Islam emerges as divisive issue in French local polls campaign
Islam has emerged as a central issue in the campaign for French local elections on Sunday that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party hopes to win by taking a tough line on the integration of France’s large Muslim minority.
Sarkozy, who faces an uphill battle for reelection next year, has set the tone by blurring the border between his UMP party and Marine Le Pen’s National Front, the once-shunned anti-immigrant party that recently overtook him in opinion polls. Interior Minister Claude Guéant, until recently Sarkozy’s chief of staff in the Elysee Palace, has fleshed this out with a series of statements flirting with the anti-Muslim rhetoric that has made National Front leader Marine Le Pen so popular.
“The French don’t feel like they’re at home here anymore,” Guéant said this month in a verbal wink and nod at voters upset by the large numbers of Muslims in the country. “They want France to remain France.”
The minister has called the Western-led air strikes against Libya a “crusade,” evoking Christian-Muslim conflict, and suggested that patients in public hospitals must avoid wearing religious symbols — another issue concerning mainly Muslims.
Both the centre-right government and Le Pen declare their aim is to defend laïcité — the aggressive French secularism that strives to keep religion out of the public sector. But amid debate about offering halal food in school canteens and Muslims praying in the street because their mosques are too small, the term laïcité is clearly code for the problems France has adjusting to its 5-million strong Muslim minority.
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Erdogan urges Turks in Germany to integrate, not assimilate
Turkish immigrants in Germany should integrate into society but not assimilate to the point where they abandon their native culture, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on a visit to Germany on Sunday. Speaking to some 10,000 members of Germany’s large Turkish community in the wake of last year’s heated debate over the place of foreigners in the country, Erdogan took up the theme of integration amid what he sees as persistent European xenophobia.
“You must integrate, but I am against assimilation … no one may ignore the rights of minorities,” he said, adding that individuals should have the right to practice their own faith.
On Saturday, Erdogan threw an even sharper barb at German immigration policy, telling the Rheinische Post newspaper that forced integration requiring immigrants to suppress their culture and language was an affront to international law.
Immigration leapt to the forefront of political debate last year after central banker Thilo Sarrazin published a bestselling book that argued German culture was at risk from Muslims, who he said were a drain on state coffers. The debate left raw nerves on both sides as German politicians initially closed ranks to condemn Sarrazin’s theories, but later shifted tones rightwards as polls showed he enjoyed widespread support. Sarrazin later stepped down.
Erdogan’s newspaper comments were published alongside those of a senior German politician who complained of discrimination against Christians in Turkey. Conservative parliamentary floor leader Volker Kauder told the same paper that lands of a Christian monastery in Turkey known as Mor Gabriel were being expropriated, which he said showed that the Muslim country lacked religious freedom.
“I urge the EU to not open any more negotiation chapters with Turkey as long as Turkey does not guarantee full freedom of religion,” Kauder said.
Erdogan’s speech on Sunday comes ahead of a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel scheduled for Monday, where Turkey’s bid to join the European Union waslikely to come up. Turkish leaders have sounded increasingly impatient with lack of progress in entry talks that began in 2005, though they insist membership remains their top foreign policy goal. In his newspaper interview, Erdogan again derided what he described as European foot-dragging over the entry talks, saying he expected more German support for Turkey’s bid.
In France, far right seizes on Muslim street prayers
A call to prayer goes up from a loudspeaker perched on the hood of a car, and all at once hundreds of Muslim worshippers touch their foreheads to the ground, forming a sea of backs down the road. The scene is taking place not in downtown Cairo, but on a busy market street in northern Paris, a short walk from the Sacre Coeur basilica. To locals, it’s old news: some have been praying on the street, rain or shine, for decades.
But for Marine Le Pen — tipped to take over from her father this weekend as leader of the far-right National Front party — it is proof that Muslims are taking over France and becoming an occupying force, according to remarks she made last month.
Her comments caused a furore as she seized on the street prayers to drive home the idea that Islam is threatening the values of a secular country where anxiety over the role of Muslims in society has deepened in the past few years.
