Hamas supporters at a rally in Cologne, Germany, on Oct. 22. Photo: Reuters/Ying Tang

Nearly two weeks after Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged to ban all Hamas activities in Germany, a row is festering among German politicians over the apparent slowness in implementing the decision, as well as on the broader issue of antisemitism prevention.

During an Oct. 12 speech to the German parliament in which he described Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s silence on the Oct. 7 pogrom unleashed by Hamas terrorists in southern Israel as a “disgrace,” Scholz underlined that the authorities would prosecute anyone promoting support for Hamas. He also confirmed that Samidoun — a pro-Hamas organization whose demonstrations in Berlin have featured cries of “Death to the Jews” — would be outlawed.

However, opposition politicians from the center-right CDU Party are showing increasing impatience with the ruling center-left SPD government, with Interior Minister Nancy Faeser first in the firing line.

“The chancellor has announced a ban on the Palestinian network Samidoun and a ban on Hamas from operating, and none of this has been implemented yet,” Alexander Throm, the CDU’s domestic policy spokesperson told the Welt news outlet on Wednesday. “Bans like these should have been announced and implemented long ago; it shows once again that Faeser is not taking the danger of radical Islamism seriously enough.”

Other parties have also urged Faeser to act more decisively, with some politicians mocking her decision to take a short vacation in Spain despite the present crisis.

“I would like to see a little more leadership and presence from Ms. Faeser,” said Sandra Bubendorfer-Licht, a spokeswoman for the liberal FDP Party. “The federal government must now act quickly in a legally secure manner in coordination with the states. Every day that passes brings time to prepare against a ban.”

Those views were echoed by the left-wing Green Party’s domestic policy spokeswoman, Lamya Kaddor.

“We must do everything we can to prevent Germany from becoming a refuge for terrorist organizations and from glorifying terror against Jews on German streets,” Kaddor said. However, she added, “in order for these bans to really have their long-term and desired effect, it is crucial that they are legally watertight.”

The potential legal complications stem from the German Constitution’s protection of free speech, which includes the fundamental right of political associations and clubs to organize — meaning that judges have the discretion to reject government demands for Islamist groups to be banned.

“Appropriate bans have to be very well prepared because you never know what the judges will decide,” Rudolf van Hülsen, an expert on political extremism, told Welt. “If an application for a ban is rejected, the interior minister will be embarrassed.”

A statement from the German Interior Ministry pushed back against the criticism of Faeser. “The ministry and the security authorities involved are preparing these bans intensively and will implement them as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson explained. “Of course, no information can be provided in advance about the times and details of operational measures in order not to endanger these measures,” as there is “the risk that those potentially affected will adapt their behavior accordingly and this could impair the effectiveness of operational official measures to thwart them.”

Separately, some CDU politicians have been calling for a wholesale overhaul of the government’s approach to preventing antisemitism, outlined in a national strategy approved last November.

“The antisemitism prevention programs, which were very expensively financed, have not been successful. We have to rebuild this from the ground up,” Burkard Dregger, the CDU’s domestic policy expert, stated over the weekend.

Dregger emphasized that Muslim immigrants in Germany were particularly prone to believing “fake news” about Israel. “This shows that we need a complete turnaround in prevention policy,” he said. “This appeasement is no longer necessary.”

Berlin’s Jewish community held a panel discussion on Tuesday night to examine the situation in the German capital’s schools, where antisemitic and anti-Zionist invective from Muslim students is a growing problem.

Gideon Joffe, the community’s chair, noted that out of the 300 students enrolled at Berlin’s Jewish high school, “100 fled to us because of antisemitic experiences, 100 came to us out of fear of antisemitism, and only 100 out of conviction. The 200 are refugees from Berlin.”

The meeting also heard from the CDU’s Katharina Günther-Wünsch, who serves as Berlin’s education senator. Warning that “something is smoldering in our schools,” Günther-Wünsch argued that antisemitism was going unchallenged in many cases “because people are not sensitized or because educators are afraid of confrontation.”

In the wake of the Hamas pogrom in Israel, antisemitic incidents in Germany have risen by 240 percent compared with the same period last year.