RUTHFULLY YOURS

This past weekend Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has caused a sensation by declaring that “Multiculturalism Has Utterly Failed.” She was speaking at the “Deutschland Assembly,” a meeting for the youth division of her Christian Democratic Party (CDU) in Potsdam. When she finished her speech, she received a standing ovation. She told the auditorium:

“This is a country that brought guest workers to Germany in the 1960s. For a while, we kidded ourselves into believing that they wouldn’t stay and would leave. Naturally, the notion that we would become ‘multiculti,’ that we would live next to one another and be happy about one another, failed.”

She was referring specifically to the migrants of Turkish background. Her speech followed on the heels of two controversial statements. Last week, Horst Seehofer, who is head of the Bavarian CSU party (the Christian Social Union which is allied to the CDU), had announced that “Multiculti is dead.” Seehofer had said it was “obvious that immigrants from different cultures like Turkey and Arab countries, all in all, find it harder.”

On Tuesday October 5, German president Christian Wulff had said that

“Christianity is of course part of Germany. Judaism is of course part of Germany. This is our Judeo-Christian history … But now Islam is also part of Germany, When German Muslims write to me to say ‘you are our president’, I reply with all my heart ‘yes, of course I am your president’.”

Wulff’s speech, though endorsed by Merkel, had created controversy. A poll by YouGov found that while 24 percent of German respondents agreed that Islam was as integral to German life as Christianity and Judaism, a far greater proportion – 66 percent – disagreed.  There are 4 million Muslims in Germany, with at least 2.5 million of these coming from Turkey.

As the debate about integration becomes more intense in Germany, Wulff flies to Turkey today on an official visit. He will be the first German head of state to visit Turkey in a decade. (American readers should take note – the German “presidency” is largely a ceremonial role, and the true leader of the German nation is the chancellor).

A week before her speech to the “Deutschland Assembly,” Angela Merkel had spoken with

In her speech this Saturday, Merkel had said of Islam:

“The question is how we deal with this question. Integration is a central issue because the number of young people in this country with an immigrant background is increasing, not decreasing.”

Multiculturalism And the Death of Nations

The debate about integration is fundamental to any discussion about multiculturalism. Multiculturalism of itself is not even a “policy”. If it is, it a policy of neglect, where a government abnegates any responsibility to ensure that migrants follow the codes and values of the society.

All too often politicians throughout praise multiculturalism, and cite the fact that there are choices of restaurant on main streets of cities, or that stores sell exotic vegetables and fruits as evidence that “multiculturalism is working.” These politicians are deluding themselves, confusing ethnicity and free market forces with multiracialism.

It is certainly possible and desirable to have a multiracial, multiethnic society, where migrants bring something positive to the culture. However, bringing foreign food, music and other cultural attributes may add to diversity and the pluralism of a society, but these things are nothing to do with “multiculturalism.” Many migrants who choose to integrate will keep a part of their roots intact and sacrosanct. The problem with multiculturalism is that politicians praise apparent “diversity” but encourage separatism and ghetto communities, while overlooking the uglier sides of such communities. When such communities can be breeding grounds for extremism and terrorism, it has been common policy for European governments to encourage multiculturalism as a means to combat terrorism, when only integration and inclusion would reduce the “alienation” factors that lead to extremism and ultimately terrorism. An example of such muddle-headed thinking, written in Germany by a former president of the German Federal Constitutional Court in 2005, can be read here.

In the case of Islamic migration, young women growing up in isolated ghetto communities are often deprived of representation and have no free choice to integrate into the community at large. The biggest failures of multiculturalism include forced marriages and honor killings. The proponents of multiculturalism have totally overlooked the horror of young girls trapped in these closed ghetto communities, or forced into loveless marriages or subjected to domestic violence. When multiculturalism places any person out of reach of the protection offered by the authorities, it can never be a good thing.

One woman who has stood up to the abuses of Muslim migrant women by their families and husbands is Seyran Ates (pictured.) Ms. Ates herself comes from a Turkish background and migrated with her family when she was six. She has defended the rights of women in forced marriages, and in 2005 she was awarded the title “Woman of the Year.” However, in 2006, the death threats that she constantly received from husbands and male relatives of the Muslim women she defended became too much for her. She retired, worried about the safety of her six-year old daughter, and claiming that the police had ignored her requests for protection from attack. In a previous incident twenty years before, she had been shot and seriously injured, and a colleague had been killed.

