<span style="font-size:105%;">Telegraph</span>

Kind of odd timing for those types of comments, given this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/7979084/Bundesbank-official-to-be-sacked-after-controversial-Jewish-and-Muslim-comments.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/7992927/Merkel-ally-resigns-after-implying-Poland-was-jointly-to-blame-for-Second-World-War.html

Edited October 17, 201015 yr by CarlD2

Germany is such a tricky subject. In some ways multiculturalism has failed, but it depends upon which cultures we are talking about. The whole jewish experience is about assimilating and adapting to the various cultures, with only the hardest core jews retaining their orthodox garb. Recent trends is Europe however show a growing muslim population that led a couple of years back to Sharia law in the UK. That is just insane and a disgrace. Of course, Europe and Germany especially have a history of hating the jews so in that regard both Jews and Muslims have failed to live side by side peacefully. Not everybody can live together, I don't think there is any escaping that as long as tribalism exists. Tribalism will exist forever.

<span style="font-size:105%;">There is also this, it seems kind of coordinated: Study predicts women in power, Muslims heading West.</span>

I live in one of Germany's biggest cities and all of my Turkish neighbors speak German fluently. The strange thing is that these Turkish-German people bitch about other nationalities living here, for example Russians, and claim that they won't integrate.

Honestly, Merkel and her fellows don't even have a clue in what state Germany is in these days. They don't know how many uneducated Germans there are who can't write or speak their native language properly. Instead of optimizing the education system, they just messed it all up.

Every day I see these families where the father gets drunk in public (usually with a beer bottle in one hand), the mother looks like trash, and the two or three children don't know how to behave and scream all the time. Last week I saw a four-year old girl taking a huge rottweiler for a walk while her mother was busy talking on her cell phone. But of course everyone is shocked when little children are bitten to death by dogs.

4 million Muslims are about 3 percent of the whole population. That's next to nothing, so I really don't know why they are suddenly making such a huge deal about this. It's not like these people have moved here only recently – they've been living here for almost 50 years.

In France and the Netherlands, the political situation is almost the same. There was a huge outcry when the French government sent Romani people back to Romania and Bulgaria a few weeks ago.

Edited October 19, 201015 yr by Huntress

Thank you for giving us some perspective from a resident. We can't really understand what it's like.

I think the whole debate is nothing but hot air. Rita Süßmuth, who was president of the Bundestag (our parliament) from 1988 to 1998, said on tv the other day: "They knew about this problem ten years ago, and now they are discussing it once again."

Our Federal President Christian Wulff (who is, btw, Germany's head of state) is currently visiting Turkey and is trying to bring the two countries closer together.