EU AND THE INVASION

Return to search
While most centrist & leftwing politicians
about (esp. Continental) Europe's Immigrat
Angela Merkel & Wouter Bos once blurted ou
truth, thereby sounding just like Pim Fort
From:[email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: 2016-02-21 00:51
Subject: While most centrist & leftwing politicians lie liberally about (esp.
Disaster, Angela Merkel & Wouter Bos once blurted out the terrible truth, ther
Before Angela Merkel wrapped herself in the cloak of madcap
multiculturalism, she had tagged non-Western immigration in Germany as a
“total failure.” With all the irrefutable evidence-based facts slapping her
in the jowly face, Frau Merkel had thus described non-Western immigration in
Germany

The decade-old URL no longer works
http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2005/10/19/international/IHT-19globalist.html?
n=Top%2FNews%2FWorld%2FColumns%2FRoger%20Cohen
October 19, 2005
Globalist
Europe’s Troubles Push Even the Left Rightward
By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com
The pendulum of Europe’s political direction tends to be erratic, but for
the moment it is pointing rightward. That may be surprising at a time when
the Continent has spent a lot of time defining itself in opposition to
President George W. Bush
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w_bush/
index.html?inline=nyt-per> ’s conservative administration.
But it’s less surprising when two factors are considered: the alarm caused
by jihadist killings in Madrid and Amsterdam and London, and the
difficulties of social market economies with comprehensive welfare systems
creaking under the strain of high unemployment and aging populations.
The terrorism means that law and order, part of Angela Merkel’s winning
message in Germany
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/ge
rmany/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> , is in and indulgence toward immigrants is
out. The economic difficulties, especially in France
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/fr
ance/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> and Germany, are pushing in the direction
of free-market reform. Both these trends favor the right.
It has not been lost on Europeans that terrorism has come from within. The
killings have in general been perpetrated not by agents sent from the Middle
East, but by Europe’s own, Muslims born and raised in European societies or
long-term residents. The murderers knew freedom, often a great deal of it,
and opted for an attempt to destroy the open societies that nurtured them.
That is disquieting, especially for a European left that had long held aloft
the “multi-culti” model of diverse peoples living side by side and in
harmony without a strong overarching national culture.
So the left is moving right. Earlier this month, Wouter Bos, the leader of
the Dutch Labor Party, had some sharp comments for a gathering of European
socialists. His speech suggested the degree to which the mainstream European
left is reconsidering its past policies in the light of the violence that
has struck the Continent.
“Every society has limits to its capacity to absorb newcomers,” Bos said.
“Successful integration therefore above all requires a restrictive migration
policy because our capacity to integrate and emancipate is not limitless.
And it will require toughness, both on those who arrive new into our
societies and the society that adopts them.”
Toughness on immigration is a new message for the left. So is talk of
“emancipating” immigrants, a clear message that European Muslims will have
to show more readiness to buy into the norms of Western societies on such
matters as the equality of men and women and freedom of sexual choice.
Bos acknowledged that past policies had proved inadequate. “Social Democrats
all over Europe have not been too good at tackling these problems,” he
declared. “Maybe because they were afraid to be accused of racism.”
Another reason, of course, was that hostility to immigration was the terrain
of the right and, in its ugliest form, the preserve of extreme-right
xenophobes like France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen.
But the left now sees that it is possible, indeed critical, to confront the
grave failures of immigration policy without adopting the bigoted excesses
of the right. For one thing, the welfare state that is the great creation of
European social democracy depends on change because a welfare system
supporting out-of-work immigrants in disproportionate degree tends to stir
resentments that are explosive.
In the Netherlands
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/ne
therlands/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> , Bos said, “migrants and people of
migrant background have a much greater chance than others of being poorly
educated, unemployed, sick or ending up with a criminal record. Here again
the result, if we do nothing about it, will be that the white middle-class
tax-paying citizen wonders: Am I paying taxes for myself or am I paying for
them?”
In a similar way, if basic values are not shared in a society, the welfare
system, ultimately based on a sense of solidarity, frays. The welfare state
is a form of collective insurance. For it to work, there has to be some
agreement on the nature of the risk and the nature of the way of life to be
defended. From Britain
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/un
itedkingdom/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> to Spain
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/sp
ain/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> , evidence has accumulated that such a
consensus has been lacking.
The bottom line, after Europe’s recent violence, is that greater efforts, in
education and in imparting the meaning of citizenship in a European
democracy, appear essential if tensions with immigrants are to be eased.
Nationalism tends to be anathema in Europe, which knows its downside too
well. But national values and national pride may be making a comeback.
