Und ihr seid schlecht zu den Negern...

From today's SPIEGEL ONLINE comes another report on the hapless Rütli Schule. The problem is not the violence of Muslim students, it is -- are we amazed -- the German class system. Hey, mobile phones for all, so they don't need to mug their classmates!

LETTER FROM BERLIN
Germany's School of Hard Knocks
By Marc Young in Berlin

Recent revelations about a violence-plagued high school in Berlin have Germans worried about the state of their country's education system, the decay of modern society and the poor integration of foreigners. But are things really that bad and are Germany's immigrants to blame?

Anyone who's spent time in Berlin knows what a safe city it is. Sure, there's petty crime and occasional violence like in any big city, but compared to London or even the new cleaned-up, Disneyfied version of New York City, Germany's capital is a very peaceful place to live. That is, unless you happen to be teacher at the Rütli high school in Berlin's scruffy Neukölln neighborhood.

Last week, a letter from the school's faculty describing a complete breakdown of discipline and growing tendency towards violence by the students was made public. The situation had gotten so bad that some teachers refused to enter their classrooms without a mobile phone they could use to call for help if they were threatened. One Rütli teacher even told SPIEGEL that he often dreamed one of the out of control teens would "finally burn the place down" so he wouldn't have to face another day working there.

So what's life like at a Berlin school where 83 percent of the student body has a non-German background? The faculty letter describes an institution that appears to fail both its students and the teachers working there: "We must realize that the mood in some classes currently is marked by aggressiveness, disrespect, and ignorance towards adults ... The tendency toward violence against property is growing ... In most of the families of our students, they are the only ones getting up in the morning. For them, school is a stage and battleground for attention. The worst culprits become role models."

The letter created an immediate uproar across the country. How could this happen? The ensuing frenzy by the German media made the Rütli school sound like it could rival the worst inner-city schools in the United States. Police and metal detectors at the doors was the answer offered by a few pundits. Some politicians pointed to the extremely high percentage of students from immigrant families. Was it not evidence of Germany's failure to integrate foreigners and a warning against further immigration?

But the calls for prison-like security and the xenophobia-tinged scapegoating of foreigners completely miss the mark. If anything, the whole episode is more an indictment of an antiquated German school system that shunts students off into different academic tracks early on, as well as the country's inability to make many immigrants feel they are valued part of German society.

Neukölln is not South Central LA

To be sure, by German standards Neukölln might be a rough and tumble place. The Berlin district does struggle with widespread joblessness and a fair chunk of its non-German inhabitants are indeed marginalized from the rest of society. But the neighborhood and its schools certainly can't compare with downtown Detroit. No one is getting shot on a daily basis -- not at Rütli and not in the neighborhood -- and there is nothing of the kind of gang violence found in South Central Los Angeles.

The kids at the Rütli are without a doubt disrespectful, destructive and uncivilized. But such uncouth youths are a problem wherever apathetic and disengaged parents fail to care for their children. It would therefore be easy to chalk up the "scandal" about the school simply as another example of Germans talking down their own country. It's in fashion these days to complain about the decay of Germany's economy and society. Whether it's the country's chronically high unemployment, the inability to compete in a globalized world, or simply the poor state of German soccer, moaning and Cassandra-like panic has become something of a national pastime. But dismissing this as Teutonic malaise would be wrong for several reasons.

While not as bad as they are made out to be, Germany shouldn't wait until things get worse before it tackles the problems exposed by the Rütli school affair. If anything, this should serve as incentive for a long-overdue revamp of the German school system. Currently, high schools are broadly separated into three tracks: Gymnasium for university-bound students, Realschule for the less academically inclined, and Hauptschule -- vocational schools like Rütli -- that all too often end up being receptacles for problem kids from troubled homes. Germans have unfortunately long clung to this inflexible system which needlessly segregates children early on and frequently determines a person's later station in life. In Berlin, the children from many immigrant families are predictably more likely end up at a Hauptschule than Gymnasium.

