The other day a number of tourists sexually assaulted a German woman in a hotel room in Spain. This is atrocious. Nobody should ever go through that and I really hope that the six men that were arrested are brought to justice soon… and that they’ll stay in prison for eternities.
That’s what sparked a lot of discussion online. Obviously, thoughts and prayers go out to the victim… but there are those that don’t find any issue in faulting an entire group of people for the deeds of a few, tarring the whole brush and framing the story as a migration issue… when it’s, in reality, a people issue.
So, today, I wanna talk about political agendas, horrible people and framing in news stories. This post will contain mentions of bigotry, and racism – and I’ll also talk about “racial purity” as a concept which could possibly be triggering. I’ll also mention the case at hand but will replace the r-word with [group SA] because I just don’t like the word.
Horrible People
Since the incident, details about the case became public as a number of news outlets reported on it… and as time went on, certain other people decided to utilize this atrocious case of sexual assault to push their own agenda… which is especially bad since they accuse others of doing just that in other cases…
One of those people is Georg Pazderski, a former AFD faction leader in Berlin, who claims that “Germany doesn’t want to hear the truth” after his framing of the story that he shared on Twitter got withheld for violating local laws. Here is his tweet.
His original tweet stressed the fact that the suspects are “TURKISH”. Is that important? No. Unless of course you wanna say that Turkish people or immigrants are the problem. Suddenly it’s not important that they grew up in Germany. It’s important that their ancestors were not German.
To that, I wanna add: When is someone German enough to be faulted for their crimes as a German and not as some sort of foreigner?
People that argue about this are bad-faith actors.
By engaging in their “these people are not German even though they’re born & raised in Germany” argument, you accept the fact that racial purity must be a thing. If you don’t engage in it and question their beliefs, you don’t stoop onto that level.
“You can’t turn a Poodle into a German shepherd” is something I hear a lot in this context.
It’s a weird argument to make because are Turkish people the poodles in this? Is one better than the other? Also aren’t they still both dogs? What is the implication here?
If you question their very definitions of a German person, they’re bound to say something a Nazi would say. That’s why a lot of them deflect on the matter and ask you a counter-question about Germans going to China and whether or not they’re gonna be Chinese all of a sudden.
I’m not saying that everyone should become a keyboard warrior or whatever… but if you see people making points like that in public, for instance, or in one of your spaces… you need to challenge those points. Ask them what they mean. Ask them what they are implying. Let them define everything in a way free of metaphors and implications. Be direct. Have them lay out what their actual opinion or solution is.
The Motte-and-Bailey Argument
Another person that criticizes news outlets for omitting the “reality of things” is Zara Riffler, a “journalist” for BILD, a tabloid rag in Germany that is incredibly horrible. Think of “The Sun” but worse.
In her tweet, she says that the WDR reports on the suspects being from NRW (Germany) but the WDR also omits the fact that they’re of Turkish heritage/that they have a migration background. She doesn’t explicitly say that she’s against Turkish people… but it is implied.
That is not strictly considered hate speech in Germany but one could argue that faulting an entire ethnicity for the deeds of a few and perpetuating the stereotype that foreigners are sexually assaulting women would fall at least under some form of hate speech.
Obviously, she doesn’t explicitly say so. She’s implying that there’s a “reality” that the public news outlets are trying to hide. That “reality” could be anything. She’s merely stating that they’re hiding something and that this isn’t good journalism… but she’s not talking about the fact that framing it in a way that adds to stereotypes is also not good journalism.
This is what is called a motte and bailey argument. It’s an informal fallacy where you equate two positions, one of which is modest and probably uncontroversial whereas the other is much more bold and harder to defend.
The name comes from a construct where forts would have a position that is very hard to attack and easily defendable, aka the Motte, position right behind a little area with the soldiers and stuff, aka the Bailey, which is easier to attack but is bound to win some time.
So, when you wanna try yourself at an informal logical fallacy, you’ll start with a controversial opinion, the Bailey:
“If you don’t like the facts (reality), you just change them (omit it).” [included the wording sorta in the brackets for reference]
This implies that the “reality” is that Turkish people are the problem. “They sexually assault women and they’re behind all the crimes. We should not let immigrants or Turkish people in this case into European countries!” or something along those lines.
