Turks Get a Hard Time In Germany

In the vestibule of Germany's largest mosque, identity is complicated. Zehra Yilmaz says her German passport will get her into a voting booth on election day, but her Turkish name and Muslim head scarf kept her out of apartments she tried to rent. She has lived in Germany since she was 2, but her home has been in Turkish enclaves segregated from the rest of Germany by language, culture and a mutual belief that one day the foreigners would go home. "I'm not really Turkish, and I'm not really German," says Zehra Yilmaz, 46. Inside the European Union's most populous country, a parallel society has grown. Muslim immigrants, mostly Turkish, flooded into Germany beginning in the 1960s, recruited by companies to augment the post-war work force. Yilmaz's father planned to stay five years, enough time to save enough for a car and washing machine.

The government granted them entry as guest workers. "The first generation came at a time when the economy was booming, and they expected to make money and go back. That hasn't happened," said Jochen Hippler, a political science and Middle Eastern studies professor at Duisburg-Essen University. Clustered in neighborhood enclaves, such as Marxloh in Duisburg and Kreuzberg in Berlin, the children and grandchildren of that first immigrant wave grew up in Germany without ever attaining citizenship.

Integration efforts began in earnest only recently, after the third generation of immigrants was born. Hampering those efforts is a distrust of Muslims heightened by the 9/11 attacks, an ethnic German population that abides foreigners warily, and an unwillingness among many in Turkish communities to break with their families and give up Turkish citizenship to become legally German. Until 2000, German law defined citizenship by ethnicity, rather than a person's place of birth.

original story

“Blow up the planes, trains and automobiles” Mr Griffin?

In a interview in the European Parliament July 2009 Nick Griffin leader of the BNP notoriously stated that “immigrants should be prevented from entering Africa by the advocation of “Sinking the Boats”.

The following is what was actually said in the interview by Nick Griffin

"But the only measure, sooner or later, which is going to stop immigration and stop large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans dying on the way to get over here is to get very tough with those coming over. Frankly, they need to sink several of those boats. Anyone coming up with measures like that, we'll support, but anything which is there as a 'oh, we need to do something about it' but in the end doing something about it means bringing them into Europe we will oppose."

Shirin Wheeler, the programme's presenter, interrupted him to say the EU did not murder people. "I didn't say anyone should be murdered at sea – I say boats should be sunk, they can throw them a life raft and they can go back to Libya," Griffin said. "But Europe has, sooner or later, to close its borders or it's simply going to be swamped by the third world."

Yet a very interesting article has appeared on the BBC website today which states that Spain, has revealed that the numbee of immigrants arriving in the country from Africa by boats has halfed in 2009.

And actually the figures state that the number of people arriving in the Canary islands by these so called boats Mr Griffin has fallen from 9,181 in 2008 to 2,246 in 2009.

We should expect this fact to be ignored by Mr Griffin and the BNP and their ilk across europe but on the other hand we might just get Mr Griffin stating they are now arriving by some other means.

So a “blow up the planes, trains and automoblies” statement might be coming soon.