Geert Wilders: Male asylum seekers to be locked up in asylum centers via You Tube, January 18, 2016
Swedish Boy ‘Honor’-Killed; German Trangenders Stoned, Clarion Project, Meira Svirsky, January 18, 2016
Arminas Pileckas, 15, who was killed by Ahmed Mustafa Al Haj Ali, 14, who recently arrived in Sweden.
The importation of the culture of honor violence has arrived in Europe with migrants from Islamist countries. Two profoundly disturbing stories in particular are worth noting.
In Sweden, a 15-year old boy was stabbed to death by a 14-year old migrant from Syria on his first day back at school this term. The boy, whose family themselves were immigrants from Lithuania, was reported to have been protecting a young girl from a sexual assault from the Syrian boy in December. It was allegedly not the first time.
In retaliation, the Syrian boy plunged a knife in his back and heart on the first day back at school in January.
The victim’s father angrily related that in Sweden the press was in collusion with the government, saying that, with regards to the migrant problem, “Everything is being kept hidden.”
While the grieving father was not interviewed by the press, Swedish news Aftonbladet interviewed the father of the migrant boy, who claimed that his son was being bullied by the murdered boy. In what was described as a sympathetic interview, the father insisted, “The school did nothing to help him and establish his honor. Instead, my son had to meet this 15-year old every day. It made him very upset.”
Even if this version was correct (it was denied by the boy’s classmates as well as other indicators), killing a classmate is a way to “establish” one’s “honor?” With no questions asked?
In Germany, immigrants from North Africa were arrested while stoning two transgender individuals near the city’s central train station. A police car fortuitously cruising the area broke up the attack perpetrated by three men, described as between the ages of 16 and 18.
Upon arrest, police reported that the men told them “such persons must be stoned.”
It is unacceptable that the culture of (so-called) “honor” be imported into host countries. The often manifest arguments of cultural relativism by Europeans (see Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker’s comments following mass sexual assaults in her city by migrants on New Year’s Eve) are paltry and lame excuses for the upholding of Western values. Even those who view themselves as the vanguards of human rights (feminists, anti-racism activists, social justice campaigners) shy away from criticism of the “Islamic other.”
While their criticism is eminently forthcoming for Western societies that fail to change fast enough and the way they deem acceptable, when it comes to criticism of human rights abuses inherent in sharia-based societies, they are markedly silent.
The Problem with Islam Is Aggressive Scripture, Not Aggressive ‘Traditionalism’ National Review, Andrew C. McCarthy via The Counter Jihad Report, January 16, 2016
(Islamic tradition is based on Islamic scripture, which Muslims generally rely on religious authorities to interpret for them. To rely on one’s own lay scriptural interpretations is considered a great sin. Unless Islamic religious authorities are moved to give preference to early verses from the Qu’ran — which were abrogated by later verses — divorcing Islamic tradition from unabrogated scriptures will likely be very difficult if not impossible. — DM)
Reading the Koran at a mosque in Bahrain. (Mohammed Al-Shaikh/AFP/Getty)
On the Corner this week, the eminent Jim Talent touted (with some reservations) an essay about “moderate Islam” by Cheryl Bernard. A Rand Institute researcher, she is also a novelist, a defender of war-ravaged cultures, and the wife of Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to post-Taliban (or is it pre-Taliban?) Afghanistan. With due respect to Dr. Bernard, who does much heroic work, I believe the essay highlights what is wrong with Western academic analysis of Islam.
The problem comes into focus in the very title of Senator Talent’s post, “Aggressive Traditionalism.” That is the attribute of Islamic societies that Dr. Bernard blames for the frustration of her high hopes for “moderate Islam.” In truth, however, the challenge Islam poses for moderation is not its tradition; it is Islamic doctrine — the scriptural support for traditional sharia and Islamic supremacist ideology.
I give Bernard credit. She is the unusual strategist who is willing to admit failure — in this instance, of the strategy of promoting “moderate Islam” as the antidote to “radical Islam.” But even this concession goes off the rails: She maintains that the strategy was somehow “basically sensible” despite being “off track in two critical ways.” The real problem, though, is not the two errors she identifies but the fatal flaw she fails to address: The happenstance that there are many moderate Muslims in the world does not imply the existence of a coherent “moderate Islam.” Try as she might, Bernard cannot surmount this doctrinal hurdle by blithely ignoring the centrality of doctrine to a belief system — without it, there is nothing to believe.
But let’s start with the two critical problems she does cite. The first is the matter of defining what a “moderate” is. Bernard concedes that she and other thinkers adopted a definition that was “too simplistic” — meaning, too broad. It made “violence and terrorism” the litmus test for “moderation.” This enabled what she labels “aggressive traditionalists” to masquerade as moderates.
Who are the “aggressive traditionalists”? Muslims who, though nonviolent themselves, “harbor attitudes of hostility and alienation” against non-Muslims. The failure to account for the challenge that “aggressive traditionalism” poses for moderation led to the second flaw Bernard admits: the undermining of “integration” — a reference to Muslim assimilation (or the lack thereof) in the West.
This is fine as far as it goes. In fact, Bernard is quite correct about the main challenge posed by hostile, alienated, integration-resistant Muslims: Even if they are personally nonviolent, the communities they create become “the breeding ground for extremism and the safe harbor for extremists.”
But “extremism” about what? This is the salient question, and it is one Bernard studiously ducks. The error is implicit from the very start of her essay (my italics):
Over the past decade, the prevailing thinking has been that radical Islam is most effectively countered by moderate Islam. The goal was to find religious leaders and scholars and community ‘influencers’ — to use the lingo of the counter-radicalization specialists — who could explain to their followers and to any misguided young people that Islam is a religion of peace, that the term jihad refers mainly to the individual’s personal struggle against temptation and for moral betterment,and that tolerance and interfaith cooperation should prevail.
Plainly, the “prevailing thinking” casually assumes “facts” not only unproven but highly dubious. Bernard takes it as a given not only that there is an easily identifiable “moderate Islam,” but also that this . . . what? . . . doctrine? . . . attitude? . . . is the most effective counter to “radical Islam.”
But what is moderate Islam? She doesn’t say. She maintains that there are countless moderate Muslims who, by her telling, embrace “Western values, modern life and integration.” In fact, she assumes there are so many such Muslims that they constitute the “mainstream” of Islam. Yet, that proposition is not necessarily true even in the West, where Muslims are a minority who might be expected to assimilate into the dominant, non-Muslim culture; and it most certainly is not true in the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East.
Even worse is Bernard’s assertion — uncritical, and without a hint that there may be a counter-case — “that Islam is a religion of peace, [and] that the term jihad refers mainly to the individual’s personal struggle against temptation and for moral betterment.”
As is the wont of Islam’s Western apologists, Bernard is attempting to shield from examination what most needs examining. Her reliance on the potential of “moderate Islam” to quell “radical Islam” is entirely premised on the conceit that Islam is, in fact, moderate and peaceful. Her assumption that the vast majority of Muslims can be won over (indeed, have already been won over, she seems to say) to Western values is premised on the conceit that those values are universal and, hence, locatable in the core of Islam — such that “tolerance and interfaith cooperation should prevail” because Islam is all for them.
Islam, however, is not a religion of peace. It is a religion of conquest that was spread by the sword. Moreover, it is not only untrue that jihadrefers “mainly” to the individual’s internal struggle to live morally; it is also untrue that the Islamic ideal of the moral life is indistinguishable from the Western conception.
To be clear, this is not to say that Islam could not conceivably become peaceful. Nor is it to say that jihad could not be reinterpreted such that a decisive majority of Muslims would accept that its actual primary meaning — namely, holy war to establish Islam’s dominance — has been superseded by the quest for personal betterment. To pull that off, though, will require a huge fight. It cannot be done by inhabiting an alternative universe where it has already been done.
