"We do not want any parallel societies, and where they exist we have to tackle them. Our laws have priority over honor codes, tribal customs and Shariah. ... The full face veil must be banned, wherever legally possible. Showing your face is part of our way of life."
Thus proclaimed German Chancellor Angela Merkel last Tuesday at the annual conference of her party, the Christian Democratic Union, or CDU.
But Merkel is the woman who threw open Germany's borders and welcomed in a million migrants from the Islamic world in 2015. She's also the woman who said "Islam is part of Germany" when Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu came to visit in January 2015.
Therefore, some experts doubt the sincerity of the German chancellor's words.
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"If she was truly repentant for the disastrous policies of her tenure and especially 2015, which allowed so many hostile Muslim immigrants into Germany and Europe, she would say so and resign," said G.M. Davis, a filmmaker and the author of "House of War: Islam's Jihad Against the World."
"That she doggedly clings to power and proffers minor policy course corrections testifies to the fact that neither she nor the CDU leadership is serious about confronting the progressive Islamization of Germany and Europe and the growing threat of home-grown anti-European Muslim violence."
Merkel’s proposed burqa ban also came right as she launched her bid for a fourth term as chancellor. She and her CDU party have lost support in the past year to the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party, whose platform includes opposition to mass immigration.
In fact, in a vote following her speech at the CDU conference, party delegates re-elected Merkel as their leader with 89.5 percent of the vote. This marked a decline from the previous two-party elections: In 2014, CDU delegates re-elected Merkel with 96.7 percent of their votes, and in 2012 they did so with 97.9 percent.
As the London Telegraph noted, Merkel was running unopposed and might have expected more than 89.5 percent support from her own party.
Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative and author of "Stop the Islamization of America," sees Merkel's talk of a burqa ban as a purely political move.
"There is no doubt that she is just trying to win votes," Geller told WND. "If she really believed her disastrous migration policies were a mistake, she would have changed them. She hasn't."
Davis agreed Merkel’s move was more indicative of a politician in trouble than a serious reassessment of policy.
"Especially telling is Frau Merkel's use of the qualification 'wherever legally possible,' which will provide blanket cover for her to climb down from any ban whenever she feels politically or otherwise threatened," Davis said.
Jamie Glazov, editor of FrontPage Magazine and host of "The Glazov Gang," said Merkel's ideology led her to flood Germany with Muslim refugees, and he believes the chancellor has not truly changed her beliefs.
"As someone who abides by leftist philosophy and who, therefore, gladly facilitates Hijrah (stealth jihad by immigration), Merkel sees no mistake in anything she has done," said Glazov, author of "United in Hate: The Left's Romance With Tyranny and Terror." "She did it with calculated malice, and she will return to the agenda once circumstances prove OKÂ to do so. This is a calculated political move because she has to respond, momentarily, to certain kinds of pressures."
Merkel and her party have clearly sensed political pressure. In August, Germany's interior minister Thomas de Maiziere proposed a burqa ban that would apply to "places where it is necessary for our society's coexistence," including government offices, schools and universities, courtrooms, demonstrations and while driving vehicles.
The proposal, according to Al Jazeera, came a month before "two pivotal regional polls … in which the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party looks set to make strong gains."
Then, after the AfD made strong gains at the CDU's expense the next month, Merkel finally expressed regret over her open-door migrant policy, saying, "If I could, I would turn back the time by many, many years."
Even if Merkel was sincere and did push through a burqa ban, Geller does not believe it would make any difference in terms of preventing the Islamization of Germany.
"It would be only symbolic," she said. "Serious steps would have to be taken to stop Shariah enforcement and the terrorizing of unveiled non-Muslim women. Such steps are not even being contemplated."
Glazov, on the other hand, thinks a burqa ban would still be an important move to make.
"It is a significant difference in that it shows that Germany is not completely surrendering to Islamic supremacism," he said. "Even symbolically it is a crucial move to make."
Davis, for his part, said Germany would take a significant step against the Islamization of the country if it banned the burqa in a "serious and effective way." But he said that's not what Merkel proposed.
"She couches her language in so many qualifications as to render her proposed 'ban' almost meaningless," Davis said. "The process of Islamization is broad and deep – it has been going on in Europe since decolonization following the Second World War – and will not be stopped or reversed through surgical policies cherry-picked for maximum political effect and minimum actual impact.
"Rather, confronting Islamization will require a sea change in the European political landscape and a jettisoning of the multicultural assumptions that made the Islamic subversion of Europe possible in the first place. At present, while there are stirrings along these lines, both Germany and Europe remain in the grip of a fundamentally flawed understanding of Islam, which imagines that it can be integrated on an equal footing with Christian and secular traditions with which it is fundamentally in conflict."