After a lengthy manhunt, a prominent right-wing YouTuber in Germany is in police custody. On August 13, Aron Pielka, known by the pseudonym Shlomo Finkelstein, was arrested in Frankfurt after being found in violation of the conditions he was under for a past suspended sentence and may be imprisoned for one year.
In December of 2020, Shlomo received a probationary sentence for “incitement to hatred, dissemination of symbols of unconstitutional organizations and insulting religious denominations and communities” from the Cologne public prosecutor’s office.
In the ruling, the court determined that the commentator was accused of inciting hatred on ten occasions between 2017 and 2019 on his YouTube channel, called Die vulgäre Analyse, or the channels DoxxingGegenNazis and GreenDayBoy2009, between May 12, 2017 and March 29, 2019.
Among his crimes listed include posting a video where he burned a Koran on a grill and sharing footage of pork on a flaming Koran. A video clip demonstrating how to extinguish a burning Koran using urine was also listed as a primary reason for his conviction.
“Shlomo’s goal in these actions was to insult, degrade and mock the religion of Islam and the religious beliefs of Muslim people and thereby insult, degrade and mock all users,” explained the judiciary committee in the verdict. “He also accepted the risk of inciting all users who were able to view the video to also adopt a hostile attitude towards the religion of Islam and the religious beliefs of Muslim people.”
The court also expressed disagreement with Shlomo’s catalog of profile pictures, some of which featured an animated caricature of the English writer Samuel Jackson Pratt as a bat with a “hooked nose, Jewish sidelocks, a top hat with a Star of David and sharp teeth.”
“It was obvious to a viewer of the video that the said cross between a bat and a human was meant to represent a Jewish person,” concluded the court in response to claims the portrayal of Jackson was satire. “Shlomo aimed to degrade people of Jewish faith living in Germany not as equal human beings, but as despicable, inferior and equal to animals.”
The YouTuber reportedly did not attend the court hearing to hear his sentencing On December 11, 2020, which became legally binding on June 29, 2021, but later said he learned about the court ruling from the media.
According to Apollo News, police were searching for Shlomo after he violated two of the three conditions required by the court to avoid a custodial sentence, including failing to pay a fine of just under $700 USD and failing to reside at a registered address by the court’s deadline in spring of 2022.
News of Shlomo’s arrest sparked outrage on X, formerly Twitter. Some users began showing solidarity for the YouTuber by sharing their thoughts using the hashtag #FreeShlomo:
Others, pointing to a case out of Germany where a child rapist was released from prison, decried Shlomo’s arrest as hypocritical and indicative of the priorities of the German judiciary.
This is not the first time Germany has clamped down on right-wing political sentiment in recent years.
As previously reported by The Publica, the Federal Minister of the Interior and Community Nancy Faeser recently banned the online magazine Compact for allegedly “inciting hatred against Jews and migrants.”
The outlet was founded in 2010 by journalist and former leftist activist Jürgen Elsässer and covered various topics from a right-wing perspective.
“It is a central mouthpiece of the right-wing extremist scene. This magazine incites hatred against Jews, people with a history of migration and our parliamentary democracy in an unspeakable manner,” claimed Faeser.
“Our signal is clear: We will not allow who belongs in Germany and who doesn’t to be defined by ethnicity,” she continued, accusing the publication of undermining democracy and showing support to the nation’s populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Although the publication’s website is still down, Compact continues to post updates on its X account.
