Germany Wants to Extend Border Control in Schengen Zone over Terrorist Threat

   © Ina Fassbender / Reuters

The German government wants to extend border control in the Schengen zone because it has had a tip-off about potential terrorists entering the country disguised as refugees, Germany's Der Spiegel magazine said.

This can't be serious! "A tip-off about potential terrorists entering the country disguised as refugees". Tell me this isn't the first time the German government has heard of this possibility?!!?

The report is based on the minutes of an EU ambassadors’ internal meeting in Brussels obtained by the outlet. In particular, the document mentions a "filter function of the external borders," which it says is not working.

The EU rules generally allow free movement in the Schengen area. However, in the wake of the refugee crisis, some member states re-introduced border checks, asking for travelers’ passports and searching some of the vehicles which have been passing through.

Previously, the German Minister of the Interior, Thomas de Maiziere, declared that the controls would only be “temporary,” but the checks have already been extended a few times in the country, with the latest running until mid-February 2017.

Germany's suggestion that term be extended further caused concern among members of the EU Commission. According to the body, Germany will have to provide “detailed” information about terrorist threats as a reason for the extension of border controls, Spiegel reported.

Not everyone in the German Parliament supports the extension either. Ulla Jelpke, spokesperson for the Left Party (Die Linke) in the Bundestag, said, "We have to fight for an open, just Europe."

“A return to national borders is the wrong way," the lawmaker stressed.

It seems 'open' and 'just' are not so compatible when there are terrorists attempting to enter your country and destroy as much of it as they can. Left-wing politicians can be lauded for their idealism, but sometimes seem totally disconnected from the real world.

The German proposal comes a month after the EU agreed to continue border checks for illegal migrants and radicalized individuals in five member states: Germany, Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Norway.

On Friday, representatives from Denmark and Sweden showed their readiness to continue with the controls.

“I see it as essential that Denmark continues to have border control," Danish integration minister Inger Stojberg said in Brussels, The Local reported.

Sweden’s interior Minister Anders Ygeman, said in return that "none of the countries at this time have changed their position with regard to a month ago, when we agreed on the necessity of border controls."

Send them to Greece

In October, his German counterpart urged Greece to deal with the refugees landing on its shores and asked for the re-instation of the 1997 Dublin regulation, which states that the responsibility for processing asylum seekers lies with the country they first reached in Europe.

Maiziere said Germany would be sending asylum seekers back to Greece, if it was the first country they reached in the EU. Greek authorities said that they are already experiencing a huge influx of refugees, and must deal with some 60,000 people.

As if Greece doesn't have enough problems.

    Schengen countries

No to Multi-Culturalism? Merkel’s Bavarian Allies Call for ‘Dominant’ National, Christian Values

 
© Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

The Bavarian ruling party and Merkel’s ally CSU has proposed a set of new measures aimed at toughening Germany’s refugee policy and fostering integration and particularly called for enshrining the priority of the German traditional and Christian values in the legislation.

“Germany must stay Germany,” says the document by the Christian Social Union party (CSU), which was published by the Bavarian Kurier daily. “We are against our open-to-the-world country being changed through migration and inflow of refugees,” it adds, emphasizing that “it is not the Germans, who should look up to the refugees…” but, on the contrary those who come to Germany should adopt German culture.

The paper also lashes out at the multiculturalism policy advocated by Merkel. It proposes to introduce a “dominant culture” (Leitkultur) rule in Bavaria that would mean the opposite to multi-culturalism and would encompass all the German traditional national and Christian values as well as customs and traditions.

Germany is actually living in a post-Christian culture but most values are still sacred, if nothing else is.

Multiculturalism becomes unworkable when there is mass migration of a single culture into a state with significantly different values. There has to be some give on both sides for any possibility of it working, but many Muslims are intractable and expect the Germans to give way to their backward culture from the Dark Ages. If they do, it's a slippery slope and will eventually lead to the end of the post-Christian culture in Germany.

Such dominant, or “guiding” culture, the paper says, should become the basis of social development and integration. It calls it “the best countermeasure against the [creation of] parallel societies and ghettos” demanding to enshrine the particular set of values in the Bavarian Constitution.

The document also calls for an introduction of an annual upper limit for new arrivals that would amount to 200,000 people, citing the necessity to curb the massive refugee influx to facilitate successful integration.

It also says that Germany should favor migrants and refugees with “Christian western culture,” which is close to the European values.

The paper also advocates the re-introduction of full border controls on the German borders “as long as [the system] of protection of the EU external borders does not function,” stressing that the nation “should not tolerate illegal border crossings.”

At the same time, the paper says that only those who are granted entry should be able to come to Germany with all asylum requests being processed directly at the border in specially established “transit zones.” The document also points out that those who are denied entry should be sent back directly at the border.


‘Find another country to wear burqa’

The CSU policy paper also advocates stricter integration rules and says that integration is a duty of those who come to live in Germany. It particularly calls burqa and niqab “a uniform of Islamism, an absolute barrier to integration and a symbol of the repression of women that is unacceptable in [German] culture.”

“Those, who do not want to give up wearing burqa and niqab, should find another country,” the paper says, adding that the CSU will seek “a ban on burqa in all public places, wherever it is legally possible.”

The document also says that any forms of “parallel justice” and “erosion of the German system of justice,” including unofficial Muslim sharia courts, child marriages, forced marriages and polygamy, are unaccepted and should be by no means tolerated.

The paper adds that Germany also should not “tolerate immigration into its welfare system,” emphasizing that refugees and migrants must provide for living themselves instead of just getting social benefits.