That fight would be over doctrine, the stark omission in Bernard’s analysis. I do not think the omission is an oversight. Note her labeling of faux moderates as “aggressive traditionalists.” Citing “tradition” implies that the backwardness and anti-Western hostility she detects, to her great dismay, is a function of cultural inhibitions. But what she never tells you, and hopes you’ll never ask, is where Islamic culture and traditions come from.
Alas, they are direct consequences of Islamic scripture and sharia, the law derived from scripture. She can’t go there. She wants Islam to be moderate, but its scriptures won’t cooperate. She must rely on tradition and culture because traditions and cultures can and do evolve. Scripture, by contrast, does not — not in Islam as taught by over a millennium’s worth of scholars and accepted by untold millions of Muslims. Mainstream Islam holds that scripture is immutable. The Koran, the center of Islamic life, is deemed the “uncreated word of Allah,” eternal. (See, e.g., Sura 6:115: “The Word of thy Lord doth find its fulfillment in truth and justice: None can change His Words: For He is the one Who heareth and knoweth all.”)
Bernard must blame aggressive traditionalism because if the problem is aggressive doctrine rooted in aggressive scripture, then it’s not changing any time soon — or maybe ever. Moreover, she is not in a position to challenge doctrine and scripture without deeply offending the believers to whom she is appealing. They are taught that any departure from centuries-old scholarly consensus is blasphemy.
The story Dr. Bernard tells of Islamic intransigence in her own Northern Virginia neighborhood is instructive. A Muslim-American friend of hers is a social worker who finds jobs for Muslim immigrants. He lands openings for a group of Somali women in a hospital laundry service; but the women first tell him they must check with their imam, then they turn down the jobs because they will not be allowed to wear their hijabs. The social worker and Bernard are exasperated: Why don’t the women and their adviser grasp that because hijabs could get caught in the machinery and cause injury, there is a “pragmatic reason” for departing from the traditional Islamic norm?
Notice: Bernard never considers, or at least never acknowledges, that there is doctrinal support for every decision the Somalis make: The scriptures instruct Muslims to consult authorities knowledgeable in sharia before embarking on a questionable course of conduct; they instruct Muslim women to wear the veil (particularly in any setting where they will be exposed to men who are not their husbands or close relatives). And while pragmatism suggests to the rational Dr. Bernard and her moderate, Westernized social-worker friend an obvious exception to Islam’s usual clothing rule, mainstream Islam in the Middle East and Somalia admonishes that Western reliance on reason and pragmatism is a form of corruption, a pretext for ignoring religious duty.
Doctrine is the answer to virtually every immoderate instance of aggressive “traditionalism” Bernard complains about: the separation of men from women in the mosque, and the decidedly poorer accommodations (“often unacceptable and even insulting,” as Bernard describes them) to which women are consigned; the separation of the sexes in work and social settings; the instructions not to trust or befriend “unbelievers”; the admonitions to resist adopting Western habits and developing loyalty to Western institutions. There is scriptural support for every one of these injunctions.
From the fact that she has moderate, “modernized” Muslim friends, who do not comport themselves in such “traditional” fashion, Bernard extravagantly deduces that tradition is the problem. She never comes close to grappling with doctrine — i.e., the thing that most devout Muslims believe is what makes them Muslims. The closest she comes is the fleeting observation that her moderate social-worker friend “is a scholar [presumably of Islam] and a professor who emigrated from a conservative Muslim country.” The obvious suggestion is that if he is not troubled by the flouting of traditional Islamic mores, surely there must not be any credible scriptural objection. But if it is relevant that her friend is a scholar, is it not also relevant that there are thousands of other scholars — scholars who actually do Islamic jurisprudence rather than social work for a living — who would opine that sharia requires these traditional behaviors and that it is the social worker who is out of touch?
When Dr. Bernard’s husband, Ambassador Khalilzad, served in Kabul, he midwifed the new Afghan constitution that purported to safeguard Western notions of liberty while simultaneously installing Islam as the state religion and sharia as fundamental law. In short order, Afghanistan put former Muslims who had publicly renounced Islam on capital trial for apostasy. Dr. Khalilzad, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and other Western officials and intellectuals pronounced themselves duly shocked and appalled — notwithstanding that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Islamic scripture knows that it calls for public apostates to be killed.
To great American embarrassment, the apostates had to be whisked out of the country lest the incompatibility of civil rights and sharia become even more painfully apparent. It is worth acknowledging, however, that what chased them out of Afghanistan was not aggressive traditionalism. It was Islamic doctrine, which simply is not moderate. Looked at doctrinally, the challenge for “moderate Islam” is . . . Islam.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is as senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.
Daniel Greenfield Moment – Islam’s American Identity Crisis, The Glazov Gang via You Tube, January 15, 2016
(Please see also, How Islam in America Became a Privileged Religion. — DM)
Liars or Fools: Which Govern America? Front Page Magazine, Raymond Ibrahim, January 15, 2016
When it comes to the connection between Islam and “anti-infidel” violence, one fact must be embraced: the majority of those in positions of leadership and authority in America are either liars or fools, or both. No other alternative exist.
The reason for this uncharitable assertion is simple: If Islam was once a faraway, exotic religion, now hardly a day goes by without Americans hearing calls for, and seeing acts of, violence committed in the name of Islam. If our leaders don’t, many of us still have “ears that hear and eyes that see” (Proverbs 20:12).
Today, Muslims from all around the world and from all walks of life unequivocally and unapologetically proclaim that Islam commands them to kill or subjugate all who resist it—including all non-Muslims.
This message is hardly limited to jihadi groups like the Islamic State. It’s the official position of several Muslim governments (including America’s closest “friends and allies,” like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as demonstrated in a forthcoming article); it’s the official position of Islamic institutions of lower and higher learning, including Al Azhar, the world’s most prestigious Islamic university; and it’s the official position broadcast in numerous languages on Islamic satellite stations.
In short, there’s no excuse for ignorance about Islam in America—especially if you hold a position of leadership or authority. Yet it is precisely those in such positions who vehemently deny any connection between Islam and violence. Why?
The most recent example took place on January 7. Edward Archer, a convert to Islam, shot and wounded Philadelphia police officer Jesse Hartnett. He later explained his motivation: “I follow Allah. I pledge my allegiance to the Islamic state. That is why I did what I did.”
Yet after showing a surveillance video of Archer in Islamic dress shooting at Hartnett, Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney emphatically declared:
In no way shape or form does anyone in this room believe that Islam or the teaching of Islam has anything to do with what you’ve seen on the screen….It is abhorrent. It is terrible and it does not represent the religion or any of its teachings. This is a criminal with a stolen gun who tried to kill one of our officers. It has nothing to do with being a Muslim or following the Islamic faith.
Kenney’s assertions are either the product of an addled brain or calculated lies. Take your pick, but there are no other alternatives.
If those running the show still don’t “get it,” the overwhelming majority of Americans have by now learned, in Donald Trump’s words, that “there’s something going on” with Islam, “You see the hatred. I mean, we see it every day.”
“We see it every day” is absolutely correct—hence why those who deny it must either be liars or fools. (See “Muslim Persecution of Christians,” reports which I’ve been compiling every month since July 2011, and witness the nonstop violence and carnage committed against non-Muslim minorities living under Islam.)
Still, Kenney’s falsehoods and/or foolishness are mainstream. Most politicians—practically every democrat but also a majority of republicans—makes the same claims, beginning with U.S. President Obama who insists that the Islamic State “is not Islamic,” calls for the “rejection by non-Muslims of the ignorance that equates Islam with terror,” and classified the Fort Hood massacre as “workplace violence,” despite the overwhelming evidence that it was jihad.
