The Far-Right German Proposal to Ban All Mosques
Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, March 30, 2016
A wing of a far-right party in Germany is readying a proposal to ban the “construction and operation” of mosques. The plan was articulated in a 45-page policy document put forward by members of a Bavarian branch of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, a far-right, anti-immigration party that had an impressive showing in regional elections earlier this month.
The draft policy, titled “Courage to take responsibility,” states that “Islam does not belong to Germany” and argues that mosques lead to “the spread of Islamic teachings directed towards the removal of our legal order,” according to the Deutsche Welle news agency.
The Koran, the holy book of Islam, is full of “lies and deception,” the paper says, warning that Islam “has already arrived at its declared path to world domination in 57 out of 190 countries.”
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The AfD’s leadership in Bavaria distanced itself from the proposal, which apparently came from a particularly right-wing branch of the party in Lower Bavaria, an administrative region of the southern German state. It’s unlikely that the call to ban mosques would ever be heeded.
About 4 million Muslims live in Germany, a country with a population of about 80 million. There are 184 new mosque projects underway in the country, according to a leading German Muslim group.
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