Many Germans now rejecting the horde of aggressive Muslims who have been allowed into their country

Daniel Hillig never stood a chance when he was killed in the early hours of last Sunday morning. As he took out money from a bank machine, a man ordered him to hand over his cash and credit card.

He tried to run, but was stabbed five times, leaving him dying on the pavement near a Karl Marx statue overlooking the city centre of Chemnitz in eastern Germany.

I was given this account of his death by someone who heard it first hand from those who were with Daniel that night. Indeed, this week I was taken by this friend of Daniel Hillig to the cash machine, a few yards from the shrine set up where he fell.

The 35-year-old German carpenter’s death has sparked riots and demonstrations over the divisive issue of mass migration into Europe after it emerged the prime suspect was an Iraqi Kurd who arrived in Germany three years ago.

In front of the Karl Marx statue, fascist protesters in dubious regalia have raised straight arms in grotesque Nazi salutes — banned in Germany since the defeat of Hitler in 1945 — while calling for the country’s Chancellor Angela Merkel to quit.

Left-wing anti-Nazis have retaliated with violence as police with tear gas struggled to keep the two sides apart. Significantly, also marching on the streets have been ordinary citizens of this city, where almost one in four voted for a rising Right-wing anti-immigration party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), in recent elections.

Three summers ago, Merkel invited Syrians embroiled in a civil war to come to Germany.

More than one million migrants arrived in a matter of months, their nationalities and the true purpose of their journeys largely unchecked, from a myriad countries across the impoverished and war-torn Third World.

One of them, it now transpires, was named Yousif, and is the 22-year-old Iraqi Kurd who is being investigated over the knife attack on Daniel Hillig, a German of Cuban extraction.

Yousif was living in an asylum hostel 20 miles from Chemnitz and had travelled in to town to enjoy a street festival with a migrant friend, a 23-year-old Syrian named Alaa. Both are now in custody and being questioned by police.

News that migrants were implicated in the death instantly raised hackles in this racially fraught part of Germany.

As Utte — a 61-year-old who works at the local Ikea store — told me this week at the shrine of candles for Daniel in central Chemnitz: ‘I have a son aged 33 who is half-Mozambican. ‘I have a grand-daughter who is half-Indian and half-German.

‘I have always welcomed migrants here, and I know there is terrible racism in this eastern part of Germany because my own family have suffered it. My granddaughter is shouted at on the bus for having dark skin. My son is turned away at nightclubs because he looks a different colour to a “thoroughbred” German.

‘But we believe foreigners tried to rob Daniel Hillig at the bank and then knifed him. I have to feel anger about that and feel sad for the future of Germany.’

Beside her, a young Afghan man of 21, who is a migrant himself, added: ‘I knew Daniel, too. He had a girlfriend, Bianca, who I was in touch with. I am here because I am sorry about what happened.

‘I dare not give you my name for printing because the backlash against people like me is going to get worse in Chemnitz even among those who first welcomed us a few years ago.’

This week, information from a police document emerged about Yousif and his past. A justice official in Dresden admitted to the respected German newspaper Bild on Thursday that he had leaked the arrest warrant after photographing it.

It’s now known that after his arrival in Germany in the migration wave of 2015, Yousif became a hairdresser and had passed a language test set for asylum seekers. There is even a photograph on his Facebook page of him standing proudly, apparently during a holiday, in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris holding up a Kurdish flag.

Yet there is a darker side. According to the leak, he has a string of convictions for crimes committed as an asylum seeker. They include serious bodily harm, smuggling drugs into Germany, using pepper spray as a weapon in a migrant hostel, a violent street attack, property damage and fraud.

In March last year he was listed for deportation back to Iraq, but nothing happened. As Bild commented this week: ‘Many German people will say he should have been deported the moment he arrived in 2015. He comes from Kurdish Iraq and that is, anyway, considered a safe place to live.’

