“School and police must now crack down on the perpetrators. There must be no further attacks. Even relativization have to be avoided,” said Pazderski on Sunday.
According to the police, the 16-year-old youth turned to the officials on Friday and said that classmates had been threatening him and his family for some time now. The reason for this was his father’s political work.
His dad, Gunnar Lindemann, had won the direct mandate in an East Berlin constituency in the election to the House of Representatives 2016.
Lindemann’s son called the police after three suspicious classmates aged 15, 16 and 18 years sent the threats via a text message service. The son had initially turned to the school management.
Lindemann told the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel that the classmates had threatened his son to “cut him up”. He trusted the police to do everything possible to find out how serious the threats were. “It is sad that even young people are so incited.”
Pazderski also blamed other parties and the media for the incident. “The incomprehensible incident shows that the excessive agitation against the AfD by old parties and media are completely out of control. Those who sow hatred against us want to harvest acts of violence.”
He said “old parties and the media have a duty to stop their hatred campaign against the AfD and prevent further escalation of violence.”
Also the spokesman of the education administration, Martin Klesmann, said they were alerted according to the news agency dpa. Education Senator Sandra Scheeres (SPD) was “very clear that no child may be held liable or threatened due to the political activities of his parents”. The school inspectorate will investigate the case.
In addition, the administration will in future focus more on measures against bullying. From next year there will be a separate anti-bullying officer as a contact person in the authority. In addition, by summer 2021 about 300 additional school social workers will be hired.
The Focus journalist Jan Fleischhauer pointed in his column on Saturday that voices in the mainstream media are openly calling for hatred against the AfD. Fleischhauer reported on such demands from Spiegel and Deutschlandfunk employees.
Last week, the Spiegel editor Hasnain Kazim on Twitter published a recommendation to cut off AfD voters. “It’s not about reaching AfD voters,” he wrote. “It’s about cutting them off, outlawing them, keeping them small, giving them a hard time, calling them to account for paving the way to power for neo-Nazis and racists.”
The day before, Deutschlandfunk published a piece in which the commentator asked his audience to develop more hatred for AfD supporters.
“We have to learn to hate again – and rightly so,” he recommended. “Anyone who believes that hate is generally a thing of the past also believes in the irreversibility of history and democratic civilization.”