• Print
• E-Mail
• Feedback

11/12/2009

"Xenophobia is like a leitmotif steering the life of Alex W." intoned judge Birgit Wiegand on Wednesday in Dresden, as she recapitulated her reasoning for sentencing the defendant to life in prison. "Not just in Germany, but earlier as well."

Few were surprised by the severity of the sentence handed down on Wednesday. W. was found guilty of stabbing Marwa al-Sherbini, a pregnant Egyptian woman, to death in a courtroom. Wiegand stipulated that W. will not be eligible for parole after 15 years, as is standard with life sentences in Germany, but only after 20 or 25 years. W. was also found guilty of attempted murder for stabbing al-Sherbini's husband.

The verdict was welcomed across the Muslim world, with the Egyptian ambassador to Germany, Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy saying he was satisfied because W. received the harshest penalty possible.

Al-Sherbini had been testifying against W., a German who was born in Russia, in a court hearing in Dresden on July 1. The hearing had become necessary after W. appealed against a €780 ($1,170) fine for calling al-Sherbini an "Islamist," a "terrorist" and a "slut" when she asked him to allow her son on the swings at a playground in August 2008.

W.'s attorney had sought a conviction for manslaughter instead of premeditated murder. But the judge agreed with the prosecution that the crime was born out of "racial hatred." German commentators on Thursday take a look at the case.

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"The highly shameful and alarming fact remains that in Germany, wearing a headscarf is a potentially deadly risk. That should make us think. It is only a difference of degree whether you ban headscarves in a classroom or on a playground. In both cases, however, the same thing is being denied: the equal right to participation in society at large."

Left-leaning daily Die Tageszeitung writes:

"With its verdict, the Dresden court rehabilitated its image, particularly for Muslim Germans and the Arab world. The image had become sullied by the brutal murder of a pregnant woman in a German courtroom, before the eyes of her husband and three-year-old son. But it was the image of German society that took the greatest beating -- both because public sympathy was limited and because of the absence of reactions from German politicians immediately after the crime."

"When thinking of Muslims, many Germans think first of forced marriage, honor killing and Islamist terror. An entire faith is placed under general suspicion. It is important that we as a society combat this suspicion. The murder of Marwa al-Sherbini placed the problem of Islamophobia in the public spotlight. The public must now attend to the problem."

The conservative daily Die Welt writes:

"One can only speculate on the course of W.'s life had he never become involved in the playground argument with al-Sherbini -- out of which his crime grew. But it is certainly likely that his xenophobia would sooner or later have boiled over and exploded, due to some other presumed provocation. Alex W. is an example for how integration can fail, even if the immigrant's culture isn't all that different from that in Germany. His victim was the exact opposite -- she came from a distant culture but had transformed herself into a model of integration. Sometimes, life's lessons are counterintuitive."