Salafist Jihadists in Germany

by Soeren Kern 

June 5, 2014 at 5:00 am

Counter-terrorism efforts are too focused on security-related threats rather than on prevention and combating radicalization at the earliest stages of indoctrination.

Salafist groups are recruiting and radicalizing young Muslims under the guise of doing "mission work."

A Salafist demonstration in Solingen, Germany on May 1, 2012, moments before it degenerated into a violent riot. (Image source: YouTube)

Salafism is the fastest growing Islamist movement in Germany, and Salafist jihadists pose one of the greatest threats to national security, according to a new German intelligence report.

The annual report—known in German as the Verfasungsschutzbericht Niedersachsen 2013—focuses on threats to the democratic order in the northwestern German state of Lower Saxony, home to a sizeable Muslim community.

The 196-page document was prepared by the Lower Saxony branch of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), and was made public by Boris Pistorius, the Interior Minister of Lower Saxony, at a special press conference held in the city of Hannover on May 25.

Despite its regional focus, the report provides a wealth of information about the rise of radical Islam in Germany as a whole.

Read it all here.

German Children to Know Sperm Donor Fathers

A German court has ruled that sperm donor children have a right to know the identity of their biological fathers.

"The interest of the plaintiff in ascertaining her parentage is assessed to be higher than the interests of the defence and the right to a nondisclosure of donor information," the court ruled in the case of a 21-year-old woman known as Sarah P.

The Federal Association of Reproductive Medical Centres was pleased with the decision. It said that doctors would also benefit, as they could not be deemed culpable of breaching patient-doctor confidentiality when they informed the children of sperm donors.

"The government has to introduce a register in which all the sperm donors and the children are kept permanently. At the moment these documents are kept by the doctors who are responsible for the treatment," said Dr. Andreas Hammel, who runs a sperm bank in Cologne. About 100,000 children have been born in Germany through sperm donation.

Related reading: Sperm Donation Needs Regulation; Interview with Dr. Andreas Hammel (in German)

Government Tries to Block Homeschooling Refugees

Joseph Knippenberg

Yesterday, a couple of headlines caught my eye. “Homeschooling Not a Fundamental Right, Justice Dept. Argues.” That one came from evangelical commentator Napp Nazworth. “Homeschooling Not a Fundamental Right Says Justice Department” was our old friend Joe Carter’s riff on the same theme. Both articles were inspired by a piece written by the Home School Legal Defense Association’s Michael Farris, in which he responded to the Justice Department’s brief in a case HSLDA is litigating on behalf of a German family that is seeking asylum in the United States. (All the relevant briefs can be downloaded here.)

The case involves the Romeike family, which has run afoul of Germany’s compulsory schooling laws. Alone in Western Europe, Germany offers no conscientious exemption from attending state or state-supervised schools. Homeschoolers are treated like truants–indeed, arguably worse than mere truants–with parents subjected to mounting fines, jailtime, and forcible removal of the children from the family home. Most German families that seek to homeschool their children leave the country. (Indeed, there was one such family involved in our homeschool group.)

Read it all here.

Thalidomide Survivors Want Apology and More

The German company responsible for manufacturing a drug that directly caused thousands of babies to be born with birth defects apologized Friday, 50 years after thalidomide was pulled off the market. Victims, often born with shortened limbs and missing arms and legs, quickly described the apology as insufficient, saying it was time for the company to begin paying out compensation, reports Reuters.

The drug, a powerful sedative, was given to pregnant women to combat morning sickness but was pulled off the market in 1961 after thousands of babies were born with defects. The drug was never approved in the United States, points out the Associated Press.

Read it all here.

Nazi Criminal Medical Experiments

The German physicians who ran SS and Wehrmacht medical institutions, along with medical personnel at lower levels, participated actively in carrying out Nazi extermination plans. SS physicians assigned to the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, played a special role. They conducted criminal medical experiments on prisoners and committed other acts that violated medical ethics. Having furthered the extermination program in the concentration camps, they have gone down in history as medical criminals.

