Germany fights radical Islamism with caricatures

The issue of spreading radical Islam ideas in Germany manifested itself in several ways. It was found that in order to increase the number of its followers, Al-Qaeda does not shun even pornography. Meanwhile, the German far-right have decided to make the Muslims angry by organizing a competition of caricatures of Prophet Muhammad.

On May 2, it was said that the German secret service found hundreds of documents in porn files heralding terrorist attacks. Valuable evidence of preparation of explosions was found in the possessions of Maksuda Lodin arrested a year ago, who returned from Pakistan. German security officials were tipped off by the fact that short frivolous videos occupied too much space on memory cards. The instinct of the law enforcement officers proved to be right. 

Under the pornography files a project of a capture of a cruise ship or a large hotel was found. It also contained information on terrorists training methods. Europeans have been recruited to go to Afghanistan or Pakistan, get trained there and then return home. What they had to do at home is not hard to guess.

A couple of weeks before that, radical Islamists-Salafis decided to organize a campaign in Germany to distribute 25 million volumes of the Quran. The German authorities could not issue formal complaints as giving out the books is not prohibited. However, intelligence agencies saw this as a new sophisticated way of recruiting. The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the federal state of Hesse decided to act.

Through the efforts of Hessen security forces in Germany, 26-year-old Austrian citizen of Egyptian origin, Mohammed Mahmoud, will be deported from the country. At home he has already completed his four years sentence for the creation of a terrorist group. When released, he moved to another German-speaking country. Now Germany is deporting him for the fact that the Islamist rejected the German laws and called for an armed jihad against the Federal Republic of Germany.

In Hesse, the local Salafis have been monitored for six years in an attempt to prevent the growth in their numbers. Now, the neighboring Lower Saxony has similar concerns. The head of the Interior Ministry Uwe Schünemann offered the Minister of Internal Affairs of Germany Hans-Peter Friedrich to adopt a national pact against the Salafists. He proposed to involve Muslim organizations loyal to the authorities.

Meanwhile, the nationalist party "Movement for the Rights of the citizens of North Rhine - Westphalia" (Pro NRW) came up with an answer to Salafi. They decided to hold a competition of caricatures of Prophet Muhammad on May 13, the day of the upcoming elections to the parliament of the largest federal state of Germany on. The goal of the competition, according to its organizers, is to fight the Islamization of Germany.

On April 29, first events of this campaign took place in Gelsenkirchen and Essen. However, the police thwarted an attempt to bring the cartoons directly to the mosques in order to avoid collisions. In the future, the organizers suggest "walking" with provocative pictures near the mosque in Cologne, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Aachen, Wuppertal and Solingen. Police should be vigilant.

The recent reports from the front of the invisible "war of civilizations" should make the German authorities to think seriously of the ways to deal with the local Muslims. The Salafi deported from Hesse is a native of German-speaking Austria, and the distributor of "Islamist pornography" is the owner of a German passport. It turns out that the fact of birth in Germany or Austria does not mean that people share the German values.

Today, Germany has approximately 4.3 million Muslims (or over five percent of the population). Approximately two-thirds of them are the Turks, the rest are the Arabs, Albanians, Bosnian Muslims and Kurds. Nearly 45 percent of them have German passports, but only a quarter expressed a desire to fit into the German society. Is it surprising that many of them end up joining the Salafi?

Scandals, one way or another pointing to the incompatibility of the German and Islamic cultures, have been ongoing. For example, in 2008 the Islamic community in Cologne tried to build a mosque in the city that would have been higher than the well-known Christian church. As a result, the minarets had to be slightly "trimmed". A small town of Felkingen in the federal land Saarland, where the ultra-local Turks opposed the construction of the mosque, had been an arena of confrontation for a long time.

Currently in Germany there are over 2,500 mosques, of which approximately one in ten have minarets (in 1970 there were only three mosques in the country). The Berlin district of Kreuzberg is now often called "Istanbul" because it looks more like a Turkish rather than German city. A large number of Muslims live in Hamburg, Cologne, and Frankfurt. In some areas of these large cities you will not find a single Caucasian.

Some mosques have become a hotbed of outright Islamist ideas. Especially revealing in this sense is the mosque "Taiba" in Hamburg, closed in 2010. It was attended at least by one of the executors of September 11, 2001 attack in the United States. Police said that it housed a think tank for the terrorist attacks planned in Europe. As it turns out, it was not the only think tank of this kind. Reports about the arrests of Islamists and the prevention of terrorist attacks in Germany became somewhat almost commonplace.

"In the early 1960s, our country invited foreign workers, and now they live here. For some time we have been deceiving ourselves thinking that they will leave, but this has not happened. Of course, our approach was multiculturalism, that we will live together and appreciate each other. But it has failed, completely failed," admitted six years ago Chancellor Angela Merkel. Recent events clearly prove that she was right.

The only issue is that everyone is waiting for Mrs. Chancellor's reaction, but there is none. Salafis are continuing their advocacy, and the ultra-right respond in a very provocative manner. If no action is taken, it will result in the widespread clashes in Germany.

Pavel Chernyshev

Pravda.Ru

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