A socio-economic problem

Around 83 percent of the students at the school have a non-German background.
And that leads to the next point: Although poor integration certainly doesn't help matters, the horror stories emanating from the Rütli school have less to do with immigration than with basic socio-economic problems. It wouldn't be hard to find a young black man born and raised in Detroit who feels just as marginalized in American society as a young Arab or Turk in Neukölln does in Germany. And there are most certainly a number of schools in economically depressed eastern Germany filled with just as many troubled German kids from failed households.

The outgoing principal at the Rütli school, Brigitte Pick, recognized that in a letter published on Monday in the Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. "The actual problem doesn't stem from the Arabic, Turkish or Serbian background of the students, but rather the lack of opportunities for them," she wrote. "The Hauptschule is only chosen by marginalized groups without a future and from students expelled from elsewhere."

Cem Özdemir, a Turkish-German member of the European Parliament, pointed out in a SPIEGEL ONLINE commentary last week that this has, in effect, exacerbated efforts to integrate foreigners into German society, since the children of immigrants and the children of middle-class Germans have very little contact with each other in the country's school system.

Of course, when parents no longer teach their children how to behave as civilized human beings, it makes it very difficult for teachers to do their job no matter how committed they are as educators. But this is a universal lament in nearly every modern society. Unless young men and women feel that they have both a stake in their society and a shot at a decent future in it, there is little a shocked and outraged nation can do to convince them otherwise.

I know the competition is tough, but this piece of bullshit really deserves the dhimmi-award of the week!

Isn't it simple? So it's not the fault of the "non-German kids" and their cultural environment (as usual, any mentioning of "Muslim" or "Islam" was avoided) it's the age old and omnipresent social injustice and the Americans are much worse than we anyway! (The headline-quip says: "And you are mean to the Negroes", a seasoned and not unfunny anti-American argument become travesty, which has acquired a bit of bizarre cult-status here.)

But the bit I like best is the one about doing away with the three-track school system. Everything until we have steamrolled everybody down to the common lowest level! Serves those right who have the temerity to come from a family of hardworking and performance-orientated parents, who can give their children a good education.

Here is a mind-boggling account from Kewil's blog by a teacher who chose to remain anonymous:

... since more that 20 years I am teaching at a school with pupils from 62 countries, among them many recent immigrants.

Group A: Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese
(totally hardworking, top-students, are learning German within six months)

Group B: Eastern Europeans, ethnic Germans from Russia
Girls: extremely hardworking but quiet
Boys: big mouth but mostly get their act together with the finals approaching

Group C: “classic guest-worker countries" E,P,I.GR,ex-YU
Mostly bent on social advancement, but average results

Group D: Islamic countries (Turks, Arabs)
Permanently miffed, aggressive, misogynist, antisemitic, only very few success stories (Turkish Alevites),
some girls if there isn't a male migrant in the study group...

Yes, that IS racist! There must be a GENE for the will to get on in life and perform that goes together with slit eyes. Yes, that's it, definitely! But hey, there is room for the followers of the milieu-theory as well: What about: Just take away their mobile phones and see how nasty those Chinks will turn!

There is more than one way to avoid the truth.

This is NOT an April Fool's jest!

The following is so incredibly moronic, so rock-hard impregnable and-mega stupid dumb, that it defies all credibility. It is from a DPA dispatch, which is not available online and about the Rütli Schule in Berlin of which I reported yesterday.

You remember? The school that had to call in the police because of …harrrumph… attitude problems of pupils with a migrant background. (How am I doing at politically correct speech?):

Schulen/Gewalt/Berlin/
(Zusammenfassung 1230 - dpa-Gespräch)
Experte: «Rütli-Probleme» sind Folge von falschen Erwartungen

Berlin (dpa/bb) - Die massiven Gewaltprobleme an der Berliner Rütli-Schule sind nach Ansicht des Sozialarbeiters und Diplompädagogen, Hartmut Brocke, auch eine Folge falscher Erwartungen an die Schüler nichtdeutscher Herkunft... «Wir nehmen einfach unsere Maßstäbe und bewerten die ausländischen Kinder danach.» Das führe bei den Jugendlichen zu starken Frustrationen.

