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Once Upon a Time in Germany… : A Review Essay

2019; Wiley; Volume: 45; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/padr.12286

1728-4457

Landis MacKellar,

Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences

This book—Hostile Takeover: How Islam Hinders Progress and Threatens Society—was not released; it escaped last summer (August 2018) in a hail of lawsuits when Random House, one of whose imprints owned the rights, balked at its publication on account of the manuscript's raving disparagement of Islam and its Muslim believers. In the end, the book was bought by a Munich financial publishing house which laughed all the way to the bank as Feindliche Übernahme flew off the shelves. It was easily the non-fiction trade book of the year in Germany. Opinion polls showed that 80 percent of the German public was sympathetic to the views that elevated Legal's blood pressure at Random House. Dear reader, I read it. But, probably like other policy cognoscenti, I approached the checkout counter shamefaced and removed the distinctive, oh-so-recognizable iridescent green dust jacket immediately after repairing to the café to read. If you read German, I recommend the book; if not, do not hold your breath waiting for an English-language edition. Maybe someone from the American Renaissance crowd will buy the translation rights but, given the tempestuous legal history of the book in Germany, these may be poxy. However, even if you are language-constrained, it is worth knowing about this book. Keats said that a fact is not a truth unless you love it. Goebbels said that a lie is a truth if enough people believe it. Feindliche Übernahme gives opportunity to reflect on these frightfully complementary insights. It is, for the field of demography that this journal serves, an outstanding example of how dodgy science, weaponized by obscure family-and-friends peer reviewed journals and the popular media, especially the internet and social media, bends popular opinion and by extension policy. The book deserves to be hammered, and your critic intends to do so.11 Why waste print on a lousy book? Population and Development Review is not reluctant to be harsh on influential books when needed. See Aristide Zolberg's review of Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation (Random House, 1995) in Vol. 21, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 659-664 and Geoffrey McNicoll's review of Patrick Buchanan's Death of the West (St. Martin's Press, 2002) in Vol. 28, No. 4 (Dec., 2002), pp. 797-800. Both reviews are included in the April 2019 online collection International Migration: An Anthology from Population and Development Review (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/17284457/homepage/specialonlineissue). Thilo Sarrazin is rumbustious. He is a former Finance Senator for Berlin (2002–2009) and member of the Bundesbank board (2010–2011; he resigned rather than be fired following an ill-founded comment about Jews possessing a distinctive gene). But Sarrazin is at heart a traditional, if somewhat dour, Social Democrat, which is why he enrages the German political establishment.22 The Social Democratic Party (Soziaistische Partei Deutschlands; SPD) keeps threatening to kick Sarrazin out but is afraid to do so—too many of its dwindling voters share his views, especially the Ossies (those from the former East Germany; the Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR). However, and significant, Sarrazin has had no real truck with the extreme right Alternativ für Deutchland, except for addressing its party conference. This was the most recent casus belli between Sarrazin and the SPD. His notoriety is not new. In 2010, he raised a ruckus with his book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany is Doing Away with Itself; Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt). Part of his appeal is dry wit: “Being wealthy in Germany these days is immoral unless you made the money in sports or entertainment.” Part of it is the demagogue's perennial hook: I am only saying out loud what you think but are afraid to say. Part of it is that his prose is accessible; neither too highbrow nor too vulgar. The incessant use of bullet points and we've just-left-this-town and here's-the-next-one-we're-headed-for road signs are helpful for quick reading, but they also remind you that you are on a strictly guided tour. Similarly, there is overuse of shock italics; the guide is frog-marching you along. And so, to the book. Sarrazin's argument is as follows. For centuries, Islam in Europe, having been expelled from Spain and latterly repelled at the gates of Vienna, was confined to Turkey and a few patches of that miserable neighborhood today known as the Western Balkans. Over the last 75 years, Europe has, in a folly unparalleled in modern history, taken to its bosom a substantial and growing Muslim minority population that, on average, (1) does not accept European values of democracy, wellbeing, and freedom; (2) despises European culture and religion; and is, in no particular order, (3) oversexed (the men), (4) overfertile (the women), (5) ineducable (the young), and (6) poorly performing overall (everyone). There is, this critic would agree, more than enough evidence to indict and so, Auf gehts! Let's go! Chapter 1 is foundational for the rest of Feindliche Übernahme; therefore, it deserves more attention than it warrants on its merits. A believer in induction to the point of pedantry, Sarrazin starts from the source. This is the Koran, which he declares to have read from alpha to omega (so to speak) in a respected translation, as well as the hadiths. The divide between believers and non-believers is absolute; the first are going to heaven and the second to hell. The believer should not be distracted by any knowledge not derived from the sacred text. Non-believers are fair game; jihad demands conquest and annihilation, whether through conversion or more prejudicial measures. Islam is a political system in religion-drag; there is no possible compromise between the imams and the Montesquieuan rule of law. Women are inferior, periodically unclean creatures from the holy get-go. Those who hope for a Westernized, liberal, humanist, historicized, critical Islam are delusional. Those Muslim preachers, theologians, and public intellectuals who advocate for one do so, Sarrazin correctly reports, at their professional and personal risk. Sarrazin reproduces copious excerpts to support this swingeing criticism. But his hermeneutics consist not of exegesis, the search from scratch for what the text means; but eisegesis, scouring the text to prove that it means what he has already decided it means. Sarrazin is correct, to the extent that this reader (never having cracked the cover) would know, that the Koran and other early texts contain propositions that are in varying degree absurd and obnoxious. But that is true of any religious Grundtext. If a religion were not founded in mumbo-jumbo legitimacy claims and humbug secular rules, would it—adoration of the Archangel Uriel, Buddhism, Christianity, Eckankar, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Rastafarianism, Santeria, Satanism, Voodoo, Wicca, Zoroastianism; you name it—be a religion? No. A religion that hopes to become a going concern requires only two things: a hailing message (Althusser there) to attain critical mass, and a pitch that its adherents can employ to sell it on; whether by preaching merits, promising profits, or swinging swords. Judging Islam, and by extension Islamic society and the Muslims who comprise it, based on the Koran makes as much sense as judging Judaism and Jews on the Torah, Christianity and Christians on the Gospels, Mormonism and Mormons on the Book of Mormon, or Scientology and Scientologists on Dianetics. In Chapter 2, Sarrazin presents a depressing gazetteer of the Islamic world. That is not difficult work and was much better done by Bernard Lewis in What Went Wrong? (Oxford University Press, 2002). The statistics, as presented, for example, in the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) annual Arab Human Development Reports, are wretched. If you were conceived behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance and had to choose what kind of society you wanted to be born into, it would, on the UNDP and other standard international indicators, not be an Islamic one. When Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, and Tunisia are your star pupils, you know you are teaching a weak class. Is Islam to blame? Sarrazin makes a credible case that it is—in part. But that “in part” is an attenuation of which he is incapable. Sarrazin's ears are acute when picking up the signal he wants to hear, but deaf to the noise he does not—capitalism, colonialism, Crusaders, Israel, Jews, oil, orientalists, Ottomans, Sykes-Picot; great power meddling, challenging weather and topography for the most part, unmanageable borders, etc. Sarrazin's argument that the belief forces he has identified in the Koran contribute to the Islamic world's poor performance on the standard indicators of progress has traction. But how strong is the contribution; where is the religious signal in all the historical, geopolitical, environmental, and cultural noise? Chapter 3 on Islamic society is wide in scope and long in length, but the main axes of Sarrazin's analysis are obvious. Islam is a prison from whose religious walls the believer cannot escape. Curiosity, investigation, and openness to the new are stifled at every turn—the madrassa mentality. Sarrazin's favored source is Jacob Burkhardt (1818–1897). Eminent though that cultural historian may be, this is like analyzing abstract expressionism on the basis of Modern Painters; or applying the critical methods of Johnson and Hazlitt to Naked Lunch. Blowing the Bamiyan Buddhas to smithereens and knocking noses off statues does not endear the good Muslims responsible, but the lack of an Islamic representational art tradition has given us the marvels of Arabic calligraphy. If religious beliefs cannot be judged by the standard of truth, they can be judged by their artistic sedimentation—a risky exercise, but one blending aesthetics and materialism (there is, for example, a flourishing Islamic art market), more reliable than the