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2019-08-23 Europe
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Syrian sentenced for deadly German knifing that sparked far-right protests
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 [IsraelTimes] Alaa Sheikhi, 24, whose murder of Daniel Hillig on August 26, 2018, led to bad boy rallies against Moslem immigration, gets 9.5 years in prison.
A 24-year-old Syrian man was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years in jail Thursday for a knife killing that sparked racist street violence and far-right protests in the eastern German city of Chemnitz.
The court found that Alaa Sheikhi,
Continued from Page 1
| ...also in our files as Alaa S.... |
together with an Iraqi man still on the lam, stabbed to death 35-year-old German Daniel Hillig in the early hours of August 26 last year.
Defense lawyers appealed the verdict, arguing that the court had buckled under social and political pressure, but chief justice Simone Herberger said she saw "no doubt about his guilt."
The manslaughter conviction comes at a sensitive time, one year after thousands of neo-Nazi
...adherents of a philosophy that was seen even at the time as pure evil, which makes them either consciously and purely evil, or attention-seeking ratbags. Pick one, or both....
s and enraged citizens marched through Chemnitz, and 10 days before state elections in the formerly communist region.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which has railed against immigrants colonists and Islam, is forecast to poll strongly in Chemnitz’s state of Saxony and neighboring Brandenburg on September 1.
The court heard that the runaway Iraqi, a 22-year-old identified only as Farhad A.,
| ...he has a single mention in the Rantburg files as Farhad R.A.... |
was first to confront Hillig, a carpenter with German-Cuban roots.
Both he and Sheikhi then stabbed Hillig, who died of internal injuries, as well as another man, named as Dimitri M., who was badly injured.
| This is the first time he has been mentioned. One hopes he healed well and quickly. |
Sheikhi, who arrived in Germany during the 2015 mass migrant influx to Europe
 ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
, was detained hours after the attack, together with another Iraqi who was later released for lack of evidence.
| That would be Yousif Awas, also in our files as Yousif Ibrahim A. and Yousif A. 23, who was released last September. His Iraqi passport, citizenship documents, and national identity card were determined to be fake, so perhaps he isn’t Iraqi after all. He first entered Europe through Bulgaria, so he should have been returned to their loving arms when his asylum request was rejected. But the German authorities missed the deadline to send him back, so apparently they have to keep him forever... |
Defense lawyer Ricarda Lang had argued that the case against Sheikhi was based only on questionable, late-night witness testimony rather than fingerprints, DNA or other forensic evidence.
Lang also asserted, shortly before the verdict, that the court was "not unaffected by the political situation in Chemnitz" and may convict the defendant because "someone needs to take the blame so that Chemnitz stays quiet."
FAR-RIGHT HOTBED
The trial was held not in Chemnitz but in Saxony’s state capital Dresden, for security reasons and because of what the court called the "extraordinarily high public interest."
News of the killing a year ago spread within hours on social media and led neo-Nazis, angry football hooligans, bad boy martial arts fans and others to march through Chemnitz.
In some cases, the mobs randomly attacked people of foreign appearance and, in follow-up mass rallies, fascist
...anybody who's not a leftist...
activists openly performed the illegal Hitler salute.
Local Jewish, Ottoman Turkish and Iranian restaurants at the time became targets of xenophobic vandalism.
As the bad boy AfD, Pegida and Pro Chemnitz movements marched in Chemnitz, and anti-fascist groups organized large counter-protests, a political fight also raged in Berlin.
In a controversy that shook Chancellor Angela Merkel
...chancellor of Germany and the impetus behind Germany's remarkably ill-starred immigration program. Merkel used to be referred to by Germans as Mom . Now they make faces at her for inundating the country with Moslem colonists...
’s coalition government, the then-domestic spy chief Hans-Georg Maassen, an outspoken critic of her liberal immigration policy, questioned her assessment that the violence amounted to organized "hunts" of ethnic minorities.
Maassen, a member of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), eventually had to step down. But he has recently been touring eastern Germany with speaking engagements outlining his stance on immigration and security.
The Chemnitz unrest threw a harsh spotlight on the drab city of 240,000 people, formerly known as Karl-Marx-Stadt, which has had an bad boy subculture since the turbulent years after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.
In the 1990s it was an early hideout for a hard boy neo-Nazi cell dubbed the National Socialist Underground, which was only uncovered in 2011 after its members had murdered nine immigrants colonists and a police officer.
Last October, police arrested eight men accused of having formed the far-right hard boy group "Revolution Chemnitz," assaulted migrants colonists and plotted further attacks.
And in March, fans of fourth-tier football club Chemnitzer FC paid tribute to the recently deceased former security chief Thomas Haller, co-founder of a group called "HooNaRa," short for Hooligans-Nazis-Racists.
The prosecution case was largely based on the testimony of an employee at a nearby kebab shop.
But beneath these efforts at political engagement in Chemnitz, the politics in the city can't be hidden. The results of the city council election in May this year returned the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) 18% of the vote, a close second to the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). That doesn't sound that much, except that the far-right group Pro Chemnitz, which includes some neo-Nazis, and which organized last year's far-right demo in the wake of Daniel H.'s death, took another 8% and now has five of the 60 seats in the city council.
Karsten Hilse, an AfD Bundestag member for Saxony, says last year's demos have been misrepresented. "Of course there were some far-right extremists there," he said. "But a young man was murdered, and then citizens got together who weren't far-right extremists, but just normal people like you and me, who said, 'right, this is enough now'."
"What annoyed a lot of Chemnitzers is that hardly anyone talked about the murder afterwards, but only about the people who demonstrated," he argued. "But if you're a normal citizen, you go to work, you pay your taxes, and then you say ok, now I'm going on the street to say: 'I just don't agree with this migration policy anymore.' And then when the media suddenly describes you as a far-right extremist, then of course you get really angry."
'MORALIZING' RILES PEOPLE
Despite the city's best cultural efforts at fostering tolerance, many Chemnitzers resist what they see as attempts to impose an ideology. "If it becomes too demonstrative, then it becomes divisive," said Franz Knoppe, project director for the Chemnitz cultural and educational organization ASA-FF, the "Network for Global Learning.". "The 'Wir Sind Mehr' demos are an act of self-assurance: 'Maybe we are more,' but it doesn't open the people who maybe didn't want to march with the Nazis, but also didn't like the fact that Daniel H. was killed."
But even as they react with antipathy to political moralization, which, according to Knoppe, "reminds people of communist East Germany," there is evidence that the people of Chemnitz do get on at basic day-to-day level. Drinking a coffee on a quiet August afternoon, Knoppe tells an anecdote about how his own children play in football teams with children of immigrants and children of AfD voters. He knows that some of them attended the far-right demonstrations) last year.
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Posted by trailing wife 2019-08-23 00:00||
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