Refugees and anti-Semitism: is it a problem? | Germany

2016/03/14 Leave a comment

More about antisemitism and refugees in Germany:

First, there were the images on TV of desperate, scared people climbing out of tiny boats and marching slowly along motorways and through woods. Then, not long after, the refugee crisis arrived on Shaked Spier’s doorstep in Berlin: overcrowded gyms, people waiting for weeks to be registered, overwhelmed officials.

“I knew immediately: If refugees are now in the country that my grandparents had to flee, and if they need help and protection, then I have to do my part,” Spier said. For him, there was absolutely no doubt. Since then, Spier, a Jew whose grandparents once fled the Nazis, has been volunteering at a refugee shelter in Friedrichshain, a hip district of Berlin filled with bars and cafes. Spier, 30, is a well-spoken man who works as a project manager at an IT company, and gives long, reflective answers when asked questions. At the refugee shelter, he helps to serve meals, plays with the kids and talks to the parents about the trauma they’ve experienced.

He is one of many Jews who’ve been helping refugees by donating clothes, working in shelters, or taking refugees into their homes. Spier says he hasn’t had any negative experiences. He says his identity, background and sexual orientation – Spier is openly gay – have never played a big role in his encounters with refugees. If someone notices the Hebrew tattoo on his arm or his accent, the reaction is typically one of, “Oh, you’re from Israel? Cool, I’m from Afghanistan.” He laughs.

Deutschland Rosenheim Grenze Österreich Turnhalle Lager Asylbewerber More than 1 million refugees came to Germany in 2015

No research to support the claims

But then he grows serious. It makes him angry, he says, when other people accuse refugees of being anti-Semites or harboring hate towards Israel simply because they come from countries whose governments espouse such sentiments. The head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, has frequently spoken about the danger of importing anti-Semitism along with refugees. In a recent newspaper interview, he said that “a considerable proportion of Arabs have grown up with anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli stereotypes. These people cannot simply leave their prejudice behind at the border.”

Spier says he has experienced no hostility while working with refugees

Dervis Hizarci, a history and political science teacher in Berlin, also finds such generalizations problematic. There is no research on the extent to which refugees may be bringing anti-Semitism with them to Germany, he said. Hizarci is the head of KIGA, an initiative against anti-Semitism based in the Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg. The initiative has launched a project about anti-Semitism among refugees; he expects to have the initial results by the end of the year. Until then, Hizarci says people shouldn’t make generalizations about the issue, as that would only stir up anti-Islam and anti-foreigner sentiment. However, he points to research showing that between 15 and 20 percent of the German population harbor latently anti-Semitic views. “Of course there are Muslims among these people, even in the second and third generation, but they’re by far not all Muslims!”

Hizarci doesn’t deny that young German Muslims are susceptible to anti-Semitic views, fueled by the horrors of the Middle East conflict they see on their smartphones and televisions. Hizarci and his colleagues give workshops and lead debates about anti-Semitism, but also about hatred of Islam. He says his work requires a lot of time and resources. “Just like when it comes to fighting homophobia or right-wing extremism, you can’t change such views with a single workshop; it doesn’t happen overnight.” After the Easter holidays, the initiative wants to start a model project that, among other things, will offer welcome workshops on the topic.

Mosques are overwhelmed

But often, it’s individual people engaged in such efforts to promote tolerance: German mosques are often overwhelmed with the problem, in part because they are led by volunteers who also have to commit their time and energy to other problems facing members of their community, such as exclusion, anti-Islam sentiment and joblessness. There are barely any resources left for confronting the problem of anti-Semitism, said an insider who asked to remain anonymous due to the contentious nature of the topic. The source added that many young Muslims are not an integrative part of the mosque community: “When that’s the case, there’s no way to reach them.”

