“Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 83 “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary Olivia Landry University of Pittsburgh abstract: Confronting Islamophobia as the “new racism” in the West, resistance narratives have reappropriated interpolated forms of “threat” projected onto Muslims. The supposed threat of Islam and the often-exaggerated panic it evokes offer critical points of subversion for Muslims to expose the prejudice and its devastating repercussions on matters of citizenship and belonging. Here the resistance narrative takes on rigorously methodological articulation in documentary film. Expanding on the definition of documentary as a powerful medium of documentation, authentication, and even performance, this article considers the political force of the 2010 documentary films Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited. In these two films, form and content intersect to provide salient protestations against Islamophobia in the West. Keywords: Islamophobia, documentary, Germany, Israel, immigration Panic is a visceral reaction, something that is elicited by the sensation of fear or threat, or a feeling of being unsure and overwhelmed. It inhibits our ability to think and reflect rationally and impairs our judgment. Panic is often “a result of ill-defined fears that eventually find a dramatic and oversimplified focus in one incident or stereotype, which then provides a visible symbol for discussion and debate” ( Jenkins qtd. in Introvigne 48). Thus, it is not entirely surprising that narratives of panic, especially moral panic, converge with Western narratives of exclusion and hate with regard to race and religion. A rhetoric of “us” versus “them” finds footing in the circulation of panic. Furthermore, as a potentially collective sensation, panic, like hate or fear, “ works to bind the imagined white subject and nation together ” (Ahmed 118, emphasis in the original). Yet distinct from hate and fear, panic’s effect is immediate and often exaggerated to the point of ludicrousness. As Massimo Introvigne points out, “a concept of ‘moral panic’ was developed to explain how social problems become ‘overconstructed’ 84 Olivia Landry and generate exaggerated fears” (47). In this way, panic has come to characterize a hyperbolized Western response to Islam, which is all too often packaged in a media-fed imaginary of radicalism, misogyny, homophobia, and even terrorism. Taking the affect of panic and its ascendency in discourses about Islam in the West as a jumping-off point, I propose an exploration of means and media of resistance. How do we resist panic? And what does this resistance look like? Although this study takes us to several different national and transnational contexts, the two main nations under inquiry are Germany and Israel. Within these national and cultural folds, I propose a turn to documentary film. Two 2010 films, Love During Wartime by Swedish filmmaker Gabriella Bier and Neukölln Unlimited by German and Italian filmmakers Dietmar Rasch and Agostino Imondi, render rich elucidations of how panic and Islamophobia intersect. By way of these films, the following looks at the political, aesthetic, and ontological capabilities of the medium of documentary as a viable articulation and performance of resistance against Islamophobia in Germany and Israel. I begin with a brief consideration of the resonance of the slogan “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic.” From there, I turn to the two films and consider their cultural politics. By doing this, we can begin to glean the overt as well as the subtle scenarios and narratives of Islamophobia that the films work to displace. In the second half of the essay I examine the aesthetic and ontological qualities of these documentaries that not only complement but also inhere in a politics of resistance. In more general terms, the international Muslim community has directly and subversively reappropriated the anticipated panic—at least in popular culture— to generate slogans, such as “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic” or “I’m Muslim, Don’t Panic.” Such evocative verbal gestures have been taken in different directions, both meditative and artistic. They offer a platform for religious avowal and community, as can be seen, for example, on the open Facebook page “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”; a source for artistic expression, such as for the hip-hop performance by the Turkish rap sensation Ceza and the Turkish-German DJ Volkan T. in their 2010 collaboration “Happy Vibrations—Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”; and a popular slogan for T-shirts and other apparel. More indirectly, though, this backlash can be detected in a number of media and performance pieces whose political and artistic aim is to subversively confront Islamophobia in the West and provide perspectives of how Western panic about Muslims continues to negatively affect the lives of many individuals and communities. Effectively, these slogans serve as a means of subverting the anticipated panic reaction of non-Muslims based on negative stereotypes about Islam and Muslims. As Fatima El-Tayeb comments in her study European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (2011), already in the 1990s there was “a moral panic discourse “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 85 around male migrant and Muslim youths as delinquent” (99). Although El-Tayeb is writing from a European perspective, this slightly earlier phenomenon offers a precursor to what has become a widespread, certainly Western, affective crisis of panic with a new focus on the Muslim male as (always) a potential or even presumed terrorist after September 11, 2001, and again, more recently, as a resurgence with the emergence of the terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Without downplaying the real threat of terrorism, the slogan “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic” aims to expose the ideologies that form as a result of both the abuse of Islam and the over-emotional political response to acts of terror that can serve irrational and harmful generalizations about all Muslims. Responding to Lauren Berlant’s provocative claim in her monograph Cruel Optimism (2011) that the “‘war on terror’ is a war on an emotion and a war on and through the senses” (243), “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic” calls for an intervention. Such a polemical intervention of Islamic or Muslim reappropriation of “panic” as an articulation of resistance can be compared in some ways with the earlier work of the activist group Kanak Attack, 1 which likewise reappropriated the derogatory term “Kanak,” used pejoratively against people of color and Muslims in Germany. The aggression expressed in the word “Attack” also subversively plays with popular misconceptions of violence and aggression in Muslim communities; however, “attack” was part of this group’s strategy of resistance, that is, to attack racism head-on. With verve for comically subversive and bitingly sarcastic approaches, Kanak Attack created a polemic around the “label of ‘inauthenticity’”; in other words, it combated the idea that Europeans of color and Muslims cannot possibly be “European” (El-Tayeb xlvi). While “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic” is only a slogan with no activist group connection, it has certainly come to represent a new kind of anti-discrimination movement in the West, that explicitly addresses Islamophobia. Distinct from the methods of Kanak Attack, I propose a mapping of resistance to panic against Muslims through authenticity. However, the quality of authenticity I refer to is unrelated to normative identity; instead, it pertains to a reality and proximity of experience. Such an experience becomes possible through documentary film, which as I seek to show avails itself as a rigorous medium for both articulating and substantiating narratives against Islamophobia. Resisting harmful mainstream attitudes of panic against Muslims plays out in the personal and intimate dramas of a mixed couple and a Muslim family whose everyday lives are negatively affected in the two films I analyze here. Documentary’s exceptional concern with tracing the intimate and the authentic mobilizes the necessary means of exploring these dramas as potentially political scenes of