“Veiled searches” probably aren’t what you think they are. Women wearing veils aren’t randomly being searched here (although the idea isn’t half bad).

It means stop and search practices or dragnet controls – searches made without having a concrete suspicion.

Bavaria is pushing hard for more of these at the moment, all over the country. Federal minister of the interior Thomas de Maizière is all for it, too. And the usual cry of outrage hält sich in Grenzen (is being kept within bounds, within the border). Maybe because this is a country that thinks it doesn’t need to have a border?

Diese verdachtsunabhängigen Polizeikontrollen sind bislang auf einen 30-Kilometer-Gürtel hinter den Bundesgrenzen beschränkt, sollten laut Herrmann aber auch in der Nähe von Flughäfen, Bahnhöfen und Rastplätzen möglich sein.

PS: Not that stop and search would do any good here in Germany anyway. The courts here don’t cooperate. Check out the judgement reached be a court in Cottbus last week: A Muslim asylum seeker stabs his wife 19 times, cuts her throat and throws her out the window because he thinks she’s been sleeping around (the mother of his five children). He gets off with manslaughter. That means he’ll be out in half the time he would be out in if convicted of murder (there is no life sentence in Germany). The court’s reasoning? In the Muslim world it’s apparently OK to kill your wife if she commits adultery so the man had to be judged with a different set of standards. He gets a discount, in other words. For being a Muslim. This was a court in Germany. Today. Coming to your town soon.