Unique moral duty
Germany has moral obligation to eradicate acts of violent racism from its midst
Baby Onur survived, but at least nine other people, five of them children, were killed in the blaze that appears to have been perpetrated by neo-Nazis against the ethnic Turkish minority in Ludwigshafen, Germany.
German authorities are still investigating whether the building that housed Turkish immigrants was the target of a deliberate arson attack. Although eyewitnesses told police that they saw a man handling a blazing torch near where the fire broke out and that the word “hate” incorporating Nazi SS symbols was also seen inscribed on the walls of the house, the identity of the perpetrators has yet to be determined.
This pattern repeats the typical tardiness of such investigations in the past.
If the investigation does indeed reveal that neo-Nazis motivated by anti-Turkish sentiment are behind the blaze, this incident, which joins a long list of similar ones, should serve as a loud wake up call for Germany.
Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, when racist violence broke out sporadically in the poorer east of the country and spread to the west, dozens of innocent people have been killed and maimed.
The frequency of these incidents makes it abundantly clear that xenophobia and racial violence in Germany are once again on the rise, echoing the type of persecution associated with the Jews of Germany that ended with six million dead.
Germany’s response far from satisfactory
Some three million Turks currently reside in Germany. Ludwigshafen, an industrial city situated in the southwest of the country, has always employed large numbers of them in its chemical factories. However, as local unemployment has grown, so has resentment towards the ethnic minority, just as it did during the Nazi era, thus facilitating the Nazi party's paramilitary force, the Sturmabteilung (SA) or "Storm Unit” in attracting large numbers of alienated and unemployed youth to the party, which promised “employment and a return to glory for the nation.”
The danger signals in Germany are blazing like bright neon lights and if they continue to go unheeded Germany could once again find itself in the midst of chaos, despite the persistent voices maintaining “that history will never repeat itself.” Granted, Nazi crimes leading up to and during WWII were carried out as the official acts and policies of an elected regime, and today’s leaders do not resemble those of its dark past. Today, with racial violence increasing worldwide, Germany has done more than most nations to combat such acts and has outlawed neo-Nazi parties and propaganda - yet Germany's response is far from satisfactory.
Numerous racist incidents are underreported or are not investigated, such as the incident in Cologne in 2004 when a bomb filled with nails was detonated in the Keupstraße, a busy commercial street known as "Little Istanbul," wounding 22 people. All but one of the injured were of Turkish descent. No charges were ever filed.
Despite its efforts to clamp down on extremist violence, Germany will always be scrutinized more intensely than any other country with regards to its curtailment of such incidents. Based on is history, Germany has a unique moral duty to eradicate all racial manifestations from its midst with harsher punitive measures, so that it will never repeat the atrocities of its past.
