Right wing parties in Germany are attracting a new if not unlikely audience who are becoming more supportive of their anti mass migration policies: immigrants.
German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine has reported that more and more Turks and other migrants are becoming weary if not hostile to the migrant crisis and Angela Merkel’s government’s handling of it. Facebook pages of parties like the anti-establishment Alternative for Germany (AfD) are seeing more posts by the day of people who list hometowns like Ankara and Istanbul as much as those from Munich or Berlin. One man who’s profile picture is himself with a Turkish flag, wrote on the AfD page that recent migrants are, “antisocial parasites who take what they want by force.”
Another man with an Arabic name says that migrants are responsible for the huge influx of reported sexual assaults and violence and tells the AfD they have his support. A doctor named Guerold Salk supports the AfD’s stance on a more vigorous border control saying Germany needs to be protected, “with a fence, with walls, police or the army,” and tells of the danger he predicts from Islamists terrorists in German cities if the flow of migrants remains high and unvetted.
Salk told German media that the reason he left Turkey in the first place was the ever growing Islamisation of what was once regarded as the most secular nation in the Middle East. He said that he had no intention of supporting those ideas and attitudes in Turkey much less in Germany. Having spent half of his life in Turkey and half in Germany he said he knew the differences in the culture and that they were not in any way compatible. The misogynistic attitudes of rural Turkey and Syria wouldn’t be accepted in the cities of those countries, never mind in Germany he said.
Even in the immigrant neighbourhoods of cities like Hamburg, the people are hesitant to welcome the new arrivals without extreme reservations. Sinem Yaman is a 19-year-old immigrant who is wary of the so called refugees who flood into Hamburg and said that many in the community are worried about possible Islamic State terrorists hiding in migrant centres, something that was proved correct earlier this week.
She also spoke of unwanted sexual harassment on trains and buses by, “young men who speak loudly in Arabic and stare at you,” adding that it’s been this way, “since one or two years,” since many migrants seek out immigrant neighbourhoods to find people who share their language and religion it’s no surprise that the first women affected by these men would be in these areas.
Many in the Muslim community blame North Africans saying they aren’t real refugees and they are taking advantage of the migrant crisis to fulfil “adolescent desires” and to take advantage of the ability to sexually harass women and steal things. A member of a mosque in Hamburg said they had to install over 10 security cameras because, “Even our Imam had his phone stolen, and regularly the shoes of visitors are stolen during prayer times.”
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