So this course in Europe is a very positive step:
Skinny-dipping, gay relationships and parenting all form part of Magdi Gohary’s crash-course introduction to a strange new home, Learn to Understand Germany, given at a huge refugee camp on the outskirts of Munich.There is very little effort to make immigrants in Germany, France, Italy, Holland, etc. into Germans, French, Italians, Dutch, etc.
Many of those who join his seminars headed to the country in search of security and gave little thought to what else awaited them there, says the 74-year-old, a retired chemist who left his native Egypt for Munich half a century ago.
“We talk about homosexuality, which a lot of my course members tend to see as criminal. I go on to explain to them that Germans don’t see it that way and that they will have to accept that if they want to live here,” he says.
They are warned that their children will have more independence if they grow up German than they might have expected in the Arab world.
“Arabs are often shocked here when they see the Bavarians go swimming naked in the River Isar. But I tell them that if they want the Germans to accept Arab women wearing headscarves then they must accept Germans sunbathing and swimming naked in public parks and rivers.”
In the wake of mass assaults on women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve – which police believe were largely carried out by men of Arab and North African backgrounds, including several asylum seekers – Germany is being pushed into a public debate about the challenges of integration.
The conversation is a delicate one. Refugees, those who work with them and the millions of Germans who support chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming new arrivals are all very wary of giving more ammunition to far-right groups who have already made political capital from the attacks. But many are also frustrated by assumptions that it would take little more than a change of clothes and passports for new arrivals to settle in, and say the conversation is a very necessary one for Germans and refugees alike.
Instead, Europe has tacitly accepted the creation of segregated ghettos, with little meaningful integration into the surrounding culture.
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