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Stefan Buchen* - (Qantara website) 01/22/2022
Germany's new Islamic dawn
German broadcaster Constantin Schreiber's cheap novel addresses fears and provokes hatred by warning against Muslims taking control of Germany, according to German journalist Stefan Buchen.
* * In fact, one should not waste a single second reading this book. However, the author's social standing and fame are sufficient reasons to do so. Konstantin Schreiber is the presenter of the German public television news bulletin "Tageschau".
Since the beginning of 2021, Schreiber has been one of the handpicked broadcasters to present the 8pm news, the most followed news bulletin in Germany. Which simply means that Schreiber has become a celebrity.
Thus, it is not surprising that this fame contributed to the increase in the sales of his novel "The Candidate".
Unlike his previous two non-fiction books, Inside Islam and Children of the Qur’an, in which Schreiber presented his ideas clearly and without equivocation, this time he had to invent a story to write a novel about Islam.
There is no doubt that Schreiber received all the help in this from the French writer, Michel Welbeck, who painted in his novel “The Surrender” a picture of a future reality in which the rule of the French Republic will be transferred to a Muslim president.
However, although Schreiber tried to minimize the influence of Welbeck's novel on his own, the similarities between the two stories are unmistakable. “The Broadcaster” transferred the spatial framework of his novel to Germany, where the protagonist of the novel is a Muslim woman running for the chancellorship in the country.
Muslim woman as a sign of diversity
According to Mr. Schreiber's future predictions, Sabah Hussein, the candidate of the "Environmental Party", is the most likely candidate to win the elections to become the next German chancellor.
According to this future scenario, the “advantages of cultural diversity” will be the trump card in Germany 15 years from today.
This is what Sabah Hussein will use without hesitation when she uses her cultural diversity advantage (being a Muslim woman) to move up the career ladder and move up the ranks of German society. Even though she removed her veil before, she is still a devoted follower of the Qur'an.
We see her secretly meeting an imam in the Neukölln district (a Berlin district characterized by a heavy presence of Arab and Muslim communities) in search of advice. While her male siblings are active in organized crime families, she works to keep it under wraps.
During a business trip to Lebanon, Sabah Hussein visits a refugee camp, the German government has decided to grant asylum to five thousand of its residents every month. But Sabah Hussein aspires to raise that monthly quota to ten thousand, because the immigration of Muslims to Germany will enhance its electoral chances.
The majority of immigrants will be young people whose electoral weight is inflated by the electoral law; Every person who has reached the age of sixteen with a residence permit has the right to vote.
According to the intimidation scenario that Schreiber depicts in his novel, on the other hand, Germans who are over the age of seventy are not entitled to vote.
The novel depicts Germany - to which Sabah Hussein came as a refugee girl and rose to the top of the social ladder - as a paradise for Muslims, where comprehensive quotas systems prevail to favor Muslims in the labor market.
These regulations require private institutions that a quarter of their employees be observant Muslims. In the event of non-compliance with these quotas, employees who do not have the “plurality privileges” can be dismissed within a maximum period of six weeks.
The quota system includes facilities for other groups with “pluralistic advantages,” such as people of “non-white skin,” homosexuals, and women. During a demonstration by the Environmental Party, we see a young man calling the demonstrators through the microphone: “Do you want a policy of absolute pluralism?” The crowd responds with an expected answer: “Yes, we would like it!”
There is no sign of satire in the novel
Sabah Hussein reiterates, in a press interview, that her party intends to impose a comprehensive policy of diversity, in order to ward off any misunderstanding that might arise towards it, commenting that, if she wins the chancellorship, she will work to complete her party's achievements in this field.
And while privileged white German neighborhoods - such as those on the Elbe in Hamburg - continue to fall into their own hands, the Muslim candidate for chancellor aims to settle immigrants in these affluent neighborhoods, and has a clear vision of how to fund such programs. Governmental: by imposing a "tax on eggs".
There is no ironic or satirical tone permeated in this poor, uninterpretable text. It embodies the vision of the author of From Within Islam for the future.
