I almost felt sorry for Andreas N. How bad must the poor man have been that he gets into his car on New Year's Eve and drives in, resets and drives in again? A total of four times, in Bottrop and Essen. All Germany knows since the reporting on this case: Here it was a guy really dirty - unemployed, disadvantaged, mentally confused.

The new year is only a few days old, but already marked by discussions about violence: Bottrop, Essen, Amberg, Bremen. The handling of many politicians and the media thus shows that the deciding factor for how we classify an act of violence is less an act and a motive, but rather, who committed the act and who the victims are . For example, "foreigners" are of particular interest to us as perpetrators.

Case 1: Murder attack in Bottrop and Essen on New Year's Eve 2018/2019: Many media described this as "attack," auto-assassination "," car attack "or" amokfahrt "- the perpetrator was" a German ", his victims came almost exclusively from Syria and Afghanistan "Xenophobia", "hunting for foreigners" identified, but above all it was very quickly about his personal condition, he was "possibly mentally ill".

Case 2: Drunken adolescents beating passers-by on December 29 in Amberg: Many media called it "beating attacks", "spanking orgy", "violence-excesses", the perpetrators were four young asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Iran, the Victim: twelve injured, apparently arbitrarily selected. The motive was unknown, the perpetrators first of all knew that they were between 17 and 19 years old and drunk.

In both cases, similar keywords were used: attack and attack . Only in the first case the motif is known. And it is very crass. The goal: ethnic cleansing by murder. Andreas N. did not set out on any groups of people, he wanted to kill "Kanaken". Sometimes I have the impression that canakised people understand the subject more clearly than the rest of society in such cases .

Actually logical, because that's the idea of ​​terror: It scares those who it should scare. And the "auto-attack" was for us - the people who are stupidly subsumed as "strangers" in the presentation of the events. Stupid because Andreas N. would have been pretty much unimportant about how long the people living in Germany, he drove.

That's why many people rightly pointed out that this is not a xenophobic but a racist offense. But that too is actually too weak: racist crime sounds more like discrimination in the workplace. But if racists want to murder People of Color , that's terror.

That was an attack on our democracy - on the liberal democratic constitution. So how can it be that the adulterous adolescents are supposed to have concrete consequences for tougher deportation regulations, but hardly anything happens here? How can it be that a great debate about racism and its consequences did not occur? Three years ago, we talked for months about sexual assaults on New Year's Eve and even changed laws. But back then, the perpetrators were just foreigners. So politicians once again took care of more deportations - the panacea of ​​German domestic politics.

As in the case of Amberg, who only became a nationwide message because the perpetrators were refugees. And first nobody asked her mental state. Maybe they did not feel well either. Maybe they were too frustrated. Not that that would justify the violence, not at all, but in the case of the car terrorist, we eventually learned that very quickly. The only thing we knew about the whipping clique from Amberg in the first days of 2019 was age, origin and residence status.

Because of individual offenders!

The Federal Prosecutor's Office has decided in the case of Bottrop that this is not terrorism and does not fall within their competence. The Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer sees the similar. This is annoying because it is pure luck that Andreas N. in Bottrop and food killed no people.

And his message is by no means isolated and only every few years. The federal government recorded an average of four attacks a day on refugees in the first half of 2018. In 2017, the authorities registered 312 crimes against asylum shelters; for 2018, the final figures are not yet available. By October it was about 100.