How to Stage a Political Assassination: The Neukölln Attack That Never Happened

In November, Hudhaifa Al-Mashhadani, the principal of an Arabic-language school in Neukölln, announced on Facebook that he had been the victim of a targeted attack on the U-Bahn. He claimed that a pro-Palestinian attacker had tried to kill him, pushing him in front of an incoming train. The story drew condemnation from Berlin's mayor and civic honours from the senate.

Four months later, journalist Yossi Bartal co-authored a taz investigation into the incident — and found that Al-Mashhadani's account didn't line up. The piece pointed to the educator's fabricated résumé, and was followed by Tagesspiegel publishing BVG surveillance footage showing that the attack Al-Mashhadani had claimed never took place.

That case would be remarkable enough in isolation. But it has since been followed by a strikingly similar incident in neighbouring Brandenburg, where antisemitism commissioner Andreas Büttner reported an arson attack on his property, complete with Hamas red triangles spray painted on his door. The suspected perpetrators turned out to be his own friends — young men with whom he had shared a hotel stay, attended the opera, and exchanged WhatsApp messages about how to raise his profile as a candidate for the soon-to-be-vacant federal antisemitism commissioner role. Antisemitic violence appears to be of such high concern that when it doesn't occur, some feel compelled to invent it.

HEIST spoke to Bartal about how he broke the Al-Mashhadani story, the failures of German media reporting, and what it means that the country's obsession with antisemitism has such little regard for its own purported aims: the actual lived experience of Jews in Berlin.