It’s good to see another European elected official (besides Geert Wilders) mention the Islamic elephant in the room and how it should be brought under control. Why continue to import people whose values are opposed to Western freedoms?
Some, perhaps many, Muslims would prefer totalitarian sharia Islamic law to western democracy. For example a 2006 UK poll showed that 40 percent of Muslims there would rather live under sharia than British representative government.
BERLIN – A German official on Saturday called to stop Muslim immigration into the country, stirring public controversy.
Horst Seehofer, leader of the Christian Democratic Union Party (CSU), which is a member of the coalition government in Germany, said in an interview to Focus magazine, “It is obvious that immigrants from Turkey and Arab countries face more difficulty integrating into German society than other immigrants.”
“In any case,” Seehofer added,” the conclusion is that we don’t need additional immigrants from ‘foreign cultures’.”
The German politician’s remarks rekindled an already heated public discussion over the question of the Muslim minority’s integration in Germany.
During the interview, Seehofer also argued that unemployment benefits should be revoked from immigrants who do not seek employment, arguing that immigrants should be forced to share the basic values of Germany, and have command of the language.
Seehofer’s remarks come after German President Christian Wulff’s speech on the 20th anniversary to the unification of Germany.
Wulff, whose speech carried a particularly reconciliatory tone, said that Islam constituted a part of Germany’s nature, just as Judaism and Christianity have in the past, and will continue to be a part of the nation in the future.
The speech triggered mixed reactions, as Muslim community leaders lauded it, while Christian-rightist elements, including Seehofer, issued fierce criticism.
“I do not understand how the role Christianity has played in Germany can be compared to that of Islam,” Seehofer noted during the interview.
According to the conservative politician, tolerance and openness to other religions, as cemented in the German constitution, do not grant these religions direct influence over the country’s core values.
Seehofer’s remarks angered politicians from across Germany’s political spectrum, leading some politicians to dub him a “radical-rightist populist.”
The heated debate in German society centers on the integration of nearly three million Muslim immigrants living in the country today – a majority of them of Turkish descent.
The public debate was set in motion by Thilo Sarrazin, a former banker who published a book in which he slammed the Muslim immigration in the country, claiming it led to a drop in Germany’s intellectual capacity and has diminished it’s cultural assets.
Sarrazin was dismissed from his post at the Bundesbank following the publication of his book, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies and is expected to become Germany’s largest best-seller since the end of the Second World War.
In Germany, the man expressing the popular anger against Muslim immigrants who refuse to assimilate happens to be a banker until recently employed as a board member of the Bundesbank.
Thilo Sarrazin has been excoriated for writing a book that is critical of Muslim immigration, Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany does away with itself). The author has been condemned by top political leaders, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, for saying unpleasant things.
However, many Germans agree that Sarrazin is discussing issues too long covered up by elites in thrall to multicultural beliefs. The people see their communities changed by Muslim diversity, and they don’t like it.
Thilo Sarrazin was a board member of Germany’s august central bank until he wrote a book claiming German society was being made “dumber” by Muslim immigrants. It’s a runaway best-seller, but has cost him his job. [. . .]
But supporters say Sarrazin’s criticisms are simply meant to make a point about what is expected of newcomers to Germany.
“We are not far-right extremists, we just want the people who come here to contribute something, to be polite and learn the language. Nothing more,” said Mike Temme, a doctor.
Temme was among a lively crowd of several hundred in Berlin who paid to hear Sarrazin debate his book, “Germany Abolishes Itself.” Support for the ex-banker was palpable as the crowd applauded his defense of his theories and drowned out any participants who questioned Sarrazin’s use of genetic theory or accused him of manipulating data.
“Because we’ve started and lost two world wars, nobody dares to say it. But now somebody has spoken the truth and everybody agrees,” Temme said.
The “truth,” according to Sarrazin, is that Germans “have accepted as inevitable that Germany will be smaller and dumber.”
“The three immigrant groups with the largest educational deficit and the highest social welfare costs, are also those with the highest rate of reproduction,” Sarrazin writes, citing Turks, immigrants from the former Yugoslavia and from the Middle East. [. . .]
