EUROPEAN POLITICS: Et tu, Angela? Merkel picks politics over people

If Merkel really wants to stamp out the wearing of face veils, she will find no greater ally than the mainstream German Muslim communities.

Three Muslim women

And so it goes. The Brexit effect becomes the Brexit/Trump effect, which then becomes the Brexit/Trump/Italy effect. It could almost have become the Brexit/Trump/Austrian Nazi/Italy effect. It may become the Brexit/Trump/Italy/One Nation effect. And it all leads to one simple conundrum: how do centre-right parties stop the seemingly inevitable rise of the “populist” far right?

The conventional wisdom is to take on a key aspect of the far right so as to take the wind out of their sails. That usually means pick the minority the far right loves to hate and throw them under the bus — preferably the minority that is weak and cannot fight back.

In the past 12 months or so, Germany has shown genuine leadership in relation to refugees escaping the horrors of war in Syria. Some 1.1 million refugees were resettled during 2015 alone. Asylum applications have been expedited so that people are not left in limbo.

This isn’t the first time Germany has had to take in large amounts of refugees. After the end of World War II, when Germany was decimated by the Allies, millions of expelled Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechs and other refugees of German ethnicity were expelled from homes and lands they had lived in for centuries.

It was extremely tough, but Germany managed. The new Germans eventually assimilated despite their differences with the German-born Germans, and despite the fact elderly people and children made up many of the refugees’ numbers.

The new Syrian refugees are largely of working age. Many are professionals who, even if not German-speaking, can at least speak English. They wear Western clothes, and many were well-travelled before the war. In this photo of students from the University of Aleppo sitting for their exams in 2013, I can’t find a single burqa.

Whatever the horrors of the Assad regime, it was a regime that allowed religious and ethnic minorities to flourish. Historically, Syria was the land of Byzantine churches, of saints who spent years sitting atop poles, of some of the oldest Christian music in the world. In his 1997 book, From The Holy Mountain, William Dalrymple writes about the strong Christian presence in Syria and the centuries of interaction between the various faith communities of the former Byzantine world.

The idea of lecturing and hectoring this largely modern, educated refugee diaspora about not wearing the burqa or some other face covering (as Chancellor Angela Merkel is now doing) makes little sense. It would be hard to find a Syrian woman who wears the burqa, just as you’d be hard-pressed to find a third-generation German-Turkish woman wearing one. Why even talk about it?

German Muslims who refuse to integrate will likely find pressure on them not just from the courts but also from their own communities. Seriously, how many German Muslims would agree with the claims of an 11-year-old girl before a German court that

... even wearing a burkini, or full-body swimsuit, breached Islamic dress codes ...

? Imagine a Syrian refugee family who saw women drowning in the Mediterranean having objections to their daughters learning to swim.

If Merkel really wants to stamp out the wearing of face veils, she will find no greater ally than the mainstream German Muslim communities — Turks, south Asians and Syrians. A far better strategy would be consulting with them to see how community education and other grassroots strategies can assist.

Of course, the far right and their friends in the German and European and, indeed, our Breitbart-wannabe Australian media will find any excuse to turn a small incident into a mountain of “creeping sharia”. This places pressure on mainstream conservative parties to respond. Some will respond by focusing on who they are and what they stand far. Others will point to a small minority and declare “We are not like them!” hoping this will take attention away from the hate brigade.

It is a strategy that is rarely temporary, It turns the normal centre right into enablers of the far right. And the last thing a leader of Germany would want to be is an enabler of the political descendants of Nazism.

First published in Crikey on 9 December 2016.

DIVERSITY: Centre for Independent Studies hosts genetics expert ...

As part of its Big Ideas Forum this year, the Centre for Independent Studies is hosting German Thilo Sarrazin, a German former banker and politician who claims Muslims are lowering German intelligence and that all Jews share certain genes.

Lovely. Janet Albrechtsen will also be sharing the podium. You can read a gushing tribute to Sarrazin in The Australian authored by Oliver Marc Hartwich, a research fellow at the CIS. Hartwich believes that Sarazzin is the victim of German political correctness.

Heck, why shouldn't a German, less than a century after the Holocaust, claim that Jews have shared features that are inherited? Why shouldn't the CIS be allowed to host someone with such rabid views? And why shouldn't those sponsoring the CIS, among them some major Australian corporations that supply goods and services to Jews and Muslims, not be able to finance the promotion of such opinions?

And why shouldn't I and my Jewish friends be allowed to name and shame these corporations? It's a free country.

COMMENT: Tim Soutphommasane on multiculturalism in Australia

Tim Soutphommasane is one of the few regular opinion writers for The Australian who is not certifiably mad. He has penned an interesting comparison between Australian and German multiculturalism in response (it seems) to angela Merkel's statement at one of her Party's gatherings that multiculturalism has "utterly failed".

