JUST how mad is Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, who this week defiantly refused to reverse the barmy mass immigration policy responsible for her country’s greatest crisis since the end of the Second World War?
“I’m still convinced today that we can do it – it is our historic duty and this is a historic challenge in times of globalisation,” said Merkel, referring to the open-door policy that in 2015 alone welcomed nearly 1.1million migrants and refugees into her country.
Some of these are no doubt keen to integrate. But a significant minority are not.
Among the latter are people like the Pakistani migrant who savagely assaulted with an axe and a knife a family of Chinese tourists on a train in Bavaria; the failed Syrian asylum seeker who blew himself up, injuring several others after trying unsuccessfully to enter a crowded music festival, and the Syrian refugee who hacked to death a pregnant Polish woman outside a kebab shop in Reutlingen.
Deadliest of all was the killing spree by a young man in Munich who shot dead nine people and wounded 36.
Though the authorities have tried to explain this away as a case of Right-wing extremism by someone obsessed with Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, ordinary Germans are not so sure. It has not escaped their notice that the killer was yelling “Allah Akbar”.
In a press conference this week Mrs Merkel conceded that this situation was “shocking, oppressive and depressing” but refused to perform a U-turn on the policy that had created it, apparently because this would mean the terrorists had won.
Is Mrs Merkel pigheadedly stubborn, delusional or clinically insane? If I had to live in Germany right now, I would probably plump for all three.
Even before the recent axe and knife attacks, the mall shooting and the suicide bombing, this once staid, tolerant, law-abiding country was starting to resemble a multicultural basket case quite incapable of protecting its citizens’ rights.
Here are a few examples of the kind of stories which Germany’s politically correct media has been doing its best to suppress: an Afghan man is arrested in a public baths in Dresden after molesting four girls aged between 11 and 13. He is subsequently released by police.
Another swimming pool, which tries to ban immigrants after a string of similar incidents, is forced to relent under pressure from Left-wing activists.
A gang of bearded Muslims invades a nudist swimming pool in Geldern in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, threatening male bathers and spitting on women and children, while yelling “Allah Akbar”.
A man – yelling “Allah Akbar” – threatens to behead a surgeon at a hospital in Troisdorf because he is upset at the way the doctor treated his son’s broken leg.
Traditional German sausages have been banned in numerous schools and public canteens out of fear of upsetting Muslim immigrants.
Schoolgirls no longer feel safe to travel on school buses unless protected from gangs of migrant molesters by a cordon of their male classmates.
Most notorious incident of all – at least till the recent killings – was the mass of sexual assaults which took place in Cologne over the New Year, in which no fewer than 1,200 girls were raped or sexually assaulted by groups of migrants. How on earth did Germany come to this pass?
Perhaps the oddest thing of all about this crazy situation is that the politician most responsible for it – Mrs Merkel, known to her people as “Mutti” (Mummy) – remains remarkably popular. So entrenched is her position as Germany’s chancellor that she is unlikely to be ousted.
And even now, despite growing opposition from new anti-immigrant party the AfD, the broad majority of German society accepts her mass immigration policy as a worthwhile aim. To outsiders this may seem bizarre beyond measure. But then, the Germans aren’t quite like the rest of us.
First – as a leading German-speaking editor recently explained to me – they are still crippled by war-guilt, which is why they feel such a strong moral compulsion to take in so many refugees. It is their way of making amends for what the Nazis did.
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Second, like most of the Western world, Germany’s declining birth rate is a major threat to its economy (currently the world’s fourth largest after the US, China and Japan). In order to maintain its economic power Germany therefore needs to be able to import fresh labour as it first began doing in the 1970s with its “guest workers” from Turkey.
And it currently gives this need a higher priority than protecting native Germans from the social problems inherent when you encourage mass immigration from alien cultures.
None of this means that Mrs Merkel’s immigration policy isn’t bonkers: it is, totally. And the worst is no doubt yet to come.
As Germany’s immigrant hordes grow more defiant and belligerent, the attitude of ordinary native Germans – peaceful so far – is bound to reach breaking point. And we have all read enough history books to know what Germans do when they lose faith in the political mainstream and decide to take action into their own hands.
