Friday, October 11, 2013

Spain's Escalating Mosque Wars



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Spain's Escalating Mosque Wars

by Soeren Kern
October 11, 2013 at 5:00 am
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"The rules of the city and the country are mandatory for everyone, and Mollet del Vallès will be uncompromising toward any kind of radicalism or blackmail." — Josep Monràs, Mayor of Mollet del Vallès, Spain
Police in Spain have forcibly removed Muslim activists from an illegal mosque in a small town in Catalonia, an autonomous region in northeastern Spain that is home to the largest Muslim population in the country.
The eviction ends -- for now, anyway -- a highly public one-year standoff in which Muslim immigrants in the Catalan town of Mollet del Vallès openly and aggressively challenged the authority of municipal officials to evaluate and determine the proper location of new mosques based on established urban planning regulations.
The dispute over the unauthorized mosque is the latest in a growing number of mosque-related conflicts resulting from efforts by towns and cities across Spain to relocate overfilled mosques from congested downtown areas to uninhabited industrial parks.
Catalan police ended the standoff in Mollet del Vallès on October 2 by conducting an early morning raid on the property, which was being illegally occupied by up to 50 Muslims from North Africa who were angry over a decision by the town council to prohibit the premises from being used as a mosque.
The confrontation began in July 2012, when the Al Huda Muslim Community told the town council that their existing mosque on Sant Ramon Street in downtown Mollet del Vallès had become too small for the swelling ranks of Muslims who gather for weekly prayers each Friday.
Al Huda -- one of two Muslim communities in this town of 50,000 inhabitants, near Barcelona -- went on to tell municipal authorities that the group was interested in purchasing an old factory building, also situated in the downtown area, in order to convert the property into a mosque.
In response, the mayor of Mollet del Vallès, Josep Monràs, warned Al Huda that the building in question was zoned for commercial use only and, in accordance with the Municipal Management Plan dated 2004, could not be used as a mosque.
As an alternative, Monràs offered to provide Al Huda with a much larger property in an industrial park located two kilometers from the downtown area. This location would not only accommodate a greater number of worshippers, it would also serve to avoid the noise and parking problems associated with hundreds of Muslims gathering in the cramped downtown area.
In any event, Monràs argued, the Islamic Council of Mollet del Vallès, the other Muslim community in town, had accepted a similar offer and was already operating a mosque in the same industrial park without any problems.
Al Huda rejected the mayor's alternative offer, calling it a case of "Islamophobia" and alleging that the municipality was eager to "banish" all Muslims from the downtown area. "We are not some merchandise that should be in an industrial park," a member of Al Huda told the Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia.
Rejecting the mayor's warning, Al Huda went ahead and purchased the old factory building in June 2013. Shortly thereafter, Al Huda demanded that the town council change the zoning regulations so that the property could be converted into a mosque. The town council refused this demand.
The conflict escalated when members of Al Huda began construction work to convert the new building into a mosque -- in defiance of the town council, and despite lacking a building permit. On July 10, 2013, the town council sealed off the old factory building, due to urban planning violations, thus prohibiting Al Huda from continuing its illegal construction activities.
Al Huda responded by ordering more than 400 Muslims to hold five prayers each day in front of the town hall (photos here, here and here). "We will be one or two months or however long it takes. We will not leave until the town council gives us back our site," said the president of Al Huda, Ahmed Balghouch.
Members of the Al Huda Muslim community stage a public prayer protest in Mollet del Vallès, Spain.
The "pressure tactic" ended up disrupting normal daily activity for non-Muslims in downtown Mollet del Vallès for three months, from July through September.
Mayor Monràs refused to back down, however, saying he would not give in to Al Huda's "blackmail" tactics. "The [Al Huda] Muslim community knew that they could not purchase the property in order to convert it into a mosque because it would be a breach of municipal planning regulations. Yet, they have launched a number of protest actions that are illegal. The rules of the city and the country are mandatory for everyone and Mollet del Vallès will be uncompromising toward any kind of radicalism or blackmail," Monràs said.
After the daily prayer ploy failed to force the town hall to budge, Al Huda escalated the conflict still further. On September 20, around 50 Muslims broke the seal on the old factory building and occupied the property, on the pretense that they wanted to turn off a light that had been left on. In fact, they sought to deceive the police and several of the men went on a hunger strike in an effort to force the municipality to amend the zoning regulations.
On September 21, the municipality gave Al Huda 72 hours to vacate the premises or the 50 protesters would be subject to a court-ordered eviction. Mayor Monràs said he was not "Islamophobic" and reiterated that Al Huda knew full well that the factory building could not be used as a mosque. He also warned its members that they would not get anywhere "with impositions, radicalism and violence."
After Al Huda refused to comply with the order, police raided the property on October 2 and forcibly removed those who were holed-up inside. The property has now been resealed, but Al Huda now says it plans to file a lawsuit against the municipality.
The conflict in Mollet del Vallès is just one of many mosque-related incidents in Spain in recent months.
In July 2013, for example, public prosecutors charged one of the key figures behind the construction of a mega-mosque in the municipality of Salt -- a town near Barcelona where Muslim immigrants now make up 40% of the population -- with money laundering.
Police are questioning Mohamed Ataouil, a prominent Moroccan businessman who lives and works in Salt, about the source of the money used to purchase the land for the mosque. An investigation that began in late 2012 is looking into the origin of €280,000 ($380,000) that was wired to an entity controlled by Ataouil. The transfers were always in quantities under €3,000, apparently in an effort to avoid detection by counter-terrorism authorities.
Ataouil has been in the crosshairs of Spanish intelligence for years due to his suspected links to the Salafi stream of Islam. Salafism, a branch of radical Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, openly seeks to replace the democratic order in Europe and elsewhere with an Islamic system of government that would be ruled by Sharia law.
Police suspect the funds used to build the Salt mega-mosque, to be located in an industrial park on the outskirts of the town, are being secretly provided to Ataouil by Islamic radicals in the Middle East who are seeking to spread their ideology in Spain. Ataouil has so far refused to cooperate with police.
In April 2013, the City of Tarragona approved a new regulation that would limit the opening of new mosques within inhabited parts of the city. The modified Municipal Urban Development Plan would restrict mosques to "exclusive buildings," meaning single purpose buildings that have no other residential or commercial tenants. In the local context, this implies that from now on mosques can only be built in suburban industrial parks.
In March 2013, contrarily, the Supreme Court of Catalonia ruled that the Catalan municipality of Lérida is prohibited from relocating a mosque to an industrial park situated on the outskirts of the city. The court ruled that efforts by the Lérida City Council to rezone a parcel of land from industrial use to religious use was illegal.
The dispute began in July 2010 when the city council voted to close the controversial North Street Mosque in downtown Lérida -- led by a Salafist imam named Abdelwahab Houzi -- because of repeated violations of over-occupancy ordinances that saw hundreds of Muslims spilling out into the streets for Friday prayers.
Muslims retaliated by praying in public squares and streets in protest. The Lérida City Council eventually decided to amend the zoning laws in an industrial park in an effort to get Muslims off public property. But Muslims complained that the city was seeking to remove them from the city center in violation of their rights to religious freedom.
The Catalan Supreme Court agreed, saying that the Lérida City Council's decision to rezone the industrial park was "irrational and arbitrary." City officials said they would not appeal the decision because there was no money to finance construction of the new mosque.
Until another solution can be found, Muslims in Lérida are now meeting in a pavilion at the Camps Elisis trade fair grounds -- situated within walking distance from the city center – courtesy of the Lérida City Council.
Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.
Related Topics:  Soeren Kern

