Category Archives: Germany

‘Europeans have stopped defending their values’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“When it comes to Islam, there is no freedom of the press nor freedom of opinion in Germany. Organized groups in Islamic communities want to decide what is said and done here…. Pluralism and tolerance are pillars of modern society. That has to be accepted. But pluralism doesn’t just mean diversity. It means that we share the same rules and values, and are still nevertheless different. Islam doesn’t have this idea. And Islam also has no tradition of tolerance. In Islam tolerance means that Christians and Jews are allowed to live under the protection of Muslims but never as citizens with the same rights. What Muslims call tolerance is nothing other than discrimination.”

Bassam Tibi explains the Muslim threat to Europe.

Spiegel, 2 October 2006

German politician blames Islam for religious violence

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A top German politician and close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel said today Islam was one of the main factors in religiously motivated violence, and urged Germany’s Muslims to reject all forms of brutality. Ronald Pofalla, general-secretary of Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), also said many Muslims would find it painful that their religion was being abused for violent ends.

“Certainly it is painful for many Muslims that their religion is misused for violence,” Pofalla wrote in a guest column for tomorrow’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper. “But… the problem of religiously motivated violence is today almost exclusively a problem of Islam. In addition, many of the victims are Muslims themselves,” he said, according to extracts released today.

The Central Council of Muslims in Germany criticised Pofalla’s comments, saying such generalisations reinforced stereotypes and prejudices. “I get the impression that some CDU people want to take one step forward and two back,” its general-secretary said.

Reuters, 1 October 2006

Mozart’s Idomeneo should not have been cancelled

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“I never thought this could be possible, but I agree with Angela Merkel. The Deutsche Oper should not have suspended its staging of Mozart’s Idomeneo because of the scene depicting the severed heads of the Buddha, the Greco-Roman god Neptune, Jesus, and prophet Muhammad (interestingly, Moses’ head was missing from the gruesome procession).

“When the controversial Danish cartoons were published last year, I saw them as a symptom of rising Islamophobia in Europe, particularly as they appeared in a rightwing paper under a rightwing Danish government notorious for its hostility to religious and ethnic minorities. And when a few weeks ago the Pope quoted a Byzantine emperor equating the Muslim faith with evil and inhumanity, I wrote that this was unacceptable coming from the representative of the largest religious institution in the world.

“Things are different this time. What we are dealing with is a creative artistic interpretation of the theme of the eclipse of the sacred…. So long as a creative and artistic work does not stigmatise a specific group, ethnic or religious, or seek to vilify it, it remains perfectly legitimate and within the parameters of free thought and expression. We need to draw a clear line between free thought and expression and the stirring of hatred against other races and religions. Mozart’s Idomeneo should not have provoked this noise and controversy, and should not have been cancelled.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, 28 September 2006

German mistrust of Muslims and Islam grows

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Experts fear new conflicts after a study published this week showed most Germans doubt the Western and Islamic worlds can peacefully coexist. Mistrust of the 3 million Muslims living in Germany appears to be growing.

In spite of official attempts to promote dialog among religions, distrust of Islam continues to grow, with 60 percent of Germans expecting tension between traditional German society and immigrants from Muslim countries, according to an Allensbach study commissioned by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

“Germans are increasingly of the opinion that a lasting, peaceful coexistence with the Islamic world will not be possible,” the researchers said in the survey. Some 56 percent of Germans said they believed a “clash of cultures” already exists, partly a result of recent incidents that received a large amount of media attention, according to the survey’s authors Elisabeth Noelle and Thomas Petersen.

Deutsche Welle, 20 May

The Allensbach survey of 1,076 German adults in early May found that 83% of the respondents associated Islam with “fanaticism,” an increase of 8% from a similar poll in 2004. Over 71% believed Islam to be “intolerant,” a rise from 66% in 2004; 62% saw it as “backward,” up from 49%; while 60% saw it as “undemocratic,” an increase of 8% since 2004. Only 8% of the survey participants characterized Islam as peaceful. When asked what keyword or phrase they associated with Islam, 91% of respondents stated that Islam implied discrimination against women.

40% of the participants said they would favor curtailing Germany’s constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom of religion in order to safeguard national security. Asked if there should be a ban on the building of mosques in Germany as long as Saudi Arabia and other Islamic states banned church construction, 56% agreed, the survey found.

Jerusalem Post, 24 May 2006

German state bans hijab-clad teachers

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The western state of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populous, has banned teachers in public schools from wearing hijab.

The state’s regional parliament, where the conservative Christian Democrats hold a majority, adopted a law banning hijab on Wednesday, May 31. The law was voted against by the Greens and the Social Democrats. North-Rhine Westphalia became the eighth of Germany’s 16 federal states to ban hijab in public schools.