Of course, as long as the economies of Germany and France remain stalled
with unemployment rates hovering around 10 percent, tensions within European
societies will tend to persist. Societies that fail for long periods to
produce significant growth or jobs are societies that promote a paralyzing
dependency and stifle hope.
That is why both Merkel and the center-right French prime minister,
Dominique de Villepin, have proposed tax cuts, greater labor market
flexibility, reductions in nonwage labor costs and other measures to try to
stop the institutionalization of unemployment in their countries.
In a coalition with the Social Democrats, Merkel’s margin for maneuver will
not be great; Villepin faces French labor unions and may opt to zigzag into
ineffectiveness. But at least they have been frank about the core of their
countries’ problems: the fact that it has often been more attractive
financially not to work than to work.
Their joint presence may just revive the French-German alliance and give a
new impulse to free-market ideas in the euro zone. Resistance will be
significant. But Merkel has real convictions about where she wants to go;
Villepin has unusual energy. This combination could bring results,
especially as the railing of leftists against globalization, neoliberalism
and the like has an increasingly sterile air in both countries.
The most successful politician in a major industrialized democracy, Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/junichiro_koiz
umi/index.html?inline=nyt-per> of Japan
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/ja
pan/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> , has successfully deployed a mixture of
radical reform and carefully dosed nationalism. Merkel and Villepin may take
a leaf from his book.
After all, toughness, national values and a freer market are even being
espoused by some of Europe’s mainstream left. Could there be a looming
market for European neocons?
E-mail: [email protected]
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The URL no longer works
http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2006/02/14/international/IHT-14politicus.html?
n=Top%2FNews%2FInternational%2FColumns%2FJohn%20Vinocur
Blunt Talk on Migration From Dutch and Danes
By JOHN VINOCUR
International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com
Post-politically correct Europe starts here. It loops north to Denmark
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/de
nmark/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> . These days, it branches east, although
less distinctly, to Germany.
But in the Netherlands
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/ne
therlands/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> the words are free, and inhibitions
about describing and dealing with the problems caused by immigration,
particularly from Islamic countries, are largely gone.
“In 2002, I was demonized for urging the Amsterdam City Council to drop
publishing notices on every piece of business it does in Kurd, Papiamento
and God knows what,” said Geert Dales, who is mayor of Leeuwarden, a city of
100,000 on the North Sea.
Four years ago, Dales’s thrift was called intolerance or even racism. For a
decade, anyone expressing concern about projections that Amsterdam would
have a Muslim majority by 2020 (about 65 percent of its young people now
have Islamic backgrounds) risked disgrace as a closet fascist. Now the Dutch
discuss the implications of similar population projections and similar time
frames for cities like Rotterdam and The Hague without cramped
circumlocution.
In comparison, direct official- and politician-speak in places like Britain,
France and Spain shies from the idea that failed national policies
accommodating (or avoiding) Muslim integration have been factors in the most
confidence-shaking European events of the new century:
Bomb attacks by local Islamic extremists in Madrid and London, the murder of
a Dutch filmmaker by a member of the Amsterdam Moroccan community, riots in
immigrant towns around Paris, and now, Denmark and Danes coming under threat
and attack around the world after a newspaper published cartoons of the
Prophet Muhammad.
The post-politically correct comes in here. Danes point to Islamists in
their midst - not themselves - as the key factor in turning the cartoons
into a source of misery. A poll in the Danish media late last week said that
58 percent believed the central problem was not the newspaper’s choice to
carry the cartoons, but imams living in Denmark who propagated them and even
more devastating fakes in Islamic countries.
By way of an explanation, this comes down to both the Netherlands and
Denmark, countries with small but dense populations, cherished cultures, and
languages that require protection, feeling a new precariousness in their
national identity as a result of substantial Islamic immigration. In both
places, the mainstream left has followed the center-right onto this track.
Perhaps because there has been open contempt for assimilation by Muslims in
supposedly soft and marginal places like the Netherlands and Denmark, both
countries have been intent on demarcating the line where their accommodation
of immigrants stops.
You could call it a flow-reversal of attitudes in two famously tolerant
nations. Their emphasis, coming now with special intensity caused by a sense
of declining sovereignty, is specifying that their Muslim communities must
demonstrate compatibility with Dutch or Danish society.
A Dutch example: In more politically correct France, race or national origin
are excluded from official statistics, whether they involve job-seekers or
the prison population. In calmly talking about Leeuwarden, Dales says
point-blank that an immigrant group from Curaçao, making up 1 percent of the
city’s population - Muslims represent 16 percent - is responsible for 50 to
60 percent of its crime.
What to do? Expressed in the increasingly blunt Dutch manner, Dales’s
response was not that short of the style of the U.S. Marine Corps: kicking
butt and taking names.