«Wir wollen uns oft gar nicht mit den anderen Kulturen beschäftigen», sagte Brocke. «Stattdessen nehmen wir hin, dass uns andere Familienstrukturen und Frauenbilder fremd bleiben und lehnen diese ab.» Das Ergebnis sei jedoch, dass sich die Migranten abgelehnt und unverstanden fühlten, was dann wiederum zu Unverständnis in der hiesigen Kultur führe. «Das ist ein sich ständig selbstbestätigender Kreislauf», sagte Brocke.

Für die Lehrer bedeute dies, dass sie sich auf ihre Schüler einstellen müssten. «Nicht die Schüler müssen sich an die Schulen anpassen - die Schulen müssen sich an die Schüler anpassen», sagte Brocke... «Man kann nicht einfach davon ausgehen, dass das alles kleine Biester sind.»

Die «Jugendsozialarbeit an Berliner Hauptschulen» ist ein Projekt der Stiftung Sozialpädagogisches Institut (SPI) Berlin... Seit Anfang dieses Jahres können im Rahmen des Hauptschulprojektes schrittweise alle Hauptschulen Hilfe durch einen zusätzlichen Sozialpädagogen erhalten. Dafür stehen pro Jahr 500 000 Euro aus dem Europäischen Sozialfonds zur Verfügung. Auch die Rütli-Schule ist laut Brocke dabei...

----------

Schools/Violence/Berlin/
(Summary 1230 - dpa-interview)
Expert: «Rütli-Problems» are based on wrong expectations

Berlin (dpa/bb) - The massive violence problems at the Rütli-Schule in Berlin are, according to the social worker and certified educationalist (Diplompädagoge) Hartmut Brocke, often based on wrong expectations towards the pupils with a non-German background... «We simply take our own criteria and apply them to the foreign children.» This is supposed to lead to marked frustrations with the young.

«Very often, we just don't want to be bothered with other cultures», says Brocke. «Instead, we take it for granted that other family structures and images of the female sex remain alien to us and reject them.» The result is that the migrants feel rejected and misunderstood, which leads in turn to a lack of understanding of our culture. «This is a self-perpetuating vicious circle», says Brocke.

For the teachers this means that they have to empathise with their pupils. «Not the pupils have to adjust to the schools, but the schools will have to adjust to the pupils», says Brocke... «One can't simply take it for granted that they are all little beasts.»

«Youth Social Working at Berliner Hauptschulen [i.e. secondary schools and, in fact, holding track for those who have dropped out of the educational system]» is a project of the Stiftung Sozialpädagogisches Institut (SPI) Berlin [of which Brocke is director]... Since the beginning of this year all Hauptschulen can get, within the framework of the project, successively all possible help by an additional social worker. For that, 500,000 per annum from the Europäische Sozialfonds have been made available. The Rütli-Schule, too, is part of this, according to Brocke...

Do you get just HOW dangerously stupid that is, dear reader? Or is it dangerously clever? Those unspeakable Gutmenschen-do-gooders are producing more and more recipients of welfare, enemies of our society, culture and values, and, of course, jobs for themselves. Just how fatuous is that: So OUR schools have to adjust to pupils from a violent death-cult background and not those pupils to our standards of an open society, pluralism, freedom, tolerance and non-violence?

So WE have to accept "other family structures and images of the female sex"? Do we? Including honour killings, gang rapes of unveiled women, female genital mutilation and stoning for adultery? Including hanging of nine-year-old girls who are raped before their execution so they won't go to heaven as virgins?

DO WE REALLY?

So is this social worker with a huge budget from Europäische Sozialfonds REALLY asking us to abandon our dearly bought constitutional law, the Grundgesetz, of which the equality of the sexes is part?

YES HE DOES!

And nobody is laughing.

'Culture' is to make a nice drinking bowl from one's enemy's
skull.
'Civilisation' is to go to prison for that.
(Anonymous)

To verify the incredible DPA dispatch, please see the article at the website of the newspaper Kölner Stadtanzeiger, which is based on it.

And thanks to Gudrun Eussner who made me aware of this.

