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Picture
shows the famous Cologne Cathedral before its illumination is switched off in a
protest against a march by the growing grass-roots anti-Muslim movement through
the western German city of Cologne. (Photo by: REUTERS)
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Middle Israel: Cry, beloved Cologne. By Amotz Asa-El. Jerusalem Post, January 7, 2016.
Asa-El:
As the New Germans’ best friends, we must tell them from under our battle- tested Jewish nostrils that we smell calamity’s approach – and so does Cologne.
Having
set out to conquer the mayoralty of affluent, bustling, cultured Cologne, an
idealistic and innocent Henriette Reker presented her priorities on the Web,
clueless about what she would soon come to face: downsizing bureaucracy,
raising cultural funding, encouraging start-ups, upgrading infrastructure,
nurturing the city’s logistical centrality, etc.
It was
the agenda of a peaceful, enterprising and optimistic German liberal, a local
politician who at 59 would find herself at the heart of a renewed collision
between her country’s humanistic aspirations and xenophobic ghosts.
The
clash came in three installments: first, as Ms. Reker campaigned, the summer’s
influx of immigrants redefined the political agenda, particularly for the
lawyer-turned-candidate who was running at the time her city’s social services,
and as such presided over, and became identified with, the effort to welcome
the thronging refugees.
Then,
two days before her electoral victory, Ms. Reker was stabbed in the neck and
severely injured by an anti-immigrant fanatic who resolved to punish her for
personifying the immigration policy of her Christian Democratic Union
colleague, Chancellor Angela Merkel.
And
finally, last week, Reker’s pleasant metropolis on the Rhine, dominated by its
trademark two-spired cathedral and adorned by a 628-year-old university and
three major museums, became the site of a mass attack by hundreds of immigrants
on scores of local women who joined the crowds that gathered outside the
central train station to greet the new year.
The
method, as reported in more than 90 individual complaints to police, was reminiscent
of what happened in Cairo’s Tahrir Square five years ago: a ring of men would
eye a woman, circle her, and then grope and rob her. Some threw firecrackers at
the crowd, others shoved firecrackers under their victims’ clothes. One woman
said she was raped.
The
assaults, and the system’s response to them, are emblems of a denialist
Europe’s looming encounter with the real Middle East.
IN LINE
WITH the escapism that animated postwar Europe’s treatment of all things Middle
Eastern, police and politicians refused to call the assailants “immigrants,”
even though all reports made it plain that they mostly spoke Arabic and did not
know German.
Witnesses
readily reported what police effectively denied.
“We
stood with our backs to the wall and could see how people were robbed and
German girls were groped,” one witness was quoted as saying by The New York Times. “I was surrounded by
a group of 50 to 60 people from Arabic countries,” he said. “They would come up
to us, shake hands and then try to reach into our bags.”
A sense
of alarm descended on Germany, so much so that fear of the immigrants crossed
from the Right to the Center, where some in Merkel’s camp called to slash and
cap immigration, and then proceeded to the Left, where some called to deport delinquent
immigrants. Women’s rights groups then joined the evolving outcry, complaining
that police have been underplaying reports of sexual assaults within the
refugee centers.
Young
as this new immigration is, the violence it triggered is already a two-way
street.
In
Berlin, gunshots were fired Monday into a refugee asylum, injuring one
immigrant while in his bed. In Schwäbisch Gmünd, some 50 kilometers east of
Stuttgart, an asylum built specially to house refugees was torched on Christmas
Eve, one of 220 such anti-immigrant arsons in Germany throughout 2015.
Few
places in Germany can warn more ominously than Cologne that all this is but the
beginning of something much longer, bigger and nastier than several months’
worth of sporadic encounters between impolite refugees and unwelcoming hosts.
COLOGNE
IS WHERE the Nazis issued one of their earliest declarations of intent, when in
1933 they deposed its mayor of 16 years, Konrad Adenauer, who had expanded the
city’s port, built its exhibition grounds, and sprinkled the riverside
metropolis with sports grounds, schools, infirmaries, libraries and parks.
Slipping
past the SA storm troopers who by then were camped outside his house, the mayor
took the train to Berlin in order to complain to the new regional governor,
Hermann Goering, about election fraud.
Goering
kept Adenauer waiting for three days, during which the mayor heard on the radio
that Cologne’s Nazi boss, Josef Grohé, had entered city hall, emerged in its
balcony, and from there – several blocks from where the crowds gathered last
week to greet 2016 – announced Adenauer’s dismissal and replacement.
At 57,
Adenauer lost his income, house, job and employability, and later also his
freedom, all of which gave no hint of his subsequent role as the architect of a
re-humanized and re-legitimized Germany – a legacy most memorably underscored
by his visiting David Ben-Gurion in his shack in Kibbutz Sde Boker, and by
Ben-Gurion attending Adenauer’s funeral.
Now
Adenauer’s spirit is inspiring Germans like Merkel and Rekel to greet the
current refugees in disregard of the Middle East that produced them, and at the
same time confront the bigots who are Goering’s heirs.
Middle
Israelis have nothing but admiration for Merkel, Rekel and the critical mass of
Germans who have resolved to absorb so many victims of our region’s malaise.
Besides
this moral salute, no one hopes more than us that Germany’s generosity will
give rise to a tolerant and assertive Arab who will help undo the ignorance,
hatred, misogyny, tribalism, triumphalism and bellicosity that have shaped the
Middle East as we know it.
For
now, however, Germany is meeting the real Middle East, the one whose despots
abused millions while bribing Europe with oil and brainwashing it to believe
that the region’s illnesses are the fault of the Jews.
Tragically,
Israelis are the only ones intimately familiar with the unfolding German
showdown’s two sides: We know the Middle East’s bigots, and our parents knew
Germany’s.
God
willing, the New Germany that Adenauer bequeathed will find a way to avert this
clash and, better yet, to disarm its combatants and reprogram their minds.
Alas, as the New Germans’ best friends, we must tell them from under our
battle- tested Jewish nostrils that we smell calamity’s approach – and so does
Cologne.