That's pretty much impossible sometimes. What are you going to do let people starve?

Another point of the CSU is that asylum does not equals to a “permit for committing crimes in Germany” and those found guilty of committing any crimes should automatically lose their right for asylum and be sent out.


‘One cannot be servant of two masters’

The issue of double citizenship is particularly highlighted in the new CSU policy paper, which refers to it as a huge barrier to integration that leads to “double loyalty.” 

“One cannot be a servant of two masters,” the paper says, adding that “those who want to be Germans do not need any other citizenship.” The paper demands an end to dual citizenship as well as an annulation of the regulation that allowed the children of non-German citizens, who were born on German soil and lived in Germany for a long time, to be automatically recognized as Germans.

The CSU also expressed its opposition to the idea of visa liberalization for Turkish citizens and criticized Turkey for “moving away from European and western values” as well as for not fulfilling the necessary requirements for visa liberalization. It also said that the implementation of the refugee deal between Turkey and the EU should not be linked to some “unrelated issues, such as visa liberalization or Turkey’s accession to the EU.”


‘Irresponsible’ and ‘racist’

The document immediately provoked a wave of indignation among German left-wing politicians, who labeled it “irresponsible” and “racist.” Some of them said that it is highly reminiscent of what the right-wing populist party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), demands.

The Green Party leader, Simone Peter, said that the CSU was apparently seeking to become “the Bavarian sister party of the AfD.” At the moment, CSU is commonly referred to as the sister party of the Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), with both parties sharing the common origin and core program. The CDU does not operate in Bavaria while being present in all other 15 German states.

Jan Korte, an MP from the Left Party, denounced the new policy paper of the CSU as “irresponsible, backward-looking and brimming with hypocrisy.” He also called the idea of selecting migrants by cultural background “racist” and a violation of the German constitution and international human rights conventions.

The new policy paper comes after the electoral success of the right-wing populist and anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD), which beat Merkel’s CDU in several regional elections a year before the national elections to the parliament.

On September 4, the AfD placed second in state elections, ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in her home state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Established in 2013 following the euro crisis, the AfD is already represented in eight out of 16 state parliaments.

Horst Seehofer, the leader of the conservative CSU, has long criticized Angela Merkel’s open-door policy and earlier already proposed to introduce a cap of 200,000 refugees pro year.

Seehofer, who is also the head of the German state of Bavaria, which is a transit region for the vast majority of all asylum seekers arriving in Germany, several times threatened to take the German Chancellor to the Constitutional Court if she fails to change the country’s refugee policy.

'Germany Should Send Back Foreigners to Save Lives, Stop Appeasing Islamists' – Bavarian MP

Finally, the conversation that should have

started last year begins

© Leonhard Foeger / Reuters

The fact that three of the terror attacks that shocked Germany last week took place in its largest state of Bavaria is a “nightmare” for locals, and shows a failure of the EU and Berlin to deal with migration, Thomas Jahn of the CSU party told RT.

Jahn, a vice chairman of Bavaria’s dominant Christian Social Union (CSU) conservative campaign, lambasted the migration policy pursued by Angela Merkel – the chair of his party’s traditional ally, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

“People in Bavaria and in [the] whole [of] Germany say that, of course, Mrs. Merkel has failed and, historically, the nation because she decided to ignore the German immigration law and she opened the borders of our country last year for two million immigrants from countries outside Europe,” Jahn said, adding that the government is to blame for the “nightmare” terror spate that has descended upon Germany.

“It’s really a nightmare [what] politicians brought to Germany and Bavaria, and people are very worried to be [the] next victims of terrorism in our country,” he said.

In order to prevent terror from spreading, Germany must secure its borders by introducing tougher border controls. In addition, Berlin must not hesitate to deport all new arrivals who could pose a threat to the country’s security, the MP argued.

“We need to control our borders, that is the most important thing at the moment, and we need to send...the dangerous people with Islamist ideology back to the countries outside Europe and [the] European Union,” the politician said.

While Bavaria’s interior minister, Joachim Hermann, has suggested that Germany’s internal army could be deployed to tackle major terror threats, Jahn believes such a move would be an “overreaction.” Instead, he says authorities should focus on expanding existing resources – particularly giving more powers to the police force.

“We have to give our police more rights,” Jahn stressed, before adding that “we have to send back foreigners very quickly, back to their countries, to save our lives and save security in our countries.”

Although the majority of Bavarian attackers were not German nationals, having fled war-torn regions of Afghanistan and Syria to resettle in Europe, the issue of home-grown terrorism inspired by violent Islam should not be ignored, Jahn said.

“The problem is that we have some kind of ideologies, we have some kind of Islamist ideologies that we never controlled in the last few years, we don’t have much attention on it,” Jahn said, adding that the advancement of extremist teachings within Europe should serve as “one of the greatest reasons we have to stop this kind of appeasement policy in Europe.”

In the wake of the attacks that rocked the Bavarian cities of Wurzburg, Munich, and Ansbach – at least two of which were linked to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) – Bavarian Governor Horst Seehofer said that “Islamist terrorism has arrived in Germany,” adding that Germans are “full of fear” as they face “an entirely new dimension of terrorism – the Islamist-minded terrorism.”

Hermann echoed Seehofer’s statement, proposing that Berlin deny entry to all asylum seekers who cannot prove their identity with a valid ID.

“Deportation into a war zone should not be taboo as well,” he stressed in an interview to Suddeutsche Zeitung, referring to refugees who do not abide by German law.

“You have to seriously consider how such people should be treated if they violate laws or pose a threat,” he said.