Expect to see a lot more of this in the coming months and years, as Europeans finally remember what all that fuss at the Battle of Tours, Grenada,and the Gates of Vienna was all about:
A leading conservative politician said on Thursday that Islam did not belong in Germany, fuelling tension at a conference on integrating Muslims that also debated a controversial Salafist campaign to hand out copies of the Koran across the country.
“Islam is not part of our tradition and identity in Germany and so does not belong in Germany,” Volker Kauder, head of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives in parliament, told the Passauer Neue Presse.
“But Muslims do belong in Germany. As state citizens, of course, they enjoy their full rights,” he added.
His remarks added to a highly charged nationwide debate about a campaign by an ultra-conservative Salafist Muslim group to hand out millions of free German translations of the Koran to non-Muslims.
As the story correctly notes, there are “four million Muslims living in Germany, about half of whom have German citizenship.” That’s actually a fairly high percentage because, unlike the U.S., Germany does not confer birthright citizenship. In fact, until the year 2000, it conferred citizenship only via the jus sanguinis – which meant, for example, that the German-born children of the Gastarbeiter Turks were not eligible, but the Volga Germans, repatriated to the Fatherland after centuries in Russia, were. Kauder’s qualification about Muslims as “state citizens” is simply a distinction between legal citizens of a country called “Germany” and the echte Deutsche.
#more#The Europeans got caught up in the fashionable “multikulti” mania that accompanied the establishment of the European Union, but deep down their Voelkisch notion of citizenship is far different than that of the U.S., and as they see their distinctive national cultures diluted and their countries turned into theme-park “lands,” the backlash is quietly forming. A few years ago, no German politician would dared to say publicly what Kauder just did.
Naturally, he’s already been savaged as a far-right nut rather than a defender of (as the lefties might say) the indigenous culture and people:
“Volker Kauder is the last crusader for the conservatives. He is putting a bomb in the Islam conference,” said senior opposition Social Democrat (SPD) lawmaker Thomas Oppermann.
“(He) . . . is denigrating and marginalising all Muslims in Germany. That course is utterly wrong,” he said.
But, of course, he’s not. Islam is not part of German tradition and identity, nor of any place else in Europe outside the Balkans. Despite President Obama’s claims, nor is it part of America’s heritage, unless you count Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Koran. This is not to disparage Islam, but simply to point out a fact.
For centuries, the great division in human civilization was not north vs. south, but Western Christendom vs. Middle Eastern Islam — a war fought mostly defensively by the West. The much-disparaged Crusades were not aggressive but rather waged in reaction to the Musselman conquest of the Holy Land; and Tours, the Spanish Reconquista, and Vienna were last-ditch attempts to stop the incursion of a desert-warrior faith and alien social ideology into Europe.
From its formation, the goal of European integration (chiefly a French-German notion) was to beat the nationalism out of the former Great Powers, so as to avoid a repeat of the first and second World Wars. But the EU assumed a static-state entity, one with free movement between borders but not across borders from an historically inimical part of the world. The huge flood of Muslim immigrants from Italy to Scandinavia changed the equation. The only question now is how the Europeans react to it, once they realize that “multikulti” is not peaceful coexistence, but a cultural suicide pact.