Too long a silence

Is she the first casualty of the Islamophobic atmosphere in Germany? Marwa el-Sherbini, a headscarf-wearing Egyptian woman, was stabbed to death eight days ago in a Dresden courtroom by the defendant Axel W., who had previously branded her a terrorist and Islamist.

It has taken the German government nearly a week to get round to expressing its condemnation and regrets about the incident. Hence the widely-mooted suspicion that it was dragging its feet till the case made massive waves in Egypt, though also in other foreign media.

Would the politicians have kept silent so long if a Jew had been stabbed to death in a German court of law after the assailant had shouted out anti-Semitic slogans? Axel W. may have been acting alone, but was he not infected by the widespread anti-Islamic atmosphere?

Whenever Muslim fanatics carried out an attack, German politicians never wearied of calling on the nation’s Muslims to take a stand to keep any blanket suspicions from falling on themselves. Now the Germans are facing such a blanket suspicion, at least in Egypt, of being Islamophobes.

Where were the condemnations of the courtroom attack last week in Germany? They were nowhere to be heard. With one noteworthy exception. “You don’t need to be a Muslim to object to anti-Muslim behaviour, and you don’t need to be a Jew to take action against anti-Semitism,” said the Secretary General of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Thank you, Stephan Kramer, for these unequivocal words. Self-evident as they are, they were high-handedly passed over last week by German politicians.

The facts

Murder that rocked the Federal Republic

Marwa el-Sherbini was murdered on 1 July in a courtroom in Dresden, the capital of Saxony. The headscarf-wearing Egyptian 32-year-old was stabbed to death by a young German of Russian origin, against whom she was testifying because he had grossly insulted her at a playground in August 2008.

According to the German daily Tagesspiegel, Alex W. had openly aired his sympathies with the NPD, a right-wing extremist party, before the attack. “You got any right to be in Germany? You got no business being here. That’ll all be over soon as the NPD comes to power. I voted for them,” he declared before striding over to the pregnant woman and stabbing her 18 times with a knife. Since then Germany has been trying to get to the bottom of this tragic incident. The NPD is trying to mobilise Germans of Russian origin, even though many neo-Nazis consider Aussiedler (ethnic Germans from the former Eastern bloc) as immigrants and therefore reject them out of hand.

The Muslim Coordinating Council, convinced that the animadversion toward Muslims and immigrants is to blame for the death of the Egyptian, is calling on German politicians to issue a clear-cut condemnation. In its declaration the Council links the crime to the current headscarf controversy. Ever since the decision was taken to ban headscarves in the German civil service, websites posting Islamophobic slurs and rallying cries have been proliferating, making Marwa “the most tragic victim of the humiliations, suspicions and discrimination to which our sisters are subjected”. The Egyptian press presents the young woman as “the headscarf martyr”. Protestors in front of the Germany embassy in Cairo chanted “Germany is the enemy of God”.