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So, this is very interesting. I wonder: was his plan to essentially make this look like an Islamist attack, to stir up hostility toward Muslim immigration? I imagine he understood that everyone would, justifiably, assume that an Arab man driving his car into a Christmas market (with an explosive device inside, no less!) would be interpreted by all sides as an Islamist terror attack. Maybe he was hoping nobody would identify him and discover his Twitter account? If he did expect people to find his account, I really have no idea what political outcome (if any) he was hoping to facilitate as a result of this attack.
On the one hand, his background as a former refugee from the Middle East makes him an incredibly unwieldy weapon for progressives to use to discredit immigration skeptics; on the other hand, his support for the AfD and his criticism of Muslim immigration makes him pretty much impossible to use as a cudgel by the right wing. Some commentators, such as Keith Woods, are taking the position that this proves that all Arab immigration to Europe should be cut off, because even the apparently liberal/assimilated ones are still ticking time bombs of potential violence; this seems fairly tendentious even to me, given what we know about the guy so far.
You really have to be kidding? The Right Wing argument is that he does not belong in Europe, no matter if he's a doctor or what he tweets, in a box or with a fox, not here or there, not anywhere in Europe. That argument can and should be used as a cudgel by the right wing, at least the Right Wing who acknowledges that this is about race and not merely about religion. The people who can't use this as a cudgel are those who pretend that this is just about Islam, and mass Arab migration to Europe would be fine if they just weren't Muslim. Is that an argument you accept Hoffmeister?
"Arabs don't belong in Europe." "But this Arab who slaughtered a bunch of Europeans tweeted pro-Israel stuff!" How could you think that's responsive at all to the argument?
How does a refugee slaughtering a bunch of people in a Christmas market not validate the anti-refugee political perspective? Because the refugee wasn't Muslim? That is just ridiculous.
Keith Woods is correct, and the Right Wing who pretends that mass migration from the third world is only a problem because of religious incompatibility do not form the ranks of the DR, and people like Woods have long made the argument that it's about race and not about religion.
True, but screening people becomes somewhat easier if you limit the number of people coming in. If you’re taking in only about 10,000 you can be pretty sure that the background checks will show criminality, drug use, lack of language skills, troubling political or religious beliefs, and so on. If it’s 100,000 it’s plausible to find things that would show up in a very quick background check, but more will slip by. At 1,000,000 a year, you’ll barely have any idea who these people are or why they’re coming.
And on the tail end, having fewer immigrants means better assimilation because the newcomers must learn the language and culture due to a lack of an ethnic enclave where he doesn’t have to adapt to the language and culture. If a million Swedes moved to the USA, they’d form a Swedish enclave in which Swedish is spoken, people go to the local Swedish Lutheran Church, they all eat Swedish food (Swedish pancakes and meatballs I assume), and so on. This happened in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindsborg,_Kansas) and obviously with groups like Orthodox Jews in New York who still speak Yiddish. Sonnet or later you are taking in so many people from a given background so fast that you simply cannot get them integrated and assimilated at all.
There's a difference between not wanting "low human capital people" (as the kids say these days) to come lower the average quality of life in your town/city/country, and, say, proposing grinding up all the Congolese into Soylent Green while telling them it's nothing personal. No microscope required, it's quite visible with the naked eye. In fact you'd almost have to be trying not to see it.
The difference is one of degree, not kind. The former is less bad than the latter, but they both come from the same malignant well: the belief that the well-being of Mtumbe Ngoube from Kinshasa or Fulan al-Fulani from Karbala matters less than that of John Doe from Kansas City or Max Mustermann from Koln.
There is a story told of Churchill, that he asked some lady
It’s a fun story but it’s actually pretty dumb. There is probably an amount of money that even Elon Musk would suck a dick for, and even if we’re talking about people who don’t desire money, there’s every chance there’s something (health, physical fitness, the resurrection of a loved one, the chance to have children, world peace, a tripling of their beloved dog’s lifespan) they would degrade themselves to have. Churchill himself was surely no different.
There are some things which most people will not do for money, or anything else short of a credible threat of death or hideous pain. In cultures influenced by Abrahamic religion, a straight man sucking dick is one of them. It isn't just a sin - it's an abomination. (Leviticus, passim)
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