More recently, democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton admonished us to get aboard the wishful thinking bandwagon: “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Republican leaders like John McCain say that “unequivocally, without a doubt, the religion of Islam is an honorable and reasonable religion. ISIS has nothing to do with the reality of Islam.” “Conservative” talking heads like Bill O’Reilley flippantly dismiss jihad as “a perversion of Islam, we all know that.”
And so it goes. In the context of the most recent slaughter of Americans at the hands of Muslims—one last December and one last November, both in California—the usual chorus of politicians, media, and others made the same tired claims.
Despite the evidence that the Muslim couple that massacred 14 people in San Bernardino was motivated by Islamic teachings of jihad against the hated “infidel,” Obama claimed “We do not know their motivations.” Chris Hayes and MSNBC were also “baffled” in their search for a motive.
Despite the many indicators that the Muslim student who went on a stabbing spree in UC Merced was motivated by Islam—he was described as a “devout Muslim,” had an ISIS flag, and praised Allah in his manifesto—“local and federal authorities continue to insist that Faisal Mohammad, 18, carried out the vicious attack because he’d been banished from a study group.”
In response, the father of Byron Price, who was stabbed while defending some Merced victims, observed that, “Everyone is afraid to be politically incorrect… [I]t seems like to me we aren’t getting the whole story. I just wonder how much of this is driven from way higher up and is politically driven — I just don’t know.”
Unfortunately, it was one thing to be politically correct when America existed in a utopian bubble away from all the nastiness “over there,” but to be politically correct at this late hour when the tentacles of the global jihad are well entrenched in America is suicidal, literally.
Either way, political correctness is a fancy way of saying “lying”— bringing us right back to our question and a final observation: It doesn’t matter if those running the show are liars or fools, for at day’s end, the result is the same: the world’s strongest nation lays paralyzed before a vicious threat that grows more emboldened by the day.
You Can Count on Governments to Conceal the Truth about Islamic Crimes, National Review, David French, January 12,2016
The truth disrupts the elite’s preferred multicultural narrative, which places all faiths and cultures on equal footing — except for our despised Western civilization. The truth must therefore be suppressed. But the lies are starting to backfire. Victims can’t be ignored indefinitely, and it’s hard to hide mass-scale public assaults. Since 9/11, Western governments and mainstream media have relentlessly pounded their people with deception and wishful thinking about Islam, jihad, and the Middle East. The lies are now being exposed by the light of day. Will enough people care?
************************
At this point, it’s a sad joke — a form of gallows humor shared in times of trouble. When there’s a shooting, and the hours tick by without any identification of the suspect, one can presume that it’s a jihadist. When there’s a riot in Europe, and the perpetrators are described as “youths,” one can presume it’s Muslim men. When an Islamist goes on a shooting spree or stabbing spree or beheads a coworker, authorities will latch onto any explanation but the obvious.
But now even gallows humor is inappropriate. Western denial of Islamic crimes is so common, so systematic, that we can no longer have any confidence that we understand the true dimensions of the jihadist threat. Consider the following:
In Germany, police actively “tried to obfuscate” what happened on New Year’s Eve, when thousands of Muslim men systematically sexually assaulted hundreds of German women — an act that my colleague Andrew McCarthy has aptly termed a “rape jihad.”
The New York Times reported yesterday that Swedish authorities now stand accused of covering up a wave of sexual assaults at a concert last summer. A Swedish newspaper wrote today that national media refused at the time to report factual accounts from the concert assaults, claiming they were nothing but far-right “propaganda.”
Yet for sheer scale, nothing touches the infamous scandal in Rotherham, England, where gangs of Pakistani men brutalized an estimated 1,400 women and girls. Over at least 16 years, from 1997 to 2013, girls and women were trafficked, tortured, and raped while authorities turned a blind eye to the abuse. According to the Rotherham Borough Council’s belated report on the mass abuse, authorities were concerned that they might give “oxygen” to racism claims. Up to 160 British police officers now face investigation for systematically ignoring abuse complaints.
Here at home, willful blindness seems to be a deliberate strategy. The Obama administration for years called Nidal Hasan’s deadly terror attack at Fort Hood “workplace violence,” and in November, the FBI said that it may never release a report into the motivations of the Muslim man who attacked two Chattanooga recruiting stations, killing five. FBI director James Comey said that the Bureau didn’t want to “smear people.” Finally, in December — five months after the event — Comey unequivocally declared the Chattanooga shooting a “terror attack.”
But for sheer brazenness, it’s hard to top Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney. Immediately after police apprehended Edward Archer for attempting to assassinate a Philadelphia police officer, Archer started telling anyone who would listen that he did it “in the name of Islam.” But don’t tell Kenney. He broke land-speed records to get in front of the cameras and declare that the attack “has nothing to do with being a Muslim or following the Islamic faith.”
The consequences of the lies, cover-ups, and evasions are serious. American and European elites hector their respective publics over accepting increasing numbers of migrants. They belittle the public’s concerns over the terrorist threat and instead praise Islam to the heavens for its tolerance — often with full knowledge of systematic criminal acts. Even now — after Cologne and after Rotterham — those of us outside the halls of power can’t have any confidence that we know the truth about the impact of mass Muslim immigration on Europe, or that we know the true dimensions of the domestic terror threat in the United States.
When, for instance, a Muslim man beheaded his coworker in Oklahoma and attempted to behead another, was his attack “merely” the enraged action of a disgruntled worker? Or was it an act of “lone wolf” jihadist? After all, on social media, he’d made the popular hand sign of ISIS fighters, posted pictures of jihadists (including ISIS fighters and Osama bin Laden), and appeared to call for Jihad.
What about the recent stabbing spree at the University of California, Merced? Authorities say it was over a study-group dispute, but the young Muslim attacker reportedly carried an image of an ISIS flag and a handwritten manifesto that “included instructions to behead a student.”
How many Americans are aware of these incidents? How many Americans are aware that New York City police are now looking at a Muslim terror suspect as a “person of interest” in the stabbing of a nine-year-old boy? To learn that, you might have to read a British newspaper that reported on a student named Fareed Mumuni who allegedly stabbed the child in a “botched audition to join ISIS.” His long-term goal was reportedly the bombing of Times Square.
The truth disrupts the elite’s preferred multicultural narrative, which places all faiths and cultures on equal footing — except for our despised Western civilization. The truth must therefore be suppressed. But the lies are starting to backfire. Victims can’t be ignored indefinitely, and it’s hard to hide mass-scale public assaults. Since 9/11, Western governments and mainstream media have relentlessly pounded their people with deception and wishful thinking about Islam, jihad, and the Middle East. The lies are now being exposed by the light of day. Will enough people care?
Germany Just Can’t Get It Right, Gatestone Institute, Douglas Murray, January 11, 2016
♦ How can you explain why Germany, which in the 20th century had such a gigantic anti-Semitism problem, would import so many people from those areas of the world which now have the same gigantic anti-Semitism problem?
♦ The police water cannons were not in evidence on New Year’s Eve to break up the migrant gangs committing violent crimes against women. Instead they were used to break up a lawful demonstration of people opposed to such violent attacks on women.
The late Robert Conquest once laid out a set of three political rules, the last of which read, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” This rule comes in handy when trying to understand the otherwise clearly insane and suicidal policies of Chancellor Merkel’s government in Germany. These policies only make sense if the German government has in fact been taken over by a cabal of people intent not on holding Germany together but on pulling it entirely apart. Consider the evidence.
There can be few other explanations for why Chancellor Merkel’s government last year let in more than one million people (about 1.5% of the current German population) without having any idea of who they were, where they came from or what they think. No democratic leader could possibly push through such a startling measure. How else can you explain why a country that in the 20th century had such a gigantic anti-Semitism problem, would import so many people from those areas of the world which, in the 21st century, now have the same gigantic anti-Semitism problem?
