On Jul 17, 6:34=A0am, "simple_langu...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"
<simple_langu...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> source:http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,565146,00.html
>
> 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 wor****p 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 re****ted "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. Still, the words used by the project's opponents called to mind
> the protests of earlier times. "The minarets even look like missiles,"
> railed one woman. A man said the mosque's dome reminded him "of a
> nuclear plant."
>
> 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 sup****t before he was murdered in 2002.
>
> In Germany there is also a market for these "single-issue parties,"
> suggests trend researcher Adjiedj Bakas, who himself emigrated from
> Surinam to the Netherlands. In the populous Ruhr Valley region of
> western Germany the Voter Initiative Recklinghausen (whose acronym
> "WIR" is the German word for "we") has found resonance with its
> message. The group claims it is fighting against "creeping
> Islamization," and is allied in the local government with the
> conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), one of Germany's major
> political parties. WIR members say they aren't alone in their
> opposition to Islam and their concern "that in 20 years in
> Recklinghausen, as in all large German cities, the majority of the
> residents under the age of 40 will be Muslims." "Discomfort is already
> spreading in some parts of the city," says Georg Schliehe, a WIR
> representative on the local city council, "but policy, public
> authorities and scholars downplay the problem."
>
> This burgeoning sentiment against mosques has no doubt been
> strengthened by the Islamist murders and suicide attacks that have
> also afflicted European cities in recent years. Some Muslims like
> Imran Sagir, director of a property development company specializing
> in mosques, say they can understand German citizens' fears. When you
> hear on the news about crimes committed in the name of Islam," he
> says, "who can blame people who don't want a mosque in the
> neighborhood?"
>
> Wolfgang Huber, the head of Germany's Protestant Church and bishop for
> the states of Berlin and Brandenburg, names what he sees as one
> im****tant cause for the increasing unease. He says there is an
> "obviously large-scale initiative" on the part of Islamic
> organizations to show their presence in as high-profile a way as
> possible and in as many places as possible. No fewer than 184 new
> mosques, some with domes and minarets, are currently being built or
> planned throughout Germany. That's considerably more than the 163
> existing traditional mosques (along with around 2,600 prayer rooms
> mostly hidden within secular buildings).
>
> And that appears to be only the start of an expected wider European
> mosque-building boom. 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.
>
> More often than in the past, Muslim communities nowadays are trying to
> include Middle Eastern style minarets in their building projects. It's
> an addition that is rousing greater protest -- no matter where the
> mosque is getting built in Germany. "As soon as the foreignness is
> cemented in a structure like a mosque, the problems just multiply,"
> says Christoph Dahling-Sander, the Protestant church's representative
> in the city of Hanover for matters concerning Islam.
>
> There have been some notable exceptions, though. Residents in the far
> northern town of Rendsburg in the state of Schleswig-Holstein kept
> their famous northern German composure and a majority accepted the
> construction of a large mosque. But as a rule, when building plans for
> mosques become public, neighbors immediately mobilize with a laundry
> list of concerns about why they will be bad for the neighborhood. They
> fear parking shortages, plunging property values and noise pollution.
> Hoping to maintain a veneer of political correctness, local
> politicians with the traditional parties play down these concerns. But
> by doing so, they just create even greater op****tunity for grassroots
> groups like the citizens' movement Pro Germany.
>
> "Where this kind of gaudy Middle Eastern building goes up, with a dome
> and minarets, the next thing will be an application to the authorities
> for permission to do the call to prayer," a passage on the Pro Germany
> Web site reads. It's visions like this that are leading more and more
> Germans to see the construction of mosques as the expression of a
> "kind of land grab," observes Claus Leggewie, a political science
> professor at the University of Giessen in the western state of Hesse.
>
> This impression is aggravated not only by right-wing agitators but
> also, according to Leggewie, by careless or sometimes even
> deliberately provocative statements by Muslim builders. Many seem to
> think like Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In words
> spoken in 1997, Erdogan made mosque construction seem like part of a
> strategy of Islamization: "The minarets are our lances, the domes our
> helmets, the believers our army."
