This is the mess center-left parties wind up in when they try to “me-too” rightwing xenophobia

This is a snippet of a report of how German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reacted to a reported killing of a police officer by an Afghan refugee:

In a heated debate days after an Afghan asylum seeker allegedly killed a police officer at a far-right rally, Scholz responded on Thursday to accusations by the conservative opposition and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) that his government was lax on deportations.

He told MPs, to applause: “Let me be clear: it outrages me when someone who has sought protection here in our country commits the most serious crimes.

“Such criminals should be deported, even if they come from Syria and Afghanistan.”¹

If my experiences hearing Stammtisch discussions in Austria the last few years is any measure, this kind of response plays into xenophobic rhetoric in a way that responsible politicians should be able to avoid. (In American terms, Stammtisch means more-or-less “discussions among good-ole-boy beer-drinking types.”)

And once that casual kind of discussion slips into reports of a refugee killing someone, in this case killing a cop, this is the cue for someone to say with emotion, “Sie gehören abgeschoben!” (“They should be deported!”) And the conversation immediately goes into the toilet. If you think of an American racist trying to sound out who might be a good candidate for Ku Klux Klan membership, that’s kind of the tone of such conversations.

As Politico EU reports:

The grisly killing of a police officer — captured on video by an onlooker and shared widely on social media — has sparked a highly emotional debate in Germany about migration and radical Islamism, just days ahead of the European Parliament election.

The officer, identified as Rouven L., 29, died Sunday after being stabbed in the back of the head allegedly by a 25-year-old man from Afghanistan, who arrived in Germany in 2014.

The political context for the attack could hardly be more sensitive. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party wants to turn this week’s EU election into a referendum on migration policy; the killing could provide just the ammunition it needs.² [my emphasis]

Deutsche Welle reported June 7 on the public memorial event in Mannheim for the officer killed³:

As the reporter in that piece notes a could of time, authorities “suspect” that an “Islamist” motive may have been behind it. Presumably we’ll hear more about the basis for that assumption as the investigation proceeds.

I’m going to drill down on this larger theme a bit.

To start: If you actually take crime issues seriously but not hysterically, the normal response to a report about the murder of a cop would be something like: I hope they arrest the right person and that they get a tough sentence. (In the US, the conversation would probably go directly to the death penalty, but EU countries don’t have that.)

But, “Deport the guy immediately!” makes no sense in that context. If a person has just murdered someone in Germany, then Germany has the responsibility as well as the direct interest in seeing that the suspect is tried correctly and serve any sentence in German prison.

There has been no trial yet, of course. But the alleged crime was apparently committed in a public place with multiple witnesses. So the fact of the crime is plausible enough. Birgit Baumann begins a column on the event this way:

What happened is appalling. A young policeman in Mannheim died while trying to save lives. On Friday, an Afghan attacked people at a rally of the Islam-critical movement Citizens’ Movement Pax Europa. When police officer Rouven L. intervened, he was so badly injured by the attacker that he died on Sunday. The act has shaken Germany and has also leads to extreme reactions.⁴

If it had been a peaceful Afghan counter-protester killed by a cop, would there have been remotely as much publicity and outrage over it? Maybe. But none of it would be coming from Stammtisch xenophobes, who would reflexively defend the killer cop. No Stammtisch xenophobes will be defending this Afghan man who allegedly killed a cop.

Let’s be clear. From the standpoint of rightwing Islamophobes and xenophobes, this is an excellent outcome for their cause. They wanted to piss off some Muslims and/or pro-human-rights Germans, and they did. Does anybody from “Pax Europa” actually cares whether a cop was killed or not? You’ll have to ask them about that. They’re probably buddies with some cops themselves, and some of them may be cops, too.

One hopeful sign of pushback against xenophobia came on Saturday, when the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) staged a protest demonstration in Mannheim to capitalize on the killing. They reportedly drew 700 participants, and a counter-demo drew three to four thousand:

The counter-demonstration had started at the Alter Messplatz. There, the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) [the largest labor federation in Germany], among others, had called for a rally in the afternoon - under the motto "Mannheim stands together - for democracy and diversity". The DGB estimates that 4,000 participants came together. The alliance "Mannheim against the Right" had called for the subsequent demonstration.⁵

A reminder: one of the standard Islamophobe talking points is, why aren’t them thar Muslims having demonstrations against “Islamists”? The idea is that Muslims have a special duty to oppose “Islamism,” beyond, you know, not supporting it. In practice, the Islamophobes and xenophobes make no distinction between “Islamists” and “Muslims.” And generally know nothing about either Islamist theocracy or Islam as a religion. For them, both are just other words for “Arabs” or “Turks” or other brands of foreigners they consider undesirable. Which is, pretty much all of them.

