Germany’s Fork in the Road Moment

and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

News broke this morning that “a car” had driven into a crowd of 2,500 Versi trade union demonstrators in Munich, at 10:30 AM (CET) — on the eve of the Munich Security Conference and only ten days away from a federal election, in which the national populist party AfD are poised to make unprecedented gains. If you were reading the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters, or the BBC, you may infer from the headlines that the automobile in question was possessed by a poltergeist, and swerved without cause into pedestrians, killing one and injuring twenty-eight — including children. Panic might ensue, with the fear that any of our vehicles could take on a life of its own, and swerve into oncoming traffic without warning.

But of course, that wasn’t the case. Unless Elon Musk has developed a sentient and malevolent AI overnight, and installed it into every Mini Cooper, it’s the man behind the wheel’s fault. Predictably, the man was a 24-year-old Afghan immigrant, and beneficiary of Germany’s generous asylum system, arrested at the scene. Officials confirmed that the suspect was known to police for theft and drug offences — which makes you question why he was still in Germany. In fact, Der Spiegel reported he arrived in Germany in 2016, had his asylum claim rejected, and was due to be deported — but was granted a “tolerance” permit, suspending his removal from the country. What you tolerate you permit. Today’s attack is just the latest entry in a recurring trend of migrant crimes and terror attacks in Germany, and foreshadows an overdue rightward lurch in the forthcoming February 23rd federal election.

Muslims in general and Afghan nationals appear to have a pattern of violent crime in Germany. In January, a 28-year-old Afghan man stabbed a 41-year old man and a two-year old boy to death, and injured two others, in Schoental park, in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg. On May 31, 2024, 25-year-old Afghan asylum seeker Sulaiman Ataee attacked an anti-Islam Pax Europa rally in Mannheim, stabbing a 29-year-old police officer to death. In the now-infamous footage, the officer was too preoccupied with restraining one of the Pax Europa activists who were trying to subdue the attacker to defend himself. One of the six injured, Michael Stürzenberger, was then fined €3,600 on November 25 after judges in Hamburg ruled he had defamed refugees and Muslims at a protest in October, 2020. Given his attacker, although not prosecuted as a terrorist, told neighbours he wanted a caliphate, and sympathised with Islamic state, it’s hard to argue that Stürzenberger’s fears are unfounded.

It isn’t just Afghans, of course. In August, a Syrian asylum seeker named Issa al H stabbed two men and a woman to death, and injured eight others, at a “Festival of Diversity”. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on Telegram. Issa al H infiltrated Germany via Bulgaria in 2023, and evaded a scheduled deportation under the Dublin Agreement by going on the run. The deportation attempt was inexplicably abandoned, and Issa al H was provided accommodation in Solingen, at taxpayers’ expense. He repaid that kindness in blood.

In December, fifty-year-old Saudi Arabian national Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove a car into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, injuring 300 and killing six. Abdulmohsen moved to Germany in 2006, and was granted asylum in 2016, on the grounds that he — an ex-Muslim and avowed feminist — would face persecution if returned home. His motive remains unclear: with some suggesting he resented Germans for recreating the Islamist theocracy he fled in Saudi Arabia through their asylum policy; while others predicting he practiced Taqiyya. German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said it was “clear to see” the suspect held “Islamophobic” views; whereas the Saudi government say they warned German authorities that Abdulmohsen held “very extreme views” four times, but were not listened to. In either case, had Abdulmohsen not been allowed into the country, he would not have been able to weaponise his hatred behind a steering wheel and kill six people. If the German politicians had not so utterly betrayed their population, through a misguided sense of collective guilt for historical atrocities, then those people would still be alive, and German families able to visit Christmas markets in peace.

What is striking is that Germany’s asylum seekers are overwhelmingly men. 3.48 million refugees lived in Germany as of September 2024 — comprising 4 percent of the entire population. From January to November 2023, 50.7 percent of first-time asylum applicants in Germany were men aged 16 – 40, which is almost double (26.6 percent) that of 2020. 71.1 percent of all applicants in 2023 were male. In 2023, Afghans had only a 1 percent rejection rate for first-time applicants in Germany. The same trend is observable in Britain: which granted 16,000 Afghans automatic indefinite-leave-to-remain (ILR) with its humanitarian visa scheme in 2022; and saw 4,859 predominantly-male Afghan illegal migrants cross the English Channel in small boats in 2024.

