Bavaria Cracks Down on Muslims
Last week, amid finger pointing, investigations and umbrage taken over the U.S.’s recent covert domestic spying program as part of the war on terror, authorities in Germany began taking a more aggressive approach against militant Islam.
While Americans debated the constitutionality of the Patriot Act and rights to privacy, authorities in Germany’s most Catholic and conservative state, Bavaria, shut down an Islamic center in Munich. At the same time, the interior minister from the state of Lower Saxony, another conservative stronghold, suggested electronically tagging the thousands of Islamic militants within Germany in order to keep better tabs on them.
Bavarian authorities banned a Bavarian-based Islamic group, the Multi-Kultur-Haus, on Dec. 28, 2005, “after seizing material allegedly inciting Muslims to kill Jews and Christians and carry out suicide attacks in Iraq” (Deutsche Welle, Dec. 29, 2005).
The material turned up in a search last September—including an audio cassette stating “send us bombs to kill the Jews with,” another book seized from the library calling on Sunnis to “execute Jews and Christians as infidels,” as well as a cd glorifying the rebels in Chechnya (Reuters, Dec. 28, 2005).
But the move happened just now “in the wake of the cia abduction of Lebanese-German Khaled el-Masri, who was known to have frequented the center” (Deutsche Welle, op. cit.).
“With today’s ban of the Multi-Kultur-Haus association, Bavaria is making the limits clear to supporters of foreign extremist organizations,” said Günther Beckstein, the state’s interior minister. “Organizations that aggressively try to oppose our constitutional order and openly call for violence will not be tolerated.”
Strong words accompanying strong action.
Elsewhere in Germany, the interior minister of Lower Saxony, Uwe Schünemann, spoke some strong words. He told German newspaper Die Welt that Berlin should consider electronic ankle bracelets “to monitor 3,000 potentially dangerous Islamists, hate preachers and people who had been trained in foreign terrorist camps,” denying the move would be unconstitutional.
Imagine such a suggestion coming from a prominent U.S. cabinet member, either at the national or state level, to, say, the New York Times. The fact that it is so far from happening (such measures are currently used only for sex offenders and parolees) shows the difference between the American mindset and the German.
Germany is taking far more extreme measures to thwart terrorists within its borders than other nations are willing to take. (And so are other European nations, for that matter, as we stated in a January 2006 article.)
And though the ankle-bracelet suggestion is only coming from a state official, that type of thinking is not new to Germany which, at one time, started “monitoring” Jews through a simple piece of cloth worn on the sleeve. Of course, we know where that cultural labeling took the country and what it meant for the Jews in particular.
Also interesting is the fact that the latest crackdown happened in Germany’s most Catholic and most economically prosperous state. Bavaria is not only home to the current pope, it bred the country’s staunchest conservatives and cultural purists like Adolf Hitler and Richard Wagner. Its current premier, Edmund Stoiber, has held his state up as an example for the rest of Germany in how to deal with its economic troubles. He, and the pope for that matter, may one day call on Germany and the rest of Europe to use how Bavaria deals with militant Islam as another shining example of progress.
The Bible does, in fact, prophesy of such a cultural clash. Germany, leading a united Europe, is destined to collide with an Islamic power. We are seeing the beginnings of such a clash in Germany today.
