Is Europe finally starting to react to the rising tide of Islam ? It certainly seems so:
MUNICH, Dec. 5 ? Helga Schandl says she has nothing against Muslims. For three decades, she worked in Munich?s wholesale food market, where many of her colleagues were immigrants from Turkey. ?I have experienced integration firsthand,? she said.
Yet Mrs. Schandl, a 67-year-old Bavarian, is leading a fierce campaign to halt plans to build a mosque in a working-class district here. ?It is a provocation,? she said of the mosque, which would sit across a graceful square from her Roman Catholic church ? its minarets an exotic counterpoint to the church?s neo-baroque steeples. ?The mosque doesn?t have anything to do with religion,? she said. ?It is a power play.?
Of the many ways that Christians and Muslims rub up against each other in this country, the construction of mosques has become one of the most contentious. Symbols of a foreign faith, rising in German cities, they are stoking anti-foreign sentiment and reinforcing fears that Christianity is under threat.
Why, Mrs. Schandl asked, do the Turks want to build their mosque right here, on a site opposite St. Korbinian? Like churches everywhere in Germany, hers is struggling to survive in a secular society. A few empty churches are being converted into banks or restaurants.
And she isn’t alone:
Wolfgang Neuner, a parish counselor at St. Korbinian, said parishioners told him they would not feel comfortable at prayer, knowing that they were near a mosque. Andrea Borger, the deacon at the Protestant church, got a letter asking, ?What are you going to say when your daughter isn?t able to walk in this neighborhood without a head scarf??
Such fears resonate with politicians. Speaking in a beer tent last April, Bavaria?s prime minister, Edmund Stoiber, pledged to block the mosque. His Christian Social Union invalidated the preliminary permit that was issued by the Munich government, which is run by a coalition of the Social Democratic Party and the Greens.
Meanwhile, in Denmark, residents are taking matters into their own hands:
Copenhagen 4 December 2006 ? Last night some people protested against the construction of Mosques on European soil by defiling a proposed site with pigs blood.
A bag filled with Pig?s blood was splattered at the ground of a planed mosque in Copenhagen.
A video of the act ? showing the men pouring a red liquid on the ground, and speaking in English, was released to the media, anonymously?
As I argued last month, the notion that Europe will simply sit back and let itself be overrun ignores history.
Here in England, there are many mosques, and we don’t have protests to this extent. Perhaps in Germany and Denmark, the mosques are a new concept which the people aren’t used to. Hostility towards Muslims across Europe is partially due to the fact that governments seem to be giving Muslims more attention than other groups, even though Muslims represent a small minority. Because problems with their community are given so much coverage, as are other Muslim issues, Muslims get targeted more. Of course, if all Muslims lived in the 21st century and were as civilised as the rest of us, people may not have such a problem with them.