Is the nation of Germany as we know it coming to an end?
More than a third of Germans sometimes feel like strangers in their own country due to the massive influx of Muslim migrants over the past couple of years, according to a study made public last month. Likewise, a third of Germans told researchers there are “too many foreigners in Germany.”
The study, which was conducted by the Friedrich Elbert Foundation, also found a 53 percent majority of Germans want a limit on refugees coming into the country, compared to 44 percent in 2014. Fifteen percent went so far as to say the German government should stop granting citizenship to Muslims.
Germany, under the direction of Chancellor Angela Merkel, has led the way in welcoming Middle Eastern and North African refugees to the Western world, having taken in more than 1.1 million migrants starting in 2015.
But the rapid injection of so many non-Western people has caused an anti-immigrant backlash among many native Germans. Support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party, which favors more immigration restrictions, has grown in the past two years, and Merkel’s popularity has waned as more and more Germans blame her open-door policies for the country’s problems.
The latest reminder of Germany’s migrant problem was Monday’s truck attack in a crowded Berlin Christmas market. ISIS claimed credit for the attack, which killed 12 and wounded 48. Police now suspect Tunisian-born Anis Amri, 24, of being the man behind the wheel. Amri came to Germany in July 2015 as an asylum seeker, and although he was denied, he evaded authorities and remained in the country.
But the influence of migrants on Germany goes far beyond terrorist attacks.
In the first six months of this year, Muslim migrants committed 142,500 crimes in Germany – an average of roughly 780 crimes a day. It represented an increase of nearly 40 percent over 2015, when migrants committed just over 200,000 crimes the entire year.
And those numbers only include crimes in which a suspect was caught. According to a Gatestone Institute report, most migrants who commit rape are never found, and the few who are often receive lenient sentences. Only one in 10 rapes in Germany is reported and only 8 percent of rape trials result in convictions.
In fact, Gatestone quoted a high-ranking police official in Frankfurt as saying: “There are strict instructions from the top not to report offenses committed by refugees. It is extraordinary that certain offenders are deliberately NOT being reported about and the information is being classified as confidential.”
Among the more than 200,000 migrant crimes German police did report in 2015, there were 85,035 cases of theft and 36,010 assaults and robberies.
Widespread lawlessness in migrant communities has created “no-go zones” that police refuse to enter because they fear for their own safety. According to a Gatestone Institute report on German no-go zones, police are disturbed by the aggression and brutality of the migrant clans they encounter, because the clans seem to view crime as a leisure activity.
If police dare to step in, hundreds of clan members are ready to confront the police.
Gatestone quoted Rainer Wendt, president of the German Police Union, as saying: “In Berlin or in the north of Duisburg there are neighborhoods where colleagues hardly dare to stop a car – because they know that they’ll be surrounded by 40 or 50 men.”
The attacks amount to a “deliberate challenge to the authority of the state – attacks in which the perpetrators are expressing their contempt for our society.”
A German TV station put it like this: “Once Duisburg-Marxloh was a popular shopping and residential area. Now clans claim the streets for themselves. The police are powerless. The descent of the district is nightmarish.”
The police chief in the German city of Essen went so far as to say he was “sick of” citizens complaining that police refuse to patrol one particularly dangerous area of that city. Even though locals told horror stories of drug-related crime and brawls, they claim police refused to respond in time to offer help to law-abiding citizens.
Perhaps that explains why Germans are now taking their defense into their own hands.
Late last year, German manufacturers ran out of pepper spray following a 600 percent surge in sales over a two-month period. All across the country, demand skyrocketed for non-lethal self-defense weapons, including gas pistols, flare guns, electroshock weapons and animal repellants. Germans have also been applying for weapons permits in record numbers, according to the Gatestone Institute.
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However, the migrants are making their presence felt in less violent ways as well. Cultural change is creeping into Germany. In September 2015, a Muslim named Morad Almuradi created a petition asking the city council of Munich to cancel its annual Oktoberfest event because “it offends us and all Muslims on the earth.”
He also wrote that canceling Oktoberfest “will help refugees not to forget their Islamic history.”
Several primary schools and kindergartens in Germany didn’t wait for a petition. They went ahead and either abolished or changed an annual Christian celebration to avoid offending the country’s hundreds of thousands of new Muslim arrivals.
Some schools abolished the St. Martin’s Day festival altogether out of “consideration for the refugees,” while others re-named the event the “Festival of Lights.”
The bans came just a few months after a school in Bavaria sent a letter to parents asking them to ensure girls didn’t wear shorts or mini-skirts so as not to invite “attacks” from Muslims being housed in a nearby gym.
Meanwhile, a Protestant church in Oberhausen actually removed crosses, altars and pulpits to accommodate 50 Muslim migrants who were invited to stay in the building.
Germany’s decision to admit millions of migrants comes with economic costs as well.
Reuters reported in May that the German government planned to spend 93.6 billion euros by the end of 2020 on costs related to the refugee crisis, including “costs for accommodating and integrating refugees as well as tackling the root causes for people fleeing from crisis-stricken regions.”
The same report said the government would need to spend 25.7 billion euros for jobless payments, rent subsidies and other benefits for asylum applicants over the same period, as well as 5.7 billion euros for language courses and 4.6 billion euros to help migrants get jobs. ($1 = 0.8841 euros)
So is Germany’s fate America’s fate, too?
Will the United States soon find itself bogged down by the same migrant-related problems Germany has experienced? Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, thinks it’s all up to President-elect Donald Trump.
“This will only happen if Trump fails to implement immigration restrictions,” said Geller, author of “Stop the Islamization of America.” “If his program is put in place, we could avoid this terrible fate.”
What do YOU think? Will Trump be able to defeat Islamic terrorism? Sound off in today’s WND poll.
Leo Hohmann, a veteran reporter and WND news editor, pointed out the Islamic foothold in the United States has been gaining ground for 35 years, beginning with the resettlement of Afghan refugees during the Reagan administration. Since that time, refugee resettlement and other immigration programs have fueled the growth of the American Muslim population to 3.3 million.
“In Germany, the process of Islamization is occurring much faster and more dramatically with the welcoming of about 1.3 million Muslims over a very short period of time, about two years, on top of the large Turkish Muslim community that has already been imported over the last 50 years,” said Hohmann, author of the brand new book “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and the Resettlement Jihad.”
“So with Donald Trump coming in as the next president we have a historic opportunity to shut down, or dramatically reduce, the influx of Sharia-compliant immigrants from parts of the world where disdain for American values is commonplace.
“Whether that will actually happen or not remains to be seen. All eyes are truly on Trump: He campaigned on a platform of anti-globalism and shutting off Muslim immigration.”
If Trump does reduce or shut off Muslim immigration, Hohmann predicted, he will come under tremendous criticism from the global elites in both parties and the mainstream media, as well as all the Muslim Brotherhood front groups.
“So we cannot guarantee that even if Trump’s heart is in the right place on this issue, that he will have the political backbone to carry the task through and give us a true reprieve in the ongoing Islamization of America,” Hohmann said.
“I personally have my doubts. The more likely course, I believe, is that we can expect to see Muslim immigration continue at perhaps a slightly slower pace but with more monitoring of mosques and other Islamic activities to make sure they don’t cross the line from legitimate religious practice to seditious activity.”
