Germany’s Merkel is right — multiculturalism has failed
The Germans, for obvious reasons, prefer their politicians dull. The current German chancellor, Angela Merkel, more than meets local expectations. So on the rare occasion when Merkel says something vivid, something important must be going on.
It is.
Speaking in Potsdam on Saturday, Chancellor Merkel told a gathering of young Christian Democrats that multiculturalism has failed.
That might seem to be saying the obvious.
Item: December 20, 2007. Two young men are smoking on a Munich subway train, where smoking is prohibited. A fellow passenger, a 76-year-old pensioner, asks them to stop. What happened next was captured on surveillance cameras. The young men call the old man a “s— German” and savagely beat and kick him, fracturing his skull. Other passengers on the train failed to intervene. One of the attackers was a Greek immigrant, 17. The other, 20, was born in Germany of Turkish parents.
The Munich train story captured the attention of the country, symbolizing an apparent deterioration of public order driven by multicultural immigration. After the attack, Hesse governor Roland Koch asked:: “How much are we prepared to take from a small proportion of violent youths, who frequently have a foreign background?” There are more than 15 million people living in Germany who were either born outside Germany or whose parents were born outside Germany. That amounts to almost 20 percent of the population.
This immigrant population is disproportionately connected to almost all of the social problems of modern Germany. Yet the problem that has transfixed the country is, very understandably, the problem of crime. In Berlin, young men of immigrant stock are three times as likely to commit a crime as young men of German background, reports Germany’s state broadcaster, Deutsche Welle. In a September interview, Chancellor Merkel endorsed claims that religious young men of Muslim origin were more likely to commit acts of violence than other young Germans.
These crimes seem increasingly the work of criminal gangs of immigrant origin that organize resistance to police authority in what the German media — with tabloid exaggeration — increasingly call “No Go areas.” Violent assaults upon police officers jumped 60 percent between 2005 and 2009, according to the German newspaper Bild.
Less spectacular — but as important to ordinary people’s feelings of security — is the perceived deterioration of public order: declining schools, rising welfare rolls and foiled terrorist attacks.
