The Vicious Snake, Donald Trump via You Tube, January 18, 2016
H/t Puma by Design, February 7, 2016 and 1389 Blog, February 26, 2016. I had missed it. According to Puma by Design, “Donald Trump began reciting the lyrics to a song entitled “The Snake” at his rallies, a few weeks back, as not reported by the mainstream media.’ The video is apparently “going viral” in Europe.- DM)
CAIR vows to Save us from ‘the Trumps, the Cruzs, the Palela Gelleers, the Robert Spencers’ Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer, February 26, 2016
Jacob Bender, the non-Muslim Useful Idiot who heads up Hamas-linked CAIR’s Philadelphia chapter, boasted Wednesday on the organization’s website: “What CAIR can do, however, and what it has been doing superbly for 10 years now, is to oppose the anti-Muslim ideology of the Trumps, the Cruzs, the Pamela Gellers, the Robert Spencers…” Notice that he doesn’t say that Hamas-linked CAIR is opposing the ideology of the Syed Rizwan Farooks, the Mohammed Abdulazeezes, the Dzhokhar Tsarnaevs, the Nidal Malik Hasans.
As for those he does mention, Hamas-linked CAIR is opposing us so superbly that Trump actually has a chance to become President of the United States, and whether he does or not, he has moved the public discourse to a place where the issues of jihad terror and Islamization can be discussed more honestly in the mainstream than has been possible for years. Cruz has outlasted most of the Republican candidates to remain one of Trump’s chief rivals. Pamela Geller is planning an exciting new initiative and I am busier than ever, having just completed a new book and busy traveling to speak all over the country: yes, Hamas-linked CAIR is doing its job of demonization and marginalization of foes of jihad terror superbly.
More importantly, Bender here repeats the common and hysterical claim that “Muslims are the new Jews,” which has been answered many times — as often as it has been asserted. Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong, Leftist “journalist” Jeffrey Goldberg, Iranian front group Board member Reza Aslan, Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison,Nicholas Kristof, and Canadian Muslim leader Syed Sohawardy, among many others, have repeated it. The blazingly brilliant Daniel Greenfield takes it apart in this video.
And in 2014, Bill Maher noted: “Jews weren’t oppressing anybody. There weren’t 5,000 militant Jewish groups. They didn’t do a study of treatment of women around the world and find that Jews were at the bottom of it. There weren’t 10 Jewish countries in the world that were putting gay people to death just for being gay.” Indeed, and no one is calling for or justifying genocide of Muslims now; there is no individual or group remotely comparable to the National Socialists in any genuine sense.
The late Christopher Hitchens also refuted this idea when writing a few years ago about the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero: “‘Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,’ Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like.”
The purpose of this claim is to intimidate people into thinking that criticism of Islamic supremacism leads to the concentration camps, and thus there must be no criticism of Islamic supremacism. The unstated assumption is that if one group was unjustly accused of plotting subversion and violence, and was viciously persecuted and massacred on the basis of those false accusations, then any group accused of plotting subversion and violence must be innocent, and any such accusation must be in service of preparing for their subversion and massacre. It is simply a method to foreclose on any criticism of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism.
Jacob Bender, who is himself Jewish, ought to pause before making such a reckless and baseless comparison – especially in light of the fact that the new Jews are not the Muslims at all, but are none other than the old Jews: anti-Semitic hate crimes remain much more common in the U.S. than “Islamophobic” hate crimes, and Jews all over Europe face an increasingly dangerous and precarious situation because of the anti-Semitism of the rapidly increasing Muslim population. CAIR’s Hamas ties don’t seem to trouble him either. In his complacency and willful ignorance, as well as his active work for CAIR, Bender could be the poster child for our blinkered age.
Police in Rotherham Turned Blind Eye to Islamic Child Rape Ring, Counterjihad.com, February 25, 2o16
The Times of London reports on new evidence of police complicity in a child rape ring being run by Pakistani Muslims in Rotherham, England. The ring groomed and then raped children for a decade and a half before it was broken up. The authorities were repeatedly informed, as early as 2002, but agents did not want to risk their careers in an environment of intense pressure not to seem racist or critical of Islam. There was a Home Office investigation into charges that Tony Blair’s government had known of the ring as early as 2001, but did nothing because it conflicted with “his government’s efforts to pacify Muslim communities.” Some 1,400 children were raped over the ensuing 16 years.
Now the Times tells us that the police hadn’t just been warned, they knew and were sometimes complicit.
“Corrupt police and an influential politician fuelled a culture of impunity that allowed three brothers to ‘own’ the town of Rotherham and abuse children until their crimes were exposed by The Times. One officer had sex with under-age girls, passed drugs to the sex-grooming gang and tipped them off when colleagues were searching for missing children, a court was told. Another helped to broker a deal in which one brother returned an abused girl to police after receiving an assurance that he ‘wouldn’t get done’. The jury was told that Jahangir Akhtar, the former deputy leader of Rotherham council, also took part in the handover at a petrol station. Mr Akhtar, the former deputy chairman of South Yorkshire police and crime panel, was a relative of Arshid, Basharat and Bannaras Hussain, who behaved for years ‘like a pack of animals’ to pursue dozens of young girls before demanding sex, often with threats of violence.”
This sounds like a story of intense local corruption, and it is. It sounds like a story of the failure of the police to uphold their most basic oath, and it is that too. But it is also a story of the ways in which these criminals could rely upon protection from the highest levels of the British government.
The former Prime Minister of England, Tony Blair, is being investigated for having known about the ring as early as 2001. Blair’s administration suppressed investigations into the ring because it would conflict with his Muslim outreach efforts — outreach efforts being advised by Muslim Brotherhood affiliate groups. Even today, Tony Blair’s religious charity is accused of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The culture of not questioning Islam or Muslims from on high made possible these corrupt police, who in turn made possible a child rape ring in the heart of England.
Follow the links. They are links to the most famous newspapers in Britain: the Times, the Guardian, theIndependent, the Daily Mail. Believe your eyes.
Immigration or an IPhone, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, February 25, 2016
The public argument between Apple and the FBI over cracking the encryption on an iPhone used by the San Bernardino Muslim terrorists is one of those ongoing civil liberties debates that negotiate the terms on which we are asked to sacrifice our civil liberties for the sake of Muslim immigration.
We have already made a thousand accommodations and we will make a thousand more. There will be more databases, naked scanners, eavesdropping, vans that can see through walls, backdoors to every server, registrations, warrantless searches, interceptions and regulations. There will be heavily armed police on the streets. And then curfews and soldiers. These things exist in Europe. They’ll come here.
Some libertarians will argue that we should have none of this and no restrictions on immigration. That we should just shrug off each terror attack and move on with our lives.
Eventually though there will be a terror attack that we can’t shrug off and that can’t be minimized by using the cheap statistical trick of comparing Terror Attack X to the number of people who die every year from cancer. Or there will just be an endless parade of daily attacks, bombings, stabbings or shootings, as in Israel, which create a constant climate of terror that will preclude any hollow rhetoric about the number of people falling off ladders each year or getting struck by lightning.