resistance. Indeed, the documentary is more than just a form of representation; it is also a powerful medium of performance, contemporaneous doc- 86 Olivia Landry umentation, and authentication. As Bill Nichols has established, the conventions of the documentary tradition of filmmaking, “such as voice-over commentary, location shooting, the use of nonactors engaged in their daily lives as people, and the exploration of social issues like global warming or social justice,” give it a powerful sense of authentic representation of the world (xiii-xiv). At the same time, however, documentary filmmaking also serves to record and archive the performance of the everyday in an act of preservation and subsequently dissemination. Documentary filmmaking thus critically troubles the distinctions between representation and reality, archive and repertoire, past and present. The important paradox of the documentary—its connection to reality and immediacy as well as its mechanism of recording—is what makes it such a compelling artistic and especially political tool. These medial processes gain traction when coupled with the personal narratives of resistance to Islamophobia explored in and through Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited. These two 2010 films are essentially about the challenges of immigration and asylum for Muslims. Their shared main setting is Germany; however, in the case of Love During Wartime this also extends to Israel and more peripherally to Austria. While none of the figures in these films are devoutly Muslim in a religious sense, Islam is a marker of cultural and even political heritage with which the figures not only identify but also from which they are (often negatively) identified by society around them. Unique in the ways in which they encounter, narrate, and ultimately confront their struggles with immigration and asylum, these two films similarly condense the concomitant valence of Islamophobia that has been fueled by an antagonistic sensorium of overwrought fears and anxiety about that which is unfamiliar and estranged. These films’ subsequent resistance to Islamophobia is diffused in the form of intimate narration of the everyday that draws the viewer in and engages through experiences that feel real and close. A lesser-known film in a long line of documentaries set amidst the Israel-Palestine conflict, Bier’s Love During Wartime takes a slightly different approach to charged discourses and reveals and documents the struggle of a Jewish Israeli woman and a Muslim Palestinian man as they fight for the right to live together as a married couple. In the wake of the Second Intifada in 2003, Israel passed a law banning Muslim Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining citizenship. For the Jewish Israeli, Jasmin Avissar, and the Muslim Palestinian, Osama “Assi” Zatar, featured in Bier’s documentary, this law is not only a violation of human rights but also an almost insurmountable obstacle to their love. Even in a period when love—and especially marriage—is still not a right enjoyed by all, the troubled story of Jasmin and Assi seems as though it were a Romeo and Juliet tale of yesteryear. While characterized more definitively, then, as a love story “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 87 than as a film about Middle-Eastern politics, Love During Wartime does serve as a political tool in the young couple’s struggle for the right to settle together in Israel and then in Germany—a struggle that lasts nearly seven years and is ultimately lost. Read politically, the film works through a number of vectors. On one level, it seeks to bring attention to both the political and the religious conflict between Israel and Palestine, which are distilled here in the issue of unjust citizenship laws in Israel. It may be added that subsequently in 2012, the Supreme Court of Israel moved to uphold the discriminatory citizenship law that bans Muslim Palestinians (from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) from obtaining citizenship in Israel. This struggle overlaps with Jasmin’s and Assi’s failed attempt to alternatively find permanent residence in Germany, the outcome of which is highly ambiguous. Contemporaneous and decidedly personal, the political register of Love During Wartime is suffused with the everyday of personal experience, love, and hardship. When the film was released it only ran in festivals and almost exclusively in the presence of the filmmaker, and often with Jasmin and Assi too. One event included the “Voicing Resistance” festival at Berlin-Kreuzberg’s Ballhaus Naunynstraße theater. 2 As part of this screening, the director and nonactors were present and personally answered questions about the film, framing the viewers’ experience of the film with an added sense of directness and authenticity. During the post-screening discussion, the art director of the theater at that time, Shermin Langhoff, praised the film for its authentic portrayal of the discrimination and tribulations experienced by so many Muslim immigrants and refugees who come to Germany. 3 Offering a slightly different narrative of struggle for the “right to reside” ( Bleiberecht ) in Germany, the second documentary film I consider here, Neukölln Unlimited, focuses on three siblings—Hassan, Lial, and Maradona Akkouch—from a larger Shiite Muslim family originally from northern Lebanon and presently living in Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood. The family fled to Germany in the late 1990s following the mass devastation of the Lebanese Civil War, subsequent militarized conflicts with Israel, and persisting religious tension between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. As the documentary shows, over ten years later, only the two elder siblings have temporary visas and the rest of the family is merely geduldet, and can be deported at any moment. This film demonstrates the urgent problems with the German asylum laws, which have garnered much attention in recent years around the ongoing wave of protests among asylum seekers and their supporters, such as activist organizations Pro Asyl and Kein Mensch ist illegal, referred to as “Refugee Tent Action.” 4 Beginning in June 2012, these protests spread to twelve cities in Germany and asylum seekers fled their Asylbewerberheime to protest the residence requirements, the labor ban, the lack of transparency of asylum procedures, and the long bureaucratic delays—all of 88 Olivia Landry which place asylum seekers in a precarious legal position and severely restrict their freedom of physical and social mobility. 5 Given this loaded contemporary context, Neukölln Unlimited decidedly resonates with a political movement of resistance to anti-immigration and anti-refugee discourses. At the same time, this resistance extends to a politics of anti-Islamophobia that is directly indicated in its visual symbolism. As I will discuss further, one of the main figures dons a T-shirt with the slogan “Don’t Panik, I’m Muslim” (sic) for much of the film. This same T-shirt can be seen on the film’s official poster, thus immediately visually linking the film to a criticism of panic against Muslims. Neukölln Unlimited unambivalently bears out the collusion of anti-immigration and Islamophobia movements in Germany, which I will examine at greater length. With explicit narratives about citizenship, Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited also emerge from and influence anti-Islamophobia movements. Questions of citizenship precipitate a discussion of the binaries of inclusion, and exclusion becomes inevitable. In the case of both films, it is clearly Muslims who are not only ideologically but also legally excluded. Within this context of the exclusion of Muslims from Israeli and German configurations of citizenship, I ask: How does panic against Muslims operate? And, moreover, what exactly do these films in their performance of the polemic “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic” seek to subvert? The mobilization of panic can be seen as a disproportionate reaction to the pervasive discriminatory misconception of “the Muslim,” especially Muslim men, as always a potential threat. Cemented in the figure of the terrorist, this discourse of threat has roots that date prior to 9 / 11 and America’s inundating war on terror. Already in 1972 with the Munich Olympics Massacre, the image of