German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged her fellow-citizens to stand up more for Christian values, saying Germany suffered from “too little Christianity.”
Addressing her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party in Karlsruhe on 15 November 2010, Mrs Merkel said that she took the current public debate in Germany on Islam and immigration very seriously.
“We don’t have too much Islam, we have too little Christianity. We have too few discussions about the Christian view of mankind,” Mrs Merkel said with applause from the hall.
Germany needs more public discussion “about the values that guide us (and) about our Judeo-Christian tradition. We have to stress this again with confidence, then we will also be able to bring about cohesion in our society,” she added.
Mrs Merkel’s conservative allies have previously called for an end to immigration from “foreign cultures” — a reference to Muslim countries — and more pressure on those who do not want to integrate into German society.
In her 75-minute speech before the audience of 1,000 delegates she also emphasised her party’s Christian roots, conservative family values and spoke out against pre-implantation diagnostics.
In October 2010, Mrs Merkel said that most Turks and Muslims who came to Germany in the 1960s to jumpstart the German economy after World War II have not integrated into German society. They kept their language, religion and most of their cultural habits. Instead of blending in, they created their own parallel societies.
“Of course integration has changed our society, but not at the expense of our core values… We are Christians and this informs everything we do… We are for diversity but we will not abandon our basic beliefs,” she said at the time.
At the beginning of this month, the BBC conducted an interview with Thilo Sarrazin, a writer and former member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, who has changed the debate over immigration in Germany. Mr Sarrazin said “the failure to integrate on the part of migrants from Muslim countries can’t be due to a fault on our side – because all are treated equally. It has to be because of a characteristic of Muslims themselves.”
Sources
New York Times
Reuters
Time Magazine
Spiegel Magazine
Financial Times
BBC News (blog)
Illume Magazine
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