A document that was leaked late last year from the German intelligence service warned that the country is “importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples…” How to explain a government and security service policy which allowed this to happen? Or a Chancellor who, when asked a very lightly critical question about all of this by a concerned German citizen, responded with a long disquisition that failed to answer even one part of the pertinent point?
More up-to-date, it is worth considering events since New Year’s Eve. As the world now knows, that was when around 100 women were subjected to rape, harassment and sexual molestation by a huge crowd of migrants in the centre of the city of Cologne. It has now emerged that the first response of the Cologne police to this major incident was to hold back information about the identity of the attackers. Whether the police thought they could get away with that or not, this lie has now poured fuel onto the flames of public anger by demonstrating that the police, like the government and much of the media, are intent on misinforming the public about what is going on in their country, rather than keeping them truthfully briefed about it.
The next German police response to suggest that they, too, must have been taken over by a cabal of their enemies — intent on whipping up rather than dampening public concern — came a week after this attempted cover-up. At protests this past weekend, the Cologne police wheeled out water-cannons to hose down protestors and disperse them. Of course, these water cannons were not in evidence on New Year’s Eve to break up the migrant gangs committing violent crimes against German women. Instead, they were used to break up a lawful demonstration of German people opposed to such violent attacks on women. Unless you take Conquest’s rule into account, there is no explanation for the deployment of water-cannon by the German police against people protesting the rapes, rather than deploying them against the rapists.
Then there is the “too late” response. This is the declaration by officials, after the rapes have taken place and once the government realizes that it has to say something, that the German authorities will not tolerate and do not want people in their country who do not hold contemporary, enlightened European views on women. As at least 75% of the migrants who arrived in Europe last year were young men from the Middle East and Africa, it might be noted that this point could have been more constructive had it been made somewhat earlier. But, as those people are now here in such vast numbers, a government intent on causing as much societal damage as possible would, of course, allow them in and then complain about something that they will now be able to do nothing about. All such “hardball” pronouncements by German politicians can now be seen for the puff-balls they really are.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel doubled down on her open-door asylum policy in a November 13, 2015 television interview, saying: “The Chancellor has the situation under control. I have my vision. I will fight for it.” Mere insanity, incompetence or duplicity could not possibly explain the behaviour of a German government so obviously dedicated to its own pathetic end.
The conundrum for the rest of Europe now is what to do with the unwelcome knowledge of what is really going on. The realization that the most powerful and significant political and economic country in Europe has clearly been taken over by a cabal of its own enemies, intent on destroying the German nation rather than on protecting its citizens, will strike different Europeans in different ways.
From the British point of view, one striking opportunity to respond will be presented in the referendum over Britain’s membership (or not) in the European Union, slated to take place at some point next year. That Union – which has dissolved the continent’s external and internal borders as a central pillar of its policy — may now be seen by British voters for what it is. And so perhaps the best explanation of the behaviour of the German government is that it has been taken over some time ago by British Euro-sceptics, intent on finally bringing the EU to this dismal end. That is clearly the most likely explanation. Mere insanity, incompetence or duplicity could not possibly explain the behaviour of a German government so obviously dedicated to its own pathetic end.
The Islamization of Germany in 2015, Gatestone Insitute, Soeren Kern, January 10, 2016
♦ A mob of a thousand men of “Arab or North African” origin sexually assaulted more than 100 German women in downtown Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Similar attacks also occurred in Hamburg and Stuttgart. Cologne’s Mayor Henriette Reker, said that “under no circumstances” should the crimes be attributed to asylum seekers. Instead, she blamed the victims for the assaults.
♦ “There is nothing wrong with being proud German patriots. There is nothing wrong with wanting Germany to remain free and democratic. There is nothing wrong with preserving our own Judeo-Christian civilization. That is our duty.” — Geert Wilders, Dutch politician, addressing a rally in Dresden.
♦ “We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law. German security agencies are unable to deal with these imported security problems, and the resulting reactions from the German population.” — From a leaked government document, published by Die Welt.
♦ Germany will spend at least €17 billion ($18.3 billion) on asylum seekers in 2016 — Die Welt.
♦ Saudi Arabia is preparing to finance the construction of 200 new mosques in Germany to accommodate asylum seekers. — Frankfurter Allgemeine.
Germany’s Muslim population skyrocketed by more than 850,000 in 2015, for the first time pushing the total number of Muslims in the country to nearly six million.
Of the one million migrants and refugees who arrived in Germany in 2015, at least 80% (or 800,000) were believed to be Muslim, according to estimates by the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland, ZMD), a Muslim umbrella group based in Cologne.
In addition to the newcomers, the natural rate of population increase of the Muslim community already living in Germany is approximately 1.6% per year (or 77,000), according to data extrapolated from a recent Pew Research Center study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe.
Based on Pew projections, the Muslim population of Germany reached an estimated 5,068,000 by the end of 2014. The 800,000 Muslim migrants arriving in Germany in 2015, combined with the 77,000 natural increase, would indicate that the Muslim population of Germany jumped by 877,000, to reach an estimated 5,945,000 by the end of 2015. This would leave Germany vying with France for the highest Muslim population in Western Europe.
Muslim mass migration is fast-tracking the rise of Islam in Germany. It is also responsible for a host of social disruptions, including a rape epidemic, a public health crisis, and a rush by German citizens to purchase weapons for self-defense. What follows is a chronological round-up of some of the key stories in 2015.
JANUARY 2015
January 8. A survey published by the Bertelsmann Foundation found that because of the growing Muslim population: 57% of Germans believe that Islam is threatening to German society; 61% believe that Islam does not fit into Western society; 40%, feel like “foreigners in their own country.”
January 9. The newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, reported that Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Agency (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA) enacted a nationwide emergency plan to prevent Islamic terrorists from striking in Germany. Federal and state security agencies were ordered to locate the whereabouts of up to 250 German Islamists and other “relevant persons.” The magazine also reported that the BKA had evidence “that key European cities could be attacked at any time.”
January 11. The offices of the Hamburger Morgenpost were firebombed, after the newspaper, in solidarity with the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, republished its cartoons on the cover, in defense of free speech.
January 11. In an interview with Bild am Sonntag, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière confirmed that German intelligence was monitoring “around 260 individuals” who could potentially strike at any moment. He said:
“We have about 260 dangerous individuals (Gefährder). We also have around 550 people who have travelled to the battle zones in Syria and Iraq. Between 150 and 180 of these have returned to Germany; 30 of them are battle-hardened fundamentalists. They pose a serious threat to our security. I am very concerned about well-prepared perpetrators such as those in Paris, Brussels, Australia and Canada. This situation is serious.”
According to Bild, at least 60 police officers are needed successfully to monitor just one German jihadist around the clock. The newspaper questioned whether Germany has enough security personnel to track all the potential terrorists. De Maizière conceded: “So far we have been lucky. Unfortunately, this may not always be the case.”
January 12. More than 25,000 people showed up in the city of Dresden for a weekly gathering of a burgeoning grassroots movement known as PEGIDA — short for “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West.” In what was the largest turnout yet, marchers wore black armbands and observed a minute of silence for “the victims of terrorism in Paris.”
On its Facebook page, PEGIDA wrote that the attack against Charlie Hebdo in Paris confirmed its worst fears. It said:
“The Islamists PEGIDA has been warning about for 12 weeks showed France that they are incapable of democracy and rather look to violence and death as an answer! Our politicians want us to believe the opposite. Must such a tragedy happen here in Germany first???”
January 12. Chancellor Angela Merkel repudiated the PEGIDA movement by saying that Islam “belongs to Germany.”
