-compensation, a philosemitic approach to Jews.

The majority of people in Germany have rarely met Jews, unless they’ve been to the US. There are an estimated 225,000 Jews in Germany, so it’s very difficult to have a general sense of Jews as ordinary people who are part of the country’s population. Many people have an image frozen in time of Jews as the victims of the Nazis, who were the parents or grandparents of many Germans.

In some cases, this leads to an over-compensation which means that people want to have a particularly favourable idea of Jews. They make a point of doing what they think is supporting Jews. Including supporting Israel, going on holiday in Israel, or cultivating connections to Israel thinking this somehow revives Jewishness.

But Germany contains at least as many Palestinians as it does Jews. And Palestinian people are an unwanted and disturbing presence in the equation, because the very existence of these Palestinians is an indictment of Israel. Why are they in Germany in the first place? It’s because they’re exiled. They’re refugees or migrants.

The presence of so many Palestinians here is down to the injustice of the Nakba and then the occupation. This confronts those Germans who support Israel because they want to support Jews.

There’s a big tangle of things here, connected to a general racism, especially towards Palestinians. This reveals racism in areas where one maybe didn’t think that it was present.

To add to the entanglement: you’ve talked about the German government in the 90s encouraging Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. But another major case of Jewish migration to Germany is of Israelis. They are largely coming because they don’t want to live in Israel anymore. How do they fit in with the general experience?

That’s an interesting case because there’s something quite contradictory about it. In this idealization of Israel, the “only democracy in the Middle East”, Israel is meant to be a “protective space” for Jews, which is a phrase that makes me think of a nature reserve for Jews.

Or a safari park?

Yes. And you still find Germans talking about how Israel is necessary for the safety of Jews, which, of course, means that they’re not safe here. According to this view, we can only be safe by going to Israel. But Israel is clearly not a safe environment for anyone.

So people are coming from Israel, this supposed protective space, to Germany, which is supposedly unprotected, what does that say about this idea that Israel is protecting Jews? Because clearly they don’t want to be there anymore.

In some cases, that’s not for explicit political reasons. It’s easy for Israelis with German ancestors to get German citizenship, which then makes them EU citizens, and offers various advantages. And in urban Israel Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, the cost of living has got higher and higher. So in some cases, it’s more of a pragmatic, economically motivated decision than an escape from the political surroundings.

But of course, there are those of a more Leftist persuasion, including many members of Jüdische Stimme. They leave because they’re in conflict with that society, or because they see no future. Depending on how much Germans think about it, this could unsettle their narrative.

Then, when Israelis come to Germany, they realise fairly soon that Germans have this unnatural way of dealing with them, both as Jews and as Israelis. There are things that can be rather troubling, uncomfortable or just downright bizarre.

If they are in any way politically active or just move in political circles, they find Germans who are generally liberal, or even left of liberal, but who use language about Israel echoing the Israeli right wing and the way they talk about Palestinians. So many Israelis coming to Germany realize quite soon that they’re in a place that doesn’t deal with them in a normal way.

I moved to Berlin 20 years ago from Stuttgart, where there weren’t many Israelis at all. At the time, most Israelis who I met were musicians who said that they’d come to Berlin so they could play music. Some of them had wanted to play with Palestinian musicians in Israel. But few wanted to talk about Palestine, because that was “politics” and they’d left Israel to get away from politics. More recently, Israelis in Germany – at least in my circles – have been engaging more with Palestine. Is this just a subjective thing, or do you have a feeling that this is something which is happening in broader society?

That’s difficult to say. I guess I would have a similar kind of experience to you in terms of which Israelis I deal with. But certainly you still find Israelis in the culture scene who are critical of their government, and don’t want to live in Israel, but they also don’t want to deal with this in their art, or to talk about it all the time. I guess they don’t want to be reduced to that.

There’s also that expectation by people here that if they meet an Israeli, then immediately this Israeli should give their position on the so-called conflict. Sometimes one does encounter some resistance to and resentment of that. Among those who define themselves less overtly in political terms, there may be some discomfort, and a wish that they could just exist outside of this.

Let’s go back to Germany’s attitude towards Israelis and Jews. Do you think this is something that’s immutable, or can it change? Is it changing?

I think it can change. It’s difficult to say how long that will take and to what extent the change is occurring now. Because most of society isn’t really aware that there are Israeli or ex Israeli Jews who are opposed to their state at a fundamental level. Not just against the excesses of the Netanyahu government, but the whole ethnocratic Zionist project. To be fair, it is a relatively small proportion of the Israelis here who go that far in their analysis. Plenty have a more liberal view – the classic two-state mentality.

The dominant discourse in the media and politics is that to oppose the very nature of the Zionist project is at best an unjustified hatred of Israel and at worst antisemitism. This is put in the context of an irrational world view. It is viewed as completely different from, say, being against segregation in South Africa or the USA.

