German Foreign Minister: Refugees Must Reject Anti-Semitism

The surge of Muslim migrants into Europe has brought with it the inevitable surge in anti-Semitism – a problem the German leadership appears to be attempting to combat. 

Germany’s foreign minister says refugees who find shelter in his country must reject anti-Semitism.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Tuesday that whoever comes to Germany has to accept that “anti-Semitism is against our constitution, against our civilization — against everything we believe in and everything we have learned.”

Germany has been debating how to integrate more than 1 million asylum-seekers who arrived last year, most of them Muslims from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The country has also seen a recent rise in nationalism who fear the migrant’s influence on their country.

Steinmeier told the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Anti-Semitism (ICCA) Conference in Berlin that “there is and can be no place for anti-Semitism in our understanding of a free, democratic and tolerant Germany.”

In remarks made in January, the president of the Frankfurt Jewish community Salomon Korn said he feared newly arrived Muslim migrants from the war-torn countries of the Middle East were bringing with them inculcated anti-Semitism and the value of spreading Islam.

A German intelligence document revealed last October by German newspaper Welt am Sonntag warned that many of the migrants fleeing the eastern Mediterranean countries for Europe were liable to be bringing with them “Islamic extremism” and “Arab anti-Semitism,” which the document said the German authorities would not have the power to combat.

By: AP and United with Israel Staff

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