January 12. A 20-year-old Eritrean refugee and asylum seeker, Khaled Idris Bahray, a Muslim, was stabbed to death in Dresden. European media were quick to blame PEGIDA for inciting the murder. The London-based Guardian reported that the killing “exposes racial tensions” and “anti-immigration sentiment” in Germany. On January 22, however, German prosecutors said that Bahray’s 26-year old Eritrean roommate had confessed to the stabbing.
January 14. The German cabinet approved a plan to confiscate the national ID cards of known Islamists, making it harder for them to leave the country to fight for ISIS.
January 15. Police in Lower Saxony arrested a 26-year-old German-Lebanese jihadist, identified as Ayub B., and charged him with participating in the jihad in Syria. Also on January 15, police in Pforzheim raided the apartments of two Balkan Salafists.
January 16. More than 250 police searched 11 premises in Berlin. They arrested five Turkish Islamists, including a 41-year-old Turk identified as Ismet D., who refers to himself as the “Emir of Berlin.”
January 20. More than 200 police raided 13 properties linked to Islamists in Berlin and the eastern states of Brandenburg and Thuringia.
January 21. The founder and leader of PEGIDA, Lutz Bachmann, abruptly stepped down after German media published a photograph of him with an Adolf Hitler-style haircut and moustache. In Facebook posts, he also referred to asylum seekers as “trash” and “filth.” PEGIDA’s detractors said the photo, taken at least two years before the group’s rise to prominence, proves the movement was motivated by racism. Bachmann insisted that the photograph was an act of satire.
January 21. The Roman Catholic diocese of Münster banned Paul Spätling, a Roman Catholic priest, from preaching after he spoke at a PEGIDA rally in Duisburg. He told a group of 500 listeners: “Europe has been at war with Islam for 1,400 years. It is unbelievable that Chancellor Angela Merkel said ‘Islam belongs to Germany.'” Stephan Kronenburg, a spokesman for the diocese, said: “With his statements he stirs up hostility against Islam; we consider this dangerous.”
January 25. The prime minister of the eastern German state of Saxony, Stanislaw Tillich, disagreed with Merkel’s statement that “Islam belongs to Germany.” He said: “Muslims are welcome in Germany and can practice their religion. But this does not mean that Islam is part of Saxony.” The capital city of Saxony is Dresden, headquarters of the PEGIDA movement.
January 29. The carnival committee in Cologne dropped plans to build a Charlie Hebdo-themed float. The cancellation was prompted by fears that it might pose a security threat. The float was to be featured in the February 16 parade as an expression of support for France and Charlie Hebdo. The design, chosen by the public in an online poll, showed a cartoonist forcing a pencil into the barrel of a terrorist’s gun.
Also in January, the German supermarket chain, Aldi, removed a brand of liquid soap from store shelves after complaints that its packaging was offensive to Muslims. Aldi said the packaging of the Ombia 1001 Nights liquid soap, which depicts a mosque with dome and minarets, together with a lantern and a set of prayer beads, was intended to evoke a scene from the Middle East.
Muslim customers had posted complaints on Aldi’s Facebook page. “When I saw your liquid soap by Ombia on your shelves, I was a little shocked as it showed a mosque,” one customer wrote. “The mosque with its dome and minarets is a symbol that stands for dignity and respect for Muslims. That is why I do not find it appropriate to depict this meaningful image on an item of daily use.”
FEBRUARY 2015
February 8. The newspaper, Die Welt revealed that German public prosecutors were investigating 83 German jihadists for war crimes, based on atrocities committed in the name of the Islamic State.
February 12. The Hamburger Morgenpost reported that senior politicians representing the State of Saxony and the City of Dresden secretly used more than €100,000 ($115,000) in taxpayer money to pay for a PEGIDA counter-demonstration held in Dresden on January 10. The purpose of this demonstration, for which more than 35,000 people showed up, was to portray PEGIDA supporters as “intolerant” and “bigoted,” in contrast to the majority of Dresdeners, who are considered “cosmopolitan” and “committed to tolerance.”
February 15. The city of Braunschweig cancelled a planned carnival parade because of the “specific threat of an Islamist attack.”
February 26. The President of the Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, warned Jewish men not to wear skullcaps while in the Muslim districts of Berlin. “This is a development I would not have expected five years ago,” he said. “It is certainly frightening.”
MARCH 2015
March 6. Police in Bremen warned that Islamists were plotting to attack the city’s cathedral as well as a synagogue. Two suspects were arrested after a raid on a local mosque.
March 7. Sheik Abu Bilal Ismail, a Danish imam who called for the death of Jews during a sermon at Berlin’s Al-Nur mosque, was found guilty of hate speech and ordered to pay a fine of €9,600 ($10,300). “O Allah,” Ismail had said, “destroy the Zionist Jews. They are no challenge for you. Count them and kill them to the very last one. Do not spare a single one of them. Oh Lord, bring torment upon them.” He later said his words had been taken out of context.
March 12. A court in Berlin fined the father and two uncles of Nasser El-Ahmad, an 18-year-old Lebanese Muslim, for attempting to force him into marriage with a woman despite his being openly homosexual. El-Ahmad said his father had threatened to slit his throat and his uncle doused him with gasoline because they refused to accept this fact. Observers said the case showed that males can be victims of forced marriage, as well.
March 14. Hooligans, Salafists, PEGIDA and far-left counter-demonstrators all descended on the city of Wuppertal. It was the first time the groups all held simultaneous events. More than 1,000 police were deployed to maintain calm.
March 26. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière banned the Salafist group Tauhid, which he said was recruiting jihadists to fight in Syria and Iraq.
APRIL 2015
April 8. Federal Police Chief Dieter Romann revealed that in 2014, more than 57,000 people had tried to enter the country illegally, a 75% jump in comparison to 2013. In addition, police arrested 27,000 people who had managed to enter the country and were living there illegally, a 40% jump from the year before. Most of the illegal immigrants were from Syria, Eritrea, Serbia, Somalia, Kosovo and Afghanistan.
April 13. Dutch politician Geert Wilders addressed a rally of the German grassroots anti-Islamization movement known as PEGIDA in the eastern city of Dresden. Wilders said: “There is nothing wrong with being proud German patriots. There is nothing wrong with wanting Germany to remain free and democratic. There is nothing wrong with preserving our own Judeo-Christian civilization. That is our duty.”
April 22. The Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a think tank in Berlin, announced the launch of the “Muslimisches Forum Deutschland.” The new forum aims to promote the voices of liberal Muslims in order to counter-balance the influence of extremist Muslim groups in Germany.
Also in April, the German rapper-turned-jihadist Dennis Cuspert appeared in an ISIS propaganda video rapping the following lyrics:
“To the enemies of Allah. Where are your troops? We can no longer wait. O Allah, destroy them! Grant us victory over them. Take from us. Make us honorable. Take from our blood. Fisabilillah [One who fights for the cause of Allah]…
“We want your blood. It tastes so wonderful…In Germany, sleeper cells lie in wait. The brothers are coming. Terrorize the Kafir [nonbeliever].”
MAY 2015
May 1. Police in Oberursel, a suburb of Frankfurt, cancelled a professional bicycle race with more than 5,000 participants, on fears that Islamic terrorists were planning to attack the event.
May 20. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière addressed a conference in Berlin called “Jewish Life in Germany: Is it at Risk?” He said that in 2014, anti-Semitic hate crimes were up by 25% and that much of the increase was due to attacks perpetrated by Muslim immigrants.
May 23. The German Army announced that it would recruit its first imam for the 1,600 Muslims in uniform.
JUNE 2015
June 3. More than 90 police officers were deployed to break up a fight between 70 members of rival immigrant clans at a public playground in Moabit, an inner city neighborhood of Berlin. The fight began when two women got into an argument over a man, and turned violent after more and more family members participated. Two police officers were seriously hurt.