It’s common in politics to see religion as somewhat off limits, something that you’re not going to criticize politically. Because religion is based on a whole different belief system. It’s not about the kind of rational analysis we would apply with geopolitics. For most people, there’s a taboo on demonstrating outside a place of worship.

But the sad fact is that almost all Jewish institutions and organizations worldwide, including Germany, propagate Zionist politics. Some are more explicit and vehement in a very crude nationalist way. Others may be more liberal, subtle, and moderate, but are still ultimately contributing to this.

It’s hard to find a Jewish museum or an exhibition about some form of Jewish culture that doesn’t have sponsorship from the Israeli embassy, or the Israeli ministry for diaspora affairs. Or that doesn’t serve supposedly Israeli food in the interval (by which they generally mean Palestinian or Arab food like falafel and hummus).

It’s very difficult to find mainstream Jewish spaces that don’t have an implicit pro-Israel bias. Meaning something which excludes anti-Zionist, or even non-Zionist Jews. If you’re someone who goes to synagogues, there are prayers for Israel and its defenders, which means the IDF. So you’re sitting there praying for an army that’s committing genocide. What kind of politics is that? Is that a situation where we can say that religious institutions are off limits politically?

We know how in Western societies, people talk about mosques where they claim that radical and militant ideas are being preached by imams. But how should one politically or morally assess the fact that people are praying for the IDF in synagogues?

This is something that has to change in the long term. It is a long project, and not everyone is interested in it. Not all Jews are religious, and the ones who come here tend to be secular Israelis who are not really interested in religion. But I think for anyone who cares about Judaism or Jewishness in a broader sense, this is something that has to change.

We’re doing this interview with theleftberlin.com. Most, but not all, of our readers are neither German nor Jewish. What’s the role of our readers in this discussion?

I think they have the advantage of not having this German view on things. They haven’t grown up with mainstream indoctrination. So it’s often easier for them just to relate to Jews as normal people, and in many cases as migrants.

There’s a sense of migrant identity that comes in here. You have a mobile identity that makes it more natural for you to connect both personally and politically with other groups of people. This is something that you can see in Berlin. Without wanting to overly generalize, there’s a natural kinship or alliance.

In the left wing area of society, which is your readership, communities from migrant backgrounds are far better suited to really having normal and fruitful relationships with Jews than Germans are. Because they don’t have this baggage and they’ll often have similar insights as Jews about German society,

Most Jews you’ll meet here are white, Ashkenazi Jews. White Germans will feel able to speak to them about non-white people in the way they would speak to other whites. Some of them will assume that there is natural enmity between Jews and Muslims. They may feel free to make anti-Muslim comments in front of Jews, because they assume that there is agreement.

While those Jews aren’t on the receiving end of that racism, they will get quite a clear view of it. That will make them natural allies of those migrants who really are on the receiving end of that racism.

Where can people get hold of your new book?

It’s up for pre-order on the OR books website, and copies will start shipping in October. It won’t be available on the wider book market until April, because this is the way OR books do things. They sell directly for a while before handing it over to Amazon and all the other other retailers.

If you want to read the eBook version, that can be ordered and downloaded at most online stores. There’s a brief pause at the moment, and it’s currently only available at the Google Play Store because there’s a change of distributor, but from mid-September, it will be back in all mainstream online stores.

And you’ll let people know about that from your blog?

Sure.

What are you doing next? You just announced that you’ve got another book coming out. What’s that about?

This book is not about Germany. It’s called “After Zionism: Towards a New Jewish Left”, and will be published by Verso. When I chose that title, I was aware that this is a pretty bold claim to make. So I feel that I’m putting a certain pressure on myself to deliver some kind of vision.

It starts by taking a look at Zionism, not just in the sense of its political manifestation in Israel. But also in the ways of thinking sometimes even even among Jewish people who don’t really support the project. The critique is sharpened by insights from Palestinian thinkers like Ghassan Kanafani, Steven Salaita and Mohammed El-Kurd. It’s thinking about ways to overcome Zionism, not in the sense of just leaving it behind and moving on, but in defeating it. The same way as we fight against racism and fascism.

This is connected to various left Jewish traditions and histories, one famous example being Bundism. And uncovering things like the buried Arab-Jewish (Mizrahi) identity. Through fighting against Zionism, and drawing inspiration from various traditions, we can move forward to a left Jewish culture and politics. I’m not suggesting a sort of separatist movement. I’m suggesting something that’s very much part of a wider politics, part of the overall leftist struggle, but drawing on a particular kind of Jewish thought and practice.

I said before that Jewish institutions need to be overthrown, or at least eroded bit by bit. That’s something that’s also part of this vision. Maybe some would call this utopian, but it’s trying to push through the ruins of Zionism, and to bring together the wealth of progressive and diasporist thinking as an antidote to nationalism, reinforcing solidarity across all groups in society.

I think that’s the place to end this interview. I’m sure we’ll talk again about the new book when it’s nearer to publication. But thanks for talking to us, and good luck in all you’re doing.

Groundbreaking People’s Tribunal at Berlin Biennale Highlights Art for Resisting Oppression in the Philippines

KULTURFABRIK Moabit, 24 August 2025, from 4PM,

The Left Berlin
23/08/2025

On Sunday August 24 the Berlin Biennale will convene a groundbreaking People’s Tribunal on Art for Resisting Oppression—Philippine Cases. In a departure from traditional tribunals, this event will not only feature oral and written testimonies but also live performances by the artists themselves—each an act of resistance in the face of state-sponsored repression.

The People’s Tribunal brings attention to the power of art as a form of resistance against state repression through compelling testimonies from three brave witnesses— Mercedita Centeno de Jesus, Father Chris Ablon, and Reya Morgado—who have faced persecution for their art and activism in the Philippines. Some of these witnesses sought political asylum in Europe due to the severe political repression, including red-tagging they endured in the Philippines. Red tagging is the act of
labeling individuals or groups as communists or terrorists to discredit them, putting them at risk of harassment, violence, or even death.

Mercedita de Jesus is the mother of the forcibly disappeared activist Bazoo who has been missing since April 28, 2023. She describes that in the evolution of her artistic process, she “turned to art not just to cope with anxiety and depression, but to resist”.

Father Chris Ablon is a priest, advocate, and musician who was forced into exile under the Duterte Regime due to harassment and death threats. Now living as a political refugee in Germany, he continues to fight for migrants’ rights and the rights of all oppressed people.

For Reya Morgado, a cultural performer from the Manobo tribe and victim of red-tagging, “artistic expression is my resistance. Each performance is a political act—a call for freedom, human rights,
and justice. I want people to know: I exist. I am living proof of the harassment that continues.”

Alongside the personal testimonies, the Tribunal will include an expert witness statement from Catherine Abon shedding light on the broader context of political repression faced by artists and activists in the country. Ms. Abon is a volunteer coordinator of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP-DE) and member of Alpas Pilpinas and Gabriela Germany.

This event aims to amplify the voices of those who have experienced firsthand the intersection of art and political struggle, while calling for global attention to the ongoing crisis of human rights in the Philippines.

Following the Tribunal is an open forum with activists from the convening organizations who are also calling on all Filipinos and allies to join the Duterte Panagutin Network and mobilize to The Hague in September for former President Rodrigo Duterte’s first International Criminal Court (ICC) hearing.

The event is part of the 13th Berlin Biennale production organized by ALPAS Pilipinas, Gabriela Germany, the International Coalition for Human Rights Germany Chapter (ICHRP-DE) and Berlin Philippines Solidarity Organization.

Contact: ichrp.germany@gmail.com; gabriela.alemanya@gmail.com
People’s Tribunal on Art Resisting Oppression: Philippines Case
When: 24 August 2025, from 4PM, doors open at 3PM
Where: KULTURFABRIK Moabit
Lehrter Str. 35, 10557 Berlin

Big Trumper is watching you: Republican doublethink and the Colbert cancellation

Trump-era censorship and Colbert’s cancellation expose Republican hypocrisy on free speech and satire

Ellen McBride
22/08/2025

Stephen Colbert Late Show Telephone Booth

Visit any far-right, Trump-glorifying online publication (which holds the same grim fascination as a shoestring-budget true-crime documentary on cannibalism), and it won’t take five seconds before the article bashes “the woke” and claims that liberals are infringing on free speech. It’s the same tactics employed by alt-right online influencing grifters for well over a decade: insist the left as a monolith are shrieking, hysterical, and unreasonable. Then, any quote-unquote woke takes that are rolled out are treated as attempts to police, gaslight, and enforce a particular and threatening manner of thinking that will undoubtedly wind up brainwashing you. Trump et al. have weaponized The Left’s supposed hunger for indoctrination and cancellation to deflect any well-earned criticisms: it’s slippery and defies common sense, but has proven wildly effective.

Years ago, when Trump had first been elected—it’s funny to think about now, since at the time it felt like the world had gone mad, and we hadn’t yet reached peak bizarro nightmare—a friend and I, during summer holidays from university, were heading to the club and struck up a conversation with our taxi driver. The conversation turned to American politics, as it is wont to do when you are nineteen, three glasses of vino deep, and covered in streaky fake tan. Our driver, much to our surprise, pledged his allegiance to Trump. We enquired (cautiously) why he felt supportive of a crass billionaire with a long history of racism and misogyny (not in those exact words, it was more of a barely-breathed, courteous cluster of syllables that sounded like a question). His response was that Trump was honest, because Trump told the truth: that, as a savvy businessman and a paragon of authenticity, he could lead America to a brighter future than any Democrats, who our driver insisted were worse than Trump, and also liars.

