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Courtroom murderer sentenced to lifelong imprisonment in Germany

The verdict has been reached in the murder trial of Alex W, a German-Russian citizen accused of killing a 31-year-old Egyptian woman, Marwa El-Sherbini. W was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder with “malicious intent”, as well as for the attempted murder of El-Sherbini’s husband, Elwy Okaz. In a courtroom of the Dresden District Court on July 1, W launched a tirade of anti-Islamic curses at the pregnant woman, attacking and killing her with 16 knife wounds. The court deemed the crime “particularly grievous”. This means that the possibility of the sentence being commuted to parole after 15 years has been virtually ruled out. By affirming that the murder had been carried out with “malice forethought”, the court also attempted to let itself off the hook. The phraseology implies that the deed was entirely unforeseeable because the victim was completely guileless and thus defenceless, and that this condition was exploited by the perpetrator.

Actually, the court was fully aware of the perpetrators racist frame of mind. It knew that he hated Muslims and non-Europeans, and denied their right to exist. Nevertheless, he was able to bring an 18-cm-long knife into the courtroom, without being searched beforehand. There were no security checks, guards or police officers in the courtroom. The subsequent hearing, also held in the Dresden District Court, shed little new light on the deed and its background. The defendant had met El-Sherbini in a playground, where she asked him to give her child the place he was occupying on a swing. He then insulted and swore at her because she was wearing a headscarf. Witnesses tried to calm him down.

A woman from Russia gave the Egyptian her mobile phone to call the police. Alex W also cursed her in Russian for offering help. “Our soldiers” were being killed “there” by Muslims, he said. Whether or not he was alluding to the war in Chechnya is unclear. It is more likely he meant the German occupation forces in Afghanistan. Alex W was charged with insulting behaviour and had to pay a fine. He appealed against this ruling. During the appeal proceedings, Marwa El-Sherbini was asked to give an account of the incident. According to a statement by the judge in the case, she spoke very objectively, even disputing the police account that W had called her an “Islamic slut”. Instead she said he had called her an “Islamist” and a “terrorist”.

Reacting to another tirade from W, who claimed that Muslims were monsters and since September 11 no longer had a right to live in Germany, the woman merely replied that Islam was a peaceful religion. As she was then about to leave the courtroom with her husband and three-year-old son, W lunged at her with a knife and stabbed her. The 28 year-old W was born in Perm, Russia, and settled with his mother—as emigrants of German origin from an eastern European state—in Dresden in 2003. His parents had previously separated. Apparently the trained painter and plasterer was unable to find employment or establish a circle of friends. He undertook a course in social integration and further vocational training as a warehouseman, but was forced to draw the lowest level unemployment benefits. His former headmaster at the time said that he wanted to speak perfect German. Acquaintances characterised him as intelligent but lacking in self-esteem.

Several witnesses stated that W identified himself completely with German nationalism, disputed the right of Muslims to live in Germany and supported the fascist NPD (National Party of Germany). They claimed he had also expressed this outlook just before committing the bloody deed. Ten years ago, W was exempted from Russian military service on suspicion of suffering from schizophrenia, and thereafter placed under treatment. However, confirmation of this, arriving a few days before the verdict, failed to alter the court’s decision on the murder case. In the heat of the proceedings, the defence pleaded “diminished responsibility” due to a psychological disorder and called for a verdict of manslaughter.

Alex W’s mother refused to make a statement to the court, but gave an interview to the newspaper, Bild am Sonntag. In contrast to her son, who admitted to the manslaughter but showed no sign of remorse and expressly acknowledged his hostility to foreigners, his mother expressed her sympathy for the victim. She reported that Alex’s father had disappeared when the boy was two years old. At school he was teased and beaten on account of his German descent.