More than two thirds of French and German people now consider the integration of Muslims into their societies a failure, pollster IFOP said in a survey published on Jan. 5. In France, where Islam is the second-largest religion after Catholicism, 42 percent saw it as a threat to national identity.
“This has become a key political issue,” said Frederic Dabi, IFOP’s head of research. “Street prayers and the perceived growing influence of Islam are seen as impinging on French values of secularism, communal living.”
Germans more negative towards Muslims than other Europeans
Only about one third of Germans think positively of their Muslim neighbors, a much lower proportion than in other western European countries, according to a new poll published on Thursday. In contrast, 62 percent of Dutch and 56 percent of French people responding to the TNS Emnid survey indicated they had positive attitudes toward Muslims.
Detlef Pollack, a Muenster University sociologist who led the study, attributed Germans’ views to their lack of contact with Muslims compared to people in other nations surveyed. “The more often you meet Muslims, the more you view them as generally positive,” he said.
The survey broke down the German results into western and eastern responses, reflecting continuing divisions in the once-divided country. Only 34 percent in the west and 26 percent in the east had positive impressions of Muslims, it said.
Contact with Muslims also showed regional differences, with 40 percent of westerners but only 16 percent of easterners saying they occasionally met Muslims. French people appear to have the most contact with Muslims, 66 percent of those responding saying they had such contacts.
The survey was conducted before former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin plunged Germany into a heated debate over Muslim integration with a controversial best-selling book published in August.
Read the full story by Eric Kelsey here. There plenty more in this study — click here for the English-language press release.
Thilo Sarrazin is of arab descent, the only thing which made him a German was his family adopting the protest religion. The German population is strictly under the control of the church, who pay ten percent of their income to the Church, unless they opt to leave the church. The church in germany is a very powerful institution in Germany and have deliberately kept its followers unaware of Islam, says the former chancellor of Germany Helmuth Schmidt. The xenophobia in Germany saw its climax during the third Reich when Jews became the main group which suffered. There is a lot of improvement in their outlook but certain elements such as the sarrazin keep bringing up Nazi philosophies about different races.
The statistics are misplaced and needs to be qualified.
Rex Minor
Scathing U.S. view of French unrest and Muslim integration in WikiLeaks
The U.S. embassy in Paris turns out to be one of the sharpest critics of France’s track record in integrating its Muslim minority. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we now have its unvarnished view of the 2005 unrest in the poor suburbs of Paris and other large cities. It is a scathing indictment that goes beyond even what many of the government’s domestic critics at the time were saying. It may also go beyond most if not all of the criticisms of domestic policy found in cables from other European capitals (has anyone found anything more devastating elsewhere?). Here is our overall news report on the cables. Some excerpts from the key cables are copied below.
For FaithWorld, it’s especially interesting to see what the embassy says about “what the violence is not”. Back in those days, some American media were throwing around terms like “Paris intifada” and “Muslim riots” as if Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” had reached the outlying stations of the Paris Metro network. The cables are clearly written to refute that view. Yes, many of the rioters came from a Muslim background, but this was a socio-economic protest by a growing underclass, as we have argued in earlier posts such as “Smoke without fire – there was no ‘Paris intifada’ in 2005″ and “Why we don’t call them ‘Muslim riots’ in Paris suburbs.”
If religion had to be brought into the issue, it would have to be mentioned as an underlying cultural background on both sides — something that French politicians and editorialists didn’t do and don’t like. But this cable did do that in one of its most striking quotes — “The real problem is the failure of white and Christian France to view their darker, Muslim compatriots as real citizens.” As Le Monde put it: “The Americans’ logic has never been explained in such transparent fashion.”
It’s interesting to see how the embassy links the social exclusion of the Muslim minority now with possible radicalisation of some Muslims in the future. The first of our three excerpts examines the security issue in August 2005, months before the banlieues (suburbs) erupted in protest.The second and third analyse the protests themselves.
