Finance minister says Islam is part of Germany

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble on Tuesday warned Germany must not discriminate against its Muslim population, saying that Islam was a part of its society. His comments contrast starkly with those of the country’s new conservative interior minister.

“We have every interest in saying that Islam is a part of our country and in inviting Muslims to value what we have achieved in the Western World,” the Christian Democrat told the latest edition of political magazine Cicero. Religion, faith, democracy and universal human rights are all compatible, he added.

Still, immigrants must strive to integrate in Germany, said Schäuble, who initiated the government’s Islam conference in 2006 while he was interior minister in attempt to promote a healthier dialogue with the approximately four million Muslims living in the country.

In early March Germany’s new interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, made the controversial statement that Islam did not “belong” in Germany because it lacked a historical foundation. The conservative Bavarian plans to meet with the Islam conference plenum next Tuesday.

Friedrich’s comments mirrored similar statements he made last autumn amid a rancorous debate over whether Muslim immigrants are capable of integrating into German society.

The Local, 22 March 2011

See also Islam in Europe which takes a more sceptical view of Schäuble’s statement.

Prejudice against Muslims is general across Europe, report finds

Via Islam in Europe here is the section on anti-Muslim prejudice from the new Friedrich Ebert Foundation publication, Intolerance, Prejudice and Discrimination: A European Report (summary of the study here).

Anti-Muslim Attitudes

After statistical testing, three statements were used to produce the anti-Muslim attitudes mean scale (Table 7, items 18 to 20). These cover the general impression that there are too many Muslims in the country, the charge that Muslims make too many demands, and broad-brush criticism of Islam as a religion of intolerance. Four further statements were surveyed in a random half of the sample. These cover a positive attitude that sees Muslims as an enrichment and the idea that there are great cultural differences between the majority society and Muslims, especially concerning attitudes towards women. We also surveyed the idea that Muslims generally support and condone terrorism.

In most of the countries a majority believe Islam to be a religion of intolerance, with agreement just below 50 percent only in Great Britain and the Netherlands. In almost all the countries more than half of respondents said that Muslims make too many demands; Portugal was the only exception with about one third. The statement that there are too many Muslims in the country is affirmed by just over one quarter in Portugal and by about one third in France. In Germany, Great Britain, Italy and the Netherlands more than 40 percent of respondents complain that there are too many Muslims in their country, in Hungary about 60 percent.

Interviewees were also asked to respond to four further statements covering perceived cultural differences and supposed affinity of Muslims toward terrorism (Table 7, items 22 to 25). Despite correlating closely with anti-Muslim attitudes these items represent separate constructs and were therefore excluded from the scale measure.

FES1

The figures for those who say that Muslim culture is compatible with their own range from 17 percent in Poland and 19 percent in Germany to about half the population in Portugal and France. A majority of more than 70 percent of European respondents find that Muslim attitudes towards women are incompatible with their own values. Overall in the surveyed countries about one third think that Muslims treat Islamist terrorists as heroes, although somewhat fewer believe that terrorism finds moral support in the Muslim community (ranging from under 20 percent in Germany and the Netherlands to nearly 30 percent in Hungary).

The scale created from the first three statements clearly illustrates the extent of anti-Muslim attitudes in the studied countries (Figure 5). It is conspicuous that Europeans are largely united in their rejection of Muslims and Islam. The significantly most widespread anti-Muslim attitudes are found in Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland, closely followed by France, Great Britain and the Netherlands. The extent of anti-Muslim attitudes is least in Portugal. In absolute terms, however, the eight countries differ little in their levels of prejudice towards Muslims.

FES2

Update:  See comments by ENGAGE, 16 March 2011

Germany’s main Muslim organisation urges government to tackle Islamophobia

Germany’s main Muslim organization announced Saturday it is to boycott planned talks with the government over its refusal to address the key concerns of Muslims, including the problem of Islamophobia, the daily Neuen Osnabruecker Zeitung reported.

The Chairman of the Central Council of Muslims Aiman Mazyek said the government-sponsored Islam Conference, scheduled to be held in Berlin on March 29, had to encompass a greater part of Germany’s Muslim civic society. He also urged the conference to press ahead with the formation of two working groups which would dwell on aspects like granting official recognition to Islam as a religious community in Germany and serious tackling Islamophobia.

German Muslim leaders have repeatedly voiced deep concern over mounting Islamophobia in their country. Although the German government has acknowledged Islamophobia has become a serious problem, it has yet to really address the issue.

Mosques in Germany have been the target of firebombings in recent months amid growing Islamophobia in the country. Berlin mosques have been the scene of at least seven arson attacks since June 2010, among them Iranian Islamic Culture Center. The Sehitlik Mosque, Berlin’s biggest mosque, has been firebombed four times over the past months.

There are around 4.3 million Muslims in Germany of which 2.5 million are Turks.

IRNA, 12 March 2011

German interior minister says Islam does not ‘belong’ in Germany

Winterklausur CSU LandesgruppeGermany’s new interior minister has said Islam does not “belong” in the country, reopening a bitter debate over the integration of Germany’s 4 million Muslims.

