09/29/2017
Another New York Times op-ed columnist:
Return of the German VolkUh, Roger Cohen, how many Syrian refugees has Israel taken in?Roger Cohen SEPT. 29, 2017
BERLIN — The Volk is back in its tribal sense. That was the message of Alexander Gauland, a leading politician of the extremist Alternative for Germany (or AfD) party, when he vowed on election night to “take back our country and our Volk!”
Volk means people. Sure it does. It’s a simple little word. Sure it is. Gauland was just feeling giddy because his party had won 94 seats in Parliament, a breakthrough that has reshaped German postwar politics. Sure he was.
I would like to believe in the inoffensive nature of this four-letter word. I can’t, not in Gauland’s mouth. His statement raises the question: Take back Germany from whom? The immigrant rabble, I assume, and the half-breed hordes, and the Muslims who, for the AfD, serve as today’s Jews…..
The Federal Republic has journeyed, with detours, from this exclusionary “volkisch” identity to one that is open and inclusive. German identity can never be a simple thing; history dictates that. But Germans, with each post-1945 generation, have grown more comfortable with themselves. Chancellor Angela Merkel has said flatly: “The Volk is everyone who lives in this country.”
That would include, in a population of 82 million, more than one million recent immigrants (many of them Syrian).
You know, Israel has annexed by right of conquest a pretty underpopulated place where they could give haven to Syrian refugees, some of whom would be feel right at home there: the Golan Heights. Why should Syrian refugees have to move all the way to cold, rainy German, when the sunny, mild Golan Heights is right next door in what the world community still considers Syria?
I presume that Israel has taken in a few wounded ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists, patched them up, and dumped them back in Syria to try to overthrow Israel’s traditional enemy, the legitimate government of Syria. But the official government of Israel policy on permanently taking in Syrian refugees is at least as far right extremist as the AfD Germans you hate so much.
The difference is simply that while AfD endorses the same policies as the government of Israel, the government of Israel is, despite all your quibbles with it, your tribe and AfD in Germany is, in your view, the enemy tribe.
Perhaps the rest of the democratic world should enjoy the same privileges you impute to Israel?
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