Just "Local Residents"?

 „After the repreated racist outbreaks of violence and hate against refugees, politicians, and journalists in Bautzen it needs to be stated that not only the Saxon police has failed – representatives of the media also do not always fulfil their task of informative reporting,“ criticises Dominic Heilig, member of the executive board of DIE LINKE:
 
Police in Saxony today announced that it „has been quiet in the last night“ in Bautzen; and adds coyly that merely 350 people gathered at the town centre's market in the evening. „Obviously“, say agencies, those persons were „rightwing extremists“. Other reports, uncritically copied, speak in this context naively of „local residents“. The picture painted here can be thus summarised: local residents against foreigners! On one side the „citizens“ and on the other „refugees“ or – as well informed sources say – antifascists and antiracists having come from „Leipzig and Dresden“.
 
Five years after the self-exposure of the nazi terrorgroup NSU, whose safe haven famously was Saxony, nothing is left from the assertion „We have learned out of the NSU murders“. The belittling depiction of organised rightwing extremists as „local residents“ is dangerous and is supposed to colour all those as civic who do not have anything civic or democratic about them.

It is high time that state institutions in Saxony finally perform their task to offensively proceed against racists and rightwing extremists. And it is high time that representatives of the media as well rethink and once again take up their heaviest weapon: information and an according language.