Hysterical agitation against refugees and immigrants after knife attack in Mannheim

Since the knife attack on Mannheim’s market square on May 31, in which a police officer was killed, the anti-Islamic media campaign in Germany has continued unabated. Leading politicians from the established parties, especially former Left Party leader Sahra Wagenknecht, are going all out in hysterical hate campaigns against Muslims, calling for an “end to tolerance” and merciless deportations, including to Afghanistan. Shortly before the European elections, they are doing everything they can to poison the climate in Germany and move it to the right.

On Friday, May 31, a young Afghan attacked a rally of the anti-Islamic civil movement Pax Europa (BPE) with a knife. A police officer who intervened was so badly injured that he died two days later; several participants were also injured, some seriously.

The attacker, who was shot by police officers, is still in hospital six days after the incident and is unresponsive. 25-year-old Sulaiman A. fled to Germany from Afghanistan with his brother ten years ago. He is now married, has two children and lives in Heppenheim, Hesse. He had a high school diploma and was involved in refugee aid. He repeatedly took on odd jobs but was unable to find permanent employment, not least because the immigration authorities refused to grant him a permanent residence permit despite his marriage to a German woman.

According to his neighbors, Sulaiman A. had only recently become radicalized when he attacked BPE chairman Michael Stürzenberger and several of his supporters on Friday, fatally injuring a police officer.

The way in which this case has been used for political purposes since then is unprecedented. Top politicians are calling for harsher punishments and deportations, including to Afghanistan and Syria. Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) described the attack on a police officer as an “attack on all of us” and Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) promised to provide the security authorities with better financial resources. “Stop the false tolerance!” shouted Lindner. The CDU/CSU called for a debate in the Bundestag with the aim of “better protecting” the police officers and examining deportations to Afghanistan.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser announced harsh penalties:

“The perpetrator must be punished for his murder with the greatest possible severity of the law,” said the SPD politician. The security authorities have “the Islamist scene firmly in their sights.” On Tuesday, Faeser went a step further and emphasized: “It is clear to me that people who pose a potential threat to Germany’s security must be deported quickly. … Germany’s security interests clearly outweigh the interests of those affected in staying.”

YouTube video by Sahra Wagenknecht. “Radical Islam does not belong in Germany!” (Photo via screenshot)

Sahra Wagenknecht, who now leads the BSW split from the Left Party, made particularly nationalistic and repulsive statements. In the style of the AfD, she railed in an election campaign video about the “serious problem of failed integration: Islamist parallel societies are becoming entrenched.” The situation has been “exacerbated by non-integrated immigration,” she said.

Wagenknecht indirectly denounced the Mannheim perpetrator as a social parasite who had “received social benefits for ten years”. In principle, “anyone who can halfway pronounce the word asylum” can come to Germany. She called for a “turnaround in asylum and immigration policy” and described it as “urgently necessary” that asylum procedures be carried out “at the European external borders or in third countries”. She also called for “consistent deportations”, which “of course” must also take place to Afghanistan.

Wagenknecht’s words are exemplary of the hysteria of government and opposition politicians, who are in no way different from the fascists of the AfD. The intensity and omnipresence with which they express their anti-migrant agitation shows how important it is to them. In the face of rearmament, escalating war and the associated social cuts, the dissatisfied working class is to be divided, incited and thus paralyzed.

The background to the events in Mannheim is consistently ignored.

Michael Stürzenberger, the first victim of Friday’s attack, is a right-wing extremist, anti-Islam activist. The journalist and former press spokesman for the CSU made a name for himself as a pioneer of the right-wing extremist PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West). As an itinerant preacher, he traveled around the country and spread hate propaganda with the aim of driving Muslims out of Germany. His current organization, the citizens’ movement Pax Europa, was originally founded by Udo Ulfkotte, another right-wing extremist journalist who spread his anti-Islamic filth and conspiracy theories through the Kopp publishing house.

A rally by these anti-Islam agitators on Mannheim’s market square was an unscrupulous provocation. The market square in the center of Mannheim is located in a district where mostly immigrants live. It is surrounded by numerous Turkish and other international restaurants, bakeries, and fruit and vegetable shops.

Long-established Mannheim residents live peacefully alongside workers of foreign origin here. The large Mannheim demonstration against the genocide in the Gaza Strip took place here on February 24th, which many residents of the district, whether German or immigrant, actively supported.

Here, too, there have been repeated demonstrations against brutal police violence. Recently, such cases have been strikingly often fatal, but there have almost always been no consequences for the police. In the last two years alone, there have been at least four cases of police violence resulting in death in Mannheim.

There were repeated attacks by uniformed perpetrators on mentally ill people, especially those of foreign origin. On May 2, 2022, for example, several officers killed 47-year-old Ante P., who was in a mental crisis. They threw him to the ground, held him down and hit him on the head with full force. Those responsible were acquitted in early March 2024.

On December 23, 2023, police shot Ertekin Ö., who was also mentally ill. They were acquitted by the court on May 29, just two days before the latest knife attack. Ertekin Ö.’s family reacted to the acquittal by saying they were “shaken and shocked,” and the group “Initiative 2 May” announced a rally for June 1.

The demonstration against police violence has been cancelled until further notice due to recent events on the market square. In the meantime, the injured Pax Europa official Stürzenberger has reported back from the hospital. He publicly compared himself to the Dutch film director Theo van Gogh, who was murdered in Amsterdam in 2004.

At the time, Theo van Gogh had been constantly provoking against Islam and, among other things, projecting verses from the Koran onto naked women’s bodies. His death occurred, as the WSWS wrote at the time, “in a climate of increasing xenophobia on the part of the established parties and large sections of the media. … With his provocative attacks on Islam, van Gogh poured oil on the fire.”

Those in power responded to van Gogh’s murder by expanding police state measures and tightening deportation and isolation measures. Geert Wilders, the strong man behind the future Dutch government, has built his party partly on the legacy of Theo van Gogh and even denounced the Koran as a “fascist book”.

In Germany, the AfD youth organization Junge Alternative responded to the knife attack on the market square by calling for a rally at the crime scene in Mannheim. The slogan was: “Return migration would have prevented this crime.” This provocatively quoted the core message of the Potsdam event, which triggered mass rallies against the AfD a few months ago.

But hardly any established politician or major newspaper reacts to this provocation. Instead, just a few days before the European elections, they are taking part in the right-wing agitation against immigrants and thereby strengthening the AfD. They are showing once again that their lip service to “resistance” to right-wing extremism is nothing but propaganda. In reality, they are putting the AfD’s program into practice and promoting the party. They are using it to intimidate the opposition to war, the genocide in Gaza and social cuts and to build a police state.

The Socialist Equality Party (SGP) has placed the fight against war at the centre of its European election campaign. It stands for the unity of the European and international working class in the fight against war and capitalism and for a socialist programme.

The SGP calls on employees to protect their Muslim colleagues. In its appeal for the European elections, it writes:

To suppress the growing opposition to this hated policy, the coalition government is dressing itself in the moth-eaten garb of fascism, stirring up hatred against refugees and immigrants and abolishing basic democratic rights.

The SGP defends fundamental democratic rights and demands equal rights for immigrants and refugees.

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