Mannichl, 52, ... was stabbed after opening his front door to a bald man who launched into a torrent of abuse, calling him a "left-wing police pig" and declaring "greetings from the national resistance movement" before ramming an 11-centimeter (4.3 inch) blade into his stomach.Everybody is outraged. Outraged! With all the cheap and foreseeable standard reactions, from a rally of more than 300 people "against far-right violence" on Monday afternoon via the predictable calls "for a crackdown on neo-Nazis and tougher sentences for far-right offenders" to the Bavarian interior minister's original statement that "the assault showed that far-right violence had reached a new dimension".
Two men from the right-wing scene were quickly arrested but had to be released soon. No other suspects have been found yet.
The Neo-Nazi party NPD, who was able to clock up a whopping 1.2% at the elections for the Bavarian state parliament last September, issued a statement on its website condemning what they called the "insidious attack on the father of two children" and "Whoever pulled the knife on the Passau police chief has done a major disservice not just to the NPD, but to the entire national resistance movement", which is true.
Another, equally life-threatening, stabbing last year in Frankfurt (we reported) caused less concern. The victim was a Rabbi and the perpetrator a 22-year-old unemployed "German of Afghan parentage". He, too, had delivered the blow together with a message, namely "I’ll kill you, you Scheiß-Jude." [Expletives are hardly translatable: Scheiß=shit, Jude=Jew]. The perpetrator remained adamant, largely supported by the justice system and the maintream media, that there had been no antisemitic motive and that he felt threatened by and physically inferior to the middle-aged, grossly obese rabbi, whose fat layers had prevented worse, and had thus reached for his knife. As the journalist Henryk M. Broder put it: "Here we have another case of self-defense, where the provocateur leaps aggressively into the provocatee's knife as an answer to a friendly "salam aleikum". In the end, the young man was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison for aggravated battery and harrassment, the charge of attempted manslaughter had been dropped. The culture-enricher's lawyers stated that the fact that their client didn't stab the Rabbi a second time posed an "abandonment of an attempt to commit manslaughter" and that he was just an ebullient young man who was just too fond of "brandishing a knife".
Will justice be done now? Didn't the policeman provoke the perpetrator by opening the door to him? How do we know that the perpetrator wasn't just another ebullient young man who was just a little bit too fond of brandishing his knife? Will the fact that he didn't hit the policeman a second time seen as an "abandonment of an attempt to commit manslaughter"? I doubt it. Doubt it, simply because police and Inland Security would lose sinecures of enormous proportions would "right-wing extremism" finally granted the marginal importance it has. And, even more important, yacking about "a crackdown on neo-Nazis and tougher sentences for far-right offenders" spreads a feel-good experience no other medium can provide and that's exactly why this shitty little party will never be banned because what would all the many upright and noble Germans, good democrats all of them, do if they hadn't that scapegoat anymore, whom to repudiate is so easy, cheap, effective and absolutely nonhazardous.
The following older entries are still extremely topical in this context: Barking up the Wrong Tree as an Art Form and Leave the Poor Nazis Alone.
What if the neo-Nazis didn't do it and what if the neo-Nazis weren't even neo-Nazis:
German Feel-Good-Experience Busted.
No comments:
Post a Comment