The media reaction

At first, media and political circles in Germany gave scant attention to the murder of Marwa El-Sherbini. Maria Böhmer, the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) federal spokesperson for integration, only made a comment 10 days after the murder, and Dresden’s Mayor Helma Orosz (also of the CDU) found it unnecessary to interrupt her holiday for the funeral service held eleven days after the crime. The situation changed following repeated protests in Egypt and increasingly critical reports in the Arab media. Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the former SPD (Social Democratic Party) foreign minister, then contacted the Egyptian embassy and the Egyptian foreign ministry—without, however, making any official comment on the murder. They obviously felt that Germany’s economic and strategic interests in Islamic countries were in danger.

Before the trial began, the foreign office arranged meetings in Germany with, among others, Böhmer and Orosz, who until then had taken hardly any interest in the case. Egyptian journalists were issued with a dossier concerning the German legal system prior to embarking for Germany. The conservative Welt newspaper reported, “The German embassy in Egypt has sent information material to all editorial offices: How do trials proceed in Germany? Why is there no death penalty here? What does ‘lifelong’ mean? It’s important to avoid misunderstandings and discord”. While Marwa’s murderer had been able to walk unchecked into the courtroom with a long knife, the district court was transformed into a high-security installation for W’s own trial. A metal detector was installed at the entrance, and belts, jewellery and shoes handed over at the control point. This applied to everyone involved in the trial, including judges and attorneys.

The courtroom was sub-partitioned by a huge wall of bullet-proof glass—at a cost of €50,000—and metal barriers were erected around the district court. Some 200 police guarded the building. The state criminal investigation office justified this by citing the “general threat of danger”— i.e., there was no concrete danger. Although the trial concerned a murder motivated by anti-Islamic hostility, it was used to further heighten fears of Islamic terrorism. The Bild press referred to the case as “the most dangerous trial of the year”, and the supposedly liberal Zeit newspaper warned, “Wide realms of the Middle East are under the yoke of a judicial culture which continues to be influenced by a principle of retribution that is alien to us. Consequently, not only Egyptians but whole sections of the Islamic world claim for themselves the right of revenge that is due to the offended family of Marwa al-Sherbini, and regard—in their view—any insufficient punishment of the culprit as an attack on Islam”.

Der Spiegel magazine also reported that an obscure Islamic sheikh in an Egyptian province had called for the murder of the defendant. Investigations carried out by the taz newspaper revealed that the sheikh is virtually unknown even among Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt. The taz also commented, “It is true that Der Spiegel is in possession of information about the incitement to murder—but the Muslims in Germany, whom the sheikh appeals to and who supposedly might carry out the deed, were not informed. Nor can the call for murder be tracked down via a simple search in the Internet”. The subsequent verdict against Alex W received effusive praise in the media. Böhmer said she regarded it as an “important signal for people in Egypt and other parts of the Arab world”. The message was that, “there is no place for xenophobia and Islamaphobia in our country”. This was the tenor of almost all the commentaries.

The political environment

However, hardly any commentator posed the question as to what kind of political environment could enable such a murder to occur. Alex W’s deed was certainly an abhorrent crime, but the fear of Islam and the xenophobia, which produced in him the rage to kill, did not simply arise out of the brain of a psychologically disturbed and socially displaced individual. His mother gave Bild am Sonntag a simple answer to this question: “His view of Islam, his hatred .... Alex must have got that from television.” One of Alex’s defence counsels also said something very similar, as reported by Der Spiegel: “But there is also the picture of Islam presented by politicians and the media. I’m not speaking about the attacks of 2001, but the daily reports about murders.” The notion of Islam is coloured by honour killings and calls to violence, he said.

Politicians and the media have indeed created an atmosphere in which Alex W could feel that he was acting on their behalf. From Der Spiegel to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper and from the CSU (Christian Social Union) to the Greens, hardly any opportunity has been missed in recent years to call for an “end to the tolerance” of Muslims and immigrants. “Multi-Kulti” (multi-cultural) has become a swearword. Alice Schwarzer, Germany’s most well-known feminist, has called the headscarf, similar to that worn by Marwa, the “flag of Islam”. Women wearing it in many German states are not allowed to be either teachers or any other kind of public employee.