Hardening attitudes toward Muslims are felt in many European countries. But these are generally spearheaded by the far-right, whereas Sarrazin, 65, belongs to the traditional, center-left Social Democratic Party, which is moving to expel him. Some heavyweights of Germany’s left-leaning establishment are leaping to Sarrazin’s defense, arguing that he is being unjustly pilloried for saying what a silent majority has long felt.
Matthias Matussek, a columnist with the weekly Der Spiegel, praised Sarrazin for challenging “the politically correct branch of Germany’s consensus-based society” and for forcing politicians to listen to the public’s demands for Muslims to embrace German ways.
“They are sick of being cursed or laughed at when they offer assistance with integration. And they are tired about reading about Islamist associations that have one degree of separation from terrorism, of honor killings, of death threats against cartoonists and filmmakers,” Matussek wrote in his blog for Der Spiegel’s online edition.
The heated debate has left leaders struggling for a response.
The video below is a composite of European news reports about the Sarrazin book.
Congrats to Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancelor, for honoring the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard for his courage in pursuing free speech during the Danish cartoon jihad. The artist angered the Muslim street (not that hard, true) for perhaps the most iconic cartoon of the controversy, Bomb-Turban Mohammed (shown).
As a result of Westergaard’s exercise of Western freedoms, he has required 24/7 security since February 2008 because of threats to his life. Last winter an axe-carrying Somali broke into the cartoonist’s Denmark home with murderous intent (Panic room saved artist Kurt Westergaard from Islamist assassin, UK Sunday Times).
It would be nice if our own national leader, Barack Hussein Obama, would stand up for free speech against the Muslims-of-perpetual-fury. He has tried to straddle the fence regarding the Ground Zero mosque, for one example.
One might also recall the semi-hidden audience BHO gave to the Dalai Lama (hated by Red China) who was forced to exit through White House trash. Obama is never the stand-up guy for American values.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel praised the bravery of a Danish cartoonist who caricatured the Prophet Muhammad at an award ceremony honoring his achievements for freedom of speech.
In her speech praising illustrator Kurt Westergaard, “who has had to fear for his life since the publication of the cartoons in 2005,” Merkel emphasized Wednesday that media freedom is an important element of rights in Europe.
“It does not matter if we think his cartoons are tasteful or not, if we think they are necessary and helping or not,” Merkel said at the ceremony in the city of Potsdam. The question, she said, was, “Is he allowed to do this? Yes, he is.”
There have been at least three attempted attacks on the 75-year-old Westergaard or his newspaper, the Danish the Jyllands-Posten, since he and 11 other artists angered Muslims around the world by creating the Muhammad cartoons four years ago.
Protesters in Muslim countries have torched Danish and other Western embassies.
Westergaard’s cartoon, which he said took 45 minutes to draw, was considered by many Muslims the most offensive of the 12. He has rejected calls to apologize, saying poking fun at religious symbols is protected by Denmark’s freedom of speech.
Merkel’s appearance at the award ceremony drew criticism from Muslim groups, who perceived it as an endorsement of Westergaard’s cartoon. Aiman Mazyek, general secretary of Germany’s Muslim Council, told public radio Deutschlandradio that Merkel is honoring the cartoonist who sullied “our Prophet … and thereby all Muslims.”
Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, rejected the criticism and said Merkel’s message was to underscore the importance of freedom of speech.
Merkel condemned plans by a pastor in the United States to burn the Muslim holy book to commemorate the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“If a fundamentalist evangelical pastor in America wants to burn the Quran on Sept. 11, I find that — in a word — disrespectful, also abhorrent and false,” Merkel said.
An uproar exploded among officialdom about the book, with Prime Minister Angela Merkel leading the call for his expulsion, and the Bundesbank voted in a couple days for Sarrazin to be fired from his position on the board.
The Bundesbank said in a statement that its six-member board “unanimously agreed” to ask Christian Wulff, the German President, to remove Mr Sarrazin, 65, from his post. It said the bank’s corporate governance commissioner “unreservedly supports” the decision.
Mr Wulff’s office said he had received the request from the Bundesbank and was considering it. It did not say when he was expected to make a decision.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and several members of her government have indicated they would like Mr Sarrazin to go, amid fears that his comments were damaging to the central bank’s reputation.
Following the Bundesbank’s announcement, a government spokesman signalled Mrs Merkel’s satisfaction with the move.
