DOMES AND MINARETS? Not in My Backyard, Say an Increasing Number of Germans

By Jochen Bölsche/Spiegel

* For once a (not so) biased report from the far left Spiegel:

* The planned construction of over 180 mosques in Germany is mobilizing right-wing xenophobes but also an increasing number of leftist critics. They fear the Muslim places of worship will facilitate the establishment of a completely parallel society.

* One organization alone — Ahmadiyya, a movement seen as an outsider community within Islam that the respected German weekly Die Zeit described as “something like the Jehovah’s Witnesses among Muslims” — has introduced a “100 mosque plan” for Germany. Currently 25 percent of these projects have been completed.

Lets hear what an ex-muslim has to say:

 “there are “more than enough mosques in Germany”-

*   Mina Ahadi, co-founder of Germany’s Central Council of Ex-Muslims. “When a mosque is built, the result is that greater pressure is placed on women, and even more children are forced to wear a headscarf to school, which leads to isolation.” She accuses German politicians of “boundless naiveté” in their dealings with Islamic organizations that, she argues, “ultimately want to instate sharia law.”

‘War is Deceit”

Volume 4, Book 52, Number 269:

Narrated Jabir bin ‘Abdullah:

The Prophet said, “War is deceit.”

 

Councilwoman Stefanie Vogelsang of the conservative Christian Democrats says her awareness of the issue had been heightened by a conflict with DITIB a few years earlier, when the organization deliberately violated its building permits during the construction of a new mosque in the same neighborhood.

By the time construction had been completed, the mosque’s two minarets rose 37 meters into the Berlin skyline rather than the approved 28 meters and the dome measured around 22 meters instead of the permitted 18. For Vogelsang that was cause enough to slap the Muslim congregation with the highest fine ever imposed in her district, €100,000. “Whoever lives here, whoever builds here, needs to follow our laws,” she said.

* But still, they got away with it: because mosque construction is, more than anything, a show of power and an effort to establish Muslim enclaves. “Where you can hear the call of the minaret, from a certain Muslim perspective, that’s Islamic ground.”

* local CDU members in Castrop-Rauxel, a city in western Germany, recently agreed to a disproportionately radical resolution on the topic.

Of course mosque construction should be allowed, the CDU members say, but land usage must be strictly restricted: “We suggest applying the standards that are in effect for the construction of new Christian religious buildings in Turkey.”

* There is much wisdom (and the solution) in this statement…

 

Resized after protests: The planners of this mega-mosque in Cologne were forced to scale back their blueprints as a result of public protest. The architects reduced the overall size of the mosque, but they preserved the original height dimensions for its minarets.

Moving out of the cellar: Instead of being restricted to prayer rooms mostly hidden from public view, Muslims in Germany are pushing to build grand mosques like the one pictured here near the city of Rendsburg in northern Germany.

Taking it to the streets:  Muslims pray on the sidewalk in front of a mosque in Berlin’s Wedding district. They are praying on the street because the mosque is overflowing and they still want to fulfill their religious duty to conduct Friday prayers.

‘There must be some kind of way out of here…”

Ominous official text: ‘Most mosques are more than places of worship. They also serve as cultural and business centers.’ Yep. And mosques are also places to plot murder, assassination, hijack, kidnappings, blackmail, intimidation, weapon-storage and terrorism, all of it mandated by the Koran.

*  The names of some of the newly built mosques aren’t exaclty in harmony with the reassuring “Islam is peace” slogan. Religious scholar Ursula Spuler-Stegemann at Germany’s University of Marburg, among others, criticizes the fact that mosques are named after warlords like Fatih Sultan Mehmet, conqueror of Constantinople. “That can only be an agenda,” she believes.  (Hmm, are you wondering what that agenda might be?)

*  Part One

*  Part two

*  Part three: Building Code Violations and other Community Spats

*  Part 4: Minarets ‘By No Means Compulsory’

 

Update: Altruist turned terrorist motivated by “childhood anger”

So now his original story has changed. He didn’t go to Pakistan to “help earthquake survivors,” as he first claimed. No, now the real reason he went to Pakistan (only to return with enough information “that would have enabled him or others to carry out terrorist attacks here or abroad in a variety of ways”) is “childhood anger.” Odd that—especially considering his “hobbies” are “Islamic history, jurisprudence, warfare – contemporary, historical and classical warfare – books on jihad in the past, jihad today.” We’ve a classic chicken-or-the-egg conundrum here. Did “childhood angers” lead him to the study of jihad (which only validated them) or did the study of jihad lead to his “childhood angers”? Or is he simply another jihadist trying to exploit the Western proclivity to sympathize with angry children? “Anger fuelled jihad interest,” from theYorkshire Evening Post, 

A MUSLIM caught with computer files about weapons, explosives and poisons, told a court how childhood “anger” fuelled his interest in “jihad”. 