Italics are our own, to highlight the main points in these excerpts:
PUTTING OUT BRUSHFIRES: FRANCE AND ISLAMIC EXTREMISM — August 17, 2005
As Americans well know, true integration is a difficult endeavor.
250 years of integration vs debate over Muslims in Germany
Percy MacLean can call on 250 years of experience to weigh up how immigrants integrate in Germany. Since his Scottish ancestor arrived in 1753, the family has produced mayors, members of parliament and even a Nazi.
Today, the 63-year-old MacLean, a chief judge in Berlin’s administrative court, says Germany risks losing the openness that allowed his family to flourish for generations because of a divisive national debate over the integration of Muslims.
In an interview with Reuters, MacLean said tendentious arguments now being aired publicly contained the seeds of what could spawn the kind of right-wing populism and xenophobia Germany witnessed in the run-up to the Holocaust.
Muslims have been in the media spotlight since central banker Thilo Sarrazin stirred up a row this autumn by asserting Turkish and Arab families were dumbing down Germany, swamping it with a higher birth rate and threatening the indigenous culture.
“Things can get very explosive once you start mentioning genes and intelligence,” MacLean said. “Talking down to them is totally wrong. We are the ones who invited them over here.”
Merkel: Germany doesn’t have “too much Islam” but “too little Christianity”
Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans debating Muslim integration to stand up more for Christian values, saying Monday the country suffered not from “too much Islam” but “too little Christianity.”
Addressing her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, she said she took the current public debate in Germany on Islam and immigration very seriously. As part of this debate, she said last month that multiculturalism there had utterly failed.
Some of her conservative allies have gone further, calling for an end to immigration from “foreign cultures” — a reference to Muslim countries like Turkey — and more pressure on immigrants to integrate into German society.
Merkel told the CDU annual conference in Karlsruhe that the debate about immigration “especially by those of the Muslim faith” was an opportunity for the ruling party to stand up confidently for its convictions.
“We don’t have too much Islam, we have too little Christianity. We have too few discussions about the Christian view of mankind,” she said to applause from the hall.
Germany needs more public discussion “about the values that guide us (and) about our Judeo-Christian tradition,” she said. “We have to stress this again with confidence, then we will also be able to bring about cohesion in our society.”
How about that? A politician that says something that makes sense. With an attitude like that she will not be around long. Especially with the attitude of the press that is scared out of their pants about the response of the Islamic terrorists that call themselves Muslims these days. The press will find countless reasons why she should not offend them like that to protect their butts but it will not alter the truth of what she says.
The slow death of multiculturalism in Europe
The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Ibrahim Kalin is senior advisor to Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. This article first appeared in Today’s Zaman in Istanbul and is reprinted with its permission.
By Ibrahim Kalin
Has multiculturalism run its course in Europe? If one takes a picture of certain European countries today and freezes it, that would be the logical conclusion.
The European right is thriving on anti-immigrant attitudes and is likely to continue to reap the benefits in the short term. But there are forces that are sure to keep multiculturalism alive whether we like it or not.
Take Germany as an example. Chancellor Angela Merkel has said bluntly that Germany has failed to integrate large immigrant communities. The complaint is that most Turks and Muslims who came to Germany in the 1960s to jumpstart the German economy after World War II have not integrated into German society. They kept their language, religion and most of their cultural habits. Instead of blending in, they created their own parallel societies.
But is it logical to conclude that multiculturalism is dead because certain European countries have failed to integrate their minority communities? First of all, what some European countries present as multicultural policies have very little to do with multiculturalism. Again Germany is a case in point. German governments welcomed Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Turkish workers in the 1950s and 1960s and treated them as “guest workers.” But it never occurred to them that these so-called guest workers were also human beings with social and familial needs just like any other people. As a result, the German governments made very little or no effort in creating a social and political environment for them to integrate.
Muslim religious demands on French state schools rising: report
The sometimes difficult integration of Muslims is climbing the ladder of public concerns in Europe. It’s been hotly debated in Germany and figured in recent elections in the Netherlands and Austria. Now, a French government body called the High Council for Integration (HCI) has drawn up a critical report about the problems faced by — and posed by — school pupils with immigrant backgrounds. It’s not only about Muslim pupils, but they are mentioned so frequently that it’s clear who’s mostly involved here.
