At Last, Germany Has an Alternative

by Hugh Fitzgerald

Alternative for Germany (AfD) has distinguished itself for its resistance to mass Muslim migration. Known for its tough stance on Islamic immigration, AfD has been calling for an end to the country’s open-door policy since its inception in 2015. One incident illustrative of its unusual candor regarding the difficulties inherent in that mass migration came last year, after the notorious murder of a German citizen in Chemnitz, allegedly by two Iraqi and Syrian migrants. One of AfD’s members, Gottfried Curio, who is also a member of the Bundestag, gave a speech to that body, calling for certain Qur’anic verses to be censored.

Here’s the story:

A representative of the AfD party in the German Bundestag, Gottfried Curio, has presented a request to the government asking that dissemination be restricted for certain Koranic passages that allegedly allow crimes such as honor killing, forced marriage and physical abuse of women. Curio believes that Islam’s key religious book “ideologically legitimizes committing crimes” in its text.

The German lawmaker brought up several quotes from the Koran to prove his point:

“Women are a field for you. Go to them whenever you want […] Allah has cursed the unbelievers and prepared the fire for them to burn […] The unbelievers are the worst of all creatures, worse than cattle.”

This is the most important part of Curio’s speech. He understands, and would like his audience to understand, that Muslim behavior comes out of, is formed by, what Muslims read in the Qur’an (and, as he did not mention, the Hadith). The misogyny, the antisemitism, the homophobia, the contempt and hatred for Infidels, the need to wage violent Jihad in order to spread Islam until the whole world submits to Allah, all this is found in  the texts.

For the deep misogyny in Islam, he offers one verse: “Your wives are a tilth unto you; so go to your tilth when or how you will.” (2.223). Women exist for the sexual pleasure of men. Marital rape is allowed. And there is much more in the same vein that he might have adduced. He could have quoted in full 4:34, which gives husbands  the right to “beat” disobedient wives. He might have quoted 2:282, which is one of the sources for the belief that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man. He could also have quoted  Muhammad’s explanation in the Hadith for this inequality: It  is “because of the deficiency in her [woman’s] intelligence.” The leftist-feminists who sat on their hands in the Bundestag, with some of them booing during Curio’s speech, need to hear this kind of thing.

In a future speech, he could take the Bundestag through the other misogynistic aspects of Islam. He notes that though polygamy violates German family law, Muslims still practice it. And not prosecuting, but allowing a Muslim man to keep his plural wives, has other consequences. Even as it demeans women, the practice of polygamy allows the husband to receive increased benefits from the state for each new wife (and, of course, for each new child). Curio might have mentioned the difference in the way Muslim husbands and wives obtain a divorce according to the Sharia. While the man need merely say the triple-talaq, without giving a reason, a wife must return her mahr, the gift given to her upon marriage by the groom or the groom’s father, and present a reason for the divorce that is Islamically acceptable. And there are still other aspects of this unequal or wretched treatment of women. According to the Sharia, daughters inherit half that of sons. Finally, to bring a charge of rape, a woman must supply four male witnesses — which in practice means almost no one is ever successfully convicted of rape in Muslim lands.

The second quote Curio gives is 33:64: “Verily Allah has cursed the Unbelievers and prepared for them a Blazing Fire.” This is only one of so many similar quotes. Curio might have pointed out that there are 109 verses that command violent Jihad against the Unbelievers, that they are everywhere cursed in the Qur’an, and that several verses specifically instruct Muslims to “strike terror” in the hearts of the Unbelievers. And finally, he might have brought forth one of the most telling of quotes from Muhammad, found in the Hadith, the one where Muhammad declares that “I have been made victorious through terror.”

His third quote is a version of  98:6, in which Infidels are described as “the most vile of created beings.” He could have bookended it with the verse — 3:110 — which describes Muslims as the “best of peoples.”

