Europe’s Multicultural Nightmare

“The festival gives expression to our demand for a peaceful coexistence of all humans with their different cultures, languages and traditions.”

- Proclamation of the festival’s organizers.

The beautiful, rosy multicultural paradise Europe’s leftists promised in the 1960s and ’70s manifested itself brilliantly again recently at a Kurdish festival in Mannheim, a German city in the south-western state of Baden-Wurttemberg. Almost as soon as the festival began, German police were set upon by hundreds of young Kurds who were encouraged “with words and applause” by thousands of others. When the shocking, hours-long savagery ended, eighty policemen were injured, one seriously, while “more than a dozen vehicles were destroyed” before order could be restored.

Martin Boll, a spokesman for Mannheim’s police, said he had never seen such violence in his 30 years of police service.

“The outbreak of violence by the attackers was enormous,” said Boll, who was described by German newspapers as “visibly shaken” by the events. “Hundreds, if not more than a thousand Kurdish assailants stormed towards the police and threw stones at officials.”

One German newspaper said policemen had to “throw themselves down behind vehicles” in order to avoid the pavement stones, glass bottles, bricks, barricades and even firecrackers that were being thrown at them.

It was estimated 40,000 people, of whom 2,500 were regarded as “violent or violence-prepared,” attended the twentieth holding of this annual “multicultural” event. Most of the previous 19 Kurdish festivals had been held in the German state of Rhineland-Westphalia. An estimated 600,000 to 800,000 Kurds live in Germany, but Kurds had travelled from all over Europe for this year’s festival in Mannheim.

The riot began when officials of a security firm contracted by the festival’s organizers asked two policemen for assistance with a 14-year-old Kurdish youth who was refusing to give up a flag he was carrying of the banned Kurdish terrorist group, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK).  Apparently angry at the police intervention, about 100 young Kurds “suddenly attacked the two policemen from behind and kicked them in the back.” The violence escalated from there as more police and thugs were drawn in.

Unfortunately, the Mannheim riot is not an isolated incident. Germans and other Europeans are becoming more accustomed to seeing their municipal police forces attacked by people who, for the most part, had been allowed into Europe under the multicultural banner or asylum laws.

Last May, for example, three German policemen were injured when Salafists, adherents of a violent, ultra-conservative strain of Islam, attacked police in Solingen with stones. The Salafists were staging a counter-demonstration against a rally by members of the Pro Rhineland-Westphalia Party (PRO NRW), a group that is protesting the Islamization of Germany. The Salafists, some of whom were German converts, said they were provoked by caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad the PRO NRW demonstrators were carrying. But since there were no stones in the demonstration area, police believe the Salafists had brought them, indicating their violent intentions. There were 40 arrests.

Also in May, hundreds of Salafists fought “a brutal street battle” with police in Bonn after PRO NRW demonstrators again held up caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad outside the King Fahd Academy. During the riot, a policewoman and a policeman were seriously injured by a Salafist in a knife attack, suffering “severe cut and stab wounds.”

“The radical Islamists attacked (police) officials with roof laths, stones, steel balls, and even knives,” reported the German newspaper Die Welt of the Bonn violence. “Altogether, 29 policemen were injured and 100 Islamists arrested.”