Polish over Principle: Bahri Cani’s Response to a Public Assault

After Armend Zemaj punched a citizen, Bahri Cani condemned “violence” yet domesticated it as “complexity”— then liked an ad hominem against me. Neutrality, here, is complicity.

It was late on an otherwise unremarkable Saturday when Bahri Cani’s remarks¹ caught my attention. The country was still absorbing the shock of a public act of violence. Armend Zemaj, a Member of Parliament from Kosovo’s LDK, had turned mid-interview in the centre of Pristina and struck a citizen who had dared to utter two small words “you’re lying.” The clip travelled fast, replayed in the loops of Balkan irony that can turn a moment of disgrace into an entertainment.

Cani, a journalist long resident in Germany working with DW, responded online with a statement that seemed, at first glance, even-handed. Violence, he wrote, was “not a solution.” Yet embedded in the phrasing was a familiar sleight of hand, a gentle relativism that blurred aggression into “complexity,” as though the citizen’s words might somehow share the blame for the politician’s fist. It was this tone, civil, balanced, and morally inert that stirred me to write today.

I addressed him as a colleague, not an adversary. I w…