At the hostel where he lived, fellow migrants told reporters this week that Yousif often took drugs, particularly cannabis, and liked alcohol. Sometimes his behaviour was erratic. ‘He always had a knife because he had a lot of money. He said it was for self-defence on the street,’ explained one.

The hostel pals say that last Saturday Yousif kept calling them from the festival on his mobile phone to say: ‘You must come. We are having a lot of fun.’ But when he did not return on the Sunday — Daniel Hallig was killed before dawn that morning — they began to think something was wrong.

Indeed, something was. Those who have spoken to a witness to the knifing say that when Daniel ran from the bank machine, refusing to hand over his card or money, there was a flurry of activity.

They say the man who accosted him had made a call on his mobile, after which a group of men came around the corner and helped chase down the carpenter.

Now there is febrile talk on the streets of Chemnitz that others in Yousif’s circle played a part in Daniel’s death — and that does not bode well for Mrs Merkel’s migrants here in Saxony.

While the exact circumstances of this murder will be tested in court, there is no doubt the threat of violence against other immigrants has increased substantially.

Some have been chased through the streets and attacked in recent days. The mood I witnessed this week is ugly — and it may yet get worse. Disturbances continued in the city on Thursday night when protesters waved banners and shouted that Chemnitz had become an ‘African enclave’.

They had been warned by organisers Pro Chemnitz — a nationalist group with 18,000 followers — not to give Nazi salutes to avoid pictures being taken of the abhorrent gesture and shown around the world.

Another march over Daniel’s death is promised by the Right-wing groups PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West) and the AfD today.

The situation has been inflamed by the publication on Thursday of a new book by a leading figure in the German New Right, former senior banker turned politician and author Thilo Sarrazin.

It is provocatively entitled Hostile Takeover: How Islam Obstructs Progress and Threatens Society. Pre-orders made the book the immediate best-seller in Germany at online retailer Amazon.

Neo-Nazis are a strong presence in this part of Germany, which has long been a breeding ground for far-Right politics. The bombing of a mosque in 2016, and the 2017 conviction of a terror cell which planned attacks on migrants cemented this reputation.

Now, the legacy of Merkel’s policy has made migration the source of intense national debate. As one AfD politician told me recently at his office in Leipzig, 40 miles from Chemnitz: ‘In the past, Germans stayed at home on their sofas and didn’t bother to vote.

‘Now they are taking an interest in politics because they don’t like the migration policies of Mrs Merkel. They see the migrants sitting in hostels with nothing to do but gaze at their mobile phones or television, and they think that’s not fair when I have to find work.’

It’s certainly true that many ordinary Germans are highly alarmed by the mass influx sparked by Mrs Merkel’s invitation to migrants.

Plenty of people in Britain will have sympathy with their concerns. But the re-emergence of the far- Right in Germany is something else all together. For a truly frightening xenophobia has taken hold here.

Until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, paving the way for the country’s reunification, cities such as Chemnitz — which used to be called Karl Marx City — were isolated from the outside world in the Communist bloc of East Germany.

For that reason, the immigrant population was minimal, with the largest group coming from the ‘socialist brother state’ of Vietnam, who had been brought in as labourers.

The few other foreign faces were students from Leftist nations invited to study on scholarships. Residents were not allowed to go abroad until they retired, and then only to other Communist nations.

‘We were blinkered, but everyone was friends,’ says Helene, a 43-year-old car insurance agent I found walking on the street near the shrine to Daniel Hillig. ‘There was no racial hostility. Most people only knew Germans. When the Wall came down, that changed. We found ourselves mixing with incomers of different cultures. Some, particularly the older people, have found it hard to adapt.’

Preying on this discontent came the PEGIDA movement. Since 2014, it has run a violent weekly march through the Saxony state capital of Dresden, blaming all ills on migration. (Dresden is also an iconic meeting place for German neo-Nazis embittered by the Allies’ aerial bombing of the city at the end of the World War II.)

