People don’t assimilate except in the most superficial of ways (language, etc). They behave according to their genetics.
William Kilpatrick writes: Europe’s embrace of mass immigration can be explained in part by guilt from the Nazi era. It’s no coincidence that Germany, which has the most guilt to deal with, has pledged to take in the most refugees.
But other European nations are not free of guilt. Some of them collaborated with the Nazis, and even those who didn’t feel a need to expiate for the sin of European anti-Semitism.
The irony is that Europe’s current welcoming policy toward immigrants and refugees seems destined to bring about the very fate it is intended to avoid. European governments have decided that the best way to expunge any trace of racism or xenophobia is to invite into their midst people who are as far removed from European culture and tradition as it is possible to be. The reasoning seems to go as follows: if Europeans persecuted the Jews for their “otherness,” they can make up for it by accepting millions of “new Jews”—not actual Jews, but people who by reason of their otherness can stand in as proxies for the Jews.
The problem is that the “new Jews” are on the whole decidedly anti-Semitic. Europe’s atonement for its past anti-Semitism is to invite into the continent the most anti-Semitic people on the planet. It’s no secret that the majority of the refugees and immigrants now pouring into Europe are Muslims. What’s more, many of these Muslims are from the Middle East and North Africa (“MENA”), the most anti-Semitic portion of the Muslim world.
According to a 2014 poll conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, 74 percent of those polled in MENA had anti-Semitic attitudes. The top ten in the ADL Global Index are:
• West Bank and Gaza— 93 percent of the adult population holds anti-Semitic views.
• Yemen— 88 percent
• Algeria— 87 percent
• Libya— 87 percent
• Tunisia— 86 percent
• Kuwait— 82 percent
• Bahrain— 81 percent
• Jordan— 81 percent
• Morocco— 80 percent
In short, the “new Jews” are reminiscent of the old Nazis. In fact, Hitler is considered a hero in many of the MENA countries, and Mein Kampf is a popular book. In a 2009 statement, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most popular and influential spiritual leaders in the Muslim world, called the Holocaust “a divine punishment” of Jews, and prayed that the “believers” would finish the job started by Hitler.
For a continent which is dedicated to the proposition that what happened to the Jews must “never again” happen, it seems odd to lay out the red carpet for people who are dedicated to finishing Hitler’s work. Here it seems appropriate to add the obligatory qualifier and note that of course not every Muslim hates Jews. But, then, neither did every German in the Nazi period hate Jews. And certainly many of them never endorsed the final solution to the “Jewish problem.” Still, as the German experience showed, a dedicated minority can wreak havoc if the majority are willing to stand by and look the other way. Given the results of the ADL poll, a large number of Muslims might be willing to avert their eyes. And in Germany, Muslims already outnumber Jews by about forty to one.
There might be less to worry about if Germany took pains to assimilate its growing Muslim population. But the guilt hangover from World War II mandates that the multicultural other be given special treatment. And one way of showing respect for the other is to absolve him of any duty to assimilate. To ask the other to assimilate implies that you think your culture is better than his—which, of course, would be a major social blunder. As a result, in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, parallel Muslim cultures with separate rules and institutions have grown up alongside the native cultures.
What’s happening is not a Germanization of Islam, but an Islamization of Germany. As Germany braces to receive some 800,000 refugees and migrants this year (a four-fold increase over 2014), very little is being done to acquaint them with Western standards of behavior. Instead, Muslim have turned urban areas into de facto “no-go” zones, polygamy is commonplace, sharia courts operate in all big cities, and churches are being turned into mosques. Moreover, rather than undertake the difficult task of integrating young people into Western society, Germany, according to one report, is “handing over the religious education of the next generation of German Muslims to Islamist radicals.”
One could counter that it’s not easy for the government to oversee what’s being taught in the madrassas, but Vijeta Uniyal, the author of the report, isn’t talking about madrassas, he’s referring to the public schools. In a number of German states, the Islamic Studies program has been given over to the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB). The organization, which has close ties to Turkey’s Islamist party, the AKP, oversees the writing of textbooks, the selection of teachers, and the content of the curriculum. Given the anti-Semitic leanings of the AKP leadership, one wonders how their friends in the DITIB deal with such a sensitive topic as the Holocaust.
Or will they have to address the subject at all? In the state of Bavaria, it’s been proposed that Muslim students should be exempt from mandatory visits to former concentration camps. The stated reason is that children from Muslim families have no connection to the German past. Yet one of the chief architects of the final solution—a man who worked closely with Eichmann and Himmler—was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and one of the most prominent and influential Muslims of the time. Moreover, as the ADL poll shows, anti-Semitism is still very much alive in the Middle East. In short, the students who are likely in most need of Holocaust education are the ones least likely to receive it.
