The Selective View of Who Makes a Victim

Not quite two years ago we reported the case of Ermyas Mulugeta, a "Germano-Ethiopian" (as the politically correct definition goes) who had come to grief in Potsdam, the capital of the state of Brandenburg, on Easter night. The two suspected "right wing extremists", who had been arrested as perpetrators on the strength of their appearance and because they had been there, were helicoptered manacled and blindfolded about 600km to the federal prosecutor at Karlsruhe, all self-righteous whining about "Guantanamo" momentarily forgotten.

All of Germany was in an orgiastic frenzy of "fight the right" Gutmenschentum, the sale of candles and flowers soared.

It then turned out that the suspected perpetrators were no "right-wing extremists" and that they weren't even the perpetrators. In fact, there hadn't been any perpetrators. It turned out, too, that Ermyas Mulugeta, pissed as a newt, had started a brawl and acquired his severe head injuries by falling and hitting the pavement.

An old German joke goes like this: "When I saw you coming, I thought it was you, then I thought it was your brother, and now you are close, I see it's neither you nor your brother."

Sadly, this is no joke.

Did the entire sordid affair teach anybody anything? Apparently not. Since then, a 15-year old boy has been expelled from his school on the strength of a hairdo that LOOKED "rightwing" and other coloured victims of violence did not become darlings of a depraved and rotten-to-the-core media, because in their cases the perpetrators had been youths "with a migration background".

No, the case of Ermyas Mulugeta did NOT teach a lesson indeed. Recently, the local court in Potsdam convicted him of defraud and imposed a fine of some hundred Euro on him. He had lied about his financial circumstances to get legal aid. To pay for the legal charges and to help Mulugeta to get over his traumatic experience, the organisation "Brandenburg Against The Right" (Brandenburg gegen Rechts) had collected about 50,000 Euro. And in an, otherwise amazingly subdued, media, the man from Ethiopia is still described as a "victim of violence".

Cross-posted at Roncesvalles.