Iman Spati, 38, has no memory of his father, Akbar Spati, except for a small and haunting keepsake: an audio cassette in which his father says, “Don’t be afraid. Wherever you go, I’ll be watching over you.” A year after recording those words, when Iman was just two years old, Akbar, a political activist in Iran’s opposition, was executed. The man responsible for the sentence was Ebrahim Raisi, then Tehran’s prosecutor general and later Iran’s president. “To retrieve his body, my mother was forced to pay for the bullets used to kill him,” Spati recalls.
In 1999, as repression tightened in Iran and Iman neared military draft age, his family fled to Germany. “Shortly after I arrived in Germany, I became deeply interested in issues of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment,” Spati says during an interview at the offices of Bild, where he works as a multimedia producer. “I remembered how it began the same way in Iran. In 2016, after witnessing Berlin’s Al-Quds Day rally, where horrific slogans were shouted and Iranian, Hamas and Hezbollah flags waved, I decided to get more active and document these hate demonstrations.”
Since October 7, Spati has attended around 140 pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Berlin – not as a journalist, but as a citizen armed with a video camera to capture what he describes as Germany’s descent into hatred.
“At first, thousands came out to support the Palestinian cause,” he explains. “Now it’s only a few hundred, but they’re much angrier, more antisemitic, and increasingly violent. They attack police, throw bottles, and the officers are exhausted because politicians won’t back them up.”
At almost every protest, Spati is targeted. Demonstrators shout, “F--- you, Iman Spati,” hurl insults, follow him, and threaten him. In July, someone struck him on the head with a flagpole, and later another individual headbutted him. That same month, while walking his dog, he was confronted outside his home by a man wielding a knife and a blonde woman he recognized from previous demonstrations. “When I chased them, the woman screamed that I was trying to assault her,” he says. Spati was briefly detained but released after police apprehended the assailant.
“There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of complaints about what happens at these demonstrations, and not a single conviction,” Spati says. “People pretending to be pizza delivery workers knock on my door, accusing me of being a Mossad agent. The rhetoric is violent and threatening, and no one is doing anything about it. On the contrary, some police officers with immigrant backgrounds see me as the problem, as someone stirring up trouble against Arabs.”
Who attends these demonstrations of hate?
“It’s a bizarre cocktail of far-left radicals and radical Islamists who have nothing in common except their sweeping hatred for Israel and Jews,” Spati explains. “Ninety percent of them think what happened on October 7 was a good thing. The other 10% are too afraid to speak out. The mass Muslim migration in 2015 allowed the far left to openly express their antisemitism under the guise of helping Muslim victims. October 7 lit the fuse. The far left bears the responsibility for what’s happening at these protests – they hate colonialist Israel and the West.”
And what about the Muslim protesters?
“Most are in it for the money,” Spati says. “They earn sometimes thousands of euros a month by posting protest videos that rack up hundreds of thousands of views. And it’s become ‘cool’ to be antisemitic and anti-Israel – it’s a way to fit in socially.”
According to Spati, the level of violence and incitement rises with each protest. He recalls an incident earlier this month when a passerby wearing a yellow badge to symbolize support for the hostages in Gaza was assaulted, and his young daughter was dragged into a march.
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“Ever since I saw them celebrating with baklava on October 7, I knew I had to be there,” he says. “I’m not afraid of them, I’m afraid of what could happen. I know what it means when people try to bring the Middle East, the place they fled, into the heart of Europe. The average German doesn’t understand what that truly entails.”
“I don’t want to die, but I’m ready to sacrifice my life for the way of life that gave me refuge when I fled Iran," Spati adds. "I’m certain my father is watching over me, and he would be proud that his son is carrying on the fight he gave his life for.”