RACISM ALERT: Twenty right-wing thugs grievously assault two Ghanaian girls in Grevesmühlen & the AfD is to blame. Except the perpetrator turns out to be an 11 year-old, and nobody was really hurt

How a minor tussle between children became the occasion for another round of hand-wringing about right-wing violence, the evils of Alternative für Deutschland and xenophobia in Germany.

According to expert journalists, the camouflage trousers of the boy on the right indicate dangerous right-wing political affiliations.

This one is so stupid that I think it belongs in the same folder with The Phantom Lion of Kleinmachnow.

First, though, a little prologue for you: I spent long and not entirely happy years as a professor at a wealthy selective school in the United States. There I had many opportunities to observe that peculiar, recurring cultural ritual known as the Racial Bias Incident.

This is how it works: Somebody, usually a student, will discover allegedly racist graffiti somewhere, or she (it is very often a she) will claim to have been racially insulted, or something else of this nature. The great Diversity Brigade will then spring into action. Everyone will get emails from obscure deanlets deeply regretting the persistent racism that is oppressing our campus. Students will protest and demand more diversity, more inclusion and more equity. This can go on for days or even weeks. Sometimes the press will show up and you’ll find yourself dodging random reporters on the way to teach class. Even if the press never come, the entire incident becomes the occasion for long and tedious lectures directed at the undiverse, who must hear yet again, and at great length, all about their unwarranted privilege and their deeply unconscious bias. Eventually the whole circus winds down, usually after the powers that be agree to hire more diversity, inclusion and equity administrators, or to improve funding for whatever diversity, inclusion and equity initiative happens to be the flavour of the month.

After all of that whining, crying and remonstrating, and after the press have departed and the campus has returned to the usual routine of teaching and exams (from which protests always promise welcome relief), some inconvenient facts invariably come to light. It will turn out, for example, that the allegedly racist graffiti was actually found on the underside of an old desk and that it may have been scrawled there 40 years ago for all we know. Or you will hear that nobody witnessed the grievous racial insults directed against our student diversity activist and so the entire incident remains unconfirmed. Not infrequently – I would say about a third of the time – the racially insulted student will turn out to have invented the entire episode or to have scrawled the graffiti herself.

In all my years observing this perennial farce, I never once encountered a genuinely unambiguous, well-documented and clearly confirmed Racial Bias Incident at all. Perhaps they exist, but I have certainly never seen one. While each and every Racial Bias Incident is the occasion for the schoolmarms to draw broad and wide ranging conclusions about all of our racism, for some reason the repeated collapse of bias incident narratives is never the occasion for the converse lesson, that perhaps racism and bias incidents are not really the problem they have been built up to be. Racism, alas, is in very high demand but always extremely short supply.

All of this is to say that I have amassed a great dubious experience with these kinds of things. I can see them coming from a great distance. And so when the German press began to hyperventilate about an alleged racial assault on a Ghanaian child in Grevesmühlen (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) last Friday, I knew that the first thing to do, was not to say a word about it. Instead, I just read and accumulated a wide variety of internet links.

First, I read the official police statement:

On 14 June 2024, at around 19:30, a police operation took place in Ploggenseering in Grevesmühlen. According to initial findings, two Ghanaian girls, 8 and 10 years old, were attacked by a group of approximately 20 people. The younger girl is said to have been kicked in the face, among other things. When the parents of the children arrived, the group also began an argument with them. Up to eight people in this group took part in this dispute and the father was also slightly injured.

When the police arrived, an as-yet unidentified person is said to have shouted racist insults to the injured parties as they were leaving.

According to initial findings, the alleged perpetrators were all teenagers and adolescents.

One of the girls and her father were slightly injured and were taken to hospital by ambulance.

The police have opened an investigation into breach of the peace, grievous bodily harm, incitement to hatred and insulting behaviour.