especially the Palestinian Muslim terrorist took shape in the Western imaginary. After 9 / 11, however, the panic mobilized by the potential threat of the Muslim male found its focal point. The war on terror zealously drew on processes of Othering and fetishizing the Muslim in visible terms, for example, often erringly, as the turbaned Sikh (Puar and Rai 117). More recently, however, the Muslim is broadly perceived (especially in Europe) as supposedly posing a direct threat to liberal secularism. Religion per se does not play a major role in Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited, yet Muslim identity and especially the racialized identity of the Muslim are treated here with acute awareness. Racialized identity is of course almost always an interpolated identity—that is, an identity for others. Frantz Fanon has defined this in Hegelian terms as the person of color’s “being-for-others” (1). That Muslim identity has also been relegated to an identity marker divorced from religious practice, attests to the inescapable presence of the discourses of Islam, Islamophobia, and anti-Islamophobia in these films. El-Tayeb “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 89 elucidates this phenomenon in the European context in the following way: “Islam at times appears as a signifier almost as empty as race, ascribing a combination of naturalized cultural attributes to ‘Muslims’ that has little to do with religious beliefs or even with being a believer. Instead, the trope of the Muslim as Other offers an apparently easy and unambiguous means to divide Europeans and migrants” (xxx). The Othering of the Muslim thus takes on a form of racialization insofar as it offers up an empty signifier for oversimplifying a complex identity and community as a means of classifying and “quarantining” the threat of Islam in the West. 6 Journalist Carolin Emcke has also written provocatively about the growing problem of Islamophobia in the West, which she calls a form of “liberal racism.” In her award-winning essay “Liberaler Rassismus,” she makes the insightful claim that: Muslime im Singular scheint es nicht mehr zu geben. […] Jeder einzelne Muslim wird verantwortlich gemacht für Suren, an die er nicht glaubt, für orthodoxe Dogmatiker, die er nicht kennt, für gewalttätige Terroristen, die er ablehnt, oder für brutale Regime in Ländern, aus denen er selbst geflohen ist. (Emcke) 7 A kind of liberal racism, Islamophobia has become racism in another form, or as some might say: “the new racism.” But as we observe in the narratives of Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited, this racism carries its own particular social, legal, and emotional weight. In Love During Wartime, Jasmin and Assi fight the Supreme Court of Israel in an attempt to appeal the Citizen and Entry into Israel Law (2003) that forbids Assi as a Palestinian from the West Bank to permanently reside in Israel despite his marriage to an Israeli citizen—a battle they eventually lose. This law extends to a number of other Muslim countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen. While religious affiliation is not explicitly a factor, Jews from these countries (including Palestine) could legally circumvent such a law as mandated by the Aliyah (Law of Return). In a voiceover, Assi remarks at the beginning of the film that Israel claims that it must protect its borders from (especially Palestinian) Muslim terrorists, but perhaps in reality Israel is simply afraid that if Israelis get used to seeing Palestinians, the racist, ideological construct of “the Palestinian Muslim” in Israel (read panic against Muslims) will be shattered and Israelis will have nothing to fear. It is a fact that many Israelis have never even seen a Palestinian (from the Palestinian Territories). Assi’s simple yet highly evocative comment is accompanied by the image of a cityscape (Ramallah) and, just beyond, Israel. The provenance of the gaze is from inside a stone building looking out through a notably tiny window of what appears to be an abandoned or bombed out building. Engendering a visceral effect of longing and confinement, this powerful verbal declaration of 90 Olivia Landry separation aligned with a visual demonstration of geographical proximity strikingly exemplifies the condition of stasis of so many Palestinians. The main setting of Love During Wartime is, however, Berlin, where Jasmin and eventually Assi both wait out their Israeli court case and attempt to alternatively find refuge. Yet immigration to Germany becomes comparably challenging and even more bureaucratically confounded. According to Article 116 Paragraph 2 of Germany’s constitution, as the daughter of a Jewish-German mother who fled Germany during the Second World War, Jasmin has the right to (re)claim the German citizenship taken from her mother as a result of Nazi Germany’s Gesetz über den Widerruf von Einbürgerungen und die Aberkennung der deutschen Staatsangehörigkeit (1993)� 8 But once the German Auslandsbehörde discover that Jasmin is married to a Palestinian, the process becomes infinitely more difficult. There is suddenly no longer any record of Jasmin’s mother’s German citizenship. In the meantime, Assi applies and waits for a visa to study in Germany—a wait that lasts over a year. Even when the couple is finally reunited in Berlin, life is not easy. Assi is not permitted to work, feels isolated, and experiences discrimination. Jasmin explains to their lawyer in Israel: “It is difficult for [Assi] there, to be a foreigner, a minority, to be unwanted. The way they treat Muslims and blacks in Germany is revolting. Racism is completely open. They are careful when it comes to Jews. They have been brought up not to talk badly about Jews” ( Love During Wartime ). In the last published report by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (2006), 9 there is evidence of increased Islamophobic tendencies in all European countries. In Germany alone, these range from violent attacks (consider the NSU murders in Germany, only uncovered in 2011) 10 to discrimination in postsecondary education opportunities and on the job market. Finally, the emergence of the high-profile Islamophobic / anti-immigration movement PEGIDA in late 2014 offers yet another instance of open displays of definitively mainstream discrimination against Muslims in Germany. 11 In some ways, the scholarship anticipates this movement. Writing in 2011, El-Tayeb argues that Islamophobia has been “justified with the supposed threat […] to the secular, liberal Europe” (90). One year earlier in 2010, Emcke writes that Islamophobia “ist zunehmend ungehemmt ins Zentrum des medialen mainstream gerückt” 12 (150, emphasis in the original). According to the European Agency for Fundamental Rights (2013), anti-Semitism more recently has also been on the rise in European countries (especially in Greece, Hungary, and France). 13 However, anti-Semitism in Germany is generally speaking less open and often ensconced in a “politically correct” anti-Israel discourse. Jasmin’s lawyer comments that at least in Germany there are no laws upholding discrimination, whereas the Citizen and Entry into Israel Law has been condemned by critics as Islamophobic in nature. In 2008 Amos “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 91 Schocken, the publisher of the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, referred to the law as a call for an apartheid state. By the same token, supporters of the law have hailed it as part of an effort to preserve the Jewish nature of Israel. But Germany remains soldered to a history of the Shoah. The memory and trauma of Germany’s not-so-distant National Socialist past is strongly embodied by Jasmin’s taciturn mother, a German Jew and refugee of the Holocaust, who found asylum as a young girl with her family in Israel. Now an Israeli citizen, she is still legally entitled to her dispossessed German citizenship and tries to assist the couple as much as possible. At one point in the film, she is shown very reluctantly and uncomfortably calling the German embassy to inquire about Assi’s study visa. For nearly another year, Jasmin and Assi temporally wait for their court case in Israel and for Jasmin’s German citizenship in Berlin. The film evidences this drawn-out frustration and the tedium of waiting in transit with myriad shots of Assi wandering aimlessly through Berlin, restlessly