Germany: Difficult integration of Muslim immigrants

 This, according to a report by the Berlin correspondent of Le Figaro of November 23, reported by Apic. According to a representative of the Bundestag, Germany has for years evaded tackling the question of its immigrants. The question today is explosive.

On November 18, a firebomb was thrown at a mosque in Baden-Württemberg, without claiming any casualties. Around 25,000 Muslims demonstrated on the following Sunday in Cologne “for peace and against terrorism”.

The inhabitants of Muslim origin number around 3.2 million in Germany. Of these, 2.5 million are Turks, a quarter of whom have German nationality. The situation is different from that in Holland, where Muslims are mainly of Arab origin, marked by the Palestinian situation.

But with rare exceptions, integration has never really happened across the Rhine. The workforce which began to flood in about forty years ago, the Gastarbeiter (invited workers), were in no way expected to stay and become integrated. All over Germany, everyone is ready to sing the praises of “his” Anatolian vegetable merchant, but there is a rift between the two worlds. The opposite is also true: only one third of Turkish parents would accept a German son or daughter-in-law.

A parallel society

Thus, over the years, a parallel society has been formed. Forced marriages, oppression of women, refusal to allow muslim girls to participate in gymnastic classes in schools, the formation of entire areas where German is not spoken, all this has been ignored, reports Le Figaro, “in the name of a benevolent multiculturalism”. Thus, the deputy of the Green party, Hans Christian Ströbele suggested the suppression of a Catholic feast day and the creation for the Muslims of a “legal public holiday”. Opposition to this was instantaneous, both from the Left and the Right, including the Greens, whose co-president of the parliamentary group had this to say: “No-one would dream of demanding that Saudi Arabia celebrate Whit Monday”. The deputy of the Green Party rapidly backtracked.

 In opposition to this multicultural approach, which the Figaro correspondant sees as “marked by the fear of appearing racist, an indelible mark of the Third Reich,” there are those who wave “the red rag”, such as the Republikaner, a party of the extreme right. But even Laurenz Meyer, secretary general of the CDU – the oppostion Christian Democratic party – affirmed that Germany found itself sitting on a “gunpowder keg”.

According to the Social Democrat Minister of the Interior, Otto Schily, the events in Holland would not have direct consequences in Germany. There are certainly 30,000 Islamic fundamentalists registered by the secret service, but only 200 of them are considered to be potentially dangerous. The minister is nevertheless in favor of the idea of expelling the “preachers of hatred”, as they did in France with an Imam from the Lyon region, who was accused of advocating the stoning of adulterous women. These “preachers” officiate in some of Germany’s two million Mosques. In Berlin, for example, the Imam Yakup Tasci was filmed during a sermon which was very hostile to the Germans. Having discovered the content of the sermon, the Christian Democrat Minister for Culture of Baden-Württemberg, Annette Schavan, demanded that preachers be obliged to speak only German in Mosques, in order to facilitate surveillance. “We beg you,” the Bavarian Minister of the Interior, Günter Beckstein said publicly, “to learn German.”

 Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, for his part, warned against the danger of a “conflict of cultures,” and demanded that immigrants respect “our democratic rules of the game.” The naturalization laws have relaxed considerably in Germany. In 2000, the notion of right of territory was introduced. The following year, a new law on immigration imposed language and civilization courses “in order to break down barriers and promote integration.”