Obama & Merkel’s open door for migrants takes Ameica & Europe towards ruin
DOUGLAS MURRAY THE AUSTRALIAN JANUARY 30, 2016
Has the road to modern Europe’s future been paved with good intentions? Or did the opening of the continent’s borders to the rest of the world constitute one of the most cynically destructive acts ever carried out on a democratic public?
These are just a couple of the questions now being tossed around among European publics. But whichever answer you veer towards — naive decency or cynical destruction — there can be little doubt that the path on which its leaders have put the continent tends towards hell.
Consider this month’s news alone. The new year began with a mass sexual assault against German women carried out by migrants in the centre of Cologne. Such is the self-designated role of much of the media these days that this story didn’t properly emerge for nearly a week. For in Germany and many other countries across the continent, the media has decided that its role is not to report the news. Rather, it has decided that its role is to mediate between events and the possibly negative reactions of the general public should they learn of such events.
Indeed, if it were not for a few gutsy websites the news might have taken weeks or months to come out. Which is not so unlikely. After all, in Britain when gangs of Muslim immigrant men in the north of England raped and abused as many as 1400 girls — many underage — every arm of the state and much of the media worked to keep the facts and the identities of the attackers secret for almost 15 years.
It took the resignation of Cologne’s police chief to partially alleviate this scandal. But the manner in which the story came out points to a fascinating reality in modern Europe.
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The media, politicians and almost every arm of the state in the new Europe treat the general public as though we are a powder keg likely to go off at any moment. Not least among the ironies of this is that the best way to turn the public into such a powder keg is to treat it like such a powder keg.
Every day now brings stories of migrant misdeeds and hardening public attitudes. This week the story once again came out from Sweden. The murder of a 22-year-old female worker, stabbed to death at a refugee centre, certainly horrified the Swedish public. But it did not shock it. For this is only the latest in a string of sex and murder attacks carried out by recent arrivals in the Scandinavian country.
And if anyone wonders why the stories of atrocities perpetrated by migrants seem to come out as thick and fast from Sweden as they do from Germany, one answer lies in the simple fact that Sweden was the only country in Europe willing to take in the same proportion of refugees as Germany.
Thanks in part to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s summer spasm, Germany took in more than one million migrants last year, comprising more than 1 per cent of its 80 million population. Last year Sweden, with its population of around 10 million, was taking in up to 10,000 migrants every week and over the year added more than 1 per cent to its population. Both countries expect similar additions this year.
One result of the country’s soaring immigrant population — which like the immigration across the continent largely comprises young men from Africa and the Middle East (eight out of every 10 migrants, at a conservative estimate) — is that Sweden now has the highest rape rates of any country in Europe.
Indeed, according to police reports Sweden now has the second highest number of rapes of anywhere in the world — second only to Lesotho. In 2014, there were 6620 rapes, compared with 1472 in 1975, and the numbers rise year on year.
Everybody knows why. But for years nobody would say that it might have something to do with the mass influx of young men from predominantly Muslim countries.
Now in Sweden, as in every other country across the continent, people are willing to say it. And, as in every other country across the continent, the only political party to have warned about this — the Sweden Democrats — has risen from being a fringe party derided as “far Right” by the political mainstream to a party ahead of those same “mainstream” parties in many recent polls.
What is now occurring in Europe is the wholesale loss of public trust in an entire political class. And it was all just so predictable.
When the body of a young Syrian boy was found washed up on a beach in Turkey last year, many Europeans were strangely bounced into thinking that this was both Europe’s fault and its responsibility.
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For parts of Europe the human tidal wave appeared to present a kind of moral opportunity. The Swedish government boasted of becoming a “humanitarian superpower”. “Mutti” (mother) Merkel — to give her the name Germans often used to accord her — presented the desire of refugees to actually come into Germany, rather than flee from it, as something of a historical atonement.
Her government also disingenuously and short-sightedly echoed some free-marketeers who suggested that this tsunami of mainly young people could assist the “greying” German population by providing the labour force for the next generation. Never mind that this “labour force” had no jobs to go to or that they were moving through southern European countries such as Italy and Greece, which themselves had between 25 per cent and 50 per cent youth unemployment rates.
This argument also criminally foresaw no problems from importing a new working class from a different continent with a different creed and different values. Cologne helped reverse that lack of foresight. But there is some unravelling to do yet.As some of us said at the time, the whole migrant crisis (most of the arrivals are not “refugees”) has been woefully, indeed destructively, ill considered from the start.
While the glow of moral effervescence may have briefly hung around those leaders who said “refugees welcome”, the story was bound to have a second act. That was always due when the next turn of the wheel brought negative stories associated with refugees.
The first big shift in public attitudes came after the November terrorist attacks in Paris when Islamist gunmen massacred 130 people.
The fact that these and other terrorists turned out to have been able to slip in and out of Europe through its open southern borders, and thereafter enjoy the free movement that the Schengen agreement brings, brought a flicker of political mortality even into the eyes of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.
But like most of his political class his immediate instinct was to double down and to attack critics of EU policy for “exploiting” the situation.
There would be no rethink on immigration into the continent, nor free movement within it, he insisted. Juncker and co dodged that one, but only just.
Then came Cologne, and the summer of love turned into a winter of discontent. Now even Merkel — the sole titan of the Euro crisis — looks politically vulnerable. Admittedly the new and much talked-up Alternative for Germany party is only at 13 per cent in the latest poll published this week in the German paper Bild .
But this is the anti-immigration party’s highest polling so far (up from 4.7 per cent in the 2013 election).
Crucially, for the first time, Merkel looks weak and on the defensive. It was only after allowing a million more migrants into the country — and as reports of anti-Semitic incidents began to seep in — that the Chancellor said Germany did not want any anti-Semites to come to Germany.
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