Category Archives: Germany

Germany: FDP politician calls for ban on veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The liberal parliamentarian Serkan Toeren has demanded a ban on the burqa in Germany. Toeren, who represents the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in the Bundestag, says it was time to have an open debate on the issue. Toeren, whose constituency is in Lower Saxony, said the full body covering worn by some Muslim women, obscuring the face, posed a threat to public security, and undermined the individuals.

“Wearing a full-body veil like the burqa is a breach of human dignity.” Toeren told the German daily Leipziger Volkszeitung. Women who choose to wear the burqa voluntarily cannot be accepted either, because individuals cannot control human dignity.”

According to Toeren, the burqa robs women of their dignity and freedom: “It is supposed to make women more or less invisible, and not present. The burqa is a mobile women’s prison.”

The FDP spokesman for integration, who is of Turkish origin, does not accept religious reasons as justification for wearing the full-body veil. “The burqa is not a religious, but rather a political symbol against our state order and a means of suppressing women,” said Toeren.

Deutsche Welle, 20 August 2010

Berlin: Islamophobic politician faces expulsion over invitation to Wilders

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam Dutch politician, is set to address like-minded Germans in October, triggering criticism Thursday in Berlin, with city Christian Democrats saying they may expel a politician who invited Wilders to the German capital.

Rene Stadtkewitz, a Christian Democratic deputy in the legislature of Berlin state, was unrepentant over his invitation to Wilders. He said they would meet October 2 to share views on how to fight political Islam. He gave no details of any public appearances.

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Chancellor Angela Merkel is an opposition party in the Berlin regional legislature. The city and suburbs constitutes one of Germany’s 16 states.

Frank Henkel, caucus leader of the city CDU, said he would expel Stadtkewitz from the caucus if he did not call off the Wilders visit. “I won’t cancel the invitation to Wilders. That would go against my fundamental political convictions,” Stadtkewitz responded.

Stadtkewitz resigned his CDU party membership in 2009 in protest at a fellow member who has built bridges with city Muslims, but remains a member of the CDU caucus in the state legislature. He has campaigned against plans to build the newest mosque in the city. He has charged that the Merkel party is “too soft and too tolerant” towards “violence-prone, radical Muslims.”

Earth Times, 22 July 2010

Memorial to Marwa El-Sherbini vandalised

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Marwa El-Sherbini memorial

Vandals have attacked an art project erected in honor of Marwa El-Sherbini, a pregnant headscarved Egyptian woman who was murdered in a German court room, organizers said Friday.

The Citizen.Courage group, which sponsored the display in the eastern city of Dresden, said that a few knife-shaped columns used in the open-air show had been knocked over several times and signs explaining the project were stolen.

“Citizen.Courage assumes this was a malicious, politically motivated attempt to destroy the project,” group chairman Christian Demuth said in statement. To warn against everyday racism, we will not restore the destroyed installations. But we will continue the project.” A police spokeswoman said authorities had opened an investigation.

During a trial last July, a Russian-born defendant suddenly attacked Sherbini – who was Muslim and wore a headscarf – plunging an 18 centimetre kitchen knife at least 16 times into her while she was three-months pregnant with her second child. Her son, Mustafa, three years old at the time, watched her bleed to death at the courtroom.

Sherbini’s husband, Egyptian geneticist Elwy Okaz, rushed to her aid but was also stabbed repeatedly and then shot in the leg by a police officer confused about who was attacking whom.

The 28-year-old assailant, who was sentenced to life in prison, attacked her out of revenge after she pressed charges against him for calling her a “terrorist”, “Islamist” and “whore” during a dispute over a playground swing.

The killing, and the initially muted reaction of Germany’s politicians and media, sparked outrage in Sherbini’s home country, as well as in the wider Muslim world. Many newspapers dubbed her the “veil martyr” after her headscarf.

The “18 Stabs” installation, unveiled on the first anniversary of Sherbini’s death on July 1, featured 18 knife-shaped concrete pillars erected throughout the city with signs condemning racism and xenophobic violence.

AFP, 23 July 2010

Europeans approve, Americans reject veil ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pew pollDays before French lawmakers are due to vote on a bill that would make it illegal for Muslim women to wear full veils in public, a US poll has found that a majority of Europeans back such a ban while Americans reject it.

The French overwhelmingly endorse a ban on Muslim face coverings, also known as the burqa or the niqab, as do majorities in Britain, Germany and Spain, a survey conducted by the Washington-based Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project found.

More than eight in 10 people in France said they would approve of a ban on Muslim women wearing full veils in public, including in schools, hospitals and government offices, the survey, conducted over three weeks in April and May, found. Just 17 percent of French people were opposed to a ban on the burqa.

Majorities in Germany (71 percent), Britain (62 percent) and Spain (59 percent) said they would support a burqa ban in their own countries. But in the United States, the opposite was true, with two-thirds of Americans saying they were against a ban on full veils in public.

AFP, 7 July 2010

Download the poll report (pdf) here.

The report finds that in Europe and the US “support for a ban on Muslim women wearing a full veil is more pronounced among those who are age 55 and older” and that “those on the right in France, Britain and Germany are more likely than those on the left to approve of a ban on women wearing the full Islamic veil in public places”.

Rise of European far right fuels ‘new racism’ of religious victimisation

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A rise in right-wing radicalism is fuelling the spread of xenophobia and extremist attitudes towards religious minorities in Europe, says Minority Rights Group International.

MRG’s flagship annual State of the World’s Minorities and Indigenous Peoples report, themed for 2010 on religious minorities, was launched in Budapest, Hungary. It suggests that victimisation against religious groups is in many respects the “new racism”.

The report says that ultra right-wing parties, aiming to establish themselves in mainstream political arenas in Europe, justify their anti-immigration, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic rhetoric by stoking fears that religious minorities and immigrants are a threat to modern societies.

