Mannheim Updates: The stabbed policeman has died, the assailant Sulaiman Ataee was a years-long illegal resident of Germany, and discourse about the incident continues to be very, very stupid

Video grab from Junge Freiheit via Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa.

Rouven L., the policeman stabbed in the head and neck by the Afghan immigrant Sulaiman Ataee in Mannheim last Friday, succumbed to his injuries on Sunday. He was 29 years old.

Rouven’s death is an occasion to acknowledge an important error in my prior post. The initial footage I shared was ambiguous, and it looked as if Rouven had intervened in the fight, as I said, to defend the attacker from BPE staff who were detaining him. I should’ve watched this video from another angle more closely (you must be logged in to view). There, you can see that events are much more complicated, and involve four actors: There is 1) the attacker Ataee; 2) his target Stürzenberger who he has just stabbed; 3) a man in a dark jacket, who is struggling to restrain Ataee; and 4) an additional man in a blue jacket, who arrives to help. Unfortunately, blue-jacket man misjudges the situation, and begins attacking restraining dark-jacket man instead of the assailant. The police at this moment intervene; Rouven tackles blue-jacket man, effectively breaking up the fight. In the chaos, Ataee is freed to claim his only life. There is astounding police incompetence here, but it is that of Rouven’s colleagues and not his own. Rouven surely expected his fellow police to have his back; instead, most of the officers step away from the scene as the violence escalates, and one of the policewomen even runs off, obviously terrified.

More information has emerged about Rouven L.’s killer, who remains in hospital and is not in mortal danger, but is still according to press reports “unfit for interrogation.” Ataee arrived in Germany in 2013 as an unaccompanied minor. His application for asylum was rejected a year later, but he was not deported because of the poor security situation in Afghanistan. He first became a fully legal resident of Germany in 2019, when he married a Turkish-German woman, with whom he has two children.

As a teenager, [Ataee] trained in the martial art of taekwondo in Hesse and successfully took part in competitions, as newspaper articles and Facebook posts from the time show. He later volunteered at an aid centre for refugees in the Bergstraße district. According to the files, until last weekend he would have passed as a prime example of a well-integrated refugee, an official says.

This entire incident speaks volumes about how much “integration” is worth.

On the day of Rouven’ death, Chancellor Olaf Scholz released a four-minute speech addressing not Ataee’s knife attack but the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Walter Lübcke. In this way, he hoped to keep the focus off of murderous mass migrants and on right-wing extremist violence instead. As the story ceased to be about Michael Stürzenberger, however, these tactics came to look increasingly ridiculous. Thus obese Green Party co-chair Ricarda Lang took to public media where on the one hand she offered some hard words about “Islamism,” and on the other hand appeared to draw an equivalence between Ataee’s attack and the drunken “Ausländer raus” video from Sylt. Sholz, for his part, after offering initial vague condolences to Rouven’s family, finally provided a more forthright statement, if only on Twitter:

The police officer who was killed in Mannheim was defending the right of all of us to speak our minds. If extremists want to violently restrict these rights, they need to know: We are their toughest opponents. We will take action with all the means available to us under the rule of law.

Last autumn, when leftist parties were facing serious popular discontent and the AfD were at an all-time high in public opinion polls, some establishment politicians began talking about border security. Scholz even demanded “deportations on a grand scale.” Of course, these deportations never happened, but the present political crisis has our rulers attempting to save the situation by returning to the same rhetoric:

Following the fatal knife attack in Mannheim, there are increasing calls for stricter deportations of foreign criminals. Several federal states … supported the proposal by Hamburg’s Senator of the Interior Andy Grote (SPD) to deport foreign criminals to Afghanistan and Syria in future. FDP parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr also told the Bild newspaper: “People who become conspicuous for their Islamist behaviour here should also be deported to countries where this has not been possible up to now, such as Afghanistan.”

Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) demanded that [Germany] … “create the conditions for the repatriation of criminals and dangerous persons to Syria and Afghanistan – of course, while constitutionally weighing up fundamental and human rights and taking a differentiated view of individual cases” …

Even that fanatical opponent of all things right-wing extreme, our marshmallow minister Nancy Faeser, is suddenly very interested in deportations:

… Faeser … declared that she wants clarity “as quickly as possible” as to whether serious offenders could be deported to Afghanistan … She wants “people who are a potential threat to Germany’s security to be deported quickly” [adding that] … Germany’s security interests would “clearly” outweigh the interest of those concerned in remaining in the country …

