Egypt, Arab world anxious for Marwa killer's verdict

CAIRO: Egyptians are waiting anxiously for a verdict to be delivered by a Dresden court in the killing of a pregnant Egyptian woman in July. Marwa el-Sherbini's killing sparked massive outrage across Egypt and the Arab world after Western media failed to report on the killing until anti-German statements were yelled at an Alexandria demonstration days after the pregnant woman was knifed down inside the German courtroom.
Prosecutors are seeking a life sentence for Alex Wiens, 28, who murdered the woman after a judge had fined him 750 euros for racist comments on a playground where she had been watching her three-year-old son.
The German man – he is a German citizen of Russian ethnicity – has confessed to killing the woman, who has been dubbed the “veiled martyr” by Arabic media.
“It is true that I am hostile to foreigners but that was not the motive,” Wiens said in a statement read by one of his lawyers on November 4.
Prosecutors, including an Egyptian delegation from Cairo's Lawyers Syndicate, have said that the man was driven “by a pronounced hatred of non-Europeans and Muslims.”
Sherbini was killed only minutes after winning a court case against the man for defaming her after he had called her a “terrorist” and demanded she return home on a Dresden playground.
(see also Bikya Masr's breaking scoop on Marwa's murder: “Egyptian woman stabbed to death in German as a result of veil”)
The murder stimulated a cultural battle between Europe and the Arab world, with a number of Arabs claiming the murder was part of a larger problem facing European society, namely, racism and hatred of Muslims and Arabs.
“We have seen that Europe is growing more and more conservative by the day, so the killing was a shocking example of what some people will do in order to try to make us go back to where they think we come from,” said 27-year-old German-born Hana Jabar. The Tunisian-German artist, who has lived her entire life in Berlin, says that there are undercurrents within society that are very hateful toward Arabs.
“They don’t realize that there are Christian Arabs, that many of us were born here and are German citizens. They fear what they don’t know,” she added.
(see also “Marwa: the symbol to gather people together”)
For el-Sherbini’s family, the tragic loss of their daughter led to a campaign against all things German. In Alexandria, local pharmacy’s called for a boycott of German products, but the movement drizzled out with little success.
In Europe, experts were quick to point to Egypt’s own problems with racism, arguing that they had no place to talk of Europeans failings while Africans and black people are “treated with such disregard it is appalling,” as one Geneva-based intellectual told Bikya Masr last summer.
(see also “Egypt: take care of own racism”)
But some Germans said that the cause behind the murder were well-founded within German, and European society. One student, who had traveled throughout the Middle East, said that it “is common in German press to downplay the existing racist and neo-fascist activities.”
(see also “German student reacts to Marwa’s murder: Racist murder in Dresden”)
One of the main factors that caused much angst among Egyptians and Arabs was the international media’s apparent lack of attention given to the murder. It was not until the anti-German chants began at the Alexandria protest days after the killing that major news networks began following the story. By then, it was too late, with Egyptians demanding a reason for what they called the “double standards” of Western news.
(see also “The West’s Marwa coverage: anti-Islam bias”)
“If it had been a Chrstian white woman killed in an Egyptian courtroom, it would have been the lead story, then there would have been a discussion of how the Middle East hates America and the West, but in this case, there was nothing until a few Egyptians chanted against Germany,” said one Egyptian activist at the time, who was participating in the protests at German government buildings in Egypt.
In the end, the back and forth war of words died down and the German judicial system took charge of the case, which left the vast majority of Arabs at ease, but the cultural friction created by the murder continues still, as media have once again put Marwa’s picture back in the limelight.
BM