A Slumbering Politicization

When I sometimes talk with friends, I often hear myself saying that I was apolitical for most of my life, and that my politicization basically only began around 2016, shortly before Trump was elected for the first time. Except I’ve come to realize that’s not entirely true. The more I dig, the more key moments I find where my politicization “steering wheel” was turned sharply in new directions.

I think, for example, of Thilo Sarrazin’s biologistic racism, which achieved bestseller status in Germany (2010), or Gamergate and Anita Sarkeesian (2014). These were formative moments for me, even if I didn’t immediately understand them as such. Of course I already thought Sarrazin and Gamergate were awful back then, but I “didn’t make much of it yet,” if that makes any sense.

But I can also find very formative moments long before 2010 that are closely connected to my positions today.

On an early autumn day, just before my 17th birthday, I was on my way home from handball practice. A friend was giving me a ride and the news was on the radio. Something about a plane that had crashed. Into a high-rise. In the middle of New York.

I still remember how I couldn’t quite grasp that news. I spent the rest of the evening in my teenage bedroom in front of my small TV watching the news. The reports on the evening news were tumbling over one another. It felt like an evening full of “special broadcasts.” But all the programs had one thing in common. They unambiguously linked the attacks of September 11, 2001 to a single face and name. Everywhere, you could see Osama bin Laden’s long grayish beard at a rapid-fire pace. The name was repeated over and over again like a mantra.

What struck me even then as a 16-year-old was how quickly the public media had practically ready-made reports and documentaries that were immediately broadcast. Admittedly: at the time I was still a fairly big X-Files fan, and in the 1990s conspiracy theories were already quite the hot thing. So I don’t want to pretend I wasn’t susceptible to them. But something felt weird to me. Today I consider the openness to conspiracy theories in the 90s a fatal mistake, and partly responsible for the times we live in now.

The coverage and this intense focus on the one great responsible person, always with the same look — long gray beard, raised finger, turban, Kalashnikov on his lap.

I think, without really understanding it, that was the first time I felt what propaganda is.

After the second evening full of coverage about this intangible demon, as the media portrayed him, I had made a decision. I turned my back on television. In my quiet youthful protest, I didn’t want to tolerate this kind of news presentation. And I followed through. From then on, no news and no other TV programming for the time being.

It’s the Oil, Stupid!

It was of course inevitable that I would continue to hear news. At least in politics class, where I had to endure the racist political takes of teachers, and also when the US invaded Afghanistan. And then later Iraq. The Iraq War of 2003 was shocking to me, and even in the provincial, rural Germany where I grew up, there were anti-war demonstrations — which were also my first demonstrations.

The documentary filmmaker Michael Moore was at his peak then, and his US-critical stance struck a chord not just with me at the time. There was much discussion about how behind the pretext of supposed weapons of mass destruction, the US’s real agenda was to secure oil and other resources from the region for its own purposes. “It’s the oil, stupid!” was everywhere on the internet.

In this field between aggressive good-and-evil rhetoric and publicly visible war crimes (Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, etc.), an image was increasingly being constructed. No, I don’t mean the image of the US as an aggressive empire. Alongside it, as part of Western propaganda, another image was gradually taking shape.

The image of Arabs living in sand, huddled in caves, long-bearded and veiled, who either need to be liberated from their dictatorial regimes or are terrorists themselves. Today I can’t help but draw a direct connection between this image and the current phase of the Palestine conflict.

It’s no wonder. The image of a backward culture in which women and queer people are oppressed and not treated as equals, where the death penalty is part of the legal system and religious fanaticism can be found on every corner, fits very neatly into Western white supremacy. Every single one of these characteristics is equally present in the Western world (especially in the US), but “Let us be! We’re not like them!” Distraction tactics mastered on hard mode.

Indeutschtrination

The racist, islamophobic image of people from Arab countries was essentially ultra-accelerated by the events of the early 2000s. Call of Duty games where you face Arabic-speaking terrorists, TV shows like Homeland, Spiegel TV reports about creepy Salafist demonstrations, Sarrazin’s integration-Nazi talk, and before you knew it it was 2014 and the first PEGIDA demonstrations had arrived. Islamophobia is a very convenient word! Because it doesn’t sound quite like racism — at least not to the ears of those who had already filed the word Islam away as something dangerous through prior propaganda (btw, anti-Muslim racism instead of Islamophobia is the better term here IMHO).

That the backlash today is so gigantic when people advocate for Palestinian lives and rights is, in this sense, a straight line from 2001 to now. The handling of the Palestine conflict as a continuation of the anti-Muslim racism from then until today.