This is obviously a very bad implication but it’s only my interpretation of what Zara Riffler’s tweet says. If I were to argue against it, Zara Riffler would retreat to the motte:
“I didn’t say that Turkish people are the problem. I am merely criticizing the media for not doing a proper job by omitting details that could very much matter.”
Now, I wouldn’t be able to argue against that. It’s a valid position to say that facts shouldn’t be omitted as the framing could end up being used politically… but obviously, Riffler would then be equating the “if you don’t like reality, you omit it” bit to “journalism” or whatever that motte is.
With the motte and bailey, the person that does this strategy will have an easy time defending the modest position attacking you for equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte.
Even if they don’t have a good time defending the motte, many people just won’t be able to tell what they’re doing. They’ll see a “reasonable” position in the motte and attack all that question it. “Those darn woke people!”
Framing
Framing is the act of adding context or information to a title or narrative in a way that panders towards certain crowds and/or manipulates them into believing certain things. In the following, I’ll showcase this a little bit.
1. In Spain, six tourists were arrested over [group SA].
2. In Spain, six German tourists were arrested over [group SA].
3. In Spain, six tourists from Germany were arrested over [group SA].
4. In Spain, six tourists from Germany were arrested over [group SA]. They have Turkish roots.
5. In Spain, six Turkish tourists were arrested over [group SA].
(1) is a very neutral headline that doesn’t give people much information about who the perpetrators are or who the victim was. You only learn that it happened in Spain. If the viewer is in Germany, you wouldn’t care as much.
(2) showcases that the suspects or perpetrators were German. That’s ambiguous as we don’t know whether or not that’s the ethnicity or nationality but, then again, most normal people don’t differentiate between the two. (3) showcases that it’s the nationality. They’re from Germany. They could also be German but we don’t know that.
By simply mentioning that they have Turkish roots in (4), the reader is somehow guided into a belief that this is relevant to the crime of sexual assault. It’s the headline, after all. Most normal newspapers wouldn’t put that right into the headline… meanwhile, populist tabloid rags would put it in there for sure. After all, hate sells better.
Because we don’t care about the fact that they’re from Germany or that they were born and raised here, and since we only want to polarize and antagonize, we can also just leave that part out (5). This is similar to (2) but quite different as its ambiguity could lead to people thinking that they’re from Turkey – which in this case is wrong.
Now, theoretically, I could add the fact that the victim was German to this and it would probably sell even better then. After all, people feel solidarity to the people in their own country.
Other countries would report on this with everything on the table. They’re, after all, not from Germany, so in Spain, a newspaper has reported on this by stating that they’re from Germany but of Turkish heritage, not that it matters.
What I’m trying to get at is the fact that by putting different pieces of information into the header of the article, you can make people believe different things. “Turkish people sexually assaulted a German tourist” would get more concerned Germans fuming than “German people […]”, even though their Turkishness has nothing to do with what they did.
Yes, of course, the way people see women or the world, in general, depends heavily on how they’re brought up, and educated and who influenced them… but people in Turkey have different values from people in Germany. I can attest to this. Had I been raised in Kosovo where my parents are from, I’d probably be a lot less liberal compared to now.
The fact that they’re from Germany, specifically NRW, is more relevant than who their ancestors are because their ancestors are not at fault for what these people did. They were raised in Germany and still did this atrocious crime.
Racial Purity?
At last, before I sum things up, I wanted to talk about the concept of “Racial Purity”.
What I see is that whenever a crime is committed by a person with a migration background, a lot of people are upset that the media are trying to “hide that fact”.
To a lot of people that buy into the framing that Turkish people, immigrants, people with a migration background, refugees, etc. are all sexual assaulters, the fact that they’re not German in terms of their ethnicity is a problem.
A lot of these people gatekeep “being German”. They exclude those that only are of German nationality because of their ID or because they were born here. They alienate others based on their own feeling of racial purity.
