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Police union calls for children to be taken away from anti-Semitic parents

The Local Germany
The Local Germany - [email protected]
Police union calls for children to be taken away from anti-Semitic parents
Photo: DPA

The head of Germany’s second largest police union has responded to recent reports of anti-Semitism in the schoolyard by saying that authorities should be allowed to take children away from anti-Semitic parents.

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“Authorities need to act decisively [against anti-Semitism] including when the aggression comes from migrants,” Rainer Wendt, head of the German Police Union (DPolG) told the Augsburger Allgemeine on Wednesday.

“If children are raised to become anti-Semites we shouldn’t be afraid to take them away from their families,” he added.

DpolG is Germany’s second largest police union with 94,000 members. Wendt, who has been head of the union since 2007, regularly makes headlines due to his hardline stance on criminality.

His latest comments come in the wake of a report last week that a Jewish girl at a Berlin primary school was told by a Muslim classmate that she deserved to be beaten and killed because of her religion.

It was the third such report of anti-Semitism in Berlin schools to make headlines over the past 12 months. On another occasion a Jewish teenager swapped schools after Muslim classmates threatened him with a fake gun.

Wendt claimed that many school directors had chosen to ignore the problem, saying “they act according to the mantra ‘it doesn’t exist in my school.’”

“There has also been a tendency not to willingly register anti-Semitism by Muslims - but it needs to be recorded without prejudice so that we can develop effective counter-strategies,” he said.

Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, called last week for a more straightforward system for schools to report anti-Semitism.

He said he wanted teachers and students to have a way to report "anti-Semitic or other acts of violence without bureaucratic hurdles, in order to get a clearer picture of what is going on".

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