I dutifully reposted Kamala Harris TikToks, bathed in BRAT green and hailing her as a diva during last year’s bleak election run—not because I was blind to Harris’s (or her administration’s) deep flaws and moral failings, but because 1) the devastation that could be wreaked by the Trump administration was (and has proven to be) terrifying, 2) the return of Trump to the White House would fan the flames of ever-rising conservatism, and 3) the TikToks were funny. But it’s fascinating to me that the Trump administration has amassed a following (from American Republicans to Irish taxi drivers) partially via piquing fear that The Left will smother free speech—especially considering it engages in that kind of policing itself.

Recently, CBS Paramount announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, a typical late-night talk show that has been trucking along successfully for almost a decade. The production company cited financial reasons for the cancellation—despite the fact that it topped the channel’s ratings. Indeed, insiders have suggested that the show was losing an estimated $40 million annually, but Colbert’s late-night peer Jimmy Kimmel has already called that figure out as “bullshit”.

Nowadays, shows—even wildly successful ones—are being canceled left, right, and center, so this may seem like a non-issue, and Kimmel’s reaction a tad overwrought. This particular cancellation, though? There’s a strong whiff of dubiousness, one so pungent you don’t even need to put on a tinfoil hat to acknowledge.

Colbert has described himself as a Democrat since as far back as 2004, and has frequently cited his faith as a committed, practicing Catholic as a guiding light and moral benchmark. For eleven years, he hosted The Colbert Report, a satirical skit revolving around a right-wing, bumbling, blustering, “well-intentioned idiot”, transitioning in order to succeed David Letterman as The Late Show host. Colbert invited and whole-heartedly embraced nuance: he crafted a character that was satirical, but not hollow. Within the multitudes of his mockery, he unspooled hypocrisy and hidden meanings from combustive slogans and conservative standings. He poked fun at his subjects, but also created a space in which humor could be extracted from unease and terror, and where he encouraged a certain agility in thinking, an impulse to navigate a brutal political landscape with poise instead of powerlessness.

Unsurprisingly, Colbert’s political leanings have not endeared him to the Republican crowd, and he has been unabashed in his criticism of Donald Trump. Not that that is an anomaly—Presidents, government officials, and celebrities are well-trodden fodder for the late-night talk show hosts. Actually, they’re the bulk of what those shows consist of. They pick at and satirize current affairs and pop culture, generally striving nowadays for an array of snippets to go viral as shorts online. Personally, I think if you’re involved in politics or Hollywood, you should probably expect a spoonful of mockery on these shows, by virtue of the profession you’ve literally chosen. A host makes you look a bit daft, or critiques your shady moves? Maybe public sphere dwellers should just accept the condemnation and try to rise above.

That’s too much to ask of Donald Trump, though, a man who is so incapable of rising above that he may as well take up permanent residence at the earth’s core. In mid-July, Colbert called out his own production company, CBS Paramount, on-air, describing its $16 million settlement with the Trump administration as a “big fat bribe”. The settlement followed Trump’s lawsuit protesting CBS’s use of two clips from Harris’s response to a question about the Middle East. The company saw the show’s executive producer refuse to apologize and stand down, followed by the departure of its CEO shortly afterwards. A range of scholars and constitutional experts advised that the lawsuit was frivolous, a misapplication of the law, and a violation of the First Amendment principles. Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Ron Wyden wrote a letter to CBS Paramount’s chairwoman expressing their concerns that reaching a settlement with President Trump would essentially amount to bribery. “Paramount’s scheme to curry favor with the Trump Administration has compromised journalistic independence and raises serious concerns of corruption and improper conduct,” the letter reads.

On July 17th, Colbert announced to his audience on air that The Late Show was canceled, emphasizing that this wasn’t even a case of replacement—the show itself had been unceremoniously slashed and would not be revived with a new host. The next twist in the tale came through Paramount merging with Skydance Media—a studio that requires approval from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission in order to take over from Paramount. Skydance has committed itself to rooting out CBS’s “bias”—which will be undertaken by steadily eroding the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices. Deeply ironic, considering the Trump administration’s allergy to diversity and inclusion of differing opinions and lack of censorship.

Did Trump himself cast down the order that Colbert be axed? Maybe. Even if he didn’t issue the explicit decree, the pressure surely came under his administration’s unrelenting, tyrannic weight. And it’s totally at odds with what they have said they are for. Trump entered the arena back in the 2010s vowing to restore America’s greatness, presenting himself both as a straight-talking Everyman and as a messiah-like tycoon, ready to save the children from liberal “brainrot” and keep the country free and strong.