Although the percentage of migrants in Saxony is tiny, and unemployment is low (the area has seen so much high-tech investment it’s nicknamed ‘Silicon Saxony’) a recent survey found 58 per cent of residents here think Germany is overrun with foreigners.

Nearly 40 per cent said immigration of Muslims should be banned and 18 per cent, worst of all, insisted that Germans ‘by their nature’ are superior to other nationalities.

But it is not only in Saxony that German political sentiment is turning to the Right as 10,000 migrants a month continue to enter the country.

A now infamous murder this spring of a 14-year-old German girl became the focal point of intense unease among mainstream Germans, and a trigger for protests against Mrs Merkel. The victim, Susanna Maria Feldman, from Mainz, a city in the heart of the country, was found dead in a wooded area near train tracks a few miles from her home. She had been raped and strangled.

Her suspected killer emerged as Ali Bashar, a 29-year-old Iraqi Kurd who arrived in Germany, like Yousif, during the big migrant wave of 2015 with his parents and five siblings.

Bashar fled to his homeland, but was hauled back to Germany from Iraq (some say willingly because there is the death penalty there) where officials said he had confessed to Susanna’s murder and rape. He is now in detention while the German authorities continue to investigate.

Such stories have been seized on by the AfD, which has used them as a rallying cry for concerned Germans to join its ranks. In elections last autumn, the party won almost 13 per cent of the vote and 94 seats in the Berlin parliament.

In an emotive speech recently the AfD leader, 39-year-old Alice Weidel, demanded Mrs Merkel’s resignation over immigration, citing a number of murders of young girls in which migrants have been implicated. She complained: ‘Susanna from Mainz is dead. Maria from Freiburg: Mia from Kandel, Mireille from Flensburg.

‘Susanna’s death is not a blind stroke of fate. It is the result of many years of scandalous failure of our asylum and immigration policies. Susanna is the victim of an out-of-control Left-wing multicultural ideology that stops at nothing to impose its moral superiority [on the people].’

She added later in a Twitter video message to Mrs Merkel’s cabinet: ‘Make way for an asylum policy that is built around law and order, so fathers and mothers in our country will no longer be afraid for their children.’

Her words were deliberately provocative. But Rainer Wendt, head of one of Germany biggest police unions, took up the baton. ‘People feel the German state has lost control,’ he said recently.

‘There are thousands of people in this country and we don’t know who they are. That is an enormous security risk.’ Another police union chief, pointing to growing vigilantism in the east, explained: ‘When the state is perceived as no longer able to protect citizens, citizens take the law into their own hands.’

Nowhere is this kind of polemic lapped up more than in Saxony, and that was before the killing of Daniel Hillig, who was out with two German-Russians on the night of his death. They were also stabbed, but survived and are in hospital.

Now, Chemnitz is bracing itself for more ugly protests over this latest murder.

Many, particularly politicians on the Left, have accused the extreme Right of exploiting his death for political ends. Daniel’s friends have also said that his killing is being overshadowed by the outbreak of racist violence.

This week, one pointed out that the dead man was not interested in politics. Fernando Herrmann, a roofing contractor, 41, said: ‘He was not Left or Right. He would not have wanted any of the disturbances over his death. He was peace-loving and enjoyed life, always with a smile on his face.’

Yet calls for calm may fall on deaf ears. Werner Patzelt, a respected political analyst at Dresden Technical University, said this week that many in eastern Germany believe immigration was imposed on them ‘against their will’.

‘They have a deep resentment against the Government and the whole political class whom they see as responsible for the influx of immigrants into Germany.’

The Chemnitz riots would, he added, be ‘another nail in Mrs Merkel’s coffin’.

For her part, the beleaguered Chancellor has condemned the riots, insisting ‘hate on the streets’ has no place in modern multi-cultural Germany. It seems unlikely she will be listened to. A flurry of messages filled Chemnitz social media sites this week.

