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German police repeatedly punch Israeli victim of antisemitic assault in a case of mistaken identity

Officers had been called after a man repeatedly knocked the kippah off Israeli university professor Yitzhak Yohanan Melamed's head

July 16, 2018 15:47
Professor Yitzhak Yohanan Melamed shared this image of his injuries on his Facebook account
1 min read

An Israeli philosophy professor has accused German police of punching him multiple times and wrongly arresting him when he reported an antisemitic attack against him in the city of Bonn.

Yitzhak Yohanan Melamed, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, said his face was left bleeding and glasses broken after officers pushed him to the ground and handcuffed him — but they had caught the wrong man.

The police had been called after a man repeatedly knocked the kippah off Prof Melamed's head while he was walking with a colleague in the city’s Hofgarten park last Wednesday.

“A stocky man about 1.60 meters tall approached us and asked me Bist Du Jude? (‘Are you Jewish?’) and then, added that he is Palestinian,” Prof Melamed said in a post on Facebook.