At least in the video below, Sarrazin the banker emphasized the economic impact on German society of so many unproductive immigrants, specifically the Muslim ones who refuse to assimilate, unlike other immigrant groups of which he approves. “In every country, the Muslim immigrants — on the basis of their lower participation in the work force and looming recourse to social support — cost the state more than they bring in,” he reads from his book.
For more of Thilo Sarrazin speaking out in his own defense, see a Bild article translated in Gates of Vienna: Strangers in Our Own Country.
In Washington, a gaffe can be said to occur when an influential person tells the truth.
In Germany, a similar sensibility prevails. A ruckus has been brewing up since last year when Thilo Sarrazin (pictured below), a board member of the Bundesbank, expressed unkind (but accurate) assessments about Germany’s Muslim immigrant population: “A large number of Arabs and Turks in this city, whose number has grown through bad policies, have no productive function other than as fruit and vegetable vendors,” Sarrazin remarked to the magazine Lettre International.
He further stated that a majority of Arabs and Turks reject the authority of the German state. Muslim children, he said, do poorly in school and bring down the educational level of the country, unlike other immigrant groups which integrate within a generation. Sarrazin is fine with Vietnamese, Indians, etc. who get with the program of education, speaking German and having a job.
But the dust-up is just getting started. Sarrazin’s new book is being published this week, titled “Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab (“Germany Does Away With Itself”).
This week, though, the Social Democrat (SPD) seems to have outdone himself. German media outlets, including SPIEGEL, have published excerpts of his soon-to-be-published book on Germany’s supposed demise. As Sarrazin makes abundantly clear, that demise comes as a result of immigration. The bluntness with which he presents his ideas has kicked off a debate in Germany, and within the center-left SPD, as to whether Sarrazin has crossed the line into racism and whether he should be censured.
In the excerpts that have been published, Sarrazin writes that Germany’s Muslim immigrant families have profited from social welfare payments to a far greater degree than they have contributed to German prosperity. He also has raised the spectre of the country’s Muslim population, due to what he claims are much higher birth rates among immigrants, soon overtaking that of the country’s “autochthonous” population — a term roughly synonymous with “indigenous.”
“If the fertility rate of German autochthons remains at the level it has been at for the past 40 years, then in the course of the next three or four generations, the number of the Germans will sink to 20 million,” he writes in the book. “And, incidentally, it is absolutely realistic that the Muslim population, through a combination of a higher birth rate and continuation of immigration, could grow by 2100 to 35 million.” In another passage, he writes: “I don’t want the country of my grandchildren and great grandchildren to be largely Muslim, or that Turkish or Arabic will be spoken in large areas, that women will wear headscarves and the daily rhythm is set by the call of the muezzin. If I want to experience that, I can just take a vacation in the Orient.”
In another passage, Sarrazin seems to suggest that Muslim immigrants would rather work under the table than legally. Through the language used in his polemics, Sarrazin appears to be aiming to push the highly divisive debate over immigration and integration closer to that of right-wing populists elsewhere in Europe, like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.
It looks like a fine debate is shaping up between the people who admit the truth about Muslim immigration and those who believe in multiculturalism uber alles.
At least 150 people protested outside the book launch in the capital. Author and sociologist Necla Kelek spoke before Sarrazin, defending him and calling for the book’s issues to be discussed properly.
Controversy erupted after excerpts from the book were published in the mass circulation daily Bild last week. The author then gave a series of publicity interviews, during which he said Muslims denigrate European society due to their lower intelligence, and said that “all Jews share a particular gene.”
Advance orders have sent the book at the top of German sales charts.
Thilo Sarrazin says that Muslim immigration does not provide a benefit for German society but is instead a total negative. He knew the flack that comes from such opinions but pushed forward anyway by writing a book that was sure to be controversial. Hopefully the self-outing of a banker against the looming catastrophe of immigration-created Eurabia will stiffen the spines of others to speak out more forcefully about preserving European civilization.
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It’s good to see another European elected official (besides Geert Wilders) mention the Islamic elephant in the room and how it should be brought under control. Why continue to import people whose values are opposed to Western freedoms?
Congrats to Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancelor, for honoring the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard for his courage in pursuing free speech during the 