Source: Refugees and anti-Semitism: is it a problem? | Germany | DW.COM | 12.03.2016

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Merkel’s approach to the migrant crisis is a battle for Germany’s soul

2016/03/02 Leave a comment

Alan Freeman on Germany and refugees:

Yet while Chancellor Merkel is keenly aware that the flow must slow down and is enacting measures to screen out non-Syrian and non-Iraqi migrants, she continues to insist that Germany cannot and should not follow its neighbours and simply shut its borders. In a weekend TV interview, she dismissed the idea of a rigid limit on the number of new migrants. “There is no point in believing that I can solve the problem through the unilateral closure of borders.”“I have no Plan B,” Merkel said bravely, although she added that Germany will continue to work on solving the problem at its root, in the Syrian conflict, and will try to get her EU colleagues to accept some redistribution of the migrants. Aside from Sweden, nobody else has stepped to the plate in the same way as Germany.

Why is Merkel doing this? Her reasons actually have as much to do with Germany’s past and future as they do with its present.

When I lived in Berlin in the late 1990s, I was struck by the burden of history that ordinary Germans bear. The Nazi past is around every street corner, with museums, memorials and plaques recalling the horror of those dozen years. Added to this unfortunate heritage was the weight of four decades of totalitarian rule in the old German Democratic Republic. Can a nation have too much history?

Aware of how their forebears were the source of so much displacement, hatred and death in the Second World War, contemporary Germans like Merkel have vowed they will never again close their doors to those in need. They also see their national identity as being as part of something bigger — which explains in large part why they continue to be the major backers of the European ideal.

“If Germany can’t show a friendly face in an emergency situation, then it’s not my country,” Merkel has said.

She picked up the same line in her weekend interview. “There is so much violence and hardship on our doorstep,” she said. “What is right for Germany in the long term? I think it is to keep Europe together and to show humanity.”

There’s also a practical, down-to-earth reason for opening Germany’s doors to migrants. Germany’s population is stagnating and on the verge of major decline, as the birth rate continues to fall and the proportion of the elderly rises. Over the next 15 years, it could mean a loss of 6 million of the workers needed to power the German economy. If nothing is done, the population will drop to 67 million by 2060.

Japan, facing a similar demographic crisis, already has seen its population fall by 1 million over the past five years to 127 million. Japan is on track to losing 40 per cent of its population by the end of the century. But Japan won’t even consider mass immigration as an alternative, dooming itself to increasing irrelevance.

The idea of a shrinking Germany is obviously anathema to Chancellor Merkel. So she is willing to take the risk of opening up the country to masses of migrants, hopeful that they can be successfully integrated into a strong economy and become Germans. It’s a huge gamble.

Germans may not be yet convinced — but neither are they rejecting her vision of the future either. A poll conducted for Focus magazine at the end of January showed that 39.9 per cent of those surveyed believed Merkel should resign because of her handling of the refugee crisis. But a surprisingly strong plurality of 45.2 per cent said she should stay on.

And her Christian Democratic Party still leads handily against its rivals. It would be foolish to count Merkel out.

http://ipolitics.ca/2016/02/29/merkels-approach-to-the-migrant-crisis-is-a-battle-to-save-germanys-soul/ 

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Angela Merkel opens Holocaust art show with warning on antisemitism

2016/01/27 Leave a comment

Making the lessons of the past relevant to today:

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has opened a major exhibition in Berlin featuring works by Jewish concentration camp prisoners, as she pledged to combat a feared rise in antisemitism in Germany linked to a record influx of refugees.

The show, Art from the Holocaust, brings together 100 works on loan from Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial. They were created in secret by 50 artists between 1939 and 1945 while they were confined to the camps or ghettos.

Twenty-four of the artists did not survive the second world war.

The drawings and paintings on display at the German Historical Museum depict the suffering, drudgery and terror endured by the detainees.

But about a third of the collection shows artists’ attempts to escape their plight with their imaginations, putting to paper treasured memories and dreams of freedom beyond the barbed wire.

Merkel, looking ahead to Wednesday’s commemorations of the 71st anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation in her weekly video podcast, said such exhibitions served as a crucial tool for educating younger generations.

