The Failure of Open Borders in Germany and Sweden
Chancellor Merkel finally admits the obvious connection between refugee flows and increased security concerns.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has just woken up to the fact that terrorists have been entering her country under the guise of would-be asylum seekers. “There is no doubt that among the so many people who have sought shelter in our country were also persons who have become the focus of the security authorities,” Chancellor Merkel acknowledged. However, as if to exculpate herself from any responsibility, she added, “we should not forget that our country was already in the sights of Islamic terrorism before the many refugees came to us.” Her latter observation begs the question as to why she was so reckless in opening up Germany’s borders to a veritable flood of refugees, without any careful screening, in the first place.
With the upcoming election in mind as she seeks a fourth term, Chancellor Merkel was most likely trying to appear strong in reacting to the latest in a string of radical Islamic terrorist attacks in her country. Terrorists linked to ISIS are suspected of having detonated three bombs on Tuesday, next to a German soccer team bus in the town of Dortmund, which the chancellor called a “repugnant act.”
In September 2015, Chancellor Merkel boasted of how welcoming Germany was to the self-proclaimed refugees pouring in from the Middle East, Afghanistan and North Africa. “The right to political asylum has no limits on the number of asylum seekers,” she said. “As a strong, economically healthy country we have the strength to do what is necessary.” She opened Germany’s borders to nearly a million migrants and refugees from the world’s most terrorist ridden regions.
In 2016, Germany began to reap the horrors of the seeds of radical Islam and jihad that Chancellor Merkel had so enthusiastically planted. For example, ISIS claimed responsibility for the deadly December 19th truck assault on an outdoor Christmas market near a landmark church in Berlin, which killed 12 people and injured nearly 50 other victims. The individual who had allegedly carried out the attack was a 24-year-old Tunisian man whom had traveled to Italy from Tunisia in 2011 and spent time in an Italian jail before arriving in Germany in 2015. Last summer, there were four violent attacks in Germany within just a week’s time, which resulted in deaths and serious injuries. Two of them were committed by Syrian migrants. A third was committed by an Afghan asylum seeker. The fourth, a mass shooting in Munich, was committed by the German-born son of Iranian asylum-seekers.
Like Chancellor Merkel’s Germany, Sweden opened its borders to so-called refugees, only to find its once peaceful society turned into a haven for radical Islamic terrorists.
Sweden has become “a place to Islamize,” as the Gladstone Institute put it. The Swedish Security Service, according to the Gladstone Institute report, “admitted great concern over the possibility that foreign jihadis might take advantage of the Swedish asylum system — through which more than 90% of refugee claimants gain permanent residency status, despite lacking passports or identifying documents — by ‘hiding among the refugees.’”
Sweden had admitted 80,000 asylum seekers in 2014. It admitted more than 160,000 in 2015, which exceeded any other European Union state per capita. The 2015 total included 51,338 asylum seekers from Syria, 41,564 from Afghanistan, 20,857 from Iraq and 5,465 from Somalia. Instead of assimilating into Swedish society, asylum seekers and other migrants from Muslim majority countries have re-created their violence prone, Islamist culture in Sweden.
Sweden has since begun placing more restrictions on admission of asylum-seekers in response to jihadist-inspired acts of violence. But the die has been cast.
In February, a riot broke out in the largely immigrant Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby. According to a report in Nordstjernan, Rinkeby is known as “’Little Mogadishu’ because of the number of Somalis living there. Rinkeby is also the center of the recruiting efforts of al-Shabab, a group with ties to al-Qaida.”
Last Friday, a truck was driven into a crowd of people in a Stockholm shopping center, killing 15 people and injuring at least 15 others. “Sweden has been attacked,” Prime Minister Stefan Lofven declared. “This indicates that it is an act of terror.” The suspect is said to be an ISIS sympathizer from Uzbekistan. The attack followed the pattern of prior ISIS-inspired acts of terrorism weaponizing vehicles, which were seen in Nice, Berlin and London.
Germany and Sweden have been the most open in welcoming would-be “refugees” from terrorist-prone Muslim majority countries. Their reward has been jihadist-inspired acts of terror and spikes in violent crimes by individuals from an alien culture who refuse to assimilate into their host countries. While the pro-refugee and open border progressives try to obscure the truth, the failure of the German and Swedish experiments in opening their borders to refugees and migrants from terrorist-prone countries proves that President Trump’s extreme vetting approach is the correct one.