The definition of a refugee is, according to the 1951 UN Convention,

“someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”

As journalist Anna Slatz asked, “What are male refugees from Afghanistan fleeing? Oppressing women?” If the advertisements used by people-smugglers are any indication of their intent, perhaps they weren’t running from the oppression of women in their homelands, but rather coming to exploit the women of Europe: mothers, sisters, friends, and daughters instead. Between 2017 – 2021, Afghan and Pakistani men committed 16 times more rapes than German nationals. Four in ten sex crimes in Germany every year are committed by foreigners.

This has been obvious to anyone without willful ideological blindness since the mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Years Eve, 2015. Gangs of North African and Arab assailants surrounded women, groped and digitally raped them, and robbed them. Over 1,200 criminal complaints were filed, including over 500 allegations of sexual assault. This predation is a common practice in that part of the world — called Taharrush in Egypt. One harrowing example was when CBS News correspondent Lara Logan covered the resignation of Hosni Mubarak in Tahrir Square, Cairo. Logan was surrounded by hundreds of men who tore off her clothes, digitally raped her, and took photographs, before soldiers dispersed the crowd and carried Logan to safety. She was hospitalized, and her attackers have never been brought to justice. Predictably, this still happens to women across Europe — including on New Years Eve, 2024, in Italy, where two British tourists were sexually assaulted by a gang of North African men. When they reported it to the police, they were dismissed, and told “it would be useless” to try to find the perpetrators.

Why are these men being admitted into Europe via the asylum system? Yes, individual politicians are to blame. Who can forget Angela Merkel’s disastrous proclamation, “Wir schaffen das,” which encouraged 1.2 million people to apply for asylum within a year. But international legal frameworks, designed for a different cohort of refugees, compel European nations to admit millions of these illegal and economic migrants — and frustrate attempts to deport them. The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and its associated Court, continues to thwart the lawful removal of foreign criminals from the UK.

The ECHR is the source of woes for Britain, France, Holland, Austria, and any other country wedded to this irrational legislation with a substantial population of asylum migrants. In particular, Article 8, protecting a “right to family life,” has frustrated the removal of many foreign criminals. Just this week, the Telegraph revealed Albanian criminal Klevis Disha won a deportation order appeal using Article 8 of the ECHR, because his ten-year-old son “will not eat the type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad.” Repeat offender Mauro Rodrigues was spared deportation to Portugal, because his son shows signs of autism. (No reason was given as to why Portugal is particularly unfriendly for autistic children.) Puspam Elangeeran, a Sri Lankan man who arrived in Britain in 2000 and fought extradition for twenty-five years won his Article 8 appeal on the grounds that he had been in the UK “too long,” and would face “unjustifiable harsh consequences” if returned home. A Nigerian woman, whose asylum applications were rejected eight times, was given right to remain in the UK because she had joined terrorist group the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in 2017 “in order to create a claim for asylum”. Most perversely, amidst the rape gang scandal, a Pakistani pedophile who targeted targeting “pre-pubescent” girls, aged 12, 13 and 14, was protected by Article 8. The reason given: his deportation would be too harsh on his toddlers — despite not being allowed to see his children without supervision.

Most alarmingly, Article 8 of the ECHR was used this week to grant a family of six from Gaza the right to settle in the UK. The application was made through an asylum scheme for Ukrainian refugees — who are not given ILR, and will return home to rebuild when the war ends. During a Parliamentary debate before last year’s election, former shadow Immigration Minister, Stephen Kinnock confirmed that the Labour government-in-waiting were planning to make a family reunification scheme for Palestinains to claim refugee status “operational.” Turns out, they need not have done it, because the ECHR as applied by an activist judge has set precedent for them to come anyway. Keir Starmer confirmed he opposed the decision, and would seek to close the loophole which allows lawyers to circumvent immigration policy, during Prime Minister’s Questions. However, given Starmer wrote the textbook for lawyers on Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act (1998), which embedded the ECHR into British law, we have little reason to believe him. Add to that Labour making it easier