She cited in particular the fears of German Jewish leaders that the need to impart the lessons of the Holocaust has grown more urgent with the influx of a record 1.1 million asylum seekers to Germany in 2015, many from the Middle East.

“We must focus our efforts particularly among young people from countries where hatred of Israel and Jews is widespread,” she said.

The head of Yad Vashem, Avner Shalev, called the works on loan irreplaceable “treasures”, many of which were hidden by their creators and only discovered after the war.

They are “the expression of human beings under these unique circumstances to try and prevail … above the atrocities and deaths”, he told reporters at a press preview of the exhibition.

“After thinking and rethinking, we thought it might be the right time, the right place, to bring this collection to Germany.”

Merkel noted later at the opening that the collection had been sent to Berlin in two shipments “in case something happened, so that they would not all be damaged”.

Source: Angela Merkel opens Holocaust art show with warning on antisemitism | World news | The Guardian

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German Jews ‘no longer safe’ due to anti-Semitism and ‘deteriorating security’ – The Independent

2016/01/22 Leave a comment

Worrisome:

Jewish people no longer feel safe living in Germany, it has been claimed.

The leader of Hamberg’s Jewish community, Daniel Killy, told the Jerusalem Post: “We no longer feel safe here.”

He went on to explain how a combination of extreme right-wing forces, deteriorating security, and Germany welcoming of refugees brought up in cultures “steeped in hatred” for Jews were resulting in anti-Semitism.

Hamburg has a 2,500-strong Jewish population, and there are around 118,000 in Germany overall. One million Muslim refugees arrived in Germany over the last year.

Mr Killy referenced a report published on tagesschau.de, authored by expert in extremist ideology Patrick Gensing.

In the report he said: “Anti-Semitic sentiments have diverse manifestations in Germany. [There are studies that point to] “historical defensive guilt [about the Holocaust], obsessive criticism of Israel, National Socialist racism, Muslim anti-Semitism [and] Christian anti-Semitism.”

An article published on dw.com included an interview with 22-year-old Jewish man, Elliot Reich, who took part in a pro-Israel demonstration in 2014.

Reich said he was surprised at the animosity against the marchers, claiming counter-protesters shouted things like: “’Hamas, Hamas! Jews into gas!’ Words like this have nothing to do with Israel – they are purely anti-Semitic.”

Source: German Jews ‘no longer safe’ due to anti-Semitism and ‘deteriorating security’ | Europe | News | The Independent

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Cologne assaults revealed hazards of closed borders and vague policy: Saunders

2016/01/18 Leave a comment

Doug Saunders on the Cologne attacks and European policies that contributed:

There are two key lessons here, ones that European leaders need to learn fast.

The first is that even a large-scale, liberal-minded immigration and refugee system needs to be accompanied by a quick and decisive deportation system. This is both for the sake of the non-accepted migrants themselves, who do not deserve to linger in ambiguity, for the peace of mind of the general population, and, especially, for the genuine refugees and immigrants, who are horrified to find their families subjected to mass demonization and bigotry because a similar-looking group has become a menace.

Deportation is neither cheap nor easy, which is why so many of these guys have stuck around. The European Union’s 28 countries have repeatedly failed to develop a co-ordinated international system of registration and deportation, and existing efforts are hampered by “non-refoulement” laws that prevent many from being returned to their country of origin. But since mass immigration will be part of the continent’s future, a faster, better system is urgently needed.

The second lesson is that this is a result not of Europe’s open internal borders, but of Europe’s closed external borders. Before the late 1990s, such men entered Europe for a few months at a time, on legal short-term visas and with airplane tickets, to do casual labour such as fruit picking, and then returned home, benefiting their communities. After the EU’s Maastricht Treaty led to a closed and policed external border, suddenly these temporary, legal figures became permanent, illegal figures who paid thousands to cross the Mediterranean and did not dare move back home seasonally.

Blocking quick movement – either into the continent or out of it – has created a situation that is bad for these men and their families, bad for legitimate refugees and immigrants, and bad for the safety of European streets.