He told me about a national pilot program that would let cities like
Leeuwarden initiate proceedings “to send them back.”
Dales, a member of the center-right Liberal Party, a component of the
government coalition, believes all the same that Dutch history suggests the
country can successfully absorb its Islamic immigrants. He very much trusts
in the possibility of their integration and sees there are successful
examples of it in every Dutch town. “But it involves an approach that says,
again and again, exactly what is non-negotiable and exactly what is
required.”
Requirements, according to Dales: educational achievement, speaking Dutch,
tance of the work ethics Dales’s accompanying view of daily reality: a 65 percent dropout rate among
Muslim immigrants in Leeuwarden’s schools; notoriously poor language
capacities; and inconsistent interest in finding jobs, complicated by
insufficient training and a Dutch network of social services that for
decades made the Netherlands a kind of Nirvana for the work-challenged.
Above all, Dales said, the difficulty for some Muslims was that Islam had
principles that are no way in line with those of Dutch society.
When I asked Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen in Copenhagen last week
about a Dutch-Danish post-politically correct link (a phrase first used by
the American writer Christopher Caldwell), he talked about insisting on the
same core values that Frits Bolkestein, the original politically incorrect
Dutchman and former European Union commissioner, first described in relation
to Islam as “non-negotiable.” Like the separation of religion from politics,
the importance of work, and Western notions of freedom of expression and
gender equality.
“We’re on the right track,” Rasmussen said. “I see a very clear tendency
that other European countries will go in our direction.”
In Germany, where the former Social Democratic interior minister, Otto
Schily, said two years ago that multiculturalism was dead, there are
indications that Rasmussen’s view of a European trend has some reality.
The Bundestag’s vice president, Wolfgang Thierse, a Social Democrat, has
recommended that only German be spoken on school grounds and received
unexpected support from teachers’ unions, while Christian Democratic state
governors are backing a plan that would require testing acceptance of the
principles of the Constitution and genuine German language skills as
requirements for citizenship. Parliamentary debate in Berlin on the Danish
situation on Friday was not so much a succession of calls to tolerance but
of remarks that there should be respect for religion “but not its
instrumentalization” and that this respect must not be a “one-way street.”
But in light of the Danish experience, countries considering a more
politically incorrect stance on immigration may now think twice.
Bolkestein, who warned in the early ‘90s about Islam’s challenge to the
Dutch and Europe, is not optimistic. He believes Europe has only seen “the
thin edge of the wedge” of pressure to come from rogue states and Islamic
extremists.
“Next time,” he said, “I fear it will be oil, or Israel, or nuclear weapons
rather than cartoons.” End of article.

France’s under-siege Jewish community is estimated to have dwindled from
500,000 to 400,000 – with anecdotal evidence suggesting that a mass exodus
may well be under way
Welfare sponging on a scale never seen before in human history is just one
item on a never-ending list of non-Western immigration horrors in esp.
Continental Europe, which also includes rampant anti-Semitism. At present,
the lion’s share of anti-Semitism in Germany comes from Muslims, while the
Far Left and Far Right account for the much smaller remainder. Green Party
Co-Leader Cem Özdemir acknowledges that anti-Semitism is rife among German
Turks and other Muslims. Hell, if you translate the PC Kremlinese uttered by
the BBC’s previous chief Germany correspondent into plain English, even he
appears to say so.
France plays host to 6 million Muslims, and a Jerusalem Post article
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=170731 expects
France’s Muslim community to be the majority within 50 years. And that’s not
even factoring in Turkey’s probable entry into the EU. This demographic
tsunami is really bad news for Jews. Let me quote from
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11335980/Antisemitis
m-in-France-the-exodus-has-begun.html: Attacks on Jews have risen sevenfold
since the 1990s. No wonder Jewish emigration from France is accelerating.
From being the largest Jewish community in the EU at the start of this
decade, with a population of around 500,000, it is expected by Jewish
community leaders to have fallen to 400,000 within a few years. That figure
is thought by some to be too optimistic. Anecdotally, every French Jew I
know has either already left or is working out how to leave. […] Almost of
all these attacks have been carried out by Muslims.
The Jerusalem Post piece echoes this assessment: “In recent years,
burgeoning hostility emanating primarily from radical Muslims has led to
increasing desecration and bombing of Jewish sites and synagogues, as well
as violent altercations on the streets climaxing with the 2006 kidnapping,
brutal torture and murder of Ilan Halimi, a young Parisian Jew. Hostility
has become so pronounced that Jews are now warned not to wear kippot in
public even in central thoroughfares such as the Avenue des Champs Elysees
in Paris.
View email View source
WikiLeaks Leaks News About Partners Sear
≡