The SS physicians who carried out pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz included:

Professor Dr. Carl Clauberg

He experimented with sterilization in the camp. Part of Block No. 10 in the Main Camp was put at his disposal. Several hundred Jewish women from various countries lived in two large rooms on the second floor of the building. Clauberg developed a method of non-surgical mass sterilization that consisted of introducing into the female reproductive organs a specially prepared chemical irritant that produced sever inflammation. Within several weeks, the fallopian tubes grew shut and were blocked. Clauberg's experiments killed some of his subjects, and others were put to death so that autopsies could be performed.


In June 1943, Clauberg wrote to Himmler:

"The non-surgical method of sterilizing women that I have invented is now almost perfected . . . As for the questions that you have directed to me, sir, I can today answer them in the way that I had anticipated: if the research that I am carrying out continues to yield the sort of results that it has produced so far (and there is no reason to suppose that this shall not be the case), then I shall be able to report in the foreseeable future that one experienced physician, with an appropriately equipped office and the aid of ten auxiliary personnel, will be able to carry out in the course of a single day the sterilization of hundreds, or even 1,000 women."

Dr. Horst Schumann

Like Clauberg, Schumann was searching for a convenient means of mass sterilization that would enable the Third Reich to carry out the biological destruction of conquered nations by "scientific methods"--through depriving people of their reproductive capacity. "X-ray sterilization" equipment was set up for Schumann in one of the barracks at Birkenau. Every so often, several dozen Jewish men and women prisoners were brought in. The sterilization experiments consisted of exposing the women's ovaries and the men's testes to X-rays. Schumann applied various intensities at various intervals in his search for the optimal dose of radiation. The exposure to radiation produced severe burns on the belly, groin, and buttocks areas of the subjects, and festering sores that were resistant to healing. Many subjects died from complications. The results of the X-ray sterilization experiments were unsatisfactory. In an article that he sent to Himmler in April 1944, titled "The Effect of X-Ray Radiation on the human Reproductive Glands," Schumann expressed a preference for surgical castration, as being quicker and more certain.

Dr. Mengele

Josef Mengele held a Ph.D. and a medical doctorate. In close collaboration with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Genetics, and Eugenics, he studied the phenomena of twins, as well as the physiology and pathology of dwarfism. He was also interested in people with different-colored irises and in the etiology and treatment of noma ("water cancer" of the cheek). This latter disease, widespread in the Gypsy Camp, had been previously almost unknown in Europe. Mengeles first experimental subjects were Gypsy children. He had a laboratory in the so-called "Gypsy Family Camp." On Mengele's orders, children suffering from noma were put to death in order for pathology investigations to be carried out. Organs and even complete heads of children were preserved and sent in jars to institutions including the Medical Academy in Graz, Austria.


Mengele also began selecting dwarves and persons with physical peculiarities (including inborn disabilities and the developmental defects that appear in dwarfism) from the Jewish transports brought to Birkenau for extermination, from the Jewish "Theresienstadt Family Camp" in Birkenau, and from the so-called Mexico (Sector BIII).


In the first phase of his experiments, Mengele subjected pairs twins and people with physical handicaps to special medical examinations that could be carried out on the living organism. Usually painful and exhausting, these examinations lasted for hours and were a difficult experience for starved, terrified children (for such were the majority of the twins). The subjects were photographed, plaster casts were made of their teeth and jaws, and their fingerprints and toeprints were taken. As soon as the examinations of a given pair of twins or dwarf were finished, Mengele ordered them killed by phenol injection so that he could go on to the next phase of his experiments, the comparative analysis of internal organs at autopsy. "Scientifically" interesting anatomical specimens were preserved and shipped to the Institute in Berlin-Dahlem for more detailed examination.

