DISINFO: European Commission Vice-President blusters about genocide on Europeans
SUMMARY
The European Commission Vice-President rants about genocide on Europeans. He said: “Monocultural states have to disappear, mass immigration of Muslim men is a means to an end.” No country should escape the inevitable process of inter-racial mixture. Instead, immigrants should be encouraged to “reach even the remotest places on the planet to ensure that no more homogeneous societies remain anywhere.
RESPONSE
Frans Timmermanns did not say this. The wrong quote appeared first in May 2016 at the German Website Frankfurter Erklaerung, where the article is offline and only available in Web-Archive. The article referred to a speech of Timmermanns at the EU Fundamental Rights Colloquium. On the website of the European Commission you can find the speech of 1 October 2015 at the opening of the colloquium in written form. The story is currently doing the rounds again in social media. Within the wrong quote, Timmermans had called on the members of the EU Parliament to contribute more to the disappearance of monocultural states. But within the actual speech there is no evidence for this claim. The quotation is purely fictional. Timmermans warned that the abandonment of values would cause our society to perish. He did not speak of "erasing" or "disappearing". The original quote in full length: "Diversity is now in some parts of Europe seen as a threat. Diversity comes with challenges, but diversity is humanity's destiny. There is not going to be, even in the remotest places of this planet, a nation that will not see diversity in its future. That's where humanity is heading and those politicians trying to sell to their electorates a society that is exclusively composed of people from one culture are trying to portray a future based on the past that never existed. Therefore that future will never be. Europe will be diverse like all other parts of the world will be diverse. The only question is, how do we deal with that diversity. And my answer to that is: by ensuring that our values determine how we deal with diversity and not giving up our values to refuse diversity. That will bring us down as a society. If we don't get this right, I truly believe, Europe will not remain the Europe we've built. Europe will not remain the place of peace and freedom for very long." The case was debunked by dpa’s Presseportal on 25th April 2019. The disproof was also picked up by the German fact-checking site CORRECTIV who published it here.