ANTI-MIGRANT violence in Germany has become so severe over the past year that it is a miracle that no refugee has yet been killed. In one case, inebriated thugs threw a Molotov cocktail through a window into a room where an 11-year-old refugee would have been sleeping, had he not crept into bed with his mother in another room. Another xenophobe fired a gun into a refugee home and hit a Syrian man in the leg. Elsewhere, someone lobbed a hand grenade into a processing center for asylum seekers. It did not go off.
There were 13,846 “right-extremist” crimes in Germany in 2015, according to preliminary estimates, about 30% more than in 2014. Of those, 921 were violent. This year the pace has accelerated, especially in the former East Germany. On February 18th about 100 people in Clausnitz, in the eastern state of Saxony, tried to block a bus carrying 20 refugees, including children. In another Saxon city a cheering crowd interfered with firefighters dousing flames in a building being converted into an asylum home. One police chief warns of a “pogrom atmosphere”.
Fears of a xenophobic backlash in…