Some hawks will cheer every terror fighting measure short of closing the door on the root cause of the problem. They would rather see every American wiretapped, strip searched and monitored every hour of the day then just stop the flow of Muslim terrorists into this country.
The encryption methods of an iPhone, like the question of how many ounces there are in your tiny bottle of mouthwash, would not be much of an issue, if Muslim migration did not make it one.
Terrorists adapt to the terrain. They use the native population as protective coloration. They can find a way to transform a shoe, a tube of toothpaste or instant messaging on a game console into a terror tool. Just as the left can ‘politicize’ everything, Muslim terrorists can ‘terrorize’ everything. When everything is a potential terrorist tool, then there can be no such thing as privacy or civil rights.
Muslim immigration is forcing us to constantly choose between our lives and our civil liberties. It’s a Catch 22 decision with no good choices. Terrorists push governments toward totalitarianism so that their own alternative totalitarian state starts to seem like a less terrible alternative. But the refusal to fight terrorism also makes the totalitarian state of the terrorists more viable.
With every Muslim terror attack, successful or only attempted, they win and we lose. The pressure of terror attacks discredit Western ideologies and worldviews, both on the right and the left. Each attack helps generate new converts for Islam and more political influence for Islamist organizations.
Vociferous debates over the choice between civil liberties and security make it seem as if we have to choose between our worldviews because something in our society is the problem. It isn’t.
We do not have an American terror network problem. The Amish aren’t using iPhones or obscure apps to coordinate terror attacks. We have a Muslim terror network problem. It’s not because of the Methodists that we have to weigh our mouthwash or take our shoes off and put them in a greasy plastic tray at the airport. It’s because 19 Muslims entered this country, hijacked our airplanes and murdered thousands of Americans. Guantanamo Bay is not an issue because Buddhists are at war with America. It’s an issue because Muslim terrorists are at war with America.
We do not have an iPhone encryption problem or a shoe problem or a mouthwash problem. We have a Muslim terror problem.
Whatever decision is made about iPhone encryption will not be the last word. The simple reality is that privacy carries too high a price as long as we have large numbers of people in this country who want to kill us in equally large numbers. If we want our privacy back, it’s not the FBI that is standing in our way. It’s the religious organizations that are paid to bring Muslim “refugees” to this country. It’s the liberal, libertarian and even conservative voices that think there is something wrong with pausing the mass migration of the group that is disproportionately responsible for our terror problem. It’s the media that would rather discuss anything and everything than discuss the problem we are really dealing with.
The source of this problem is not whether the FBI handled the iPhone correctly or whether Apple should be obligated to build a way for law enforcement to access its devices. These arguments would exist even without Muslim terrorism, but they would lack the same level of life and death urgency.
This is not an iOS problem. It’s an immigration problem.
The San Bernardino massacre by Muslim terrorists would not have happened without Muslim immigration. The security flaw here was not in the work of FBI agents or of Apple programmers, but of our immigration laws. Just as we cannot and will not intercept every single Muslim terrorist who finds a way to hide explosives in his underwear, shoes, soda or laptop, we will not ever be able to crack every single encrypted Muslim terrorist device. And their underwear bombs and encrypted iPhones would not be an issue if we did not have Muslim terrorists in America in the first place.
Instead of discussing the Islamic root cause, we put stress on our own competing institutions, technology providers face off with law enforcement, hawks and civil libertarians berate each other as if they were each part of the threat. But we are not the problem here. They are the problem.
The only backdoor that should be at issue here is the one that Muslim terrorists use to enter America. We don’t need to violate everyone’s rights to close it. We just need the political will to do the common sense thing and shut down the source of the threat. Either that or give up on our privacy.
Our choice is very simple. We can have external security or an internal police state. But neither of the above is not an option. We can have open borders that fill our country with criminals, but that means that eventually any livable middle class neighborhood will have a cop on every corner. We can have airport security for the people coming into this country. Or we can have airport security for everyone.
Ongoing Muslim migration makes a police state inevitable. But to avoid the perils of profiling and the appearance of discrimination, it will be a universal police state that will strip away rights from everyone without regard to guilt or innocence in the hopes of averting the next Muslim terror attack.
The only way to protect our lives and our freedoms from Muslim terrorism and its consequences is by shutting down Muslim immigration. If we fail to do this, then we will lose our lives and our liberties.
Canadian PM: ‘Islam is compatible with secular West’, Israel National News, Ari Yashar, February 22, 2016
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of the Liberal Party has already made a number of eyebrow-raising statements since taking office last November, but on Sunday CIJ News revealed yet another questionable sentiment he raised twice in TV interviews in recent months.
In the two interviews, both with CBC, Trudeau insisted that Islam is “not incompatible with the Western secular democracy.”
In the most recent interview on January 31, he said “we need to make sure that we’re working with communities like the Muslim community, for example, to demonstrate that Islam is not incompatible with free and open Western societies.”
CIJ News went further in documenting the trend by pointing out a video message from Trudeau to the annual Reviving the Islamic Spirit convention at the Metro Toronto Convention Center last December 25-27.
In the message, Trudeau said the convention “is also about celebrating our shared beliefs in justice, fairness, equality of opportunity and acceptance. The work you do in communities across the country is what builds and strengthens our multicultural fabric.”
Trudeau’s stance towards the Islamic world has been raising question marks. Last Tuesday he was grilled in parliament for proposing to give UNRWA $15 million despite its well-documented ties to the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza, and largely ignored the question on the topic.
In more questionable behavior vis-a-vis Hamas, Trudeau appointed Omar Alghabra as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs; Alghabra was previously the head of the radical Canadian Arab Federation (CAF), which ran afoul of the state for its open support of Hamas.
Last month amid heavy concerns that jihadists and rapists have infiltrated the massive influx of migrants from the Middle East to the West, Trudeau defended his policy of mass immigration, saying he is confident in people who “don’t think a lot about politics, don’t think a lot about terrorism.”
Denmark Criminalizes Free Speech – Selectively, Gatestone Institute, Judith Bergman, February 19, 2016
♦ According to the court decision, pointing out the totalitarian and cruel aspects of Islam itself is now a criminal offense, considered “insulting and demeaning” to Muslims in Denmark and therefore constituting “racism.” In effect, this means that the court is conflating what might possibly constitute blasphemy with racism.
♦ Conversely, when a Danish imam called Jews “the offspring of apes and pigs,” he was officially reported to the police for breaching § 266b, but no legal charges were ever filed against him.
♦ In Denmark, apparently, it is a crime to criticize Islam and “Islamists,” but calling Jews the “offspring of apes and pigs” and inciting their murder in a mosque (and calling non-Muslims in general “animals”) can be done with impunity.
Last week, a Danish district court ruled that what a Danish citizen had written on Facebook in November 2013 violated the Danish criminal code.
