From the New York Times:
A Girl’s Killing Shakes Germany’s Migration Debate
The body of a 14-year-old girl was found buried by rail tracks near Wiesbaden in southwestern Germany.
By Katrin Bennhold
June 8, 2018It was a gruesome murder: A 14-year-old girl was raped and strangled, her body buried under brushwood in a secluded area near the railway tracks near her hometown in western Germany.
But the fact that the chief suspect is an Iraqi asylum seeker has turned a terrible crime into political dynamite.
On Friday, the case dominated the German news media and became the latest cudgel for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s opponents and, some predicted, a potential turning point in the migration debate in a country where some 10,000 asylum seekers still enter every month.
There is no doubt the murder has given ammunition to those who want to get tougher, led by the far right, who are waging a widening challenge to what they contend is the government’s botched handling of asylum cases.
The killing comes on top of a deepening scandal and calls for a full-blown parliamentary investigation over allegations that civil servants may have granted asylum to as many as 1,000 migrants in exchange for money — and that some of those migrants may have been criminals or even terrorism suspects.
The murder suspect, identified as Ali Bashar, a 20-year-old Iraqi, arrived in Germany in October 2015, shortly after Ms. Merkel opened the borders to hundreds of thousands of migrants.
Once again, let me point out that that our lack of a handy, agreed-upon term for this important historical event, in the way that “Brexit” and “Trump” are useful shorthands for subsequent reactions to this, makes it hard for the average New York Times subscriber to remember the chain of historical causality.
To the typical NYT reader, Brexit and Trump came out of the blue with no causation, and therefore can only have been the result of the nearly ineradicable evil residing in the bad blood of native British and American voters, which can only be bred out by a lengthy eugenics program involving mass migration into these benighted countries.
If we had a term like, I dunno, “Merkenter” it would be easier for people to remember that 2015′s Merkenter helped cause 2016′s Brexit.
He was rejected in late 2016, but was allowed to stay in the country while his appeal was pending.
“If he had been deported, she would still be alive,” read a headline in the country’s largest tabloid, Bild, which devoted two pages to the case.
In the meantime, he came to the attention of the police several times, involving allegations of jostling a police officer, robbing a passer-by and carrying a knife.
Last Saturday, he and seven other members of his family managed to flee the country, boarding a plane in Düsseldorf with papers apparently issued by the Iraqi Consulate but featuring false names, after paying cash for a one-way fare to Istanbul and then on to Iraq, where he has since been arrested.
The case is not linked to the scandal at the German migration agency, but together they have played into fears that Ms. Merkel’s government is not in control of the migrant situation.
The NYT’s write-up is surprisingly lacking in the usual suggestions that anybody who is distressed over a 14-year-old girl’s murder must be stupid and evil.