A commentary on the verdict in the rather conservative Tagesspiegel daily newspaper pointed out that W’s attitude to Muslims largely corresponded to that of the German establishment: “Whether we are talking about the characterisation of Islam as a ‘dangerous and insane religion’, whether he (W) spouted on about Muslims who don’t want to fit in, but rather infiltrate society, whether he saw tolerance as a dangerous risk or the headscarf worn by Marwa El-Sherbini as a symbol of oppression, as an insult to his—i.e., to German—culture, as a sight he should not have to bear: The basic ideological scaffolding of Alex W’s mind has been bolted into the heads of many of our citizens and, with the coming of the headscarf law in the German states, elements of this kind of thinking have become legally binding”. Thilo Sarrazin (SPD—Social Democratic Party), a former finance senator and current board member of the German central bank, claimed months after Marwa El-Sherbini’s murder that, “90 percent of the Arabs and 70 percent of the Turks” were social parasites and enemies of the state, “neither desirous nor capable of integration”, and seeking to “overrun” Germany by bringing “ever more headscarfed-girls” into the world.

Some politicians and sections of the media certified that Sarrazin had perhaps formulated his comments rather crudely, but had “had kicked off a necessary debate”. Stern magazine wrote, “Sarrazin is right”. He was even declared a hero in the FAZ newspaper and compared to a man who had died courageously defending children from thugs in a Munich train station.

In the 1990s, whole families died in xenophobic arson attacks in the towns of Mölln and Solingen. Sharing responsibility for these atrocities were sections of the media and political establishment, who months before had whipped up sentiments against “asylum-seekers” and “economic refugees”. The same role was played in the murder of Marwa El-Sherbini by those who currently agitate unceasingly against Islam and foreign communities in Germany.

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Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk defends racist remarks by central banker

The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has waded into the controversy surrounding German Central Bank executive member Thilo Sarrazin with an open defence of racist remarks made by Sarrazin in an interview published in a prominent European cultural magazine.

Thilo Sarrazin is a long-time member of the Social Democratic Party and was for a number of years finance senator in the SPD-Left Party Senate coalition in Berlin. Just a few months after his appointment this past summer to the executive committee of the German Central Bank, Sarrazin unleashed a tirade against the poor, the socially deprived and, in particular, immigrant communities in Germany. His interview appears in the latest edition of the cultural magazine Lettre International in his magazine interview, Sarrazin employed racial stereotypes and “language usually associated with far-right parties… to stir up hatred against the most vulnerable layers of society—the unemployed and poor—and, in particular, against Turkish and Arab residents.”

In his interview, Sarrazin combined racist agitation against foreign “conquerors” with anti-Semitic clichés. He declared: “The Turks are conquering Germany in exactly the same manner as the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: by a higher birth rate. I could accept that when it applied to East European Jews with around a 15 percent higher IQ than the German population.” Now Sloterdijk, a well-known philosopher and media personality, has publicly defended Sarrazin’s views. In an interview for the forthcoming edition of the German political magazine Cicero, Sloterdijk lambastes those criticizing Sarrazin as opportunists.

“One would think that the circle of German opinion-makers has turned into a cage of complete cowards who complain and chivvy against any deviation from the norms of the cage,” Sloterdijk declares. He goes on to assert that Sarrazin had merely drawn attention to the “undeniable existence of a lack of will to integrate by certain Turkish and Arab milieus in Berlin.”