Germans are an ethnic group that began with the separation of a distinct Kingdom of Germany from the eastern part of the Frankish empire under the Ottonian dynasty in the 10th century. I doubt that any of these Germans that complain are of that specific origin… purely, that is.
The German ethnicity, on the other hand, as it’s used nowadays is about a genealogical/linguistical commonality shared amongst many people living in Germany.
This, however, also is hard to argue for. When people argue against people not being German, they wanna trace their finger up the family tree and check whether or not people are German – and then they have a point… or something. I have a very Albanian name, so I’m not German… but if I was called Fabian or Tim or whatever, would that count?
What I’m trying to get at is the fact that there are no “true Germans” in the world. There’s bound to be some Polish, Russian, French or whatever blood somewhere in the family. A friend of mine has a red beard even though nobody in his family does. He’s as German as it gets.
The differentiation of nationality and race/ethnicity is problematic because if you keep going into that direction, pursuing racial purity, you’ll end up with what the Nazis did, again. History repeats itself.
Even in America, where Jim Crow laws weren’t gone for that long, actually, there are Black people whose rights to vote are being taken away, as I mentioned in this post here.
Instead of focusing so much on where people’s heritage is, why don’t we focus on the fact that people are doing horrible things and should go to jail for it.
If they were “pure Germans” would their deed suddenly have been okay? No, of course not. They’d still be horrible people that did something atrocious.
Why does it matter what their roots are? Why are we focusing so much on our differences rather than what’s important?
Detroit segregation wall
Summary
To sum it all up, this isn’t about “good journalism” vs “bad journalism”. This is about whether or not the people that sexually assaulted a woman in Spain are “German” or not. Even if they had German parents, the crime committed wouldn’t be less severe or less bad. It would still be atrocious.
The victim in this situation is also from Germany. I wonder how they would feel if they saw how their story was getting utilized to push a political agenda that goes not against abusive men but rather against the whole ethnicity of a group of people.
Isn’t it bad enough that six men sexually assaulted a woman? Why are we now abusing her story to push a narrative about races suddenly being important when it comes to crimes committed?
Why are we pushing an agenda?
Instead of arguing about people’s ancestry and instead of arguing for more border control, we should teach men that this is the lowest thing you could possibly do.
We shouldn’t advocate for a solution to a different problem when this is what people are “concerned” about.
Sexual violence is one of those things that get utilized so much to fearmonger and to rally against refugees and people with a migration background… but the people that do that, don’t care about women.
They don’t care about the victims. They don’t care about sexual violence.
It’s vile how these people can claim that public media are “pushing an agenda” when they’re reporting on something horrible that happened… when they’re literally using this story to advocate for hate speech.
Georg Pazderski is a former AfD politician that claims Germany wants to censor him for tweeting “the ‘German’ RAPISTS are TURKISH”. This is hate speech.
This is hate speech because it perpetuates implications about foreigners being rapists.
Emphasizing the heritage rather than the person, faulting a people instead of a perpetrator, and abusing a victim further instead of denouncing the crime committed… They should be ashamed.
And the bad faith arguments that people add to this discussion, talking about races rather than people and acting as if they’re pureblooded or whatever… it’s disgusting. Honestly, it’s just so horrible.
What’s even worse is that Riffler, as a journalist, talks a lot about antisemitism but she doesn’t care about racism at all. If we allow racism and islamophobia in Germany to get their way, Jews are going to be next… so will be queer people, disabled people, old and sick people… and eventually it will be women, like her, that will get their rights taken away…
And anyone that doesn’t think so should take a look at the United States of America where women are not allowed to decide over their own bodies, where black people are not allowed to vote in some of the States, and where trans people are persecuted solely for existing.
Look over there and tell me that can’t be Germany.
Tell me that we learned our lesson when the far-right and extremists are on the rise in Europe.
Tell me we don’t have a problem with racism.
Tell me that my personal experiences with racism are not real.
Please invalidate me. Convince me that I’m overthinking this and prove to me that I don’t need to worry that I’ll eventually get deported or worse despite being born here.
Well, you can’t because as it stands, people are convinced that racism has been solved… and narratives like this are being pushed around by people that say “the left” is pushing a narrative.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.
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