I also read the early press reports from Saturday. There was for example this piece in Der Spiegel about the “suspected racist attack.” They had little to offer besides the police statement, but they could quote Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Interior Minister Christian Pegel’s condemnation of the incident. “You don’t attack people, especially not children, and certainly not for racist motives,” Pegel said.

The state media broadcasters at tagesschau were also quick to report on this “racist attack.” Once again, they had little to offer beyond the police report, but they one-upped Der Spiegel by burying the reference to “minor” injuries deeper in the story and by quoting the mayor of Grevesmühlen, a man of grievously limited intellectual capacity named Lars Prahler.

The mayor of Grevesmühlen, Lars Prahler … was shocked by the attack. “This racially motivated act simply leaves me stunned. It shows bottomless hatred and uninhibited inhumanity and cannot be excused. Not even because [the perpetrators] were teenagers,” Prahler said … He expressed his sympathy for the children and their family …

“I think we are living in very difficult times right now, where complex problems are on the streets and those who entice people with dull slogans and simple solutions have an easy time of it …” Prahler continued. He added that it is time for mainstream society, which rejects the drift towards racist views of humanity, to make its voice heard and to set an example.

By Sunday the tabloids had picked up the story. Express, a publication by and for the mentally impaired, ran a very loud histrionic piece under the headline “KICKED IN THE FACE: Youths beat up two African girls.” They quoted a CDU district administrator named Tino Schomann denouncing this “despicable act,” which he claimed had left him “speechless.” Oddly, Schomann went on to say many other things, which you would not generally expect from a speechless person. “Acts like this are a disgrace!” he exclaimed. “Attacking the weakest members of our society from the safety of a group is hard to beat in terms of cowardice!” Even the AfD felt the need to denounce; the head of the AfD faction in the state parliament of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Nikolaus Kramer, deplored “this brutal lack of restraint towards children” and declared that “there is nothing to excuse or trivialise here!” All very virtuous and upstanding comments, I hope you will agree with me.

Also on Sunday, a profound idiot named Stephanie Walter, who writes for BILD, got an interview with the young girl’s father. He appeared with “thick bandages on his arm and hand” – injuries he sustained while trying to save his daughters from the ferocious racists. The “light injuries” from the police report had by this time become very grave injuries indeed. The father reported that his “seriously injured” daughter had just been released from the hospital. “The father doesn’t want to say much more,” Walter wrote. “Is this because he fears racist attacks?”

Unable to wring anything else out of the father, Stephanie Walter pooped around the Grevesmühlen apartment blocks where the attack occurred until she found some totally uninvolved overweight women, one of whom claimed to be an acquaintance of the victims. Both were ready denounce the terrible violence and racism of their neighbourhood.

One thing is certain: [The Ghanaian’s] two daughters are said to have often been subjected to racist insults at school. This is reported by Gina (25) – an acquaintance of the family. Her daughter, who is also dark-skinned, is in the same class as Grace. “Unfortunately, racism is part of everyday life for the children at school. And my girl has already been beaten too.”

She continues: “My daughter was alone at [the supermarket] for the first time on the day of the incident. There was a group of teenagers there who insulted her. They told her she didn’t belong in this country, she should get out of Germany, she’s black, she’s shit.”

I don’t know about you, but I have all the confidence in the world that all of these things actually happened, precisely as our upstanding social critic and paragon of antiracist virtue Gina has reported them.

Kathleen (33), another mother from Grevesmühlen, confirms the incidents. “In general, violence in the city has increased enormously. One problem is that we have a lot of young people here who drink a lot among themselves and then lose control of themselves.”

The mother of three is furious: “I think it’s outrageous that children are being attacked, regardless of whether they are German or foreign. That’s not acceptable at all. Our mayor gave a great speech at the town festival and emphasised once again that he will not tolerate such violence in our town.”

By Monday the racism experts – who I guess don’t work on the weekends – were charging into the fray to explain how terrible and racist all of this was, and also how the AfD bears joint responsibility for attacks like these.