The Muslim minority blasted the hijab school ban as unconstitutional. The Central Council of Muslims in Germany said the new law does not treat all religions as equal, banning only the hijab and not the Christian cross or other religious symbols.

The constitutional court, Germany’s highest tribunal, ruled in July 2003 against a decision by the Baden-Wuerttemberg state to forbid a Muslim teacher from wearing hijab in the classroom. But it said Germany’s 16 states could issue new legislations to ban the Muslim headscarf if they believe it would influence children.

A number of states, including Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, still allow hijab at schools. Others, including Baden-Wurttemberg, Saarland and Lower Saxony, ban teaching staff in state schools from wearing symbols that express religious, political, or ideological affiliation, including hijab.

Islam Online, 1 June 2006

Saudi woman insulted in Germany over veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Saudi woman claims to have suffered humiliation and abuse at a German airport for refusing to take off her veil in public for a security inspection. Saudi daily Al-Watan reported on Wednesday that the incident occurred two days ago at Munich airport, exposing the growing animosity and anti-Muslim sentiment in Western countries.

The paper quoted the woman as saying that she and her daughter were returning home after spending time in Germany for medical treatment. They stopped at the inspection point and the mother asked a female inspector if she needed to take off her coat but got no answer, while another female employee answered brusquely that she had to remove it.

“After we crossed the inspection point,” the woman said, “an employee came to me and asked to remove my veil, which I refused to do, asking her to use the electronic detector and pass it on my head. “The employee refused and started yelling at me, attracting the attention of the people around, so I asked her if I can do it in an isolated place or behind a curtain … So she started cursing me as she indicated a small room,” the woman said. “I was trying to fight my tears and told her that her behavior is not respectful and does not reflect the democracy they talk about,” she said.

The woman then said that “a man came close to me and also started yelling at me and hitting me on the shoulder screaming ‘this is Germany’. “Then,” the woman said, “the supervisor intervened and called on the employee who hit me to apologize, but he refused and started yelling again without taking into considering my old age and illness”.

UPI, 10 May 2006

German minister wants to end discrimination against Muslims … by banning hijab from schools

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Muslim minority in Germany is suffering from a growing religious discrimination with many Germans wrongly associating Islam with terrorism, a federal minister admitted on Sunday, May 7.

“Muslims are lately being confronted with mounting rejection which feeds from fear,” Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries told the weekly Welt am Sonntag. She said many Germans were not able to properly distinguish between Islam and terrorism. “As a consequence many Muslims are faced with discrimination because of their faith as some people link the Muslim faith automatically with Al-Qaeda and terrorism,” added Zypries.

The Interior Ministry is sponsoring a mobile exhibition touring the country to draw the line between Islam as a faith and the practices of some Muslims. It aims to distinguish between Islam as a religion that preaches peace and tolerance and parties condoning violence in the name of Islam, said the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the sponsor. The exhibition would visit universities, schools, parliaments, municipalities and cultural centers in the different states.

European officials said recently that the bloc is set to remove derogatory terminology about Islam like “Islamic terrorism” and “fundamentalists” in its new lexicon of public communication.

The minister proposed the introduction of school uniforms to avoid sparking furor over Muslim students wearing hijab. “All school pupils should wear the same school uniform,” she said. The minister believes such uniforms would also help prevent religious and social discrimination in Germany.

Islam Online, 7 May 2006

German school suspends students for wearing veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A high school in the German city of Bonn has suspended two Muslim girls for wearing a burka, an all-enveloping cloak worn by women in central and south Asia. The two teenagers who returned to school following the Easter holidays dressed in burkas were considered to have disturbed the peaceful running of the school and were handed initial suspensions of two weeks, a school official said.

August Gmünd from the local government, which supports the suspension, said the action had caused disruption throughout the school.  “A heated discussion broke out in the school the instant the two girls turned up, not just amongst the kids, but also the teachers,” said Gmünd. “It was just impossible to maintain a controlled environment in the school.”

Deutsche Welle, 29 April 2006

Neo-Nazis threaten to massacre Muslims at World Cup

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The World Cup in Germany is set to become a battleground between facists and Muslims, an Italian member of a new European neo-Nazi movement warned. In a statement published by Italian daily Repubblica, the member of AS Roma’s notorious ultras hooligan group claims neo-Nazis across Europe met in Braunau in Austria to plan attacks against supporters from Islamic countries during the World Cup in Germany from June 9 to July 9.

“We are united. For the first time we are talking and planning together, with the English, the Germans, the Dutch, the Spanish, everyone with the same objective. At the World Cup there will be a massacre,” said the Italian ultra. “We will all be in Germany and there will be Turks, Algerians and Tunisians. The Turks, we can’t stand them. In our country (Italy) there are not many, but in Germany, there are many of those guys there. They are Islamic terrorists. We will attack them. They are all enemies that need to be eliminated….”

AFP, 21 March 2006