In response to a debate about the local activities of a radical Islamic organization, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which works for the re-establishment of the Islamic caliphate, he wrote: “The ideology of Islam is as loathsome, disgusting, oppressive and as misanthropic as Nazism. The massive immigration of Islamists into Denmark is the most devastating thing to happen to Danish society in recent history.”
According to § 266b of Denmark’s criminal code, it is prohibited and punishable by fine or prison publicly to threaten, insult or demean a group of persons because of their race, skin color, national or ethnic origin, faith or sexual orientation.
The man was fined 1600 Danish kroner (approximately $240), which makes it unlikely that he will be allowed to appeal the sentence: the fine is so small that an appeal to the Higher Court requires special permission.
The Danish district court found that the man’s statements about Islam were “generalizing statements” that were “insulting and demeaning towards adherents of Islam.”
The district court reached this conclusion despite the defendant’s testimony, according to which he specifically wrote “the ideology of Islam” in order to make a distinction between the religion of Islam and the ideology of Islam. The defendant explained that, “‘Islamist’ is a normal term for extremist groups, who commit crimes against humanity and do the most terrible things, whereas Islam is a peaceful religion.”
The district court decided to disregard “the defendant’s explanation that a distinction should be made between the ideology of Islam and the religion of Islam”.
The court reasoned that
“the statements that the defendant has made should be seen in the societal and historical context of the fall of 2013, and in this context the court sees the statements about ‘the ideology of Islam’ as pertaining to Islam generally and not only the extreme part of Islam. In this regard, the court has furthermore emphasized that the quoted statements were written on 29 November 2013 at 17.13 and that at 17.27 on the same day — as pointed out by the defense — the defendant wrote in the same [Facebook] thread that “Islam wishes to abuse democracy in order to get rid of democracy.”
For the incredulous reader, it should be pointed out that the court presumably meant that in 2013, Islamism as an ideology had not manifested itself through terrorism in Denmark and Europe in the same way as it has today, a few years later. This is, of course, nonsense, as pointed out by the defendant’s lawyer, Karoly Nemeth: “I believe the court is expressing a lack of historical understanding. The ideology of Islam has existed for over 1,000 years,” he said.
According to this court decision, then, pointing out the totalitarian and cruel aspects of Islam itself is now a criminal offense, considered “insulting and demeaning” to Muslims in Denmark and therefore constituting “racism.” In effect, this means that the court is conflating what might possibly constitute blasphemy with racism. Despite this decision being wrong in every single aspect, the court did, however, get one thing right: It refused to distinguish between Islam as an ideology and Islam as religion. The prosecutor, Bente Schnack, said it did not make a difference whether the defendant spoke of the ideology or the religion of Islam. “It is pretty difficult to tell the difference,” she said.
While the court’s decision was widely criticized in Denmark, two leading professors of Danish criminal law agreed with it. One professor, Gorm Toftegaard Nielsen, said that, “§ 266b is about subjecting a group of people to hatred by threatening, insulting or demeaning them. When you group Islamists with Nazis, then it is not a compliment.”
The following question, of course, inevitably arises: Since when is public debate supposed to be restricted to complimenting each other?
The professor continued: “When he [the defendant] says ‘the massive immigration of Islamists,’ it can easily be interpreted as meaning that those people are as immoral as Nazis… It is not nice to compare those two groups. But that is what he does indirectly and that amounts to subjecting a group to hatred.”
What the Danish district court did was what the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation has long sought: the establishment of Islamic “blasphemy laws,” making criticism of a religion a criminal offence. The UN Human Rights Commission’s Resolution 16/18 does exactly that, although it is non-binding — except presumably for the countries that want it to be. Infractions, as in Denmark now, are punishable by law. The UNHRC Resolution, originally known as “Defamation of Islam,” was changed in later versions — it would seem for broader marketability — to “Defamation of Religions.”
Conversely, in October 2014, when Mohamed Al Khaled Samha, a Danish imam from the Odense mosque, called Jews “the offspring of apes and pigs,” he was officially reported to the police, and local Danish police began an investigation of the imam with a view to charging him for breaching § 266b, but as far as Gatestone Institute has been able to ascertain, no legal charges were ever filed against him. (Incidentally, this imam was among the group of imams who traveled to the Middle East presumably to stir up anti-Danish sentiment in the aftermath of Jyllands-Posten newspaper’s printing of the Mohammed cartoons). In his sermon, Samha also said, “”Palestine has been and will remain the land of Islam. It is the land of the great battle, in which the Muslims will fight the Jews, and the trees and the stones will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah! There is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.'”
In July 2014 another Danish imam, Abu Bilal Ismail, from the Grimshøj mosque, prayed for the death of Jews at a sermon in a Berlin mosque. “Oh Allah, destroy the Zionist Jews. They are no challenge for you. Count them and kill them to the very last one. Don’t spare a single one of them,” Ismail said. This, too, was officially reported to the Danish police, who never acted against that imam, either.
Instead, it was German authorities who criminally charged him. In December 2015, he was sentenced to a €10,000 fine for inciting hatred against Jews as well as non-Jewish groups in Germany. The Berlin court found that Ismail targeted “Jews with hatred, as well as all other non-Muslim groups living in Germany.”
The German court also said that the Lebanese-born cleric had shown deep contempt for the United States and Europe in his sermon, and that his assault on European civilization and Zionists had met the definition of incitement. The verdict said that Ismail considered Jews as “criminals who kill prophets and children, and Jews are worse than wild beasts in the world of the jungle,” and that “Allah should kill Jews.” Since Ismail had already been convicted in Germany, and a person cannot be punished twice for the same criminal act, the Danish police decided not to press charges.
In another, ironic, development regarding the use of § 266b of the Danish penal code, the state Prosecutor decided that Hajj Saeed, who incited against Jews in the Masjid Al-Faru mosque in Copenhagen, on February 13, 2015 — the very same sermon, in fact, that the terrorist Omar Abdel Hamid El-Husseini attended the day before he murdered Dan Uzan at the Copenhagen synagogue — will not be prosecuted for his statements. In his sermon, Saeed said that the Western “infidel” civilization has led non-Muslims “to an abyss of deprivation and corruption and has reduced them from being human to being at the level of animals”. He incited Muslims to wage war against Jews:
“Our prophet Muhammad had Jewish neighbors in Medina. Did he talk about closer ties, harmony and dialogue with them — in the same way as the UN and those who call for reconciliation between what is true and what is false? Or did he tell them to worship Allah? When they broke their promise and did not accept his calling, well, you know what he did to them… He declared war against the Jews.”
Danish police investigated the imam and recommended that the state prosecutor indict him under the same provision of the penal code, § 266b, for inciting hatred and threatening a particular group of people because of their ethnicity — in this instance because they were Jews. The state Prosecutor, for reasons that are unknown at this point, evidently thought otherwise.