>
> 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. "These Muslims don't just want to show their
> presence here, but also to strengthen and expand it."
>
> Statements made by intellectuals like Spuler-Stegemann, who has also
> said that, "Islam has a problem with violence," underscore the fact
> that criticism of mosque construction is no longer exclusively the
> domain of mindless xenophobes. And it would be a mistake, offical
> representatives on immigration issues from Germany's states warned a
> recent joint convention, to sweepingly dismiss mosque critics as being
> right-wing extremists.
>
> In the case of the controversy over the mosque planned for Cologne's
> Ehrenfeld neighborhood, the right-wing Pro protesters have indeed been
> pushed into the margins. Their complaints have been drowned out by
> more high-profile statements coming from prominent leftists and
> liberals including German Jewish journalist Ralph Giordano, women's
> rights activist Alice Schwarzer and investigative re****ter G=FCnter
> Wallraff, who have all spoken out against the mosque. Representatives
> of Germany's large churches have increasingly added their voices to
> the criticism as well. The "dishonest dialogue" with Islam described
> in SPIEGEL's pages in December 2001 -- in which church representatives
> simply ignored scandalous and unbearable aspects like persecution of
> Christians, discrimination against women, toleration of terror and
> "honor" killings for the sake of harmony -- is now a thing of the
> past.
>
> In place of the "fairy tale that we're all 'children of Abraham'," in
> the words of Leggewie, the churches are now making an effort not to
> entangle themselves in finding contrived common ground with Islam.
> Instead they are trying to find areas in which they differ -- and this
> applies particularly to the construction of mosques.
>
> "Why Would You Build a Mosque in an Area Where Nobody Lives?"
>
> Of course the Protestant and Catholic churches stress unanimously that
> Germany's more than 3 million Muslims have the same constitutional
> right to build houses of wor****p.
>
> But agreeing to a mosque, German Protestant leader Bishop Huber said
> at a national church meeting in 2007, should in no way preclude the
> op****tunity for an open and critical discussion about the location,
> size and number of such buildings.
>
> Location, size, number -- at least one of these factors seems to be
> out of pro****tion in some of the 184 new mosque projects. There are
> plenty of examples out there.
>
> In Berlin the local Ahmadiyya congregation, just 200 members strong,
> is pu****ng construction of a mosque at a cost of around =801 million
> ($1.6 million) in Berlin's suburban Heinersdorf district, which is
> home to a paucity of Muslims. Feeling left out of the process by local
> politicians, furious residents quickly began to gather at numerous,
> often overflowing and sometimes tumultuous protest meetings. "No to
> the mosque" or, as in the time around the fall of the Berlin Wall in
> this former East German district, "We are the people." They demanded
> that their quiet neighborhood not be allowed to be transformed into a
> "second Kreuzberg," a reference to a downtown Berlin neighborhood
> known for its massive Turkish immigrant population. "Why?" one of the
> speakers asked, drawing applause, "Why would you build a mosque in an
> area where no Muslims live?"
>
> Meanwhile, in populous Cologne in western Germany, the locally based
> Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB) -- which has close
> ties to a sister institution in Ankara -- has plans to build what it
> is describing as "Europe's biggest mosque." The construction is
> designed for thousands of visitors and slated for Ehrenfeld, an
> overburdened neighborhood that already suffers from a serious parking
> shortage. It's not just the mosque's location that has local residents
> seething, though, it's also its gigantic scale. Once built, the mosque
> will have a surface of 22,000 square meters (236,800 square feet) and
> 55-meter minarets standing as tall as an 18-story office tower. The
> enormous Ottoman style building, pronounces author Dieter Wellershoff,
> is as strange for some residents as it would be "if it were some
> object that suddenly landed there from another planet."