An Explosion That Lasted Twenty Years

DER SPIEGEL, the leading German newsmagazine, informs us about the history of the disastrous Rütli-Schule in Berlin of which I reported here and here:

In der Rütli-Schule kommen beide Probleme seit Jahren zusammen. In einer Festschrift zum 80. Jubiläum der Rütli-Schule im Jahr 1984 wurde das Phänomen des stetig steigenden Ausländeranteils erstmals durch die Schule selbst thematisiert: "Soweit möglich werden die ausländischen Schüler auf die deutschen Klassen verteilt. Doch schließlich ist ihre Zahl in den 7. und 8. Klassen so groß, dass türkische Klassen gebildet werden müssen." Was sich hinter diesen Zeilen verbirgt, ist eine Explosion: 1984 lag der Anteil nichtdeutscher Schüler noch bei 33 Prozent, 1999 schon bei 58 Prozent, heute bei 83 Prozent. Die Schule wurde schlicht überrollt von einer Situation, auf die sie nicht vorbereitet war.

----------

At the Rütli-School problems are piling up for years. In a festschrift to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Rütli-School from 1984, the phenomenon of the increasing number of non-German pupils was made an issue by the school itself: "As far as possible, non-German pupils will be shared by the German classes. But finally, their number has become so large that for the 7th and 8th classes Turkish classes had to be established." What those numbers are hiding is an explosion: 1984 the percentage of non-German pupils was about 33 percent, 1999 58 percent already, today around 83 percent. The school was simply overwhelmed by a situation for which it was not prepared.

I am asking myself: does the preoccupation with that homemade hellhole suck people's brain out or does it attract nutters to begin with?

We are talking about a development that covers more than two decades (in 1984 there had been more than a third of "non-German" pupils already, mind you, so we can safely assume that it didn't start just then) and those schmocks from DER SPIEGEL are talking about an "overwhelming" situation. An explosion that lasted twenty years. Yeah, right!

"Waah! It isn't our fault!"

Pathetic!

Germrabia

From the UPI website:

German school 'breeds terrorists'

BERLIN, March 30 (UPI) -- Officials from a Berlin school have issued a dramatic call for help because if rising violence and anarchy in the school.

One teacher told the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel, she had the impression that the violent environment at the school in the problematic district of Neukoelln would breed "criminals and terrorists."

For years, the Neukoelln 'Hauptschule' (a school for students age 11 to 15) has not been able to find a deputy principal; after the principal recently became sick and hasn't returned so far, teachers there have written a letter to the Federal Education Ministry, calling for help.

The teachers wrote that they are ignored and sometimes attacked in class; teachers wouldn't enter classrooms without their cell phone, so they may call for help in case of an emergency. Mass brawls and knife fights are common at the school.

The students are mainly from immigrant families; students with an Arabic background account for 44 percent, the biggest group, according to the Tagesspiegel.

"The Arabs have the say here and they oppress the Turkish students," one teacher said.

The few German students -- commonly called 'pig-meat eaters' -- try not to call on any attention to themselves, the teacher said.

Berlin's education ministry announced it would dispatch two social workers speaking Arabic and Turkish, adding police would from now control students upon entering the school building.

Note that the German media is talking delicately about pupils with a "migrant" or "non-German" background. Everything not to call a spade a spade.

The hens are coming home to roost for the 1968'er teacher generation. And the politicians of the same generation, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, didn't like the people they had, so they elected a new one. Now they've got what they wanted.

(Thanks Politically Incorrect and their commentators for the thoughts!) Rütli-Schule

No Christian Values Christian Politician Says

René Stadtkewitz, the Berlin lawmaker who invited Geert Wilders to a political event in Berlin on October 2, is facing expulsion from his parliamentary group, the CDU.

SPON is the online version of the leftist battle rag mother of all political magazines in Germany, where the party of the hardcore-GDR-educated leftist Angela Merkel is doggedly called "conservative" and Geert Wilders with boring predictability as "right-wing populist". SPON informed us about the Stadtkewitz affair and even spared no efforts to find a pickie on which Stadtkewitz looks as ugly and cadaverous as humanly possible.