Would Shiites demonstrating against Sunnis count for them? (Hint: the Islamophobes mostly don’t know what those are, either, but are sure both of them are bad and also not “white.”) Something similar happens with griping about Muslim women wearing “headscarves,” aka, hijabs. You don’t have to listen too closely to tell that most such complaints have nothing to do with women’s rights or sympathy for Muslim women, but are normally just expressions of contempt for Muslim women. In the far-right Great Replacement imaginary, Muslim women are more of a threat than Muslim men anyway because the women have Muslim bablies.

The center-right and even more so the center-left make a big mistake when they pander to xenophobic demagoguery. Instead, they need to deal with dishonest claims head-on and actually insist on practical and sensible immigration policies. Which really are not an exotic mystery.  The problem is that the not-far-right parts of the political spectrum allow the rightwingers to talk nonsense without adequate pushback.

Dan Drezner in a recent column verbally spanks Nicholas Kristof for a sadly typical, lazy-centrist take on US immigration policy. We need a lot more straightforward debunkings like this one against the xenophobic agitation, both the malicious kind and dumb-and-lazy kind.

He quotes the following from Kristof, which really is surprisingly lazy:

However much we believe in immigration, we’re not going to welcome all 114 million people around the world who have been forcibly displaced, not to mention perhaps one billion children globally who are estimated to suffer some kind of severe deprivation. We must settle for accepting a fraction of those eager to come, and determining that fraction is the political question before us, with many trade-offs to consider.⁶

Most of those millions of people he mentions are displaced by wars, famines, or environmental disasters. And they are not all coming to the US and Europe. In fact, most of them are displaced within their own countries or in neighboring ones. And the goal of most of them is to go back home, or at least to resume normal lives in their own countries if their old homes are no longer available. The idea that there are a hundred million refugees coming to mooch off Europeans and Americans is typical xenophobic demagoguery.

The so-called “immigration crisis” in the EU in 2015-16 involved around 1.1 million refugees, mostly from wars caused in no small part by American blundering in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. In the year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, around five times that many Ukrainian refugees came into the EU, particularly into neighboring Poland. It didn’t bring Europe to its knees. In fact, the EU managed to handle the arrangements for receiving those refugees in a way that didn’t set off anything like the panic of 2015-16. Nor has it wrecked the social and education system in the receiving countries. And it hasn’t created massive homeless encampments.

So, when people like Kristof hyperventilate about 114 million refugees coming to take all our stuff in the US and Europe, well, that’s honestly off into Great Replacement Theory loony-tunes land.

That a New York Times columnist like Nicolas Kristof would write something like this, without any obvious inkling that it’s ridiculous, is one sign of how sloppy the centrists – in this case the Democratic Party – can be on this issue. It’s dumb, silly, and embarrassing.

Thomas Bierbacher makes an important point about “cultural” issues treated as purely cultural/emotional ones give the right – and particularly the far right – an argumentative advantage:

Conservatives may believe that they have an advantage over leftists on cultural issues, but authoritarians also have an advantage over conservatives: these conflicts do not reward middle ground, nuance, and differentiation; they are structurally oriented not towards balance, but towards escalation, and the resulting bidding competition is ultimately always won by the far right, with the regular collateral damage that the center-right, which has gotten involved in it, is itself approaching the right-wing fringe and at the same time providing its positions with the long-awaited legitimacy.⁷

Bierbacher in his book extensively analyzes the history of such conflicts since 1989 in Italy, France, and Britain.

Getting back to the send-the-criminals-back theme, I was surprised to see that a senior party leader Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) rushed to agree with the German Chancellor’s reaction.

The SPÖ supports Scholz's initiative, said the social-democratic club chairman Philip Kucher Thursday evening in the program ZiB 2. Because: "Anyone who cheers murder and terrorism is in truth not a person seeking protection [asylum]." What is needed are "very clear consequences of the rule of law, starting with long prison sentences and ending with deportations," Kucher said.⁸

See how quickly that jumps from send-the-cop-killer-back-to-Afghanistan to anyone-who-cheers-murder-and-terrorism-should-be-exiled? And what the hell does “cheering murder and terrorism” mean? Using a banner protesting Israel’s war in Gaza that says “from the river to the sea”?

