A study commissioned by Germany’s Interior Ministry warns that 180.000 of the country’s 3 million Muslims are willing to commit violence in the name of Islam, which amounts to 6 percent of the Muslim population of Germany. The number is alarmingly high because a similar study a year ago showed that just 32.000, slightly more than 1 percent, were radical islamists representing a potential security threat.
Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble says in a foreword that the study leads to the ”worrying conclusion that a serious potential for Islamist radicalization has developed in Germany”.
Christine Haderthauer, secretary general of the conservative the Christian Social Union, told Der Spiegel that her party ”has always warned against the dangers of parallel societies. Our fears have been confirmed in a shocking manner.”
The study was conducted by two researchers from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Hamburg. The authors interviewed 1,750 Muslims of whom around 40 percent were German citizens. Almost 40 percent of the respondents think that ”physical violence is justified as a reaction against the threat of the West’s threat to Islam”. The study doesn’t clarify what is meant by ”threat” and for what exactly the West should be hold accountable.
The survey found that more than half of the respondents felt themselves excluded from German society, and felt they were being treated as foreigners. the study has caused a big debate in Germany about the need for better integration.
Unfortunately the study doesn’t specify what the respondents mean by ”being treated as a foreigner”. My Russian born wife feels being treated as a foreigner every other day, but that does’t make her want to commit violence in the name of the Russian orthodox church. Or that she is supporting terrorist attacks on the West, when she feels that Russia is being mistreated by the West or has not been given a fair hearing.
People from the countryside who arrive in Copenhagen and start to speak in a heavy provincial accent also risk being treated as ”foreigners”. If it means discrimination it’s bad and should be fought in every possible way.
But sometimes treating people as foreigners also implies some kind of reluctance to engage them in debate or being very polite without challenging their views if they say something outrageous. That’s the multiculturalist way of integration, and it has obviously failed.
In fact, the publication of the Mohammed cartoons in Denmark was an act of inclusion and integration of Muslims into the Danish tradition of religious satire, though a majority of Muslims saw it differently. The cartoons send an important message to Muslims saying: We don’t expect more or less of you, we expect exactly the same of you as of everybody else, and that’s a full recogniction of your presence in society as equal citizens.
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