German Left Party leader backs new attack on immigrants
By
Christoph Vandreier
28 February 2018
On Saturday, Left Party parliamentary leader Sahra Wagenknecht defended the decision of Essen Tafel to limit its food handouts to Germans. This puts her in the front ranks of the anti-refugee campaign that blames the social crisis in Germany on impoverished foreigners.
The Essen branch of the volunteer aid organization Tafel, which collects leftover food and distributes it to the needy, announced in December that it would register only German citizens at its issuing offices. The decision was implemented on January 10.
The chairman of Essen Tafel, Jörg Sartor, justified the discriminatory decision on openly xenophobic grounds. German pensioners were avoiding coming to get the handouts because foreigners had not behaved properly, he claimed. There was a “taker gene” among the Syrians and Russian Germans, Sartor told newsweekly Der Spiegel. Some would jostle and push, he said, and they lacked “a culture of queuing.”
While other branches of the Tafel organisation and representatives of many other relief organizations were outraged by the discrimination in Essen, a nasty campaign was started by the media and political circles to defend the preferential treatment being shown to those in need who have a German passport. The Left Party has now taken the lead in this xenophobic campaign.
In an interview with broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, Wagenknecht described the criticism of the decision in Essen, much of which had come from Tafel members, as a “moralized debate” that was “unduly hypocritical.” Although no one should starve, she said, certain groups were in a special position. “I would prefer,” she declared, “that people who live in Germany, some of whom have…