One of the more printable ones said succinctly: ‘The people are not prepared to be assaulted, robbed and killed any longer . . . accusations of being called a Nazi or racist no longer scares them into turning the other cheek. They are fighting back.’

And that is a sentiment that truly chills the heart.

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Those who see Nazis everywhere in Britain and the USA have lost touch with reality

One left-leaning commentator informs us that ‘fascist extremism and terrorism is being legitimised and fuelled by “mainstream” newspapers and politicians alike’. Another insists that ‘all white people’ are implicated ‘in white supremacy’. The rhetoric has become so commonplace that these terms have begun to lose their potency.

This kind of concept creep is a huge problem, not least because genuine fascists are able to claim greater support than they really have. For all the sensationalist headlines in the Guardian, we do not live in a country in which racism, homophobia or misogyny are in any way considered acceptable. Even the mildest suspicion of such tendencies can result in excommunication from polite society. That is not to say that such prejudices have been eliminated – human nature is too flawed to ever enable such utopian ideals – but it is reassuring to know that there is at least a civilised consensus among the majority of our citizens.

So why is it that so many activists are persuaded that neo-Nazism has gone mainstream? Why do so many on social media feel the need to identify themselves as ‘anti-fascist’? Like most people, I have never met an actual fascist. My default expectation of my fellow creatures is that they would instinctively oppose such a pernicious ideology. Claiming to be an ‘anti-fascist’ is rather like wearing a badge saying ‘I am not a paedophile’ — it makes others wonder what you’re hiding.

The fantasy of a crypto-fascist epidemic is buoyed by a failure to distinguish between right-leaning civic nationalists and authentic neo-Nazis. When thousands gathered for the ‘Day for Freedom’ in London earlier this year, the press labelled the protesters as ‘far right’, in spite of the fact that only a tiny minority of those in attendance could be said to fall into that category. The recent white supremacist march in Washington, DC, at which a paltry 20 or so racists turned up in the face of thousands of counterprotesters, gives an accurate sense of just how marginal this type of extremism has become. Nobody is denying that such repugnant individuals exist, but in these febrile times we need to retain a sensible perspective.

Then there is the slippery term ‘alt-right’, a catch-all that rivals ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ for the way in which it is deployed so thoughtlessly. Even Jordan Peterson, a man whose opposition to tyranny in all its forms could not be more well documented, has been branded as ‘alt-right’ by numerous media outlets. In common parlance, the term has become irrevocably associated with white nationalism and movements helmed by the likes of Richard Spencer. So when Peter Walker, political correspondent for the Guardian, claims that the meaning of ‘alt-right’ is ‘subjective’ he is either being disingenuous or naive. According to him, it ‘can be associated with a sort of highly robust, fairly confrontational libertarian right-leaning politics with a dash of support for Trump’, but his use of the modal verb is telling. That a phrase with such potentially libellous connotations can be defined in multiple ways should surely give journalists pause for thought. Unless, of course, their intention is to imply a correlation with white supremacy, safe in the knowledge that the get-out clause of ambiguity will excuse the smear.

The blurring of these distinctions contributes to a generalised false belief that neo-Nazism is widespread. Take, for instance, the left-wing press coverage of the news that YouTubers Paul Joseph Watson, Markus Meechan (aka ‘Count Dankula’) and Carl Benjamin (aka ‘Sargon of Akkad’) have joined UKIP.  One writer described them as ‘far right’, another as ‘social-media activists linked to the alt-right’. A columnist for the Guardian caricatured them as a ‘supergroup’, asking whether they were best described as an ‘alt-right Led Zeppelin or white supremacist A-Team?’. Whatever one may think of these men and their politics, it is grossly misleading to describe them in this way. At worst, it is an attempt to discredit their views through deliberate misrepresentation. At best, it reveals a woeful unfamiliarity with their political output or the definitions of the terms being applied.