The only thing redeeming about Kucher comments was that it wasn’t as ditsy as those from the Christian-Democratic Chancellor Karl Nehammer and the Interior Minister Gerhard Karner, an admirer of the “Austrofascist” dictator Engelbert Dollfuss from the 1930s.

The current head of the SPÖ is Andreas Babler, and he made pretty much exactly the kind of sensible response one would expect from him immediately after the incident. Because he knows immigration issues, and he’s willing to push back on rightwingers who talk trash about refugee issues:

The pictures of the attack from Mannheim are shocking - the attack should be completely condemned. Another cruel attack on our fundamental democratic values in Europe, which we must protect with all our might. My thoughts are with the victims and their relatives.⁹

And the same Die Presse article that quotes Nehammer and Karner does mention that Annalena Baerbock, the German Foreign Minister from the Green Party managed to be more reality-based than her Chancellor on this flap:

The Greens took a cautious position: German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock fears that deported Islamists could also plan terrorist attacks from there. [Duh!] One thing is certain: Since the radical Islamist Taliban took power in Kabul in August 2021, Germany has not sent any more people back to Afghanistan.

But another guest on the ZiB 2 news program also makes a legal point and a practical one:

"The Taliban's interior minister is an internationally wanted terrorist," warned international law expert Ralph Janik to the "ZiB 2". If one were to deport people to Afghanistan, one would "de facto recognize" the Taliban with that cooperation, he said. In addition, in his opinion, deportations would probably not be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.

Because: Deported criminals would be threatened with humiliation and torture. "This is precisely the reason why deportations to some countries are not legally possible at the present time," says Janik.

Of course, if they got a deported prisoner who had already killed a German police officer, that could be a good candidate for someone to infiltrate into Europe for terrorist actions, too.

It’s also notable that some journalists tried to bring a more reality-based context about Muslims in Mannheim, e.g., Stephanie Ley of SWR.¹⁰

1. Cole, Deborah (2024): German leader hardens on deportations amid row with far right as EU election looms. Guardian 06/06/2024. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/06/scholz-hardens-line-on-deportations-after-row-with-far-right-as-german-election-looms> (Accessed : 2024-07-06).

2. Memorial held for killed police officer in Germany. DW News YouTube channel 06/07/2024. (Accessed : 2024-09-06).

3. Angelos, James (2024): Killing of German police officer inflames migration debate ahead of EU election. Politico EU 06/03/2024. <https://www.politico.eu/article/murder-german-police-officer-migration-social-media-afghanistan-afd-far-right/> (Accessed : 2024-07-06).

See also: Karnitschinig, Matthew & Nöstlinger, Nette (2024): Armageddon days are here (again). Politico EU 06/07/2024. <https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/berlin-bulletin/armageddon-days-are-here-again/> (Accessed : 2024-07-06). They write oft he suspect, “The AfD could hardly have hoped for a better villain.”

4. Baumann, Birgit (2024): Nach dem Messerattentat in Mannheim heißt es kühlen Kopf bewahren. Der Standard 03.06.2024. <https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000222633/nach-dem-messerattentat-in-mannheim-heisst-es-kuehlen-kopf-bewahren>  (Accessed: 2024-08-06). My translation from German.

5. AfD demonstriert in Mannheim - Tausende bei Gegendemo. Taggesschau 07.06.2024. <https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/regional/badenwuerttemberg/afd-mannheimer-marktplatz-demo-100.html> (Accessed: 2024-08-06).

6. Drezner, Daniel (2024): Why Nicholas Kristof Is Wrong on Immigration. Drezner’s World 06/08/2024. (Accessed: 2024-08-06).

7. Bierbacher, Thomas (2023): Mitte/Rechts. Die Internationale Krise des Konservatismus, 586. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. My translation from German.

8. SPÖ für Abschiebung von Schwerstkriminellen nach Afghanistan. Die Presse 07.06.2024. <https://www.diepresse.com/18540882/spoe-fuer-abschiebung-von-schwerstkriminellen-nach-afghanistan> (Accessed: 2024-08-06). My translation from German.

9. Babler, Andreas (2024): Twitter/X 05/31/2024. <https://x.com/AndiBabler/status/1796583437849198986> (Accessed: 2024-08-06).

10. Ley Stephanie (2024): Was Muslime nach dem Messerangriff in Mannheim jetzt befürchten. SWR Aktuell 07.06.2024. >https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/mannheim/muslime-moslems-mannheim-messerangriff-marktplatz-sorgen-polizist-100.html> (Accessed: 2024-08-06).