Curio could speak about this again at the Bundestag, at which time he might not only recite, but give the reference in the Qur’an — sura and ayat — to those verses that he deems most necessary for Infidels to learn. This list might include 2:190-194, 3:110, 4:34, 4:89, 8:12, 8:60, 9:5, 9:29, 47:4, 98:6, ten verses  containing the essence of the  ideology of Islam. He could even print them out, and make them available to all members of the Bundestag.

Based on this, the AfD has requested that the government ban certain provisions of the religious book, claiming that Islam and Sharia are incompatible with the rule of law. Curio claimed that the party’s demands do not contradict the German constitution’s provision protecting freedom of religion, as that freedom is not an excuse for violating the law with “polygamy, child and forced marriages, honor killings and beheadings.”

Curio made an important  point: “freedom of religion” is not limitless. It cannot be invoked as justification for violating the law of the German state. Polygamy must not be tolerated. Child marriage — that is, marriage of Muslim girls younger than the minimum age set by German law — cannot be justified. Curio might in another speech be bold enough to mention the critical example of nine-year-old Aisha and its effect on Muslim minds. As for honor killings, by which male relatives of a Muslim girl who has been deemed to have disgraced the family  in some way (spending time with a Christian boy, refusing to wear a hijab, not observing Ramadan) uphold the family’s honor by killing her, that remains murder under German law. It must be punished as such. What Muslims think about their “honor” and how to uphold it is irrelevant.

Curio did point out that a very large number of Muslims believe the Sharia is superior to man-made law, and that in the case of a clash between the Sharia and German law, they would obey Sharia. Again, for pointing out this unpleasant truth, he was booed by those Bundestag members who did not want to be confused with facts. It’s much too painful.

Curio is a learned man, a mathematical physicist interested in string theory, who was once a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It’s hard to paint him as a German version of the British lager lout, as islamocritics have been depicted with such success in the U.K. This makes him dangerous.

“At the end of his speech, Curio took on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, claiming that she was responsible for the rise in religion-related crimes in the country.

“Daily knife attacks, nightmares for women and Jews, bullying of German students, increasing no-go areas — these things didn’t exist prior to Merkel. If Merkel believes that Islam is a part of Germany, then we say: Islam belongs to Merkel, but Merkel no longer belongs to Germany,” he said.

Everything Curio said is true. Is not true that there are knife attacks, by Muslim migrants in Germany, frequent enough to be described as “daily”? Haven’t the Muslim migrants in Germany created “nightmares for women and Jews”? During the 2015/2016 New Year’s Eve celebrations, there were mass sexual assaults, 24 rapes, and numerous thefts in Germany, mainly in the Cologne city center. There were similar incidents at the public celebrations in Hamburg, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart and Bielefeld. For all of Germany, police estimated in a document leaked in 2016 that 1,200 women were sexually assaulted and that at least 2,000 men were involved, often acting in groups. Many of the incidents involved women being surrounded and assaulted by groups of men on the street. Cologne police chief Wolfgang Albers stated that the perpetrators in his city were reportedly men of “Arab or North African appearance,” and said that Germany had never experienced such mass sexual assaults before.

As for Jews, there have been many incidents where people who were recognizably Jews — one victim was wearing a Star of David, others wearing kippahs, or Israeli pins, still others were dressed as Orthodox Jews — have been set upon by  Muslims. German Jewish groups demanded stronger action by the authorities. Michael Szentei-Heise, the executive director of the Jewish community in Düsseldorf, said after an attack by Muslims on an Israeli professor, that “For the safety of Jewish citizens in Germany it [the situation] is catastrophic.” Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said on Berlin public radio that “Defiantly showing your colors would in principle be the right way to go. Nevertheless, I would advise individual people against openly wearing a kippah in big German cities.”

Curio claims that German pupils have been bullied by Muslim classmates. There is plenty of evidence that such bullying of both Christian and Jewish children has been  going on all over Germany.

As for his claim about “no-go areas,” a majority of Germans believe that those no-go areas are to be found in many of Germany’s major cities, where the police are afraid to patrol, and firemen need police escorts. Even Angela Merkel has finally admitted that these no-go areas exist..

