Islamophobia Watch

Germany's central bank today took the unprecedented step of sacking a board member after he repeatedly criticised the country's Muslim population and said "all Jews share the same gene".

In a brief statement, the Bundesbank president, Axel Weber, and four other board members said that they had been in unanimous agreement in dismissing Thilo Sarrazin, who caused an outcry when he said Muslims were sapping Germany's intellectual and economic strength.

The board's decision, taken at an extraordinary meeting, is the first such in the institution's 50-year history. All that remains is for the German president, Christian Wulff, to sanction the dismissal of Sarrazin, according to the bank's rules. Wulff has signalled he will do so, calling Sarrazin's remarks damaging to Germany's international reputation.

Guardian, 2 September 2010

German public opinion is deeply split over the fate of a central banker whose disparaging comments about Muslim immigrants have triggered a heated debate on race and integration, surveys showed on Wednesday.

Over the past week and a half, Thilo Sarrazin has dominated headlines with criticism of Germany's large Muslim community, and contentious remarks asserting that Jews have a particular genetic makeup.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and a host of leading politicians have rebuked the 65-year-old Sarrazin, who has said immigrants of Turkish and Arab origin refuse to integrate, sponge off the state and make the country less intelligent on average.

Germany's Central Council of Jews and others have urged the Bundesbank to dismiss Sarrazin, but the bank said on Wednesday it had put off a decision over his fate until at least Thursday.

A survey by pollster Emnid for N24 television showed 51 percent of respondents saw no need for the Bundesbank to fire board member Sarrazin, with 32 percent taking the opposite view.

But another poll by YouGov for Bild newspaper said 42 percent considered Sarrazin no longer acceptable for the job, with 34 percent seeing him as still acceptable and 25 percent undecided. Both surveys polled around 1,000 Germans.

The Emnid poll people showed more disagreeing with than backing the views of the banker. Some 35 percent of respondents said they "rather rejected" his theories, which have been applauded by far-right parties at home and abroad, with only 30 percent taking the opposite view.

Still, 56 percent of those polled said migrants were to blame for their integration problems, while only 11 percent held the opinion that Germans were responsible for the difficulties.

Reuters, 1 September 2010

Writing in Spiegel, Erich Follath assesses the impact of Thilo Sarrazin and his anti-Muslim co-thinkers:

"Their efforts are having an effect, and are bringing about changes in Germany. The changes aren't sufficiently dramatic to jeopardize democracy right away, but are gradual, like a slow-acting poison. From a cosmopolitan country characterized by religious freedom, Germany is slowly becoming a state that is dominated by exaggerated fears and that exhibits the beginnings of an Islamophobic society....

"The concept of Muslims as the enemy is becoming more targeted, with Islam being held accountable for many social problems, like unemployment, the supposed inundation of foreigners and deficits in education. A religion has become a scapegoat – and a focal point for intolerance and hate....

"Germany is changing. And although it is not yet a consistently Islamophobic society, a Sarrazin republic, it is certainly on its way to becoming one."

See also Gavin Hewitt, "German angst over immigration", BBC News, 31 August 2010

Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD) on Monday said it would begin proceedings for the expulsion of longstanding member Thilo Sarrazin over comments in his new book.

Sarrazin, a central bank executive, officially launched his book "Deutschland schafft sich ab" ("Germany does away with itself") at a press conference in Berlin on Monday. A series of interviews with Sarrazin last week included xenophobic comments against Muslims and Jews, causing a storm of controversy in the run-up to the launch.

At the launch, Sarrazin reiterated his beliefs about the threat of Muslim culture to European societies. He told reporters that Germans were in danger of becoming "strangers in their own country" and demanded stronger checks on immigrants.

"There is no place for these ideas in the SPD," Ralf Stegner, the SPD chairman in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, told the daily newspaper Tageszeitung. "It would be better if he would resign himself, but I fear that he won't do this."

Sarrazin vowed to fight on while presenting the book. "I am in a people's party and I will stay in a people's party, because I believe that these issues belong in a people's party."

The former Berlin finance senator also said his ideas should be viewed separately from his current role in the Bundesbank, and hit back at criticism from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, asking if she even had time to read every page of his book.

Merkel condemned Sarrazin's comments during an interview with public broadcaster ARD on Sunday. "I am very sure this will be discussed inside the Bundesbank," she said.

The president of the central bank, Axel Weber, has said he will speak on the subject Monday afternoon. Sarrazin was stripped of some of his responsibilities at the central bank in 2009 after making derogatory comments towards Turkish and Arab immigrants in Berlin.

At least 150 people protested outside the book launch in the capital.

Deutsche Welle, 30 August 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has never been one to mince words. The German central bank board member and former senior city official in Berlin has long been a strident critic of German immigration policies, even going so far as to say in an interview last autumn that immigrants sponge off the state, are incapable of integrating themselves into German society and "constantly produce little girls in headscarves."

In the interview, which appeared in the cultural magazine Lettre International, he also said that "a large number of Arabs and Turks in (Berlin) ... have no productive function other than in the fruit and vegetable trade." In the same interview, he claimed that the Turks were "conquering Germany ... through a higher birthrate."

This week, though, the Social Democrat (SPD) seems to have outdone himself. German media outlets, including SPIEGEL, have published excerpts of his soon-to-be-published book on Germany's supposed demise. As Sarrazin makes abundantly clear, that demise comes as a result of immigration. The bluntness with which he presents his ideas has kicked off a debate in Germany, and within the center-left SPD, as to whether Sarrazin has crossed the line into racism and whether he should be censured.

In the excerpts that have been published, Sarrazin writes that Germany's Muslim immigrant families have profited from social welfare payments to a far greater degree than they have contributed to German prosperity. He also has raised the spectre of the country's Muslim population, due to what he claims are much higher birth rates among immigrants, soon overtaking that of the country's "autochthonous" population – a term roughly synonymous with "indigenous."

"If the fertility rate of German autochthons remains at the level it has been at for the past 40 years, then in the course of the next three or four generations, the number of the Germans will sink to 20 million," he writes in the book. "And, incidentally, it is absolutely realistic that the Muslim population, through a combination of a higher birth rate and continuation of immigration, could grow by 2100 to 35 million." In another passage, he writes: "I don't want the country of my grandchildren and great grandchildren to be largely Muslim, or that Turkish or Arabic will be spoken in large areas, that women will wear headscarves and the daily rhythm is set by the call of the muezzin. If I want to experience that, I can just take a vacation in the Orient."

In another passage, Sarrazin seems to suggest that Muslim immigrants would rather work under the table than legally. Through the language used in his polemics, Sarrazin appears to be aiming to push the highly divisive debate over immigration and integration closer to that of right-wing populists elsewhere in Europe, like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.

In a contribution for the mass-circulation tabloid Bild, Sarrazin wrote, in reference to the relative lack of success that immigrants have had in German schools and the country's low birth rates, "we are simply accepting that Germany is becoming smaller and dumber." Two months ago, Sarrazin created similar headlines by saying "we are becoming ... on average dumber" and linked that claim with integration "from Turkey, the Middle East and Africa."

The responses this week have been quick and pointed. SPD party boss Sigmar Gabriel has called Sarrazin's comments "linguistically violent" and said "if you were to ask me why he still wants to be a member of our party, I don't know either." He said he plans to read the book for indications of racism. Others in the party have demanded that Sarrazin leave the SPD immediately.

Spiegel, 25 August 2010