Dr Johann Paul Kremer

The killing of prisoners was also accompanied by research into the changes that occur in the human organism as a result of starvation--in particular, liver atrophy ("braune Atrophie"). This research was carried out at Auschwitz Concentration Camp by SS-Obersturmführer Johann Paul Kremer, M.D., Ph.D., professor at the University of Münster, where he lectured on anatomy and human genetics. At the Block No. 28 clinic in the main camp, he carried out assessments of prisoners attempting to gain admission to the hospital. Many of them were at the point of exhaustion, in the "Musselman" state, in the final stages of starvation to death. Kremer ordered most of them killed by phenol injection. Kremer selected prisoners who struck him as particularly good experimental material, and questioned them just before their deaths, as they lay on the autopsy table awaiting injection, about such personal details as their weight before arrest and any medicines they had used recently. In some cases, he ordered these prisoners photographed. Before their bodies were cold, they were subjected to autopsies and slides were made for Kremer of the liver, spleen, and pancreas.

SS physicians Friedrich Entress, Helmuth Vetter, and Eduard Wirths

In 1941-1944, SS camp physicians Friedrich Entress, Helmuth Vetter, and Eduard Wirths carried out clinical trials of the tolerance and efficacy of new medications and drugs, with such code names as B-1012, B-1O34, B-1O36, 3582, P-111, rutenolu, and peristonu, on Auschwitz Concentration Camp prisoners. They did so on commission from IG Farbenindustrie, and particularly from the Bayer firm, which was part of that cartel. These preparations were given to prisoners suffering from contagious diseases, who had in many cases been deliberately infected.

Prof. Dr. August Hirt

In 1942, SS-Hauptsturmführer Prof. Dr. August Hirt, chairman of the anatomy department at the Reich University in Strassburgu, set about assembling a collection of Jewish skeletons under the auspices of the Ahnenerbe Foundation. To this end, he received permission from Himmler to select the required number of prisoners at Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The selection of 115 persons (79 Jewish men, 30 Jewish women, 2 Poles, and 4 "Asians"--probably Soviet POWs) and the preliminary preparation, consisting of biometrical measurements and the collection of personal data, were carried out by Hirt's collaborator, SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Bruno Beger, who arrived in Auschwitz in the first half of 1943. Berger finished his work by June 15, 1943. After going through quarantine, some of the prisoners whom Berger selected were sent in July and early August to Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp, where they were killed in the gas chamber. The victims' corpses were sent to Hirt as material for his skeleton collection, which was intended for use in anthropological studies that would demonstrate the superiority of the Nordic race.

From here.

Swedish Home School Leader in Exile

Swedish family policies are lauded for enabling women to go to work as well as have children. Sweden has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe. What you can do with your children once you have them, however, is not altogether a matter of choice.

You can put them in a free kindergarten, costing $20,000 per child a year, from the time they are one year old, but if you wanted to look after them yourself at home you would be pretty much on your own. Homecare allowances are small and few and far between.

And if you want to educate your child at home, you are in real trouble. Home-schooling is banned in the Scandinavian utopia and families who defy the ban are feeling the full force of the law. Several families have gone into exile in neighbouring countries (which allow home-schooling) as a result, and a handful living on the Finnish Aland Islands were joined in early February by the most high-profile home-schooling dissident yet -- President of the Swedish Association for Home Education (ROHUS), Jonas Himmelstrand, his wife and three children.

For more than three years Mr Himmelstrand and his wife have had a conflict with the Uppsala municipality over educating their daughter (now 13) then their younger son (7) at home. After two years they were able to appeal to a court, but while the court decision was pending, the civic authorities continued what Mr Himmelstrand calls a “political persecution” of his family. In November they were reported to the local “social authorities” and, around Christmas, received notice of fines -- US$25,000 for their daughter’s non-attendance at school in the 2010-2011 year, and $15,000 for not enrolling their son for the current school year.

