Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Gatestone Update :: Soeren Kern: Germany: "Radical Salafism is Like a Hard Drug", and more


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Germany: "Radical Salafism is Like a Hard Drug"

by Soeren Kern
June 19, 2012 at 5:00 am
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In an effort to improve their image, the Salafists have removed from their "information booths" all literature about the role of women in Islam or the supremacy of Islamic Sharia law over democracy. The German translation of the Koran has edited out many of the verses which call on Muslims to make war on non-believers.
German authorities have launched a major crackdown on radical Islamists suspected of plotting against the state.
The move reflects mounting concern in Germany over the growing assertiveness of Salafist Muslims, who openly state that they want to establish Islamic Sharia law in the country and across Europe.
In nation-wide raids on June 14, over 1,000 German police searched about 70 Salafist homes, apartments, mosques and meeting places in seven of Germany's 16 states in search of evidence that would enable the German government to outlaw some of the dozens of Islamist groups operating in the country.
German authorities believe the Salafists, who trace their roots to Saudi Arabia, want to create a Sunni Islamic Caliphate (Islamic Empire) opposed to Western democracy; and that some within the group support martyrdom and the use of violence, and are also fuelling militancy among German's socially alienated Muslim youth.
Announcing the crackdown, Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said he had banned a Salafist group called Millatu Ibrahim, based in the western city of Solingen. "The Millatu Ibrahim group works against our constitutional order," he said, "and against understanding between peoples." Among other things, Millatu Ibrahim teaches its followers to reject German law and to follow Islamic Sharia law, and that "the unbelievers are the enemy."
Friedrich also said that the raids in Bavaria, Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg and North Rhine-Westphalia, among other locations, may unearth evidence that would allow outlawing two other Salafist groups, the DawaFFM and "Die Wahre Religion" [DRW, "The True Religion"].
Friedrich said a "comprehensive collection of evidence" had been seized, including cell phones, laptop computers, videos and other items. "All these things will be evaluated over the coming days, and we shall see to what extent the evidence is sufficient to ban the two organizations being investigated."
Among the homes targeted in the raids was one belonging to Ibrahim Abou-Nagie, a Palestinian-born, Rheinland-based Salafist hate preacher who runs the DRW Salafist group.
Abou-Nagie is the orchestrator behind an unprecedented nationwide campaign to distribute 25 million copies of the Koran, translated into the German language, with the goal of placing one Koran into every household in Germany, free of charge.
The mass proselytization campaign -- called Project "READ!" -- is being implemented by hundreds of Salafists in cities and towns throughout Germany, as well as in Austria and in Switzerland. More than 100 Salafist "information booths" have already been set up in dozens of German cities, particularly in the regions of North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Hessen and Hamburg.
In September 2011, German public prosecutors launched an investigation into Abou-Nagie after he called for violence against non-believers in videos posted on the Internet. In his sermons, Abou-Nagie glamorizes Islamic martyrdom and says that Islamic Sharia law is above the German Constitution. He outspokenly believes that music should be prohibited, that homosexuals should be executed, and that adulterers should be stoned.
Abou-Nagie has tens of thousands of followers across Germany. Among them are two German Muslim converts-turned-terror suspects trained by Abou-Nagie and recently arrested in Dover, England, after British border police searched their luggage and found a document entitled "How to Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom," an article from the English-language online magazine "Inspire" produced by Al-Qaida in Yemen.
In one video, Abou-Nagie tells his audience that "whoever follows the Christian Bible or the Jewish Torah instead of the Islamic Koran will go to Hell for eternity." Abou-Nagie says he sees it as his calling to save the German people from the wrath of Allah by converting them to Islam.
During the extended Christian Easter weekend from April 5-9, Abou-Nagie's Project "READ!" entered into a new phase. According to the Berlin-based newspaper Die Welt, the Salafists launched a "frontal assault" against people of other faiths and "unbelievers."
On April 7 Project "READ!" organized a nationwide campaign to distribute the Koran in 35 German cities, including Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hanover, Heidelberg, Konstanz, Munich and Osnabrück.
According to Die Welt, German authorities view the Koran project as a "most worrisome" recruiting campaign for radical Islam. Security analysts say the campaign is also a public-relations gimmick intended to persuade Germans that the Salafists are transparent and "citizen friendly."
In an effort to improve their image, the Salafists have removed from their "information booths" all literature about the role of women in Islam or the supremacy of Islamic Sharia law over democracy.
Moreover, the German translation of the Koran has edited out many of the verses which call on Muslims to make war on non-believers. According to the German domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), the German version of the Koran is "rather non-controversial."
The BfV believes there are an estimated 29 Islamist groups active in Germany with around 35,000 members or supporters who want to establish a "Koran-state" in Germany because they believe Islamic Sharia law is a divine ordinance that is supposed to replace all other legal systems. The BfV says the Salafists, who are estimated to be about 4,000 in number, are the fastest growing Islamic group in Germany, which has a total Muslim population of 4.3 million.
German authorities have been stepping up their monitoring of Salafist groups after a series of violent clashes with police.
In May, for example, more than 500 Salafists attacked German police with bottles, clubs, stones and other weapons in the city of Bonn, to protest cartoons they said were "offensive."
The clashes erupted when around 30 supporters of a conservative political party, PRO NRW, which is opposed to the further spread of Islam in Germany, participated in a campaign rally ahead of regional elections in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW).
Following the fights (in which 29 police officers were injured, two of them seriously), a video surfaced on the Internet by a known terrorist, the German-born Yassin Chouka, a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.
In the German-language video, Chouka calls for members of PRO NRW and German media to be killed. He also urges the Salafists to move away from street confrontations, where the risk of being arrested is great, and instead to target PRO NRW members in their homes and workplaces.
In a June 8 interview with the newspaper Die Welt, Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said: "Radical Salafism is like a hard drug. All of those who succumb to her become violent."
Friedrich also said the recent Salafist attacks on German police show "that the threshold for violence has decreased in an alarming way. There can be only one answer: The government must make it clear with all the force of the law that our democracy is fortified. Salafists fight the liberal-democratic legal system and in its place want to introduce their radical ideology in Germany. But we will not let that happen. We will defend our freedom and our security with all our might."
Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.
Related Topics:  Germany  |  Soeren Kern

