By Soeren Kern
Sunday, May 19, 2024
More than a thousand Islamic extremists recently
marched through the streets of Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city,
demanding that the European Union’s most populous and powerful country be
reconstituted as an Islamic state governed by sharia. The demonstration,
organized by a fast-growing Islamist group called Muslim Interaktiv, was
allowed to proceed after left-wing parties in Hamburg’s legislature rejected a petition by right-wing parties to prohibit the event.
During the April 27 march in Hamburg’s multicultural Sankt Georg district,
the Islamists — mostly young men, but also women in chadors, hijabs, niqabs,
and jilbabs — complained about an alleged surge in “Islamophobia” in Germany
since October 7, when Hamas terrorists slaughtered more than 1,000 Israelis.
Amid shouts of “Allahu Akbar” and “There is no God but
Allah,” the protesters reminded German authorities of their constitutional
obligation to ensure justice for everyone. They then described Germany as a
“dictatorship of values” and called for replacing it with a caliphate, an
Islamic dictatorship in which there is no separation between state and
religion.
The audacious display of Islamist power on German streets
cast light on a glaring double standard: On the one hand, the German government
continues to trivialize and even express solidarity with the totalitarian
challenge to democracy posed by radical Muslims, who openly seek to overturn
Germany’s constitutional order; on the other, the government is obsessed with
the threats it says are posed to democracy by the anti-immigration Alternative
for Germany (AfD), the country’s second-largest political party, whose
popularity is largely fueled by voters frustrated with the
government’s refusal to crack down on those very same Islamists.
The German government’s laissez-faire approach to
Islamism has moved the problem into a taboo zone that has strengthened the
Islamists. Some observers argue that if the German government would only take
the Islamist threat more seriously, it could instantly solve the populist
problem by removing the main issue that makes the AfD so popular.
But alas, key members of Germany’s government — and,
apparently, many German voters — are disciples of wokeism, which claims that
Islamists are a disadvantaged minority group that must be empowered. At the
same time, Germans seeking to preserve their culture against the encroachment
of Islamism are branded as right-wing extremists who pose an existential danger
to democracy.
After the Hamburg imbroglio, Interior Minister Nancy
Faeser declared: “If you want a caliphate, you’ve come to the
wrong place.” And yet, just a few weeks earlier, she’d insisted that the real
danger to Germany lies not with the Islamists but with the far right. When
asked why she considers right-wing extremism to be more threatening than
Islamism, she replied: “Islamism does not want to overthrow the system,
right-wing extremists do.”
A New Islamism
Muslim Interaktiv, along with its close cousins,
Generation Islam and Realität Islam, is the vanguard of a new generation of
German Islamists who have replaced old-school jihadist propaganda with the
fresh battle cry of grievance peddling. While the overall goal — to Islamize
Western society — remains the same, the new method of adopting the role of an
aggrieved minority is more effective because, rather than being overtly
illegal, such speech is constitutionally protected.
Muslim Interaktiv, whose stated goal
is to establish Islam as a “comprehensive way of life” in Germany, is a
successor of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a global pan-Arab and pan-Islamic group that seeks
to establish an Islamic caliphate. Although Hizb ut-Tahrir has
been banned in Germany since January 2003, the government
continues to turn a blind eye to Muslim Interaktiv, which was established in
2020 and opposes Western liberal democracy, women’s rights, and the state of
Israel. Muslim Interaktiv has successfully filled a vacuum created after the
destruction of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) in 2019.
The leader of Muslim Interaktiv is a charismatic
25-year-old Ghanaian-German convert to Islam named Joe Adade Boateng (he now
goes by Raheem) who is studying at the University of Hamburg to become a
teacher. He is adept at using social media and digital networking to propagate
victim narratives, a strategy that has made him a superstar within the Islamist
subculture.
In its latest annual report, Hamburg’s state-security agency warned that Muslim
Interaktiv was leveraging social media to find new recruits from among
Germany’s disaffected Muslim youth. The group’s leaders have been described by security experts as “radical pop
Islamists” who “shun beards, drive flashy cars, and hate Israel” and produce
professional-looking videos that “appeal to young people via the internet.”
Hamburg’s spy chief, Torsten Voß, said that Muslim Interaktiv is “dangerous” because of
its capacity to “increase the number of Islamists in the long term.”
An Increasing Base of Support
Muslim Interaktiv and associated groups have mobilized
large numbers of followers at public gatherings across Germany. In March 2024,
hundreds of Salafists gathered in Hamburg to listen to a speech by Marcel
Krass, an influential convert to Islam who, according to German intelligence, had contact with one
of the terrorist hijackers in the 9/11 attacks.
In February 2023, Muslim Interaktiv mobilized 3,500 people in Hamburg to rally
against Koran burnings in Sweden. In October 2023, the group organized a pro-Palestinian protest during which
hundreds of demonstrators carrying Islamist flags attacked police officers with
bottles and stones. And in November 2023, more than 3,000 members of Generation
Islam — which, like Muslim Interaktiv, is an offshoot of Hizb-ut Tahrir — participated in a virulently anti-Israel protest in
Essen, where they called for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in
Germany
Muslim Interaktiv has a large pool of supporters among
younger Muslims in Germany. A new report from
the Lower Saxony Criminological Research Institute revealed that a majority of
Muslim students (67.8 percent) agreed with the statement: “The rules of the
Koran are more important to me than the laws in Germany.” Almost half (45.8
percent) believed that “an Islamic theocracy is the best form of government”
and 51.5 percent agreed with the statement: “Only Islam is able to solve the
problems of our time.”
Turkish-German Islamism expert Eren Güvercin explained the seriousness of Germany’s Islamist
problem: “The vast majority of caliphate supporters are not refugees, but
German citizens. They are children and grandchildren of immigrants, including
those who the German state once ‘recruited’ as cheap labor. They were born in
Germany, attended German schools, then German universities. They cannot be
deported. It is not just a failure of integration, but also of education.”
Tepid Responses
On May 4, a group of moderate Muslims in Hamburg led by
the chairman of the Kurdish community in Germany, Ali Toprak, held a counterdemonstration to Muslim Interaktiv to
defend Germany’s liberal democratic constitutional order against the
encroachment of radical Islam. “The Islamists are babbling about the caliphate
and sharia,” he said. “We as a civil society shouldn’t put up with that.”
In the end, a few hundred people showed up.
One of Germany’s leading experts on political Islam,
Ahmad Mansour, lamented that “despite the seriousness” of the
challenge posed by Muslim Interaktiv, “only a few are upset, while the majority
of the country continues to ignore them.” He warned the “naïve West” against “tolerating everything
— even those forces that would threaten its way of life — in the name of
radical diversity and multiculturalism.”
But the mood in the country may now be changing.
Germany’s main opposition party, the center-right Christian Democratic Union
(CDU), in a stark departure from the years when Angela Merkel ran it, has signaled that it intends to take a much harder line on
Islam and migration. CDU general secretary Carsten Linnemann recently proposed changes to the party platform that would
specify that “Sharia does not belong to Germany” and “Everyone who wants to
live here must recognize our guiding culture [Leitkultur] without any
ifs or buts.”
The CDU is now calling on the federal government to ban Muslim
Interaktiv for engaging in anti-constitutional activities. “It is unacceptable
that Muslim Interaktiv is openly agitating on our streets against Jews and
against our free way of life,” said Hamburg’s CDU leader, Dennis Thering. “We are
governed by the Basic Law [Germany’s constitution] and not Sharia law.”
No comments:
Post a Comment