Authorities in Hamburg have become the first in Germany to officially recognize Islamic holidays so Muslim employees and students can celebrate them at home.
The decision forms part of an agreement between the north German city and local Muslim groups. Similar agreements exist with Christian and Jewish communities in the city.
Hamburg’s mayor, Olaf Scholz, said Tuesday that he hopes the deal will serve as an example for other German cities.
Until the discovery last year that a string of unsolved killings had been perpetrated by neo-Nazis, few in Germany considered far-right extremism a major threat.
After the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, security agencies around the world poured energy into fighting Islamist terrorism, and Germany did so with special urgency because several of the hijackers had lived in Hamburg. But the shift led to the neglect of other types of homegrown violence in this nation of 82 million people, critics now say, allowing a neo-Nazi movement to flourish.
Under the slogan “march of the patriots” the EDL’s sister organisation, the German Defence League, organised a procession and rally in Cologne yesterday.
Sebastian Nobile, leader of the GDL’s Cologne Division, had issued a call to “representatives of all liberal, conservative, patriotic parties and organisations” to join the GDL’s demonstration, appealing to right-wingers to put aside their differences “for the sake of our country and our future”. In the event, according to a report in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, only 50 marchers rallied to the GDL’s cause, while an anti-fascist counter-demonstration drew 150 participants.
Far right members from organisations in Germany, Sweden and the UK attended a meeting in the European Parliament on 9 July at which literature was sold to attendees.
While one keynote speaker described how “The pansy left are auditioning to be the Muslim’s prison b*tch” and said the mainstream media represented “a threat to life and liberty.”
The same speaker stated: “A society which becomes more Muslim becomes less everything else.”
“Her latest book, The New Religious Intolerance, is a vigorous defence of the religious freedom of minorities in the face of post-9/11 Islamophobia. And by minorities she mostly means Muslims. ‘We see unreasoning fear driving a certain amount of public policy, perhaps more in Europe than in the US,’ she explains. And Europe has historical form on all this. ‘The laws that made it illegal to speak Latin in a church but left it legal to speak Latin in universities were covert forms of persecution – and not very covert at all. And you get that all over Europe. You get that in the Swiss minaret case, where a building that expresses the wish of a religious minority is suddenly illegal; you get it in Germany in those cases where nuns can teach in full habit but a teacher can’t wear a headscarf’.”
Giles Fraser talks to Martha Nussbaum.
A history lesson for Joachim Gauck from Bernhard Zand.
Germany’s Salafist Muslims are back in the spotlight. Since early May, hardly a week has gone by without another regional or national politician in the country proposing new ways to counter the group’s extremist version of Islam or a major German newspaper publishing yet another exposé on the group’s insular isolation from the mainstream. Just on Friday, interior ministers from Germany’s 16 states, at a regularly scheduled conference with federal Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, resolved to be increasingly firm in their dealings with the Salafists.
President Joachim Gauck has said in a newspaper interview that Muslims living in Germany are more definitively a part of the country than the religion of Islam, a slight change from the stance of his predecessor.
A Reformist priest from a tiny Bernese village is under investigation by church leaders after it emerged that she helped run a fanatical anti-Islamic website.
The Council of Reformist Churches for Bern, Solothurn and Jura has criticised the priest, and declared her activities on website ‘Politically Incorrect’ to be “incompatible” with her position as a priest due to the “Islam-baiting” that takes place on it, newspaper Tages Anzeiger reported.
Darling of the Islamophobic right, fellow at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute and serial liar Ayaan Hirsi Ali was in Berlin last week to receive the Axel Springer Honorary Prize. In her acceptance speech, which was delivered in English, she attacked the “advocates of silence” who censor the truth about Islam and the Muslim extremists who are destroying Europe:
The advocates of silence warn us that publishing these facts or debating them in the media and in parliament will transform the existing resentment towards Muslims into violent behavior. Censorship and silence, we are told, are the best preventive remedies against hatred and violence.
I believe that the advocates of silence are wrong, profoundly and dangerously wrong.