Many consider Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck to be the green party. But there is also a hard ideological core, as the nomination of activist Ferda Ataman for anti-discrimination officer shows.
There are milieus that are easy for a reporter to explore, and there are others that require patience and nerves of steel. A simple milieu is that of politics. Usually a call is enough and you have an appointment. If the result is not as expected, the politician may threaten to refuse contact in the future. Even then, he often doesn’t last long.
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A definitely difficult, if not to say hermetic milieu are extended Arab families. Clan people are extremely suspicious. The business that they do to earn their money already entails that. They’re also not very lenient when it comes to bad press. Anyone who sets out as a reporter to describe life in the clan world should take out proper life insurance in good time.
I always had a lot of respect for my colleague at “Spiegel TV”, Thomas Heise. I hardly know a more fearless reporter. Heise interviewed rockers and drug lords. His reportage on the power of the clans is the best documentary I know about the inner workings of the extended criminal families. I don’t know how he does it, but you get to see things that are only second- or third-hand elsewhere.
A year and a half ago, Heise and his team received an award for their reporting. However, not the kind of award you might be thinking of now, but a warning. The “Neue Deutsche Medienmacher*innen”, an association for the promotion of migrant concerns, awarded him the “Golden Potato”, a negative award for “particularly underground reporting”.
The “Spiegel TV” reports about clan crime are “stigmatizing and racist” and thus promote reservations against people of Arab origin, it was said in justification. In addition, statements by police officers were accepted uncritically and the investigators were accompanied without distance. Which is considered to be a breach of taboo when even the mention of a shisha bar in the wrong context is evidence of the prejudice structure of German journalism.
The matter is important again because the federal government wants to make the long-standing chairwoman of the “New German Media Makers”, Ferda Ataman, Commissioner for Anti-Discrimination. Or to be more precise: to the “Independent Federal Commissioner for Anti-Discrimination”. This is no small matter. The Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency employs 34 people and has an annual budget of 5.1 million euros. You can make many followers happy with this.
The Greens are in the polls at 23 percent. Many people see Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock and say: reasonable people. I recently heard myself say at an economic congress in Erfurt that the economics minister was doing a great job. Be careful what you wish for. Behind Robert and Annalena are many party members who have ideas about the restructuring of this society that only partially correspond to those of the majority.
In fact, the Green Party still has a hard ideological core. She’s smart enough not to show him too clearly right now. Only sometimes does it come to the fore, as now with the nomination of Ferda Ataman for anti-discrimination officer. The personnel proposal is an idea of the new Green family minister, who is giving something like her debut.
I know Ferda Ataman from “Spiegel”. We were fellow columnists for a while, until the editor-in-chief took the column away from her because there was simply too much nonsense in it. She would have loved to keep going, but she just couldn’t. I thought about writing about her at all. On the other hand: if I keep everyone I know out of my texts, I can close up shop.
Ataman is proof that you can get far with other people’s guilty conscience. In the meantime, she has even founded a company that advises companies on how to “manage diversity”, as it is called in modern German. The company calls itself the “Diversity Cartel”. According to the website, she has already advised Nivea, RTL, the city of Cologne and Bayerischer Rundfunk.
I admired anyone who had an idea and built a business around it. However, my admiration would be even greater if government funds were not constantly used. Two years ago, the “Welt am Sonntag” totaled the federal funds that had flowed to the “New German Media Makers” and came up with over one million euros for 2020 from the budget of the Chancellery alone.
The Ministry of the Interior was also there as a sponsor, i.e. the Ministry whose then head Horst Seehofer had accused the club chairman of blood and soil ideology because he showed too much joy in the concept of home for her liking, an accusation which in turn prompted Seehofer to staying away from an integration summit where he was supposed to meet Ataman.
I’ve known Seehofer even longer than Ataman. The man is really not made with the little finger. If he cancels his participation in an event, it is because, exceptionally, a limit has been crossed for him. But hey, why so sensitive, they say when one’s snapped. It wasn’t meant like that, of course, wink, wink, also not meant in an insulting way when one calls Germans potatoes.
A few days ago Ataman deleted all traces on Twitter. Apparently she herself was of the opinion that her old life is in such a blatant contradiction to the new task that she should better hide it from the public. Anyone who goes to their account today only sees harmless entries such as congratulations on the nomination.
Among the tweets that are no longer displayed is the assessment that German society is so corrupt at heart that doctors would select against migrants. Literally, Ataman wrote at the beginning of the pandemic: “I kind of have an idea which population groups will be treated first in hospitals when ventilators become scarce.”
This is not a blip as one might think. It is an expression of a world view that also forms the basis of the associated business model. According to this, German society is so permeated by discrimination that the problem can no longer be solved with normal means. It takes positive discrimination, i.e. quotas and government countermeasures, to end a laborious process with a truly equal society.
Of course, not every migration background counts in order to be counted among the group of those to be funded, but only the membership of a group that is considered to be “marked as racist”, as that is called – which would mean that everyone who is Polish or Danish or have a French grandmother.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against activism. Everyone fights for their concerns as best they can: the friends of gender-neutral topless bathing in the German outdoor pool as well as the advocates of gender language or the representatives of the migrant cause. My only doubt is that someone who thinks every representative of mainstream society is at risk of racism is the right person to head a federally funded counseling center.
After all, no one would think of making someone like me an independent representative for social balance and understanding. And if, say, the Minister of Justice came around the corner with this idea, everyone would be laughing, and rightly so.
The readers love him or hate him, Jan Fleischhauer is indifferent to the least. You only have to look at the comments on his columns to get an idea of how much people are moved by what he writes. He was at SPIEGEL for 30 years, and at the beginning of August 2019 he switched to FOCUS as a columnist.
Fleischhauer himself sees his task as giving voice to a world view that he believes is underrepresented in the German media. So when in doubt, against the herd instinct, commonplaces and stereotypes. His texts are always amusing – perhaps it is this fact that provokes his opponents the most.
You can write to our author: By email to j.fleischhauer@focus-magazin.de or on Twitter @janfleischhauer.