airy assessment of theological virtues. By these standards, Islam scores right up there with the best. Sarrazin is exercised that the music of the Islamic world has produced no polyphony, but then neither have the musics of India, China, or Japan; all three representing cultures that have done well. Sarrazin denounces Arab architecture as “wild, lacking in plan and public infrastructure.” On the contrary, medieval Arab town planning, especially its management of the precious water resource, is legendary. Or, consider the Alhambra. Sarrazin's criticism goes on: the Arabs were ignorant of timekeeping and geodesy, incapable of technological innovation, etc. (here Sarrazin is borrowing from Lewis who, while far better grounded in scholarship, nevertheless took strong criticism). This tone is what led one reviewer to describe Feindliche Übernahme as Islamophobia masquerading as scholarship. Chapter 3 introduces (and Chapter 4 returns to) one of Sarrazin's core concerns: cognitive competence as measured by students’ standardized reading and mathematics test scores. As early as Schafft sich ab, he was concerned that Muslim (then mostly Turkish) students were dragging down standards in the German public education system. This is an argument that deserves policy attention. But, as he did with Burkhardt for art and culture, Sarrazin has found a pet scholar—Heiner Rindermann, the go-to European professor for academic proof that immigrants are ruining the schools.33 https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/hsw/psychologie/professuren/entwpsy/team/rindermann.php.en. Rindermann is excoriated by the same forces that have attacked intelligence research for the last three quarters of a century, destroying a number of reputations along the way.44 It could be worse. In Chapter 4, when cognitive competence arises again, his source for Denmark is an article by Emil Kirkegaard and John Fuerst, both outright cranks. Kirkegaard, who is cited a few other times, as well, is the editor of the OpenPsych family of journals (www.openpsych.net), comprised of Open Differential Psychology, Open Behavioral Genetics, and Open Quantitative Sociology and Political Science. These are tenderly peer-reviewed online journals specializing in scientifically controversial (bordering on dubious) politically incorrect pieces derived in part from (Roger) Pearsonian hereditarianism and in part from more novel and esoteric streams of thought such as evolutionary psychology. They lack the charming retro vibe of Mankind Quarterly, where many of their contributors also publish. However, for a doughty editorial defense of the journals, see https://openpsych.net/paper/57. Your critic, ignorant of psychology, genetics, and the advanced statistical techniques that inform them, will not dip his flimsy oar into these choppy waters. Sarrazin's conclusion is predictable: since Islam makes its believers stupid; the presence of Muslim students reduces the quality of public education. The argument is not new; the roots of the current white nationalist movement in the United States, while running back to eugenicists Grant, Stoddard & Co. in the first quarter of the last century, get there via the 1950s anti-school integration movement; e.g., psychologists Garrett, Shuey & Co. Closer to demographic home and within living memory, race enthusiasts such as MacDonald, Abernathy, and Co. hijacked the editorial board of the then-Kluewer journal Population and Environment for a few years before being ousted.55 Sarrazin believes there is at least one genetic source for the cognitive competence gap—inter-cousin marriage. He may be on to something. For an economic critique of Muslim first-cousin marriage, see Lena Edlund (2018), “Cousin Marriage Is Not Choice: Muslim Marriage and Underdevelopment,” AEA Papers and Proceedings, 108 (May):353–57. (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20181084) In The Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), poet John Berryman's alter ego Mr. Bones was mighty big on moral. In Feindliche Übernahme, Sarrazin is mighty big on gender. Chapter 3 also allows him space to expound at length his views, which are easy for this critic to endorse, on the position of women in Islamic society. That the policymakers of the Christian West have pussyfooted around this issue is the product of refined cynicism; although so, too, is their tiptoeing around the position of women in orthodox Judaism; and indeed, in their own house. Women's bodies; their faces, their gazes and attire (which is where the oppression starts according to Zana Ramadani,66 Ramadani, of Kosovar origin, is a politician (Christian Democratic Union, Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands, CDU), journalist, and founder of the German branch of the breast-baring feminist protest group FEMEN. A critic of Islam, her most relevant publication is Die verschleierte Gefahr: Die Macht der muslimischen Mütter und der Toleranzwahn der Deutschen (The Veiled Danger: The Power of Muslim Mothers and the Deluded Tolerance of the German People), Munich: Europa Verlag, 2017. Sarrazin's go-to here); their intimate parts and the pleasures to be had therewith; and