Frank Henkel, the CDU's regional parliamentary group leader, gave Stadtkewitz an ultimatum: Withdraw the invitation by July 26 or face the consequences.

Stadtkewitz refused in an open letter in which he also suggested that the CDU should be doing more to combat Islam politically. Up until now, public debate about the Islamic faith had been "too timid" in Germany, Stadtkewitz wrote. He added that the debate should focus on the defense of freedom and of Christian values, including concerns about "countless young women, who are forced into arranged marriages, enslaved and who sometimes become victims of so-called honor killings."

'No Place in Our Party'

Henkel responded Monday by saying that he would propose a motion to exclude Stadtkewitz from the parliamentary group because he had distanced himself from "the goals of the conservatives."

From which the conclusion can be safely drawn that the defense of freedom and of Christian values, including concerns about young women, who are forced into arranged marriages, enslaved and who become victims of so-called honour killings are not the goals of those "conservatives". I repeat: He gives a damn for the frightening number of honour killings of girls and women in his city and elsewhere, he couldn't care less for enslaved and forcibly married women, he flips the bird to the Christian faith, which is still, albeit yet and just, part of the name of his own party, in brief, he refuses to serve and protect the people he has sworn to serve and protect.

It gets worse:

Henkel said Berlin set a positive example of integration and immigration for the whole of Germany. "There is no place in our party for people who demonize Islam and pass judgment on believers in other religions," Henkel explained.

He is lying through his teeth and he knows quite well that this is not about "believers in other religions". Neither Russian Orthodox Christians nor Vietnamese Buddhists, Confucianists, or Taoists are a problem, and neither are Jews. This is about Islam and Islam only, and nobody needs to "pass judgment" or "demonize" Islam, because what Islam and those who believe in it do in its name is for everybody to see.

He knows, too, that Berlin is one of those cities where in "migrant quarters", which make up for a considerable part of the city, the rule of law doesn't apply anymore because the monopoly on the use of physical force has become void. For "migrants" take "Muslims".

More positive examples of integration and immigration in Berlin, anybody?

In Berlin, during the last two Football World Cups, policemen were banned from sporting German flags at their cars because it "might be provocative to supporters of other teams". Of course, this was meant to appeal to people like Poles, Italians and Dutch who are known for their violence and rioting. Not.

At an exhibition "The Third World during the Second World War" in Berlin 2009, the "Grand Mufti of Jerusalem"'s collaboration with the Nazis, which had a decisive influence on the Holocaust (we reported many times already) wasn't exhibited at all "out of respect for joint Arab organisations". The decision was supported by the migration commissioner of the Berlin Senate, Günter Piening because in a neighbourhood (heavily dominated by Muslims) like Neukölln a "differentiated presentation" was paramount. Doubtlessly an excellent example for how "positive examples of integration and immigration" are understood in Berlin.

In 2008, a Berlin senior prosecuting attorney made two mistakes. He took a hard line bringing young criminals to justice and declared publicly that ca. eighty percent of those are not ethnic Germans, which was against the policy of only recognizing "positive examples of integration and immigration". The result? The Berlin government muzzled and then transfered him to a position where he surely couldn't do any more harm to "positive examples of integration and immigration". Hint: Ethnic Russians, Poles or Italians were rather underrepresented among those "non-ethnic Germans".

Surely Henkel doesn't know either the Rütli Schule, where after DECADES of inaction admiration of "positive examples of integration and immigration" the percentage of pupils with "a migration background" had reached a number that made calling in the police and a temporary closing down of the school inevitable. Hint: It weren't the Russian, Polish or Italian children who were the reason for that.

Now what makes a man like Henkel tick? Why is he so blatantly, openly and shamelessly lying? Because this goes far beyond denial or ignorance. Is he paid by some oil-rich sheik, the age-old argument to explain dhimmitude? I don't think so. Frankly, other than that limp "I don't think so", I don't have a ready answer either. As it is, it just seems that a mixture of belief in multiculturalism, Gutmenschentum and general spinelessness, coupled with the old German yearning to be dominated by a totalitarian cult, is answerable for that.