In honour of the victims of the racist attack in Hanau, a prize was awarded for the first time this week. The award went to a rapper who is himself known for hate speech. Locally, this no one finds strange, apparently.
“The Irani and the Arabi are banned from Tel Aviv”, rapper Massiv sang in 2015. Phrases that sound like a violent fantasy against Israel also appear in the song, which the rapper recorded together with Sinan G.: “Bomb belt zelame”, “I’ll hijack a Boeing and shoot your family”.
In May 2021, the resident of Berlin made a further comparison, comparing the situation of the people in the Gaza Strip in an Instagram post to the Warsaw ghetto.
Not one year later, Massiv is holding a prize in his hands, awarded for “special commitment (…) against extremism and racism”: the Hamza Kenan Kurtovic Award. Only a metre or so away from the giant musician, the Federal Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser ( Social Democratic Party of Germany), smiles for the camera. She, too, has just received an award for her commitment. Earlier, Chancellor Olaf Scholz ( Social Democratic Party, SPD) had read out a greeting.
All this could seem strange. If the commemoration of the victims of the right-wing terror in Hanau had not become increasingly bizarre.
The prize was awarded for the first time on Tuesday. It is intended to honour Hamza Kenan Kurtovic and the eight other victims of the racially-motivated attack in Hanau on February 19, 2020 – and actually show “how important social commitment is for the fight against all extremism and racism”, according to the organisers.
Massiv, who accepted his award wearing a Palestine jersey, was honoured for his commitment to refugees.
What remained unnoticed was that the rapper was active in circles of known German Islamists in the past. This is proven by photos showing Massiv next to his long-time manager Ashraf Remmo and the leading Salafist Bilal Gümüs.
Gümüs, who was the head of the Koran distribution campaign “Read!”, has been in custody since February 2020 on charges of preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state. In 2013, he allegedly helped a 16-year-old to leave the country for the Syrian civil war, where he died fighting for an Islamist militia.
For Massiv, this was apparently an inspiration. In a song called “Verurteilt / Ich Wollte Nicht Nach Syrien” (Condemned / I didn’t want to go to Syria), Massiv rapped in 2015 about a 26-year-old Quran distributor named Bilal: “They insinuated that I was one of ISIS. I serve God, my heart is pure.” In other songs, he played with the terror image, calling himself a “top ten terrorist”, for example.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior stated on request that Faeser had not known who would be honoured next to her before the award ceremony. Faeser had received the award “because of her commitment against racism and her close solidarity with the victims of the right-wing extremist attack in Hanau”.
The prize was awarded by C&E Bildung und Sport, a non-profit limited company. One of its directors is Ernes Erko Kalac, former integration ambassador of the German Olympic Sports Confederation and holder of the Federal Cross of Merit since 2021.
Among the 14 award winners are former German President Christian Wulff, comedian Enissa Amani, the football club Eintracht Frankfurt and professional boxer Zeina Nassar.
They were chosen by a jury of twelve members, including Hamza Kurtovic’s family, ex-DFB team manager Rudi Völler, ZDF presenter Dunya Hayali and Aiman Mazyek, Chairman of the Central Council of Muslims. Behind the scenes, however, the influencer Tarek Baé was apparently also involved in organising the event.
Baé calls himself a journalist and worked in the past for the think tank Seta, which according to the German government is close to Erdogan’s AKP party. On Instagram and Youtube, Baé expresses dubious theories on the subject of Islamism. In the past, he had run a Facebook account on which anti-Semitic conspiracy theories were also spread. Since an enquiry to Baé by the newspaper WELT in the summer of 2021, the account is no longer online.
On Twitter, Baé wrote that he had worked on the “award and it was a success”. Next year, he will also be part of the jury.
The official Hanau commemoration in February had already been instrumentalised by anti-Israeli groups and Turkish nationalists. While Interior Minister Faeser and Hessian Prime Minister Volker Bouffier (CDU) spoke at a memorial service in a Hanau cemetery, demonstrators in Berlin shouted “Yallah Intifada, from Hanau to Gaza”.
In addition, a dubious association of “Hanau associations and mosque communities” met at Hanau’s Heumarkt. The journalist Eren Güvercin criticised that it remained nebulous who these associations actually were. The suspicion persisted that mainly demonstrators from outside Hanau had come from the environment of the AKP lobby organisation UID.
The organiser was a man named Teyfik Özcan. Özcan is also a supporter of Erdogan and publicly denies the Armenian genocide. SPD leader Saskia Esken did not let this hinder her from speaking at the event – and from having her photo taken with initiator Özcan while having coffee.
Journalist Güvercin criticised at the time that stakeholders who preach anti-racism in Germany but support the “aggressive nationalist-identitarian power politics of the AKP-MHP in Turkey” are certainly concerned with many things – but not with racism and the commemoration of victims.