Culture clash in Cologne

Now I lived in Germany for nine years during the 80s and the early 90s, and I know this must really stick in most Germans’ collective craw. According to the Daily Telegraph (by way of the Washington Times);

The construction of one of Europe’s biggest mosques near a globally famous Christian landmark has sparked a furious dispute in Germany.

Immigration and integration are extremely sensitive issues in Germany, which is home to a Turkish community of several million.

But almost within the shadow of Cologne Cathedral, political correctness was replaced by bitter confrontation, as the city’s Muslims began building a 2,000-capacity mosque whose twin minarets will reach 170 feet.

The German government has always been more accomodating to Turks than the German population. The West Germans, at first, were even wary of their East German neighbors when the Wall came down in ’89. I had a West German taxi driver tell me in 1990 that she’d wished the Wall had never come down. 

After World War II, there was a serious shortage of manpower in Germany because the of allies’ (particularly the Soviet Union) meatgrinder into which the Nazis had sent their youths. So the Bonn government grudgingly accepted foreign workers, mostly Turks who settled together in their own communities within German communities. Most Germans did not like the fact that Turks lived among them, but accepted it as necessary. Now the need for foreign workers is gone – but the Turks are still there.

Now, the Muslims want to remake this particular city’s skyline;

“We don’t want to build a Turkish ghetto in Ehrenfeld. I know about ‘Londonistan,’ and I don’t want that here,” [Jorg Uckermann, the district’s deputy mayor] added, referring to a phrase used to describe the rising trend of radical Islam in England.

[…]

Leading the charge is Ralph Giordano, a prominent Jewish author, who wrote recently that Germany is witnessing a “clash of two completely different cultures” and questioned whether they could ever be reconciled.

Stating that he had received death threats for his opinions, he added: “What kind of a state are we in that I can face a fatwa in Germany?”

Really, death threats against a Jew in Germany – one might think that would wake up the accomodating government just a little.

“We live in a land of religious freedom,” said Prelate Johannes Bastgen, the [Cologne] cathedral’s dean. “But I would be very glad if the same principles existed in Muslim countries.”

Well, what with fatwas and death threats being issued against German citizens, apparently there’s only one religion that gets religious freedom.

And of course, Preeti Aroon of Foreign Policy magazine sees Nazis around every corner;

 The protest is driven by a fear of the Islamization of Europe. This anxiety, which Philip Jenkins argues is overblown in a recent web exclusive for FP, is a variant of what one sociologist has described as “cultural displacement” — “the fear that your children will grow up in a world different than the one you grew up in.” In the United States, it’s captured by those white Americans who, in the face of a rising Hispanic population, worry about a day when Spanish will be the language on the streets and there will be more Miguels than Michaels. In Europe, it’s captured by a woman in Cologne who says she wants to feel at home, not as if she’s in a foreign land.

[…]

With the rise of the far right, let’s hope that Germany doesn’t end up going the way it did in 1933.

Funny how it always ends that way, doesn’t it? When an intolerant group of people invade a country and refuse to integrate into the the previously successful culture, and the indigenous people protest, it’s always because they’re Nazis.

Is that the education your parents wasted their money on, Preeti?

Category: Foreign Policy, Terror War