Since she became Chancellor of Germany in 2005, Angela Merkel has been reviled from both sides of the political spectrum. As leader of what is inevitably referred to as the “center-right” Christian Democratic Union [CDU], she aspired to that principled yet compassionate point of view I would define as the essence of true conservatism, thereby alienating those on the Left most of whom seem willing to abandon all Western Values in the name of compassion, and those on the far right who are in fact racists.
In 2010 Merkel declared that multiculturalism had utterly failed, that tolerating the beliefs and values of new immigrants to Germany which were inconsistent with the foundational principles of the West, simply made no sense. According to a Reuters article of Oct. 6 that same year, she declared that the 4 million Muslims already resident within her homeland needed to learn German and integrate both culturally and economically, forsaking the Medieval strictures of Sharia for the principles of the German Constitution. In an effort to achieve that end she sought to have them dispersed throughout the country rather than conspiring together in urban ghettos. Seemingly intent on highlighting either the hypocrisy or naivete of Merkel’s agenda, law professor Hilmar Kruger pointed out just 3 days after the Oct. 6 article that Sharia Law was in fact being used throughout Germany’s Muslim population to settle a variety of legal issues.
The extent to which Merkel was successful in integrating Germany’s Muslim population is not my present concern. What makes her truly amazing was her insistence on standing up for Western values, a position presently being denounced by “intellectuals” throughout North America as racist. That her principled agenda does not make her so is evident in the fact that 2015, for example, saw her welcome 1 million more Muslim migrants into her homeland. And yet a Washington Post article of Dec. 2016 declared that Merkel had called for a ban on face coverings for Islamic women based on a “perceived” threat to her German heritage. The implication of the article, of course, is that she was guilty of racial or religious intolerance, that her revulsion for a Muslim tradition that is clearly indicative of the second-class status of Women throughout Islam was in no way rational or indeed progressive, but just a typically right-wing expression of hate.
The stupidity, real or feigned, behind such denunciations of Europe’s concern with the preservation of its Culture is truly disgusting. It is double-think rife with hypocrisy. I worked for a couple of years beside a young Muslim woman who had not once exposed any part of her head or face other than her eyes. When I mentioned to her at one point that I had never seen her hair, she answered that her hair was for her husband alone. Imagine the outrage from Feminists should White Christian Males submit Western Women to the same level of oppression! And yet when the Brits, whose government had allowed over 100 Sharia courts to operate within their borders, decided to gain control of immigration to their country by leaving the European Union, they were assailed universally by our “progressive intellectuals” as Neo-Nazi racists.
While there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who still subscribe to some of the barbaric aspects of Sharia Law, there are hundreds of millions who do not. Life is complicated and ill-informed generalizations are of no value. Merkel’s “center-right” political career exhibited unequivocal compassion for those seeking to escape the hopelessness of their native lands along with a firm commitment to her Western Values. It is a level of complexity apparently beyond those on the sanctimonious Left, those who have succumbed to the absurdities of Identity Politics: i.e., White Westerners bad, everyone else good; Men bad, Women good; Heterosexuals bad, Non-Binaries good; Successful people bad, poor people good, etc., etc……..You get my drift.