“Successes in the 2009 European Parliamentary elections, and at the national parliamentary level, have allowed these populist right-wing parties to shift formerly far-right ideas, on immigration for example, into the mainstream,” says Carl Soderbergh, MRG’s Director of Policy and Communications.

The report details a sharp rise in Islamophobia in Europe in 2009.

In May 2009, ultra right-wing groups held an “anti-Islam” rally to oppose the building of a large new mosque in Cologne, Germany. When the authorities in Denmark’s capital city Copenhagen approved the country’s first purpose-built mosque, the extreme-right Danish People’s Party launched an anti-mosque campaign in September.

Following a campaign by the ultra-conservative Swiss People’s Party, a sizeable majority of Switzerland’s cantons backed a referendum in November 2009, which proposed a ban on the building of new minarets in mosques.

“MRG is deeply concerned about the infringement of religious freedom that the Swiss ban on minarets, and other European Islamophobic initiatives, supposes for the Muslim community. We urge European authorities to abide by their obligations under international law and protect their populations’ freedom to practice their religion and be free from discrimination,” added Soderbergh.

Ekklesia, 5 July 2010

See also ENGAGE, 2 July 2010

Germany’s ‘multi-culti’ football team

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sami KhediraWhen Sami Khedira and his Under-21 team‑mates held aloft the European Championship trophy last summer, after humbling England 4–0 in the final, they dreamed of changing the face of German football. Little did they know that their opportunity would come so quickly.

After Euro 2008, Joachim Löw, the Germany manager, accepted the need to “rejuvenate” a squad that had become too heavily seasoned in parts. He has done so in spectacular fashion. And once Löw had done with filleting his squad, the players he turned to were almost all from the next generation.

The youth of this new Germany, however, is only part of the story. The country has changed greatly over the past decade or so, with its society becoming more integrated, and Löw’s squad reflects what the tabloids like to call German “multi-culti”. Of the six players promoted from Horst Hrubesch’s U-21 champions, five are of immigrant backgrounds. Khedira’s father is Tunisian and Ozil is of Turkish descent. Jerome Boateng’s father is Ghanaian, Dennis Aogo’s is Nigerian while Marko Marin was born in Bosnia.

There remains a section of Germany’s support that struggles to come to terms with the multiculturalism, traditionalists who complain about some of the players not singing the national anthem. Ozil murmurs verses from the Koran when it plays. But Aogo says “people shouldn’t attach too much importance” to this. “I don’t sing the national anthem and I am still proud to play for Germany.”

Guardian, 18 June 2010

Germany’s interior minister rejects veil ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Thomas_de_Maiziere_CDUGermany’s interior minister has criticized the ban on wearing a full Islamic veil, or burqa, in public, saying Tuesday even a debate would be “unnecessary in Germany.”

Thomas de Maiziere, from the majority coalition partner, the Christian Democratic Party, or CDU, said his country does “not need a ban,” as there are at most a hundred women who wear burqas, in a video interview with the German Leibziger Volkszeitung.

Earlier this week, another CDU deputy, Wolfgang Bosbach, had voiced a similar opinion, saying: “Veiling is part of the right to express your personality.” He also said a ban like the one in Belgium would be counter to the German constitution.

Both politicians’ remarks came a few days after German MEP Silvana Koch-Mehrin, European parliament vice-president and a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s junior coalition partners, called for a Europe-wide ban.

Much more pressing issues than the burqa will be discussed at the upcoming Islamic conference, held by with the German government in cooperation with Muslim organizations on May 17 in Nuremberg, de Maiziere said. There, issues such as whether there is an antagonistic atmosphere toward Islam in Germany, and the differentiation between Islam and Islamism, will be discussed, he said.

Hurriyet, 4 May 2010

German MEP calls for Europe-wide ban on veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Koch-MehrinAfter Belgium’s parliament voted to ban Islamic full-face veils, the German vice-president of the European Parliament has called for a ban of the burka throughout Europe.

Silvana Koch-Mehrin called the full-body veil an attack on the rights of women in a guest editorial in the Bild am Sonntagnewspaper. “I would like to see all forms of the burka banned in Germany and in all of Europe,” wrote the politician, a member of Germany‘s pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP).

She called the burka a “mobile prison,” saying that those who veil women take away their faces and therefore their personalities. “The complete veiling of women is a blatant acknowledgement of values that we here in Europe do not share,” she wrote.

The Local, 1 May 2010

Berlin – Geert Wilders solidarity demo flops

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Wilders Berlin demo

Over the weekend a “Solidarity with Geert Wilders” demonstration was held in Berlin. Organised by Pax Europa and Politically Incorrect, the demo was reportedly inspired by the London march in support of Wilders by the English Defence League, whose representatives attended the Berlin demo.

The event has received little coverage from its far-right supporters, no doubt because according to one report it attracted fewer than 80 people. However, photographs of the demo (carefully framed to disguise the fact that there was hardly anyone there) have now been posted, providing a helpful illustration of the sort of international links the EDL are building.

Postscript:  And while we’re on the subject of the EDL, we note that they now have a website, “English Defence League … Extra”, which claims to offer a more theoretical take on the organisation’s anti-Muslim bigotry. The latest post is a rant against the Aylesbury Carnival Against Racism that will be held in opposition to the EDL’s planned provocation in that town on May Day. The author is evidently incapable of distinguishing between Steve Bell, secretary of the Bucks health branch of UNISON who took the initiative in organising the alliance responsible for calling the anti-EDL carnival, and Steve Bell of the Communication Workers Union who is treasurer of the Stop the War Coalition. But then, UNISON or the CWU – what’s the difference? They’re all communist organisations after all.