According to Sloterdijk, even the head of the German Central Bank, Axel Weber, demonstrated that he was not “immune from the plague of opportunism” because Weber made some criticisms of Sarrazin’s remarks after their publication. (In fact, Weber had seen Sarrazin’s text and did nothing to prevent its publication). Sloterdijk concludes that the criticism of Sarrazin’s views by various media commentators shows how “deep we have sunk into the linguistic mire.” The disingenuous attempt by Sloterdijk to intimate that the debate over the comments made by Sarrazin involves some sort of “linguistic confusion” is absurd. There can be absolutely no confusion over the terms used by Sarrazin.

Anyone familiar with the ideological evolution of Sloterdijk will not be entirely surprised by his comments. Nevertheless, the speed and bluntness with which he has intervened to give his support to Sarrazin are remarkable. Sloterdijk (62) is currently chancellor of the University of Art and Design in Karlsruhe. He appears frequently on German television, espousing his opinions on a wide range of contemporary ideological and cultural issues.

After completing his university studies, Sloterdijk spent the years between 1978 and 1980 studying under the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh—a period he has subsequently described as having “irreversible” importance for his later writings. Sloterdijk began publishing a series of essays and philosophical works and first came to wider public attention in 1983, with the publication of his Critique of Cynical Reason (Kritik der zynischen Vernunft) In this book and subsequent ones, Sloterdijk eclectically draws from the ideas of German thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and from prominent representatives of German critical theory in the twentieth century such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.

Echoing Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment in their work Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Sloterdijk has sought to bury the Enlightenment, not to praise it. The result is an abstruse, rambling critique of Enlightenment and scientific thought. In common with Heidegger, Sloterdijk implies that Western thought went astray when it embraced the rationalist scepticism of Socrates. Sloterdijk declares that Enlightenment values in modern times have degenerated and been reduced to “enlightened false consciousness. “Enlightenment attempts to understand and improve the world have been nullified by the atrocities committed in the twentieth century. No consistent, materialist analysis of the world and society is possible—all we are left with are shards.

Modern disillusionment in the Enlightenment ideals of rationality, science, equality and justice has grown over into cynicism, he asserts. In the opening chapter of Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk makes clear that one of the prime candidates for his designation of “enlightened false consciousness” is Marxism. In line with his rejection of scientific method and historical analysis, Sloterdijk is under no obligation to prove his thesis. He himself says his book should not be taken too seriously.

Adopting the “playful stance” of post-modernist thinkers, he declares his work to be “a labour of entertainment, diversion, amusement: not so much work as relaxation.” The traditional rigours of philosophical thought are dissolved into air by Sloterdijk, who seeks to “reintegrate the truth capacity of literature, satire and art with that of scientific discourse.” There is not a single original idea to be found in the verbose and self-indulgent arguments that run throughout Critique of Cynical Reason. Not surprisingly, Sloterdijk’s excavation of the Enlightenment concludes that its logical endpoint is the Christian tradition of unhappiness and the nuclear bomb.

Even here, Sloterdijk merely regurgitates the world-weariness and pessimism of one of his mentors, Theodor Adorno, who wrote, “No universal Theory leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb…” Purporting to reveal the Enlightenment path, which ends in cynicism, Sloterdijk merely provides a rationale for a cynical outlook. Sloterdijk’s work, including his swipes at both Marxism and post-1968 “political correctness,” found an appreciative audience in the 1980s amongst a layer of middle-class ex-radicals who had tossed aside their left-wing political and ideological views of the 1960s to concentrate on furthering their own careers and making money.

For some time, Sloterdijk’s own social and political opinions remained buried in the morass of his dense and obtuse texts, but clear signs of a rightward radicalisation of his position emerged in a number of his works written at the cusp of the new century. In his book Rules for the Human Park (Regeln für den Menschenpark, 1999), Sloterdijk pleaded for an intensified discussion on the implications of genetics and such notions as the regulation of “bio-cultural” reproduction. Sloterdijk’s book caused a controversy for pushing the issue of genetics into the spotlight of public debate for the first time since the crimes committed by the Nationalist Socialists in the name of racial selection.