In his novel To Hell in a Handcart (2001), Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn depicts a Britain in a state of inexorable moral decline, in which asylum seekers are accommodated in ‘luxurious’ hostels and granted ‘£117.50 a week in cash… supplemented with the proceeds of begging and petty crime’, while the hard-working indigenous population are left to suffer in penury. In Littlejohn’s vision, such circumstances are the norm rather than the exception. Not to be outdone, certain factions of the liberal-left have seemingly conjured a different kind of imaginary Britain, in which the behaviour of a few extremists is magnified to an absurd extent. These are the new Richard Littlejohns, occupying a nightmare land of their own creation. It is our security services and intelligence agencies who are taking on the handful of fascists in our midst. The rest are just scrapping with ghosts.

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Trump: We’ve Stopped Government Effort to Undermine Religious Freedom

President Trump on Monday night thanked prominent evangelical leaders for their "incredible" support, and in turn listed measures his administration has advanced on issues of importance to them – from restricting federal funding for abortions to confronting religious persecution around the world.

Welcoming leaders "who believe in the dignity of life, the glory of God and the power of prayer," the president joined First Lady Melania Trump in hosting a dinner at the White House to celebrate "America’s heritage of faith, family and freedom."

"As you know, in recent years the government tried to undermine religious freedom, but the attacks on communities of faith are over," he told the guests. "We’ve ended it – we’ve ended it. Unlike some before us we are protecting religious liberty."

Trump drew enthusiastic applause as he declared that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of American life.

He outlined a series of steps his administration has taken, including reinstating the Reagan-era Mexico City policy, which requires organizations receiving federal family planning funding to certify that they are not carrying out or promoting abortion; and barring Title X family planning funds from programs and facilities that support, perform or refer patients for abortions.

"We have stopped the Johnson Amendment from interfering with your First Amendment rights," Trump said, referring to a 1954 tax code provision preventing non-profits including churches from endorsing political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status.

(Trump signed an executive order in May 2017 instructing the Treasury Department not to enforce the provision against religious organizations. Initiatives are underway in Congress to repeal it.)

The president was cheered as he recalled his decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. Embassy there, and again while speaking of efforts to bring Pastor Andrew Brunson home from Turkey, where he is on trial on espionage and terror-related charges which the administration views as bogus.

"Together we will uplift our nation in prayer, defend the sanctity of life and forever proudly remain one nation under God," he said.

Concluding his remarks, he thanked the leaders again.

"The support you’ve given me has been incredible," he said, then added, "but I really don’t feel guilty because I have given you a lot back, just about everything I promised."

Trump used the opportunity to make his first public comments on the death Saturday of Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a veteran Republican and war hero who frequently had disagreements with the president’s policies.

"Our hearts and prayers are going to the family of Senator John McCain," he said. "There’ll be a lot of activity over the next number of days. We very much appreciate everything that Senator McCain has done for our country, so thank you very much."

According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelical Protestants supported Trump over Hillary Clinton by a 77 to 16 percent margin in 2016.

Trump also attracted the support of 52 percent of white mainline Protestants (44 percent for Clinton) and 64 percent of white, non-Hispanic Catholics (31 percent for Clinton).

On the other hand, 96 percent of black Protestants and 78 percent of Hispanic Catholics reported voting for Clinton, compared to three percent and 19 percent for Trump, respectively.

Guests at Monday night’s dinner included Faith & Freedom Coalition chairman Ralph Reed, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, Civil Rights for the Unborn director Alveda King, Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr., Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, and evangelical pastors including Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Paula White and Darrell Scott.

Also taking part were members of the administration including Vice President Mike Pence, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, and ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, Sam Brownback.

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‘It’s black kids who suffer most from the victim narrative’

This week, shadow minister for equalities Dawn Butler accused the celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver, of cultural appropriation. She took issue with Oliver’s new ‘punchy jerk rice’ product, saying that the ‘appropriation of Jamaica has to stop’.

