In an unhappy outcome for German Muslims in the largest regional state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the conservative anti-hijab Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won state elections Sunday, May 22, triggering a decision to hold a snap general election across Germany in the autumn.
The CDU’s resounding victory sent shock waves among the Muslim minority in NRW, home to one million of Germany’s 3.4 million Muslims. During the election campaign, Christian Democrat leader in NRW Juergen Ruettgers said he would swiftly ban hijab from state schools.
Ruettgers’s plan to ban hijab within three weeks of his election victory, despite opposition from other parties, was not the only reason for Muslims’ concern. His anti-Muslim drive is shown in many statements he made in the run up to state elections and even before.
Late last month, he told a German news channel that he is a Catholic who believes Christianity presented the best image of man and should therefore be leading all other religions worldwide.
“A friend of mine told me that Peter Tatchell was again at the Free Palestine demo yesterday. Apparently he was with a group of about thirty people (with a police escort) bearing placards saying ‘Stop the Honour Killings’. The expression ‘honour killings’ is usually used to refer to domestic murders of women deemed unworthy. It’s used by western Orientalists to suggest that there is something worse about this than the two women killed by men every week in the UK. So why is Tatchell using the expression to condemn the killing of gays in Palestine? And why does he see fit to demonstrate against Palestinians at a Free Palestine rally? When he first invade the demo last year he bore a placard with the inane slogan ‘Israel stop persecuting Palestine – Palestine stop persecuting queers’. Now by conflating homophobia in the third world with extreme domestic violence, and putting as orientalist a spin on it as he could think of, he’s crossed the line from seeking to embarrass Palestinian officialdom to full-blown anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.”
“Accounts of abuses at the actual American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, including Newsweek magazine’s now-retracted article on the desecration of the Koran, ricochet around the world, instilling ideas about American power and justice, and sowing distrust of the United States. Even more than the written accounts are the images that flash on television screens throughout the Muslim world: caged men, in orange prison jumpsuits, on their knees.”