Schreiber had indicated in articles published to coincide with the release of the novel that he wanted to lay out a vision for the development of the current situation in the future, and that he relied on facts and discussions taking place with unquestionable honesty, as the news anchor Mr. Schreiber claims.
Hamburg-based Hoffmann und Kamph Publishing announced the release of the novel with a press release stating the following: “(The Candidate) is a daring novel with political explosive power and a piercing future vision.”
Hoffmann und Kamph did not answer questions about whether the publishing house had reservations about publishing the novel, due to the poor literary text, to name a few.
The publishing house and the writer alike know that they can cite “literary imagination” as an excuse if necessary, arguing that this novel is above all just a fiction that elevates it and will not be a work of art.
As a preemptive move, Schreiber confided in interviews that he may have "over-described" some of the events, and that the book had some ironic touches in it.
Islamization through the back door
But the veil of fantasy in the novel is so thin that it cannot hide what is behind it. It is easy to look through and see Islamization creeping into all aspects of life in Germany.
In the tenth chapter of the novel, men who are not from the police and who bear characteristics of “cultural diversity” block the streets of Berlin’s Neukölln district every Friday, in order to enable residents to pray in the street and not to mix across the lines separating the two halves of the road.
Here, Schreiber, who is an expert in the subtleties of the Islamic religion, does not miss the opportunity to point out with all scientific honesty that the worshipers “turn their faces towards the Kaaba in the Grand Mosque in Mecca.”
Blocking the way for the Islamists to seize power in Germany
But a policewoman from the German Federal Police gets fed up with what is happening and fires her rifle at Sabah Hussein, causing her serious injuries.
The attacker, a "blonde German woman from eastern Germany", claims that many of her colleagues in the police force share her opinion, "they understood, as she did, the games played by politicians."
The accused admitted in court that she had committed the attack. When the public prosecutor asked her why she had shot Sabah Hussein, he explained: "I wanted to block the path to the ascension of an Islamic activist to power in Germany."
The accused continues to justify her position before the court: “Why does the Christian party stand motionless in the face of what is happening? Why are German youth active in defending the veil, Islamic school quotas, more mosques and minarets, and in order to bring in more Muslim immigrants? We are heading into the abyss. The point of all this is not diversity, no, but domination of our country!”
But Denise Stein, the blonde accused, was not so lucky. The judge assigned to look into the case was a Muslim wearing a black headscarf over the judges' black robe, making her look like an "Iranian woman wearing a chador."
However, the authorities reject the defendant's petition to replace the Muslim judge, arguing that she is not impartial. The court decided that this judge, with her Muslim background, is the perfect person to take up a case that revolves around “racism and an unequivocal hate crime.” Then the accused is sentenced to conviction, while the heroine of the story recovers from her injury.
The tale ends a few moments before the election result is announced in the evening. The candidate for the position of chancellor spends her time praying until 6 pm on a carpet that she spreads on the floor of her office. Sabah Hussein chose the words she would say if she won the elections: “The dawn of a new Germany has come.”
One wonders about the credibility of the white-skinned Mr. news anchor who works on the most important German news programme, in his “critical” handling of the excesses of cultural diversity politics. But this is really secondary.
From a historical literary perspective, his “candidate” novel is nothing more than a continuation of a genre of cheap novels that was very popular in the twenties and thirties of the last century, which at that time also addressed the fears of the masses and ignited the fire of hatred within them, warning them of “others taking control of our country.”
This was what was overlooked by press reports that dealt with the novel. Several serious media outlets presented the book positively, such as the Berliner Tagesspiegel and Hamburger Abendblatt from Hamburg, while the Zeit, Welt and Berliner Zeitung all published interviews with the author of the novel.
This is not surprising; The marketing machine is going well, and stories about the alleged impending collapse of Western countries boost sales. At the same time, Konstantin Schreiber asserts that all he aims at is to invite readers to reflect and reflect, adding that his novel is in fact a wake-up call in the face of right-wing extremism. Absolutely.
*Translated from German by Suhaib Zammal for the “Qantara” website.* Stefan Buchen is a journalist working with the television magazine “Panorama” for the first German public channel.