sirenianshores

Jerusalem Post is reporting that Rammstein - “the name of a German heavy metal band who some associate with neo-Nazism” - was spray-painted on the floor of the Great Synagogue in Petah Tikva, Israel, which was broken into and desecrated on Thursday morning (May 4).

The perpetrators drew swastikas on the walls, on the ark and on Torah Scrolls. They also wrote “Hitler” on the doors of the synagogue and flung the contents of the ark onto the floor. They covered every Jewish symbol with spray paint and drew the symbol of a known devil worship cult on the synagogue’s walls.

Rammstein has been dogged by controversy throughout their career, notably in the aftermath the Columbine shootings where it was claimed the shooters were fans of the band and also for their music video ‘Stripped’ - in which footage was used from Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympics - an event which Hitler’s Nazi party exploited for its propaganda value.

However, the band has never in its career endorsed Neo-Nazism or violence of any kind. The Leni Riefenstahl footage was used for it’s esthetic value and not it’s politicical content. Being from the former Communist East Germany, their politics are actually quite left-wing and one of the band members is also married to a Jew. Rammstein are not a Black Metal band either - a mostly European form of heavy metal which is often linked with Neo-Nazism. They are electronic/industrial metal.

The Rammstein/Neo-Nazi myth should have died years ago, but the stereotypical image of the band still persists to this day. I guess the image of a group of angry young men from Germany performing music in a very Germanic way will always have certain connotations associated with it.

The JPost article goes on further to describe the growing problem of anti-semitism in Israel itself - a growing phenomenon among the population of recent immigrants from places like Russia:

Zalman Gilichenski, the head of a foundation that documents anti-Semitic attacks in Israel, said that such attacks had increased drastically in recent years. In the Russian-language media in Israel, he said, reports of anti-Semitic incidents perpetrated by non-Jewish immigrants from the Former Soviet Union against fellow Russian-speaking immigrants appear once every week or two. His organization, Gilichenski says, receives multiple phone calls every week.

One proposed solution is to strip anyone who has engaged in Neo-Nazi activities of their Israeli citizenship.