The last 18 months have been awful for Germany’s five and a half million Muslims and it looks like they are only going to get worse.

Making up around 6.6 percent of the population with three million citizens, negative portrayals of Muslims and Arabs play an outsized role in the media and in politics, particularly since the start of the Israel-Gaza conflict, but with very little representation in either of these spheres.

Things were already bad – an EU study on Islam in Europe last year found that Germany was the second worst country in Europe for anti-Muslim racism – but with the most right-wing Parliament in the Federal Republic’s history, many Muslims, Arabs and other minorities are worried.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) scored the best result for the German far-right since World War Two at 20.8 percent, with fifty mentions of “Islam” or “Muslim” in their manifesto, none of them positive.

And though Alice Weidel has promoted herself as a “libertarian conservative”, and much has been made by Elon Musk and the international press of her lesbian marriage to a woman of color, but she also claimed that “the hijab doesn’t belong to Germany” and that Islam is incompatible with Germany’s constitution in 2017.

Though the party are going to be kept out of government by Germany’s famed “firewall” against cooperation with the far-right, Chancellor apparent Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democrats has made it clear that he is only going to accelerate Germany’s authoritarian decline, which primarily targets Arabs, Muslims and supporters of Palestine.

It does this in defense of the so-called Staatsräson, the doctrine that Israel’s security is one of Germany’s top priorities. This was initially just a rhetorical flourish by Angela Merkel on the floor of the Israeli Knesset but has since then taken on a life of its own.

After over a million went on the streets to protest his collaboration with the far-right on a vote aimed at restricting asylum Merz asked rhetorically in his final speech on the campaign trail in Munich where the pro-democracy protests were “when Palestinian flags were swung in this country.”

To Mr. Merz, showing the Palestinian flag, which is flown at the UN headquarters, is more scandalous than purposefully voting alongside a far-right party which campaigned on “remigration”.

He also recently promised to expand the law on racial incitement to make it illegal to do “deny Israel’s right to exist” – a highly controversial formulation with little basis in actual international law, and which doubtlessly will include Palestinians showing images of historic Palestine.

Germany’s case of déjà vu

One of Merz’s first moves after winning the election was to phone Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and invite him to Germany, despite the outstanding warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.

Though Germany’s outgoing “traffic light” coalition made clear that they weren’t likely to arrest Netanyahu, they were not going to roll out the red carpet either.

Merz on the other hand considered the invitation “an open challenge against the scandalous decision of the International Criminal Court to describe the Prime Minister as a war criminal” according to Netanyahu’s office.

No wonder that only 12 percent of Germany’s Muslims voted for the victorious conservative party according to pollsters Forschungsgruppe Wahlen.

The move was condemned by Amnesty International as an “open call to break the law” and “not a good start as future chancellor” while the Left Party, who received the most votes from Muslims in this election at 29 percent criticized it sharply.

But Merz is just a particularly extreme member of the Staatsräsonquerfront, a German word I have coined to describe the alliance between far-right through to the right, center and even elements of the so-called “antideutsch” left to defend Israel at any costs, including trashing freedom of opinion and assembly, restricting citizenship rights and continuing to deliver weapons to a man wanted as a war criminal by the world’s highest court.

Under the guise of the noble goal of fighting antisemitism in the land of the Holocaust, Islam and Arabs have been turned into a problem, with German politicians failing to see the historical irony in stirring hatred against one religious and ethnic minority to supposedly protect another one, and with the far-right as steadfast allies this time around, with key pieces of legislation against “antisemitism” initially coming from or being voted for by the AfD.

After October 7, Muslims were told by liberal darling and vice chancellor Robert Habeck — now thankfully retiring from frontline politics — that their protection from right-wing extremists was conditional on distancing themselves from Hamas, considered a terror group in Germany.

Sixty eight percent of Muslims in Germany have experienced discrimination in the last five years, with a sharp rise across Europe since 2022, so this danger is hardly theoretical. Mosques have already seen numerous bomb threats and property damage to mosques, as well as hate messages, the Muslim Coordination Council (Krm) in Cologne said in late January.

“In mosque communities, people are scared that fascists will come and take us away” newly-elected Left party politician Ferat Koçak told The New Arab on election night from the Arabic district of Neukölln. Koçak became the first Left MP to ever win outside of former East Germany.

“It is very important that we give people, our friends and neighbors, the feeling of security” he said, representing a growing anti-racist wing within his party, whose revival was one of the big surprises of the election.

Protecting citizens and inhabitants is one of the key jobs of a state – an actual Staatsräson– and should never be conditional on what people believe. We’ve seen Germany go down that route before, and it did not end well.

Source: The New Arab

In a statement, it said the IZH had acted as a direct representative of Iran’s Shi’ite Muslim Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and sought to bring about an Islamic revolution in Germany to impose theocratic rule.

The IZH was not available for comment by phone on Wednesday morning, and its website was not accessible to the public.

