Islamophobia on the rise in Germany

Saeed Pourreza

Press TV, London

Germany, home to the second biggest Muslim community in Western Europe after France. It is also home to a growing number of racist attacks on Muslims by neonazis and far right extremists.

Rights group FAIR International, which has founded Germany’s first reporting center for attacks on mosques, has recorded nearly 840 such incidents since 2014. A case in point the horrifying 2014 arson attack that gutted Berlin’s Mevlana mosque.

German police are usually quick to show up on the scene, but in most cases FAIR International says the crimes are not properly investigated.

Just 10 percent of them find the people who have done it. That shows that even the government, the police and some people of the government are together with them.

The attacks are not limited to Muslim places of worship. Physical attacks on Muslim men and women are also an almost daily occurrence.

A 2019 study found more than half of Germans view Islam as a threat. Nearly a thousand anti-Muslim attacks against individuals and institutions were recorded in 2019, and in 2020, at least one individual or mosque was either assaulted physically or received death threats almost every day.

Another report published in 2020 criticizes many European states for failing to report on anti-Muslim incidents as a separate category of hate crime. Despite all the warnings and criticism, anti-Muslim hatred, fueled by the propaganda of neo-Nazi groups and the far-right opposition parties, has only grown- a reality that does not bode well for the country of nearly five million Muslims.

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