Whether or not he gave the word for Colbert to go, he reacted on Truth Social with predictable glee: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert. Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.” (To digress momentarily, why does the President of one of the leading global powers write like the mean-girl parody Chanel Oberlin from Scream Queens?)

On the July 21st episode of The Late Show, Colbert was joined by John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers, his late-night comrades. Their succession of cameos underscored their unwavering loyalty, not just to Colbert, but to the right to satirize, the crucial importance comedy has in culture and the danger that may be posed if it’s stripped away.

To be deeply predictable and quote George Orwell’s 1984, “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”. Rather unfortunately, this book continues to be relevant, and seems to illustrate the conundrum of a number of Trump supporters currently. “The Left wants to cancel us and brainwash us” seems to coexist with “Trump’s administration can and should dictate the contents of our media and roll back inclusion and equity”. Not all of his supporters think this, of course—I wouldn’t dream to say I understood the beliefs of such a sprawling group, all of whom have unique experiences—but there’s a definite chunk that can be found on the aforementioned alt-right websites.

I spent a pathetic amount of time as a teenager on Tumblr—scrolling through fandom edits and aesthetic shoots, gorging on bite-sized social justice posts that gave me a dopamine hit and inflated my sense of superiority (mostly quashed now; nothing like adulthood to make you realize you’re an idiot). The waves of online discourse can absolutely be draining and over-complicatedly politically correct to the point that they sometimes loop all the way back around to being a touch offensive. Identity politics could be fraught, and accusations of “problematic” behavior were fired with all the force of an arrow from Katniss Everdeen’s bow. I also think that the tendency for people to weaponize therapy-speak after reading a singular Psychology Today article may have either been born on, or at least was popularized by, Tumblr.

And yet, as trigger happy as we 2014 Tumblrinas could be, censorship wasn’t what was wanted. Maybe, due to being a blogging site mostly composed of hipster teenagers, the conversations weren’t exactly cultural resets, but they were discourse; it was an encouragement of debate and reflection and even, yes, conflict. The Tumblr girls could go toe-to-toe with a dissenter. Meanwhile, Trump and his cohorts have all the debating backbone of a cooked strand of spaghetti. Deflect, demonize, derail, and, when all else fails, cancel. Push people who challenge your words and actions from their platforms and establish a culture scared into bending the knee.

The positive slant to take is that, now Colbert has been dropped, he’s going down swinging. After all, what does he have to lose? He has from now until next May to finish up his duties as host, and he has wasted no time whatsoever in telling Trump to go fuck himself. And since the cancellation, he’s seen a surge in ratings, as people who may never have watched an episode of a late-night show in their life tune in to signal support and see Colbert mock with renewed vigor. The gloves are resoundingly off, and no topic seems to be too treacherous for Colbert to tread. What will they do, fire him?

And despite everything, I allow myself a small—an incredibly small, but still very real—bit of cheer. Trump and his cronies are shameless, but you don’t shut somebody up unless you care about what they’re saying; the whole point is for people to feel powerless, so they don’t keep talking. It’s not a victory, but it doesn’t have to be a defeat. Ironically, the controversy around Colbert’s cancellation has drawn more viewers to his still-airing show, which will spend the next year undermining Trump. As Colbert himself said in a monologue on 2016’s election night, “the devil cannot stand mockery”. Trump has a staggering amount of power. But he doesn’t have the same power his satirizers have, and his need to silence them proves it.

Legal Victory

German Federal Constitutional Court Ends Separation of Baby and Parents Over Palestine Solidarity

The Left Berlin
20/08/2025

A one-year-old child separated from parents over Palestine solidarity is finally allowed to re-enter Germany, according to the German Federal Constitutional Court ruling on 5^th of August 2025, after a successful urgent appeal by the European Legal Support Center (ELSC).

The court ruling means the German authorities are now obliged to allow the re-entry of the one-year-old child to Germany, after being separated for months from his Palestinian-Jordanian mother – a skilled worker in Germany with a valid visa permit – and forced to stay with his grandparents in Jordan.

The case dates back to August 2024 when the baby was denied re-entry to Germany after he was initially deemed as a “security threat” in a letter from the German Embassy in Amman. Later, the German foreign ministry argued this was because of the mother’s alleged involvement with Palestine solidarity groups and an ongoing investigation by notorious German domestic intelligence service “Verfassungsschutz” (Office for the Protection of the Constitution). The ministry said while the child does not constitute a security threat to Germany, allowing the child to re-enter Germany could possibly constitute a “security risk”. This reasoning was accepted in two previous decisions by the Higher Administrative Court Berlin-Brandenburg and the Administrative Court Berlin.