Ironically, the mosque in question, Masjid Al-Faru, is connected with Hizb-ut-Tahrir; and the imam, Hajj Saeed, is considered to be one of the organization’s “rising stars” in Denmark.
In 2002, in fairness, the spokesman at the time for Hizb ut-Tahrir, Fadi Abdullatif, was sentenced for violating § 266b, when his organization handed out flyers against Jews with the words, “And kill them, wherever you may find them and banish them from where they banished you.”
Members of the Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir demand a worldwide Islamic Caliphate during a demonstration in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2006. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons/Epo)
After the February 2015 terrorist attacks in Copenhagen against the synagogue, where Dan Uzan was murdered, and the Krudttønden café, where film director Finn Nørgaard was murdered, Hizb ut-Tahrir told Muslims not to condemn the terrorist attacks, but instead “put things in their right context.”
In Denmark, apparently, it is a crime to criticize Islam and “Islamists,” but calling Jews the “offspring of apes and pigs” and inciting their murder in a packed mosque (and calling non-Muslims in general “animals”) can be done with impunity.
Spring could bring a fresh surge of refugees. But Europe isn’t ready for them. Washington Post, Griff Witte and Anthony Faiola, February 16, 2016
LONDON — After an unparalleled tide of asylum seekers washed onto European shores last summer and fall, the continent’s leaders vowed to use the relative calm of winter to bring order to a process marked by chaos.
But with only weeks to go before more favorable spring currents are expected to trigger a fresh surge of arrivals, the continent is no better prepared. And in critical respects, the situation is even worse.
Ideas that were touted as answers to the crisis last year have failed or remain stuck in limbo. Continental unity lies in tatters, with countries striking out to forge their own solutions — often involving a razor-wire fence. And even the nations that have been the most welcoming toward refugees say they are desperately close to their breaking point or already well past it.
The result, analysts say, is a continent fundamentally unequipped to handle the predictable resurgence of a crisis that is greater than any Europe has faced in its post-Cold War history.
“It’s a very dangerous situation,” said Kris Pollet, senior policy officer at the European Council on Refugees and Exiles. “Anything can happen.”
“Europe can deal with this if it wants to. But there needs to be a political breakthrough. And I’m not optimistic,” Pollet said.
Without one, he said, “it’s going to be chaos. That’s clear.”
The scale of disorder and political disruption could be even greater than what Europe faced in 2015.
The numbers themselves are already of an entirely new magnitude: Although arrivals are down from the height of the crisis last fall, the number of people who crossed the sea to reach Europe in the first six weeks of the year — around 75,000 — is 25 times what it was during the same period last year. More than 400 have drowned along the way.
On the Greek islands, the most common European landing spot for people fleeing war and oppression in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa, thousands have arrived even on days when the rough winter seas have been churned by gale-force winds.
With countries improvising their own responses to the mass migration, the most basic tenet of Europe’s post-Cold War identity — that national leaders should act collaboratively to reach continent-wide solutions to common problems — is being called into question as never before.
At most immediate risk is Europe’s decades-old system for borderless travel, the Schengen zone. European leaders have warned that it could come crashing down within months, and it has already been riddled by an array of new fences, military patrols and identification checks where once there was free movement.
Greece could be the first casualty of Schengen’s decline, with the rest of the European Union threatening to kick the cash-starved nation out of the free-movement club unless authorities in Athens can get better control of the nation’s sea border with Turkey. Last week, the E.U. gave Greece a three-month deadline to do so.
But some do not want to wait that long. Eastern European countries including Poland and Hungary are attempting to form an anti-refugee front ahead of this week’s Brussels summit, seeking to combine forces on a plan that would effectively trap refugees in Greece and allow them to travel no farther into Europe.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who on Monday called Europe “defenseless and weak” in stopping what he regards as an Islamic invasion, has called for the construction of razor-wire fences along Greece’s northern borders with Bulgaria and Macedonia.
Such a barrier is already going up on the Greek-Macedonian border, a major transit point for those heading farther north. Even governments regarded as reasonably pro-refugee say that border will soon need to be sealed.
On a visit to the Macedonian capital Friday, Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said that his country is rapidly nearing the limit it has set for asylum seekers this year — less than half the total of last year — and that Macedonia should be ready to “completely stop” the flow of migrants in the coming months.
On Tuesday, Austria announced a plan to limit new arrivals, part of what is now being called a “domino effect” of measures from Greece through the Balkans and into Western Europe meant to deter migrant flows. In a news conference, Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said Austria was preparing to set up 12 new checkpoints along its southern border and impose a daily, perhaps even hourly, quota on migrant flows. Austria will also follow Sweden in denying entry to anyone without a valid travel document.
“If fences are necessary, additional fences will be built as well,” Mikl-Leitner said.
Those comments only add to the pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose nation has taken more asylum seekers than any other in Europe but who faces growing demands to live up to her pledge to dramatically reduce the flows.
She heads to Brussels this week with an urgent need to break the political gridlock. One possibility would be to form what some are calling a new “coalition of the willing” — or a list of nations, probably in northern Europe, willing to take in asylum seekers who qualify for resettlement directly from Greece and Turkey.
She is also putting stock in a new NATO effort to combat people-smugglers in the Aegean Sea, while pushing Greece to more rapidly ramp up its hot spots for registering and processing asylum seekers. Meanwhile, she is continuing to press Turkish leaders to live up to their end of a bargain in which the E.U. agreed to pay Ankara 3 billion euros ($3.34 billion) in exchange for Turkish cooperation in cracking down on smuggler networks.
But with arrivals already far outpacing those in the same period last year, Germans are running out of patience with Merkel. At home, she faces a falling approval rating and a conservative backlash against her steadfast refusal to close Germany’s borders, even after it took in more than 1 million people last year.
The refugee crisis “is a Gordian knot Merkel has to cut. But she tied her political future to it, and there’s no way back for her,” said David Kipp, an associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
If Merkel fails in her attempts to cajole European leaders into cooperating, refugee advocates say there could be grave consequences — not only for the continent but also for the millions of people seeking an escape from the wars that have consumed Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other conflict zones.
“Our fear is that there will be a domino effect where countries say, ‘We’ve had enough,’ ” said William Spindler, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. “Refugee flows are a reality. As long as you have conflict, you will have people fleeing for their lives.”
And at the moment, more people are doing so globally than at any time since World War II — some 60 million. The number trying to enter Europe is a relatively small fraction.
Heaven Crawley, who chairs the study of international migration at Britain’s Coventry University, said Europe should be able to handle the number of people reaching its shores. Syria’s neighbors, she noted, have coped with much higher proportional totals.
But, she said, the continent has been plagued by internal division, as well as a focus on keeping people out — rather than honestly reckoning with what should happen once refugees arrive.
“It’s a crisis of Europe’s own making,” she said. “If Lebanon and Jordan can manage it, why can’t the richest region in the world? It’s politics.”
