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The chickens are coming home to roost

By Russell Grenning - posted Tuesday, 20 February 2018


Now that there are more than five million Muslim asylum seekers in Germany with the total continuing to grow daily, what many foretold as the inevitable consequences are now starkly evident.

Late last year the German Government's Federal Office for Migration and Refugees reported what was described by them as a "new phenomenon" – the Radicalism Hotline of the Office is being deluged by teachers, school psychologists and mental health workers concerned about primary school children with Islamist tendencies. These children are described as "Salafist children" meaning that they have been or are being radicalised by their already radical Muslim parents.

German authorities are deeply worried that Muslim children, many of whom have been born in Germany, are being targeted by Jihadist and Salafist groups not only via social media but directly in the playground. This growth of exclusionary and fundamentalist beliefs among young children has already been identified as having the magnitude of a youth subculture. Perhaps ironically, this development has grown increasingly as Islamic State has lost more and more ground in the Middle East.

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A spokesman for the Nuremberg Advisory Centre on Radicalisation has confirmed that most primary school Muslim children "have grown up in a Salafist environment".

The German Baden-Wurttemberg State Government has been so concerned by this emerging trend that it has established the Centre for Coordination of the Network to Prevent Extremism, which is now training school psychologists and teachers about how to recognise extremism among Muslim students.

An expert from the Centre who briefed a group of school mental health professionals last December told local media that teachers and psychologists "often lack awareness with regards to how to distinguish between regular behaviour that has maybe been brought on by puberty and extremism".

These courses teach school staff how to recognise jihadist symbols and code that young people post on the internet such as the Islamic State flag or a picture of lions. During the training, participants told the course presenter, "Now that you have explained the codes and symbols, I remember seeing that".

One of the Centre's online resources says that schools should be alert if pupils show "emphatic rejection of the views of teachers and classmates as haram (forbidden)". Other warning signs include Muslim youths/children turning their backs on music and other leisure activities and radically changing their behaviour towards the opposite sex.

German intelligence agencies have warned that there is a growing number of female Islamic extremists coming to prominence as their terrorist husbands are sent to prison. In the state of North Rhine-Westphalia alone, more than forty female extremists have already been identified as radicalising children who are seen as the next generation of jihadists.

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Last December, German domestic intelligence chief Hans-Georg Maassen warned that support for radical Islam was at "an all-time high" with the number of Salafists identified by authorities as living in Germany having grown from 3,700 in 2011 to 10,800 in 2017. Thousands more, authorities concede, have not been identified.

He said that street recruitment and radicalism in mosques had been reduced somewhat in favour of "small conspiratorial circles, primarily on the internet" which was, he said, "a particular challenge" for his office.

According to official statistics quoted by the respected Pew Research Centre, the number of Muslims living in Germany rose from 3.3 million (4.1% of the population) in 2010 to 5 million (6.1%) in 2016. The median age of Muslims is 31 and for non-Muslims it is 47 and the total fertility rate predicted over 2015 – 2020 is 1.9 for Muslims and 1.4 for the rest of Germany's population. Clearly, the growth in the Muslim population is not just because of refugees but because of the higher Muslim birth rate. These population figures and trends in Germany are broadly reflected throughout Europe, which is estimated to already have a 5% Muslim population and growing.

In what could only be described, at best, as a rather dubious argument, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), an inter-governmental body of fifty seven nations, has claimed that Europe needs Muslim immigration "to pay their pensions". In a statement made last December, OIC described "rising" migration from the Muslim world to Europe as a "win-win boom" because Europe was obliged to "rejuvenate itself".

The organisation's information and communications director, Maha Akeel, said that European political parties which opposed Muslim immigration were "lying to their own populations" and that the influx had proven to be a "roaring success." "The far-right's ambition to erect a Fortress Europe that shuts out migrants would doom continental economies to slow growth, stagnation, low productivity and low employment for decades to come," she said.

She claimed that Muslim immigrants to the UK between 2001 and 2011 had paid the government 22 billion pounds more than they took despite official figures showing that immigration to the UK had cost taxpayers there anywhere between 115 billion pounds and 160 billion pounds. Ms Akeel did not identify the source of her statistic.

Only recently, the Austrian Government has revealed that 90 per cent of asylum seekers end up on welfare benefits with the Interior Minister saying, "Our system is simply overwhelmed". The Norwegian Government has released a report showing that half of welfare beneficiaries are Muslim immigrants, despite comprising less than 17% of the population.

And, of course, the general UN line is that Europe should take every Muslim immigrant who turns up and if there are any problems, then it is the fault of the European governments themselves.

One classic recent illustration was the lecture by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) handed out to the cash-strapped Greek Government which is constantly teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, telling them that they should provide separate housing and washing facilities for women and children at refugee camps because of increasing sexual violence against them. Yes, it is the Greek Government's fault that Muslim men in the camps are attacking and raping Muslim women and children and they should stop it – "they", of course, means the Greek Government.

Again and again, public opinion polls across Europe show a growing resistance to Muslim immigration and a growing support for anti-immigrant political parties.

The most recent example released in January revealed that a staggering 84 per cent of Belgians likened the Muslim influx to an invasion, while 77 per cent "no longer feel at home as we did before" due to Muslim immigration. This came as a terrible shock to a pro-immigrant liberal newspaper and a taxpayer–funded public broadcaster RTBF which initiated it along with the This is Not a Crisis Foundation. Their views are predictably very much in favour of open borders.

It was an extensive survey and, obviously, nobody could claim that it provided predictable outcomes skewed by a right-wing, anti-immigrant bias.

In fact, RTBF bemoaned the obvious fact that Belgians were "increasingly xenophobic" adding, "The results raise many questions, but they revealed a society that is filled with fear and the rejection of otherness" and that researchers, "observed the development of a true anti-Muslim paranoia (among Belgians) which has taken on a pathological dimension."

Other findings included 74 per cent of people who thought that Islam was "not a tolerant religion", 70 per cent who believe that Muslims want to impose their way of life on everybody and 60 per cent who said that the presence of Muslims presented a threat to the nation's identity.

So, the bottom line is that most Belgians, apart from Muslims, are paranoid, intolerant and very probably neo-Nazi.

Presumably non-Muslims throughout Europe who hold these views are also the same breed of vile bigots.

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About the Author

Russell Grenning is a retired political adviser and journalist who began his career at the ABC in 1968 and subsequently worked for the then Brisbane afternoon daily, The Telegraph and later as a columnist for The Courier Mail and The Australian.

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