One man who has taken Oliver’s side is Tony Sewell, whose parents, like Butler’s, were born in Jamaica. He is an education consultant and CEO of the charity Generating Genius, which helps young people from disadvantaged backgrounds study the sciences at top universities. spiked caught up with him to talk about the rice row.

spiked: Do you think Jamie Oliver’s jerk rice is something that is worth a senior MP spending her time on?

Tony Sewell: No, it isn’t and I’m trying to understand why she ran with this. I have no personal beef with Dawn Butler – it seems that nobody has a sense of the right priorities, even when it comes to racism. But her comments came at the same time as London is experiencing a crime wave and young black men are being killed by other young black men. She has no answers for this. Labour has no answers and nor does the government. Instead, the target becomes Jamie Oliver with his microwaved rice, which is bizarre.

spiked: What do you make of the cultural-appropriation debate?

Tony Sewell: There is a sense that, in the past, people with power were able to take ideas without giving due credit for them. They would make them their own and get much more out of them. But really, cultural appropriation is nonsense. It is an idea that has come from university campuses. It only really makes sense in the context of a culture where people are seeking offence and looking for opportunities for virtue-signalling.

It partly comes from a misunderstanding of how culture works. I would say Caribbean culture itself is entirely appropriated. We were literally appropriated, put on this island and told to get on with it. We could only create new things by borrowing what was around us. That’s the reality of most cultures. In this case, there’s an argument to say that Jamie’s jerk rice could have a positive effect. Lots of people are now interested in trying to understand what jerk is.

spiked: Are we in danger of seeing race everywhere, even in the most trivial matters like this?

Tony Sewell: Clearly, there are real issues to do with racism. But we’re getting angry about the wrong things. In this case, we’re going after a really silly thing because we can’t solve the harder things. People can’t see where their energy should be. This is partly because their analysis of racial issues is too simplistic. I’m not convinced that we should always go down the road of saying all problems are caused by white power or white men. Everything gets reduced down to one simple cause, and for some people that seems to explain the whole world. It’s comforting, it’s how you go to bed at night. It’s a bit like CNN going on every day about Trump, where every issue is explained through the lens of this one man.

spiked: Does this kind of oversimplification risk bringing racial boundaries back in a new, politically correct form?

Tony Sewell: I wonder sometimes whether there’s a psychological comfort zone that makes people cling to it. People are constantly saying the world is falling apart, that we live in this divided world, all without realising how much we’ve progressed. So there’s a sense of division but it’s exaggerated. The reality is that a great deal of the politics around race today is not observing a division but analysing a divide that isn’t there. There are serious issues to do with race, of course. There’s a great deal of segregation in schools, for instance. We have to address these things. But the progress we’ve made on race relations has been significant.

spiked: Do you think this new form of anti-racism feeds a victim mentality?

Tony Sewell: Yes, and it’s black kids who suffer the most from this. Two things happen when a victim narrative takes hold. Firstly, you stop recognising our common humanity. You start to think there is something special about you because of your race. Secondly, it’s disempowering. For example, I run a charity called Generating Genius. Last night, we had the launch for our alumni programme. In that room were lots and lots of kids from inner-city backgrounds telling their stories about how they’ve ended up getting top grades and going to top universities, despite coming from the poorest of backgrounds.

If you were to follow a certain narrative, you would think that every black kid in Britain or in London is doing badly. If you saw the room I was in, you would be shocked. But the truth is these kids are not victims, they actually have agency. What we try to do with our programme is we take them away from that noise, all the negative voices. Because then they can believe in their own power. Of course, there are problems with race, and bad things are happening, but it’s not significant enough to prevent you from progressing. The irony is that progress for black kids in a place like London depends on them not listening to all those people that tell them their race matters.

Tony Sewell was talking to Fraser Myers.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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