A well-known German criminologist, Professor Hans-Dieter Schwindt, believes that the problem of crimes committed in Germany by foreigners receives far too little attention. In his opinion, because more and more Germans feel threatened, a syndrome of fear of all foreigners is increasingly manifesting itself, which could well grow into classic xenophobia. And then the day will not be far off when a party appears on the far right flank of the German political spectrum that manages to gain at least 10% of the votes in federal elections.
Already now, apart from traditional right-wing radicals such as the Republicans, the 'German People's Union' or the National Democratic Party of Germany, two newly formed parties are trying to play on this fear: the 'Rule of Law Offensive' of Hamburg's interior senator Ronald Schill, and the party 'Project 18' of former North Rhine-Westphalia economics minister Jürgen W. Möllemann, who was expelled from the Free Democratic Party for anti-Semitism.
In Professor Schwindt's opinion, the process of integrating foreigners into German society has failed brilliantly, and the politically correct taboo on discussing the concept of 'crime among foreigners' can no longer be maintained. In the past weeks, a very telling occasion has arisen for such a sharp and unexpected judgment: three bus hijackings and the murder of a police officer, committed in Berlin and Bremen. As if by design, in three of the four crimes that shook German society, Arabs living in Germany were involved.
One of them, a 17-year-old German citizen, a native of Lebanon and a resident of Bremen, Ali Marwan T., intended to demand the release from US and German prisons of members of al-Qaeda – for this purpose he hijacked a city bus with 19 passengers. Another, also a Lebanese, who attempted to seize a bus in Berlin, demanded the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestine. On the eve of these two hijackings, a police officer was killed in a shootout with four (!) Lebanese in the German capital. In this case, however, there was no political motive – according to the Berlin police administration, it was an operational capture of members of an Arab criminal 'family' engaged in drug and human trafficking in Berlin.
The resonance from all these incidents turned out to be very great, and now politicians of various calibers have started talking about the danger of the 'Arab mafia', the 'Vietnamese mafia', and also, lest we forget, the 'Russian mafia'. At the same time, far-reaching proposals are being made: from 'creating special legal frameworks for foreign criminals' to 'expelling everyone zum Teufel!'. Which is exactly what Professor Schwindt needed to prove. And if earlier common labels like 'all Poles are car thieves', 'all Russians are bandits', and 'all Muslims are terrorists' were the lot of the lower strata of German society, then in the last two years this way of thinking is taking hold of an increasing number of representatives of the middle class, as well as politicians expressing their interests.
The German press also showed itself far from its best side in covering the recent high-profile crimes. News channels are completely uninterested in the fact that 17-year-old Ali Marwan ran away from home in order, as he wrote in a farewell letter to his family, to 'become more terrible for the Jews than Saddam and Osama combined', and he apparently intended to get to Palestine... in this very hijacked bus. The media also ignored the fact that the Berlin hijacker was dead drunk at the time of the crime. Instead, everyone sagely discusses the 'Islamist threat' – no doubt, the threat exists, but is it from those the reporters have attacked?
Meanwhile, the German Federal Prosecutor's Office has already taken aim at the Bremen mosque Abu Bakr, known for the radicalism of its preachers (to such an extent that visitors wishing to visit it are asked in detail whether they have any Jews among their relatives), which Ali had the misfortune to attend. As for the Berlin bus hijacking three weeks ago, which was committed by a German criminal armed with a rifle and a pistol (the Bremen and Berlin Lebanese used, respectively, a gas pistol and a kitchen knife), who had robbed a bank ten minutes earlier, the German media conveniently forgot. As did the report of the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, which states that, firstly, the crime rate among foreigners is much lower than in Germany as a whole, and secondly, that foreigners commit an order of magnitude fewer violent crimes than native Germans. This, obviously, does not fit into the frightening picture of the dominance of 'newcomers', so painstakingly constructed by the German right.
Of course, it would be an exaggeration to think that Germany is again threatened by the 'brown danger'. Germans are very sober-minded people and are unlikely to step on the same rake a second time. Nevertheless, early symptoms of a disease called 'xenophobia' are already clearly visible. And it is precisely with them, and not with foreigners, that criminologist Hans-Dieter Schwindt calls for a fight.