(From my limited knowledge of German history, the last time multiculturalism failed there was when Germany's political leadership decided that people from certain undesirable backgrounds should be rounded up and shot or gassed or have nasty medical experiments performed upon them. Yep, nothing like a good dose of Western European Enlightenment philosophy.)

Merkel's conclusions about German multiculturalism are ... well ... perhaps a little premature. There's no point saying your failed at something before you've even tried it.

... in the German case, pronouncing any death of multiculturalism is somewhat misleading. If Merkel had meant multiculturalism in policy terms - public recognition of cultural differences in settlement and citizenship policies - it made little sense to say that it failed. Germany hasn't practised an official multiculturalism.

Indeed, much of the German difficulty in integrating its Turkish Muslim population can be explained by its lingering ethno-cultural, blood-and-soil (blut und boden) view of national identity.

When West Germany took in Turkish nationals beginning in the 1960s to fill labour shortages, it treated them as guest workers who were to go home once their work was done. The Turks weren't regarded as immigrants who would become future citizens.

It wasn't until 2000, for example, that German nationality law adopted the principle of jus soli, allowing those born in the country to parents without native ancestry to claim citizenship.

What makes all this even more interesting is that a few million Turks and Kurds are described collectively as "Muslims". I mean, what the ...? Has Germany suddenly discovered it is officially Christian? Is German and/or European identity defined by religious affiliation? Does Europe need a few more non-Christian migrants to shake it out of its pre-Enlightenment intellectual stupor and into the 21st century?

And the Australian branch of the Tea Party shouldn't keep pointing to Europe on these issues.

We shouldn't draw the wrong lessons from Europe. There is multiculturalism and there is multiculturalism.

Then again, perhaps all that is required is a name change.

A cultural diversity in which communities end up living in isolation from one another isn't an ideal that should appeal to anyone. But such failure often comes about because of not enough attention to integration, as in the case of the Germans, or because of rigid attempts to assimilate all difference, as in the case of the French. When it is the fault of official policy, it is because government fails to place diversity within limits.

Yet another multiculturalism in practice is possible. A liberal multiculturalism that aims to ensure a national identity can speak for all citizens regardless of their background - that is still worth defending. We just may have to call it something else now.

RACISM: Germany's answer to Glenn Beck?

If you thought Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book contained gross generalisations, wait till you get your hands on the German Central Banker Thilo Sarrazin's book. Published in German as Deutschland schafft sich ab ("Germany does away with itsel").

So what does he say that is so offensive? According to DW:

At the launch, Sarrazin reiterated his beliefs about the threat of Muslim culture to European societies. He told reporters that Germans were in danger of becoming "strangers in their own country" and demanded stronger checks on immigrants.

You don't need to know German to read that kind of sentiment. Just listen to the likes of Pauline Hanson, Fred Nile or Andrew Bolt.

But it gets better. Philo also talks about the existence of a "Jewish gene". What a ridiculous suggestion.

"All Jews share a particular gene," Sarrazin said in an interview published on Sunday. "That makes them different from other peoples."

Still, why should anyone complain about that? After all, he was only saying about Jews what a certain American citizen has said about Muslims.

Perhaps FoxNews could have its own German language version. And with Thilo Sarrazin, Mr Mrdoch might have his own Glenn Beck.



Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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VIDEO: Media and government responses in EU to the murder of an Egyptian woman in Germany ...

The following discussion on the al Jazeera Inside Story program concerns media and government responses in Germany and wider Europe to the murder of an Egyptian woman in a courtroom in Dresden, Germany. The video along with its accompanying text is reproduced below. Notice the cautious comment made by the German Muslim representative.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf

Inside story discusses the motivation behind the killing of Marwa al-sherbini.
An Egyptian Muslim woman was killed in a German courtroom by a man convicted of insulting her religion.

The brutal killing of the pregnant Marwa Al Sherbini, 32, raised a lot of questions about the rise of right wing fanatics in Europe.

Al Sherbini was stabbed 18 times by a German man of Russian descent, formally identified only as Axel W, last week as she was about to give evidence against him as he appealled against his conviction for calling her a "terrorist" for her wearing the headscarf (hijab).

While the German authorities focus on court security, we ask, what about the underlying problem - the motivation behind the attack.

Inside Story discusses with guests: Maleiha Malik, a professor of law at King's college London, and author of "Anti Muslim prejudice: past and present"; Sulaiman Wilms, a media spokes person for European Muslim council and editor of the German language newspaper and Douglas Murray, a director of the centre for social cohesion, and author of "Neoconservatism: why we need it".

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