Lufthansa fined $4,000,000 for Jew-hatred discrimination against passengers

Lufthansa: the airline most preferred by Nazis

You may remember when Lufthansa Airline refused to allow 128 Orthodox Jewish passengers to board a flight in May 2022. Well, the U.S. Department of Transportation has ordered the German airline to pay a $4 million fine for the anti-Semitic incident.

The passengers were easily identified as Jewish as they wore traditional Orthodox garb and were going from New York City through Frankfurt to Budapest. 

A few of these passengers allegedly "misbehaved" partly due to mask compliance, and rather than dealing with the alleged offenders, the Lufthansa employees reportedly treated them as a single group, in spite of the fact that they all didn't know each other and were traveling individually.

What were these Nazis thinking?

The Jewish community in the diaspora was outraged and leading anti-Semitism watchdog groups got involved, including Deborah Lipstadt, the United States' special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. She told NBC News that she found the Lufthansa incident “unbelievable.”

I believe it.

“[When] I first heard it, I said, ‘Oh, this must be wrong,” Lipstadt said when it happened. “Someone must be misreporting this. And then of course, it turned out to be precisely right — and worse than we even thought.”

Later that year, the American Jewish Committee signed a memorandum of understanding with Lufthansa, announcing that Lufthansa would adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism and that the AJC would train airline employees on how to identify and respond to antisemitism. In July 2022, Lufthansa CEO Jens Ritter said the company would hire someone to fill a senior management position “for the prevention of discrimination and antisemitism.”

The airline also agreed to pay each affected passenger $20,000 from the airline in November 2022, plus a reimbursement of $1,000. But what about the scumbags who didn't allow them to board--were they disciplined with having to find other employment in a non-airline industry.

The new penalty, which followed an investigation into more than 40 discrimination complaints from Jewish passengers aboard the flight, is the largest amount ever issued in the United States against an airline over civil rights violations, the federal transportation department said in a statement Tuesday.

“No one should face discrimination when they travel, and today’s action sends a clear message to the airline industry that we are prepared to investigate and take action whenever passengers’ civil rights are violated,” gay Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement.

In the consent order announcing the penalty, Lufthansa lied about the occurrence of any discrimination, instead attributing the incident to “an unfortunate series of inaccurate [aka anti-Semitic] communications, misinterpretations, and misjudgments throughout the decision-making process.” 

The company again apologized for the incident in the hope of avoiding boycotts by non-racists.

“Lufthansa states that it has zero tolerance for any form of religious or ethnic-based discrimination, including antisemitism,” the company said in the consent order. “Lufthansa states that it and the entire passenger airline group have had a robust and fruitful relationship with the Jewish communities around the world, especially in the United States. Lufthansa states that it is a trusted choice, to this day, for members of the Orthodox Jewish Community who continue to use the Lufthansa Group for travel throughout Europe as well as to Israel.”

The Lufthansa airline group had the perfect excuse and has canceled all flights to and from Israel until at least the end of this month, amid broad interruptions in air service induced by widening conflict in the region as the IDF is kicking some serious terrorist butt.

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