The recent punitive action occurred after Mr Himmelstrand debated home education on national radio with the chair of the Education Committee of the Swedish Parliament. Coincidence? It also came at the end of a year in which he spoke internationally about Swedish family policies, presenting a critical view based on his research for the Swedish family association, Haro.

The social authority decided not to investigate the family but told Mr Himmelstrand that if he wanted to home educate safely he should leave Sweden. Staring financial ruin in the face and refusal on the part of the authorities to discuss the issues with them, the family quietly left Sweden in early February.

”It is an incredible relief, and only now are we starting to understand the degree of pressure we have lived under for many years”, says Jonas Himmelstrand. ”At the same time it is an almost surreal experience to be forced to leave Sweden for an issue which in most of the democratic world, and by the UN, is regarded as a human right.”

He is vowing to continue the work of ROHUS. ”In fact, we will be more effective when we do not feel our families are under threat.”

According to the report here

Home education is regarded by the UN as a valid form of education under the concept of ”the right of education”. Home education is permitted in most of the world’s democracies with the exception of Germany (under their school law of 1938) and now Sweden.

Source:  Mercatornet


Related reading: Federal Government Tries to Block Homeschooling Refugees

Bonn II Conference

December 05, 2011
by Charles Recknagel

BONN, Germany -- The message coming from Bonn was clear: the international community intends to support Afghanistan after foreign combat troops leave the country, and that means new training for Afghanistan's security forces and further development aid for its economy.

At least that's the message conveyed by the bevy of high-powered representatives of 85 countries and 16 international organizations gathered at the so-called Bonn II conference.

But if participants' focus was on committing to Afghanistan after foreign troops leave by the end of 2014, two key players made their presence felt by their absence: Pakistan and the Taliban.

​​"We would, of course, have benefited from Pakistan's contribution to this conference," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted. "And to that end, nobody in this hall is more concerned than the United States is about getting an accurate picture of what occurred in the recent border incident."


Damage Control
Pakistan said it would not come after NATO accidentally attacked two of its border posts late last month, killing 24 Pakistani soldiers.

Pakistan is a key player in the Afghan crisis because it is on Pakistani soil that Afghan insurgents have their safe havens. Islamabad also is widely believed to wield such influence with some Taliban groups -- particularly the Haqqani faction -- that Islamabad's cooperation is needed to bring them into any Afghan peace process.

Islamabad's boycott left Kabul, which has difficult relations with its neighbor, in the awkward position of trying to do damage control.

Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister Jawed Ludin told RFE/RL that Afghanistan and Pakistan continued to talk bilaterally about security matters no matter what happened on the larger world stage.

"Well, Pakistan's support is absolutely crucial, but we are working with them on that on a bilateral basis," Ludin said. "That is a process that is ongoing, as I said. But their absence from this conference is not going to affect our bilateral relationship."

For it's part, the Taliban's absence only further underlined the challenges to peace in Pakistan. Afghan officials confirmed to RFE/RL that no active members of the Taliban, nor any prominent former members of the organization, were present in Bonn.


No Ignoring The Neighbors
Yet Pakistan's and the Taliban's absence was important for other reasons as well. One is the much-voiced hope in Bonn that peace in Afghanistan could help the entire region become more peaceful and prosperous.

As Afghan President Hamid Karzai told the conference: "A stable, secure, and developed Afghanistan is not just the noble desire of the Afghan people and our international friends. It is a necessity if the region is to achieve security and meaningful economic integration."

Kabul and the international community know that one day Afghanistan will have to stand on its own economic base, and that base can only come through trade with its immediate and extended neighbors.
Other Kabul officials brought this same message with them as they attended the conference.

Afghan Finance Minister Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal told RFE/RL that Kabul wanted good economic relations with all of its neighbors, even those like Iran that today give its Western backers cause for alarm.

