‘Individuals Identifying as Qatari’ Viciously Beat Two Jewish Students in Warsaw

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Sep 13, 2019

Four men who identified as “Qatari” reportedly beat two male students to a pulp in Warsaw, Poland, on Sunday after discovering that they were Israeli and Jewish.

The two Israeli students, who were studying in Poland as part of a student delegation, were brutally assaulted in Warsaw last weekend shortly after they left a club called “The View.” According to the brother of one of the victims, the men were leaving the club around 4 a.m. when a group of “Arabic speakers” approached them and allegedly asked if they were from Israel.

Yotam Kapshitzky was reportedly hospitalized with a broken nose and an injury to his eye socket after his assailants attacked him using brass knuckles. His twin brother, Barak, created a Facebook post detailing the incident and two pictures of Yotam, whose face is badly beaten and covered in blood. Barak referred to the assault on them as a “terror attack.”

“The Arabs started to hit him and his friends just because they are Jewish,” he wrote on Facebook.

The incident drew widespread attention. CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Jonathan Greeblatt tweeted, “After confirming they were Israeli, individuals identifying as Qatari reportedly yelled “Free Gaza” and viciously beat two students at a club in Warsaw. With #antiSemitism & anti-Israel hate on the rise, we need ally-ship; indifference is not an option.”

Yotam reportedly told Israel’s Channel 13 that his four attackers said they were from Qatar and chanted “Free Gaza” and “fuck Israel” as they beat him. “There were many, many people and club bouncers watching on the side, but nobody did anything,” Yotam reportedly said.

“Yotam called me from the hospital and told me he and his friend were attacked by Arabs just because they are Israelis,” Barak told Israel’s Channel 12. “He received painkillers and is still in shock from the whole thing.”

“History is repeating itself in Warsaw, Poland, as Poles stand by and watch, while people who ‘are not from our nation’ are beating Jews until they lose consciousnesses,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

Barak was referring to Nazi Germany’s so called “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” which saw its most lethal phase in German-occupied Poland.

Before the Holocaust, Warsaw had a Jewish population equivalent to the number of Jews living in all of France and was reportedly “the only city that rivaled New York’s Jewish population.”

“Today is my twin brother,” Barak wrote. “Tomorrow is your relatives.”

His words draw attention to a quote from the late Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller, a German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor who famously wrote, “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Several days after the Warsaw incident, a 21-year-old Israeli tourist was reportedly assaulted outside of a nightclub for speaking Hebrew.

In August, two men reportedly spat on Berlin-based Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal and insulted him in Arabic. That same month, a male and female reportedly spat on a rabbi and his two sons in Munich and called them “Shit Jews.”

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