What can be done? German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said, “He must be punished and he must leave the country.” In 2024, Scholz’s government passed the Repatriation Improvement Act to expedite the removal of criminal foreign nationals. Deportations increased by 30 percent (16,430) between June 2023 – 2024 — but these were mainly to other European Union nations, per the Dublin Agreement. To truly deal with the scale of the foreign criminal and fraudulent refugee problem, Germany must withdraw from the UN Refugee Convention, and replace it with a national refugee policy which confines applications to the continent of origin. This would allow Germany to admit culturally-proximate temporary refugees from Ukraine, while refusing entry to all economic migrants and Islamist terrorists from the Middle East and Africa.

Similarly, Germany may want to revisit their membership of the ECHR, and develop their own more limited national human rights law. With the yoke of these antiquated legal frameworks lifted, Germany, the UK, and other European nations could conduct mass deportations of all illegal immigrants, and the foreign nationals in their prisons, to their nations of origin. For those using the services of international people-trafficking gangs, the UK could use the Ascension Islands, prison island of Pitcairn, or another sparsely-populated British overseas territory to detain illegal migrants who destroy their documentation, until such a time they disclose the nation of origin they can be returned to. Germany may seek to broker a similar deal with a third-party nation — as Australian Prime Minister Tony Aboott did with Papua New Guinea, preventing migrants from Indonesia, Iran and Sri Lanka arriving in the country in small boats. (Sound familiar?)

While illegal migrants, convicted criminals, and failed asylum applicants are being detained, deterred, and deported, reforms can be made to citizenship application and benefits laws to encourage the return of net-dependents to their nations of origin. We suggest a means-tested returns scheme for foreign nationals who have been granted citizenship or ILR in the UK. For net-taxpayers who are disinclined to assimilate culturally, the Swedish model of offering a subsidised voluntary return could work. But offering this to all new arrivals who have taken advantage of Europe’s economy and welfare systems is not viable, nor fair on native taxpayers.

For net-tax-recipients — who comprise 95 percent of all annual visas in the UK — right to remain could be revoked, and these dependents can be deported. Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch, herself an immigrant, has suggested similar reforms to ILR rules: extending the application period from five to ten years, and barring anyone who entered the country illegally, overstayed their visa, committed crime, or accessed benefits or social housing in that time from ever applying for ILR or citizenship. This could be strengthened by limiting ILR to countries whose expats data from Denmark and the Netherlands show are likely to be law-abiding economic contributors: namely Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The case of Shamima Begum, the British-born Bangladeshi teenager who flew to Syria and married an ISIS terrorist, sets precedent for revoking the citizenship of dual-nationals who commit crimes or do demonstrable harm to our country. Germany passed a law last year allowing foreigners to hold dual passports. Those who are net-dependents or have committed crimes should have their German citizenship revoked, and returned to the states for which they also hold passports.

For remaining migrants, the “anti-ghetto” policies practiced by the centre-left Danish Social Democrats, could be emulated to break up the ethnic enclaves which have established themselves apart from, and are hostile to, the host population. The languages of each European nation must be the only offered by public services. NGOs promoting ethno-cultural siloing under the auspices of “Diversity” and multiculturalism must be defunded. Legislation — like the Equality Act (2010) and Charities Act (2011) in the UK — which compels the government to fund these subversive organisations, under the guise of “the promotion of religious or racial harmony”, must be repealed. Mosques, madrassas, and Islamic centres — the gain-of-function labs for Islamist Da’wah — must be closed and converted to assimilation centers where the local language, laws, and cultural norms are taught to those immigrants allowed to remain in the country.

This may upset the liberal sensitivities of Europeans, who cling to their identity of being tolerant and open at a time where it is no longer viable.  Germans may have a chance at the upcoming election to, yes, vote for change. But whomever wins power, must recognize Germany’s fork in the road moment: do more of the same, and continue on the path of decline; or embark on the path of restoration of national identity, national heritage, and national security, and establish a government that serves and protects her citizens. The asylum system, and immigration more broadly, has become a way for people who hate our way of life to enter our home and attack our families. The culprits are predictable, the ideology known, and the pile of bodies already far too high. Act, for it is already very late.