New Islamist Approach to Turks in Germany

by Veli Sirin
October 11, 2013 at 4:30 am
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The alignment of a German Islamist party with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP tends to demonstrate that an AKP campaign to penetrate and, ultimately, dominate German Turks has begun in earnest.
Germany's federal election, held on September 22, had two new consequences, one reported widely in global media -- the failure of the centrist Free Democrats [FDP] to retain their presence in the parliament, or Bundestag -- and the other observed almost exclusively by Turks, whether in Turkey or in the large Turkish immigrant community in Western Europe. That was the public emergence of an ambitious Islamist party in Germany.
In the political contest in September, for the first time, state-level candidates appeared with an Islamist ideology that values separation from -- rather than cooperation with -- other German parties. The Islamists are represented by the Alliance for Innovation and Justice, known by its German-language title as BIG, founded in 2010 and currently headed by Haluk Yildiz. A management consultant and leader of the Muslim Council of Bonn, Yildiz was elected in 2009 to the Bonn city council on the ticket of the Alliance for Peace and Fairness [German acronym: BFF], a group that joined in founding BIG.
The appearance of an ardent, nationally-organized German-Turkish Islamist party should elicit a strong and critical response from the German authorities as well as moderate German Muslims.
The Islamist BIG does not hesitate to call itself an "immigrant party," notwithstanding that most Turkish and Kurdish people in Germany, whether coming from Turkey or, as with their offspring, born in Germany, favor integration into German society and do not want to be judged by their immigrant origin. For that reason, they have generally voted for the Social Democrats, the Greens, and The Left (the last are ex-Communists), which favor their acceptance as Germans.
But the future of German Turkish and German Kurdish politics is difficult to predict. Germans of Turkish background debate the rise of the "soft-Islamist" Justice and Development Party, or AKP, headed by current Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and its impact on Turks and Kurds in Germany and elsewhere abroad. Since many Turkish immigrants to Western Europe were and are secular, with a considerable number of adherents to the Alevi Muslim religious minority among them, they wonder how the religious, Sunni-oriented AKP will deal with Turks living in the West. To some, the AKP represents an economically prosperous and increasingly influential Turkey; to others, a radicalizing Islamist and authoritarian menace.
BIG disclaims publicly a formal connection with the AKP and Erdogan – unsurprising, given that foreign financing of political parties is illegal in Germany. But the "immigrant party" in Germany and the AKP share some notable personalities. In a visit to Berlin in 2011, according to Der Spiegel, Nevzat Yalcintas, a Turkish academic and influential AKP deputy, spoke at a rally during local elections and called on Turks to vote for BIG. BIG may be AKP's spear-point for penetration of the German Turkish community.
Hasan Ozdogan, described by Der Spiegel as the unofficial and unacknowledged controller of BIG, is the chairman of the Union of European Turkish Democrats [UETD], a network established to mobilize support for the Erdogan regime. In referring to the creation of BIG, Ozdogan declared, "It is time to join our forces."
Both Haluk Yildiz, the public face of BIG, and Hasan Ozdogan, have had extremist links. In the Muslim Council of Bonn, Yildiz defended Bekkay Harrach, a member of Al-Qaida, after Al-Qaida produced videos in 2009 with the Moroccan-born, naturalized German Harrach threatening a terror campaign in Germany if Berlin did not withdraw from the NATO military effort in Afghanistan. German authorities treated the Harrach videos as a credible threat and upgraded their anti-terror watch systems. Germany did not remove its troops from Afghanistan. Yildiz, nevertheless, portrayed Harrach as an Islamic freedom fighter with "hot-headed" tendencies, while downplaying his status in the Bonn mosques where Harrach was a radical preacher. The British Broadcasting Corporation reported in 2011 that Harrach was killed in Afghanistan while fighting under the alias "Abu Talha Al-Almani," or "Abu Talha the German." (The original Abu Talha was a combatant in early Islamic history.)
