Douglas Murray: Germany Just Can’t Get It Right/Burak Bekdil: Blame Terror on Everyone but Terrorists

Germany Just Can’t Get It Right
Douglas Murray/© 2016 Gatestone Institute/January 11/16

How can you explain why Germany, which in the 20th century had such a gigantic anti-Semitism problem, would import so many people from those areas of the world which now have the same gigantic anti-Semitism problem?
The police water cannons were not in evidence on New Year’s Eve to break up the migrant gangs committing violent crimes against women. Instead they were used to break up a lawful demonstration of people opposed to such violent attacks on women.
The late Robert Conquest once laid out a set of three political rules, the last of which read, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” This rule comes in handy when trying to understand the otherwise clearly insane and suicidal policies of Chancellor Merkel’s government in Germany. These policies only make sense if the German government has in fact been taken over by a cabal of people intent not on holding Germany together but on pulling it entirely apart. Consider the evidence.
There can be few other explanations for why Chancellor Merkel’s government last year let in more than one million people (about 1.5% of the current German population) without having any idea of who they were, where they came from or what they think. No democratic leader could possibly push through such a startling measure. How else can you explain why a country that in the 20th century had such a gigantic anti-Semitism problem, would import so many people from those areas of the world which, in the 21st century, now have the same gigantic anti-Semitism problem?
A document that was leaked late last year from the German intelligence service warned that the country is “importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples…” How to explain a government and security service policy which allowed this to happen? Or a Chancellor who, when asked a very lightly critical question about all of this by a concerned German citizen, responded with a long disquisition that failed to answer even one part of the pertinent point?
More up-to-date, it is worth considering events since New Year’s Eve. As the world now knows, that was when around 100 women were subjected to rape, harassment and sexual molestation by a huge crowd of migrants in the centre of the city of Cologne. It has now emerged that the first response of the Cologne police to this major incident was to hold back information about the identity of the attackers. Whether the police thought they could get away with that or not, this lie has now poured fuel onto the flames of public anger by demonstrating that the police, like the government and much of the media, are intent on misinforming the public about what is going on in their country, rather than keeping them truthfully briefed about it.
The next German police response to suggest that they, too, must have been taken over by a cabal of their enemies — intent on whipping up rather than dampening public concern — came a week after this attempted cover-up. At protests this past weekend, the Cologne police wheeled out water-cannons to hose down protestors and disperse them. Of course, these water cannons were not in evidence on New Year’s Eve to break up the migrant gangs committing violent crimes against German women. Instead, they were used to break up a lawful demonstration of German people opposed to such violent attacks on women. Unless you take Conquest’s rule into account, there is no explanation for the deployment of water-cannon by the German police against people protesting the rapes, rather than deploying them against the rapists.
Then there is the “too late” response. This is the declaration by officials, after the rapes have taken place and once the government realizes that it has to say something, that the German authorities will not tolerate and do not want people in their country who do not hold contemporary, enlightened European views on women. As at least 75% of the migrants who arrived in Europe last year were young men from the Middle East and Africa, it might be noted that this point could have been more constructive had it been made somewhat earlier. But, as those people are now here in such vast numbers, a government intent on causing as much societal damage as possible would, of course, allow them in and then complain about something that they will now be able to do nothing about. All such “hardball” pronouncements by German politicians can now be seen for the puff-balls they really are.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel doubled down on her open-door asylum policy in a November 13, 2015 television interview, saying: “The Chancellor has the situation under control. I have my vision. I will fight for it.” Mere insanity, incompetence or duplicity could not possibly explain the behaviour of a German government so obviously dedicated to its own pathetic end.
The conundrum for the rest of Europe now is what to do with the unwelcome knowledge of what is really going on. The realization that the most powerful and significant political and economic country in Europe has clearly been taken over by a cabal of its own enemies, intent on destroying the German nation rather than on protecting its citizens, will strike different Europeans in different ways. From the British point of view, one striking opportunity to respond will be presented in the referendum over Britain’s membership (or not) in the European Union, slated to take place at some point next year. That Union – which has dissolved the continent’s external and internal borders as a central pillar of its policy — may now be seen by British voters for what it is. And so perhaps the best explanation of the behaviour of the German government is that it has been taken over some time ago by British Euro-sceptics, intent on finally bringing the EU to this dismal end. That is clearly the most likely explanation. Mere insanity, incompetence or duplicity could not possibly explain the behaviour of a German government so obviously dedicated to its own pathetic end.
© 2016 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/7201/germany-migrant-policy

