Muslim Killed in Germany
The double standard in Germany and in Europe as a whole for that matter, exposed:
At Christmastime in 2007, two young men accosted an elderly man in a Munich subway station, beating him so badly he landed in the hospital in critical condition.
Less than two weeks ago, a 32-year-old woman, four months pregnant, was testifying in a Dresden courtroom when the defendant approached the witness stand and stabbed her 18 times. She did not survive.
The two grisly attacks, 18 months apart, elicited two very different reactions in German society. The first incident became an overnight scandal, fodder for tabloid headlines and the cause of a months-long political controversy. The second incident earned cursory attention in the media and disappeared from the public imagination shortly thereafter.
The difference between the reactions reveals a double standard that Germany struggles with but has yet to confront. In the subway attack, it was the perpetrators of the crime who were Muslims, of Turkish descent. In the courtroom attack, the victim was Muslim, an Egyptian. Germans have a ready narrative to apply to the first situation, but not to the second.
Make no mistake about it; if the victim was a white Christian and the murderer a Muslim (immigrant) in the second case as well, it would have received a whole lot of attention. Why? Because it’s news when a Muslim does something wrong, but not when a non-Muslim commits a similar crime. It’s the double standard alive and well in Europe today.
Of course it is extremely interesting to see that this double standard is employed in Germany, of all countries. Germans should have learned from World War II. Not so, I’m afraid: apartments and houses with Turkish immigrants living in them are burned to the ground by neo-nazis, colored Muslims who travel to Germany are discriminated against every single day, and neo-nazi parties are becoming increasingly popular, in the country that brought forth one of the worst dictators who ever lived (Hitler) and a regime that committed the worst crime against humanity in the history of mankind.
The problem is not that the second, brutal, murder received scant attention as such. No, the problem is that crimes against Muslim immigrants are ignored, while the media obsess over crimes committed by them. A hate crime is a hate crime. It’s that simple.
Which media are you referring to? Certainly not the Arab media, which has covered it extensively and led to Egyptians openly protesting in the streets. If you are really wondering why Marwa al-Sherbini’s death didn’t generate more publicity in the German press, maybe its for the same reason that the Arab press virtually ignores it whenever a Christian is murdered in a Muslim country. Every week I read about another such murder – in fact several churches were just bombed in Iraqi-controlled Baghdad this week. Where were the open street protests over that outrage?
Keep in mind that the media is a business, and people tend to read stories that are about their own nationality/religion/ethnic group. It’s obvious that Germany is not alone in that regard. Also keep in mind that her murder had to compete with many other world headlines this week.
I want to know how and why the “defendant” was able to stab his victim 18 times without being shot or tackled by court personnel.
Oh come on. Give us a break. Apartments burned down? And how long ago? Years and years and years and as I recall, that got tons of press in Germany as well as the USA and UK at that time. Ancient history and btw … there were arrests and convictions. Or is your memory playing you up.
Holly asked the same question I had. Stabbed 18 times in a court and nobody close enough to stop it? Something very wrong here. And defendants are allowed to go to the witness on the stand? There is something missing here.
As for Mr.Hitler and the Nazis … yes. No argument except to say that Stalin killed on an even larger scale but by different methods. I suppose had the Nazis killed 2wice as many ppl but used Stalin’s strategy, we’d hear as little about them as we do about Stalin.
It is true that the apartment burnings received a great deal of international media attention.
I am also skeptical of the idea that Europe as a whole is anti-Muslim. In Britain, courts are endorsing the maintenance of a separate system of Shari’a law to accommodate even very fundamentalist readings of Islamic law in spite of their contradictions with standard liberal principles of English law. Anti-Muslim speakers are routinely barred from traveling or appearing in public. And in Australia (a European government, even though geographically removed), the government is trying to prohibit the use of “Islamic” designators on terrorist groups in favor of vaguely general categories that conflate all types of political violence.
That said, the fact that Islamist violence is real does not justify a cavalier attitude towards anti-Muslim violence. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Furthermore, every time a Muslim is targeted for violence in the West, it is easy fodder for the propagandists of the jihadist groups.