For his part, Hasan Ozdogan is associated also with the anti-Western and particularly anti-Jewish Milli Gorus [National Vision] movement, formerly led by the Islamist Necmettin Erbakan (1926-2011), Turkey's prime minister for a year, from mid-1996 to mid-1997. As secretary-general of Milli Gorus in Germany, Ozdogan had expressed his surprise that anti-Jewish public rhetoric was considered normal in Turkey, but is prohibited in Germany. Many Milli Gorus cadres have entered the AKP administration under Erdogan.
Ozdogan admits to no pessimism about the future of radical Islam among German Turks. Although the BIG has not yet been seated in any German state parliament, he has declared, "We are only beginning," and notes that it took years for the Greens to gain serious political influence. "We need a long time to breathe," he says.
While the majority of immigrants and their children want to leave the mark of the foreigner behind, except during vacations in Turkey, BIG stands for primary loyalty to their ethnic heritage. In this regard, BIG, with its separatist outlook, appears unlikely to gain much support from German Turks, who, to judge by their history, after they began moving to Western Europe in search of work in the 1960s, do not want to maintain walls between them and their ethnic German neighbors.
Among other proposals, BIG calls for German Turks and their children, even if they possess German citizenship, to be allowed dual passport status as Turks and as Germans. At present, the right to dual citizenship is denied in Germany except to citizens of the European Union or Switzerland, and in complex cases involving serious hardship for the applicant. Immigrants from Turkey do not currently qualify for German citizenship while retaining Turkish citizenship.
The future of BIG may well depend on how much open and active support it receives from Erdogan's AKP. The ranks of BIG, for now, remain thin enough to keep it out of national politics; it is doubtful that it will, at least in the near future, send members to the Bundestag. Under German electoral law, a party must receive 5% of votes to be included in parliament. The Free Democrats slipped under the 5% requirement in the most recent election, for the first time since their formation after World War II. The FDP had long served as allies of the Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), led by victorious incumbent chancellor Angela Merkel. The FDP loss has left chancellor Merkel searching for a coalition partner, since her CDU/CSU, the Social Democrats, the Greens, and The Left are now alone in the Bundestag. The CDU/CSU could form a government with the Social Democrats or Greens, but not with The Left, because of the association of the latter with the former East German dictatorship and with radical socialism.
But a German think-tank, the Futureorg Institute, determined that 6.9% of German voters of Turkish origin favored BIG. In addition, another German non-governmental organization, Citizens for Europe, carried out a survey among 400,000 residents of Berlin who did not have German citizenship, and therefore could not vote in the local state elections of 2011. Citizens for Europe found that 6% of those it interviewed said that if they had the franchise they would choose BIG. And the German weekly, Der Spiegel, reported last year that The Greens had conducted a study of BIG, which the environmentalists assessed as a competitor among the many Turks and Kurds who have voted for them.
The "immigrant party" has yet to summon mass enthusiasm that might undermine German Turkish and Kurdish loyalty to parties favoring their integration into the majority society. The U.S.-based news portal, TurkishJournal.net, states that in the September 2013 Bundestag contest, BIG received only 2,700 votes for its own candidates and 17,700 for its general party slate. Under the German system, voters cast two ballots, one for a local candidate and one for a list under the party's name. For those concerned about BIG's possible expansion and influence, the poor number of ballots cast for it were evidence that a German Islamist party would likely remain marginal.
This result for BIG was far below the 5% barrier, which, from a pool of 62 million eligible voters, would range from about three million downward according to voter participation. Germany's population of Turkish background, including Turkish Kurds, is estimated at two million, or about 2.5% of the country's total of 81 million.
The alignment of a German Islamist party with Erdogan's AKP appears to demonstrate that an AKP campaign to penetrate and, ultimately, dominate German Turks has begun in earnest. Such a development, long feared by German Turkish and Kurdish moderate and secular Muslims, may be slender in its probability of success, but its involvement in German Muslim life can only be negative.
Veli Sirin is the German Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism.
Related Topics:  Germany, Turkey  |  Veli Sirin

