Three young men from North Africa sought to stone two transgender women in the western German city of Dortmund on Sunday. According to a report on Friday on television station SAT1.NRW, the men attacked Yasmine und Elisa, two transgender women, near the city’s main train station.
“Within seconds we were tossed around…and they took stones from a gravel bed on the corner and threw them at us,” said Elisa.
A police car at the train station appeared as the stoning attack unfolded and arrested the men.
The German media as a general rule do not disclose the last names of victims to protect their privacy. The three men are between 16 and 18 years-old and are known to the authorities because of theft and assault arrests. The Dortmund police official Kim-Ben Freigang said the suspects told the police that “such persons must be stoned”…
And looking at what may lie ahead, the (admittedly rarely calm) Daily Mail reports:
The worries of Germans have been heightened by a report published earlier this month by Professor Adorjan F. Kovacs of the world-renowned Goethe University in Frankfurt. Entitled ‘Truths about the Refugee Crisis’, it blows apart Merkel’s often-used argument that one, two or even three million migrants will be a drop in the ocean compared with a German population of 80 million.
Professor Kovacs compared the 11.5 million existing indigenous German population aged between 20 and 35 with the number of new arrivals, who are predominantly male and in the same age bracket. He predicts that by 2020, when it is expected that at least two million young migrants will have each brought in between three and eight family members, the ethnic demography of the under-40s will have altered irreversibly unless Mrs Merkel changes her tune.
Writing for Deutsche Welle, Christoph Hasselbach:
Chancellor Merkel said she wanted to significantly reduce the number of refugees. But Turkey hasn’t lived up to its promise to stop refugees from traveling on to Europe, nor is there much reason to expect that other EU states will take on their share of the burden. And yet Merkel wants to keep the borders open.
How long should this continue, if not even the rest of Merkel’s CDU party is willing to stand up to their leader? We can’t expect opposition from the other parties in parliament: The SPD, the Greens and the Left Party are for even more liberal policies on refugees.
That’s very true.
Turning yet again to those words of Mark Steyn:
“If the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones”.
Back to Hasselbach:
Maybe [the political class will] listen to a group of renowned legal scholars who are experts on the German constitution. They’ve now spoken out in the sharpest of tones, warning that the state is under threat. The business daily Handelsblatt quoted the former president of the Federal Constitutional Court, Hans-Jürgen Papier, who spoke of a “blatant political failure.” The constitutional state must not allow itself to become unhinged by political decisions, he said, adding that it has a duty to “stand up to threats that could result from permanent, unlimited, and uncontrolled migration.”
Former constitutional justice Udo di Fabio wrote in an opinion piece published by the mass circulation Bild newspaper that the German constitution is not there to protect people from all over the world “via an actual or legal entry permit.” The country is obligated to “reintroduce effective controls along national borders,” he said.
And Michael Bertrams, a former president of the constitutional court in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, accused Merkel, in a recent article in the Cologne Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper, of allowing hundreds of thousands of refugees into the country in a “self-aggrandizing act without parliamentary permission.”
Good for Bertrams for putting it that way. There’s been an outpouring of drivel over Merkel’s supposed big-heartedness and her supposed Christian decency (and did you she know that she is a pastor’s daughter?), but the reality is that flinging open the doors was a profoundly narcissistic act. It wasn’t about her people or her country: it was about her.
Hasselbach:
The Hamburg-based legal scholar Reinhard Merkel (no relation to the chancellor) pointed to a further aspect of the debate at the beginning of October. In an interview with DW, he said then that the point had already been reached either for “new elections or a referendum on this issue.” The German people, he said, had never been asked.
Perhaps it’s unkind to point out that they weren’t asked about the euro either.
Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Merkel’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, is wondering whether existing rules prohibiting the deployment of troops at home should continue to apply.
Deutsche Welle:
“A legal basis for domestic military missions must be created,” Schäuble told [Süddeutsche Zeitung], adding that Germans expect the state to ensure security.
“For this you need more police and enhanced legal foundations for the police and intelligence services,” he said.
“The situation may arise, however, where both federal and state police forces are exhausted,” he added. “Every other country in the world would deploy soldiers in an emergency.”
The situation may arise…