The emphasis on deporting only “criminals” is obviously calculated; it is a backhanded confirmation of our insane asylum policies, as it implies that all the rest of the asylees enjoy a right to live in the West. Some Greens appear to be too stupid to recognise this tactic, with the terrible Lamy Kaddor complaining that deporting migrant malefactors is a bad idea because the deportees “would not have to fear any sentence” from the Taliban and they would “probably … even be rewarded.” You have to love this logic, it is perfect. On the one hand you cannot deport ordinary illegal migrants to Afghanistan, because it would be a very bad and illiberal place for them; and on the other hand you cannot deport extraordinary criminal migrants to Afghanistan, because it would be a good and rewarding place for them. According to the Greens you just can’t deport any Afghan to Afghanistan ever, I guess.

The Austrian-Afghan journalist Emran Feroz managed to vomit out a brief lecture in taz this morning, warning us all against xenophobia and racism or whatever. Feroz is mostly upset because “the terrorist attack in Mannheim is everywhere” and he’d really like to stop hearing about it. He says that “all we know at the moment” is that Ataee was born in Afghanistan, although in fact we know a great deal more than that; and he complains that the attack has been the occasion “for many people … to demonise the so-called refugee wave of 2015 and to defame all people from Afghanistan as ‘fanatics,’ ‘extremists’ or ‘terrorists.’” One thing that would make these yapping priests of diversity more credible, would be if they took the slightest effort to characterise the arguments they pretend to address. The question is not whether every last Afghan in Germany is a “terrorist,” but rather whether making Germany home to the largest Afghan community in Europe was ever in the remotest interests of actual Germans, whether it has made Germany on balance more or less secure, and whether this radical decision in which voters had no say is justifiable on any grounds whatever.

Many people from Afghanistan have fled precisely from extremism like this. They know very well what it is like when security forces are killed by terrorists, because that is exactly what IS and the Taliban have done in recent years. Soldiers or police officers who prayed five times a day were murdered because the fanatics regarded them as ‘apostates’. Quite a few lost their lives when they stood in front of suicide bombers in schools or universities.

It is almost like if you import hundreds of thousands of people from countries with substantial security problems, you end up importing their security problems too. That sounds crazy I know, but Feroz is too dumb to follow the threads of his own argument and continues to dig the hole deeper:

Afghanistan has also shown that terror can come from the sky via modern weapons – from Western military forces and politicians. In the course of the ‘War on Terror’, many studies have made it clear that this violence is an effective recruitment tool for the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other pied pipers. This applies locally, but also globally among internet jihadists who radicalise themselves in various forums or via YouTube and Tiktok.

If, as seems undeniable, “Western military forces and politicians” have spent decades doing things in Afghanistan that have served to radicalise the people who live there and recruit many of them into hostile paramilitary organisations, that would be another very good reason not to import hundreds of thousands of them.

The prize for the dumbest take, though, must go to the German Police Union of Nordrhein-Westfalen, who have decided that the true culprit in the Mannheim stabbing is … the knife:

Following the fatal knife attack in Mannheim, the German Police Union in NRW is calling for a blanket ban on carrying knives in public. “There is no sensible reason for a private individual to carry a knife with them when they go out on the street. This must be prohibited by law,” state chairman Erich Rettinghaus said … “There should only be exceptions for those who have just bought a knife in a shop and then have a receipt for it. But otherwise, there should hardly be any exceptions” …

NRW Interior Minister Herbert Reul has also decided that we need to do something about these suddenly stabby knives:

“The images from Mannheim are staggering. Now, at the latest, even the last person must realise that we have to take knife crime seriously,” Reul said. “Knives are easily accessible and can become deadly weapons in seconds. Whether it’s attacking dissenters like in Mannheim or pulling out blades in a pub brawl – we have to take decisive action against it … We need stronger measures to control the possession and carrying of knives, tougher penalties for their misuse and intensive awareness campaigns¹ about the dangers. Something like what happened in Mannheim must not happen again …”

Whenever politically privileged minorities commit crimes – and particularly when they commit them in disproportionate or distinctive ways – the guilt for these crimes must be transferred from the offenders to their weapons. Thus knives, which were never a problem before, have by some mysterious process become a huge threat requiring novel draconian legislation, which of course has every chance of preventing future knife assaults, because as we know criminals are very law biding and highly likely to observe all knife prohibitions.

1. Is there anything more boundlessly cucked and emblematic of our stupid effete politics than “awareness campaigns”? Clearly the problem is that migrants don’t know that knives are dangerous. If only we tell them they’ll stop stabbing people. That sounds like a plan.