their fecundability with its consequences for bloodline, honor, and property—lie in contested territory. Evolution declared, humanity wages, and no masterpiece of diplomacy will secure peace in, the war between the sexes.77 One is put in mind of the Danish-German border dispute dating from the Second Schleswig War of 1864, which echoes to this day, at least in Danish extreme-right politics. It is said that there were three diplomats who understood the solution: one committed suicide, one went mad, and the last forgot what it was. In the Islamic world, Sarrazin argues, precocious arranged marriage of daughters is a religious and cultural necessity because, sooner rather than later, the young women are going to realize that they are sitting on idle sexual capital; when they do, they will scamper off and invest it as they fancy. Perhaps this is true in the tough parts of Neukölln (the Berlin borough, of which more below), as Sarrazin claims. But the system has certainly weakened in the North of Africa, where the unemployed young men are not worth marrying, the young women are now better educated, and their age at marriage is rising pari passu. Sarrazin is on solid ground when he expresses outrage at female genital cutting, by any even mildly functionalist argument designed to suppress female sexual pleasure and thereby agency. He correctly blames mothers, grandmothers, and aunts for promoting and enforcing the practice. He could have also discussed such women's role in the enforcement of suppressive dress codes (Ramadani is good on this). Young males hopped up on testosterone, sexual deprivation, boredom, and religion may be the sidewalk Soldati of the modesty police, but older women are the back-office Capi who run the crew.88 Sarrazin refrains from crass sensationalism. He does not invoke the small number of highly-publicized cases of young asylum-seeking males accused or convicted of assaulting or raping and murdering young German women. These are scattered horrors, and the book of good bürgerlich young German men does not lack for dark pages. But Sarrazin is inexplicably silent on the single episode that would have substantially strengthened his case, and the one that put paid to Willkommenkultur—the mass sexual assaults in the Cathedral Square of Cologne on Silvesternacht 2015–2016, committed by roving bands of young asylum seekers tipsy on beer and connected by social media and text messaging. While the Bundespolizei response was incompetent (they were acutely understaffed and did not take women's first frantic phone calls seriously), the poor security response can in no way justify the incident, which can only be characterized, although its scale is still debated, as one of gang sexual predation. For analysis of how the pre- and post-Islamic ideals of male virility, the latter long compromised by schizophrenia regarding relations between the sexes, have been distorted by failed modernity, see philosopher Nadia Tazi, Le genre intraitable. Politiques de la virilité dans le monde musulman (Arles, Actes Sud 2018), as well as the interview with her in Le Monde for 11 May, 2019. Tazi believes that Islamic extremism exacerbates, but only that, a deeper and more structural problem. Chapter 4 is the heart of the volume, and the one to which the social scientist will probably be most attentive, for it is here that Sarrazin dives into the numbers. He starts by criticizing the Statistiches Bundesamt’s official definition of someone of immigration background as a person (1) born abroad or (2) of whose parents at least one does not have German citizenship by birth. This means that, for example and to Sarrazin's concern, the grandchildren of naturalized foreign-born German citizens are not considered to be of immigrant background. This concern reflects the one-drop-of-blood fallacy; so empty of sociological validity that it need not detain us here, apart from a respectful tip of the hat to its longevity. Working (grudgingly) from the 2016 Microcensus, Sarrazin reports that 22.5 percent of the German population and 35.4 percent of those under 15 are of immigration background. Not all are from Muslim countries, of course, but he reckons that in Berlin, a third of those from an immigration background are, as is a tenth of the total population of the city. Sarrazin's demography is predictably pessimistic. He cites the 2015 Pew-IIASA study,99 The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections 2010-2050. https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2015/03/PF_15.04.02_ProjectionsFullReport.pdf which shows Muslims accounting in 2050 for between 8.7 and 19.7 percent of the population in Germany, as opposed to 4.1 percent in 2010—doubling at best, quintupling at worst. By 2050 between one-third and one-half of all births will be Muslim (there is evidently some Muslim gene like the Jewish one that got Sarrazin into hot water at the Bundesbank). Your 2050 Muslim will be a clone of your 2010 Muslim (induction again; “As I have clearly demonstrated in Chapters 1 through 3, …”), so the process of German cultural displacement and debasement can only accelerate.1010 By Chapter 5, in 2050, Muslims will be the