Among its findings, the report says Muslim pupils and parents in France are increasingly making religious demands on the state school system and that teachers should rebuff these demands by explaining the country’s principle of laïcité, the official separation of church and state. Among the problems it listed were pupils who upset classes by objecting to courses about the Holocaust, the Crusades or evolution, who demand halal meals and generally “reject French culture and its values.”
For more of its findings, read our news report on the study here.
“It is becoming difficult for teachers to resist religious pressures,” said the report, posted in draft form (here in French) on the website of the newspaper Journal du Dimanche (JDD), which published an article in its paper edition entitled “School threatened by communalism.” “We should now reaffirm secularism and train teachers how to deal with specific problems linked to the respect for this principle,” it said. The final report will be presented to the government next month.
France has been here before. There was a long and lively debate about religion in schools before the parliament banned Muslim headscarves and other religious garb in state schools in 2004. There were two large official reports — the so-called Stasi report and a parliamentary report — on laïcité in the schools that focused on an increase in religious demands in state schools.
There was also a critical book called “Les territoires perdus de la République” (The lost territories of the Republic) about rising anti-Semitism among Muslim pupils. After that, the issue was eclipsed by debates about full face veils and halal meat.
This study comes during the six-month period between France’s ban on full face veils and the imposition of that ban after a planned campaign to inform veiled women what awaits them once the prohibition is in full force. Patrick Gaubert, president of the HCI, told the JDD that his group would also soon put out “an assessment of our integration policy that will show our relative failure in this domain.”
Islam part of Germany, Christianity part of Turkey – Wulff
When German President Christian Wulff recently declared that Islam “belongs to Germany,” Christian Democratic politicians there howled and Muslims living in Germany and Turkey cheered. Now Wulff, on an official visit to Turkey, has told the Turkish parliament that “Christianity too, undoubtedly, belongs to Turkey.” This time there was applause in Germany, and silence from the Turkish deputies listening to him in Ankara on Tuesday.
In both cases, Wulff’s words could not have come at a better time.
Germany is in the grip of an emotional debate about Islam and Muslim integration. When Wulff said in his Oct. 3 German Unity Day address that Islam was now part of German society, given the large number (about 4 million) of Muslims living there, it was demographically obvious and politically risky. Several of his fellow Christian Democrats have challenged his view and insisted Germany had a “Judeo-Christian heritage” that Islam did not share. But Wulff, who was considered something of a lightweight for the ceremonial role when he was elected last July, has taken a clear stand on a political and moral issue — just like Germans want their head of state to do. He is, as the Financial Times Deutschland entitled its editorial on Wednesday, “Finally A President.”
The overwhelmingly Muslim but officially secular state of Turkey is slowly reconsidering the tight restrictions it has long imposed on its tiny Christian minority. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government has made a small and cautious opening to Christians, allowing religious services at a historic Greek Orthodox monastery and Armenian Orthodox church, allowing an art show at a forcibly closed Orthodox seminary and helping the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch’s succession problem with citizenship for foreign prelates.
Despite this, Christians in Turkey — one of the historical cradles of the faith — fear their communities are dying out. One of the names often cited at the current Synod on the Middle East at the Vatican is that of Luigi Padovese, the Italian-born Roman Catholic bishop for Anatolia who was murdered at his home in southern Turkey last June.
So it was interesting to see that the Christian minority issue came up at the news conference that Wulff and Turkish President Abdullah Gül held after the German leader’s address to parliament. A journalist referred to Wulff’s comment that he was also the president of Muslims living in Germany. Gül responded: “We have non-Muslim citizens, we have Christian and Jewish citizens. I am also their president. There is no discrimination. We respect our citizens’ religion and identity. I don’t believe there is a problem here.”
“the sunni terrorist de facto state of Turkey!” Perhaps you should take your pills before completely losing it.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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