Following the attack in Grevesmühlen and numerous other suspected racist incidents, the head of the Regional Agency for Democratic Culture in West Mecklenburg, Daniel Trepsdorf, has held the AfD partly responsible. “Anyone who plays with fire, even verbally – and the AfD and other right-wing extremist groups do indeed do this, especially on social networks – will then also reap the rewards by leading to violent riots,” Trepsdorf told NDR. “And it always affects the most vulnerable members of our society, such as these two girls in Grevesmühlen.” Trepsdorf is also an honorary member of the Left Party in the city council in Schwerin.

Daniel Trepsdorf having antiracist thoughts in front of an abandoned building somewhere.

That same NDR story reported further on the foul racist soup that is brewing in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Somebody allegedly saw some other people giving Hitler salutes in the town of Schwerin last Saturday, which is very worrying and almost certainly related to the Grevesmühlen assault, Schwerin being a totally different town a full 30 kilometres to the south. Around this time the Grevesmühlen police were also claiming that unidentified parties had been heard singing “Foreigners out” to the tune of the forbidden and extremely racist Italodance hit “L’amour toujours” the night before the incident. “The police cannot rule out a connection between the attack and the shouting of the slogans,” NDR observed.

All those leading politicians who had maintained an awkward and highly significant silence following the deadly (and apparently Islamist) attack on Rouven Laur, the Mannheim policeman, were in this case quick to condemn violent racism in Grevesmühlen. “Calling children racist names and brutally attacking them is a sign of deep hatred and inconceivable inhumanity,” Marshmallow Minister Nancy Faeser tweeted on Monday. “My thoughts and solidarity go out to the children and their families.”

She was not alone:

Foreign Minister [Annalena] Baerbock asked how hateful one has to be to even attack children. The Green politician also called for society to fight racism on a daily basis on X. Minister President [Manuela] Schwesig [of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern] demanded that the attack in Grevesmühlen should have swift consequences.

It is a good thing that all of these people got their denunciations in so quickly, between Sunday night and Monday morning, because their precious racial bias incident was about to collapse, as they so often do.

On Tuesday, our press were forced to admit that things might have been just a bit different than they had seemed at first:

The incident involving two girls from Ghana in Grevesmühlen … now appears to investigators to be different from what was initially reported. After analysing video footage, the Rostock police headquarters announced: “According to the current state of the investigation, the eight-year-old girl did not suffer any physical injuries that would indicate the act of violence described in the initial report.”

Maybe BILD should seek another interview with Grace’s father and ask about those “serious injuries” again.

Also on Tuesday, a video of the incident, or at least its latter part, appeared. It shows a lot of people standing around shouting at other; at one point you can hear a racial slur, and a black man who I guess is the girls’ father has a brief tussle with one of the teenagers. In the latter half of the video, a black woman – who I presume to be the girls’ mother – starts to lose her mind and jump around like a lunatic. That’s all I can get from the footage.

In a desperate attempt to save the crumbling narrative, crack investigative reporters at Nordkurier lamented the “disturbing scenes” the video contains, adding that “one of the youths is wearing white camouflage army trousers,” and “another is apparently wearing a Lonsdale jumper.” These indicate “that at least two of the teenagers may have right-wing tendencies.” I swear this is a real line in the article and that I am not making it up.

Yesterday, our sacred racial bias narrative suffered even further decay. It emerged that nobody had been kicked at all. Rather, as our eight year-old Ghanaian victim had attempted to ride her scooter past our fearsome racist antagonist, he “apparently blocked the girl’s path with his outstretched leg and hit her with the tip of his foot.” The girl then ran crying to her parents and there ensued the shouting, pushing, jumping and screaming we see in the video footage linked above. Oh, and our perpetrator? He turns out to be … eleven years old.

Yes, for days our highest politicians and our leading newspapers have been hyperventilating about a minor fight between two children.