Germany’s Migrant Crisis: January 2016, Gatestone Institute, Soeren Kern, February 12, 2016
♦ Despite snow, ice and freezing temperatures across much of Europe, a total of 91,671 migrants entered Germany during January 2016.
♦ German taxpayers could end up paying 450 billion euros ($500 billion) for the upkeep of the million migrants who arrived in Germany in 2015. This would presumably double to nearly one trillion euros if another million migrants arrive in 2016.
♦ A 19-year-old migrant from Afghanistan sexually assaulted four girls between the ages of 11 and 13 at a swimming pool in Dresden. The migrant was arrested but then set free.
♦ Three teenage migrants from North Africa tried to stone to death two transsexuals in Dortmund after they were seen walking around in women’s clothing. The victims were saved by police.
♦ Bild reported that politicians in Kiel had ordered the police to overlook crimes perpetrated by migrants.
♦ “The topics we cover are determined by the government. … We must report in such a way that serves Europe and the common good, as it pleases Mrs. Merkel. … today we are not allowed to say anything negative about the refugees. This is government journalism.” – Wolfgang Herles, retired public media personality.
♦ The European Commission called for the “rejection of false associations between certain criminal acts, such as the attacks on women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, and the mass influx of refugees.”
In January 2016, the German public appeared finally to wake up to the implications of their government’s decision to allow 1.1 million — mostly male — migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East to enter the country during 2015.
After more than a thousand Muslim migrants sexually assaulted hundreds of women in cities across Germany on New Year’s Eve, Chancellor Angela Merkel began to face a rising voter backlash to her open-door migration policy.
Merkel’s government has responded to the criticism by: 1) attempting to silence critics of the open-door migration policy; 2) trying to “export” the migrant problem to other countries in the European Union; and 3) announcing a series of measures — branded as unrealistic by critics — to deport migrants accused of committing crimes in Germany.
What Merkel has steadfastly refused to do, however, is reduce the number of migrants entering the country. Despite snow, ice and freezing temperatures across much of Europe, a total of 91,671 migrants — an average of around 3,000 migrants each day — entered Germany during the month of January 2016.
The following is a review of some of the more notable stories about the migration crisis in Germany during January 2016.
January 1. More than a thousand migrants sexually assaulted hundreds of German women in the cities of Cologne, Hamburg and Stuttgart. The government and the mainstream media were accused of trying to cover up the crimes, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiment.
January 1. As Muslim migrants were causing mayhem on German streets, the Minister President of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, said he could not understand public concerns about the “alleged Islamization” of Germany. In an interview with Die Welt, he said: “If you look at the facts, this fear is unfounded. We have a stable democracy and a free society. State and religion are separated. How should Muslims, who represent a minority, Islamize our society?” When asked why Germans are afraid, Kretschmann replied: “People are afraid of strangers they do not know.”
January 1. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated that 1.3 million asylum seekers would enter the European Union annually during 2016 and 2017.
January 2. A fight between children as young as 11 at a refugee shelter in Stockach near Konstanz turned into a mass brawl after parents of the children joined in the fighting. Police were deployed to restore order. Seven people were injured.
January 3. A 16-year-old Moroccan migrant went on a rampage after a judge in Bremen ordered him to be jailed for stealing a man’s laptop at knife-point. On the way from the courthouse to the jail, the Moroccan seriously injured a police officer by kicking him in the face. Once inside the jail cell, the migrant ripped a toilet from the floor and smashed it against a wall.
The chairman of the Bremen Police Union, Jochen Kopelke, said that migrants were attacking city police with increasing frequency: “The tone has become extremely aggressive; sometimes the police must apply massive force to get a situation under control.” According to Bremen Senator Ulrich Mäurer, “the excesses of violence against police officers show that these people have no respect for our constitutional order and its representatives.”
January 3. More than 50 migrants were involved in a mass brawl at a refugee shelter inEllwangen near Stuttgart. Police said migrants attacked each other with fire extinguishers, metal pipes, rocks and stones. According to local media, mass brawls have become commonplace at migrant shelters in the area.
January 3. Hans-Werner Sinn, one of the best-known economists in Germany, cited estimates that German taxpayers could end up paying 450 billion euros ($500 billion) for the upkeep of the million migrants who arrived in Germany in 2015. This estimate would presumably double to nearly one trillion euros if another million migrants arrive in Germany in 2016.
January 4. An internal report written by a senior federal police officer revealed chaos “beyond description” in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. The report, which was leaked to the news magazineDer Spiegel and published in full by the newspaper Bild, said that women were forced to “run a gauntlet” of drunken men of a “migrant background” to enter or depart the main train station. “Even the appearance of the police officers and their initial measures did not stop the masses from their actions.” One migrant told a police officer: “I am Syrian; you have to treat me kindly! Mrs. Merkel has invited me.”
January 5. Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker said: “There is no reason to believe that those involved in the sexual assaults in Cologne were refugees.” Cologne Police Chief Wolfgang Alberssaid: “At this time we have no information about the offenders.”
January 6. Former Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said it was “scandalous that it took the mainstream media several days” to report on the sexual assaults in Cologne. He said public media was a “cartel of silence” exercising censorship to protect migrants from accusations of wrongdoing.
January 7. A charity called Refugees Welcome Bonn, which organized a Rhine River cruise as welcoming party for migrants in Bonn, apologized after it emerged that migrants groped and sexually harassed some female guests during the event.
January 8. The Interior Ministry revealed that of the 32 suspects identified in the Cologne assaults, 22 were asylum seekers. Cologne Police Chief Wolfgang Albers was fired for withholding information about the assaults from the public.
January 9. A vigilante group began patrolling the streets of Düsseldorf to “make the city safer for our women.” Similar groups emerged in Cologne and Stuttgart.
January 10. Three teenage migrants from North Africa tried to stone to death two transsexuals inDortmund after they were seen walking around in women’s clothing. The victims were saved by police, who happened to pass by in a car. One of the victims said: “I never could have imagined that something like this could happen in Germany.”
January 11. A 35-year-old migrant from Pakistan sexually assaulted a three-year-old girl at a refugee shelter in Kamen.
January 12. In an interview with Bild, Frank Oesterhelweg, a politician with the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), caused a scandal when he said that police should be authorized to use deadly force to prevent migrants from raping German women:
“These criminals deserve no tolerance, they have to be stopped by the police. By force if necessary, and, yes, you read correctly, even with firearms. An armed police officer has a duty to help a desperate woman. One must, if necessary, protect the victims by means of force: With truncheons, water cannons or firearms.”
Police union leader Dietmar Schilff was irate: “These statements are outrageous and do not help the police at all. There are clear rules for using the service weapon. What would have happened in Cologne if the police had used clubs and guns?” According to Bild, many German police officers are afraid of using lethal force “because of the legal consequences.”
January 12. A YouGov poll showed that 62% of Germans believe the number of asylum seekers is too high, up from 53% in November. According to the poll, the growing resistance to immigration was being driven by the hardening of attitudes by German women.