"We don't get involved in the politics of the U.S. and others. We have kept the best of relationships with Pakistan. We have kept the best of relations with Iran. We want to keep the best of relations and the U.S. is supportive of this," Zakhilwal said.

"Again, they are keeping their bilateral politics with Iran and everybody else to themselves and do not make it part of their policy in Afghanistan," he noted. "And Afghans genuinely want their country to move toward stability and to become a genuine, active part of the region which includes Iran, which includes Pakistan, and which includes the north, China, and everyone else."

Because of its location, Afghanistan is a land bridge for transit, transportation, and connectivity within the region. Routes through Afghanistan could provide Central Asia with direct access to the booming markets of India, a prospect that interests gas-exporting Turkmenistan, to mention just one state.
This conference took place 10 years after the first Bonn conference sought to set out the foundations of a new Afghanistan following the toppling of the Taliban in 2001.

The conference did not focus on pledges of new dollar amounts for Afghanistan but on showing that the world's willingness to help the strife-torn country remains undiminished.

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/pakistan_taliban_absence_felt_at_afghan_conference/24412372.html

UN's Flawed Fertility Figures

NEW YORK, August 25 (C-FAM) The UN has reversed a decade of speculation about a demographic winter in the West, and now says that every country will achieve replacement fertility by 2100 resulting in a global population of 10 billion. The problem is there is no basis for their turnabout.

UN agencies are hailing new numbers as evidence of overpopulation in the developing world and vindication of decades of anti-natal policies in the West, but the scientific basis of the latest UN forecasts is slim.

The most significant change in the UN’s new numbers is an increase in the predicted convergence rate from 1.85 children per woman, below replacement, to 2.1, about replacement fertility.

While the UN claims there is consensus on the matter, demographers have long argued that there is no evidence to support the assumption that global fertility will ever converge, and no basis for the assertion that all nations go through three phases of demographic change: from declining birth rates where most developing nations are today, to below replacement rates experienced by all developed countries except the US, and finally to recovery at near replacement rates which a few Northern European countries have achieved.

Adherents to the recovery hypothesis say that the dip in European fertility rates may be due to women’s delaying childbearing. But as a new RAND study points out, “changes in birth timing can affect short-term birthrates” but “the effects are mild, and the result of delay can be permanent for the population as a whole even if not permanent for any one woman.”

In terms of youth 15-24 years old entering the workforce or military, the new figures would mean that India’s much-anticipated demographic advantage over China would be curtailed. India would have 75 million fewer youth by 2050, and 324 million fewer by 2100, while China would gain 26 million more than previously expected.

Germany’s share of youth in 2050 would rise from a projected 8.5 percent to 10 percent of its population according to the new UN forecast, more than doubling the number of youth previously predicted by 2100. Likewise, the number of Russian youth would be more than twice existing projections, and Japan’s share of youth would jump from just 7.7 percent in 2050 to 10.4 percent in 2100.

In sharp contrast, governments remain pessimistic. Recent reports from the European Commission and the Japanese government, for example, assume that fertility will remain near today’s levels which are about 1.3 in Japan, and 1.4 in Germany.

To achieve the dramatically new fertility predictions, the UN Population Division created a “probabilistic model” that uses high capacity computing to run 100,000 of fertility scenarios for each country.

While this new model gives a patina of greater scientific accuracy, it is based upon an arbitrary and unsubstantiated fertility rate. Just because demographers now have the capability of churning out many thousands of scenarios for each country studied does not mean the result is scientific.

Policy analysts would do well to reject the UN one-size-fits-all fertility projections and rely instead on data accounting for the various national factors contributing to desired family size.

 From here.

Related reading:  UN Population Data and Global Power

Germans Exit Nuclear Energy

Germany announced Monday it would become the biggest industrial power to completely give up nuclear energy following the crisis at the Fukushima plant in Japan, saying that all nuclear reactors would be shut by 2022. The announcement caps a startling reversal in which Chancellor Angela Merkel was strongly in favor of nuclear power before she was against it. Yet coming after weeks of discussions, “the German government has made it clear that it is serious with its U-turn on nuclear energy,” notes Der Spiegel.

