Last week in Mannheim, an rally of Islamophobic chauvinists was attacked by a man with a knife. During the attack, several people were injured with the knife, including a police officer who subsequently died of his injuries in hospital.
The reactionaries attacked were the so-called “Citizens Movement Pax Europa”, who have often attracted attention in the past for their extremely open chauvinist agitation, which is primarily directed against Muslims. As before, they spread slogans against “political Islam” and raised an Israel flag during their rally in Mannheim city center.
The rally place after the attack.
Source: Stern.de
Unlike usual, the reactionaries action was not without consequences. An Afghan man attacked several organizers of the information stand with a knife, stabbing the chauvinists with it. Several people were injured in the attack, some of them seriously. Among them was the chairman of the right-wing organization, Michael Stützenberger. During the rather confusing situation, police officers also came to the scene and tried to protect the participants in the activity. One police officer tried to intervene, whereupon the attacker stabbed him in the throat with a knife. One of the officers then shot the attacker, who subsequently fell to the ground and is currently in medical treatment. The incident was filmed by numerous people and there are several videos of it on the internet. While everyone else involved survived, the police officer who was stabbed died on Sunday.
Since then, this attack has been the hot topic par excellence. Every politician who has something to say has already commented on it and expressed their “outrage” and “ condolences”. However, this is also accompanied by reactionary political demands, such as for a “ harder crackdown” by the state. What is also much discussed, is the demand to deport people who have committed crimes to Afghanistan in the future. This is now being demanded not only by the AFD and CDU, but also by the SPD and FDP. Absurd when you consider that just a few years ago the FRG sent soldiers to Afghanistan, dropped bombs on the country and murdered masses of people there hand in hand with other imperialist states. All supposedly to fight the Taliban. But now that the Taliban are in power, it is supposedly okay to deport people there.
On the whole, however, the knife attack in Mannheim came as no surprise. The attacker's action was ultimately nothing more than a foreseeable consequence of decades of chauvinist agitation. For many years now, migrants, especially Muslim migrants, have been subjected to hate speech, attacks and social exclusion from all sides. Be it provocative newspaper articles about their religion, attacks on their mosques or racist assaults and insults on the street. Since October 7, all of this has intensified many times over. If you exclude a group of people and continually marginalize them, then it is clear that at some point people will react with such clear actions
The attack in Mannheim is basically being used by many parts of politics and the state for their own interests. However, the picture painted of the police is particularly cynical. Official police institutions and police unions in particular do everything they can to portray police officers as poor victims and shed crocodile tears over the oh-so-bad violence that police officers are supposedly constantly exposed to. However, the police are not victims but perpetrators. The Mannheim police in particular have demonstrated this well in recent years.
Numerous people have been murdered by police officers there in recent years. Be it the case of Ante, who was beaten to death by police officers in the city center, or the case of Ertekin, who was shot dead in the street. Other cases are also part of it. It is particularly striking that many people there also allegedly or actually had a knife, but in contrast to the recent attack, did not show any great intention of hurting other people with it, but primarily threatened to kill themselves. People who are in a mental crisis can have serious, concrete suicidal intentions, but often such actions are simply an attempt to be admitted to a psychiatric clinic in order to get one of the few available treatment places there.
Protests against the police durring an open information-event from the police
Source: Interventionistische Linke Rhein Neckar
The recent knife attack now provides the Mannheim police a good basis to justify the past murders by comparing all these cases with this one attack and lumping them together. Previous murders, even some very obvious ones, were simply dismissed by the Mannheim police as self-defense and tragic incidents. During the ongoing trial against the officers who murdered Ante, the police union even publicly collected donations for them. Activists who drew attention to the crimes of the police by simply using the slogan “Mannheim police kill - blood on your hands” to express what is reality were also charged with alleged defamation by the chairman of the Mannheim police union.
The fact that a police officer is killed in an attack, as recently happened in Mannheim, is not normal in Germany. Nevertheless, the great drama that is now being created in the bourgeois media does not change the fact that it is the police which has masses of blood on its hands.
Mainpicture: Securing evidence by the police after the attack.
Source: Mannheimer-morgen.de