Jew Hunting Season Open in France

by Guy Millière
June 19, 2012 at 4:30 am
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These organizations remain blindly silent : for them, Muslims are "victims of racism" and therefore cannot be racist.
France is presently prey to one of the worst waves of anti-Semitism in its history ; this wave is not receding, rather, it is intensifying.
According to the annual report published by the Protection Service of the Jewish community, 2011 was a bad year; 2012 will be worse.
Since the killing of three children and a rabbi in the courtyard of a school in Toulouse on March 19 by Mohamed Merah, the number of attacks against Jews has exponentiated.
The vicious assault of three young Jews in Lyon on June 2 by a gang of ten men armed with hammers and iron bars was only the most visible and most obvious act among more than 150 other acts of the same kind in less than three months.
Since then, in just two weeks, dozens of new attacks have occurred. In one of them, an eighty-three year old woman was beaten, raped and left for dead in a Marseilles stairwell.
Most of the victims do not even go to the police: they know only too well that their complaint is likely to be dismissed. The police have orders: the risk of riots is in the mind of all those in authority. These orders are not transmitted in writing, of course ; their existence emerges when the police, angered by the role they are asked to play, organize protests. They are even more angry when they do their job and make arrests, only to see those arrested released by the judge even when the evidence provided is overwhelming. Judges also appear to have orders, also not transmitted in written form: some organize protests, others silently comply.
Those who were arrested may then seek revenge against those who complained -- who will be protected by nobody.
The situation has evolved as successive governments have accepted the existence and growth of no-go zones which are now effectively out of control.
The situation has also evolved as nearly all politicians, left and right, submit to the omnipresence of political correctness. To them, those who commit crimes are not really guilty, but are "victims of society."
Anti-racist organizations are always ready to mobilize against anti-Semitism, but they act and speak as if there were only one form: extreme-right anti-Semitism.
But as anti-Semitic crimes committed in France do not come from the extreme-right, but mostly from the Muslim community, these organizations remain blindly silent ; for them, Muslims are "victims of racism" and therefore cannot be racist.
As the mainstream media are also silent, Muslim anti-Semites feel free to act. And the more time passes, the more they feel free to act. When crimes are not followed by repercussions, criminals acquire a giddy sense of impunity.
Almost no one dare associate the words "Muslim" and "anti-Semite" in France anymore, and those who still do are immediately accused of "Islamophobia" and charged. A law that bears the name of a communist politician -- the "Gayssot law" -- states that any criticism of a religion is a form of discrimination, and criticism of Islam is generally considered to be much worse than discrimination against anything else.
When Muslim anti-Semites, knowing the demonization of Israel that reigns in the country, say they hate Jews because of what Israeli Jews do to "Palestinians," many journalists and "intellectuals" consider that excuse a mitigating circumstance, without even bothering to consider what the Palestinian leadership does to Palestinians -- such as stealing the funds sent to the Palestinian people by gullible Americans and Europeans, throwing Palestinian journalists and any other outspoken citizen in jail wholesale, teaching toddlers to be terrorists, and effectively rejecting all rule of law. And this is the leadership that would like its own state?
When Jewish schools had to be protected before the killings in Toulouse, those killings showed that security measures in place were not sufficient. Jewish shops and restaurants receive daily threats. Every week, windows are smashed or covered with insulting graffiti. Jewish radio stations dare not display their name on their studio doors. Jewish kids are spat upon in the streets.
French Jews feel very isolated and very vulnerable. They now know that simple things can be dangerous: wearing a skullcap in the street, going to the synagogue alone, placing a mezuzah on a door frame.
400,000 Jews live in France today, and the number is decreasing. Two thousand Jews leave the country every year; those who do not leave now know they have no future in France.
Six million Muslims live in France today, and their number is increasing. In addition to the risk of riots, the existence of no-go zones and the omnipresence of political correctness, politicians, left and right, know whom they must seduce, flatter, or appease to be elected.
Even if Nicolas Sarkozy usually complied with the "Arab policy of France," it did not help him: He was considered a "friend of the Jews".
Polls shows that France's new President, François Hollande received an overwhelming majority of Muslim votes, approximately 94%. On the evening of May 6, he was greeted at Place de la Bastille by a forest of flags of almost every country in the Muslim world. French flags were virtually invisible. Groups of veiled women were there, apparently happy. Any observable signs of Judaism would have been clearly inappropriate. Holding an Israeli flag would have been suicidal.
Although saying that France will soon be a country without Jews would be going too far, it is clear that daily life for Jews in France will become increasingly harsh and unbearable. This is what is happening in France today.
What is happening in France is happens almost every place in Europe: Jew hunting season is open in France and Europe. Even if the hunt lead to the horrors that stained Europe seventy years ago, it will not end any time soon.
An isolated hate crime is an isolated hate crime. But a hate crime followed by another hate crime is the beginning of a series.
When these crimes come in addition to hundreds of less-serious hate crimes, it indicates that this is more than a series. A noxious atmosphere is taking shape.
Related Topics:  France  |  Guy Millière

