GERMANY ON THE BRINK – AT 9:46 A.M. ET:   Just when Angela Merkel is named TIME's person of the year, word comes that Germany is getting wobbly in the war on terror.  It is also a country that is leading the "normalization" with Iran, the better to secure industrial contracts.  From Gatestone Institute: 

The number of radical Salafists in Germany has more than doubled over the past five years, according to a new estimate by German intelligence officials.

Salafists disguised as aid workers are also canvassing German refugee shelters in search of new recruits from among the nearly one million asylum seekers who have arrived in Germany this year from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

A local preacher addresses Muslim refugees in Münster, Germany. Local authorities later cut off contact with the preacher's organization due to suspicions of radical Islamism.

The revelations by Hans-Georg Maassen, the director of the Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), come amid growing fears that jihadists linked to the Islamic State have infiltrated Germany by posing as refugees.

In a December 3 interview with the Berlin newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel, Maassen said that the number of Salafists in Germany has now risen to 7,900. This is up from 7,000 in 2014, 5,500 in 2013, 4,500 in 2012, and 3,800 in 2011.

COMMENT:  Germany, trying to live down the image of the Nazi era, has gone too far in the other direction, toward a kind of worship of multiculturalism.  But the country, already suffering from a seriously low birth rate, is in danger of becoming de-Europeanized, with radical immigrants holding the balance of political power.

December 9, 2015