Three judges at the Constitutional Court have now decided unanimously that “..the continued refusal to allow entry exposes the complainant [the child], given his age of not even two years, to significant, irreparable harm” and ordered the Federal Republic of Germany to allow the child to enter the country. Furthermore, the court acknowledged that the previous decisions at administrative courts might constitute a breach of constitutional rights, namely the fundamental right to protection of the family (Article 6(1) and (2) sentence 1 of the German constitution).

With this decision the family can now finally reunite after months of inhumane treatment and barely legal exploitation of migration laws.

However, this is just a preliminary decision on the urgent appeal. The final ruling on the constitutional complaint will decide whether such separations of child and parents with unclear residency status constitutes a breach of constitutional rights, namely the fundamental right to protection of the family (Article 6(1) and (2) sentence 1 of the German constitution) or not. The decision on the parents’ residency status is also still pending at the administrative courts due to the secret services procrastination to conclude the “security investigation”.

ELSC spokesperson Karim Bohnhoff comments: “This is an important ruling because we managed to end the family’s separation —something no one should ever have to endure. We hope this ruling will deter the German state from abusing migration laws to punish marginalised communities for their involvement in the Palestine solidarity movement and we will continue to push for a systematic change.”

“Boiler Room you a punk ass bitch!”—Notes from the insurgency in rave culture

Anticolonial insurgency within rave culture bolsters a vibrant effort to boycott Zionist, colonial and capitalist institutions.

Ravers for Palestine

On a warm evening in July, cars unloaded partygoers outside Under the K Bridge, the venue hosting Boiler Room’s NYC party. They were greeted by a crowd of activists, ravers and Indigenous Land Defenders, bearing placards reading “Fuck a pro-genocide pipeline party” and “KKR colonizes, KKR kills”, referring to the hedge fund which now owns Boiler Room, along with 85+ music festivals. A TikTok records the moment an incoming ticketholder sees the protesters and learns in real time about Boiler Room’s new owner. “Don’t drop us off here!” she tells the taxi driver, amid panicked laughter.

Meanwhile, across NYC, designated counter-parties to Boiler Room at Mood Ring, Earthly Delights and Basement started opening their doors. A map of these parties had been circulated earlier on Instagram by the Boycott Room campaign, one of a rapidly expanding cluster of groups in nightlife driving the boycott of KKR-owned venues. At around 8PM, an actionist who had infiltrated Boiler Room jumped up on stage with a banner reading “Boiler Room + KKR fund genocide. Boycott now”.

“Actionists are just now recovering from the atrocious vibes of even a few minutes inside the genocide party,” Boycott Room reflected in a reel the next day. The aforementioned TikToker concurred. In an update story posted after the event, she expressed regret for entering it. “This shit high key felt like a different kind of hell. Anything related to pro genocide has an evil aura. We paid $400 for this shit. Boycott the Boiler Room.”

This is a snapshot of the global, anticolonial insurgency within rave culture. Autonomous direct action, mass refusal and withdrawal of labour. Expanding grassroots coalitions, growing DIY infrastructure. The humble, implacable and patient pulling at threads.

News of KKR’s acquisition of Superstruct Entertainment and its portfolio of venues had already been noted by the Flow Strike campaign in 2024. But the sale of Boiler Room to Superstruct in January 2025 brought the news to wider attention, through a virally circulated Instagram explainer by WAWOG Toronto and a direct action led by Wet’suwet’en people and Palestinians.

Six months later, the explainer and its diagram remain confronting. KKR, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, is almost comically evil. It has deep ties to the ”Israeli” colonial project—funding data, arms and land purchase companies in the entity, and the IOF itself via the ‘Friends of the IDF nonprofit. One of its Chairmen is David Petraeus, the architect of the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and former head of the CIA. It is also the main investor in the Coastal GasLink pipeline poisoning and destroying First Nations lands in the west of Turtle Island (Canada)—making it a target of Wet’suwet’en direct action since 2020.

A few days after the post landed, three DJs—Princess Elf Bar, DJ Myna and Shannon From Admin—withdrew from a Boiler Room in Sheffield, UK. A week later, the community began reckoning with Superstruct’s ownership of festivals popular with queer and underground artists like Mighty Hoopla, Sonàr and Field Day.

In March, Boiler Room announced a merch collaboration with FC Palestina and the Sameer Project, a Palestinian led mutual aid initiative. Just hours later, after being apprised of KKR, the Sameer Project issued a statement of refusal, which remains a core moral and political compass for the movement:

“We will always say no to any kind of normalization or ties with organizations linked to zionism in any shape or form. No zionist money comes without an agenda. […] Tomorrow KKR will turn around and be on the defensive about investing in Israel by saying they donated to Gaza through one of their acquired companies. They will say this to wash away their complicity.”