majority population. It is not clear how the acceleration occurred between Chapters 4 and 5. Do not blame the post Pew-IIASA 2014-2015 migrant surge, a one-off event which dwindled to a trickle thanks to reasonably effective EU external policy measures. To his credit, Sarrazin understands reasonably well the age distribution and population dynamics; that population has memory. But the tragedy of demography is that those not adequately schooled in the art get its vital fundamentals under their belt in a few hours of mathematical recreation—linear algebra requires neither genius nor reflection—and then begin to preach policy. The engineers who designed the disastrous Chinese one-child policy are a good example. The poor socioeconomic situation of Muslims in Germany, which no one can deny so far as population averages go, is described over the course of some 50 pages. First of the problems cited is lagging cognitive competence scores and inferior school performance, as if there is nothing that better social and education policies can do about them. Second, petty criminality; mostly young persons in conflict with the law, as if there is nothing that better social-, justice-, and security-sector policies can do about it. Third, Lebanese (mostly Arab, some Kurdish) clan-based grand criminality, as if these gangs were not by now as native to Germany as is Le Milieu to le Midi in France.1111 Sarrazin's favored source here is Ralph Ghadban, a creature mostly of the internet despite books to his credit, whose attacks on multiculturalism, and specifically its role in producing extended-family criminal gangs, has made him a darling of outlets such as JihadWatch and Breitbart News. His website is http://www.ghadban.de/de/. As of As of this writing (June 2019), Clankriminalität is headline news and Ghadban is forced to live under police protection, like Gomorra author Roberto Salviano in Italy. Also of interest is Sarrazin's reference to Tania Kambouri's Deutschland im Blaulicht—Notruf einer Polizistin (Pull over, Germany! – Emergency Call from a Policewoman), Munich and Berlin: Piper, 2015). A volume that received wide media attention, it expressed—from the perspective of a policewoman (herself of immigrant background)— far from progressive views on what she regards as the coddling of young Muslim ruffians. Fourth, poor labor market performance, as if the thoroughbred East German Ossies are doing fine and there is no problem of outright discrimination against Muslims. Sarrazin's empirical observations on the lagging Muslim minority are informative and seem statistically sound (although his overreliance on population averages is deplorable and his reliance on the Microcensus has been criticized), but he is uninterested in any possible causation other than Islam. He is does not understand that it is not the average Muslim that is of concern, it is certain Muslim sub-populations that have become, as this critic put it in a previous piece, “a civic nuisance.”1212 La République islamique de France? A review essay on Michel Houellebecq, Soumission (Flammarion, 2015). Population and Development Review 42(2): 368–75. There is also a striking thought experiment that Sarrazin does not carry out. What would a Germany without Muslims look like?1313 In Hugo Bettauer's classic satire Die stadt ohne Juden (Vienna, 1922), as postwar unemployment soars and inflation rages in Vienna, a dimwitted politician comes up with a solution that takes fire: kick out the Jews. Once the Jews have been ejected, in scenes prescient of actual events in 1938, the situation goes from bad to worse, leaving the residents of Vienna begging them to come back. Viciously attacked in the press and public fora by Austrian National Socialists, Bettauer was assassinated by a Party member in 1925. He was as prescient in death as in life. In early June 2019, the Hessian Christian Democrat politician Walter Lübcke, a prominent conservative defender of Angela Merkel's asylum policies, having been vilified for months by extreme nationalist social media and internet sites and his private address having been published, was gunned down on his porch by a member of the scene. The alleged killer, in custody, has a long extremism-related criminal record and was a person of interest in the botched NSU investigation. Perhaps because his wife taught school there, Sarrazin is especially concerned about the situation in Neukölln—the Berlin borough with one of the highest immigrant proportions, mostly Turkish, but with a highly visible Arab population, as well. To read Sarrazin, one would think that Neukölln is a cancerous tumor, a fetid presence in the municipal body politic. To set the record straight, Neukölln is an immense district, stretching all the way from the city center to the city limits. As a result, and not surprising in a city of cantering if no longer galloping change, it is a district of highly variable geography. Good parts, bad parts, like Queens, Brooklyn, or the Bronx; Manhattan, for that matter. Historically a uniformly working class area, back in the day, it was a Communist stronghold; Goebbels once led a Stormtrooper march on it. “Neukölln was the kind of place that, if