Opinion: In the case of Gil Ofarim, everyone should keep calm

opinion

On October 4, the musician Gil Ofarim made allegations of anti-Semitism against employees of a Leipzig hotel – and with a video posted on the Internet triggered a wave of outrage directed against the hotel and the employee in question. Now, a good six months later, the public prosecutor’s office in Leipzig is bringing charges – against the artist himself. After extensive investigations, they accuse Ofarim of false suspicion and defamation.

And what happens? As soon as the accusation became public, Saxony’s Prime Minister spoke up, including with this statement: “Gil #Ofarim not only discredited the employee, the hotel, the city & #Saxony, but also caused damage to the Jewish community D. At least what can be expected now is an apology, even from those who jumped to their conclusions.”

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First hotel employees prejudiced, now Gil Ofarim

Now the Prime Minister is doing exactly what he accuses others of with the last half-sentence. You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that there is a world of difference between indictment and conviction – especially since the Leipzig Regional Court has not even decided whether there will be a trial. Only a possible trial would perhaps allow the public to form an approximate judgment about what exactly happened in the hotel lobby.

According to the hotel “The Westin”, the employee accused in the video was massively threatened personally and on social media. The prejudices that the hotel staff had to endure were bad. The fact that Ofarim has deactivated his Instagram account gives an idea of ​​what is now happening to him on social media. So now the wave of indignation is apparently sloshing in the other direction. Those who accused Ofarim of lying from the outset may now follow with malice.

A mistake – also by the media

The case of Ofarim is a perfect example of a mechanism that we, the media, are not always immune to. A suspected serious incident is used as a reason for hasty judgments without the facts being clearly established. Massive postings, tweets and likes set a spiral of indignation in motion that drowns out any cautious doubts. As a result, we editors are sometimes much too quick to sacrifice the so-called journalistic duty of care to the volume of the discussion. The same applies to politics – see Kretschmer – by the way. Politicians also tend to exploit such excitement to get their own political message out to the people. This rarely helps to find the truth.

Of course, anti-Semitism is a topic that is particularly outrageous in Germany. And Prime Minister Kretschmer definitely wants to avert further damage to his state and its reputation. But demanding an apology from Ofarim at this point, as if he’s already been convicted of lying, overshoots the mark just like witch-hunting the hotel employee before. The fact is: Ultimately, none of us know what happened in October 2021 in front of and in the hotel in Leipzig. It is for the court to decide. Until then, the following applies: keep calm and wait for the possible process. Then we’ll see who has to apologize to whom.