sitting or even lying alone in their modest apartment. By the end of the film and after nearly two years in Berlin, Jasmin has still not been granted citizenship and their appeal to the Supreme Court of Israel has been overturned. With a stroke of luck, however, Assi’s artistic endeavors secure him admittance into the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the couple moves to Austria. I hesitate to surmise that there is more artistic mobility in Austria, as its visa laws generally align with other countries in the Schengen zone. It is more likely that Assi’s admittance to the Academy of Fine Arts secured him a student visa. Like Neukölln Unlimited, Love During Wartime is also a film about contemporary German, and to a lesser extent, Austrian, society and politics that recasts the country’s relationship to its past and postulates the problem of institutionalized discrimination, especially against Muslims and people of color. Neukölln Unlimited tracks racism and Islamophobia in a comparatively gestural manner. The German asylum system is not portrayed as being explicitly discriminatory, but certainly the general attitude toward citizens sans papiers and especially asylum seekers is shown as dubious. Scenarios demonstrate the patronizing way in which social workers, police officers, teachers, and politicians speak to the Akkouch siblings. Hassan relates an experience he had in the Bundeskriminalamt where he went to give a statement. The receptionist there sent him away for fear that he—“so ein junger, kräftiger Typ aus Neukölln” ( Neukölln Unlimited )—might scare the defendant. Here and elsewhere, Fanon’s delineation of indirect racist behavior finds a context, for instance, in the form of condescension: “A white man talking to a person of color behaves exactly like a grown-up with a kid, simpering, murmuring, fussing, coddling” (15). This also extends to a brand of racism veiled in politically correct politeness. In an early 92 Olivia Landry scene in the utterly confusing Auslandsbehörde in Berlin the camera rests its focus on a sign that unapologetically states: “Wir helfen Ihnen bei der Rückkehr in Ihr Heimatland” ( Neukölln Unlimited, my emphasis). 14 German bureaucracy thus conceals its own anti-foreigner rhetoric in a verbal gesture of supposed generosity and support, as if it were a friend ready to help non-citizens to achieve their goals of returning to their “real homes.” This attitude that refugees are only temporarily residing in Germany and therefore should neither be treated as fellow citizens nor be given the opportunity to integrate into society, but rather as guests that have overstayed their welcome, strongly echoes the ongoing debates about the social, political, and cultural place of the massive wave of postwar migrants, the so-called Gastarbeiter who came to Germany in the late 1950s, 60s, and 70s to work and were then expected to return to their country of origin. According to El-Tayeb, five decades later these debates still focus “on the moment of arrival and ‘what if ’ scenarios: namely, what happens to Europe if these people stay” (xii)? Although Germany took an important step forward with the legalization of dual citizenship in 2014, the fact that this law has been so controversial and long deferred attests to the country’s glaring reluctance to accept that it has become an “immigrant nation.” Germany ranks third in the United Nations report, Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2013 Revision. A densely populated nation, Germany’s number of immigrants makes up a substantial percentage of the population—nearly twelve percent. 15 Many attribute such a refusal to recognize the legal and social status of immigrants in Germany to an overall resistance to cultural and religious openness, that is, a denial of the place of Islam in German society. To this day, conservatives dismiss Islam as a foreign element in direct disavowal of former Federal President Christian Wulff’s famous claim that Islam belongs to Germany. Simultaneously politically active and openly critical and eager to find their place in German society, the two older Akkouch siblings perceive integration into German society as their ultimate goal and solution against social exclusion and discrimination. It is only the youngest of the three siblings, Maradona, who has no legal status in Germany and appears to feel most openly rejected by German society. Maradona also most visibly (at least in the film) embraces religious and political Islam and the Arab community. In one scene we see him performing the Salat (Muslim prayer) and on another occasion he participates in a protest march near the German Parliament against Israel’s role in the Gaza War (December 2008-January 2009). In this latter scene and many others, he dons the symbolically loaded T-shirt that states: “I’m Muslim, Don’t Panik” (sic) and a keffiyeh (a symbol for Palestinian nationalism) (Fig. 1). “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 93 Figure 1: Neukölln Unlimited movie poster 16 94 Olivia Landry By explicitly embracing the “Palestine Question,” Maradona demonstrates his participation in and self-identification with a broader Muslim consciousness. However, Maradona’s brother, Hassan, expresses concern that unfortunately in Germany there are few positive Muslim role models for his brother to follow, precisely because the imaginary of the Muslim in German society is explicitly pejorative. As Hassan explains, the media is replete with negative images of Muslims, especially as criminals or terrorists. Neukölln Unlimited underscores the inherent catch-22 for many first, second, and third generation Muslim Germans, who, on the one hand, are pressured to assimilate into German society, but, on the other hand, are perpetually treated like outsiders. 17 Emerging from and adding to this climate of exclusion and hate, Thilo Sarrazin’s notorious anti-immigration and Islamophobic manifesto, Deutschland schafft sich ab, was released the same year as both films. Directly attacking Turkish and Arab Muslims, Sarrazin postulates that through the immigration of Muslims, Germany is increasingly becoming more Islamic. He mobilizes panic through the employment of exaggerated scenarios; for example, he contends that, due to the alarming rate at which Muslim families reproduce, there will soon be more Muslims in Germany than non-Muslims and they will force “Germans” to live in compliance to their customs, which according to Sarrazin include a repertoire of misguided and uninhibited Islamophobic characteristics. Extremely controversial, the book was so popular in Germany that over 1.5 million copies were sold within the first two years of its publication. The overwhelming success of the book indicates this deeper problem of Islamophobia among the general German public, which as a result of the book’s social phenomenon has become increasingly more open and vehement about its Islamophobic sentiments. 18 Thus, a movement like PEDIGA in Germany, which has been publicly characterized as mainstream, does not represent the development of Islamophobia per se, but actually the increased normativization of Islamophobia. Amidst this new “normal,” Sarrazin has become a kind of poster boy for Islamophobic expression and behavior in Germany, and he has influenced other authors, such as Akif Pirinçci, who more recently published his own Islamophobic manifesto, Deutschland von Sinnen: Der irre Kult um Frauen, Homosexuelle und Zuwanderer (2014). Employing the affect of panic to promote Islamophobia, figures such as Sarrazin and Pirinçci, movements such as PEGIDA , and conservative politicians and mainstream media in both Israel and Germany appeal to the base instincts of the public. This panic is often not only misguided, it is also highly ambiguous. It feeds ideologies of hate by confounding our thoughts and senses. Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited seek to dismantle such mainstream ideologies about immigrants and Muslims in Germany and beyond. In her reading of Neukölln Unlimited, journalist Cristina Nord appropriately refers to the film as “Eine Gegenrede zu Thilo Sarrazin” ( taz online )� “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 95 What documentary film offers as an intervention and means of subversion is a respite from the excited yet equivocalness of panic and the flood of emotional intensity that averts reason and understanding. Documentary is the work of realistic (if not real) representation and performance. It assertively claims that we cannot be panicked about something with which we are intimately familiar. Documentary fills the distance of harmful rhetoric and draws us in to the unmediated stories of real people. In her article “The Promise of Documentary” (2009), Janelle Reinelt indicates that central to the documentary is the historiographical question of how to present a document or event without excessive narrative intervention and creative treatment. How can a story look and feel unmediated? Achieving representative transparency means finding a balance between reality and creativity. This is the challenge of the documentary: to carefully negotiate the intersections of art, politics, ethics, and reality. In the case of Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited such an ontology of documentary film as an authentically intimate mediation and documentation of reality is fitting. Documentary film serves a dual role as both the document, which “is predicated on realist epistemology,” and the experience, which “is dependent on phenomenological engagement” (Reinelt 7). Both of these qualities become apparent in a closer examination of the two films. Situated between performance and documentation, Love During Wartime explores, on the one hand, the political impact of everyday existence in Israel-Palestine and then in Germany and Austria, and, on the other hand and more importantly, the performative promise of documenting this everyday existence to film as a means of disseminating this story to a broader public and raising awareness. The latter becomes possible through the assertion of a way of life and identity that may be viewed by some as unthinkable. In many ways, it reflects the contemporary performative politics of same-sex marriage discourses. In an interview with the director and cast, Jasmin flatly states that the couple had been encouraged to participate in the film project because garnering attention to their situation might be able to help their case with the Supreme Court of Israel. The film does not present a dramatic battle for rights and freedoms; rather, it often presents a simple portrait of the banal daily lives of two young people who love each other—sometimes argue, sometimes tease each other, and call each other silly pet names. Despite the extremely challenging circumstances, what is actually foregrounded in this film is the average married couple over an extended period of five years. In a sense, the film attests to their normality. But of course this private portrait is at the same time politically loaded. Love During Wartime is ultimately about the attachment of two people across barriers / boundaries of religion, ethnicity, politics, war, and ideology. It bears noting here again that Jasmin and Assi are not devoutly religious themselves, which 96 Olivia Landry would have assuredly generated further challenges. Yet the distinct nations and cultures to which they belong and with which they identify are emphatically faith-based. Love During Wartime thus materializes a true-to-life narrative of the spatial, legal, and the rigidly ideological separation of Israel and Palestine. 19 This is underscored when, for example, Assi’s Palestinian friend half-jokingly comments in English, “How could you marry a Jewish [sic]? Is she like us? Is she human? ” ( Love During Wartime ). Even as a “Jewish”—and therefore a non-Muslim—woman who does not cover her hair as the women in Assi’s family do, Jasmin is caring, loving, and devoted to Assi and respectful to his family. Love During Wartime shows this aesthetically through intimate and “humanizing” close-ups of Jasmin and of the two in loving embraces. This applies to Assi as well, who even as a Palestinian Muslim speaks Hebrew fluently and does not adhere to the gendered divisions so often projected onto Islamic culture and practices. He is often shown cooking for Jasmin and remarks at the beginning of the film that he was immediately attracted to Israeli women’s freedom of dress and movement. In the German and to a lesser extent in the Austrian context, Assi displaces stereotypes of foreigners eager to immigrate but not contribute to society. Eager to be able to work, he takes up menial, part-time jobs, such as selling posters to businesses. The heavy political climate of the Israel-Palestine conflict and anti-immigration and Islamophobia in Germany are always present in the film, but against these crises the private everyday lives of Jasmin and Assi emerge as something that feels even more authentic in its intimacy. It feels “found” instead of “made” and it draws the viewer in through this intimacy. The film’s effort to filter the political through the private offers an alternative narrative that is tangible and identifiable. Berlant lucidly describes this method in the following way: “Intensely political seasons spawn reveries of a different immediacy. People imagine alternative environments where authenticity trumps ideology, truths cannot be concealed, and communication feels intimate, face-to-face” (221). Authenticity through intimacy is of course not always an element of documentary film. There are also impersonal and sensational documentaries with a categorical treatment of the material. But it is applicable here. In its focus on the everyday, then, Love During Wartime compellingly provides an additional account of historical and political events. Bier herself explains that she “wanted to make a love story”; in other words, she sought to return the human element to the news stories and media about the Israel-Palestine conflict (Interview with Laura Durkay). Yet the film’s political intervention is not only an exploration of a “minor” history; indeed, since the events of the film are unraveling simultaneously with the film, its status as history or archive is only evident post-production. Instead, the film serves as an “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 97 organ of contemporary political activity—a public and private protest against the unjust citizenship laws of Israel and eventually the bureaucratic nightmare of German immigration. The film’s “intimate public” or “private public,” to play with some of Berlant’s terms, adds an interesting dimension to documentary’s already established epistemology, what Nichols calls “the flagship for a cinema of social engagement and distinctive vision” (2). The dual role of presenting (performing for a larger audience) and documenting (recording and historicizing) of the documentary positions it at the forefront of political and social interrogation. An intimate narrative of refusal and resistance is also mobilized in Neukölln Unlimited. The Akkouch siblings are in many ways much like most young people their age—living out their daily routines. The opening scene of the film lends this impression: a typical familial scene of bickering about whose responsibility it is to vacuum the apartment. At the same time, this everyday “living” becomes an important practice both to bear the burden of future uncertainty and to resist a political system and society that essentially do not want them to live out their daily lives and rituals—at least, not in Germany. Beyond this, similar to Love During Wartime, Neukölln Unlimited has a direct political function: it seeks to awaken public interest to the unjust asylum laws in Germany. Furthermore, it reveals the precarious situation of the Akkouch family, and many like theirs, which must live with legal uncertainty and prejudice. In an open press conference with Berlin’s Senator of the Interior at that time, Ehrhart Körting, one sibling, Hassan, confronts him about the lack of transparency and arbitrariness of the German asylum system. As one reviewer suggests, Körting’s response to Hassan’s vociferious accusation echoes precisely the political goal of this film: “Ist es im öffentlichen Interesse des Landes Berlin oder der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, den Menschen hierzubehalten? ” ( Neukölln Unlimited )� 20 The film’s response is “yes.” With the ambition of securing a future for their family in Germany, the Akkouch siblings have much to offer. They tirelessly and determinedly juggle family, school, work, bureaucracy and—most importantly—their passion for music and especially dance. If the performative promise