In his book “The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil," renowned German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-1980) distinguishes between two forms of love: “necrophilia”, the love of death, and “biophilia”, the love of life.

According to Fromm, necrophiliac people live in the past and never in the future. Their feelings are fundamentally sentimental, meaning that they adhere to feelings they felt yesterday. Not life, but death arouses and satisfies them.

On the other hand, “biophilia” is the expression of someone who loves life and feels attracted to the process of life and "growth in all aspects," writes Fromm.

Browsing through the one-sided obituaries in the German press on the occasion of the untimely death of 56-year-old Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor, I was instantly reminded of this Frommian socio-psychological concept because they all had one thing in common: their exclusive focus on O’Connor’s mental health issues, her manic depression and suicidal tendencies, while downplaying and even omitting the life-affirming aspects of her life, namely her Muslim faith and her support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) against "Israel".

Furthermore, the obituaries by the necrophiliac German media remained stuck in a partial past of their choosing, primarily the time of the release of O’Connor’s one and only number-one Billboard world single and cover version of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” in 1990, thus failing to acknowledge that her life was, like all human life, a process, characterized not by stasis, but by growth.

The images headlining the written pieces allegedly honoring her life in the national press in Germany were already revealing of this anti-holistic cherry-picking. Whether centrist tagesschau and Spiegel, populist Die Welt, liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung, or left-wing taz: they all featured images of a pre-Muslim O’Connor with her then signature clean-shaven head rather than show her, who converted to Islam in 2018 and changed her name to Shuhada' Sadaqat, in a hijab.

Whether as a grumbling concession to journalistic diligence or out of sensationalist exoticization, only tagesschau and Welt also featured an image of her on stage in a chador but buried deep in the throes of their respective articles.

This visual erasure of O’Connor’s Muslim identity was in stark contrast to non-Eurocentric English-language media which had no qualms in using images of her, a publicly practicing Muslim, in hijab for their obituaries and social media posts.

The aforementioned German news outlets mentioned her conversion to Islam merely in passing: only left-wing taz deemed it appropriate to not only treat O’Connor’s Muslim identity as a formality but also elevate it, quoting her saying that Islam sees to it that one neither idolizes money nor steals and that one treats one’s brothers and sisters gently.

Spiegel did something very odd, to put it mildly: its obituary featured quotes from various public figures, including Scotland’s First Minister Hamza Yousaf. Yet the article referred to him simply as a “Scottish politician”, not as the head of government (I doubt they would quote German chancellor Olaf Scholz and refer to him as a “German politician”).

Why? It seems that for the necrophiliac and Islamophobic German media stuck in the days of yore, it is unfathomable that in 2023 a Muslim (whose wife is of Palestinian heritage and even wore a traditional thobe to her spouse’s official confirmation as First Minister in the Scottish Parliament) can be the leader of a non-Muslim majority country exclusively associated to this day in Germany with whiteness and whiskey. So whether by negligence or design, monocultural Germany’s most renowned news magazine managed to tweak reality and dim the light of Scottish diversity and progression.

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When it comes to Sinéad O’Connor’s political activism, German media also engaged in the politics of erasure and in their signature selective reporting: in yet another example of their necrophiliac fixation, all major news outlets in my country saw the pinnacle of her politics in the televised ripping-up of a photo of then-Pope John Paul II while singing the word “evil” on NBC’s Saturday Night Live in 1992.

Not surprising that they would do so, as this is the same atheist media that fanboyed the anti-religious and Islamophobic direct actions of the self-proclaimed “feminists” from the Ukrainian women’s collective Femen and the desecration of an Orthodox Church in Moscow in 2012 by a female band for which three of its members were convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”

The three decades after the SNL protest were of little to no concern to the establishment media in Germany in terms of O’Connor’s political activism. Once again, taz was among the very few that touched upon her staunch support for Irish republicanism and her membership in Sinn Féin, the democratic socialist political party striving for a united Ireland.

But not one single major news outlet mentioned O’Connor’s principled stance toward "Israel" and her support for the Palestinian-led BDS campaign, a non-violent movement that the German media routinely demonize as anti-Semitic and which the German state is doing everything in its power to criminalize.

So it is not surprising that German press obituaries failed to mention that in 2014, their beloved 1990s musical icon Sinéad O’Connor did what they passionately vilify as anti-Semitic: she boycotted "Israel" by canceling a show that was supposed to take place on September 11 in "Caesarea", a town between "Tel Aviv" and Haifa.

In an exclusive interview for the Irish magazine Hot Press at the time, O’Connor, who had played two gigs in "Israel" in 1995, ten years before BDS was launched, justified her boycott by saying that “on a human level, nobody with any sanity, including myself, would have anything but sympathy for the Palestinian plight. There’s not a sane person on earth who in any way sanctions what the f*** the Israeli authorities are doing.”

Following her death, this quote was widely shared in non-Eurocentric social media, as was an article by David Cronin of the Electronic Intifada, titled “Thank you, Sinéad O’Connor, for boycotting Israel,” in which he references the Hot Press interview and gives historical context to O’Connor’s decision to boycott: “Caesarea (known as Qisaryia in Arabic) was conquered by Zionist forces headed by Yitzhak Rabin, a vicious military commander who later became prime minister, in 1948. Benny Morris, the Israeli historian, has written that the Palestinians of Qisaryia suffered from outright expulsion,” Cronin writes.

But the German media, so mortified of offending the offender that is "Israel", even today with its most fascist and vicious government in power, are not interested in such inconvenient blotches to the halo of their 1990s nostalgia.

Otherwise, they would also make it known to the public that O’Connor’s support for BDS was not a one-off: in 1997, she backed out of performing at the "Sharing Jerusalem: Two Capitals For Two States" concert after receiving death threats from a Jewish supremacist group called the Ideological Front. And guess who its leading member at the time was: Israel's incumbent Police Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. How's that for a scoop?

But the German media do not even find this story newsworthy. In their one-sided, narrow-minded, and copy-paste obituaries dedicated to erasing the Muslim identity and pro-Palestinian activism of Shuhada' Sadaqat, the artist also known as Sinéad O’Connor, we learn less about the full life of the singer that blessed the world with her rendition of Prince’s ballad “Nothing Compares 2 U” and more about the disturbed psyche of Germany’s fourth estate.

The lesson here is that nothing compares to its latent Islamophobia and necrophiliac love of "Israel" an apartheid state which to this day is exclusively viewed through the lens of past Jewish victimhood in Europe, not past, present, and future Zionist perpetration in the Middle East.