German Chancellor Angela Merkel to receive prestigious Four Freedoms Award for 'great moral leadership' at home and in Europe
German Chancellor Angela Merkel to receive prestigious Four Freedoms Award for 'great moral leadership' at home and in Europe
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been named as this year's recipient of a prestigious international award, with organizers lauding her "great moral leadership" in Germany and pivotal role in tackling the crises buffeting Europe.
The Dutch-based Roosevelt Foundation says Merkel will receive the International Four Freedoms Medal at a ceremony in April.
In a statement announcing the award Wednesday, the foundation praised Merkel for her role in the European financial and migrant crises, for leading efforts to bring peace to conflict-torn Ukraine and for showing "great moral leadership as chancellor of all Germans regardless of faith and ethnicity."
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The "great moral leader" has turned Germany into a cesspit.
Cologne attacks: Germany now has North Africa's sex crime troubles
Germany is reeling from the news, hidden for several days because of its political sensitivity, that as many as 90 women were sexually assaulted by a crowd of young men of Middle Eastern appearance outside Cologne's majestic Cathedral on New Year's Eve.
This is, as the local police chief put it, a "whole new dimension of crime" for Germans to confront.
There is a lot we still don't know about the Cologne attacks, including whether they were organised ahead of time on social media and whether the actual culprits were refugees, petty criminals who have been plying the area around Cologne's train station for years, or both. All the police have said is that the complaints were made, in one case of rape, and that the men were aged 18 to 35, many of them drunk and of "Arab or North African" origin.
No matter what the details, this will be political dynamite for Chancellor Angela Merkel. The new mayor of Cologne, who was stabbed in the neck during her election campaign over her support for Merkel's pro-refugee policies, is already being hounded on social media for absurdly advising women to keep "an arm's length" from strange men during the city's carnival season next month.
But the ethnically cleansed Germans must do more:
Language teaching and courses in the laws and customs of the host country, as well as vocational training, need to be generous and often mandatory to turn the tide of refugees that have reached Germany from a problem into a resource, capable of filling Germany's looming demographic deficit. The North African petty criminals around Cologne station are evidence of the inadequacy of previous policies. And if, as is surely probable, recent refugees were also involved, they point to the high cost continued failure would have.
Why not put all those resources and all that energy into raising the German birthrate? True, Germany would lose the raping and criminality, but nothing is perfect.