of Neukölln Unlimited is its presentation of living as a practice of preservation and resistance, this is also strongly accentuated through the film’s abounding dance performances. The film’s relationship to politics and art goes beyond the creative treatment of documents and (live) observations; it also offers regular spectacles of artistic performance, namely break dancing and hip-hop. All three siblings are professional or semi-professional dancers, with such troupes as Constanza Markus’s Dorky Park and the street dance crew FanatiX. Intensifying the viewer’s experience through direct spectacle, these dance scenes open up scenarios of “phenomenological engage- 98 Olivia Landry ment” (Reinelt 7). The struggle of these young people for their right to live the only lives they have ever known in freedom and security is perhaps most compellingly embodied in their dance forms—break dancing and krumping, which resonate with imperatives of resistance, freedom, and equality. Both are street dance forms that work against violence, racism, sexism, and inequality in extremely gestural and athletic ways; breakdance and krumping are sophisticated performances that trace their origins to the U. S. and marginalized youth of color. For Maradona especially, breakdancing is not only his escape but also his most viable means to a more secure future in Germany. He rigorously trains to perform on the talent show Deutschland sucht den Superstar. It is here, cut between scenes of Maradona’s physical training, that we see him praying. Edited this way, this act of religious performance appears to be part of his overall endeavor for self-improvement. It is only after he loses the competition that he defensively turns to transgressive behavior, such as skipping school and playing with toy guns. Directly positioned against the draws and dangers of gang culture and crime statistically higher among disenfranchised youth, dancing and religious observation thus embody meditative forms of both forgetting and survival merged with the hope for something better. Indicating a specific location and milieu, “Neukölln”—a Berlin neighborhood known for its cultural diversity—but also undoing any pretensions to isolation or ghettoization in its title, Neukölln Unlimited not only maps the ongoing work and survival of the Akkouch family, it also narrates how historical crisis has shaped the lives of this family. In 2003, the Akkouch family was abruptly deported from Germany to Lebanon. This event is central to the film and to the trauma and vulnerability of the family, whose members must live with the fact that at any moment they could be deported again—a reality that affects thousands of asylum seekers in Germany every year. In its performance of this particular history, the filmmakers chose to present the past neither through interviews nor talking heads but via animation. Neukölln Unlimited employs a style of animation seen in several recent political documentary films, such as Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Ali Samadi Ahadi’s Green Wave (2010). There is something surreal yet strikingly simplistic about this style of animation that so dramatically represents the archive of traumatized memories of the young Hassan, who narrates the event in a voice-over. The embedded violence of the event—a literal and forced uprooting—is registered as something in the past both in terms of its representation and its narration. However, past blurs into present as the film considers the event’s devastating and enduring consequences still experienced by the Akkouch family. It lives on, for example, through the mother’s epileptic attacks, one sister’s severe bulimia, one brother’s attention deficit disorder, and yet another’s paranoia. “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 99 Similar to Love During Wartime, the politics of Neukölln Unlimited lie most prominently in the film’s affective projections of what living amidst crisis—that is, past trauma and future uncertainty—looks and feels like. This is a quality expressly shared by Love During Wartime. Both films can be brought into conversation with Veena Das’s insightful examination of living on after disaster and rupture in her book Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2007). Das proposes that the political event has the ability to attach itself “with all its tentacles into everyday life and folds itself into the recesses of the ordinary” (1). This, I propose, also offers an apt description of these films’ relationship to and treatment of the political. The intimacy of both films underscores the fact that the basic matter of survival is at stake. By communicating and mediating their intimate stories, the Akkouch family as well as Jasmin and Assi hope to find solutions through narration and public recognition of their struggle. For, as Berlant suggests, “collective mediation through narration and audition might provide some routes out of the impasse and the struggle of the present” (226). Escaping the impasse means escaping a paralysis—both emotional and physical—resulting in being in a crisis, either political or personal. In very literal ways, both documentaries serve this political purpose of bringing public attention to an important issue. At the same time, the performance and even reperformance of living in a crisis (for the camera) offers instances of assertion of identity and a means of working through pain and frustration. While documentary cannot necessarily take us out of the crisis, its expository nature does seem to provide a pathway out of the personal impasse caused by the crisis. There is something discerningly direct about the relationship between political and personal crises in Love During Wartime that is immediately highlighted in the paradox of its title. Similar to Neukölln Unlimited, there are no scenes of direct violence in the film, with the exception of brief live news footage of a street clash. However, violence is also not shown in any other medium either, such as the animation of the deportation of the Akkouch family; instead, it occurs offscreen in Love During Wartime. For instance, Assi’s arrest and subsequent violent mistreatment by the Palestinian police are not shown. Neither does the viewer witness the constant interrogation that Jasmin experiences every time she must pass through Israeli border checkpoints to enter and depart the West Bank, where she is treated like a “naïve terrorist,” as she refers to it in the film, as a woman easily manipulated by her “potentially” terrorist Muslim Palestinian husband. Not only would it be next to impossible to film these scenes for legal reasons, but the film also does not wish to sensationalize the situation of their hardship. It suffices that we hear Jasmin’s concerned voice over the phone as she relays the event of Assi’s arrest and torture to her parents, only to see Assi’s still shaven head several weeks after his arrest. This 100 Olivia Landry subtle visual sign may be curiously ambiguous to the viewer but it registers a change. Although the shaving of the head is an acceptable practice in Islam, and is especially common among Muslim men preparing for the Umrah or the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), the shaving of a man’s head is also a form of punishment and practice of shaming of non-conformist Muslim men as a forced means of personal hygiene. Excess hair is often seen as sinful under Islamic law. This practice of forced shaving is not uncommon in Palestine, especially in Gaza under the rule of the Islamic Hamas. 