>
> And in Frankfurt's village-like Hause district, already home to two
> mosques, a 300-member association wants to erect the third Muslim
> community center in a 400-meter radius at a cost of =803 million. Local
> residents are afraid the concentration of mosques might cause their
> area to "tip." A typical statement made by local residents at protest
> meetings goes like this: "It wouldn't feel like home anymore if more
> come here."
>
> The resentment fomenting amongst the mosque's opponents, who have
> already collected well over 1,000 signatures, was further fueled when
> the local Green Party's spokesperson on integration policies, Nargess
> Eskandari-Gr=FCnberg, pointed out that 40 percent of the city's
> population are immigrants. "If that doesn't suit you," she said, "then
> you need to move somewhere else."
>
> Local mosque critics did manage to find sup****t from the Protestant
> Church, whose leader in the local state of Hesse dismissed the Green
> Party politician's statement as "tasteless." Although state church
> leader Peter Steinacker says he has no personal objections to the
> construction project, he says the issue of whether a third mosque
> should be built in an area like Hausen is a "question of political
> prudence."
>
> These conflicts often come to a head following the same pattern.
> Persuaded by the argument that Germany's constitutionally guaranteed
> freedom of religion requires them to authorize any proposed mosque,
> city administrators are often keen to come to an arrangement with
> builders early and behind closed doors, coming to comprehensive
> agreements.
>
> But with this strategy, which political scientist Leggewie describes
> as "paternalistic," local governments tend to make "the mosque
> association's demands their own" and to inform the public of "too
> little, too late." And because the Muslim communities "often don't
> display the necessary openness" when residents find out about the
> sometimes enormous projects, they feel they're being presented with a
> done deal and taken for fools.
>
> Often it is only then, when the local conflict is taking on traits of
> a clash of civilizations, that the fundamental questions avoided by
> city planners at the beginning of the process are discussed. They
> include, for example, topics such as how the organization behind the
> project deals with issues like terrorism and women's rights, whether
> the project is aimed at integration or separation and whether plans
> that go to architectural extremes are really covered by the
> constitutionally protected right to freedom of religion.
>
> And it is often in this phase that local media and local politicians
> raise the issue of how the planned mega-mosques differ from Christian
> or Jewish holy buildings. "Whether a mosque can even be called a house
> of wor****p at all," says Middle East scholar Spuler-Stegemann, "is
> contested even within Islam."
>
> In Islam expert Leggewie's opinion, mosques are "definitely not
> churches." He says they can be better described as multipurpose
> buildings. In the same way, Islam itself is "not just a religion,"
> emphasizes Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Green Party politician and long-term
> representative for multicultural affairs in Frankfurt. It is "also a
> theocratic vision," in which politics and belief are inseparably bound
> and "democracy and human rights are subordinate and conditional
> values." Islamic associations are not officially recognized religious
> communities, points out Necla Kelek, a Germany-based sociologist and
> feminist of Turkish descent. Granting building permits for mosques,
> she says, is "not a question of freedom of religion but a political
> question." She says Germany's laws governing construction and
> associations are ill-equipped for dealing with the issue.
>
> The great dissimilarity between these mosque centers and churches is
> evident in the original plans for the Cologne mosque, in which only
> one-fifth of the 22,000 square meters was set aside as an area for
> prayer. The remaining space, according to a Turkish-language appeal
> for donations, was intended for a TV studio, pharmacy, doctor's
> office, legal practice, bakery, hairdresser, supermarket, bank,
> preschool, library, restaurant and jewelry store. The mosque's size
> was only later reduced as a result of public protest.
>
> Large mosques like the one in Cologne often offer even more: Koran
> schools and kickboxing studios, computer and TV rooms, travel agencies
> and funeral homes -- all services provided under one roof or in the
> immediate vicinity. "It's everything a Muslim needs outside the
> apartment," claims Kelek, "If he wants to, in addition to praying, it
> also allows him to have nothing to do with Germany society." She
> describes the mosques as "breeding grounds" for a parallel society and
> an "obstacle to integration."