Iran’s foreign ministry said it had summoned the German ambassador in Tehran on Wednesday in protest at the ban.

“Unfortunately what happened in Germany is an example of Islamophobia and is in opposition to the teachings of the Abrahamic faiths,” it said on X, referencing Islam, Christianity and Judaism. The ministry said the ban violated freedom of expression and promoted violence and extremism.

Asked about the summoning of the ambassador, a German foreign ministry source said that it was up to the Iranian side to take concrete steps towards improving ties between the two countries that have been downgraded in recent years.

The German interior ministry said 53 of the IZH’s premises had been searched early on Wednesday in eight German states by investigators acting on a court order.

In addition to the Hamburg-based IZH, which includes one of the oldest mosques in Germany known for its turquoise exterior, subsidiaries in Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin were also banned, with four Shi’ite mosques to be closed, said the ministry.

The interior ministry said evidence from an earlier search of 55 properties conducted in November provided the basis for Wednesday’s ban of the IZH, known in German as Islamisches Zentrum Hamburg.

“Today, we banned the Islamisches Zentrum Hamburg, which promotes an Islamist-extremist, totalitarian ideology in Germany,” said Interior Minister Nancy Faeser.

“This Islamist ideology is opposed to human dignity, women’s rights, an independent judiciary and our democratic government.”

She said she wanted to make clear “this ban absolutely does not apply to the peaceful practice of the Shi’ite religion”.

A 2020 report on Islamic life in Germany said there were about 5.5 million Muslims in Germany’s 83 million population.

The interior ministry also accused the IZH of promoting antisemitism and the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which is also banned in Germany and classified as a terrorist organization by the European Union.

Source: Reuters

German authorities have sought for many years to increase the number of imams educated domestically to decrease the influence of foreign countries on its Muslim communities.

As part of the joint German-Turkish training initiative, 100 imams are to be educated in Germany annually starting next year, while the number of imams assigned from Turkey is to be gradually reduced by the same number.

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser called the agreement “an important milestone for the integration and participation of Muslim communities in Germany.”

“We need preachers who speak our language, know our country and stand up for our values,” Faeser said. “We want imams to get involved in the dialogue between religions and discuss questions of faith in our society.”

About 5.5 million of Germany’s 83.2 million residents are Muslim, and almost 3 million people in the country are Turkish or have Turkish roots.

For many decades, the Turkish government has exercised influence on the large immigrant community through the Muslim religious leaders it sent to work in Germany.

Relations between Germany’s majority Christian population and the Muslim minority traditionally have been complicated. Extremist attacks committed in the name of the Islamic State group resulted in raids and bans of Muslim associations deemed radical.

Racism, hatred and sometimes violence against Muslims in Germany are widespread and often part of their everyday experience, according to a recent report.

The agreement on the new imam training came together after “lengthy negotiations” with Turkey’s Diyanet, or Presidency of Religious Affairs, and the union of Turkish-Islamic cultural organizations in Germany, known by its Turkish acronym DITIB, the German Interior Ministry said.

With around 900 mosque communities, DITIB is the largest Islamic association in Germany.

The agreement with Turkey calls for DITIB to be in charge of training the 100 imams in Germany each year, but the aim is to have the men supplement their religious educations with classes at the Islamic College Germany.

The Islamic College Germany, or Islamkolleg Deutschland, is based in Osnabrueck in northern Germany. It was founded by Muslim community associations, theologians and academics in 2019 to provide practical and theological training for German-speaking religious staff and imams for local communities.

The German government also wants to promote courses for future imams that include German language teaching and religious education, as well as classes about history, political issues and German values, German news agency dpa reported.

Turkish immigrants started coming in significant numbers more than 60 years ago, when West Germany recruited “guest workers” from Turkey and elsewhere to help the country advance economically.

The mostly young men were often employed in coal mining, steel production and the auto industry. Many who initially came as temporary workers decided to stay and bring their families, giving Berlin and other cities in western and southwestern Germany large immigrant communities.

Source: The Associated Press

Article: “How Young Muslims and Christians Structure Human Rights: An Empirical Study in Germany”

Author: Hans-Georg Ziebertz, University of Wuerzburg

Published in: The Ambivalent Impact of Religion on Human Rights, pp.125-153

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Publication Date: November 2021

The main question of this research paper is how young Christians and Muslims in Germany structure different areas of human rights. International conventions claim that all human rights are equal, universal, indivisible and interdependent. As a unity all human rights express the modern understanding of humanity and predictability of social and societal relations. This paper focusses on the normative claim of unity from an empirical perspective when queried how young people perceive and structure human rights. Since the claims to universality of both, human rights and religions, are not always free of tension, the question is also if Muslims and Christians differ regarding the structure and valuation of human rights. The empirical analysis among N = 1785 young people shows first that human rights are not seen as an alliance of equal rights and second that Muslims and Christians show as well commonalities as differences in their attitudes towards human rights.

Read full article HERE.

Source: ResearchGate