Chancellor Olaf Scholz repeats lie about non-existent Hamas “rape videos”

Although the claim has been definitively debunked as a lie, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is the latest German head of government to claim that Hamas militants filmed themselves raping Israeli women on October 7.

In fact, according to Israeli government and UN sources, there are no such videos.

Journalist Florian Warweg published a video of Scholz speaking at a rally of his Social Democratic Party on the European elections in Leipzig on June 1.

Amid crowd protests against his government’s role in Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, Scholz claimed: “The Hamas terrorists recorded all this so that their vileness, their murders and their rapes can be seen in the videos by the whole world.”

This came just days after Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock claimed she had personally seen a video of a rape filmed by a Hamas fighter using a GoPro helmet camera.

There are no such videos

But as The Electronic Intifada reported, no such video exists. This fact was confirmed by both Israeli government sources and a UN team that reviewed thousands of photos and dozens of hours of video footage provided by the Israeli government or obtained from open sources.

The UN team, led by Pramila Patten, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict, concluded in its report published in March that “forensic evaluation of the available photographs and videos failed to identify any tangible evidence of rape.”

The following month, the Israeli Haaretz reported that “from the inquiries made to three places in the defence apparatus, HaaretzIt turns out that the intelligence collected by the police and intelligence services, including footage from the terrorists’ body cameras, does not contain any visual documentation of the rapes themselves.”

Berlin Walls and Lies

Warweg seems to be the only journalist in Germany who stands up against the government’s increasing atrocity propaganda.

Last week, at the government’s press conference, Warweg called on the Foreign Ministry to provide details about where, when and with whom Baerbock watched the alleged rape video.

Since there is no corresponding video, Foreign Office spokesman Christian Wagner was unable to provide any information on this and instead resorted to slander and defamation against the journalist.

At the government press conference on 5 June, Warweg again challenged the government.

The journalist asked Foreign Office spokesman Sebastian Fischer to “tell us when, where and with which other representatives of the Foreign Office Ms Baerbock watched this (video) sequence?”

“You have already asked my colleague Christian Wagner these exact questions,” Fischer replied. “That was also the subject of another federal press conference. You can read about it in the minutes or simply watch your own video. Then you will have the answers.”

But as Warweg aptly replied, Wagner gave no answer.

Reminiscent of Nazi propaganda

Nicaragua is currently suing Germany before the International Court of Justice over Berlin’s role in the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip – a genocide that the German leadership continues to cover up and deny.

And indeed, government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit stated on Wednesday: “The Chancellor is convinced that Israel is doing everything in its power to comply with international law.”

One of the crimes under the 1948 Genocide Convention is incitement to genocide.

In 2003, three journalists were found guilty and sentenced to long prison terms by an international tribunal for their role in inciting the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

According to an official summary of the verdict, the crimes included “the portrayal of the Tutsi woman as a femme fatale and the message that Tutsi women are seductive agents of the enemy.”

Adolf Hitler, Chancellor Scholz’s predecessor, also used the propaganda tactic of portraying a group that was the target of genocide as sexual deviants.

The Hitler government’s propaganda portrayed Jewish men “as lecherous rapists who threaten blonde girls,” according to Edna Friedberg of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. That is exactly what Chancellor Scholz and his ministers are now doing to the Palestinians.

Given that their country is on trial for its role in Israel’s campaign of extermination, it is surprising that the German leadership has not stopped ruthlessly pursuing such smear campaigns and lies – at least to avoid having to put themselves at risk of criminal prosecution, if not out of a basic sense of human decency that even decades of declarations of remorse for German crimes have failed to instill in them.

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