No, criticizing Israel is certainly 100% not illegal, what are you talking about. Being pro-Palestine isn’t illegal.
The only thing that’s even tangentially related and therefore might have been what you heard and misinterpreted is that Hamas flags have been added to the list of anti-constitutional banned symbols in Germany, so those are illegal. But clearly support for Hamas ≠ “criticizing Israel” lol
if someone cosplays as a Nazi or thinks Hitler didn’t murder 6 million […] then arresting them because of thought crimes is fascist behavior.
Hahahahaha no. It’s not “thought crimes” when you explicitly say through symbols: “I want Jews, disabled people, leftists, and traveling folk to be genozided”. Because that’s what that is. It’s not a thought when you wear it or carry it around.
The US “free speech absolutist” Musk and his hypocritical friends have gotten into your mind. Preventing intolerance isn’t intolerance in itself.
I get it, giving the government the ability to randomly shift the boundaries of what’s considered a hate symbol can backfire if the government becomes fashy. We can see that in the US right now where they twist everything they can to make things happen that they want to happen, with no regard for process and how tools were supposed to be used.
But that’s historically not what happened with paragraph 86a, and I don’t see it happening without AfD coming into power. I might eat my words some day, but precedent has held strong with that one.