Oktoberfest, Skinheads and Islamophobia

Exactly twenty years ago this month, I visited Germany for the first time. As a 19 year old university Junior on my semester abroad in the international city of >Geneva, Switzerland, the allure of a week-end jaunt to Munich with some friends for a stint at the Hofbrau Haus tent was too “educational” to pass up. It was to be far more enlightening than I ever imagined.

In many ways, the fair itself was a kitschy display of Germania, much like an Independence Day picnic with fireworks or even Thanksgiving in the U.S. People were happy, drunk and stuffing brats in their mouths with great strength.

Coming to Germany offered a momentary tilt of the head as I considered the history my family had in and with Germany during the last world war, however I was 19 and this was going to be a blast. A huge party.

The party was pounding. We raised our enormous beer steins to the sky and shouted the drinking songs with the rest of the happy people, consuming more beer than I choose to remember. We met up with several more folks from our college who had the same idea for a free week-end in Europe and the group of us stood on a picnic table and fit right in.

Some other folks began to huddle around us as we were becoming rather rowdy, sharing our Colgate party skills with the rest of the world. Before I knew it, some of the onlookers were now participants, standing up there on the table with us, their steins raised and their cheeks flushed. A few of these new friends were even more aggressive than we were. Black jackets, tall black boots and white T-shirts. One of the guys, sporting a blond crew cut and a faded tattoo on his neck, was particularly interested in my friend Haroon. He kept on clinking steins with him and wanted to talk rather than simply laugh and drink.

“Where are you from, my friend?” he asked.
Haroon was a very proud son of his country, and shouted “I’m from Pakistan!” with passion and a requisite raise of his beer.
The gentleman began a rant about how the Moslems were taking over his country, living off of his taxes and taking his jobs. He was what many of us commonly refer to as a buzz kill. We just didn’t realize soon enough that he would actually try to kill the buzz for real.

Somewhere during the rant, Haroon offered the sensible recommendation that our new friend go fuck himself. I saw the now empty stein sail past me and land on Haroon’s temple in a moment that I replay from time to time when I think about how important it is for me to remain sharp and alert in most situations. The assailant was disappointed that my tall, robust friend did not fall with the first blow, smashed his huge glass (I know, really?) stein on the edge of the table and proceeded to stab him in the head.

There were, of course, other branches to this conflagration that occurred simultaneously. Our rugby friends from school took on the other two skinheads while Haroon and I were left with the chief assailant. For the first time in my life, I jumped into a real fight. It all happened quickly, but I tried to stop the shard of glass from hitting Haroon with my bare hand which was in turn, mangled with glass and blood. Ouch. Haroon was pummeled unconscious before the police reached us and I had managed to kick the skinhead off the table.

In a surreal turn of events, the German Red Cross threw all of us in the same ambulance as we raced to the hospital. The skinhead managed to cut himself with his own weapon and he sat in the front with the ambulance driver as I sat with Haroon in the back, my hand wrapped in a blood soaked napkin while Haroon lay unconscious beside me, his head wrapped in stained gauze. The idiot in the front tried to apologize for hurting me, noting that his only beef was with the half dead Pakistani. I decided to leave the part of my being Jewish out of the dialogue, but still managed to repeat Haroon’s previous recommendation.

Haroon received over 100 stitches that night and I came out with ten. We were very sober, very quickly. It was a turning point for me. At nineteen, I discovered that I would fight for a friend and that I would also put myself in harms way when I believe in something bigger than myself. It was huge. The scars remain on my hand to this day as a reminder.

I was reading Pepe Escabar’s article on Islamophobia on AlterNet and I couldn’t help but remember the skinhead who tried to kill my Muslim friend and left us both scarred. Angela Merkel suggestion that immigration is prejudicial to the German economy reminded me of a twisted double standard that is true not only in Europe but in my own country. The belief that letting other ethnicities inside our “pure” culture in order to work in jobs that we tend not to want to do is somehow a compromise to the homogeneous bubble we enjoy is not only farcical but is dangerous to the immigrants we welcome as well as the hosts that open the doors.

I always think of the pride in Haroon’s voice when he lifted his stein and shouted “Pakistan!” when I consider the danger of nationalism. Just a few degrees past pride lives extremism. A notch above that floats terrorism. We must find a way to reconcile the global culture that is rapidly enveloping us all with the onset of technology and the stale, limiting belief that we are still one nation under God.