I want to clear something up at this point. On the topic of Palestine — especially through German indoctrination (Oh hi! German Raison d’État 👋🏼) to reject anything even remotely critical of Israel and see it as antisemitic — I had a very large spot of ignorance. I remember a situation from a few years ago in which a chatter in my stream made me uncomfortable by referring to “Israelis as a potential trigger warning.” My immediate reaction was to call out the chatter’s statement as racist. I don’t regret that, because from the standpoint of my moral compass it simply made sense to immediately label a blanket generalization about a group of people who are themselves subject to racism as racism. After all, you better believe that as a Turk in Germany I know what racism is.

I was wrong, though. Or at least I now understand what the chatter was trying to express. Even if such a statement without context and without knowing the person well enough, made anonymously in a Twitch chat, could theoretically go in any direction and was therefore at least problematic regardless. I don’t regret how I reacted, because it allowed me to learn from the situation. A moral compass doesn’t mean dogma, and opinions are allowed to change.

Déjà Vus from the Teenage Bedroom

Then came October 7th, and that did something to me. I never looked at the images of violence. But I later read through the UN report that documented the events with evidence and witness testimonies. The details are horrifying. And yet the most extreme stories were missing — like the beheaded babies stuffed into ovens (those were demonstrable lies spread by Western media).

On the other hand, there was evidence for other suffering.

The dead children, the bombed hospitals, and everything that during the Iraq War only leaked out and became public after the fact — this time it was immediately on TikTok. Practically a live stream of horror. On TikTok… but not in the German news. There you could only see supposedly “neutral” reporting that nevertheless felt very one-sided, without me being able to properly substantiate that. (Others have documented this with figures for US news, for example)

If I were to describe it in a therapy session, the media coverage reminded me strongly of the coverage around 9/11. Something was off. That feeling crept over me again, like when I was 16 sitting in front of the TV in my teenage bedroom. Why is this happening again?

I found the explanation for this feeling a few months later through a recorded YouTube livestream. Gabor Maté (himself a Holocaust survivor as a child) and his son Daniel speak on a panel with several people about the conflict. Maté is an avowed and outspoken anti-Zionist. He describes himself as someone who was indoctrinated with Zionism and later distanced himself from it through a long, painful process. He is also an addiction and trauma therapist.

In the online panel, many contributions from the audience were heard. Some people from Israel, but also BIPOC from the US and South America. When a Black American woman asked Maté why she has this feeling that something unjust is happening here, and whether she was being indirectly traumatized by the images — she had herself served in the US military, had absorbed many of the enemy portrayals and negative images of Muslims during the Iraq War, and even then something inside her had resisted. Just as it does today.

When I heard that for the first time, I froze. I myself am the child of Turkish immigrants, I have no family and no other ties to Palestine, and I am neither read as Arab nor am I a practicing Muslim. But why was this issue hitting me in the stomach, and with full force?

Maté had the following answer:

“What a lot of People of Color and marginalized people are feeling is not indirect trauma. They are feeling their own trauma that they suffered for a long time being mirrored in what’s happening in Palestine […] That’s why people of color, minorities […] black people intuitively identify with the Palestinian people these days. Because they get it!”

My frozen state dissolved into tears. It is always painful and at the same time healing to find language that describes how you feel. Even though I would never compare my struggles to those of the Black community in the US, I found here an explanation for my feelings.

When I started reading news outside of Germany and outside of the West, a completely different picture suddenly emerged. South Africa and Nicaragua spoke of apartheid in Israel and filed suit. Germany and other colonizer nations were harshly criticized by many nations and groups across the world and accused of complicity in the ongoing genocide against the Palestinians.

When I attended my first Free Palestine demonstrations in Berlin and then saw the direct contrast between the reality on the ground and the completely opposite depiction in the German news, my stomach turned. I had been so naive.

Fetishizing Suffering

If I’ve noticed anything in the months since October 7th, it’s above all that indoctrination and propaganda can run very deep.

Many people in my circle responded to Israel’s brutality with horror, but also with “It’s so complicated,” “I unfortunately don’t know enough about it.” German Raison d’État has taught us that we are not allowed to speak on topics unless we know the 100-year history of a region and all its political events and data down to the last detail. Above all, however, we were taught that we, especially as Germany, bear a historical responsibility. I always thought our historical responsibility was to never again allow racism and fascism. My perception today, however, is that Germany learned from the Holocaust only to protect the state of Israel above all else, even if that means another group of people is being genocided in the process. The idea of calling it a genocide only occurs to you if those being genocided are also considered human. And well… we’ve put about 20-30 years of work into dehumanizing Arab folks.

