By Steve Sailer
09/14/2018
German technocrat Thilo Sarrazin, author of 2010′s Germany Abolishes Itself, which sold an insane 1.5 million copies, has a new book out, much to the disgust of everybody except German bookbuyers, who have bought up 100,000 copies in two weeks.
From the Financial Times of London:
Hostile Takeover: How Islam Hinders Progress and Threatens Society, by Thilo Sarrazin
An Islamophobic diatribe disguised as a work of scholarship
In the charged atmosphere since neo-Nazis rampaged in Chemnitz last month, this book seems like a live grenade thrown into a munitions dump
Review by Guy Chazan SEPTEMBER 9, 2018
There was no doubting what the staff at Dussmann, Berlin’s largest bookshop, thought of Thilo Sarrazin’s new book. They placed it next to Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning.
It’s no wonder. Feindliche Übernahme — or, to give it its full title, Hostile Takeover: How Islam Hinders Progress and Threatens Society — has the potential to become a bible of Germany’s new right. It provides the pseudo-intellectual underpinning for a xenophobic worldview that is striking ever-deeper roots in German society and poisoning its politics. …
A former senior civil servant in Berlin’s finance ministry and ex-director of the Bundesbank, Sarrazin has form. His 2010 book Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Is Abolishing Itself) claimed that the German nation was committing collective suicide by allowing in so many uneducated Muslims. It was a bestseller, shifting more than 1.5m copies, and paved the way for the anti-immigration, anti-Islam Alternative for Germany, now the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. If anything, this book is even more incendiary. As one paper observed: “Germany needs this book like an outbreak of Ebola.”
Sarrazin is neither a scholar of Islam nor a theologian. He knows no Arabic, and read the Koran in German translation. But that did not stop him launching a 495-page screed against the religion and its adherents.
In the Koran, Sarrazin sees only “intolerance, violence, hatred for infidels, backwardness and the oppression of women”. Islamic societies are described as backward, undemocratic, plagued by war and marked by a lack of intellectual curiosity. All, he says, are sliding inexorably towards fundamentalism.
While some scholars might put the blame on corrupt elites, the legacy of colonialism, or military intervention, Sarrazin singles out the malign effect of Islam as the sole source of their woes.
Et cetera et cetera …
The reviewer is the FT’s Berlin bureau chief
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