Source: Cologne assaults revealed hazards of closed borders and vague policy – The Globe and Mail

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Germany’s Post-Cologne Hysteria – The New York Times

2016/01/15 Leave a comment

Good nuanced commentary by Anna Sauerbrey, an editor on the opinion page of the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel:

… precisely when the country needs a coolheaded conversation about the impact of Germany’s new refugee population, we’re playing musical chairs: Everybody runs for a seat to the left and to the right, afraid to remain in the middle, apparently undecided.

The irony is that the Cologne attacks, by highlighting the issue of refugees and their culture, raise an incredibly important question and at the same time make it almost impossible to have a reasonable conversation about it.

This isn’t the first wave of migrants to postwar Germany, and it’s not the first time that the left and the right have played their respective roles of under- and overestimating the challenges of integration.

The left has long ignored the established correlations between crime and the poverty and poor education that plague refugee communities; the right has long overestimated the link between the refugees’ culture and criminal activity, even when studies show no such link exists (excepting so-called crimes of honor, which are extremely rare).

The real question we should be asking is not whether there is something inherently wrong with the refugees, but whether Germany is doing an effective job of integrating them — and if not, whether something can be done to change that.

None of this, however, fits into a TV sound bite or a tweet. Even if it did, it would probably fail to reach its audience in the heated atmosphere of the moment.

Assumptions have replaced observation, assertion has replaced assessment, and ideology has replaced evidence. With its vision thus distorted, Germany is speeding toward a multicultural society, chased by the mob on the Internet, without any idea of what that society should look like.

We need to regain our sense of balance — or it’s just a question of time until we hit a wall.

Source: Germany’s Post-Cologne Hysteria – The New York Times

Much more nuanced than the Globe’s Margaret Wente:

Germany’s brutal immigrant awakening

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Sexual Assaults in Germany on New Year’s Eve Spark Debate Over Refugee Policy – The Atlantic

2016/01/07 Leave a comment

The political fall-out from the Cologne attacks and how leaders and police are responding to justified public anger and fears in a measured and responsible way:

Groups that oppose migration into Germany said the incidents in Cologne showcased the dangers of accepting large numbers of migrants. Lutz Bachmann, who heads the anti-immigrant Pegida movement, blamed the German leadership for the alleged assaults.

Reker, Cologne’s new mayor, who was stabbed in October during a campaign event because of her pro-migrants view, said making such a connection was “completely improper.” And, she said, the city would prepare better for its upcoming Carnival season.

“We will explain our Carnival much better to people who come from other cultures, so there won’t be any confusion about what constitutes celebratory behavior in Cologne, which has nothing to do with a sexual frankness,” she said, according to comments reported by The New York Times.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has become the face of Germany’s open-doors policy for refugees, called Reker on Tuesday to express her “outrage.” She said the perpetrators must be punished “regardless of their origin or background.”

And at a news conference on Tuesday, Heiko Maas, Germany’s justice minister, said the ethnic background of the alleged perpetrators was irrelevant.

“The law does not discriminate regarding a person’s origin or passport,” he said, according to the BBC. “All are equal before the law.”

Arnold Plickert, who heads the main police union in North Rhine-Westphalia, the region where Cologne is located, called the alleged assaults “a massive attack on basic rights,” adding there would be justice even if it has “politically uncomfortable” consequences.

He said, according to Deutsche Welle, “Any refugees who have a problem integrating into our open society and respecting the rights of other people” must be dealt with using the “full force of the law.” But he added that the public shouldn’t forget “the great majority of the people who have come to us have done so because their lives are no longer safe in their homelands.”

German officials said justice would be color-blind, adding it was important not to tie the alleged assaults to the refugees and migrants.

Source: Sexual Assaults in Germany on New Year’s Eve Spark Debate Over Refugee Policy – The Atlantic

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German Jews Warn Merkel That Refugees May Spread Anti-Semitism – Bloomberg Business

2015/10/29 Leave a comment

While an understandable and reasonable fear, one that likely will require some additional orientation measures for refugees (not limited to antisemitism concerns), not sure how significant in relation to overall integration challenges:

Jewish leaders told German Chancellor Angela Merkel they’re concerned that refugees streaming into the country may foment anti-Semitism, underscoring the risk of social conflict as her government struggles to contain the migrant crisis.

