How One Former Migrant Exposed Germany’s Contempt for Free Speech

In 1933-1945, the Reich Government used censorship to enforce racism. Now the Bundes Government uses it to, supposedly, fight racism.

From The European Conservative

By Sabine Beppler-Spahl

It is a telling sign of our times that a movement claiming to oppose racism relies so heavily on censorship.

A former migrant from Burkina Faso, now a German citizen, has inadvertently laid bare the mechanisms of power and contempt for free speech operating in Germany today.

Until last week, only very few in Germany—outside of Munich—would have heard of Hamado Dipama. This changed after it emerged that he had filed a complaint against the popular online news portal Apollo News for defamation and libel. Apollo has since reported that one of its journalists is facing criminal investigation as a result.

Too much attention has been placed on Dipama himself. It is not quite true—as Apollo suggests—that Germany’s legal system is merely allowing itself to be exploited by him. “Hamado Dipama is lashing out: How the criminal justice system is being exploited by an activist,” the portal titled an article. It would be more accurate to say that the system has actively encouraged and enabled people like him.

The case is as much about freedom of speech and press freedom as it is about Germany’s highly regulated and conformist public broadcasting sector—the arena of an intense culture war that has been simmering for years.

It began last autumn when Dipama celebrated the cancellation of Julia Ruhs on his Instagram account. Ruhs is a prominent young conservative journalist who made a name for herself by criticising what she called the left-green stranglehold on opinion in Germany’s public broadcasting landscape. She made headlines when two of the very broadcasters she had criticised—NDR and BR—gave her a show called Klar, apparently as a gesture of openness. NDR then promptly cancelled it after three episodes, deeming it too “far-right”—confirming her original point.

Mirroring a widespread view on the progressive left, which had long seen Ruhs as a threat, Dipama wrote on Instagram: “Bravo to NDR for this decision. The infiltration of public broadcasting by right-wing extremists and neo-fascists must be stopped.” One reason his post caused such an uproar among Ruhs’ supporters is that he is himself a member of Bavaria’s Public Broadcasting (BR) Council. Though often presented as the voice of the migrant minority on that body, he is in fact very much a mainstream voice within it—as was demonstrated when Bavaria’s own public broadcaster followed NDR in cancelling Ruhs’ show shortly afterwards.

In response, Apollo published a feature titled “He welcomed Julia Ruhs’ dismissal: the BR Broadcasting Council includes a rejected asylum seeker.” The piece summarised publicly available information about Dipama’s migration history—he came to Germany via France in 2002—and presented him as harbouring hostility towards white people, citing an Instagram post in which he allegedly shared content referring to white people and their colonialism as “Neanderthals.”

Apollo is right to have made the case public and to criticise Dipama. It is certainly ironic that, in filing his complaint, he has arguably vindicated the portal’s portrayal of him. But there is a danger here that must not be overlooked. By focusing on the man—his migration history and his activism—Germany’s broader censorship regime and the ideological conformism of its public media risk coming off too lightly. These are the far more important and pressing problems.

The charges against the Apollo journalist appear to rest on Paragraph 185 of the Penal Code, which criminalises causing offence, and Paragraph 187, which criminalises libel—defamation through knowingly false factual claims. In recent years, criminal investigations under these laws have multiplied like weeds. Official police statistics show that in 2024 alone there were over 251,500 criminal charges for violations of Paragraph 185, up from 237,734 in 2023. The reasons are plain: the viciousness of our culture wars on social media and an ever-expanding definition of offence and libel—of which this case is only one example among many. To illustrate the point: one of those Dipama is said to have charged is a Berlin pensioner who wrote on social media, “Pathetic, arrogant, and one-sided. That’s you, Mr. Dipama.” The core problem is an increasingly determined legal and state apparatus, intent on intimidating people by demonstrating what happens to those who fail to self-censor.

Dipama’s case is especially contentious because of the charge of “racism”—but it also stands for something broader: a society in which any expression of legitimate anger risks severe legal punishment. Causing offence or engaging in libel can, in the worst case, carry a prison sentence of up to two years. The repressive nature of these laws, however, appears not to trouble Germany’s left-progressive activist class, which has been enthusiastically lionising Dipama.

To them, he is a hero of the anti-racist struggle—a struggle directed, in no small part, against many of their fellow citizens, whom they consider biased, prejudiced and irredeemably racist. Driven by identity politics, which emphasises people’s skin colour, Dipama is their anti-racist champion—who has been engaged in far-left activism for years. Before this latest complaint, he had already filed several lawsuits for racism—against nightclub owners who denied him entry and against his landlord in Munich. (As far back as 2014, Bloomberg published a piece about his activities). 

Sadly, some on the right—by directing their outrage exclusively at Dipama—have played their own part in this culture-war escalation. Although he is far from the only person to have celebrated Ruhs’ cancellation (the Green-progressive taz and others cheered it too), the anger directed specifically at him has, in some quarters, been notably intense. Much of that outrage has centred on his origins as a migrant and a perceived abuse of guest rights—a charge that is in any case moot, given that he has since taken German citizenship and can no longer accurately be called a “rejected asylum seeker.”

The dangerous escalation of the culture war was further illustrated when Dipama cancelled a public appearance in September, citing menacing online posts. Whether the threat was proportional to his response is open to question, but the episode was eagerly seized upon by his supporters.

Predictably, it served the activist Left as confirmation of their narrative. Germany’s Left Party (Die Linke) and the trade unions rallied to his defence. The Bavarian Trade Union Confederation (DGB) declared, “We, the DGB Bavaria, stand in solidarity with our friend and colleague Hamado Dipama, who is currently the target of a blatantly racist smear campaign from the far right.” There was no mention of—nor even a sliver of understanding for—those genuinely angered by Dipama’s post. The same Left that bristled at Apollo calling him a “failed asylum seeker” found nothing objectionable in Dipama labelling admirers of Ruhs neo-fascists.

It is a telling sign of our times that a movement which claims to oppose racism relies so heavily on censorship. Much of Dipama’s and his supporters’ energy appears devoted almost exclusively to cancellation: banning street names, silencing voices, shutting down debate. Today’s anti-colonial movement bears heartily little resemblance to the intellectual originality and freedom-centred vision of thinkers like Frantz Fanon.

That Dipama has sat on Bavaria’s Public Broadcasting Council since 2017 is hardly surprising for someone so thoroughly embedded in a certain progressive milieu—one that has steadily consolidated its grip on key cultural institutions, particularly those funded by the state. None of the council’s members are elected. Officially, they are meant to represent a broad range of political, ideological and social groups; in practice, the diversity of opinion on these bodies is anything but broad. Dipama holds his seat as chair of an umbrella organisation representing migrant groups—one that itself receives public funding. His fellow council members come from the trade unions, the churches, and similar organisations: a milieu that can hardly claim to be a fair reflection of German society as a whole.

This influential section of the elite has embraced Dipama for one reason: he shares, and in all likelihood reinforces, their anti-Western outlook, while flattering their sense of moral superiority—the same moral superiority with which they justify marginalising the views of those they deem racist or ideologically inferior.

The charges against Apollo and its journalist must be dropped. But this case exposes something that goes well beyond one activist’s legal manoeuvres: a progressive establishment that deploys legal mechanisms, institutional appointments, and the language of anti-racism to enforce ideological conformity—and that has found in Hamado Dipama a willing and useful instrument.

Pictured: Hamado Dipama