January 13. An Interior Ministry report leaked to Bild warned that jihadist attacks like those in Paris could take place in Germany “at any time.” The report said that attacks would likely be spread over several days and against “various target categories.”
January 13. A 20-year-old migrant from Somalia was sentenced to four years in prison for raping an 88-year-old woman in Herford. His defense attorneys argued for leniency because, according to them, the man was traumatized by his flight from Somalia. In Gelsenkirchen, four migrantsattacked a 45-year-old man after he tried to prevent them from raping a 13-year-old girl.
January 14. The Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament, approved a plan to provide all refugees with identity cards that will contain information such as fingerprints and country of origin. The cards will be linked to a centralized refugee data system. The plan may be too late: the German government has lost track of the whereabouts of hundreds of thousands of migrants who entered the country in 2015.
January 14. Prosecutors in Cologne said they were offering a reward of 10,000 euros ($11,000) for information leading to the arrest or identification of those who committed the sexual assaults and robberies on New Year’s Eve.
January 14. A Bavarian politician sent a bus carrying 31 refugees on a seven-hour journey to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office in Berlin to protest her open-door refugee policy. Merkel sentthe migrants back to Bavaria.
January 14. City officials in Rheinberg cancelled this year’s carnival celebrations. Local police said that in wake of the sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, they were unable to guarantee the safety of female revelers.
January 15. A 36-year-old migrant sexually assaulted an eight-year-old girl at a public park in Hilden near Solingen. A 31-year-old migrant from Tunisia was arrested for attempting to rape a 30-year-old woman in Chemnitz. A 31-year-old migrant from Morocco appeared in court for raping a 31-year-old woman in Dresden. A migrant sexually assaulted a 42-year-old woman in Mainz. A migrant sexually assaulted a 32-year-old woman in Münchfeld. An African migrant sexually assaulted a 55-year-old woman in Mannheim.
January 15. Male migrants were banned from a public swimming pool in Bornheim, near Bonn, after they were accused of assaulting female patrons at the facility.
In January, there were thousands of cases of migrants sexually assaulting women in Germany, including many that took place in public pools. The government began to face a rising voter backlash to the open-door migration policy, including public protests (left). In some areas, authorities have distributed cartoon guides, to “educate” migrants that sexual assault is not acceptable (right).
January 15. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, signaled his determination to export Germany’s migrant problem by calling for a Europe-wide gas tax to help pay for the cost of hosting millions of migrants. He said:
“If the funds in national budgets and the European budget are not enough, then let us agree, for example, to raise a levy on every liter of gasoline at a certain level. If a country refuses to pay, I am still prepared to do it. Then we will build a coalition of the willing.”
January 16. Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the German Bundestag and a lawmaker in Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), called upon the government to create a Ministry for Migration, Integration and Refugees. He said the migrant crisis had developed into a “primary and permanent task for the state” and is of “decisive importance for the future of our country and Europe.”
January 16. A 19-year-old migrant from Afghanistan sexually assaulted four girls between the ages of 11 and 13 at an indoor swimming pool in Dresden. The migrant was arrested but then set free. A migrant from Syria sexually assaulted a 12-year-old girl in Mudersbach. A 36-year-old migrant sexually assaulted an eight-year-old girl in Mettmann.
January 16. A group of between six and eight African migrants ambushed three people leaving a discotheque in Offenburg. The migrants were ejected from the discotheque after female clients complained that the men were sexually harassing them. After they left, at around 4AM, the migrants attacked them with metal rods, street signs and garbage bins.
January 17. In an interview with Bild am Sonntag, the president of the federal criminal police, Holger Münch, said that the number of crimes in refugee shelters had increased “significantly” since 2015, when the migrant influx began. He said that the migrants mostly responsible were from the Balkans and North Africa, especially Algerians, Tunisians and Moroccans. He added that half the offenses at the refugee shelters were physical assaults, but that there was also a growing number of homicides and sexual crimes.
January 17. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, former Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber warned that Chancellor Angela Merkel will “destroy Europe” if she refuses to reduce the number of migrants entering Germany.
January 17. Berlin clergyman Gottfried Martens accused German politicians and church leaders of ignoring the persecution of Christians by Muslims in German refugee shelters. He said that the Christians were facing “verbal threats, threats with knives, blows to the face, ripped crucifixes, torn bibles, insults of being an infidel, and denial of access to the kitchen because of uncleanness.”
January 18. A 26-year-old Algerian man was the first person to be arrested in connection with a string of sexual assaults during New Year’s celebrations in Cologne. He was apprehended at a refugee shelter in the nearby town of Kerpen. Cologne’s chief prosecutor, Ulrich Bremer, said that nearly 500 women had come forward with allegations of sexual assault, including three cases of rape.
January 18. A 24-year-old migrant from Sudan was released after being held for questioning at a police station in Hanover. After crossing the street, the man, who receives 300 euros ($335) a month in social welfare benefits, dropped his pants and exposed himself in public and shouted, “Who are you? You cannot do anything to me. Whatever I cannot get from the state, I will steal.”
January 19. Addressing the European Parliament in Strasbourg, European Council President Donald Tusk warned that the European Union had “no more than two months” to get control over the migration crisis or face the collapse of the Schengen passport-free travel zone.
January 19. A poll published by Bild showed that support for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative bloc was down 2.5 points at 32.5%, its lowest result since the 2013 election. The poll showed that support for the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) was up 1 point at 12.5%; support for the Social Democrats was up 1 point at 22.5%.
January 19. A 28-year-old migrant from Iran pushed a 20-year-old woman onto the tracks of an oncoming train in Berlin. She later died.
January 20. Bild reported that migrants invaded female changing rooms and showers at two public swimming pools in Leipzig. Migrants, dressed in their street clothes and underwear, also jumped into the swimming pools. According to Bild, the city hall had tried to keep the incidents quiet, but details were leaked to the media.
January 21. More than 200 migrants have sued the German government for delays in processing their asylum applications.
January 22. Facing political pressure over the migrant crisis, Chancellor Angela Merkel met in Berlin with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to discuss ways to stem the flow of Syrian and other refugees from Turkish shores. She renewed a pledge to provide Turkey with financial support. In November 2015, EU leaders pledged 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) to Ankara to help care for an estimated 2.5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey; the deal has been delayed by a dispute among EU member states over who will pay.
January 22. A report by municipal authorities in Zwickau that was leaked to Bild revealed that migrants were defecating in public swimming pools. Security cameras also filmed migrants harassing women in the public sauna and attempting to storm the female dressing room.
January 22. Police in Hanover investigated four nightclub bouncers for allegedly beating an 18-year-old Algerian migrant after he tried to steal the purses of two teenage girls. Two days before the incident, the migrant had been sentenced to one year in juvenile detention for robbery, but he was free to roam the streets until his sentence began.
