Monday, October 18, 2010

That Old Lost Love Feeling

Stop me if you've heard this one before: A German Chancellor is preaching religious intolerance.

From Yahoo! News:
BERLIN (AFP) – Germany's attempt to create a multi-cultural society has failed completely, Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the weekend, calling on the country's immigrants to learn German and adopt Christian values.

Merkel weighed in for the first time in a blistering debate sparked by a central bank board member saying the country was being made "more stupid" by poorly educated and unproductive Muslim migrants.
In the U.S., Europe is often looked to as being a consistent employer of more progressive and modern political and sociological views. But Merkel's statements reveal an undercurrent of unenlightened, religiously-biased sentiment that America, though often guilty of (see "Ground Zero Mosque"), rarely sees exhibited by her distant relatives in Europe. It's often assumed that European civilization, having experienced the perils and pitfalls of various societal structures for roughly 1600 years longer than the U.S., has already learned from the mistakes and troubling biases that continue to trip up the American political system (see "Tea Party movement"). But it now appears that, at least in the case of Germany, that was only a false hope.

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