“After the statements he made and which he was expected to make again, it was the right measure,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Jewish Council of Germany, told the Tageszeitung (taz) newspaper about the ban on entry to Germany imposed on Yanis Varoufakis. , after the Berlin Conference on Palestine. Joseph Schuster said that “if criminal slogans and the destruction of states – by anyone – are propagated at such a conference, then I believe that the limits of freedom of opinion and speech have been exceeded. And then I expect the police to break up such a meeting.”

However, in another article taz expresses doubts about the behavior of the German authorities. As he points out, “there were no criminally incriminating statements at the conference, which the police also admitted.” “Anyone who spreads Islamist propaganda and hatred against Jews should know that such crimes will be swiftly and consistently prosecuted,” the spokeswoman for the Federal Ministry of the Interior said on Monday, according to the newspaper. The spokeswoman, however, according to taz, “did not want to state exactly what the charges against the 63-year-old Greek former finance minister are.” “It is not possible to provide information on individual cases,” she said.

Also taz, in an opinion piece, characterizes the entry ban into the country as “German McCarthyism” and argues that “not only are the rules of decency ignored and the legislation tightened, but the limits of the rule of law are also affected when, apparently arbitrarily, entry bans are imposed and gatherings as happened with the Palestine Conference in Berlin, which was prevented by the police,” Bax comments.

According to the Die Welt newspaper, the Berlin Interior Senator Iris Spranger, from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), “denied, on Monday, Varoufakis’ version that he has been banned from political activity completely. At the same time, he defended the decision to cancel the event and not allow it again in the following days.” “Our assessment has been confirmed in advance that this is not a discussion critical of Israel’s policy, but about the networking of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic groups and individuals,” the senator said.

An article in the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung expresses reservations about the general attitude of Yanis Varoufakis. “The cynical climax was an interview on October 7, 2023,” the newspaper reports. There, Varoufakis said of the massacre by Hamas that he would never condemn this “act of liberation”, as he supports the destruction of the “apartheid state in Israel”.

But, “while Varoufakis does not want to recognize terrorism in Hamas, the term came easily to him when he was Greece’s finance minister,” reports the Zurich newspaper. “‘What they are doing to Greece has a name: terrorism,’ Varoufakis said in interviews in the summer of 2015.”

SOURCE: Deutsche Welle