After the gang rapes, does Michael Gerson still admire Germany for taking Syrian refugees?
Michael Gerson of the Washington Post visited Dachau (props to a columnist actually hitting the field) and wrote a column on December 10, 2015, "Germany’s defiant decency in the refugee crisis":
In a place synonymous with death, life has taken an unexpected turn. The radiating crisis of the Middle East has reached Bavaria in the form of refugees, welcomed to Germany by Chancellor Angela Merkel. Officials in the Dachau region were told to prepare for 1,200. There are now about 1,600; there will probably be 2,000 by year-end.
By way of comparison, our entire country has taken in about 1,800 Syrian refugees in the past two years.My thought at the time was, well, Germany has this thing covered, no need for the United States to get involved. We have taken in refugees from Somali, Yemen and other Muslim nations. From Ian Tuttle of the National Review: "Between 1983 and 2004, the United States resettled just over 55,000 Somali refugees, 13,000 of them in 2004 alone. After a dip in the mid-2000s, Somali refugee resettlement picked back up: 27,000 Somalis entered the U.S. from 2008 to 2013, making the country the fourth-largest source of refugees in that period, behind only Burma, Iraq, and Bhutan."
Gerson praised German response:
How have Germans reacted? Lowl said that more than 1,000 volunteers were helping in resettlement efforts. “It is really the whole of society that has responded,” he told me. The first thing refugees see at the gymnasium processing center are posters made by German schoolchildren. “Jeder ist willkommen,” reads one: “All are welcome.” At an open house allowing neighbors to examine refugee housing — in an upscale neighborhood where the head of Audi lives — a volunteer told me, “Germans are proud of themselves, and a little surprised.”
Merkel’s role is certainly unexpected. She is generally known as a deliberate, cautious politician. But by accepting perhaps 1 million refugees this year, she is also assuming the largest risk of her political career. Germans debate whether she intended to issue a welcome quite so broad. But she has not backed down. “If we had not shown a friendly face,” she said, “that’s not my country.”
This flash of defiant decency may come from being the daughter of a Protestant pastor. But it also reflects the confidence of a leader who has dominated German politics for a decade and become, without dispute, the most important leader in Europe (as well as Time magazine’s Person of the Year).Left out is she was a political operative in East Germany's police state.
What surprised me was not the change from putting to death two-thirds of European Jewry in World War II, but how Germany seemed to abandon its concern about gastarbeiters -- Turkish Muslim immigrants who do menial labor -- who refused to assimilate. Keeping Germany German -- according to Gerson -- no longer is a priority.
Liberals call this evolving.
Gerson ended the column:
In any case, it is Germany taking leadership in the cause of human dignity, and taking the risks inherent to leadership. This was the way the United States once imagined itself, which seems like long ago.Those right-wing, racist, etc., etc.'s protested and raised hysterical concerns about public safety. The German government denounced rallied by the Pegida group, denouncing them as Islamophobes and Xenophobes.
On New Year's Eve thousands of Muslim gang raped hundreds of German women in dozen cities in a a coordinated terrorist attack designed to strike fear among Germans the way the violent killings in Krystallnacht struck fears among Jews.
Germany can have all the Muslim refugees. The United States should not accept another one of them until we can discern which ones want to assimilate, and which ones want to rape and pillage.
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