The announcement of her retirement came after she had been attacked outside a courtroom by an irate husband who also attacked the wife who was testifying against him. Ates’ clent was living in a women’s shelter, while her husband remained free, even though he had physically assaulted ATes and her client in plain view. The difficulty of Ates’ situation brought condemnation from the mainstream German press, who thought it inconceivable that she was not offered protection. Ates did return to her work, but the problems that she has championed have remained.

In 2005, she said in a CNN interview:

“Muslim people describe or define their honor not about themselves but about their women’s and their society. So if their honor is disturbed, they have only the way to kill somebody to clean their honor….

…I grew up in a Turkish family. My parents are Turkish. My father is Kurdish, my mother is Turkish, and I grew up in a very traditional family and I ran away when I was 17 years old because I can’t stand this very hard traditional life and living in a very modern surrounding in Germany and living in a very traditional Turkish family was not so easy for me. So I grew up with this idea of women have to stay home, they have to marriage someone some time and they get children and live very traditional…”

She discussed the issues of forced marriages and domestic abuse, and the plight of young women who were too scared to complain. She said:

“In the fact of forced marriage, now we have a discussion about take place in criminal law that we have a paragraph for forced marriage. This is after 40 years immigration. I think it’s a bad thing that Germany don’t realize what happens in Turkish community, in Muslim community, in reality. They are dreaming of multicultural society of some Germans and that means that we live not together, we live nearby the other culture. This is not my idea of multicultural. So the government has done not enough for their immigrants. Not only for Turkish, for every immigrant they don’t do enough.”

In an op-ed piece in Britain’s leftist Guardian newspaper last year, Seyran Ates wrote that:

“Those who still dare to criticise religious practices in the Islamic community or other cultures often receive death threats or are the victims of a character assassination. In both cases, the aim is to strike from public discussion the issue of violence against women done in the name of Islam or some other understanding of cultural values. Some wish to do so because they are themselves rightwing (Islamic fundamentalists and/or nationalists), others (those who are allegedly political correct, leftwingers and do-gooders) because they are afraid that such criticism will play into the hands of the xenophobic rightwing Germans.”

This aspect of “multicultural tolerance” is affecting women throughout the Muslim world and the west. To their eternal shame, so-called western Feminists have managed to achieve a measure of equality for themselves, but most have turned a blind eye or refused to stand up for women victims of Islamic domestic tyranny. That they should do so in the name of fostering “multiculturalism” is staggering in its callousness.

There have been high-profile killings of women in Germany. On February 7, 2005, Hatun Sürücü (pictured) was shot dead in a Berlin suburb. She was not the first woman of Turkish/Kurdish background to be slaughtered for the warped Islamic concept of “honor.” When she was 16, Hatun had been sent back to Turkey and forced by her family into a forced marriage with a cousin. She had a child from this marriage, but had divorced the husband. She had returned to Germany and had lived alone and had raised her child, and tried to educate herself. She was shot by her younger brother. It was widely assumed at the time that the younger brother – who was aged under 18 when he had killed Hatun – was chosen by the family to commit the murder as he would have received a lesser sentence than his two older brothers.

Hatun’s death led to the creation of a charity called “Hatun and Can” (Can was the name of Hatun’s son.) This charity aims to assist women trapped in oppressive Muslim families to escape their antagonists. One woman beneficiary of this charity’s outreach work said:

“Muslim men don’t respect women,” she says. “They can’t handle it when a woman stands on her own two feet.”

The problem with multiculturalism is that it denies the validity of the original culture. IN many European nations, their cultures have evolved over centuries, and as soon as a government declares that a nation is “multicultural” that government denies its own heritage. Multiculralism always comes hand in hand with a notion of the “moral equivalence of cultures.” When people arrive from Muslim societies, societies that never experienced religious Reformation, let alone a Muslim equivalent of the Enlightenment, there is no moral equivalence of culture.

Treating the misogynistic aspects Turkish Kurdish society (which escaped many of the post-Ottoman secular advances offered by Kemal Ataturk) as equivalent to Western democratic freedoms is a route to political disaster. Migrants must be forced to acknowledge that they are going to contribute as equals in the society – not to position themselves like ticks on the body politic. Refusing to demand the education and integration of such migrants is equivalent to inviting people who have travelled in time. Would any European society be enhanced if people from the 13^th century – when people were killed for trivial offenses, and religious intolerance was the norm – were transposed into the present?

The “doctrine” of multiculturalism, inasmuch as a policy of turning a blind eye to segregation and domestic abuse can be considered a “doctrine,” protects itself from analysis by invoking the spectre of racism or the other canard of “Islamophobia” to attack its critics.

