© Jean-Paul Pelissier/Reuters
Conducted by the newspaper Bild together with research institute INSA, the poll showed a dramatic change in the attitude of the German population to Islam over the past year. In January 2015, 37 percent of people said that Islam had a place in Germany, but the figure in the latest poll dropped by 15 percentage points to just 22 percent.
The suspicion towards Islam is overwhelming among AfD voters, 92 percent of whom supported their party's stance, but was spread among members of other parties as well. Only supporters of the Green party were more in favor of Islam than against it (42 percent vs 39 percent).
The negative attitude toward the religion does not directly translate into mistrust toward those adhering to it however. Less than 30 percent said they would not like to live alongside Muslim people, while almost half said they were fine with it.
What the attitude toward Islam does appear to reflect is the fear of so-called "Islamization." Forty-six percent of Germans said they were concerned that their country could be taken over by proponents of political Islam.
The AfD, or Alternative for Germany, adopted its new party program last week, which has an entire section called "Islam is not part of Germany." Among other things, the party wants to ban the construction of mosques and public wearing of the burqa, the full-cover clothing women wear in some Muslim countries.
Critics accuse AfD of playing the xenophobic card and preying on people's fears. The Council of Muslims in Germany has compared the party's ideas to Nazi ideology. Still, the AfD won elections in three regions recently.
Germany is among the European countries hit hardest by the ongoing refugee crisis. Last year, over 1 million asylum seekers arrived in the country from the Middle East. Chancellor Angela Merkel's government declared an open door policy towards refugees, but as problems and costs associated with the inflow of impoverished foreigners started to escalate, the EU sought help from Turkey to curb and reverse the inflow. Brussels promised financial aid and political concessions to Ankara in exchange for halting the flow of refugees and agreeing to take back those whom the Europeans want to deport.
I have watched hundreds of hours of video and read reams of articles from ALL sides of this controversy. There is too much information for me to link here - I have hundreds of bookmarks on this subject.
From all of that, I have concluded that a majority of the Muslim immigrants to Britain, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, and other countries feel there is no room in those countries for Christianity.
Or for the values and behaviors derived therefrom.
Well, unfortunately the native Europeans also feel Christianity has outlived its time. They do not any longer believe the fairy tales foisted upon them 1,700 years ago at the Council of Nicea. When the 300+ assembled bishops, (guided in their deliberations by the Emperor Constantine, the George W. Bush of his day,) came up with a mishmash of wild stories and improbable statements of someone they invented called "God," they found fertile ground for those superstitions in the ignorant people of the region. Today, those wild stories about the God they invented do not cut it in the modern world.
However, the equally wild stories and fables about Mohammed and Allah are still fervently believed by the tribespeople and neuronally challenged camel-herders, of the region of Nicea and thereabouts, pouring into Europe. A boiling and fervent belief in improbable or impossible Islamic nonsense has come up against an icy contempt for the Christian nonsense, and, in boiling water, ice cubes will melt.
As a result, the immigrants are, sadly, right. There is no room in Europe for a lukewarm Christianity, only for a white-hot Islam. The Europeans had better get used once again, as in the past, to groveling in fear and terror before a vengeful God, this time called Allah instead of Yahweh, crafted in the image of one more violent, uneducated, destructive, stupid, and self-righteous Semitic tribe from the hills and deserts of Asia.
Either that, or screw up some of the courage you once had, and drive the ignorant and vicious Semites out. If Hitler was alive, this problem would never have happened. But that is the last thing you want to hear.