Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). Some days are particularly bad. Today is one of those days; you glance over the morning headlines and find nothing but a pile of stories ranging from strange to abysmal. This may also be due to the headline in Bild, which is sure to rank high on the disgust scale and, so to speak, sets the tone for the entire day: ‘Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.’
This is how Bild sells the targeted murder of an Al Jazeera journalist, citing information from the Israeli army. But not without implicitly undermining the credibility of its own statements for the attentive reader – the article then goes on to say: ‘According to UN sources, al-Sharif was the last surviving reporter for the Arab TV station in the northern Gaza Strip.’
Al Jazeera also had other reporters, all of whom were murdered before him. This basically leaves only two equally unlikely scenarios in which the Israeli army’s claims could be true: either all Al Jazeera reporters were ‘undercover terrorists,’ or the one ‘undercover terrorist’ was the last to be targeted, which then raises the question of why all his colleagues…
In reality, it is simply sickening how German citizens who claim to be journalists are dragging colleagues who were murdered while doing their job (Bild: ‘Just minutes before his death, al-Sharif had been documenting air strikes in Gaza City’) through the mud. On X, one reader responded with a quote from Max Goldt: ‘This newspaper is an organ of vileness. (…) Anyone who contributes to this newspaper is socially unacceptable.’
But it’s not just this Bild article. There’s also one in Die Zeit, under the headline ‘Russia’s borders end nowhere.’ A Putin quote that is removed from its geometric truth (just as every closed line is infinitely irregular) and declared an expression of ‘aggressive nationalism,’ even though exactly the same could be said about the borders of San Marino.
No, there is nothing new in this long article; it’s all been read before. With one exception, which is actually surprising coming from a Moscow office manager who has spent many years there: “In Moscow itself, the claim to world power has been elaborately staged, especially since the recent invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The ring roads around the city centre, built by the dictator Stalin, have been renovated and are illuminated at night like a film set. The magnificent buildings of the 19th century have been powerfully extended and re-plastered. (…) On the banks of the Moscow River, light shows flicker between the skyscrapers of “Moskva City”. At night, the Foreign Ministry looks like the tower of Sauron, the ruler of Mordor in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.”
Yes, indeed, the accusation is that Moscow has been renovated too well. It must not look good; it should look like Berlin. At least, that is the impression one gets.
‘People are oppressed by the imperial staging and are supposed to be uplifted by the promise of world prestige.’
Yet Moscow, compared to London, Paris or even the new political buildings in Berlin after 1990, has precisely the opposite: an aggressive imperial aura. Not even in the Seven Sisters, the old high-rise buildings, one of which is the aforementioned ‘Tower of Sauron’. However, this passage is a good example of what the rest of the article looks like. Really, the author, Michael Thumann, is so bent on causing a ruckus that if a citizens’ initiative were to form in Moscow, with two virgins walking ahead of him every time he left the office to scatter rose petals on his path, he would complain of sexual harassment.
Admittedly, perhaps one is particularly unforgiving after such a Bild headline. And one is not amused when, for the hundredth time, Putin’s statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century’ is not backed up with statistical figures, from the decline in life expectancy in Russia to the Indian healthcare system.
There is talk of an ‘alleged struggle for Russia’s existence,’ despite conferences on the division of the country in the West, even in the Council of Europe, and then an atmosphere is conjured up that is pure fantasy: ‘Fear of war, of being sent to the front, of surveillance and repression, and of the future shapes everyday life.’
True, in reality, he probably wouldn’t take action against the two virgins scattering flowers because of sexual harassment – he would probably be firmly convinced that they were working for the FSB.
Yes, then I stumbled across an article published by Die Welt on Saturday in which British historian Niall Ferguson uses a lot of acrobatics to explain why Gaza is not genocide, but Ukraine is. Fortunately, this article isn’t really from today, so I can just take note of it with disgust and put it aside…
But then there’s another topic that has somehow made its way from the mainstream media to the last provincial newspaper, and which rounds off the absurdities of the day, so to speak: ‘More than one in ten deportees in Germany are minors,’ reads the headline, with slight variations and the same tone of outrage. Even though it is admitted that minors have always accounted for around 11 per cent of deportees.
Of course, these articles do not mention that the current number of ‘persons required to leave the country’ in Germany is around 225,000, only the number of deportations in 2024, which was 20,084 (incidentally, there were 229,751 initial applications for asylum in the same period; 84,350 of these initial applications concerned minors). Nor is it mentioned that among the 225,000, more than 7,000 are asylum seekers who have committed criminal offences … nor is there any mention of the alternatives: that every family must be allowed to remain as an attachment to a child, or that in the event of deportation, children must be separated from their families – no, the aim of the parliamentary question was to declare it particularly inhumane for minors to be deported at all.
The intention is already apparent from the fact that in this case, a question from the Left Party and the response to it were received with such enthusiasm by the press. This is a rare occurrence in itself, but in this case it fits too well into the narrative. ‘The number of deportations has been rising in Germany for years,’ complains the Frankfurter Rundschau, for example. Which is actually true. But it would also be true if the number had risen from one to two; in other words, this is the usual tactic of targeting emotions with incomplete information. Poor children. Even Dietmar Bartsch, who usually only makes it into the press once a year, is quoted: ‘Cold-heartedness must not be the political style or political goal of our country’ …
In fact, if you look at all the figures, you see that the proportion of minors among those deported is around 11 per cent, less than a third of the proportion of initial applications; So basically, these figures, combined with the fact that even the increase in deportations amounts to less than 10 per cent of new arrivals, lead to exactly the opposite conclusion. Unless, of course, you consider it evidence of particular cold-heartedness when 97 per cent of 100 per cent of minors who entered the country illegally and without any claim to asylum ultimately remain.
But all the examples mentioned have one thing in common: the intention to manipulate emotions. Whether crude and obvious, as in the Bild , pseudo-intellectual but dripping with prejudice, as in the Zeit , or, most recently, mathematically dishonest, as in the asylum issue that made headlines via the RND . Not that we’re not used to it. It’s not that we’re not prepared to read repeatedly distorted reports, such as on the subject of the ‘Russian shadow fleet’ or, more generally, when it comes to Gaza. But on some days, one wishes there was an automatic upper limit; a semi-friendly power that would say, ‘Let’s leave the child deportations for tomorrow, we already have Al Jazeera and Mordor.’ Just to limit the horrors of the morning.