21 The effect of state-sanctioned religious conformism and the violence it can engender—its undisguisable, yet not fully understandable trace—not only clings heavily to their story but also to their bodies. Love During Wartime ’s relationship to both the event and the everyday is richly complex. Again, this is not a film specifically about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but rather about the effects of the conflict and the power of the state on real people. In the persisting so-called “state of war” within both Israel and Palestine, the management of life becomes an affair of the state. For the viewer, these documentaries give life to political discourse—make it real and tangible, not to mention identifiable; indeed, they give a face, as it were, to the devastating corollary of Islamophobia, which plays out in both the Israel-Palestine conflict and the deep-rooted problems of German immigration and asylum policies. But at the same time, these films are political without being ideological or dogmatic in their effort to ultimately convey a message of openness and heterogeneity. The blurring of mediality and performativity of the genre of documentary and between the public / political and the private / personal of Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited instead meets what Berlant has referred to as our desire for “the political to be routed through the affective eavesdropping that shapes the sense of immediacy among mass mediated intimate publics in the historical present” (228). The observational and even invisible style of documentary filmmaking that is apparent in both films quietly but willfully suffuses the political into the ordinary and vice versa. In their eavesdropping, these films’ mediation and presentation feel more truth-telling than story-telling in nature, akin to direct cinema methods of the early 1960s, whose goal was intimate, yet objective reportage and subsequently to remove all markers of the filmmaker from the film. There are no interviews or testimonials as such in these films, which are aspects of documentary that often dominate and give intentional structure. In both films, the nonactors only occasionally speak in the direction of the camera in a gesture of explanation, but for the most part the filmmaker is a fly on the wall to these enduring narratives. Especially in the case of Love During Wartime, Jasmin and Assi have explained in post-production interviews that the filmmaker had become such an important and integral part of their lives that they considered her as more of a close friend than anything “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 101 else. Bier would sometimes spend the whole day with them and only film for an hour. Often they never knew when the record button was actually switched on. The political resistance of Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited is thus extremely personal. Through these intimate portrayals of trauma and crisis interlocked with the normalizing cloak of quotidian banality, the authenticity of the documentary is underscored and personalized. The characters feel close and their crises feel real and present. Authenticity is not about essentializing identity, which the activist group Kanak Attack sought to destabilize by drawing a line between “authentic” Germans and “inauthentic” Germans. Here it refers to experience and possesses a quality of resistance. By strategically presenting stories and characters in their intimate settings, these films draw the viewer in and encourage proximities. Without employing melodramatic methods of over-emotional attachments, however, in the case of these films a subtler means of phenomenological enfolding emerges and endures. In this way, the panic induced by precisely a lack of intimacy and a lack of knowledge about Muslims can begin to be dispelled. Distinct from the ideological and aesthetic distance of narrative cinema, the documentary not only interrogates its subject matter head-on, but with its relationship to the present, insofar as what it presents is the unfolding of real-life action in present time, it keenly reinforces its ability to articulate and substantiate individual as well as collective narratives of resistance. As demonstrated in Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited, Islamophobia has enduring and devastating direct and indirect consequences for Muslims in Israel and Germany that are so often the result of unfounded fears. Panic, then, is the real problem. It characterizes the exaggerated way in which we react out of ignorance and superficiality to unfamiliar positionings. Such a reaction of course invokes lateral problems that extend to the social, the political, and even the legislative. These films provide much needed articulations and disclosures of real-life and identifiable experiences that work to overcome distance and alienation. notes 1 The activist group Kanak Attack (or “Kanak Attak”) formed in the late 1990s and was widely dispersed throughout Germany. While ideationally linked, it should not be confused with the 2000 film of the same name, directed by Lars Becker (based on the novel by Feridun Zaimoğlu Abschaum—Die wahre Geschichte von Ertan Ongun [1998]). Founded with the help of Zaimoğlu, the work of this group consists of texts, interviews, ad campaigns, and television shorts, and generally operates on a comically subversive level. Most famous among the group’s work is a series of TV shorts, entitled “Kanak TV .” 102 Olivia Landry In their manifesto, the group describes itself in the following way: “‘Kanak Attak’ is a community of different people from diverse backgrounds who share a commitment to eradicate racism from German society. Kanak Attak is not interested in questions about your passport or heritage, in fact it challenges such questions in the first place.” Quoted from the Kanak Attack website. 2 To download a full program of the festival, go to: http: / / p106499.typo3server.info / fileadmin / bilder / presse / PM -Voicing-Resistance-0612.pdf. 3 Shermin Langhoff’s former work as artistic director both at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße (until 2013) and presently at the Maxim Gorki Theater is strongly influenced by politics and the possibility that art has the power to educate and influence public opinion. See Langhoff. 4 For more information about the movement, see Refugee Tent Action. 5 The tragic refugee shipwreck off the coast of Lampedusa has played a significant role in urging European governments to rethink their refugee and immigration politics. In the early morning of October 3, 2013, a boat carrying migrants from Libya to Italy sank near the island of Lampedusa and nearly 400 people died. Another similar major shipwreck occurred on April 13, 2015, in which nearly 500 people drowned. It has become apparent to the member states of the European Union that such immense tragedies must be prevented. These shipwrecks are only two of many reported in recent years. Every year hundreds, if not thousands, of refugees lose their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe, and these numbers are on the rise. 6 Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai use the term “quarantining” in their article, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots,” to describe the way in which Muslims were treated in the West, especially in the U. S., in the wake of 9 / 11. 7 “Muslim in singular does not seem to exist anymore. […] Every single Muslim is held responsible for the surahs (of the Qur’an), in which he does not believe, the orthodox dogmatists he does not know, the violent terrorists he repudiates, or for the violent regimes in countries from which he himself has flown.” (All translations from German to English are my own, unless otherwise indicated.) 8 “Law on the Revocation of Naturalizations and Denial of German Citizenship.” (Translation by Tes Howell.) Following the Second World War, it was declared that former German citizens who between January 30, 1933 and May 8, 1945 were deprived of their citizenship on political, racial, or religious grounds, and their descendants, shall upon application have their citizenship restored. For more information, see Göktürk et al. “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 103 9 For more details on this study and others, see EUMC , Muslims in the European Union: Discrimination and Islamophobia. 10 The NSU (National Socialist Underground) is an extreme rightwing terrorist group in Germany that came to the surface in November 2011. Known members included Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt, and Beate Zschäpe, but it is believed that there are over 200 other members. The group has been linked to, among other crimes, ten murders, of which eight of the victims were Turkish-German and one Greek-German. For over an eleven-year period these crimes not only went unsolved, they were also neither connected nor identified as hate crimes. 