Anti-racists in Germany are asking whether the current attacks on Islam and multiculturalism have led to yet another Islamophobic racist murder.
On Sunday 31 October, a 19-year-old Iraqi man, named only as Kamal K. was stabbed to death by two men in Leipzig city centre. On 1 November, on the day that Kamal was buried in Leipzig, 500 people attended a memorial march in which they demanded ‘Justice for Kamal’. The murder of Kamal K. – which comes just over a year after the murder of Marwa al-Sherbini by a known neo-Nazi sympathiser – has barely been reported in the German press.
The level of hostility towards Muslims in Germany has increased dramatically over the last few months. In August 2010 Thilo Sarrazin, former member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, published Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany abolishes itself) in which he argued that as Muslim immigrants were genetically of lower intelligence and of higher fertility this would eventually lead to Germany becoming ‘a nation of dunces’. Then, in October, shortly before Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that multiculturalism had ‘utterly failed’, the president of Bavaria, Horst Seehofer, declared that ‘Multi-kulti is dead’ and that there was no more room in Germany for ‘alien cultures’.
Most of the information on the murder comes from Indymedia which reported the following.
On Sunday morning, the Iraqi Kamal K. was murdered by two men outside the railway station in Leipzig city centre. It is very likely that the incident was racially motivated. Kamal was with his girlfriend when he was insulted by two young men who stabbed him to death. One of the perpetrators was a known to be a neo-Nazi. Both of the perpetrators had previous convictions for serious offences. The spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in Leipzig, Ricardo Schulz, said that the motive for the murder was still unclear, although they are investigating a possible racial motive. The newspaper LVZ reported that one of the two attackers arrested had a sweater covering his face with the words: ‘Kick off Antifascism’.
Related links
Indymedia article: ‘Leipzig: Kamal K. von Nazis ermordet’
Indymedia article: ‘[LE] Rassistischer Mord?’
Germany has failed multiculturalism not vice versa