Representatives of the Central Council of Jews in Germany said during a meeting with Merkel that many refugees “come from countries in which Israel is viewed as the enemy” and that “these prejudices are often projected onto Jews in general,” the chancellor’s Christian Democratic Union party said in a statement Tuesday. CDU leaders responded that they would combat anti-Semitism “resolutely.”

With Merkel’s poll ratings in decline and many members of her governing coalition demanding an end to the refugee influx, the chancellor returned to stock phrases she used during Europe’s debt crisis to warn Germans they shouldn’t expect a quick solution.

“We can’t flip a switch just like that,” she said at a news conference in Berlin. “We have to proceed step-by-step.”

Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II is turning into a political liability for Merkel as Germany expects at least 800,000 arrivals this year, straining state and local governments that need to house and care for them. Merkel is seeking to enlist Turkey and Western Balkan countries to help stop the flow to Germany, though she acknowledged at a town-hall event on Monday that the situation is “anything but perfect.”

‘Centrifugal Forces’

Support for Merkel’s CDU declined to a three-year low of 36 percent, compared with 41.5 percent in the last election in 2013, according to an Emnid poll for Bild am Sonntag newspaper published Sunday. Her approval rating has declined in three consecutive FG Wahlen polls in the last four weeks.

Merkel, a Lutheran pastor’s daughter who grew up behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany, insists that Europe can’t put up new walls and must welcome war refugees, though economic migrants whose asylum requests are rejected will have to return home.

Anton Boerner, head of Germany’s BGA federation of exporting industries, urged Merkel’s domestic critics to refrain from undermining her standing.

“The centrifugal forces in the European Union are increasing dramatically and that’s a major concern for us,” he said in an interview in Berlin. “Merkel is the only politician in Europe who is still somehow able to conduct this concert.”

Source: German Jews Warn Merkel That Refugees May Spread Anti-Semitism – Bloomberg Business

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Russell Smith: Asylum seekers are the stars of this Canadian arts initiative

2015/09/28 Leave a comment

MamalianInteresting initiative to encourage understanding and integration, using the arts:

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how art has been interpreting the European refugee crisis. I was reminded after that of a Canadian artistic initiative currently happening in Germany that has direct contact with recent migrants. It is the work of the Toronto-originating theatre/social planning group called Mammalian Diving Reflex, directed by its creator, Darren O’Donnell.

The goal of this company is not to write plays and to put them on a stage, but to create social events that bring people together. They claim they aim to “trigger generosity and equity.” They do wacky things like getting children to give adults haircuts, but also deeply serious things like their current work in a small town in Germany, Hemsbach, near Mannheim.

There they have just finished a lengthy project centred around a reception centre for recent immigrants, designed to bring the newcomers and the German-born townspeople together, in an effort to find jobs for the immigrants.

O’Donnell himself stayed in the immigrant dormitory, with his co-worker Chozin Tenzin (also from Toronto), in a couple of beds that had been left vacant when some of the inmates were taken away by police. The town has about 80 recent asylum seekers staying in the holding centre, from everywhere from the Balkans to India. He then organized goofy events such as a cooking contest, for the refugees and for the German-born, in which participants were forced to use difficult ingredients from all over the world in their dishes.

The short-term goal was to facilitate interaction and understanding; the long-term goal is to leave a system of similar events in place, to continue after O’Donnell’s company leaves. (He calls this system the Hemsbach Protocol.)

O’Donnell likes in particular to work with teenagers, which he has been doing in the Ruhr region of Germany since 2013. It is only coincidentally that his work there became entangled with the refugee influx to Germany. His last project there, part of the Ruhrtriennale festival, near Dusseldorf, was called “Millionen! Millionen!” – a line from the Romantic poet Schiller’s Ode to Joy. (Yes, the one Beethoven used in his Ninth Symphony.) That poem is the European Union’s anthem and mantra, particularly for its now painfully relevant line, “Be embraced, you millions.”