>
> Under the pretext of religious privilege, the DITIB strategists in
> Cologne have in truth claimed the rights to a commercial center that
> also happens to include the op****tunity to pray. A Muslim community in
> Berlin's Neuk=F6lln district also wanted to take its cue from Cologne
> and construct an immense commercial and cultural center. But at least
> the planners there, as the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
> recognized, only described the structure as being a "semi-mosque."
>
> That plan, however, failed in the face of the strong opposition of
> Deputy Mayor and District Councilwoman Stefanie Vogelsang of the
> conservative Christian Democrats. 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,
> =80100,000. "Whoever lives here, whoever builds here, needs to follow
> our laws," she said.
>
> The local Berliner Kurier newspaper praised her as the "councilwoman
> who doesn't let people walk all over her," but the Muslim community
> had a totally different opinion. It would have been perfectly fine if
> the illegally erected minarets had been "a little bit bigger," a
> re****ter overheard in the mosque. Another congregation member
> complained that "every mosque in Turkey" is bigger. "They must be
> laughing themselves silly at us," he grumbled.
>
> Reactions like that reinforce the impression on the part of critics
> like Spuler-Stegemann that for some building associations 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," she says, "from a certain Muslim perspective, that's Islamic
> ground."
>
> Building Code Violations and other Community Spats
>
> After her experience with the mosque on Columbiadamm, Vogelsang
> appeared determined "not to allow herself to be tricked" and not to
> allow further Muslim communities to massively violate building code.
> Later, she successfully blocked an association called Inssan, which
> had plans to build an immense mosque center in Neuk=F6lln, which is
> already home to 15 official mosques and 31 other prayer rooms. The
> proposed structure violated "all zoning ordinances," she claims.
>
> The 8,000-square-meter complex had been planned for a strictly
> residential area with no bus service or parking lots; and it would
> have been located near the R=FCtli School, which became infamous
> throughout Germany in 2006 for its high level of student violence. The
> building was designed to sit along the street on a strip of land 73
> meters wide, rather than the prescribed 13 meters, with an area 40
> percent greater than that permitted in the area.
>
> Financing for the project also seemed dubious to Vogelsang. After the
> builders "almost snottily" rejected requests for disclosure of their
> sources of funding to district authorities. She eventually found out
> through the Berlin state government's Interior Ministry that "Saudi
> and other Arab foundations" were behind the project -- countries
> ranking at the bottom of the list on the global scale of religious
> freedom.
>
> The building lot had been purchased by Ibrahim el-Zayat, a
> representative of the Islamic Community of Germany organization. The
> Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's
> domestic intelligence agency, claims the group has connections to the
> Muslim Brotherhood and other radical groups. Vogelsang doesn't believe
> the Inssan Association's assertions that there are no strings attached
> to the donations from the Middle East. "You find someone who is
> willing to give me =8015 to =8020 million with no strings attached," she
> says.
>
> Vogelsang considers herself lucky "that the mosque could be rejected
> because of construction ordinances," but the Inssan Association is
> already pursuing a new strategy. It now wants to build the mosque
> center in a commercial zone in western Berlin's Charlottenburg
> neighborhood. The site first chosen in a residential part of Neuk=F6lln
> was zoned for chuches, but not meeting places of the mass scale of the
> mosque center.
>
> The organization has also been taking great pains to publicly position
> itself as being moderate in its approach to Islam. It arranges PR
> training for its members, criticizes forced marriages and runs blood
> drives and environmental campaigns. In this, diehard opponents see
> less a sign of liberalization than a camouflage intended to deflect
> attention from the group's dubious funding sources and Islamist
> backers.
>
> "To get in good with the Berlin elite, you meet with members of the
> dialogue industry and put on some politically correct events," says
> Ian Johnson, an American author, Pulitzer Prize winner and Islam
> expert living in Berlin.
