German central bank executive Thilo Sarrazin has stirred fresh controversy over the weekend with discriminatory remarks concerning religious minorities.
“All Jews share a particular gene,” Sarrazin said in an interview published on Sunday, August 29. “That makes them different from other peoples.”
Sarrazin, who is currently promoting his book “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (“Germany does away with itself”), remained undeterred in expressing his views despite criticism and calls for his resignation from the board of the Bundesbank.
“The cultural peculiarities of the peoples is no myth, but determines the reality of Europe,” Sarrazin told the newspapers Welt am Sonntag and Berliner Morgenpost.
Berlin’s former finance chief has said in the past that Muslims living in Germany do not contribute to the country’s economic prosperity, reducing their role to the running of fruit and vegetable stands.
He reiterated his view that Muslim immigrants all over Europe were integrating more poorly than other immigrant populations into the societies of their host countries.
In 2009, the central banker, who is a member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), had said he would prefer immigration “if it was by eastern European Jews with a 15-percent-higher IQ than the German population.”
The Jewish community in Germany reacted with indignation to Sarrazin’s attempts at racial profiling.
“Whoever tries to define Jews by their genetic makeup, even when it is superficially positive in tone, is in the grip of a race mania that Jews do not share,” said Stephan Kramer, secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
While Sarrazin made reference in his interview to the alleged unique genetics of social groups, he also claimed he was not racist. It was not ethnicity, he said, but rather the culture of Islam that kept Muslims immigrants from integrating into European societies.
Germany’s Foreign Minister, Guido Westerwelle, responded to Sarrazin’s latest comments, saying statements “that promote racism or antisemitism have no place in political discourse.”
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