June 5. A 30-year-old Somali asylum seeker called “Ali S” was sentenced to four years and nine months in a Munich prison for attempting to rape a 20-year-old woman. Ali had previously served a seven-year term for rape, and had been out of prison for only five months before he attacked again. In an effort to protect the identity of Ali S, a Munich newspaper referred to him as “Joseph T.” — a name deemed more politically correct.
June 8. More than 50 police officers were deployed to break up a fight resulting from an argument at a wedding reception for Bosnian immigrants in Berlin. Within moments, more than a dozen other had people joined in. But as soon as the police arrived, the rival clans stopped fighting each other and began attacking them. One of the wedding guests hit a police officer over the head with a chair; critically wounding him. Other officers had bottles thrown at them, were spat on or verbally attacked.
June 10. A 26-year-old Muslim woman, Betül Ulusoy, was allowed to begin an internship as a junior lawyer in the town hall in Berlin. Local authorities had initially considered rejecting her application because she insisted on wearing a Muslim head-covering. Berlin’s neutrality law (Neutralitätsgesetz) stipulates that anyone who works for the city is prohibited from showing outward signs of religiosity. But city officials, apparently in order to avoid being accused of Islamophobia, made an exception for Ulusoy.
June 24. In an interview with the Rheinische Post, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said that the number of German jihadists fighting in Syria had risen to around 700. “The number has never been as high as it is now,” he said. The number of violent Islamists in Germany who are “prepared to commit politically motivated crimes of considerable importance” was around 330. He said there were more than 500 ongoing counter-terrorism efforts involving 800 Islamists.
June 26. The administrators of the Wilhelm-Diess-Gymnasium, a school in the Bavarian town of Pocking, warned parents not to let their daughters wear revealing clothing, in order to avoid “misunderstandings” with 200 Muslim refugees housed in emergency accommodations that happened to be in a nearby building. Their letter said:
“The Syrian citizens are mainly Muslim and speak Arabic. The refugees have their own culture. Because our school is directly next to where they are staying, modest clothing should be worn in order to avoid disagreements. Revealing tops or blouses, short shorts or miniskirts could lead to misunderstandings.”
June 29. A mob of Lebanese immigrants attacked two police officers attempting to arrest two men for smoking cannabis on a public sidewalk in Duisburg. Within minutes, the officers were surrounded by more than 100 men who tried to prevent the arrests. Ten squad cars and dozens of police reinforcements were required to rescue the policemen.
Also in June, a debate erupted over whether Muslim students should be exempted from mandatory visits to former concentration camps as part of Holocaust education programs. The dispute centered on a proposal that would require students in all secondary schools in Bavaria to visit Holocaust memorials as part of the school curriculum. The proposal was opposed by the governing Christian Social Union, which said that “many children from Muslim families… have no connection to our past and… will need much more time before they can identify with our history. We need to be careful about how we address this issue with these children.”
JULY 2015
July 17. For the first time ever in Germany, public television and radio channel Bayerischer Rundfunk aired Muslim prayers marking the beginning of the Eid el-Fitr holiday and the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.
July 20. Germany’s first Sharia-compliant bank, the Turkish-owned Kuveyt Turk Bank, opened for business in Frankfurt. The bank’s director, Kemal Ozan, said: “Our market research has shown that 21% of Muslims in this country would see an Islamic bank as their natural household bank.”
July 24. Two police officers in Gelsenkirchen, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, were attacked by a mob of Lebanese immigrants after they tried to pull over a driver who ran a stoplight. The driver got out of the car and attempted to flee on foot. When police caught up with him, more than 50 people appeared from virtually nowhere to prevent the suspect’s arrest. A 15-year-old attacked a policeman from behind and began strangling him, rendering him unconscious. Massive amounts of police reinforcements and pepper spray were needed to control the situation.
July 25. A confidential police document leaked to the Rheinischen Post revealed that in 2014, a record-breaking 38,000 asylum seekers in Germany were accused of committing crimes in the country. Analysts believe this figure — which works out to more than 100 crimes a day — is only a fragment: many crimes are not made public.
July 25. The newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported that spiraling levels of violent crime by immigrants from the Balkans and the Middle East have turned parts of Duisburg, a key German industrial city, into “areas of lawlessness.” Such areas, according to a police report that was leaked, have effectively become “no-go” zones for police.
July 25. In an interview with the news magazine, Focus, the head of the police union in North Rhine-Westphalia, Arnold Plickert, warned of the emergence of no-go zones in the cities of Dortmund, Duisburg, Essen and Cologne. “Several rival rocker groups as well as Lebanese, Turkish, Romanian and Bulgarian clans are fighting for supremacy of the streets,” he said. “They make their own rules; here the police have no say in it.”
AUGUST 2015
August 3. A confidential document leaked to the newspaper Bild, revealed that the Hamburg transit authority (Hamburger Verkehrsverbund, HVV) ordered ticket inspectors to “look the other way” whenever they encounter migrants who are using public transportation without a ticket. The move ostensibly aims to protect the HVV against “bad press.”
August 6. Police revealed that a 13-year-old Muslim girl was raped by another asylum seeker at a refugee facility in Detmold. The girl and her mother reportedly fled their homeland to escape a culture of sexual violence; as it turns out, the man who raped the girl is from the country they had fled.
August 18. A coalition of four social work organizations and women’s rights groups sent a letter to the leaders of the political parties in the regional parliament in Hesse, warning them of the worsening situation for women and children in the refugee shelters. The letter said:
“The practice of providing accommodations in large tents, the lack of gender-separate sanitary facilities, premises that cannot be locked, the lack of safe havens for women and girls — to name just a few spatial factors — increases the vulnerability of women and children within the shelters. This situation plays into the hands of those men who assign women a subordinate role and treat women traveling alone as ‘wild game.’
“The consequences are countless rapes and sexual assaults. We are also receiving an increasing number of reports of forced prostitution. It must be stressed: these are not isolated cases.
“Women report that they, as well as children, have been raped or subjected to sexual assault. As a result, many women sleep in their street clothes. Women regularly report that they do not use the toilet at night because of the danger of rape and robbery on the way to the sanitary facilities. Even during daylight, passing through the camp is a frightful situation for many women.”
August 19. At least 20 Syrian migrants staying at an overcrowded refugee shelter in the eastern German town of Suhl tried to lynch an Afghan migrant after he tore pages from a Koran and threw them in a toilet. More than 100 police officers were called in to restore order, but when they arrived, were attacked with stones and concrete blocks. Seventeen people were injured in the melee, including 11 refugees and 6 police officers. The president of the German state of Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow, said that Muslims of different nationalities should be housed separately to avoid similar violence in the future.
August 21. Germany suspended the so-called Dublin Regulation — a law that requires people seeking refuge within the EU to do so in the first European country they reach — for asylum seekers from Syria. This means that Syrians reaching Germany will be allowed to stay while their applications are being processed. Critics said the move would encourage even more migrants to make their way to Germany.
August 27. Aiman Mazyek, director of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland, ZMD), a Muslim umbrella group based in Cologne, estimated that at least 80% of the migrants and refugees arriving in Germany in 2015 are Muslim.
August 30. German sociologist Hans Georg Soeffner warned that Germany was importing religious conflict:
“Immigration brings religious conflicts with it — like the ones between different Muslims. We must assume that the conflicts will grow. The refugees bring political and religious conflicts from their countries of origin to Germany — like the conflicts between Sunnis and Shiites, or liberal Muslims and Salafists. We are already familiar with the conflicts between Turks, Kurds, Alevites and the rest of Muslims, so we’ve seen these conflicts. But in view of the expected number of new immigrants, the conflicts will grow. And that is why we quickly have to begin promoting German values, meaning the constitution. Only then will the immigrants know what the rules here are.”
