A close Merkel ally has said the German chancellor will “convert” misogynistic migrants, and bring them in line with Germany’s more progressive attitudes.
Peter Altmaier who is both the German federal refugee coordinator and a member of Angela Merkel’s own Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) said that Mrs. Merkel will convert these misogynistic migrants’ attitudes toward women into something more in line with German progressive attitudes, reports the Kurier.
He sat on a panel at the Munich Security Conference Friday when a local politician told him that many migrants in local asylum centres refused to listen to the instructions of female workers and refused food and money from them demanding that they would only accept aid from fellow men.
Altmaier answered the question by saying that the asylum workers should tell each migrant who does not listen to a woman that he must respect women like he would respect Chancellor Merkel. “you have to explain to him that there are hundreds of thousands of “Angela Merkels” in Germany who have just as much to say,” and that they should treat women with the same reverence.
The minister is one of the inner circle of the German chancellor and regarded by many as one of the last ‘true believers’ left in the Merkel cabinet. He spent much of the Munich conference this week defending the migration policies that have unfolded in the last year after Mrs. Merkel gave a broad invite to anyone who was a refugee or merely thought they were one.
The refugee coordinator is making a last ditch attempt at getting other European nations and German politicians to be optimistic about the migrant crisis that deteriorates week by week. He is pushing the line that the German government has done since the crisis started to overwhelm them, to make European leaders take in more migrants and make what was a German invitation into a Europe wide problem. Altmeier is seen as one of the few left in Mrs. Merkel’s party who is still confident such a deal can be done.
He did have praise for one nation during the crisis. He said that Turkey had been more humanitarian toward the migrants than most European countries. The same Turkish government has threatened Europe with more migrants if the European Union didn’t pay them billions of euros, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban going as far as claiming the two nations were in secret talks to flood the EU with hundreds of thousands of migrants.
The kind words are rather strange for the German government to say, given the track record of Turkey on past human rights and freedom of the press. Turkey routinely arrests journalists who criticize the Erdogan regime and has laws that imprison academics and others who give legitimacy to the Armenian genocide that killed over a million at the tail end of the First World War. Turkish President Erdogan himself even praised the “effectiveness” of the presidential system of Hitler’s Third Reich only a few months ago.