Category Archives: Greece

Golden Dawn threatens mass mobilisation against Athens mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Golden Dawn anti-Mosque posterGreek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn has threatened to mobilize 100,000 people against plans to build a mosque in Athens, state television reported on Monday.

“If a mosque is constructed for Islamist criminals in Greece, a front of 100,000 Greeks headed by Golden Dawn will be created,” party spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris told supporters at a rally late on Sunday, in footage broadcast by state television.

The threat came after the Muslim Association of Greece over the weekend said it had received a crude note littered with profanities, warning its members to leave the country or face “slaughter like chickens.”

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Golden Dawn threatens to ‘slaughter’ Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Golden Dawn threat to MuslimsThe Muslim Association of Greece (MAG) said that it has received a threatening note giving all Muslims, Greeks and foreigners, one month’s time to evacuate the country or be “slaughtered like chickens,” according to a statement released by the association on May 18.

The note, published on the association’s webpage, is written in Greek, English and Arabic and the Golden Dawn emblem is printed on the paper, although there is no claim of responsibility from the neo-Nazi group that has 18 seats in Parliament, wants all immigrants out of Greece and has been accused of assaults on them, which the party has denied.

The note is printed over a symbol of Golden Dawn which has an openly anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-foreigner, ultra-religious jingoistic platform and says it wants a Greece populated only by Greeks with 100 percent Greek blood from both parents.

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Greece must combat racial violence: Council of Europe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Athens demonstration against Islamophobia
Demonstration against racist violence in Athens last August

The Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights has told Greece to toughen its measures to combat a surge in massive racial violence.

The council published a report on Tuesday, in which Nils Muiznieks said that he was “seriously concerned” by the increase in hate crimes targeting immigrants in the southern European nation.

“Democracy in Greece is seriously threatened by the upsurge of hate crime and a weak state response. Sustained and concerted action, notably by the police and the courts, is necessary to protect the rule of law and human rights in the country,” said Muiznieks.

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Athens mayor defends Greek Muslims’ right to worship

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Giorgos KaminisAthens Mayor George Kaminis said the pending opening of the first official mosque in Greece, being built in Athens by the government, will pave the way for more, as many as two or more in each district of the city, spreading the influence of Islam.

During a meeting of the city’s council, Kaminis, a supporter of the mosque that some critics, such as the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party and some Greek Orthodox Church officials are trying to block, defended the construction “for obvious reasons of political equality and defense of the right to free exercise of religion” but also “for practical reasons, in order to put in order the irregular creation of such informal places.”

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Belated step towards first official Athens mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt
Golden Dawn anti-Mosque poster

Golden Dawn poster

A month after denying reports that Turkey will pay for the construction of Athens’ first official purpose-built mosque, the government has finally announced it will publish a tender for this long-awaited and controversial project.

The 1m euro tender will soon be published on the government’s Diavgeia website for the construction of a mosque (without minarets) on a vacant lot of a disused naval base in Eleonas, west of Athens.

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is reportedly eager to move ahead with this project – after a seven-year delay, and after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reportedly offered to foot the bill during a recent meeting with the prime minister.

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‘Concrete steps needed’ for Athens mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Greece’s foreign minister has reiterated his government’s call to construct a mosque in Athens, but minority representatives in the country have expressed their skepticism about the administration’s sincerity. “Athens is the last European capital without a legal place of worship for its Muslim residents. The decisions have been made and we are moving ahead. We should not have delayed this long,” Dimitris Avromopoulos said in a recent interview. Continue reading →

Athens – the only EU capital city without a mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt
Golden Dawn anti-Mosque poster

Golden Dawn poster

Mark Lowen has an interesting piece at BBC News on the struggle by the Muslim population of Athens to build the first mosque in the city.

As things stand, Muslims are forced to pray in cramped underground prayer rooms, in breach of the law and facing the threat of attacks by the anti-migrant fascist party Golden Dawn.

“It is a very big tragedy for us Muslims that there is no mosque here,” Syed Mohammad Jamil of the Pakistan-Hellenic Society is quoted as saying. “Greece produced democracy and civilisation and the respect of religion – but they don’t respect our Muslims to provide us with a regular, legal mosque.”

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Greek fascists target Muslims and other ‘immigrants’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Golden Dawn anti-Mosque posterDressed in black shirts with faces hidden by helmets, ten men on motorbikes came to find him on a Saturday, after darkness fell.

Finding the door bolted at his home in a pot-holed Athens side street, they smashed the windows, broke in and trashed the place. Then, their dirty work done, the neo-Nazi gang roared away into the hot evening. It had taken less than a minute for them to sound an ugly warning that foreigners were not welcome in Greece.

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Athens: thousands protest against racism and Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Athens demonstration against Islamophobia

ATHENS — Thousands of immigrants in Greece have taken to the streets to protest anti-Muslim sentiments and racist attacks against foreigners in a country plagued by a huge debt crisis.

“This is a first action against the racist pogroms of the police which encourage the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn to come out in neighborhoods and murder and attack people,” Tasos Anastasiou of the “Expel Racism” movement told Euronews.

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