After a long night of talks, Germany’s Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen announced the details of the plan that would force all of the country’s nuclear plants to go offline by 2022 at the latest. Specifically, the seven plants that were shut down after the Fukushima disaster in Japan and one that had already been taken offline would remain shut. Six would then go offline by the end of 2021 and the three most modern plants would have until 2022 to be shut, according to a plan outlined by Roettgen. The agreement “may be even more ambitious than the nuclear exit planned when the Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens were in power in 2000,” details Reuters.

Read it all here.

German Mother in Prison for Resisting Sex Ed

A German mother is in prison as a result of resisting state measures to force objectionable “sexual education” on her children. Her husband has already served his 43-day sentence. The couple bring the number of Christian parents imprisoned for this reason to 10.

Heinrich and Irene Wiens belong to the Baptist Church. Their case has been taken up by the United States based Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) -- a Christian legal alliance defending religious liberty, sanctity of life, marriage, and the family.

In June 2006, the Wiens’ objected to their children’s attendance at both a mandatory stage play and four school days of so-called “sexual education” classes. Both parents believed the programs contradicted their sincerely held religious beliefs, as they and their four children are active in the Christian Baptist Church. The Wiens’ kept their children at home during the programs and instead instructed them in their own Christian values on sexuality. The parents were subsequently sentenced by a lower court in June 2008 and both were fined a total of 2,340 Euros (approximately $3,250 U.S.), which they refused to pay on legal and moral grounds.

Hence the prison sentences.

ADF filed an emergency appeal yesterday with the European Court of Human Rights, calling for Mrs Wien’s immediate release. Legal counsel Roger Kiska, based in the Slovak Republic, says the Wiens are well within their rights under the European Convention of Human Rights and other laws.

ADF is representing four similar cases before the ECHR. “These types of cases are crucial battles in the effort to keep bad decisions concerning parental rights overseas from being adopted by American courts,” says Mr Kiska.


From here.

How Hitler Conquered Austria

Kitty Werthmann, an 84-year-old Austrian émigré to the United States, recently wrote an eyewitness account about the way Austria succumbed to Hitler in the 1930s.

She mentioned that Hitler did not just roll into the country with tanks. There was high unemployment and many bankruptcies in Austria. Political parties fought each other in a civil war. As a result, Austrians naturally looked to their neighbor to the north and found that there was no crime, full employment, and a high standard of living. Hitler had made promises and kept them.

When Hitler’s time came in Austria, the population voted him into office with 98% of the vote. The country was then annexed to Germany and Hitler was made its ruler.

Austria now experienced: law and order; full employment; nationalization of education without any religious education; political indoctrination among youth; restructuring the family through day care. However, the quality of health care suffered, as did small businesses. Hitler instituted consumer protection, in which consumers were told what to buy and how to shop. Industrial capitalism was frozen. More and more "agencies appeared, many of them to watch over business endeavors.

And finally — and most importantly — there was no more freedom of speech. Anyone who said something against the government was taken away.

From here.

The German Taliban

PESHAWAR, June 22: A suspected German militant captured in Bannu on Monday had links with Al Qaeda, security officials told Dawn on Tuesday.

Raimi, said to be in his mid-20s, and his local accomplice were wearing burqa when they were detained at a checkpost.

One official said the man had been shifted to Islamabad for questioning, adding that the Germany embassy had been informed.

He said that Raimi had crossed into Pakistan illegally through Iran and stayed with Al Qaeda elements in Mirali in North Waziristan.

“He has been involved in terrorist activities,” another official said.

German militants have formed their own group called the ‘German Taliban’ and work with Pakistani Taliban. A Jihadi website recently said that the leader of the German Taliban, a convert who called himself Abdul Ghaffar, had been killed in a recent shootout with Pakistani security forces at Esha checkpoint in North Waziristan.

