A Turkish film about U.S. soldiers’ abuses of Iraqis has received a stern response from Germany’s most conservative and Catholic state—Bavaria.

First, Bavarian Premier Edmund Stoiber told a German newspaper that this anti-U.S., anti-Semitic film only engendered hate between Germans and their Turkish immigrants, and thus he appealed to German cinemas to ban the film.

Other German politicians and Jewish officials shortly thereafter backed Stoiber’s calls for a boycott of the film. Germany’s biggest cinema chain did drop the film. Of course, the fuss has caused the film to rise in popularity. Germany’s large Turkish community has been responsible for the sellout crowds at theaters lately.

Bavaria’s interior minister, the same politician responsible for Germany’s huge crackdown on a Muslim center in December, even sent intelligence service agents to cinemas showing the film “to ‘gauge’ audience reaction and identify potential radicals” (Telegraph, February 26; emphasis ours).

What they must have seen! A report from one theater was that, following the scene of a Turkish “Rambo” killing the U.S. commander, the audience stood and chanted, “Allah is great!”

Signs of the coming clash between Islam and Europe—namely Catholicism—continue to build. Germany, specifically Bavaria, provides the clearest indication of how Europe will deal with this explosive element of its population.

Stoiber, the ringleader of the calls for censorship, isn’t motivated by a desire to stand up for the U.S. or the Jews. For one, he is adamantly opposed to Turkey’s membership in the EU: He told Ankara, in no uncertain terms, that not taking a firm stand on this film would hurt its chances for EU membership. And far from championing a reconciliation of Germans and the Muslim community, the Roman Catholic Stoiber is drawing on deep-seated xenophobia among Germans, who fear more and more the takeover of their country by this rising immigrant population—especially in a world so frightened by Islam’s radical element.