Attempted arson on a mosque in Bochum that had been marked with a swastika, the door of a Muslim family in Saxony shot at by a right-wing extremist neighbor, a woman pushed onto train tracks in Berlin after being asked if she belonged to Hamas.

These are some of the record 1,926 anti-Muslim incidents registered in Germany last year (2023) by the Competence Network Islam- and Muslim-phobia (CLAIM), a network of NGOs monitoring Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred. That marked a 114% rise on 2023, with incidents shooting up in particular after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel from Gaza.

Yet authorities are paying insufficient attention to this phenomenon, and even denying its existence, as mainstream parties take over policies of far-rht, anti-Islam parties that have surged in popularity, Rima Hanano told a Berlin news conference on June 24, to present the report.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD), which states in its program that Islam does not belong to Germany, has jumped to second place in polls over the past year, prompting mainstream parties to talk tougher on migration.

“The streets, buses or mosques are no longer safe places for people who are Muslim or perceived as such,” said Hanano. “Anti-Muslim racism was never as socially acceptable as today and it comes from the middle of society.”

The incidents recorded, likely only a fraction of the total given a fear of coming forward and a lack of monitoring institutions, included 90 attacks on Islamic religious sites, cemeteries and other institutions, CLAIM wrote.

Most attacks on individuals consisted of verbal abuse and were aimed at women. There were also four attempted murders.

The Muslim population in Germany has been growing rapidly, especially since an influx of migrants in 2015-16, tallying 5.5 million in total or 6.6% of the overall population.

Islamophobic Incidents Soar

The CLAIM report tallies with a 140% increase in Islamophobic crimes last year recorded by the interior ministry, and a survey showing one in two Germans hold Islamophobic views.

Antisemitism also rose following Israel’s devastating military incursion into the Gaza Strip after the Oct. 7 cross-border attack by Hamas-led Palestinian Islamist militants, according to the German government and NGOs.

In a country that is particularly sensitive about antisemitism due its responsibility for the Holocaust, German authorities have been more vocal denouncing that problem than anti-Muslim incidents.

Economy Minister Robert Habeck, in an emotive video, accused some Muslim community groups in Germany of being “too hesitant” in distancing themselves from Hamas or anti-Jewish hatred.

The government last year published its first ever independent report on Islamophobia by experts it commissioned, with a series of recommendations for tackling discrimination.

Family Minister Lisa Paus has said the recent rise in both anti-Muslim and antisemitic incidents was “dramatic” and the government was trying to do prevention work from an early age by funding civil society projects working on the issue.

CLAIM’s Hanano said, however, that insufficient action had been taken so far.

“Despite the fact … that we have been warning about this situation for years, it is still barely acknowledged,” she said. “What we really need is the political will to truly fight anti-Muslim racism.”

The Competence Network Islam- and Muslim-phobia (CLAIM) was founded as a network in Germany in October 2017. It aims to bundle and improve expertise on the topic of Islam- and Muslim-phobia/anti-Muslim racism and make it available to the fields of education, politics, administration, and civil society. Its goal is to reduce anti-Muslim racism in society.

Download CLAIM Report HERE (in German).

Source: Reuters

Racism in Contemporary Germany: Islamophobia in East and West

Edited By Ivan Kalmar, and Nitzan Shoshan

Publisher: Routledge

Publication Date: January 29, 2024

ISBN: 9781032260617

This book presents a critical and empirically informed examination of Islamophobia and related issues of racism and nationalism in Germany today, with particular attention to the East/West distinction. The authors, representing several disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and media and literary studies, situate the topic in the global and German context of the 2015-16 “migration crisis” and its aftermath, and of the ongoing transformations seen in the post-socialist regions of the European Union.

Since the 2015-16 “refugee crisis,” illiberal leaders and parties within Europe have instrumentalized Islamophobia in an attempt to dislodge the traditional political elites. Strikingly, such illiberal movements have been most successful in the formerly socialist areas of the EU. This is mirrored within Germany itself, where political formations with an Islamophobic agenda remain more popular in the East than in the West. This volume examines the reasons for this difference, including not only the ideological heritage of Soviet-dominated socialism but also the effects of western interventions in the formerly socialist areas in and beyond Germany since the end of the Cold War. Some Islamophobic and other hateful tendencies were in fact introduced from, and continue to prosper also, in the West.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: Islamophobia in Germany, East/West
1. The east is just like the west, only more so: Islamophobia and populism in Eastern Germany and the East of the European Union
2. Building a new nation: anti-Muslim racism in post-unification Germany
3. Islamophobia East-West and the politics of hospitality in contemporary Germany
4. Gendered identities and German Islamophobias
5. ‘The burqa is not us (wir sind nicht burka)’: strategic Islamophobia and the mainstreaming of nativist appeals
6. Islamophobia and anti-Muslim feeling in Saxony – theoretical approaches and empirical findings based on population surveys

About the Editors

• Ivan Kalmar is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Over his career, much of his work has focused on the image of Jews and Muslims in western cultural history. He is the author of Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power (Routledge) and co-editor of the volume, Orientalism and the Jews. More recently, Kalmar’s work has focused on illiberalism in the European Union, and especially in Central Europe. He has guest-edited a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice, dealing with Islamophobia in the East of the European Union, and a special issue on Islamophobia in Germany: East/West, for the Journal of Contemporary European Studies. His latest book is White But Not Quite: Central Europe’s Illiberal Revolt (2022). A special issue on Race and the East of the European Union, co-edited by Kalmar, is scheduled to be published by the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies in the spring of 2022.
• Nitzan Shoshan is Professor of Anthropology in the Centro de Estudios Sociológicos at El Colegio de México. His prize-winning book, The Management of Hate: Nation, Affect, and the Governance of Right-Wing Extremism in Germany (2016) is an ethnographic study of young right-wing extremist groups in East Berlin. He has guest-edited a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly on post-Fordist Affect and a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies on Islamophobia in Germany: East/West. His work has focused on nationalism and the far right in Germany and Europe. He has also written on urban marginality in Mexico and on the ethics of ethnographic fieldwork.

Source: Routledge