In an interview with Radio Sputnik Simon Jacob, ambassador of the Central Council of Oriental Christians in Germany, said that refugees who are not able to assimilate and accept European values, should be asked to leave the EU.
“A lot of Christians face such kind of trouble at these facilities, but not everything becomes public because this is quite a new situation for us. This is not a general situation, but we need to talk about this because these are no longer individual cases,” Simon Jacob said.
When asked whether local media would have reported such cases if the situation was reversed, meaning that if Muslim refugees were harassed by Christians, Simon said that talking about bad things done by Muslims has long been a taboo in Germany.
“But now I think it’s time we talked about this because it is important for hundreds of thousands of Muslims leaving their countries in Syria and Iraq. It is important for them and I think that it helps us talk about untold issues we had before. This is a challenge for us living in a democratic society.”
Many human rights organizations have called on Berlin authorities to house Christian refugees separately from Muslims.
“In the short term this could be a solution, but in the long term — no it’s not. We need to educate people coming here to accept democracy and give them a chance to stay if they accept our values and our way of life,” Simon noted.
“We have to help everyone coming here if they face war in their homeland. However, it may take one or two generations and if we want to integrate hundreds of thousands of young males in ten or fifteen years we need stricter immigration laws to make it clear that if you want to stay here you need to accept our way of life.”
“Not everyone will accept this, but I don’t rule out a situation that we may have to send some of these people back. This is a challenge to German society, which is very open-minded and after everything that happened during the Second World War we refuse to tell anyone that ‘Look, you have to accept our values,’ because people may think we are Nazis or something like that. But if we do not protect our values and our freedoms we will have a lot of problems in future.”
“We also need to protect those who want to live here and escape that kind of violence by Daesh, al-Qaeda and force those who are not ready to accept our values to leave because otherwise this would be a cultural suicide for all of us,” Simon Jacob emphasized.