Gatestone Weekly Roundup

by Nina Rosenwald
October 11, 2013 at 4:00 am
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Reports have been coming in from Egypt that the American plan, it seems, supported by U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson, was that if the U.S. helped Egypt to oust Mubarak, growing senile and therefore harder to support anyhow, and if the U.S. backed as well the Islamic regime in Turkey, together that would make would create two hundred million more Sunni Muslims to support America, helped by the Muslim Brotherhood.
It is not so important in the Muslim world, reports went, who a country's leader is or what its borders are. Allah is the leader; the land is his. To the Ummah, the Community of Islam, there are no borders. You cannot give away eve the slightest part; it is not your land to give.
There are, we are told, in government offices, signs that state: "Say Allah." Nothing else. Just keep saying this name all the time, everyplace.
In the countryside, we are told, as in Turkey, people are poor, but worse, they are illiterate; there is no information other than what they hear in the mosques, in the media, everywhere, that if they do not obey Sharia law, they will burn in hell forever.
Khaled Abu Toameh, discussing a possible coup in Fatah, reports that "Fatah gunmen have returned to the streets of some West Bank cities and refugee camps are openly challenging Abbas's leadership."
Yaakov Lappin warns that, should Iran come near the nuclear mark, Israel has the right to self-defense. To the U.S., we hear, this mark comes when Iran can put a nuclear warhead on a missile; to Israel, nearer Iran and smaller, this mark comes when it is no longer possible to stop Iran from putting a nuclear warhead on a missile.
Douglas Murray reminds us that violence against us must be be our fault: if we would just stay quiet and accept abuse, there would not be any, right?
Related Topics:  Nina Rosenwald

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