The Pakistani Taliban said a German man detained by Pakistan security forces near North Waziristan on the Afghan border, was their ‘comrade’.

“He’s our comrade. He was going somewhere,” Muhammad Umer, head of the Taliban’s media centre, told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.

WWII Bomb Explodes in Germany

An Allied bomb left over from World War II has exploded in Germany, killing three military engineers who were trying to defuse it.

The blast occurred in the central city of Goettingen on Tuesday after construction workers building a sports stadium discovered it in a densely populated area.

Bomb disposal experts were called to the scene to defuse the 500 kilogramme device, which police said was likely to be British. But it exploded before they could neutralise the device.
Read it all here.

German Homeschooling Family Granted Asylum

How serious is America about parental rights in education? Pretty serious, it seems. Last week an immigration judge in the US granted political asylum to a German family who want to homeschool their children -- something that is illegal in Germany. Germany for its part is very serious about suppressing what it calls “parallel societies” based on religion or worldview -- which is how it sees homeschoolers.

Tennessee Judge Lawrence Burman ruled that, after several years of run-ins with the authorities in Germany, the Romeike family’s human rights were being violated in their own country and that they had “a well-founded fear of persecution” if they stayed there. Burman said homeschoolers “are a particular social group that the German government is trying to suppress” and this was “repellent to everything we believe as Americans”. Strong stuff, and it is not yet clear what political actions may follow.

Uwe and Hannelore Romeike are evangelical Christians and their basic issue with the public schools is that they educate “according to an anti-Christian worldview”. They say that textbooks are filled with obscene language, swear words and blasphemy, and are “more about witches and vampires than about God”.

Beginning in September 2006, they kept their three oldest children (they have five) out of elementary school. After one month the police came to their door one morning and took the children to school. They continued to defy the law making school attendance compulsory, paying fines of around US$100,000.

But in November 2007 the Federal Supreme Court ruled that in severe cases of non-compliance, social services could even remove children from home. The court argued that the public has a rightful interest in preventing the formation of “parallel societies” based on religion or worldview.

That was the last straw for the Romeikes and in 2008, at the suggestion of supporters in the (US) Home School Legal Defense Association, they emigrated to the US. Speigel reported last Thursday:

HSLDA attorney Mike Donnelly called the decision "embarrassing for Germany." According to Donnelly, the Memphis court issued a final ruling "that homeschoolers are a social group that is being persecuted in Germany." A "Western nation should uphold basic human rights, which include allowing parents to raise and educate their own children," Donnelly said. "This is simply about the German state trying to coerce ideological uniformity in a way that is frighteningly reminiscent of past history."

Is Germany embarrassed? It’s not clear. Plenty of people are furious with the German government, however, and with the European Court of Human Rights, which has backed Germany’s policy.

London Telegraph blogger Gerald Warner fumes that Europe has become a totalitarian state, and that it is significant the Romeikes did not seek asylum in Britain, where “[e]very possible obstacle is put in the way of homeschooling parents”.

The mentality is that the state – not parents – is the natural controller and shaper of children’s lives and beliefs. When a schoolgirl can be given an abortion without her parents’ knowledge, we know that, while public utilities may have been privatised, children have been nationalised. The Romeikes who fled from Germany objected to their children being forced to follow a curriculum that they believed was anti-Christian. The same would apply in British state schools, where pornographic sex education is increasingly being made compulsory.

In the United States at least one million children are being homeschooled -- not always for religious or moral reasons -- and the figure may be as high as two million. Homeschooling is also allowed in many other countries, albeit under certain regulations -- and not without a certain amount of suspicion amongst some authorities.

Germany may have some respectable historical reasons for its insistence on school attendance, but shouldn't it relax its policy now? If it is afraid of parallel societies, isn't suppression just the way to make them flourish?

From here.