Multiculturalism posits that all cultures are equal, and in the case of Islam, some cultures appear to be treated as being more equal than others. I am writing here about Germany and Europe, but the president of America’s delusional notions that Islam has “always been in America” echo and mirror the situation in Germany. Such glib and unfocused notions of cultural equivalence endanger the cohesion of any society.

In Germany, the debate on the failures of multiculturalism has been made more intense with news that there are German Islamists in Pakistan who are plotting with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (an al-Qaeda offshoot) to commit acts of terrorism in Europe. Most of these al-Qaeda-supporting German Islamists are from migrant families. Multiculturalism has allowed these young people to bypass any attempts to integrate into German society.

In March 2006, Germany was shocked by reports from a school in Neukoelln, a suburb of Berlin. A month earlier, students had attacked reporters and shouted anti-German insults. This school, the Ruetli, had a majority of Arab and Turkish students. 95 percent of its students were from immigrant families. The school’s teachers had written a letter claiming that they lived in fear of the aggression of the students. The teachers wrote that:

“The mood … is dominated by aggression, lack of respect and ignorance… We have reached a dead end and there is no way to turn around.”

The Ruetli school, according to a news report from February 2010, has made some improvements, though this has involved spending huge amounts of money. Claudia Heckmann was one of the teachers who had written the letter in 2006. She is now the school principal. She states that:

“there are still huge difficulties and sometimes we think it’s too much, and too many problems need to be resolved. But then, there is this vision that we can change things if we focus on the strength of people, and not always on what is not working.”

Ignoring public anxieties about the failure of integration and assimilation of migrants can – of itself – lead to extremism. In August this year, a banker from the central Deutsche Bundesbank called Thilo Sarrazin had claimed that “no immigrant group other than Muslims is so strongly connected with claims on the welfare state and crime.” Sarrazin was condemned by the media and by politicians and was forced to resign from his job on September 10. He also made a comment that Jews were defined by their sharing a “certain gene.” Despite this anti-Semitism, some of his comments have attracted the interest of the public. He has said that Germany has become “dumbed down” by immigration. His book ‘Deutschland schafft sich ab’ (Germany does away with itself) became a bestseller.

The problems that arise when issues that concern average voters are not addressed by politicians can be worrying. Last week, on October 13, a German center-left think tank called the Friedrich Ebert Foundation released the results of a poll. More than a third of respondents said they agreed that Germany was becoming “overrun with foreigners.” Jews – who have not been involved in mass migrations and have made no effort to “change” Germany’s political life – were also viewed by 17 percent of the people polled as “having too much power.”

There were two surprising results of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation poll. Firstly, 60 percent of respondents wanted to “restrict the practice of Islam,” and 13 percent of those asked said that they would welcome a “Führer.”

When people feel oppressed by multiculturalism, multiracialism and pluralism also seem to be sacrificed. Germany and other countries in Europe are far further down the road of cultural suicide than Canada and America, but there are signs that already America’s media and its political establishment (at least within the current administration) is tilting towards the same self-destructive leftist dogmas that have left Europe in a state of chaos.

The crisis of identity currently afflicting the nations of Europe have been exacerbated by the political Behemoth that is the European Union swallowing up the autonomy of its component states, but the cultural dissolution has been hastened by naive notions of multiculturalism. Islamic intransigence is undermining even the staunch secularism of France. In the video below, Muslims illegally stop traffic in Paris, but police refuse to enforce the law, lest Muslims get “offended.”

In America there are already ghetto towns like Dearborn Michigan where Islam is the “Mainstream” and the current administration is bizarrely promoting Islam, even though Muslims account for no more than 1.5 percent of the population. There are sanctuary cities throughout America, TV and radio stations where the main language is Spanish, and there are 10.8 million illegal immigrants who are told by Hilda L. Solis that the government will protect their employment “rights”.

Theodore Roosevelt, who railed against “hyphenated Americans” maintained that there should be only one language. He said at Republican Convention, Saratoga, New York on July 18, 1918 (pdf document) that:

“As regards Americanism, we must insist that there be in this country but one nationality, the American nationality. There must be no perpetuation in this country of separate national groups, with their separate languages and special loyalties to alien overseas flags. There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 per cent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else. We must have loyalty to only one flag, the American flag; and it is disloyal to try to be loyal to any other, whether that other is a foreign flag or the black and red flags which symbolize either anarchy or else treacherous hostility to all for which this nation stands. There is room in this country for but one language, the language of the Declaration of Independence, of Washington’s Farewell Address and of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Speech and Second Inaugural; the English language. Americanism transcends every party consideration.”

If Roosevelt were alive today, he would be appalled if he could see what has become of his beloved nation.

Adrian Morgan

The Editor, Family Security Matters.