11 Short for Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, PEGIDA first began as a Facebook group that was incited by criticism of a pro- PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) demonstration in Dresden and quickly developed into a space for communal griping and hate-mongering against the state of European politics, the liberal press, and especially immigrants and minority groups (read Muslims and people of color) in Germany. Under the original leadership of Lutz Bachmann, the group eventually took to the streets of Dresden in the form of weekly demonstrations. Although the movement, which also spread to different cities in Germany with varying levels of success, was condemned by most politicians and the German press, it had an astounding pull among citizens who had apparently hitherto identified with the political center. While internal issues and increased radicalness eventually led to a significant petering out of attention and support of the movement in the spring of 2015, at its height in January 2015, PEGIDA allegedly drew in 25,000 protesters. It bears noting, however, that the movement also provoked counter protests, often far more significant in number than the PEGIDA protests themselves. For more information, see Machowecz. 12 “has increasingly moved unchecked into the center of mainstream media.” 13 See detailed results of this study on the webpage for the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. 14 “We help you to return to your homeland.” While Germany’s rate of acceptance for refugees is still considerably better than its neighbors to the south, such as Italy and Greece, compared to the Scandinavian countries, the number of refugees that Germany accepts annually is drastically low. For example, in 2013 Sweden accepted 4650 refugees and Germany only 950. See Billström. In response to the significant increase in asylum seekers in 2014 (over 200,000), Germany did raise its acceptance rate to 7253. However, this still only equals 5.6 % of those asylum seekers legally permitted to 104 Olivia Landry apply for asylum and even less compared to the overall number of persons seeking asylum. For more information and statistics, see BMI Nachrichten. 15 To see detailed results of this study, go to the United Nations report: Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2013 Revision. 16 “Neukölln Unlimited Movie Poster” by Indie Film (Clandestino1975) available at https: / / en.wikipedia.org / wiki / File: Neuk%C3 %B6lln_Unlimited_ Movie_Poster.jpg under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0. Full terms at http: / / creativecommons.org / licenses / by/ 2.0. 17 This often manifests itself in matters of language competence. For instance, Lial comments to a friend that when the police came to deport her family they were surprised how well the siblings spoke German, in spite of the fact that the family had resided in Germany for ten years. Even more recently, I attended the documentary theater play Asyl-Monologe. After the performance there was a public discussion with a young woman originally from Chechnya. She fled to Germany with her family over ten years ago to seek asylum. To this day she is still under threat of deportation. Several audience members commented on her “exceptional” competence in the German language. It clearly did not occur to them that having spent over half of her young life in Germany meant that she was likely more competent in German than any other language, because they still viewed her as an outsider. It is imperative that asylum seekers learn German, but for many adults this is a challenge because they are often not permitted and / or do not have the means to even take language courses. Children of school age, however, must attend school. 18 See, for example, Bade . 19 The philosophy of separation of Israelis and Palestinians, which has a long history in the Middle East, was politically and geographically concretized in the mid-1990s under Yitzak Rabin in response to terrorist attacks on Israelis. It gained overwhelming support following the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. The solution to the terrorist attacks was to build a barrier around the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with militarized checkpoints. While Israeli officials view the wall as a self-defense barrier, Palestinians and many others see it as an apartheid wall that sequesters and ultimately encroaches on Palestinian land and people’s freedom. This spatial as well as civil separation clearly creates an “inside” and “outside.” Furthermore, it “restrict[s] the presence of noncitizens to their living zone, while reducing their hold on their territory and preventing their assimilation among citizens” (Azoulay and Ophir 97). This domination model of what many people have referred to as a type of ghettoization not only represses the rights and freedoms of Palestinians, but also perpetuates the “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic”: Voicing Resistance through Documentary 105 rhetorical ideologies of “us” and “them,” “self ” and “other” that fuel the conflict between Israel and Palestine and severely hinders any kind of path towards peace. 20 “Is it in the public interest of Berlin or of the Federal Republic of Germany to keep the people here? ” 21 News reports from Gaza City recently have described the common police practice of arresting young men with long or spiky-gelled hair and mocking them by shaving their heads. See Laub and Daraghmeh. Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22.2 (2004): 117-39. Azoulay, Ariella and Adi Ophir. The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel / Palestine. Trans. Tal Haran. Stanford: Stanford UP , 2013. Bade, Klaus J. “Bürger in Angst vor den Fremden.” Die Zeit , 31 October 2013. Web. 10 November 2013. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC : Duke UP , 2011. Bier, Gabriella. Interview with Laura Durkay. Mondoweiss Online. 25 April 2011. Web. 2 May 2013. Billström, Tobias. “Wir sind stolz! ” Interview with Matthias Krupa. Die Zeit 17 October 2013: 11. BMI Nachrichten. “202.834 Asylanträge im Jahr 2014”. 3 July 2015. Web. 8 Jan. 2016. Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: U of California P, 2007. El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Emcke, Carolin. “Liberaler Rassissmus.” Die Zeit Online. 25 Feb. 2010. Web. 16 May 2012� European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. “Combatting Antisemitism: More Targeted Measures Needed.” 11 Aug. 2013. Web. 12 October 2013. European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. “Muslims in the European Union: Discrimination and Islamophobia.” Dec. 2006. Web. 12 October 2013. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008� Göktürk, Deniz et al., eds. Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955-2005. Berkeley: U of California P, 2007. Introvigne, Massimo. “Moral Panics and Anti-Cult Terrorism in Western Europe.” Terrorism and Political Violence 12: 1 (2000): 47-59. “About.” www.kanak-attak.de. 1998. 6 March 2012. Web. 12 October 2013. Lange, Nadine. “Tanzen, um zu bleiben.” Der Tagesspiegel Online. 8 April 2010. Web. 12 October 2013. 106 Olivia Landry Langhoff, Shermin et al. “Interview: Im besten Fall stürzt das Weltbild ein.” Freitext 22 (2013): 6-14. Laub, Karin and Mohammed Daraghmeh. “Hamas Shaves Heads of Gaza Youth with Long Hair.” Time World Online. 7 April 2013. Web. 15 April 2013. Love During Wartime. Dir. Gabriella Bier. Perf. Jasmin Avissar and Osama Zatar. Story AB , 2010. Machowecz, Martin. “Busen, Bier und Islamismus.” Zeit Magazin Online. 23 April 2015. Web. 8 Jan. 2016. Neukölln Unlimited. Dir. Agostino Imondi and Dietmar Ratsch. Perf. Hassan Akkouch, Lial Akkouch, and Maradona Akkouch. Indi Film GmbH, 2010. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington, IN : Indiana UP , 2010. Nord, Cristina. “Die Lust auf neue unbegangene Wege.” Die Tageszeitung Online. 11 February 2010. Web. 8 Jan. 2016. Puar, Jasbir K. and Amit S. Rai. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20.3 (2002): 117-48. Refugee Tent Action. The Action Circle of the Independent Non-Citizen Struggle, 2013. 10 November 2013. Web. 8 Jan. 2016. Reinelt, Janelle. “The Promise of Documentary.” Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present. Ed. Chris Megson and Alison Forsythe. Basingstroke, UK : Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. 6-23. Schocken, Amos. “Citizenship Law Makes Israel An Apartheid State.” Haaretz Online. 27 June 2008. Web. 8 Jan. 2016. United Nations Report: Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2013 Revision. 4 June 2014. Web. 8 Jan. 2016.