Thilo Sarrazin Confounds His Critics with Common Sense (Part IV)

by Hugh Fitzgerald

Von Schwerin claims that “it’s his [Sarrazin’s]  basic thesis that appears the most questionable, in which he claims that all the Muslims’ social and economic problems can be blamed on their religion — or as the second part of his book’s title states: “How Islam Impedes Progress and Threatens Society.” Nowhere does Sarrazin make the maximalist claim that “all” the Muslims’ social and economic problems are to be “blamed on their religion,” but he thinks that it would be silly to deny,  given that Islam is an all-encompassing faith, a religion and a politics, not to attribute much of Muslim behavior to that very faith. He has spent the last eight years, since his first book, studying the texts and teachings of Islam and relating them to that behavior.

This is, incidentally, a distinctly un-racist point of view: he does not see Muslims as innately violent or backward; they are so only insofar as they follow what their texts — the Qur’an and hadith — inculcate, that is, command or prohibit. This is the very opposite of the “racism” charge so often made against Sarrazin. Among his leading  defenders is the German-Turkish and Muslim sociologist Necla Kerek, who has supported his views. She is just as critical as Sarrazin of the attitudes of Muslims in Germany:

“Being a Muslim is becoming a self-sufficient identity. And this identity consists only of being different — different from the Europeans, different from the Africans, different from the Indians. And this frightens me. [Others] do not state their difference in terms of an utter rejection of the society that hosts them, preparing to take over one day. I often hear those Muslim youngsters bragging that one day this country will be theirs.” She also criticizes those who see themselves as victims, saying “Today, the Turks, or Muslims, are given full access to civil rights, to democracy and liberty — and they reject all that. They have access to good education, healthcare, social welfare, but they voluntarily choose to keep out, to stagnate in parallel worlds. […] How can they still consider themselves as victims, as the Jews once were in reality?”

Von Schwerin ends his tendentious review with a claim that should surprise:

Hardly a Muslim bases his actions primarily or even exclusively on Islam. But even if Islam were the cause of all problems, what would be the solution? That all Muslims give up their culture and their faith? That’s not likely.

Where is the evidence that “hardly a Muslim bases his actions primarily or even exclusively on Islam”? We have had more than 100,000  members of the Islamic State, from all over the world,  who have claimed that they were, or are now, acting solely according to the teachings of Islam. There are many other terrorist groups — Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Jadhat al-Nusra, Hamas, Hezbollah — whose members claim to be following the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad. How many of the 1.5 billion Muslims does Von Schwerin think do not base their actions primarily on Islam?

And how does he who is so dismissive of Sarrazin’s statistics arrive at his self-assured remark that “hardly a Muslim bases his actions primarily on Islam”? What research has he conducted to arrive at this counter-intuitive result? How many Muslim women wear at least the hijab as cover? How many Muslim men, in Islamic countries, practice polygyny, divorce using the triple-talaq, and punish disobedient wives? How many Muslims believe that they are the “best of peoples” and non-Muslims the “most vile of creatures,” and act accordingly? How many Muslims work to spread Islam, by whatever means are both available and effective, until it everywhere dominates?

Von Schwerin then addresses a question to Sarrazin: even if “Islam were the cause of all problems” — which Sarrazin has never claimed — “then what would be the solution”?

And he ends:

Sarrazin does not present a solution to this dilemma, as he is not even interested in finding solutions. His whole book shows that he is not concerned with helping shape peaceful coexistence, but rather with the strict separation of peoples and stopping the immigration of Muslims.

Note the tell-tale repetition: “what would be the solution” and “does not present a solution” and “finding solutions.” Sarrazin does not offer a “solution” because, unlike Von Schwerin, he doesn’t think about Islam in such terms. There is no “solution” to the ideology of Islam, but the threat its adherents pose can be decreased if certain measures are taken. He thinks that Germans ought to educate themselves about the ideology of Islam, so that they will not be oblivious to the danger it poses, nor be misled either by taqiyya-and-tu-quoque apologists for Islam, or pollyannish politicians who refuse to recognize a worrisome reality.

The Germans need to understand the 109 Qur’anic verses commanding Believers to wage violent jihad against the Unbelievers, and especially the verses telling Muslims to “strike terror” in the hearts of those Unbelievers. Sarrazin thinks Germans have a perfect right, given the ideology of Islam, to decrease drastically the number of Muslim immigrants, who have become such a burden both on Germany’s social welfare state and on its criminal justice system.

The experiment with mass Muslim migration has been tried in Germany, and to a lesser extent all over Western Europe, and nowhere has it been anything but a dismal failure. Integration has failed not because of the indigenous non-Muslims but because Muslims don’t want to integrate into Western societies; they want Western societies to change so as to better accommodate them.

Angela Merkel cannot admit her colossal mistake in having admitted so many Muslims — more than a million  in 2015 alone. Others, however, who were not in her government and therefore not to blame, now are in a position, and indeed have the duty, to call for putting an end to Muslim immigration. That requires of German political figures and populace alike that rarest of qualities, singularly lacking in the likes of Ulrich von Schwerin, that quality so misleadingly called “common sense.”

First published in Jihad Watch.