by News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff
Hat tip: Dr. Jean-Charles Bensoussan
Syrian "juvenile" offender to receive one year of support services, which could include apprenticeship, help finding apartment.
A Berlin court on Monday convicted a 19-year-old Syrian of causing serious bodily harm and of slander for attacking a man wearing a Jewish skullcap in the German capital in April.
The victim, a 21-year-old Arab Israeli who
said he wore the kippah to show solidarity with his Jewish friends,
filmed his attacker whipping him with a belt and shouting "Yahudi!"
[sic] ("Jew" in Arabic).
The defendant, whose name was suppressed due to privacy laws, had arrived in Germany in 2015 seeking asylum.
He was sentenced to four weeks of juvenile
detention, the maximum under Germany's juvenile criminal law. But as he
had already spent more than two months in detention while awaiting
trial, he was immediately released.
The court has the right to
apply juvenile criminal law in cases involving defendants aged up to 21
and decided to do so in this case because the man was lacking in
maturity, said court spokeswoman Lisa Jani.
As part of his sentence, he is required to
take part in a tour of Berlin's House of the Wannsee Conference, where
the Nazis laid out the Final Solution – their plan to exterminate the
Jews – in 1942.
"The court wants to make clear that his attitude toward Jews will not be tolerated here," Jani said.
Video footage of the attack sparked a
public outcry when it was posted on the internet in April. The attack
was widely condemned and stoked a debate about anti-Semitism in Germany.
During the trial, the defendant admitted
whipping the victim with a belt but said he regretted the assault, and
apologized to the victim.
Testifying in German and Arabic through a translator, the defendant told the court he had smoked marijuana before the incident.
Jani said the man – who was born in Syria
and has a Syrian passport but considers himself Palestinian – would also
be given one year of support services, which could include help in
finding an apartment and an apprenticeship.
The Jewish community was not satisfied with the ruling.
Sigmount Koenigsberg, the Berlin Jewish
community's anti-Semitism commissioner, told Berlin-based broadcaster
105.5 Spreeradio that the ruling was "an absolute joke."
"A few weeks of detention, which have
already been served, are not appropriate. The man is laughing himself
silly," Koenigsberg said.
Chancellor Angela Merkel personally spoke
out against the attack, saying her government would respond "with full
force and resolve" against anti-Semitism in Germany. The country has
strict laws against incitement, rooted in its experience of Nazism, the
ideology of racial supremacy that Adolf Hitler used to justify the
Holocaust.
Meanwhile, in a separate incident, police
in the western city of Dortmund appealed Monday for witnesses after a
21-year-old Jewish man was allegedly attacked and insulted by three
neo-Nazis.
News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/2018/06/26/syrian-teen-who-beat-man-wearing-kippah-gets-4-week-sentence/
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