January 22. A migrant attempted to rape a 16-year-old girl in Feuerbach district of Stuttgart, and in downtown Stuttgart, four migrants sexually assaulted a 23-year-old woman.
January 23. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that migrants had attacked women in 12 of Germany’s 16 states on New Year’s Eve. In addition to the attacks Cologne, 195 women filed complaints in Hamburg; 31 in Hesse; 27 in Bavaria; 25 in Baden-Württemberg; 11 in Bremen; and six in Berlin.
January 23. Two migrants sexually assaulted an 18-year-old woman in Wiesbaden, and a 35-year-old migrant sexually assaulted a woman in a restroom on a train in Düsseldorf.
January 23. The Stuttgarter Nachrichten reported that dental work for migrants could end up costing German taxpayers billions of euros.
January 24. An official police report leaked to The Huffington Post showed that Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière was not being truthful when he said that between 100 and 200 migrants are being denied entry into Germany each day. The report stated that since September 14, border police had prevented 7,185 migrants from entering the country — or only about 60 migrants turned away each day.
January 25. A 30-year-old migrant from North African exposed himself to a 19-year-old woman on a public bus in Marburg, and then to passersby at the main train station.
January 26. In an interview with the German public radio, Deutschlandfunk, retired public media personality Wolfgang Herles admitted that public broadcasters receive “instructions from above” when it comes to reporting the news:
“We have the problem that we are too close to the government. The topics we cover are determined by the government. But many of the topics the government wants to prevent us from reporting about are more important than the topics they want us to cover…
“We must report in such a way that serves Europe [the European Union] and the common good, as it pleases Mrs. Merkel. There are written instructions … today we are not allowed to say anything negative about the refugees. This is government journalism, and this leads to a situation in which the public loses their trust in us. This is scandalous.”
Previously, Claudia Zimmermann, a reporter with the public television broadcaster WDR, said that public media outlets in Germany “have been warned to report the news from a pro-government perspective.”
January 26. A 24-year-old man on an evening stroll with his three-month-old baby daughter in the Eißendorf district of Hamburg was approached by two migrants who demanded his wallet and cellphone. When he said he was not carrying any valuables, the migrants attacked him with a knife. Fleeing for his life, the man ran onto a frozen pond and broke through the ice. A passerby heard the man calling for help. The baby, under water for an extended period, was revived by paramedics called to the scene. The baby remains in intensive care; the migrants remain at large.
January 26. A 28-year-old migrant from Algeria applied for asylum in Wesel. Authorities became suspicious because of his proficiency in German. They later determined that he had arrived in Germany in November 2014, rather than, as he claimed, in October 2015. It emerged that he had outstanding warrants for theft, but evaded police by using six different identities.
January 26. The Kieler Nachrichten reported that the proliferation of sexual assaults by migrants has women in the northern city of Kiel afraid to be out at night because the city is too dark. In an effort to save electricity, municipal officials decided to convert all of the city’s street lights to LED bulbs, but they do not provide sufficient light to keep the streets illuminated at night.
January 26. The mayor of Freiburg, Dieter Salomon, ordered police to take a hard line against migrants accused of snatching purses and assaulting women in the city’s discotheques. According to club owners, migrants have been robbing women on the dance floor and raping them in the restrooms. Many of the offenders are allegedly underage migrants from North Africa. Club owners say that the migrants are not afraid of authority: “They know that nothing will happen to them here.”
January 27. A 39-year-old migrant from Afghanistan tried to enter Germany at Simbach, a town on the border of Austria. A background check determined that in May 2000, a German court had sentenced the man to an eight-year prison term for rape. He had been deported to Afghanistan in 2006 with orders never to return.
January 27. The public radio and television channel, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, reported that German taxi drivers are profiting from the migrant crisis by taking migrants to doctors’ appointments and asylum interviews. The cab fares are being paid for by German taxpayers. MDR reported on a taxi company in Leipzig that had billed the government for 800 taxi fares for taking migrants to run errands. One taxi driver, for example, drove a migrant family on an 80 km (50 mile) journey for an appointment with migration authorities. The meter was left running while the driver waited for the migrants to return from their meeting. The fare was 309 euros ($344).
January 28. Bild reported that politicians in Kiel had ordered the police to overlook crimes perpetrated by migrants. According to the paper, the police in North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony have also been instructed to be lenient to criminal migrants.
January 28. A migrant from Sudan sexually assaulted a female police officer in Hanover as she was attempting to arrest him for theft. Public prosecutor Thomas Klinge confirmed the incident. “Such brazen behavior towards a police officer has been unheard of until now,” he said.
January 28. Berlin’s Tempelhof airport, the iconic site of the Berlin Airlift in 1948-49, is set to become the biggest refugee shelter in Germany. In a controversial move to alter the airport’s zoning regulations, Berlin’s municipal government — run by a coalition between the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party — voted to build five massive structures to house 7,000 migrants there. Opposition politicians said the government was creating an “immigrant ghetto” in the heart of Berlin.
January 28. Police in Berlin said that a volunteer with the charity group Moabit Hilft hadfabricated a story about a 24-year-old migrant said to have died while waiting for days outside an asylum registration office. The story was allegedly faked in an effort to embarrass the government for its slow response to the migrant crisis.
January 29. The European Commission, the powerful administrative arm of the European Union, said that the sexual assaults in Cologne had nothing to do with the migrant crisis and were simply a matter of public order. A confidential memo leaked to The Telegraph stressed the importance of the Commission’s “continuing role in sounding the voice of reason to defuse tensions and counter populist rhetoric.” The Commission called for “the unconditional rejection of false associations between certain criminal acts, such as the attacks on women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, and the mass influx of refugees.”
January 29. A public vocational school in the Wilhelmsburg district of Hamburg cancelled plans to host classes for refugees after male migrants sexually harassed dozens of female students at the school.
January 29. The German news magazine Focus published the results of a poll showing that 40% of Germans want Chancellor Angela Merkel to resign because of her migrant policies.
January 30. A gang of migrants on a Munich subway train were filmed attacking two elderly men who tried to stop them from groping a woman. Images show the migrants grabbing two men by the arms and neck and shouting abuse at them. It later emerged that the migrants were from Afghanistan; although they had been denied asylum in Germany four years ago, the German government refused to deport them because Afghanistan is “too dangerous.”
January 31. The Interior Minister of Saxony-Anhalt, Holger Stahlknecht, of the Christian Democrats, announced that he would delay releasing the 2015 crime statistics until March 29, two-and-half weeks after regional elections. The statistics are normally released in February or early March. Rüdiger Erben of the Social Democrats said: “The late release date reinforces my suspicion that the statistics are horrific.”
January 31. ISIS sympathizers defaced more than 40 gravestones at a cemetery in Konstanzwith slogans such as, “Germans out of Syria,” “Christ is Dead” and “Islamic State.”