Blame Terror on Everyone but Terrorists!
Burak Bekdil/© 2016 Gatestone Institute/January 11/16
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/7182/turkey-blame-terror
Muslims had the habit of slaughtering “infidel” Muslims for centuries when there was not a country called Syria or any “Islamophobia.”
The main lack of logic seems to be that innocent people are attacked repeatedly by Muslims, so they become suspicious of Muslims; this suspicion is then called Islamophobia — but it does not come out of thin air.
President Erdogan is explicitly saying that even non-terrorist Muslims have the potential to become terrorists if they happen to feel offended. So easily?
Pro-Sunni supremacists, such as the Turkish president and his top cleric, do not understand that cartoons do not kill people. But some of their friends do kill people.
There is hardly anything surprising in the way Turkey’s Islamist leaders and their officials in the clergy diagnose jihadist terror: Blame it on everyone except the terrorists. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the inventor of the theory that “there is no Islamic terror,” recently warned that “rising racism and enmity against Islam in Europe[an] and other countries” will cause great tragedies — like the Paris attacks.
Put in another way, Erdogan is telling the free world that Muslims will kill even more people “à la Paris” if they face Islamophobia in the non-Muslim countries they have chosen to attack. This reasoning, in simple order of logic, means that Muslims will not kill innocent civilians in terror attacks if they do NOT face Islamophobia. That is not a convincing argument. Erdogan did not tell anyone whether the jihadists killed more than 100 people in Ankara last October because Muslims face Islamophobia in Turkey.
In Mr. Erdogan’s thinking, there is one — and only one — culprit behind how jihadists cruelly visited Ankara, the Sinai skies, Beirut, Paris and San Bernardino in about the span of a month last year: Erdogan’s worst regional nemesis, Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.
Erdogan willingly ignores that jihadist terror, targeting “infidels,” existed long before Assad came to power, and it will exist with or without Assad ruling Syria. Forget non-Muslim “infidels,” in fact. Muslims had the habit of slaughtering “infidel” Muslims for centuries when there was not a country called Syria or any “Islamophobia.” It is simply too manipulative to claim that the Shiite and Sunnis will stop bombing each other’s mosques because Syria is not ruled by Assad, but instead by a Muslim Brother of Erdogan.
The president’s other diagnosis (and prescription) to fight terror is that “Islam and Muslims should not be insulted because of what the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant does.” He is right that 1.5 billion or so Muslims cannot be held accountable for whatever evil a few thousand jihadists do. But he is wrong that euphemizing [Sunni] Islam in the free world will stop the terrorism committed by those few thousand radicals. In fact, by threatening the free world that there may be more terror attacks if non-terrorist Muslims feel offended, President Erdogan is explicitly saying that even non-terrorist Muslims have the potential to become terrorists if they happen to feel offended. So easily? And, if yes, why? How come other offended people do not become terrorists?
More recently, Turkey’s top Muslim cleric, Professor Mehmet Gormez joined in the childish propaganda that puts the blame for terror on people and things other than the terrorists. “Today,” Professor Gormez said, “the damage caused [by] the [Islamic State] networks, distant from any belief, reason and wisdom, who engrave the name [of God] on their so-called flags is no less than the [damage caused by] cartoons [of the Prophet Mohammed] — intolerable by any means — by the pioneers of Islamophobia.”
In this thinking, the men of Islamic State, who have the habit of beheading people and cheerfully releasing their videos, of raping “slave” women and of mass-killings in Muslims lands, do the same damage as people who just draw cartoons. And, in this thinking, cartoonists are as evil as the jihadists who killed them in the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris a year ago, or as evil as the other jihadists who killed over 130 people in the French capital in just one evening.
In the thinking of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (left) and top Muslim cleric, Professor Mehmet Gormez (center), the men of Islamic State, who have the habit of beheading people, raping “slave” women and mass-killings in Muslims lands, do the same damage as people who just draw cartoons, such as Stéphane Charbonnier (right), the murdered editor of Charlie Hebdo.
Pro-Sunni supremacists, such as the Turkish president and his top cleric, do not understand that cartoons do not kill people. But some of their friends do kill people. Just as Erdogan’s presidential jet left Riyadh, the Saudi capital, after a lucrative state visit, the Saudis decided to execute 47 Shiite men on charges of “terrorism,” adding more fuel to the sectarian war in the Middle East. Erdogan is wrong. And so is his chief cleric. Muslim terrorists of this or that sect tend to kill each other in Muslim countries, not in non-Muslim lands. The main lack of logic seems to be that innocent people are attacked repeatedly by Muslims, so they become suspicious of Muslims; this suspicion is then called Islamophobia — but it does not come out of thin air. It is the same Muslim terrorists of this or that sect who bomb each other’s mosques in Muslim countries, not in non-Muslim lands. It is not the “Islamophobes” who kill Muslims and others.
At the 59th General Assembly of the United Nations in 2005, Spain’s President Jose Luiz Rodriguez Zapatero proposed an initiative that went down in the world-politics wastebasket: “The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations.” The initiative would galvanize international efforts against extremism, would forge international, intercultural and interreligious dialogue and all other niceties. It would defuse tensions between the Western and Islamic worlds. This author has lost count of the death toll from Islamist extremism since then. Any idea who was the co-sponsor of the UN initiative? A clue: It was the Turkish “sultan,” who thinks that there is no such a thing as Islamic terror and argues that Islamophobia is to blame for any terror — not Islamic extremism, of course.
**Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
© 2016 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.