Islam had better NEVER be part of Germany

German President Joachim Gauck recently said in a newspaper interview that Muslims living in Germany are a part of the country, but that Islam is not. Not everyone agrees, unfortunately. How about asking the people who have to put up with the arrogant, anti-assimiliation Muslims in their neighborhoods?
Gatestone Institute The comments — Gauck is the ninth prominent German politician to voice an opinion about Islam — have sparked a new round in the on-going debate over the role of Islam and Muslim immigrants in Germany.
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During a May 31 interview with the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Gauck was asked about a quote from the previous German president, Christian Wulff, who during a keynote speech to mark the 20th anniversary of German reunification in October 2010, proclaimed that "Islam belongs in Germany” because of the four million Muslims who now live there. Germany has Western Europe’s second-biggest Islamic population after France, with Turks the single biggest minority.

Gauck responded by saying that Wulff had wanted to encourage Germans to open themselves up to the reality that "many Muslims live in this country,” but that he, Gauck, would have worded things differently than did Wulff.

Gauck continued, "I would have simply said that the Muslims who are living here are a part of Germany,” but that religion should not be the defining mark for immigrants there. "Anybody who has come here,” he said, "and does not just pay their taxes, but also likes to be here, partly because there is a level of justice and freedom not available in their country of origin, they are all one of us; so long as they adhere to our basic rules.”

The 72-year-old Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor, also said he could understand people who might ask, "Where has Islam made an impression on this Europe? Did it experience the Enlightenment, or even the Reformation? … I am highly anticipating the theological discourse about a European Islam.”

The leader of the environmentalist Green Party, Cem Özdemir, a German of Turkish descent, told the daily newspaper Ruhr Nachrichten that he could not understand Gauck’s differentiation between Islam and Muslims. "When the president states that Muslims who live here belong to Germany,” Özdemir said, "then of course Islam it part of Germany too.”

Alexander Dobrind, however, the general secretary of the Christian Social Union (CSU), a conservative political party based in the southern German state of Bavaria and a partner in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right ruling coalition, said, "Gauck has clearly found the right words. Germany is a country with a Christian character, a Christian history and a thoroughly Christian value system.” (...)