Award-winning: Ronya Othmann
Photo: dpa/Jörg Carstensen
The award-winning poet, author and columnist Ronya Othmann was actually supposed to present her debut novel “The Summers,” recently translated into English, at the Karachi Literature Festival in Pakistan in the next few days. But nothing comes of it. She was unloaded again and had to leave her hotel and the country for security reasons after threats, as she announced on the news service X (formerly Twitter).
Over 400 signatories had previously called for Othmann’s participation to be canceled in an open letter. Among other things, she is accused of representing “racist, Zionist and Islamophobic” positions. The authors of the open letter cite, among other things, Othmann’s condemnation of the anti-Semitic massacre by Hamas on October 7th as arguments. They describe Othmann’s position that the Islamists use Gaza’s civilian population as human shields as a “racist and deeply dehumanizing Israeli narrative.” The authors of the letter also reject the fact that Othmann places Hamas ideologically close to the so-called Islamic State and does not want the massacre of the Israeli civilian population to be seen as “self-defense.” In doing so, they trivialize the dimension of sexual violence in the wake of the Islamist attack. The authors, on the other hand, are not only calling for “a boycott of Israeli products,” but also of “Zionists.”
For years, 31-year-old Othmann has been considered a committed feminist voice against Islamism and in the fight against anti-Semitism. She was born in Munich in 1993 to a Kurdish-Ezidi father and a German mother. Her texts are, among other things, about the IS genocide against the Ezidis in 2014. The Leipzig native is currently writing the column “Import Export” for the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung”. After the cancellation, she received support from, among others, journalist and author Hasnain Kazim, who withdrew his participation in the literature festival, as he announced on the X platform.
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