Political Refugees in Germany

by Jack

Imagine for a moment you’re a poor refugee from a war ravaged land.  Your host nation generously provides, not just a safe place to live, but also income, food, medical, housing and educational assistance, with no expectation of repayment.    In addition they allow you to enter the local labor market to seek employment, competing against their own people. 

This would be a pretty good deal for anyone, especially if you are coming from a culture where outsiders are treated with distrust and disdain.  Where ethnic and religious differences are no more respected than dog feces stuck on the sole of your shoe.   In your old country life is cheap and the rules are rigid.   You would probably be forever grateful to the new country, wouldn’t you? And you would probably behave in manner equal to your extreme gratitude, right?

Protest rally in Germany over immigration

Supporters of anti-immigration right-wing movement PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) take part in in demonstration rally, in reaction to mass assaults on women on New Year’s Eve, in Cologne, Germany, January 9, 2016. Wolfgang Rattay / Reuters

Q.  Then why is Germany having so much trouble with Muslim refugees?

January 16^th, 2016, Cologne, Germany: “more than a thousand young men, described by police and witnesses as being of North African and Middle Eastern descent, rampaged through the fair sexually assaulting women.” Police are now investigating over 650 criminal complaints from that night in Cologne, including two rapes.

“The majority of those arrested so far are indeed asylum seekers. Other German cities reported similar attacks. Across Europe, more stories emerged. In Sweden, for example, police have been accused of covering up a series of mass sexual assaults committed by gangs of Afghans who groped and molested girls as young as 11 or 12 at a popular music festival.

A 28-year-old German women named Katia said: “Suddenly I felt a hand on my bum, on my breasts, I was grabbed everywhere, it was horrific. I was desperate; it was like running the gantlet. Over the space of 200 meters, I think I must have been touched about 100 times.” Of the 50 suspects identified in Cologne, the bulk are from northern Africa, mostly from Morocco.”

Germans have struggled to find an appropriate way to deal with the immigrants without being labeled a Nazi or a fool. At last, this is changing. All the while, the political left tried to play down the event. Claudia Roth, a Bundestag leader from the Green Party, compared the mass crimes in Cologne to the sexual harassments that she said happen every year at the Munich Oktoberfest (which police records show to be false). The head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany warned that it would be a “major mistake” to draw any conclusions about the cultural backgrounds of these men. If this sounds like ignorance and appeasement, it is.

In fact, the recent attacks do fit a pattern: According to the Cologne police, 40 percent of the city’s immigrants from northern Africa become delinquent, mainly for theft, within their first year in Germany. Another problem, the police say, is that in order to avoid deportation, many asylum seekers from this region ditch their passports so that their home country is unknown.

The charge that economic immigrants are masquerading as refugees has long been denied by the German government, including the Prime Minister, Angela Merkel, but it’s now become painfully, and undeniably true.

There’s a lesson to be learned from this, right?  Nah, of course not, the United States has to learn everything from firsthand experience. To do less, well, it might open us to a charge of being racist or xenophobic. Therefore, we prefer to blind eye to such problems and be the gullible dupes we always are, or at least they always are in Washington.