Also in August, the number of asylum seekers entering the country in a single month surpassed the 100,000 mark for the first time ever. A record 104,460 asylum seekers arrived in August 2015, bringing the cumulative total for the first eight months of 2015 to 413,535.
SEPTEMBER 2015
September 3. In an interview with Die Zeit, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said the integration of Muslim migrants from the Arab world would be more difficult than the integration of Turkish Muslims; at least 20% of migrants arriving in the country this year were illiterate.
September 7. Aiman Mazyek, director of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, said that Muslim mass migration would significantly alter the nature of Islam in Germany. Until now, German Islam has been predominately Turkish in nature; in the future, it will become far more Arab.
September 8. The Frankfurter Allgemeine reported that Saudi Arabia was preparing to finance the construction of 200 new mosques in Germany to accommodate asylum seekers.
September 17. In an interview with the Rheinische Post, Hans-Georg Maassen, the director of the Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV), said that German Salafists were posing as aid workers and were offering gifts of money and clothing in efforts to recruit asylum seekers. Others were offering translation services and inviting migrants to their homes for tea. Still others were handing out leaflets with information about local Salafist mosques. Maassen said:
“Many of the asylum seekers have a Sunni religious background. In Germany there is a Salafist scene that sees this as a breeding ground. We are observing that Salafists are appearing at the shelters disguised as volunteers and helpers, deliberately seeking contact with refugees to invite them to their mosques to recruit them to their cause.”
September 19. In Bielefeld, Salafists were infiltrating refugee centers by bringing toys, fruits and vegetables for the migrants.
September 23. Municipal officials in Hamburg introduced an audacious bill in the local parliament that would allow the city to seize vacant commercial real estate (office buildings and land) and use it to house migrants.
September 25. Asadullah and Shazia Khan, migrants from Pakistan living in Darmstadt, went on trial for the “honor killing” of Lareeb, their 19-year-old daughter. Asadullah confessed to strangling his daughter with his bare hands because he did not approve of her boyfriend.
September 28. More than 70 asylum seekers in Hamburg began a hunger strike to pressure local authorities to provide them with better housing. “We are on a hunger strike,” said Syrian refugee Awad Arbaakeat. “The city lied to us. We were shocked when we arrived here.” The migrants said they were angry they were being asked to sleep in a huge warehouse rather than in private apartments. Hamburg officials say there are no more vacant apartments in the city, the second-largest in Germany.
Also in September, it emerged that hundreds of Muslim refugees are converting to Christianity, apparently in an effort to improve their chances of having their asylum applications approved. Under Islam, Muslims who convert to Christianity are guilty of apostasy, a crime punishable by death. The “converts” apparently believe that German immigration officials will allow them to stay in Germany if they can be persuaded that they will be killed if they are sent back to their countries of origin.
OCTOBER 2015
October 1. In Bad Kreuznach, a family of asylum seekers from Syria made an appointment to view a four-room rental property but refused to see the house because the real estate agent was female. According to real estate agent Aline Kern:
“One of the men, who spoke broken German, said they were not interested in viewing the property because I am a woman, I am blonde, and because I looked the men into their eyes. This was inappropriate. My company should send a man to show the property. I was taken aback. You want to help and then are sent away, unwanted in your own country.”
October 2. In an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio, Tania Kambouri, a German police officer and the author of a bestselling new book about the failure of German multiculturalism, described the deteriorating security situation in Germany due to migrants who have no respect for law and order. She said:
“For weeks, months and years I have noticed that Muslims, mostly young men, do not have even a minimum level of respect for the police. When we are out patrolling the streets, we are verbally abused by young Muslims. There is the body language, and insults like ‘sh** cop’ when passing by. If we make a traffic stop, the aggression increases ever further, this is overwhelmingly the case with migrants.
“I wish these problems were recognized and clearly addressed. If necessary, laws need to be strengthened. It is also very important that the judiciary, that the judges issue effective rulings. It cannot be that offenders continue to fill the police files, hurt us physically, insult us, whatever, and there are no consequences. Many cases are closed or offenders are released on probation or whatever. What is happening in the courts today is a joke.
“The growing disrespect, the increasing violence against police… We are losing control of the streets.”
October 5. The public television station ARD denied broadcasting “anti-Islamic propaganda” after it aired a photomontage of Chancellor Angela Merkel wearing an Islamic head dress. The image was shown in the background of a segment on refugee quotas in the “Report from Berlin” program, while moderator Rainald Becker said:
“Can we really do this? Or are we overwhelmed? If we succeed [in managing the migrant crisis], what will happen to our values? How will life change? How will we react if refugees have problems — with equality, with women’s rights, with press freedom and freedom of expression?”
ARD later said: “We regret that some viewers disagreed with, or even misunderstood, how our chancellor was portrayed.”
Left: Some of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who arrived in Munich during 2015. Right: Germany’s public television station ARD denied broadcasting “anti-Islamic propaganda” after it aired a photomontage of Chancellor Angela Merkel wearing an Islamic head dress.
October 14. In Osnabrück, an asylum seeker from Somalia successfully sued the German Agency for Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, BAMF) for taking too long to process his application. A judge ordered the BAMF to make a decision on his application within three months or provide him with financial compensation.
October 14. Sumte, a tiny village with 100 inhabitants in Lower Saxony, was required by the federal government to host 1,000 asylum seekers.
October 15. City officials in Hamburg revealed that 35,021 migrants arrived in the city during the first nine months of 2015. During this same period, Hamburg police were dispatched to the city’s refugee shelters more than 1,000 times — including 81 times to break up mass brawls, 93 times to investigate physical and sexual assaults, and 28 times to prevent migrants from killing themselves.
October 14. The president of the Bavarian Association of Municipalities (Bayerische Gemeindetag), Uwe Brandl, warned that Germany is now on track to have “20 million Muslims by 2020,” out of a population in 2014 of 81.1 million. He arrived at this figure after factoring in family reunifications — based on the assumption that individuals whose asylum applications are approved will subsequently bring to Germany an average of four additional members of their families.
October 20. Eight Islamists went on trial in Cologne. They were accused of stealing €19,000 ($20,500) from collection boxes in churches and schools in Siegen, then sending the money to ISIS.
October 21. More than 200 mayors in North-Rhine Westphalia signed an open letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel; they warned they were no longer capable of taking in more migrants.
October 25. The contents of a leaked government document published by Die Welt revealed growing alarm within the highest echelons of Germany’s intelligence and security apparatus about the consequences of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door immigration policy.
The document warned that the “integration of hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants will be impossible given the large numbers involved and the already-existing Muslim parallel societies in Germany.” The document added:
“We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law. German security agencies are unable to deal with these imported security problems, and the resulting reactions from the German population.”
Also in October, the Evangelical Christian Church in the Rhineland was criticized by other Christians when it advised against attempting to evangelize Muslims migrants. In a position paper, the church argued that the passage in the 28th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew known as the Great Commission — “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” — does not mean Christians should try to convert others. The paper argued: “A strategic mission to Islam or meeting Muslims to evangelize them threatens social peace and contradicts the spirit and mandate of Jesus Christ and is therefore to be strictly rejected.”
NOVEMBER 2015
November 6. The news magazine, Focus, reported that sales of pepper spray jumped by 600% since Germany’s migration crisis exploded in August 2015. Supplies of the product were completely sold out in many parts of the country and additional stocks would not become available until 2016. “Manufacturers and distributors say the huge influx of foreigners in recent weeks has apparently frightened many people,” Focus reported.