From there, the revolt rapidly expanded and globalized. Seven DJs pulled out of Boiler Room Istanbul. DAYTIMERS, a British South Asian collective, withdrew from Superstruct-owned Mighty Hoopla and Lost Village. EYRA, Animistic Beliefs and dj g2g individually withdrew from Sonàr. Dozens of their peers shortly followed suit. Half the Field Day line up dropped out. KAALO, a queer/femme-led DIY collective in Nepal, publicly dropped their Boiler Room collab. The Bay Area Boiler Room was cancelled after local pressure. Around half of the stages booked at Milkshake, a queer-centred festival in the Netherlands, withdrew, with a clear material demand: “As long as a festival is owned by KKR, we will boycott. We will not accept offsets or compromises.”

New developments arrive daily. The poles and focal points of revolt are always shifting. But in recent weeks, Brazil and Puerto Rico have seen major flashpoints, with local actionists getting Boiler Room events in both Saô Paulo and San Juan cancelled. “A global event backed by a big Zionist corporation stepped back because the scene got organised” said the group in Brazil.

“Black, Indigenous, peripheral, Palestinian and dissident people united for a greater cause.”

“We refuse to let our culture be used to whitewash genocide.”

The revolt is massive, global and popular. It is overwhelmingly comprised of global Majority, trans, queer and Indigenous people from the underground. Most are unpropertied and precarious. The fees they forego in the KKR boycott are often needed to pay rent.

It is militant. Its basic, entry level premises are an to end capitalism, uncompromising support for Palestinian resistance, the dismantlement of the ‘West’, pan-Indigenous liberation, death to all settler colonies, including those on Turtle Island (the ‘US’ and ‘Canada’). Deviations from Al Thawabit, the core principles of Palestinian liberation, are rare and attract immediate, organic rebuttal. It does not have leaders. Its core tactics are boycott, direct action, disruption, sabotage.

A revolt of this scale and militancy within electronic music culture was not inevitable. Clubland, particularly in Europe, has complex relationship affinities with the project of the West. The raver is often targeted for co-option into the imperial project—whether, in the West, as a symbol of freedom and disinhibition against a racialised Other; or, in the Global South, as potential conscripts into a comprador class. The Zionist entity has endlessly sought to position Tel Aviv as, per Nerdeen Kiswani, “a beacon of light—progressive, diverse and full of life…making apartheid look like a party”. Given the intersection of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood with a settler music festival, many of us braced ourselves for a grim tide of reactionary ‘PLUR’ and ‘both sides’ takes from ravers and DJs.

That this did not materialise—or, more accurately, was quickly staunched—attests, at least in part, to reservoirs of resistance and anticolonial militancy within nightlife. These have been activated by the genocide, alongside a visceral, ancestral ick at the commodification of underground culture, most grotesquely typified by the extractive, colonial dynamics of Boiler Room.

The structural position of the DJ/raver, despite efforts at recuperation, is still, it seems, generative of dissent. Like queers (also experiencing a re-radicalisation over Palestine), ravers are at once unbearably central to, yet askance of, the operations of imperial capital.

But besides these undergirding dynamics, can anything be drawn from how the movement has shaped itself—and created the conditions for the current, ongoing escalation? Why are boycotts in electronic music popping off like nowhere else in global culture?

No gods, no leaders

Nothing in the movement has been rolled out from above, or according to any central formulas or scripts. Decision-making is not abrogated to representative bodies. There are no intermediaries who treat or negotiate on behalf of a base. The boycott has been built through the organic accretion of autonomous acts of refusal. The energy and spirit of these refusals and actions is never workshopped or uniform. This means it avoids the overdetermined feel of NGO writing. The texts emerging are idiosyncratic, embodied, vernacular, playful, which makes them memorable and resonant—inspiring action where more top-down forms of political communication might not. The centrality of trans DJs to the movement informs this corpus: see Cultural Solidarity’s latest video, MC’d by Black trans artists on the sidelines of the NYC Boiler Room strike fundraiser:

“Boiler Room, you a punk ass bitch. You always and forever will be a punk ass bitch miss thing. You’re not tearing it, you’re not eating, your mama a bitch, your grandmama a bitch […]”

Statements learn from each other, reuse and cite text, and over time a loose, shared set of premises and parameters have developed. But there is no hegemon, no disciplinary body, no notion of copyright. This means that groups and coalitions can spring up rapidly and unceremoniously. Trust is established quickly, through action rather than deliberation, because there isn’t a strong sense (at least yet) of requisite turfs, tributes to be paid.

