Hasnain Kazim
For Hasnain Kazim, a German journalist who worked for the newsmagazine Der Spiegel for a decade and is now an independent writer, receiving hate mail has been a constant, exhausting, longstanding part of life. Kazim was born and raised in a provincial German city by his parents who immigrated from Pakistan.
He has been receiving hate mail since his youth, long before he became a journalist. At age 17 he wrote a student article in a national newspaper, taking issue with a German legislator who had warned against Germany becoming overrun by migrants. Seven readers found the Kazim family’s home address and sent letters demanding that Hasnain Kazim leave Germany or, as a foreigner (sic), keep quiet. “I was shocked by those letters,” Kazim wrote.
They were only the start. Throughout his career as a journalist, readers have sent Kazim enraged, often violent and threatening messages, assuming because of his name and skin color that he is foreign and/or Muslim and therefore, in their view, has no business commenting on German affairs. In response to some articles he has received more than a thousand messages. Some pose questions and he responds, often at length.
Unlike most counterspeakers who respond just once to each piece of content, Kazim engages in some extended dialogues with readers. Sometimes he writes detailed letters, answering their questions and attempting to educate them on topics like hijab-wearing or freedom of speech.
Kazim has clearly reached and even convinced some of his readers. One, for example, sent contentious questions about the hijab. Kazim replied at length, writing that in his view it is wrong to use the headscarf as a symbol of freedom and tolerance, and also wrong to assume that women wear it because they are oppressed by men. “You can’t impose a state of mind by law,” Kazim offered later in his letter. “You have to take the arduous path of dialogue, of argumentation, of persuasion…We must seek discourse, debate, but with respect and in a reasonable tone.”
The reader replied, “I am honored that you took the time to write me in such detail! And your words have given me food for thought…I learned something! I have my problem with the headscarf, but you are right, one needs to look more closely and differentiate and seek dialogue. Rest assured that you have triggered something in me.”
At the beginning of 2016, at about the same time as Mina Dennert was moved to start counterspeaking by a surge in hateful content online in Sweden, Kazim made the decision to respond to as many pieces of hate mail as he could manage.
He doesn’t always write long letters, of course, and is sometimes irreverent, to put it mildly. “Humor is a way to cope with all the hate, to endure it, to bear it,” he writes. Also, “[i]deally, humor is also a weapon against hate mailers, namely when it succeeds in hitting them, unmasking them, or at least forcing them to think.” The one tone he never uses is what he calls “soft-washed marketing-speak” like “Oh, I can understand your annoyance” or “Of course I will take your suggestions into account.”
More than one reader demanded to know whether he eats pork, apparently considering that to be a reliable metric of German-ness. “No,” Kazim responded to one of them. “Only elephant (well done) and camel (bloody).”
When another reader inquired, “Do I understand correctly that you are against Islamism?” Kazim replied, “Yes, I am, except where radical militant veganism gains the upper hand. There, I’m counting on the Salafists to put a stop to it.”
“Salafists are supposed to stop this with violence?” replied the reader (exhibiting, it seems fair to note, an AI-level sense of humor).
“No, with salamis,” responded Kazim.
“Salami is pork, Mr. Kazim, you should know that! Salafists do not eat salamis!”
Kazim’s dialogues with his readers so entertained other Germans that when he published a book in 2018, compiling and commenting on his counterspeaking, it became a bestseller. The title (Post von KarlHeinz: Wütende Mails von richtigen Deutschen und was ich ihnen antworte, which means “Mail from KarlHeinz: Angry messages from authentic Germans and how I replied to them”) comes from the pseudonym used by a reader who sent Kazim an insulting note excoriating him for being “anti-German” and trying, as an ostensible foreigner, to “instruct us Germans.”
“Come to where I live and I’ll show you what a real German is!” Kazim was not only born and raised in a German town, he served as an officer in the German navy. Instead of noting any of that in his reply, he simply said he was delighted to accept the invitation, and would soon arrive with three of his four wives, eight children, 17 cousins, 22 of their children, and three goats – all in two large buses. “We are all very excited to learn from you what a ‘real German’ is!”
“Are you kidding me?!” responded the reader.
Kazim continued, “no, not at all, we are really near you and are very happy about your invitation!” Cookies and tea would be sufficient offerings from the host, he wrote, since Kazim and his family planned to grill the three goats they would bring. He requested only a garden hose for cleaning up.
The reader again wrote that Kazim was surely joking, and Kazim continued to insist that he would soon visit with his large family. Then the reader abruptly changed his tone. “I want to apologize for my first mail to you!!! I was not serious about coming to me, and yes I am often annoyed with you. But I reacted carelessly and did not mean it.”
Sometimes Kazim chooses not to reply at all (like many other counterspeakers), generally because he has received a violent threat. Instead he has reported some messages to the authorities for prosecution, and on other occasions when a sender included details of their job, whether brazenly or accidentally, he has reported them to their employer. He did the latter in August 2020, after Kazim was told in an email that he should "first be really fucked up, then slit open and hung up by [his] intestines"; that he was a "disgusting, dirty foreign parasite" who dared "to speak out against the proud German people".
The author, a sales representative at a German company, had sent the email from his work address. Kazim found his employer’s contact details and sent the content of the email to the company’s board. Some time later, he received a copy of the man’s resignation letter.
Kazim published many of the less violent messages he has received, with his replies and his own reflections on why he put so much time and thought into replying, in his book Post von Karlheinz. It is vital, he writes, not only to preach to the choir of people who are already agree with him but also to engage in dialogue with “the racists, the frustrated, and the angry.” He then published the exchanges, first on Facebook and then in books, to show the “larger unsuspecting public” how much “hatred, frustration, stupidity, ignorance, malice, baseness, contempt for people, intolerance, lack of decency, and lack of education there is.” Still, he hides the identities of the people who send him hate mail.
Since Post von Karlheinz, Kazim has published two other books related to counterspeech including Auf sie mit Gebrüll! … und mit guten Argumenten (Go at them with a roar!...and good arguments) and the satirical Mein Kalifat: Ein geheimes Tagebuch, wie ich das Abendland islamisierte und die Deutschen zu besseren Menschen machte (My Caliphate: A secret diary of how I Islamized the West and made the Germans better people).
