Fundamentalist Christians in Germany are using populist slogans to incite hatred against Muslims, whom they see as the new source of danger for Europe. The number of internet users who visit their websites is alarmingly high. Claudia Mende reports.
Qantara, 26 September 2007
Via The American Muslim
For the Politically Incorrect anti-Muslim website, see Frankfurt No-Go-Area für Nazis and Watchdog Islamophobie
“‘No we are not racist. It is just that we need to preserve and protect our German identity and culture, and our Judeo-Christian heritage. The more Turkish Muslims come here, the less we know who and what we are. We cannot allow our identity and culture to be confused like that…’
“The gem quoted above was the comment made by a rather ordinary German at a public debate on Islam and the Rule of Law in Berlin; and just one week after an equally gruelling series of public talks in Amsterdam I could not help but feel as if Europe’s slide to the right is accelerating faster than ever.
“That a public forum on Islam and the rule of law could degenerate into a senseless round of Turk-bashing speaks volumes about the shallowness of public debate in some parts of Europe these days…. What was most alarming, however, was the manner in which a host of complex issues and dilemmas were reduced and pathologised to a single problem: The Muslims and their non-Western culture and belief system.”
Farish A. Noor in the Daily Times, 14 September 2007
In the London Evening Standard (5 September 2007) Anne McElvoy expresses her admiration for the repressive methods pursued by Angela Merkel’s government in response to the threat of terrorism:
“Germany has a different approach to its Muslim immigrants than Britain. There is less emphasis on a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign; her hardline interior minister Wolfgang Schauble ended up in constitutional hot water for suggesting that if a suspected terrorist was wrongly killed, it was preferable to risking the wider loss of innocent life….
“What is striking is the difference in tone. The vast efforts of the Government in Britain since the first bomb attacks have gone into improving community relations, attempting to find Muslim leaders who can separate potential extremists from the mainstream. Mr Brown has reversed some of the more confrontational Blairite policies, like the ostracism of the Muslim Council of Britain. Borderline organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir remain unbanned.
“In Germany and France, facing increasingly agitated Muslim populations, this would be unthinkable. Vast numbers of suspects are kept under the equivalent of control orders, deportations of troublemakers are more swift and frequent…. Germany, as one senior minister told me recently, does not believe in a ‘softly softly’ solution. ‘Look where that got you’, he said.”
In many Western cities, plans to erect mosques often stir more passion than any other local issue – and politicians are leaping into the fray. The Economist reports.
COLOGNE, Germany – Never mind that a local brothel claiming to be Europe’s largest calls itself the Pasha and sports an ersatz arabesque theme. Some residents of this ancient city on the banks of the Rhine see the brothel as a shining example of their tolerance. But what irks them is that some Muslims want to build a mosque, complete with a dome and minarets.
The residents complain that the minarets would clash with the towering spires of the city’s celebrated 13th-Century cathedral. But as the debate heats up, it has revealed a cultural schism that goes much deeper than any disagreement over architectural aesthetics.
Cardinal Joachim Meisner, spiritual leader of the city’s Catholics and a close friend of Pope Benedict XVI, has said that the proposed mosque leaves him with an “uneasy feeling.” Monsignor Rainer Fischer, another Catholic clergyman in the city, said: “The idea of building the mosque has brought up a number of issues that have always been there but were submerged. Now they are out in the open.”
These issues include Germany’s fears about the rising tide of Muslim immigration across Europe, frustrations over the failure to integrate Germany’s 2.7 million Turkish immigrants and gnawing doubts about whether the Turks and other Muslim immigrants truly want to integrate into a Western society.
“The mosque is not a symbol of integration, it’s a symbol of isolation, the symbol of an isolated enclave of Oriental culture,” said Joerg Uckermann, deputy mayor of the Ehrenfeld district and a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. “I think the minarets are a sign of sharia” – Islamic law – “and I do not want that here. This is a Christian city,” Uckermann said, openly expressing what many residents would say only in private.
The ferocity of the opposition has come as a shock to members of the Turkish community. It also angers them. “They are saying that this is a Christian nation, and there is no space for any other religion? This is against all the principles of freedom and democracy,” said Yildirim.
An administrative court in the western city of Duesseldorf upheld a hijab ban for female Muslim teachers, news reports said Tuesday.
The court dismissed the complaint of a 52-year-old Muslim teacher and thus confirmed the hijab ban which came into effect in June 2006. The judges argued that wearing the hijab was a religious avowal and violated state neutrality rules in schools. The plaintiff is to appeal the verdict.
Several German states have enacted tough anti-hijab laws which many Muslims view as a violation of their constitutional right to exercise religious freedom. There is no formal hijab ban in Germany, although German federal states are allowed to ban Muslim state employees with headscarves, provided the states have the required legislation on the books, according to a ruling by the nation`s highest court.