In Rules for the Human Park, Sloterdijk poses the question whether it is the philosopher’s role to devise “rules for the human park” directed towards the “breeding of elites.” He does not directly answer his own question, but in the book comes down firmly in favour of the Greek philosopher Plato’s vision of a rigidly ordered society based on a dictatorial government drawn from an elite, which exercises absolute control over the population. In his book Anger and Time (Zorn und Zeit, 2006), Sloterdijk is more explicit in his illiberal views. Sloterdijk declares rage and anger to be the decisive driving forces of human motivation and social action throughout history. He goes on to provide a list of organisations and institutions which, in his opinion, nefariously and illicitly canalise anger. This list of so-called “anger banks” includes revolutionary movements, protest parties, trade unions and religious communities.

At a time when leading politicians, intellectuals and media outlets in Western capitalist countries are warning of a “clash of civilisations” and advocating a new crusade against militant Islamism, Sloterdijk speculates in Anger and Time whether Islamism will take the place of communism in absorbing the “surplus of genocide-willing young men.” He prepares the reader for what he describes as an imminent prospect: “immense conflicts (. . .) which without exception will be instigated by anger collectives and offended civilisations,” and goes on to describe radical Islamism as a “desperate movement of economically superfluous and socially unusable individuals.” Clearly siding with those seeking to demonise Islamism in the wake of the Iraq war, Sloterdijk is now increasingly turning to Germany itself. In a series of recent comments and interviews, he has castigated the German welfare state system as a form of society, which encourages kleptocracy—theft by the masses.

In the conservative FAZ newspaper in June, Sloterdijk condemned the progressive income tax as “functionally equivalent to socialist expropriation” and referred to a “tendency to reverse exploitation.” The “unproductive,” he claimed, were living at the expense of the “productive,” i.e., top earners and entrepreneurs. He went on to call for the abolition of “obligatory taxes” and for a “revolution of the giving hand,” i.e., a revolution from above aimed at putting an end to the thieving (kleptocratic) tendencies of broad layers of the population. Sloterdijk’s social Darwinist blathering against the German welfare system, which was developed in the period following the Second World War and has since been significantly undermined by successive German governments, echoes the rants against the poor, sick and disadvantaged by the English bourgeois sociologist Herbert Spencer in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Sloterdijk speaks for a social layer—including an appreciable layer of former middle-class radicals—which fought its way to the top in the 1970s and 1980s. Radicalised to the right by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in many cases able to make fortunes during the stock market boom at the end of the 1990s, this layer is determined to hang onto its wealth and social privileges at any cost. This process of rightward radicalisation was encouraged by the SPD-Green government of 1998-2005, which opened the sluices for entirely new forms of speculation and wealth for the banks and the rich, while hacking away at the welfare state. This layer received a shock in the financial crisis of last year, which had major repercussions for their portfolios. Now, however, with the election of the new right-wing coalition in Germany between the conservative union parties and the free market Free Democratic Party, it feels fresh wind in its sails. Sloterdijk is speaking out on their behalf and calling for a revolution from above based on the racist nostrums of a rabble-rouser such as Thilo Sarrazin.

Just over a century ago, the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky characterised similar social layers in Germany, who, in the midst of the so-called Golden Age of German imperialism, were avid followers of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In his essay on the German philosopher, Trotsky notes that Nietzsche is “the ideologist of a group living as predators at the expense of society but under happier conditions than the poor lumpen-proletariat: the parasite-proletariat of a superior calibre… what ties together all the members of this ill-sorted estate of bourgeois knighthood is… plunder on an immense scale of social wealth without any (we are anxious to underline this) systematic participation in the organised process of production and distribution.”

Sloterdijk is now openly offering his services as spokesman for these modern-day parasites of “offended civilisation” and appealing to the most right-wing and fascistic political forces for a mobilisation aimed at suppressing the working population and the struggle for socialism in the forthcoming “immense conflicts.”