>
> Instead of putting all their cards on the table when they meet with
> adjacent property owners, leaders of an association wanting to build
> will strike a deal with "the usual clique of politicians and officials
> in charge of immigrant issues," says Johnson, and then put "a mosque
> right down in the middle of the neighborhood." This approach carries
> the danger that "through the lack of a democratic outlet," residents
> will be pushed into the arms of right-wing populists who reject the
> construction projects for "nationalistic or racist reasons."
>
> Public opinion polls generally show that the predominant view in
> Germany's major cities is that Muslims should have a right to places
> of wor****p beyond those hidden behind courtyards -- as long as the
> plans comply with building laws and fit their surroundings. At the
> same time, a majority sup****ts the position of journalist Giordano,
> who suggests there is "no fundamental right to building a mega-
> mosque," especially if it disrupts the look of the city around it. A
> balance, says Giordano, must be found "between the back courtyard and
> the centrally located grand mosque."
>
> The group that is dead set against the construction of any type of
> mosque is a relatively small minority. But in addition to affected
> residents and xenophobes whose views cannot be changed, this group of
> opponents also notably includes Islam experts from the Muslim world.
>
> There are "more than enough mosques in Germany," says Mina Ahadi, co-
> founder of Germany's Central Council of Ex-Muslims. Ahadi has been
> under police protection since she publicly renounced Islam -- a crime
> punishable by death according to radical interpretations of sharia
> law."
>
> "When a mosque is built," Ahadi says, "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 naivet=E9" in their dealings with Islamic
> organizations that, she argues, "ultimately want to instate sharia
> law."
>
> Meanwhile, among those local politicians who have no general
> objections to mosques being built, there is an increasing willingness
> to investigate the true ambitions and financial backers of the
> builders more fully than in the past. This is not always easy,
> however, given the complexity of the situation as well as the fact
> that imams' sermons are mostly delivered in languages other than
> German. Moreover, some groups are adept at strategies for concealing
> intentions that run contrary to the German constitution, using what
> the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution calls
> "legality tactics" -- in other words, using government means to get
> around government laws.
>
> Even DITIB, the comparatively moderate organization behind the mosque
> project in Cologne, arouses mistrust. DITIB is the long arm of a
> religious institution in secular Turkey. "What will most likely
> happen," ask the residents of Cologne who take part in the protests,
> "if the feared Islamization of Turkey happens? Will DITIB bring it
> over here?"
>
> Cologne's Archbishop Joachim Meisner is already warning people about
> of areas in Germany "where sharia law is increasingly spreading." In
> the case of DITIB, this warning might be premature or simply
> inaccurate. At the same time, however, the association is remotely
> controlled from Ankara and has a reputation for being more concerned
> with helping to maintain the identity of Turkish immigrants than with
> helping them integrate in their new homes.
>
> The worldview of Ahmadiyya, the organization that currently wants to
> build one of its planned 100 mosques in Berlin's northern Pankow
> district, also causes some unease. Every now and then, rumors escape
> the mosque walls claiming that many of the group's leaders consider
> not only women and Jews to be second-class citizens, but also
> homo***uals. In 2007, an Ahmadiyya Web site stated that the
> "increasing tendency toward homo***uality" could be traced to the
> consumption of ****k.
>
> Widespread protests against Ahmadiyya by residents of Schl=FCchtern in
> the western state of Hesse led the town to change its zoning laws so
> as to prevent a planned mosque that would have included minarets from
> being built. In other locations as well, politicians are becoming more
> and more inclined to use city-planning laws as a way of limiting or
> completely prohibiting dubious projects by questionable developers.
>
> This is exactly what Bonn did when the city voted against the
> construction of a cultural center with minarets on the grounds that
> the project would further aggravate the "uncontested and ongoing
> formation of ghettos" in a specific Muslim-influenced neighborhood. In
> Munich, the city government rejected a proposed mosque project because
> its "dispro****tionate mass" would have allegedly impacted a square
> whose buildings are on historical-preservation lists.