See also Reuters, 14 August 2007
Petitions in London, protests in Cologne, a court case in Marseille and a violent clash in Berlin – Muslims in Europe are meeting resistance to plans for mosques that befit Islam’s status as the continent’s second religion.
Across Europe, Muslims who have long prayed in garages and old factories now face skepticism and concern for wanting to build stately mosques to give proud testimony to the faith and solidity of their Islamic communities.
Some critics reject them as signs of “Islamisation”. Others say minarets would scar their city’s skyline. Given the role some mosques have played as centers for terrorists, others see Muslim houses of worship as potential security threats.
“The increasingly visible presence of Muslims has prompted questions in all European societies,” Tariq Ramadan, one of Europe’s leading Muslim spokesmen, argued when far-right groups proposed this year to ban minarets in his native Switzerland.
The issue hit the headlines in Britain in late July when a petition against a “mega-mosque” next to the 2012 London Olympics site was posted on Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Web site. It attracted more than 275,000 signatures before it was taken down.
In Germany last month, there were anti-mosque protests in Cologne and Berlin and a local council voted against one in Munich. A French far-right group vowed to sue the city of Marseille for a second time for helping build a “grand mosque”.
Bekir Alboga of the Turkish Islamic Union (DITIB) in Cologne said critics who see these new mosques as signs of separatism or of an Islamic colonization of Europe miss the point.
“The desire of Muslims to build a house of worship means they want to feel at home and live in harmony with their religion in a society they have accepted as theirs,” he said.
David Vickrey exposes the German right-winger Udo Ulfkotte, who has been taking legal action against opponents of his anti-Muslim views.
The Pope’s private secretary has given warning of the Islamisation of Europe and stressed the need for the continent’s Christian roots not to be ignored, in comments released yesterday.
“Attempts to Islamise the West cannot be denied,” Monsignor Georg Gaenswein was quoted as saying in an advance copy of the weekly Sueddeutsche Magazin to be published today. “The danger for the identity of Europe that is connected with it should not be ignored out of a wrongly understood respectfulness,” the magazine quoted him as saying.
He also defended a speech that the Pope gave last year that linked Islam and violence, saying it had been an attempt by the pontiff to “act against a certain naivety”. In the speech during a visit to Germany in September, the Pope appeared to endorse a view, contested by most Muslims, that Islam’s followers spread their religion in its early days by violence.
COLOGNE, Germany – In a city with the greatest Gothic cathedral in Germany and no fewer than a dozen Romanesque churches, adding a pair of slender fluted minarets would scarcely alter the skyline. Yet plans for a new mosque are rattling this ancient city to its foundations.
Cologne’s Muslim population, largely Turkish, is pushing for approval to build what would be one of Germany’s largest mosques, in a working-class district across town from the cathedral’s mighty spires.
Predictably, an extreme-right local political party has waged a noisy, xenophobic protest campaign, drumming up support from its far-right allies in Austria and Belgium. But the proposal has also drawn fierce criticism from a respected German-Jewish writer, Ralph Giordano, who said the mosque would be “an expression of the creeping Islamization of our land.”
The far-right party Pro Cologne, which holds 5 of the 90 seats in the city council, collected 23,000 signatures on a petition demanding the halting of the project. The city says only 15,000 of them were genuine. On June 16, Pro Cologne mobilized 200 people at a rally to protest the mosque. Among those on hand were the leaders of Austria’s Freedom Party, which was founded by Jörg Haider, and the extremist party Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Interest, from Antwerp. Both advocate the deportation of immigrants.
Manfred Rouhs, a leader of Pro Cologne, said the mosque would reinforce the development of a parallel Muslim society, and encourage the subjugation of women, which he said was embedded in Islam. “This is not a social model that has any place in the middle of Europe,” he said.
In this, he has found common ground with Mr Giordano, an 84-year-old Jew who eluded the Nazis in World War II by hiding in a cellar. Mr Giordano, who dismisses Pro Cologne as a “local chapter of contemporary National Socialists,” nonetheless agrees that the mosque is a threat. “There are people who say this mosque could be a step toward integration,” Mr Giordano said in an interview. “I say, ‘No, no, and three times no.’ Mosques are a symbol of a parallel world.”
“I don’t want to see women on the street wearing burqas,” said Mr Giordano, a nattily dressed man with the flowing white hair of an 18th-century German romantic. “I’m insulted by that – not by the women themselves, but by the people who turned them into human penguins.”
Henryk M. Broder, a Jewish journalist who is a friend of Mr Giordano’s, said he should have avoided the phrase “human penguins.” But Mr Broder said that his underlying message was valid, and that his stature as a writer gave him the standing to say it. “A mosque is more than a church or a synagogue,” he said. “It is a political statement.”
Despite reporting that “public opinion about the project seems guardedly supportive, with a majority of residents saying they favor it”, the NYT devotes most of its coverage to the views of the bigoted minority.
See also David Vickrey’s comments at Dialog International, 5 July 2007