GERMANY PERSPECTIVE

Berlin reads Belfast through the heavy filter of its own history, and the vocabulary is blunt. The German press speaks of a 'racist pogrom' — the word, taken from MP Claire Hanna, leader of the social-democratic SDLP, recurs again and again. The editorials are among the harshest in the pool: a 'barbaric snapshot' of 2026 Europe, where 'men went house to house looking for foreigners,' where a masked mob torched a 'Middle East' supermarket, a bus and homes, forcing residents to flee 'sometimes with babies in their arms.' The German press, like the French, clearly names the agitators: Tommy Robinson and above all Elon Musk, whose call to protest 'repeatedly and loudly' is quoted explicitly. But the German framing adds a moral dimension: this violence 'connects the night in the Northern Irish capital to a dark past,' and the radicalization of European immigration politics is named as the root cause. The double condemnation is constant: the knife attack is 'cruel,' but the mob's reaction is 'no less barbaric.' For Germany, haunted by the memory of pogroms, naming the thing this way is not exaggeration but duty.