Officers found the material on a laptop hard drive in Aabid Khan’s luggage when they arrested him at Manchester Airport on his return from Pakistan two years ago.

He is in the dock at London’s Southwark Crown Court alongside three co-accused, including Hammaad Munshi, 18, from Saville Town, Dewsbury, who were detained during raids in West Yorkshire and London.

The 23-year-old, of Otley Road, Undercliffe, Bradford, said by the age of 12 he was so concerned about the suffering of fellow believers overseas he regularly accessed internet news bulletins about them.

The four accused, which also includes Sultan Muhammad, 23, of Hanover Square, Manningham and Ahmed Sulieman, 30, from south-east London, variously deny 13 counts of possessing articles for a purpose connected with terrorism and making a record of information likely to be useful in terrorism between November 23 2005 and June 20 2006.

 

 

Fitzgerald comments:

 

 

From one of many postings on the reasons why this or that Muslim may return to Islam in a big way, and find solace in the faith when he suffers any of a number of setbacks in his private life, so that the search for political reasons is not necessary. Too many people think the explanation must always be sought in something the Infidels have done (and so what if they did, if they have a right to do what they did?). Such things or “root causes” as, inter alia, the American military presence in Iraq, naval bases in the Gulf, or Afghanistan, Israeli refusal to roll over and play dead for the “Palestinians,” French banning of the hijab in schools, Danish cartoons about Muhammad and the refusal of the Danish government to punish all those invovled, Dutch films about Islam and the refusal of the Dutch government to punish all those involved, the British showing themselves not quite yet willing to make Islam the official faith of Great Britain, the Spanish not yielding Ceuta to Morocco, the Italians turning away boatloads of clandestine immigrants from North Africa, and not removing crucifixes from walls, or anti-Muhammad verses from editions of Dante — all this is the kind of thing that people may think of as “political” reasons that explain — but certainly do not justify — Muslim hostility, violencer, and aggression toward Infidels. Yet none of this is necessary.

Muslims in the West are subject to the same personal reversals as non-Muslims, but the problem is, they have the mental grid of Islam already in their system, and that grid arranges the universe, and assigns a scapegoat — the Infidels — for blame.

Here is how I put it in one of many such postings previously:

“There are always people who have had unhappy childhoods, unhappy adolescences, unhappy adulthoods. As noted many times before, we who are Infidels may lose status, a job, a spouse, a girlfriend or boyfriend, or suffer setbacks or perceived slights. Did not Moussaoui think he was entitled to more than he received? Yet his inshallah-fatalism prevented him from simply working hard and doing what he could to overcome, as his brother did, that same background. Why? The answer is that he took Islam far more seriously, was far more of a deep believer, than his brother.

Infidels have a thousand things to blame. They can blame their parents — just as many on that Infidel jury wanted to blame, for Moussaoui, his treatment by his parents. They can blame their aggressive or unpleasant siblings, their ungrateful children, the System, Racism, The Man, Amerikkka, Kapitalism, Fate, the stars, their cholesterol level, their serotonin level, anything and everything at all — even, just perhaps, themselves.

But Muslim Believers have one thing to blame always at the ready. And to the extent that one takes that belief-system seriously, it is likely that one will, viewing the universe through the grid, the prism, of Islam, blame the Infidel. And that is exactly what Moussaoui did.

Unless this is going to be understood by the usual “experts” — including those complacent psychiatrists who appear not to have thought it necessary for them to study the doctrines of Islam and what might follow and has naturally followed from them (starting with the perceived behavior of Muslims conducting Jihad over 1350 years, wherever they were able to conduct it because of local conditions or circumstances) — then there will be more miscarriages, with justice stillborn, the result of those thanatotropic bromides and thalidomides, sentimentality and ignorance.

And what do we conclude? We have two possible conclusions:

1) Moussaoui [or any other Muslim terrorist] was and is simply following the tenets of Islam faithfully, and putting into practice the requirement that at least some Muslims must engage in Jihad (in order that others may, temporarily, be relieved of the duty).

OR

2) Moussaoui [or any other Muslim terrorist] became upset, disturbe, depressed, as so many of us do, all over the Infidel world as well, but in the case of Muslims, the problem is that that mental disarray or depression, or any kind of emotional setback, can lead to blaming the Infidel. Viewing the universe through the prism of Islam makes one almost automatically ready to blame that Infidel, and to seek revenge.

Those are the two possible explanations.

And either one has immense implications for the Muslim presence all over Europe and North America. For the sake of the legal and social order and the physical wellbeing of the resident Infidels who created those societies and have no desire to see them islamized, these implications need to be faced.”

[Posted by Hugh at May 7, 2006]

Posted by: Hugh  at July 17, 2008 7:17 PM