November 7. Jürgen Mannke, director of the Teacher’s Association of Saxony-Anhalt (Philologenverbandes Sachsen-Anhalt, PhVSA), was fired after advised underage female students to guard against “superficial sexual adventures” with Muslim asylum seekers. In the group’s quarterly membership magazine, Mannke wrote:
“An immigrant invasion is inundating Germany. Many citizens are ambivalent about this. There is no doubt that it is our human duty to help people who are facing existential distress due to war and political persecution. But it is extremely difficult to distinguish these people from those who come to our country for purely economic or even criminal motives….
“Already, we hear from conversations with acquaintances in many places about sexual harassment in their daily lives, especially on public transportation and in supermarkets. As responsible educators, we ask ourselves: How can we enlighten our young girls aged 12 and up so that they do not engage in superficial sexual adventures with often certainly attractive Muslim men?”
November 10. Gabriel Felbermayr, director of the Munich-based Center for International Economics (Ifo Zentrum für Außenwirtschaft), estimated in an interview with Der Spiegel that the migrant crisis will cost German taxpayers €21.1 billion in 2015 alone. “This includes costs for housing, food, day care centers, schools, German language courses, training and administration,” he said.
November 12. Speaking at a meeting of the Social Democrats (SPD) in Berlin, German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel argued that Germany should airlift a “large contingent” of migrants into Germany to prevent human traffickers from profiting from the migrant crisis. “No one should die on the way to Europe, which must be our goal,” he said. According to Gabriel, “What matters is not the number of people who come to Germany, but the speed at which they come.”
November 13. N24 television news reported that up to 50% of the asylum seekers arriving in Germany have gone into hiding and their whereabouts are unknown. They presumably include economic migrants and others who are trying to avoid deportation if or when their asylum applications are rejected.
November 13. In an interview with the public television channel ZDF, Chancellor Angela Merkel doubled down on her open-door asylum policy: “The Chancellor has the situation under control. I have my vision. I will fight for it.”
November 17. Authorities in Hanover called off a friendly soccer match between Germany and the Netherlands about 90 minutes before kickoff after police received a “credible” bomb threat. Chancellor Angela Merkel had planned to attend the match to show support for the victims of the jihadist attacks in Paris, in which 130 people were killed and more than 350 severely hurt.
November 20. The Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian alliance partner of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), called for Germany to ban the burqa in public spaces.
November 22. The head of the Federal Criminal Police Agency (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA), Holger Münch, acknowledged that German intelligence lacks the human resources necessary to track all of the most dangerous Islamists in the country. “Given the number of potential attackers, we must prioritize,” he said.
November 23. In an interview with Die Welt, Ahmad Mansour, an Israeli-Arab expert on Islam who has lived in Germany for more than a decade, said the German government is not doing nearly enough to combat extremist Islam. Mansour — a member of the Muslim Brotherhood for more than a decade until he abandoned extremist Islam in the late 1990s — said that many young Muslims in Germany “believe in conspiracy theories, cherish anti-Semitic thoughts and do not think democratically.” For these people, he said, “Islam is their only identity.”
Mansour said the German government “lacks a plan” to deal with the problem of extremist Islam. He added that much of the blame lies with “highly problematic” teachers of Islam who are radicalizing German youth. Commenting on the question of why jihadists have not yet carried out a major attack in Germany, Mansour said: “So far Germany has been lucky.”
November 29. Hundreds of migrants from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria housed at an overcrowded refugee shelter at the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin attacked each other while waiting in line for lunch. More than 150 police were deployed to contain the situation. Other mass confrontations occurred in the Kreuzberg and Spandau districts of Berlin.
DECEMBER 2015
December 1. Salafists in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein distributed recruitment literature with the message: “Come to us. We will show you Paradise.”
December 1. City officials in Frankfurt sent teams of police, translators and social workers to refugee shelters to warn asylum seekers of the dangers of extremist Islam. The teams were also educating migrants about the German legal system, religious freedom and the equal rights for men and women.
December 3. In an interview with the Berlin newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel, Hans-Georg Maassen, the director of the Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV), said that the number of Salafists in Germany has now risen to 7,900 — up from 7,000 in 2014; 5,500 in 2013; 4,500 in 2012, and 3,800 in 2011. Although Salafists make up only a small fraction of the estimated six million Muslims living in Germany, intelligence officials say that most of those attracted to Salafi ideology are impressionable young Muslims who are willing to carry out terrorist acts at a moment’s notice in the name of Islam.
December 3. A poll by the newsmagazine Stern found that 61% of Germans believe jihadists will attack their country in the near future. The poll shows that 58% think the German military should be attacking the Islamic State, although 63% believe this would lead to retaliation in the form of terrorist attacks inside Germany. Overall, nearly 75% of Germans believe the government needs to do more to prevent terrorism in the country.
December 7. The German Interior Ministry revealed that 206,101 migrants had arrived in November alone.
December 8. Bavarian Social Minister Emilia Müller said that the number of migrants entering Germany in 2015 had officially passed the one million mark. “We urgently need an upper limit for the number of migrants, because Germany cannot continue to shoulder so many arrivals over the long term,” she said.
December 10. A court in Wuppertal ruled that Islamists who patrolled streets in the city as “Sharia police” did not break the law and will not be prosecuted. Nine men, wearing bright orange jackets with the words “Sharia police,” had been arrested in September 2014. The men had told passers-by not to visit bars, casinos or discotheques. The group had also carried notices in English saying “Sharia Controlled Zone,” in which alcohol, drugs, gambling, music, pornography and prostitution were forbidden. The court said the men had not violated any laws on uniforms and public gatherings. Prosecutors lodged an appeal.
December 17. Police in Stuttgart raided and shut down a Muslim association and mosque said to have supported financially — and recruited on behalf of — ISIS. Baden-Württemberg’s Interior Minister, Reinhold Gall, said The Islamic Educational and Cultural Center Mesdschid Sahabe was often frequented by Salafist preachers and Islamist fundamentalists from the West Balkans.
December 21. The newspaper, Die Welt, quoted police sources who revealed that only 10% of the one million migrants arriving in Germany in 2015 underwent background checks.
December 28. Local officials in Arnsberg banned the use of New Year’s fireworks outside refugee shelters to prevent the noise from triggering post-traumatic stress among people seeking asylum. “Those who come from a war zone associate explosions with gunfire and bombs rather than fireworks,” a spokesman for the local council, Christoph Söbbeler, said. “This could cause new trauma to those affected.”
December 29. The newspaper, Die Welt, revealed that Germany will spend at least €17 billion ($18.3 billion) on asylum seekers in 2016.
December 31. Police in Munich evacuated two major railway stations and cancelled New Year’s Eve celebrations after a “friendly intelligence agency” warned of an imminent attack. Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said authorities received information that ISIS suicide bombers could target the central station.
December 31. The public television broadcaster ZDF aired Chancellor Angela Merkel’s New Year’s address to the nation with subtitles in Arabic. She repeated her mantra, “we can do this,” referring to the challenge of integrating the one million migrants who arrived in Germany in 2015. “What is important is that we do not allow ourselves to be divided, not between generations or social classes, nor between those who have been here a long time and those who are new,” she said.
December 31. Shortly after Merkel’s New Year’s address, a mob of a thousand men of “Arab or North African” origin sexually assaulted more than 100 German women in downtown Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Similar attacks also occurred in Hamburg and Stuttgart. Cologne Police Chief Wolfgang Albers called it “a completely new dimension of crime.”
The mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, said that “under no circumstances” should the crimes be attributed to asylum seekers. Instead, she blamed the victims for the assaults: “One must behave wisely when moving around in a group. One behaves wisely by not demonstrating exuberant joy to everyone you meet and who smiles at you. Such gestures can be misunderstood.” Reker said her office would publish guidelines, presumably including a dress code, for German women and girls to follow to avoid similar incidents in the future.
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