Hans-Peter Friedrich, who took office on Wednesday, was being asked by reporters about a gun attack at Frankfurt airport in which two US servicemen were killed and another two injured. Investigators suspect the attack, carried out by a 21-year-old Muslim immigrant from Kosovo, was an act of Islamist terrorism. A federal judge in Karlsruhe on Thursday ordered the suspect be remanded to jail on two counts of murder and three of attempted murder, pending further investigation.

In his first press conference as minister, Friedrich said on Friday that Muslims should be allowed live in modern Germany, but he added: “To say that Islam belongs in Germany is not a fact supported by history.”

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The Independent profiles Thilo Sarrazin

Protesters hold up placards showing the portrait of German central bank executive Thilo Sarrazin before a public reading to present his book 'Deutschland schafft sich ab' (Germany does away with itself) in Potsdam

Sarrazin’s work [Deutschland schafft sich ab] is a long and divisive essay, based on questionable statistics, about what he considers to be the combined ill-effects of continued Muslim immigration and an accelerating decline in the birth rate of intelligent white Germans.

His argument, boiled down, is that Muslim immigrants are chronic under-achievers who not only breed like rabbits but are more likely to be dependent on social security and involved in crime than ethnic Germans and other Europeans.

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Erdogan slams xenophobia and Islamophobia in Europe

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday slammed “xenophobia” in Germany as he urged Turkish workers there to integrate into German society, but without abandoning their own culture.

“We are following xenophobia in some European countries, primarily Germany, with great concern… We urge politicians and especially the media… not to fan it,” he told a crowd of Turkish immigrants in the west German city of Duesseldorf, in a speech aired on Turkish television. “Islamophobia is a crime against humanity as much as anti-Semitism is,” the Islamist-rooted Erdogan said.

“I want everybody to learn German and get the best education… I want Turks to be present at all levels in Germany – in the administration, in politics, in civil society,” Erdogan told the crowd. “Yes to integration… But no to assimilation… No one can tear us from our culture,” he said.

AFP, 27 February 2011

German president defends school veil ban

German President Christian Wulff wrapped up a trip to the Gulf states on Monday, with a question-and-answer session at the University of Doha in Qatar. Wulff answered a veiled student’s question with a defense of a ban on burqas in German schools.

“The conscious decision to cover yourself up clashes with the duty of the state to educate its children,” he said. “Showing your face is part of a free society.”

A person wearing a burqa in Europe appeared to be calling into question the equality between men and women, Wulff said. “But we don’t want to question this equality.”

Deutsche Welle, 28 February 2011

LSE invitation to Sarrazin condemned

Sarrazin protest placard2A German banker who has said “all Jews share a certain gene” and described Muslims as “dunces” will speak tonight at the London School of Economics amid a row over free speech.

Anti-fascist campaigners vowed to demonstrate outside the LSE during Thilo Sarrazin‘s appearance in a debate on multiculturalism. The former executive member of the Bundesbank caused outrage in Germany last year with his comments, in which he also attacked Basques. He was removed from the country’s central bank and raked down by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who called him “stupid”.

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Cameron’s Munich speech marks securitisation of race policy

In delivering his speech, Cameron clearly had in his sights a domestic audience, wooing the Sun and the Daily Mail, both of which, in calling for the disciplining of Muslim communities, have promoted a crude British nationalism based on uncritical support for the armed services and military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Only the day before, the Daily Mail had carried a feature attacking two Birmingham Muslim councillors, Salma Yaqoob and Mohammed Ishtiaq, for refusing to participate in a standing ovation for a British soldier awarded the George Cross for bravery in Afghanistan.)

But Cameron’s speech was also intended to send a clear signal to the United States and the European center-Right that Britain would no longer pursue different ethnic minority and race policies from its European counterparts. In particular, Cameron was showing his support for Angela Merkel and her German Christian Democrat party’s idea that security and cohesion are brought about not through integration and pluralism, but through monoculturalism and assimilation into the dominant Leitkultur (lead culture).

Cameron’s speech was reported as a trailer for the up-and-coming government counter-terrorism review and Lord Carlile’s review of the Prevent strategy. And it is here that Cameron indicated to a German security audience support for the German intelligence services’ approach to the compartmentalisng of Muslim organisations into ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’, with greater surveillance of those deemed ‘illegitimate’. In his speech, Cameron promised that the British government would no longer fund or share platforms with Muslim organisations that, while non-violent, were also a part of the problem because they belonged to a ‘spectrum’ of Islamism. While those who openly support terrorism are at the ‘furthest end’ of this spectrum, it also includes many Muslims who accept ‘various parts of the extremist world view’ including ‘real hostility towards western democracy and liberal values’.

In this, what should be feared is that Cameron is indicating that the government’s review of counter-terrorism policy has been greatly influenced by the approach taken by the German intelligence services (Verfassungsschutz) which has at its base a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate Muslim organisations coupled with the most widespread system of religious profiling in Europe.

Liz Fekete analyses Cameron’s Munich speech.

Institute of Race Relations, 7 February 2011