Two medial moments gave me further clues about this.

With Hasan Piker (a Turkish-American left-wing streamer), I once witnessed the following situation. A chatter was incensed that Hasan and his Jewish-American guest streamer called what is happening in Palestine a genocide and compared it to — without equating it with — the Holocaust. The chatter was of the opinion that nothing should be compared to the Holocaust. Under no circumstances, ever! Something I had also been taught in school. And yes, I have absolutely no interest in trivializing or relativizing the Holocaust. But the flip side of this dogma can take on genuinely sinister dimensions. The chatter was of the opinion that precisely because the Holocaust was systematic and industrial, and what is happening in Gaza is at least not industrial, one cannot speak of a genocide. Hasan and his guest picked up on the statement and jokingly bet briefly with each other on whether the chatter had to be from Germany. Both were very confident it was a German chatter. I didn’t immediately understand where this certainty came from, but the explanation hit me pretty hard. Both mimicked the German view of the Holocaust with: “You can’t compare it to the Holocaust. No one did it like we did it. No one does it like us.” The Holocaust as a weird flex by supposedly enlightened Germans. The chatter was, by the way, actually German. The situation made clear how much a dismissal of Holocaust comparisons leads to a weird kind of discursive prohibition that then plays down a currently ongoing genocide. Who genocides better? And if it doesn’t look like the Nazis did it, then maybe you can’t even speak of a genocide at all. Many always argue with the death toll figures, which are supposedly much lower. But the UN Genocide Convention mentions no critical mass of dead people as a criterion for genocide.

A few weeks later on a podcast I heard about a book: “People Love Dead Jews”. In it, the author Dara Horn describes above all the fascination with Jewish suffering throughout history, rather than taking an interest in the lives and culture of the living Jewish community in one’s own society. Ooof, that landed. I had to rewind to check whether I had heard that correctly.

Germany is interested in Jews and Judaism primarily when it concerns the Holocaust, when an attack on a synagogue has just occurred, or when it concerns Israel. But why isn’t Yom Kippur or Passover publicly (co-)celebrated here? Why do most Germans, 79 years after the Holocaust, know almost nothing about Jewish culture? Instead, the only thing tourists in Berlin take away from Jewish culture is the Holocaust Memorial or the deeply affecting exhibitions in the Jewish Museum Berlin.

One could somehow get the impression that Germans have a weird fetish for suffering. And then it’s always only the suffering of “the Others.” Whether Jews or Arabs. Othering as a bonus on top.

The second weird fetishism of Germans seems to me to be one of definitions and rules (Okay, Captain Obvious!). But how often I’ve had to hear “that may fall under antisemitism,” “we follow the antisemitism definition of…,” “it remains to be determined whether the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ is antisemitic”…

What’s interesting is that many Germans believe they are entitled to enforce this interpretive authority on the basis of one part of the Jewish community, while large segments of the anti-Zionist Jewish community are excluded. Which then leads to the paradox of an anti-Zionist Jewish person shouting “Stop Israel’s Genocide” being accused of antisemitism. Once more: German institutions, which are successor institutions to the Holocaust, accuse Jews of being antisemitic.

What does that tell me? Germans often seem to care more about whether they are violating a rule or definition than about vocally and loudly standing against a genocide. Once a rule has been established, it is treated as fixed and no discourse about it is possible. In such cases, institutions would rather reach for authoritarianism and quickly bring an end to freedom of assembly and expression.

My ancestors are not from here; my grandfather did not participate in the Holocaust. He probably did participate in other genocides, which I will unfortunately never be able to find out. Maybe that makes it easy for me to talk. But I wish the responsibility that Germany had taken away from the Holocaust were not about establishing new rules and then applying them selectively, but about protecting human rights for all people. Regardless of who. Regardless of where. For everyone!

The silence of many on Palestine (because it’s too complicated and they don’t want to get anything wrong) is for me a very painful continuation of a racist practice. Born out of a fear of doing wrong by Jewish people, but also out of a very indifferent attitude toward Arabs.

Sometimes only cynicism remains. Then I always tell my people that Germany lags about 15-20 years behind on all liberation and enlightenment issues. Maybe it’s the same here. Maybe there will yet be an acknowledgment that a genocide was directly supported here, or at the very least tolerated by part of society. It all just takes a little time. But by then it will be too late for our Palestinian sibs.