you were born there, you wanted to get out,” one elderly Berliner put it to me. But gentrification started seeping in from neighboring Kreuzberg a good decade ago and there are now parts of northern Neukölln where your critic could not afford to live. These areas are not just up and coming; like Dick Van Dyke's get-up-and-go, they got up and went. Yet, there are also areas of deprivation and, yes, some parts where one thinks one has been transported to the kasbah. Neukölln is also, Sarrazin omits to note, one of the hippest, most happening districts in Berlin. In summer, parts of it are an open-air bar for the London three-day weekend EasyJet crowd. If your daughter or son moved to Berlin for youthful adventure after university, odds are good s/he is flatsharing and misbehaving in Neukölln. Where does Sarrazin leave us after nearly 400 pages of rant and rage against Islam, its believers, and their impact on Germany? Abstracting from his many sub-headings in Chapter 5, he has four major policy recommendations. First, policy should ensure that Islam be as subject to criticism, even ridicule, as any other religion. That is easy to agree with; if you can dish it out, as some Muslims do with gusto and worse (suicide bombs, vehicle attacks, firearms massacres, beheadings, etc.), you can take it, too. In his novel Filth (Jonathan Cape, 1998), Irvine Welsh proposed a terse moral principal that has not received nearly the attention that its economy and broad applicability deserve: Same rules apply. Second, Europe should identify its interests and defend them. This is reasonable in our Westphalian world. But “Europe” (ipso Germany) is a social partnership. Its interests and responsibilities; its assets and liabilities, encompass all who are jointly and severally engaged—not just some romantically constructed, racially and religiously pure sub-population descended from a misty knights-and-ladies past. As the Swedes say, once you have taken the Devil into your boat, you must row him ashore, which in this case means dealing effectively with Muslim integration and assimilation – using policy to overcome the barriers Sarrazin plausibly describes as formidable without coming close to convincing that they are insurmountable. White Christian Europe is spilt milk. Regret it if you wish, forget it whether you do or not, and move on.1414 Dale Carnegie, founder of the American self-help industry (How to Win Friends and Influence People, Simon and Schuster 1936), used to smash a bottle of milk during his lectures to illustrate the point. Third, immigration policy should be stripped of ideology and wishful thinking. The first leg of the recommendation can be ignored. Ideology is like original sin; no policy, having been born in it as all are, can be cleansed of it. Sarrazin is steeped in the fallacy—discredited by postmodernism; one of the few things we can thank it for—that ideology is false belief. Love gone wrong, for Keats; a failure of sales and marketing, for Goebbels—not that there is much difference between the two; hence, the frightful complementarity. As to wishful thinking, what Sarrazin is calling for is simply more realism and less idealism; more Realpolitik and less Wunschdenken. A drier, stiffer, policy martini; more gin, less vermouth, hold the fruit. That is a sound recommendation, and it is already being implemented. The German voter has howled, as has the European; Berlin and Brussels have heard. Fourth, and requiring more attention, Germany requires a serious foreign and development policy vis à vis the Islamic world (Eine der islamischen Welt zugewandte und ernsthafte Aussen- und Entwicklungspolitik). The sub-recommendations: (1) the relationship between religion and the State needs to be examined in Germany; (2) the expected relationship between Muslims, the State, and society in Germany needs to be made clear; (3) German integration policy needs to be demystified; (4) German education policy needs to support assimilation and integration, mostly by tougher standards; and (5) reporting on Islam and Muslims in Germany needs to be transparent, open, and complete. Under each of these, Sarrazin has ideas on feasible practical and concrete first steps; some of these ideas are good and he should be credited with them; as he should be criticized for the ones that are not. Same rules apply. But the recommendation is not to be read bottom-up. It needs to be read top-down. What Sarrazin states is that all this lies in the domain of Aussenpolitik; foreign policy. His message is stark. Muslims, wherever they live in Germany and for however long they have lived there, wherever they or their parents or their grandparents were born, whatever passport they carry, whatever university they teach at or attend; whatever mosque they preach at or attend, are not German. They are foreign. Aliens on German soil. That is a dangerous thought. We heard the like from Germany before. It never went away. The Nationalsozialistische Untergrund (NSU) affair and the murder of Walter Lübcke in Hesse give us a taste of its murderous consequences and illustrate the shambolic response of the supposedly mighty German state. Once upon a time in Germany…