Egyptian Election: Islamist Victory - or Deceptive Strategy?

by Raymond Ibrahim
June 19, 2012 at 3:30 am
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It is counterproductive for the West to eat straight out of the Brotherhood's hands and unquestioningly disseminate its unsubstantiated information, as the Islamists would like: It works to their advantage.
Has anyone stopped to ask where the headlines "Muslim Brotherhood wins Egypt's presidential election!" originated? They came, of course, straight from the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, particularly the Qatari Islamist propaganda machine, Al Jazeera, and were then helpfully perpetuated by the mainstream media and talking-heads.
That allegation might sound suspiciously like a "conspiracy theory" were it not for the countless statements by the non-Islamist Egyptian media that were left unquoted by the western media, as well as many analysts who had a different tale to tell: The election was actually won by the secular candidate, Ahmed Shafiq.
What does the Muslim Brotherhood have to benefit by claiming victory now, if it might be proven otherwise three days from now, on June 21, when the results will be officially announced? Simple: they will be able to scream foul play—and gain the world's sympathy. For days the world will have been inundated with news that the Brotherhood won; when and if it hears that Shafiq won, it will naturally conclude that there has been electoral fraud -- as serves the Islamists' interests.
Mahmoud Baraka, a Shafiq campaign spokesman, maintains that "their candidate won the presidency, with 52% of the votes"—precisely the same number the Brotherhood is claiming—adding that the Brotherhood's claims to victory "are bizarre and unacceptable," a "big act."
Similarly, talk show host Tawfik Okasha appeared, emphatically saying that the Brotherhood's claims are "all lies," that most polls indicate their candidate, Muhammad Morsi "failed," and that the Islamist group's motive is simply to sow "discord and dissension." He then provided several examples of how the Brotherhood's claims are incongruous with reality.
Why believe Shafiq's spokesman and staunch secularist Okasha? Good question. Here's a better question: Why believe the Muslim Brotherhood?
Knowing the Brotherhood's deceptive tactics—"War is deceit" as their prophet said—there is good reason to think that they may have planned a propaganda victory well before the elections. They could claim victory, won fair and square; they could have their Islamist and Western media supporters trumpet it; they could embed it in everyone's mind for over three days before the results were formally announced— all to set the playing field to their advantage. If Shafiq wins, everyone—from militant Islamists in Egypt to a grandstanding US Secretary of State—will shout, "foul play!", thereby exonerating the long promised civil war Egypt's Islamists vowed to wage if the election did not go their way. So much for democracy. The rebellion they have threatened to stage would then be portrayed in the West as the result of a of a "grievance."
At this moment, no one knows which candidate won. The race is close. In the meantime, even though it is naturally the business of every news bureau to "break the news" and not be left behind, it is counterproductive for the West to eat straight out of the Brotherhood's hands and unquestioningly disseminate its unsubstantiated information, as the Islamists would like: It works to their advantage.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum
Related Topics:  Egypt  |  Raymond Ibrahim
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