January 31. A 30-year-old German, originally from Turkmenistan, raped a seven-year-old girl in Kiel. The man kidnapped the girl from a school playground at 11AM, took her to his apartment and, after abusing her, set her free. It later emerged that the man, who is the father of two children, had been accused of sexually assaulting a five-year-old girl at another kindergarten in Kiel on January 18, but the public prosecutors failed to pursue the case due to insufficient evidence. “In hindsight, we regret that decision,” the prosecutors said.
January 31. In an underhanded effort to silence critics of the government’s open door migration policy, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel called on German intelligence to begin monitoring the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the third-largest party in Germany. The AfD is surging in popularity because of its anti-immigration platform.
Op-Ed: ‘Europe, learn from Israel!’: Exclusive interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Israel National News, Giulio Meotti, February 2, 2016
When Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist on a street in Amsterdam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali could not even attend the funeral because she would have put the lives of others at risk. So the Dutch intelligence agreed to take her to the morgue. The next day, bodyguards accompanied her from her home and gave her three hours to pack and leave. From there she went to the air base at Valkenburg, near The Hague, where she would be embark on a plane. The portholes were closed, they told her not to approach them nor go near the door. The plane was full of soldiers. Hirsi Ali was leaving a country at war. They landed at a military base in Maine, in the United States. This is how the love affair between America and the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust began. A story that continues to this very day.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is still a shadow. But her voice at the telephone is clear, tough, cool. It is that of a young Somali woman who has undergone genital mutilation, who has lived in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, before being betrothed to a Canadian cousin she had never seen before. Hirsi Ali escaped from Germany to the Netherlands.
She worked as an interpreter in the Islamic Dutch ghettos, she graduated, became a Liberal MP, helped Van Gogh to make the film “Submission” and then disappeared. Now she talks with me about Europe from her think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. Hirsi Ali recently released her third book on Islam, “Heretic”, an optimistic book on the reform of Islam.
Where does your optimism for a reform of the Islamic world come from?“It is a possibility, not a certainty. But I am optimistic because of the violence committed today in the name of Islam, which is creating so much tension, and it is not just committed by individuals, but by states and organizations. People are more and more afraid of radical Islam. In Egypt, in Tunisia, everywhere, there are large numbers of young Muslims who identify themselves as Muslims, but who do not want sharia, Islamic law. Just as many women do not want sharia.”
On February 1, many feminists around the world will celebrate the World Hijab Day, the International Day of the Islamic veil. “It is multiculturalism, the ideology that eliminates the rights of individuals in favor of groups, communities. Europe is committing a cultural suicide.”
What should happen to kick off a reform? “You must first answer a fundamental question: how can someone be Muslim and be in favor of the separation of mosque and state, freedom of expression, rights of the woman? The attitude towards the Qur’an and Muhammad must change, because the Islamists use the Koran and the texts literally. We need a revolt within the house of Islam, against the culture of death, rejecting Sharia, rejecting the jihad, the killing of non-Muslims.”
You were the first authentic dissident in the Islamic world. “The dissidents of Islam are fundamental, because we are those who ask the critical questions, who pursue the critical thinking. Asking the questions means risking your life. It was the same Imam Qaradawi who recognized the role of dissidents when he said that you can not accept apostasy and it deserves death.”
Your name appears in the same list of targets alongside the late director of Charlie Hebdo, Stephane Charbonnier, and other cartoonists. “My name was on the list of Charlie, so I am not surprised by what happened a year ago. Charbonnier and the other journalists were heroes. Unfortunately, today there is a combination of fear and multiculturalism, moral relativism, the sense of guilt for the Muslim population because of colonialism. When I started going to university in the Netherlands, many did not want to hear about the Holocaust in the classroom, they were told not to speak of the Jews of Israel. This served to suppress criticism of Islamic doctrine. We must stop demonizing Israel and learn from it.”
“Unfortunately, today countries like Saudi Arabia do great missionary work in Europe, trying to suppress dissent. Freedom of expression is therefore fundamental for the opening of the Islamic world to reason. But sometimes I think it’s too late. Think about Italy, France, Germany, England, the whole great tension between Muslims and Europeans. In this context it is becoming difficult, more difficult, to exercise the right to freedom of speech.”
“I am happy in America, but even here there are the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations. In ten years I have seen a significant radicalization in America”.
One million immigrants have arrived in Germany this year and another million are expected. Hirsi Ali, who was welcomed by Europe as a refugee from Somalia, now asks Europe to stop immigration. “We are at a critical point in Europe today: the immigration of millions of people must be stopped even before Europe stops the indoctrination in the mosques and imams. If we do not stop the brainwashing, there will be another lost generation in Europe. Muslims must stop Sharia now. I keep repeating it, but who is listening?”.
Since Van Gogh was killed and you fled to America, in the Netherlands nobody longer speaks of Islam. Journalists, cartoonists, intellectuals, have all closed their mouths: “The people in the Netherlands who write and talk about Islam and these issues are tired. In the Netherlands, but also in France, many Jews are leaving. In Los Angeles I have Dutch Jewish friends who fled from the Netherlands. There is a terrible brain drain from Europe. In Europe they are all paralyzed, in Italy, in Germany, in France, but the political leadership must banish sharia, its propagation is not acceptable. Because sharia is the worst violation of human dignity. Sharia is against civilization and European culture”.
So speaks a brave woman who carries on her own body the consequences of that poisonous flower.
Muslim Refugee Rapes 72-Year-Old Woman, Gets to Stay in Europe, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, January 30, 2016
Who’s afraid of a few “orphans”? The 72 year-old women who don’t want to be raped by them.
The 72-year-old woman, identified only as Christina F., said: “It was a really hot day and I decided to take my dog for a walk along the Schwechat River, and saw two young men swimming there.”
She said that one of the young men had reached out his hand to her, asking her to help him onto the bank, which she did. She said: “Suddenly, I felt a blow from behind.”
She was grabbed and then pushed to the ground, and the attacker put his hand over her mouth and used his other hand to tear off her clothing.
A friend of the old woman, Hans Vesely, 72, said: “The dog that she had with her was 13 years old and was sadly not up to protecting his mistress from the attack.”
“She is not the same woman anymore. She doesn’t trust being left on her own and does not leave home, and she’s become very weak since the incident,” Vesely said.
The attacker was only caught because he committed another crime after the rape, and was forced to give a DNA sample. The DNA sample provided matched the one found on his elderly victim, and he was arrested.
The teenager, identified only as Wahab M., initially denied the rape, claiming that he was drunk and could not remember what happened. In addition, his friend who was also arrested told police he had not seen anything.
Because at the time he was only 17 years old, Wahab M. was punished by the youth court where the maximum sentence is five years, but because he had no previous convictions and eventually admitted the rape in the face of the DNA evidence, it was reduced to 20 months. The shorter length of sentence means he will not face deportation.
Now if Wahab had done something truly terrible, like be a European who criticizes Muslim migrants, he would be spending years in prison.
WarSclerotic 
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