>
> Minarets 'By No Means Compulsory'
>
> Cologne wants to prevent two associations from building a mosque in
> the district of M=FClheim because they have contacts with the Islamic
> organization Milli G=F6r=FCs. Norbert ****hs, the district's mayor,
> certainly sees it as a "problem (when) political questions are dealt
> with by using building ordinances." For his part, though, Cologne's
> Deputy Mayor Guido Kahlen is convinced that: "In those cases where we
> have room for administrative discretion, we have to use it."
>
> Seeing that this mindset appears to be catching on in other places,
> builders are apparently becoming more and more willing to exclude
> minarets from their architectural plans. As they see it, people living
> near these mosques view the minarets less as symbols of integration
> and more as demonstrations of power.
>
> When Leggewie gives out advice, he says that mosques should be built
> without the classic soaring towers -- on practical grounds. "As soon
> as a mosque differs from the look of the city around it through its
> =91foreign' form," Leggewie reasons, "you can count on greater
> resistance, which often necessitates more involved authorization
> procedures."
>
> "The traditional style underscores, even unintentionally," Leggewie
> adds, "the orientation of Muslims toward the areas most im****tant to
> Islam and toward their homelands." And lastly, he points out, the
> Middle Eastern style of a mosque with minarets is "by no means
> compulsory."
>
> Indeed, a counterexample is the mosque of the Turkish parliament in
> Ankara, built in 1989, which doesn't have minarets. And than there's a
> "mosque for the future" planned for London's East End. Plans for the
> mosque envision space for 70,000 wor****ppers in a high-tech structure
> with a glass roof instead of a dome and wind turbines instead of
> minarets.
>
> For the proposed Ahmadiyya mosque in Hausen, near Frankfurt, architect
> Mubashra Ilyas has designed a simple building with "Bauhaus elements"
> and one symbolic minaret that people passing by can only see from a
> certain angle. As Ilyas explains it, this is "because it's certainly
> easier for native Germans living in the area to live with it that
> way."
>
> In any case, minarets are no longer needed for the muezzin's call. A
> call to prayer is redundant, according to Fazlur Rehman Anwar of the
> Ahmadiyya mosque in Eimsb=FCttel, Hamburg: "After all, there are
> watches."
>
> On the other hand, when Muslim builders with financial backers in the
> Middle East insist on enormous, showy multipurpose centers in Turkish
> or Arab style, they must accept a high degree of political risk. The
> openly Middle Eastern style may lead to a flare up in the already
> smoldering debate about religious freedom in the countries that back
> these projects financially, since some are countries in which
> Christians are violently persecuted and prevented from building
> churches.
>
> Representatives of both the Catholic and Protestant churches in
> Germany continue to emphasize that they have in no way made their
> approval of mosque construction contingent on Muslim countries'
> allowing Christians to build churches there. At the same time,
> however, they let it be known that they can't accept the status quo in
> the long run.
>
> While Protestant Bishop Huber calls for "Muslims' unrestricted right
> to convert," his Catholic colleague Archbishop Meisner has appealed to
> the DITIB, who are building the mosque in Cologne, "to sup****t a
> project in Turkey." As Meisner explains: "The Pope has declared 2008
> to be the Year of St. Paul (as) we are celebrating of the 2000th
> birthday of the apostle Paul. Yet at his birthplace in Tarsus, we
> Christians have nothing =85 We need to campaign to be allowed to build a
> pilgrim center and a small church there. In return, that would be
> taken into account here in Cologne."
>
> Less elegant than the cardinal's approach =96 which, admittedly, met
> with no success -- is the direct method used by some representatives
> of the CDU. While representatives of the Christian Social Union (CSU)
> the CDU's Bavarian sister party, were satisfied with the stipulation
> that minarets could not rise higher than church steeples, local CDU
> members in Castrop-Rauxel, a city in western Germany, recently agreed
> to a dispro****tionately 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."
Europeans should be gathering and de****ting all muslims. Only a very
sick society im****ts cancer cells.
mitch
|
