Sep 10, 10:01 AM
The Postcolonial Absolution of Terror
A former German public broadcasting journalist relies on academic jargon to strip the October 7 massacre of its antisemitic intent.
When intellectual theory meets raw savagery, the results are rarely subtle. Former public broadcasting journalist Malcolm Ohanwe has managed to demonstrate the extreme acrobatics of postcolonial logic. In a recent Instagram post, the former RBB contributor undertook the task of absolving the October 7 atrocities of their obvious antisemitic character, reframing a barbaric attack as a clash over colonial real estate.
In Ohanwe’s accounting, the 364 young people murdered at the Nova music festival were not targeted because they were Jews, but simply because they were Israelis. By his reasoning, this distinction removes the massacre from the shadow of antisemitism entirely. He went a step further by stripping the victims of their innocence, suggesting that partying near the Gaza border made them guilty of colonialism.
This rationale represents the endpoint of a postcolonial dogma that has gained traction across German cultural institutions. By viewing complex history through a rigid lens of race, colonialism, and contemporary anti-racism jargon, real-world violence is conveniently reinterpreted. Ohanwe even attempted to link Nazi ideology to a postmodern concept of white supremacy, asserting that the Holocaust was a racial purge of an indigenous minority, whereas the slaughter of 1,200 people on October 7—the deadliest day for Jews since 1945—cannot be compared.
To complete the contortion, Ohanwe tied his commentary on Hamas to the rise of the AfD and German media reactions to the attacks. It requires a singular brand of ideological commitment to look at a terrorist group slaughtering civilians in kibbutzim and conclude that the primary subject for critique is Western colonial guilt.
That an individual holding such views was long platformed within German public media says less about Ohanwe himself than about the echo chambers nurtured within institutions like RBB. When moral clarity is traded for academic doctrine, atrocities are no longer condemned without reservation; they are merely recategorized. How far these intellectual gymnastics will be stretched before basic reality is acknowledged remains an open question.
Written by Freya Stensrud freya.stensrud@alpineweekly.com
