The planned construction of over 180 mosques in Germany is mobilizing right-wing and also an increasing number of leftist critics. They fear the Muslim places of worship will facilitate the establishment of a completely parallel society.
The issue at hand wasn't the construction of a missile base or a new nuclear power plant. Yet the media reported
"turmoil" and an "enraged" audience in a school auditorium in Ehrenfeld, a district of the German city of Cologne.
The mood was almost comparable to that of the protest gatherings once held against nuclear missiles or reactors.
Instead the outrage was directed at a huge mosque planned for the area.
Ill will over mosques like the one being built in Cologne is spreading rapidly throughout Germany, often to the surprise of local politicians. For a long time the establishment of Muslim prayer rooms provoked little protest, housed as they were mostly in residential buildings, shops and back courtyards. Recently, though, there has been an increasing number of acts of protest, some violent. Molotov cocktails were thrown through mosque windows in the Bavarian town of Lauingen; Christians set protest crosses inscribed with "Terra christiana est," or this is Christian land, on the grounds of a mosque in Hanover; and construction trailers went up in flames in the Berlin district of Pankow.
The anti-Islam protest movement has also begun to spill over into city politics. In Cologne, for example, the
extreme right anti-mosque initiative Pro Cologne captured five local government seats in recent elections. Now the
group is aspiring to enter the national scene as Pro Germany, together with other like-minded organizations, some
from the far-right fringe. Their approach follows the example of populist Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, whose
anti-immigration party garnered a surprising degree of support before he was murdered in 2002.
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