But let’s return from what Dr. Curio said to the report itself:

Alternative for Germany is a right-wing party that has been opposing Angela Merkel’s open door policy, which enabled a major migrant influx from the Middle East, beginning in 2015. The AfD believes that unregistered migrants are behind the increasing levels of crime in German cities. The party supported the anti-migrant protests that took place in Chemnitz in August-September 2018, following the murder of a local carpenter, allegedly by two migrants.

The epithet “right-wing”  is used to describe any person or party that exhibits islamocriticism. The famous left-wing journalist Oriana Fallaci started to be described as “right-wing” as soon as she began to denounce Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Robert Spencer — all of them have had the “right-wing” label permanently affixed to them, though those using that epithet have no idea of what any of them believe on any political question, except for their criticism of Islam. That’s more than enough.

As for mention in the article of that “major migrant influx” — wouldn’t it give more of a sense of the scale of this invasion if the actual figures, which are known, were given, instead of simply referring to this “major…influx”? To wit: there were one million Muslim migrants in 2015 alone, and another million in the next two years. And why are these migrants not described as what they in fact are, that is, economic migrants, intent on settling in Germany because it offers such generous welfare benefits of all kinds? They are not in search of work, unlike the Italian migrants who went into the coal mines and factories of West Germany in the 1950s, worked extraordinarily hard, sent what money they could back to their families in Italy, and when they retired, returned to Italy. In those days, of course, there was nothing like today’s welfare state in Germany. The situation is now quite different with the Muslim economic migrants. They are well aware of, and take full advantage of, every possible benefit: free (or highly subsidized) housing, free medical care, free education, family allowances (the more children, the bigger the allowance, and Muslims have very large families), and even unemployment benefits without, in many cases, actually having to have ever been employed. In fact, the German government has said that 75% of these migrants will be unemployed for many years to come.

As for the levels of crime in German society attributable to unregistered migrants, this is not a matter of belief, but is a fact, confirmed by the prison statistics. More than one-third of those in German prisons are “foreign born.” The two Muslim migrant killers of Daniel Hillig, the carpenter in Chemnitz who was stabbed to death, were not “allegedly” his killers; they were his killers. There were witnesses.

The paragraph could be rewritten thus: “Alternative for Germany is a party that has opposed Angela Merkel’s policy on Muslim economic migrants, and became particularly concerned after she admitted one million such migrants in 2015, and another million in the two years that followed. Our party  views with alarm the statistics on crime in Germany, especially the very large number of prisoners — more than one-third — who are foreign-born. One recent example particularly upset our members: the killing of a carpenter in Chemnitz by two Muslim migrants. We view with alarm the increase in attacks by Muslims  on women and on Jews. We remember what happened to women in Cologne, and across Germany, on New Year’s Eve 2015/2016. We have seen Jews attacked and beaten on the streets of our cities. Many are now too afraid to wear the kippah outside. As Germans, do we not have a special responsibility to make our country safe for Jews? Yet we are importing, by the millions, today’s main carriers of the antisemitic virus. We would like to see the authorities take strong measures to end the bullying of German children, in German schools, by Muslim classmates. We believe it is reasonable to ask that those parts of the Qur’an that indoctrinate Believers in misogyny, antisemitism, and hatred for, and the killing of, Infidels, be excised from the text. We do not feel that ‘freedom of religion’ should be invoked to protect such views. We feel we are slowly losing our country, because decisions are being made by politicians who are not listening to our anguish, and remain determinedly oblivious to the meaning of Islam, and to the observable behavior of Muslims in Germany. And most disturbing, those politicians give no sign, alas, of being willing to learn.”

That may not be perfect, but it’s a good deal fairer to the real views of the AfD, which have been scandalously misrepresented in the German media, and it’s much closer, too, in describing Germany today, to the desolate truth.

First published in Jihad Watch.