Episode 5: Germany - How a Coalition of Islamist And Far-left Actors Supercharge anti-Semitism

Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director at the Counter Extremism Project, joins the ICCT-SACC SENTINEL podcast to examine the escalating threats facing Germany's Jewish community since October 7th, 2023 - and the shifting coalitions behind them.

Schindler traces today's Islamist-far-left alliance, now the leading source of violent threat to German Jews, against its historical predecessor: the 1970s partnership between Palestinian militants and the German far-left, once bound by a shared "anti-imperialist" ideology. That genuine ideological kinship is gone; Schindler argues, what remains is, in his words, "antisemitism dressed in the clothes of anti-Zionism."

He also unpacks two emerging fronts: Hamas operatives reportedly embedded in Europe with instructions to carry out attacks, including against Jewish targets, and a troubling shift following the US/Israel war against Iran, with Tehran allegedly recruiting low-level criminals to carry out deniable attacks on Jewish targets.

For Schindler, these hybrid threats expose a structural blind spot - one that no longer fits neatly into Germany's existing categories of Islamist or far-left terrorism, and demands a fundamental rethink of how the threat is understood and countered.

Photo Credits: Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash