Newsweek — “50 Prominent Germans Condemn Anti-Muslim Rallies” : http://www.newsweek.com/tabloid-prominent-germans-condemn-anti-muslim-rallies-296895
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Germany and Islam
American Thinker
by Mike Konrad
6/27/2017
Excerpt:
Germany has a bizarre historical connection with Islam that lies beneath much of the present day crisis in Europe. One could argue that these connections are just the product of historical coincidences, but with Germany the coincidences seem to add up regularly.
When one studies the age of European imperialism, Germany came late to the game, almost as an afterthought. Bismarck, for all his authoritarian faults, felt that imperialism would do Germany no good, and wanted no part of it. He was overridden by public opinion, and Bismarck’s policy was later repudiated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who wanted Germany to take her “Place in the Sun.”
Imperialism would not have destroyed Germany, per se; smaller and weaker nations such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and even backward Spain all had empires.
But what set Germany apart was a concerted love of Arabs and Islam. There was something deeper and darker to this than mere German MachtPolitik. One of his first acts, upon assuming power as Kaiser, was to visit the Ottoman Empire in 1889, He wore a fez. He offered to arm the Turks.
Sultan Mehmet V greets Kaiser Wilhelm upon his arrival in Constantinople
The Kaiser’s Islamic enthusiasm was fired by an 1889 visit to Turkey, which Bismarck opposed on the grounds that it would gratuitously alarm the Russians. Wilhelm met the murderous Sultan Abdul Hamid II and enjoyed the sinuous gyrations of the Circassian dancers in his Constantinople harem. – New York Review of Books
The Turks were astounded. The Ottoman Empire was on a death watch, and the only reason the European powers did not carve Turkey up is because they feared an intra-Christian war over the pieces. Now, the Kaiser was promising to make Islamic Turkey great again. Kaiser Wilhelm had resurrected the Islamic corpse.
It would only get worse. In 1898, during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the Kaiser made the insane insinuation that were he not already Christian, he would be a Muslim.
A later visit to Jerusalem [in 1898], then under the auspices of the same flattering sultan, left the impressionable Kaiser declaring that, had he arrived agnostic, “I certainly would have turned Mahometan!” Soon the Kaiser was styling himself “Hajji Wilhelm”, the Protector of Muslims. – The Express
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