Holistic scope, imaginative coalitions

KKR is a universal antagonist to life—an entity which, like ‘Israel’ and ‘the US’, despoils across geographies and scales: funding the Palestinian genocide, destroying Indigenous lifeworlds, corporatising raves, privatising healthcare systems and housing. These multiple, intersecting scales lead any actionist on KKR ineluctably to an anti-capitalist, pan-Indigenous frame, providing a guard against recuperation into empire.

This is generating new coalitions which disturb the idea of the raver as a dissolute, implied White imperial subject. The revolt is not confined to the dancefloor. Remember: it was Wet’suwet’en people in Toronto who kicked off the revolt, and they continue to be heavily involved. There is no hermetic sense of the raver as distinct from other embodiments. See also the important contributions of groups like the Muslim Social Justice Initiative and Nijjormanush to the Boiler Room boycott.

Community and mutual aid

By freeing action from organizations, the endless potential of grassroots activism is revealed. Take the Bay Area. After concerted community pressure, an alliance of local collectives, operating under the moniker B.A.S.S. (Bay Area Solidarity Strike), caused so many artist withdrawals that Boiler Room San Francisco had to be cancelled. On the same day as the cancelled Boiler Room, their DIY counter-party raised over $9000, helping cover strike funds in the Bay Area and beyond as well as supporting mutual aid efforts in Gaza.

This bottom-up approach created lasting, meaningful bonds within and across communities in the Bay Area. But its impacts reverberated nonlocally, too. The B.A.S.S. initiative was rapidly reproduced in New York City (Big Apple Solidarity Strike), paving the way for their own strike fund and direct action. These precedents later informed the mass withdrawal of queer artists from Milkshake festival in the Netherlands, and the solidarity collective which emerged from it (R.U.I.S), which is based on similar DIY and anticapitalist values. In a sweet circular moment, the OG Bay Area boycotters ran a zine sale to support the Milkshake action.

These humble acts of community building, while often enacted through acts of refusal and boycott, are constructive in the most literal sense. While local, they are not parochial, creating material, transnational networks of solidarity and care.

Be reasonable, demand the impossible

The Superstruct-owned festival is uncanny and insidious. Its moniker is a dead, floating signifier, communicating vague affective hooks: queer, surfer, punk, underground. We are invited to get our monodirectional kicks in a grey strip mall of tailored experiences. The early, medieval festival, a precursor to the rave, was a space where “the world turned upside down”—one of sexual license, dissolved classes, kings becoming peasants for a day. The KKR festival is the world reaffirmed in its grim, implacable realities—a crushing acquiescence to capitalist realism.

It is precisely this realism that the movement rejects, in theory and deed. Drawing on the Wages for Housework movement of the seventies, theorist Kathi Weeks extols the power of the “utopian, unreasonable demand”—which, rather than a predestined route to narrow wins or achievable horizons—constitutes an ongoing insurgency, a “process of constituting a new subject with the desires for and the power to make new demands”.

The ambition, scope and unreasonableness of the demand—an anticapitalist rollback of the corporate takeover of rave culture—is what gives this movement potency. It also makes it effective and, yes, strategic. Consider: the news about KKR was only popularised in January. Just 7 months on, the corporate festival circuit is in ruins. DIY culture is reviving everywhere. And a system of rewards, which prioritised acquiescence, guild thinking, the collegiate co-facilitation of bag chasing, is being wrenched apart.

Abdaljawad Omar, writing on new circuits of rebellion in the refugee camps of the West Bank (The New York War Crimes, Nakba issue, 2025), writes:

“The current wave of resistance privileges the act itself—the moment of resistance—as a political assertion not necessarily embedded in a coherent project. It insists on action even in the absence of a clear horizon. This is not a failure of thought but an exposure of the limits of our inherited narratives. It answers the question “What is to be done?” simply: Act—and when you are unsure, act more.”

It is, he continues, “a form of struggle that reveals the exhaustion of inherited frameworks and insists on staying with the rupture”.

As fascism and anticolonialism recrudesce in parallel, who would bet on received patterns or lessons from the inert 2010s? No leaders have led this revolt; no strategists mapped it or predicted it, or prognosticated a pallid sequence of little wins and KPIs. Instead, by pulling at threads with humbleness, insistence and patience, a small community has brought many seemingly impregnable dynamics—commodification, competition, celebrity—to a tottering fragility.

As the international liberal order reveals its true contours, its insinuations within club culture are also becoming apparent. The credo of capitalist realism, that things must always get worse, that we must take the despoilation of our rituals, our communities, of all that is sacred, is facing non-acceptance. The consolidation of rave culture is not inevitable. Parties and festivals do not need to grow, become brands. Boiler Room does not have a right to exist. Per DJ and journalist Arielle Lana: “These platforms, they don’t need to be like the holy grail. We can dismantle them and we’ll still survive.”

Ravers for Palestine is an anonymous collective working to foster solidarity and resistance within electronic music culture.