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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3549 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 2, 2024

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A recent even in Mannheim, put on by anti-Islam group BPE (Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa) led to a policeman getting stabbed.

What's particularly notable about this incident is the bizarre way the physical altercation between BPE members, the assailant and the police unfolded, as described by German substack writer Eugyppius:

If violent internet videos are not your cup of tea, I’ll narrate it for you:

The footage opens with Sulaiman and Stürzenberger struggling in the background. Blue-jacketed BPE staff pull Sulaiman off his victim, but Sulaiman breaks free and charges, stabbing wildly and wounding Stürzenberger in the face and leg. This footage taken from another angle shows the police intervention more clearly; as is routine for BPE events, officers were already on scene, but for fifteen long seconds they do nothing. It is Stürzenberger’s colleagues themselves who must pull Sulaiman off his victim once again and fight for control of the knife. When the officers do intervene, it is to defend Sulaiman; they free the attacker from the BPE activists, at which point Sulaiman stabs one of the policemen in the neck and another officer finally shoots him. Thereafter, to complete the farce, a female officer restrains the BPE assistant who had been fighting Sulaiman.

Source

It would be interesting to hear from the German posters here what the reaction to this has been locally. Has it been completely buried, is the story that far-right anti-Islam types got what they deserve involved in the same mischief they always do, or has anything about this made an impact?

ETA: The poster of the above substack piece has written a new article linking a different video showing that from the perspective of the policeman who intervened (and has now sadly died) it's much more understandable why he tackled the individual he did.

The twitter link to the second video appears to be dead. anyone got a link to it?

Update: the cop has since died. I wonder if the stabbing victim he was pinning down will be charged for his death.

German press report that the motives of the stabber "remain unclear"

Sky news reports: "police officer stabbed during attack at far-right rally dies"

You don't hate journalists enough

Chancellor Olaf Scholz posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he was “deeply grieved” and that the officer’s “commitment to the safety of us all deserves the highest recognition.”

...He was apprehending the stabbed man on the ground while ignoring the knife-weilding attacker that came back and put several holes in his head/neck. Without knowing any better, from the video it looks the officer (and his peers) were committed to the safety of Sulaiman right up until the worst, darkest case of ShockedPickachu.jpg I've seen from a video.

I do feel bad for the cops, alive and deceased. I can only imagine that their minds were so trained on the story and expectation of 'far right violence' that they literally could not process the images their eyes were sending upstream, and just assumed noise and commotion had to do with some Neo-Nazi provocation. But they still fucked up horribly. The dead cop did not die valiantly against a rogue gunman protecting innocent lives. Wether by personal failure or institutional instruction, he and his peers screwed the pooch hard and managed to make the situation worse, somehow.

I don't want to speak ill of the dead, nor do I feel the need to. And I know politicians are going to go for the standard lines. But the lionazation of the deceased in this instance makes me want to scream. If you didn't watch the video or read a detailed breakdown, and were left with just mainstram coverage and politicians' statements, you'd think some unidentified attacker just started stabbing people, the cops showed up, one died, but the day was ultimately saved by brave heroes.

That is not what fucking happened here, and anybody who wants to give that impression should.... Well, let's just say there are days I truly wish I believed in Hell.

As a tacti-cool armchair bro, I am utterly floored by how shitty the cops are in this video.

At literally any given point past about the halfway mark (when the camera has enough perspective to capture all of the involved parties) there are at least 3 cops doing fucking nothing. The pony-tailed brunette deserves special acknowledgement for standing around. When the first cop goes in and gets stabbed, there's a clear shot of three of his comrades sort of standing in a "ready position" on the edge. With backup like that, right?

Say what you will about American policing, but the bias for action is still well instilled. If something like this went down in any major American metro, and there were 5 -7 cops in the vicinity, you would have a dogpile on at least Mr. Knife.

An American cop would have just shot someone trying to knife his comrade, and probably tased the BPE member to begin with if he decided to intervene.

There's a comment on the linked substack article suggesting that the authorities were expecting some sort of counter-protesters (i.e Antifa) and the police were under instruction to let the BPE members get a bit beaten up a bit, giving the police a plausible excuse to arrest any of the BPE as soon as they react (hence why the police do nothing while the Afghan is being violent, only getting involved it's to subdue one of the BPE people trying to defend his friend).

ETA: I might be wrong about that.

It's publicized enough, and you get the usual political angles. Left-wing papers run an article or two that mostly revolve around the plight of the stabbed policeman, right-wing papers give us some additional details, but none really call out the story for the blatant failure it is every which way. In the great scheme of things not much is made of it; the largely left-leaning media won't run an outrage campaign on this like they do for violence against "minorities", for obvious reasons, and there's not much else that's done at all about such incidents anymore.

Also, the story doesn't get buried so much as drowned. Southern Germany has been experiencing a lot of rainfall, and there's a lot of country under water right now. This dominates the news and largely crowds out other news.

I appreciate the perspective!

Left-wing papers run an article or two that mostly revolve around the plight of the stabbed policeman, right-wing papers give us some additional details, but none really call out the story for the blatant failure it is every which way.

Why in your opinion are right-wing papers failing to call out the story in the manner you describe? It would seem to be pretty obvious material to do just that.

Conservative papers like Welt tend to go easy on the culture war. Not sure whether it's to avoid alienating moderate readers, to uphold standards of objective journalism, or because "one crow won't peck out another's eyes", as we say - journalists probably want to avoid becoming non grata by taking the wrong side of history.

Openly rightist media like Junge Freiheit or Tichys Einblick may say the quiet part out loud, but have barely any readership and reach at all. So alright, I may have phrased it poorly - they do call it out, but nobody hears it.

You can see it here: https://v.redd.it/f2pyv3p7ar3d1

Bizarrely, yes, the police seem more concerned with safeguarding the terrorist than anything else.

There are two possible reasons for that:

  • the cops were there to make sure that "the nazis behave themselves", so when they saw an altercation, they were predisposed to see them as the attackers
  • they simply missed the start of the fight and saw a three-on-one fight

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