The project was, like most of Mammalian Diving Reflex’s things, hard to define – social outing, urban planning, performance. In collaboration with a German theatre collective called Mit Ohne Alles, they got a bunch of teenagers of diverse immigrant backgrounds to go camping for a weekend, then take careful note of each interaction. Some talked deeply, some fell in love.

The performance, crafted afterwards, was a kind of barely-scripted play in which the teenagers recreated, for an audience, some of the interactions that had taken place over the weekend, with large images projected and everyone who had participated on the stage at once. The theme was “embracing.” Now that newer immigrants from the war-torn Middle East and Africa are showing up, such forced embracings will have a different edge and a different echo.

In theatre terms, this kind of practice is a kind of experimentalism called “post-dramatic,” an idea of the German critic Hans-Thies Lehmann. The primary intellectual influence on O’Donnell is the work of Nicolas Bourriaud, the art curator who wrote about “relational aesthetics,” the theory that stresses an artist’s role as catalyst for social interaction rather than centre of attention.

Source: Russell Smith: Asylum seekers are the stars of this Canadian arts initiative – The Globe and Mail

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Here’s Why Germany Is Welcoming Migrants With Open Arms

2015/09/10 Leave a comment

Good analysis behind some of the considerations behind Germany’s welcoming large numbers of Syrian refugees:

But what’s the economic effect of so many migrants streaming into Germany? The country expects to receive 800,000 refugees and migrants by the end of 2015. That could cost as much as 10 billion euros, according to local government estimates. Next year, German officials estimate that as many as 460,000 more people could be entitled to social benefits.

Some anti-immigration groups argue foreigners are a drain on a country’s economy, as they seek to avail themselves of government services before contributing to the state themselves. But Germany has a long history of outsiders representing a net positive for the country’s economy. The 6.6 million people living in Germany with foreign passports paid $4,127 more in taxes and social security on average than they took in social benefits in 2012–generating a surplus of 22 billion euros that year, according to one report. German officials are hopeful that, in the long run, this summer’s new flood of refugees could result in a similar economic gain.

“We will profit from this, too, because we need immigration,” German Labor Minister Andrea Nahles said. “The people who come to us as refugees should be welcomed as neighbors and colleagues.”

Part of Germany’s rationale for allowing hundreds of thousands of migrants through the doors lies in demographics. Germany has one of the world’s most rapidly aging and shrinking populations. With one of the world’s lowest birthrates, the country relies on immigration to plug a growing workforce hole. According to one expert quoted in Deutsche Welle last year, the German economy needs to attract 1.5 million skilled migrants to stabilize the state pension system as more Germans retire. An influx of young migrants could improve the country’s dependency ratio, a measure of those over 65 compared to those of general working age between 15 and 64. According to current official estimates, every third German could be over 65 by 2060, leaving two workers to support each retiree.

Still, the jury is still hung on whether immigrants overall serve as drains or boosts to economies. According to one 2011 working paper from Harvard Business School, immigrants in Northern Europe have traditionally started off as a drain on state resources, though some of their wages tend to increase over time, allowing them to contribute back to the state.

Ultimately, whether or not this new wave of migrants helps or hinders Germany’s economy depends heavily on the skillsets they bring. Many of Germany’s current working foreigners — the ones that created the surplus mentioned above — are high-skilled workers from other European countries like Greece. In contrast, the migrants flooding into Germany right now may not be as well-trained. Though the research on the subject is thin, one estimate pegs more than half of refugees lack professional training. That means German policymakers will have to do a very good job of taking unskilled workers and incorporating them into the German labor force in a way that makes sense for long-term growth, whether that’s by incentivizing them to take low-skilled jobs or training them to do higher-level work.

Here’s Why Germany Is Welcoming Migrants With Open Arms

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