Excerpt:
The attempt to get native Germans to live peacefully side-by-side with foreigners has not worked. In an unprecedented admission that is sure to transform the debate in Germany (and in Europe as a whole), over uncontrolled mass immigration, especially from Muslim countries, German Chancellor Angela Merkel now concedes that German multiculturalism has "failed utterly."
Speaking to a meeting of her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party in Potsdam outside Berlin on October 16, Merkel said: "We are a country which at the beginning of the 1960s actually brought [Muslim] guest workers to Germany. Now they live with us and we lied to ourselves for a while, saying that they will nott stay and that they will have disappeared again one day. That is not the reality. This multicultural approach—saying that we simply live side by side and are happy about each other—this approach has failed, failed utterly."
Merkel's sobering comments follow the publication in October of a survey by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a think tank linked to the center-left Social Democratic Party [SPD], which found that 55% of Germans believe that Arabs are "unpleasant," and over 33% believe the country is being "overrun" by immigrants. The study also noted that "far-right attitudes" are not isolated at the extremes of German society, but to a large degree "at the center of it."