An international row was triggered on Saturday by a leading German politician who said that Turkish and Arab immigrants were unable to integrate into German society and should no longer be accepted, according to the Guardian.
Horst Seehofer, the premier of Bavaria, said in an interview, “It’s clear that immigrants from other cultural circles like Turkey, and Arab countries have more difficulties. From that I draw the conclusion that we don’t need any additional foreign workers from other cultures.” With regard to immigrants who already live in Germany, he said that Germany should “get tough on those who refuse to integrate.”
Outraged Turkish groups and politicians in Germany have demanded an apology from Seehofer, according to Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
Seehofer’s party is part of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing coaliation, and Der Spiegel quoted Merkel defending Seehofer: “It was a comment focused on skilled workers. We remain a homeland for many people and hope they feel comfortable in Germany. Germany is and remains a cosmopolitan country.”
Merkel may have felt compelled to defend Seehofer for a different reason – that the views he expressed are becoming increasingly popular.
This has become clear in the last two months, when Thilo Sarrazin, a member of the board of the Bundesbank (Germany’s central bank), published a book called Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Germany eradicates itself: How we’re putting our country at risk). This book was condemned by many politicians as containing racist remarks directed against Jews, Turks and Arabs, according to Spiegel.
Some quotes are: “The Turks are taking over Germany exactly as the Kosovars took over Kosovo: via a higher birth rate. I wouldn’t mind if it were Jews from Eastern Europe with a 15 percent higher IQ than the German population.” “A large number of Arabs and Turks in (Berlin) … have no productive function other than in the fruit and vegetable trade.” “All Jews share a certain gene, all Basques have certain genes that make them different from other people.” “I don’t want the country of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be largely Muslim, or that Turkish or Arabic will be spoken in large areas, that women will wear headscarves and the daily rhythm is set by the call of the muezzin. If I want to experience that, I can just take a vacation in the Orient.”
Merkel criticized Sarrazin’s book, and Sarrazin was forced to resign from the Bundesbank board at the end of September. However, his book has been extremely popular, and is going into additional printings.
Sarrazin feels that he’s been vindicated. While still at Bundesbank, he received thousands of calls, letters and e-mail messages, and he bragged, “It’s 99 percent support and letters of congratulation.”
Many people are becoming alarmed that people in the German mainstream are returning to the xenophobia of the 1930s Nazi era, according to DAPD Nachrichtenagentur A recent poll by the the Friedrich Ebert foundation (PDF German) found that an increasing (though still minority) number of Germans want a “Führer” who would “govern with a hard hand for the good of Germany,” and that about 1/3 of the people want to “send foreigners back home” to avoid the danger of German being “overrun.”
In addition, 58% say that “religious practices for Muslims in Germany should be seriously limited,” and this rises to 75% for people from the former East German.
The surge in popularity for xenophobic views has caught a lot of people by surprise. I recall how shocked I was when I wrote an article about the floods in Pakistan, and saw comments that it’s ok for Pakistani women and children to die since they’re Muslims, or that the majority of Muslims support murder and rape. I spoke to an evangelical Christian friend of mine, and he explained to me that, yes, many Christians do say that Islam is an “evil” religion.
On the Muslim side, views are equally xenophobic. I asked an online correspondent, a Muslim, for his view of the situation, and he wrote the following:
“While some of the things that well-meaning decent Americans have been saying about Islam is disturbing, you may be surprised to learn that many, many muslims I know are far worse. Most of the ones I know personally and have grown up with have no loyalty to this country and hold the most idiotic, conspiracy theories. Basically, it’s everyone else’s fault, especially “the Jews.” You should see the publications from the mosques themselves — not much separating them from KKK material. …
My british acquaintances sound seriously nuts and they were born and bred in the UK, not in a madrassa in some rural area of Pakistan. I don’t think it’s coincidence that they were local, home-grown terrorists for the London terrorist attacks a few years ago.
I don’t think they’re dangerous as in they are going to be violent. But then the vast majority of Germans during WWII weren’t violent either; however, they did ascribe to a pretty terrible set of beliefs and allowed the really militant ones to be confident in their militancy. This predates 9/11 and was something I found so appalling that I really couldn’t go to the mosques anymore.
Would it surprise you to hear that many of the muslims I’ve come across, when the veneer of politeness comes off, think that the Park51 project, aka Ground Zero Mosque, is indeed a sign that Islam is “winning” against the infidel West?
This is not just my perhaps overly Western view because I grew up here. Even my wife, who was born and raised in Pakistan and only moved here after we were married, would tell you this.”
So, some Christians believe that Islam is an “evil” religion, and some Muslims presumably believe that Christianity and Judaism are “evil” religions. Both sides can point to facts to support their views, and both sides believe that they have the “objective truth” on their side. These mutually distorted views of one another are what lead to wars.
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, religion often plays a very specific role during generational Crisis eras, as I explained in “Book review review: Christopher Hitchens: ‘God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything’.”
If you want to fight a war of extermination, then you have to convince your own people that the enemy people deserve to be exterminated. If you have no other way of making that case, then you use religion. Sunni Islamists have certainly done that by using religion as an excuse for terrorist attacks against the West, but also as a reason for terrorist acts against Sufi and Shia Muslims. The West is only just beginning to exhibit the same level of xenophobia by charactizing Islam as “evil.”
But xenophobia is not just a Christian versus Muslim thing. In fact, it’s far more often an immigration issue, often unrelated to religion.
In Europe we see harsh immigration issues raised with the Roma Gypsies, who are mostly Christian, and in America, immigration has been a highly visceral topic with (Christian) immigrants from Mexico to Brazil. The issues are often remarkably similar from one case to the next: The immigrants complain of relentless discrimination, and the local population accuses the immigrants of taking jobs and causing crime.
In a broader sense, xenophobia can grow between two ethnic groups, even when immigration is not an important factor. For example, the financial crisis has caused many Chinese to be furious at Americans, while both Republicans and Democrats are “China-bashing” in their Congressional campaigns, according to the Wall Street Journal (Access).
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, unfortunately none of this is a surprise. The survivors of WW II saw how 1930s xenophobia led to wars of extermination, and as long as they were in charge, xenophobic tendencies have been kept to a minimum. That’s why we would have seen very few of these tendencies in the 1990s. What we’re seeing today is truly remarkable — the rapid growth of xenophobia around the world, in many different forms, for the first time since the 1930s. The path to world war is becoming clearer and clearer.
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