Anti-Muslim Book In Germany Taps Into Seething Anger Over Country's Minorities

Most books don’t continue to generate intense controversy nearly half a year after publication. But a bitter debate continues to dominate German talk shows over whether the nation’s 4.2 million Muslims are dragging the nation down, a charge made by a work published last year that argues the nation’s growing minority is bleeding the welfare budget and lowering the intelligence of German society.

“Germany is Doing Away With Itself,” written by Thilo Sarrazin, a former member of the German Central Bank, has already sold more than a million copies. And while the book has been repudiated by the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, there’s no question it has hit a very raw nerve in German society.

“When I go on talk shows and we discuss the book, callers say ‘I’m not a Neo-Nazi, or a Nazi, but this book has finally allowed me to tell you that the Muslims in this country are here to get welfare and they don’t want to accept our values,' ” Wolfgang Benz, the former head of the center for anti-Semitic research at the Technical University in Berlin, told FoxNews.com. “The scholarship is awful in this book, but the guy at my gas station, who didn’t read it, thinks it’s great, and so do many others who find out what it says about the Muslims. Their pent-up feelings come out.”

Germans are now openly discussing the failure to integrate Muslims, a problem that has been largely ignored for decades.

It has roots in 1961, during the post-war economic boom, when Turkish workers were invited to Germany to do heavy manual labor at the minimum wage. Turks now make up 3.2 million of the 4.2 million Muslims in Germany. Most of the rest come from Arab countries.

The debate is also making Germany less attractive to foreign skilled workers it desperately needs because its population is rapidly aging and shrinking.

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