Has Angela Merkel lost the plot over open-door policy?
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 1.1 million 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