Germany: Urban slang should be recognized as dialect, says expert

Via the Local:

The street slang spoken by young people in Germany’s big cities is so defined that one language expert is arguing for it to be recognised as a dialect.

(…)

“Kiezdeutsch”, which differs from city to city, is most common in multicultural areas, where different languages are mixed, said Wiese.

Young people of Turkish or Arabic origin seem to dominate the wannabe-dialect, she said.

Dalia Hibish, a 15-year-old from Berlin, has been working on a language project with Wiese.

She said she spoke mostly Arabic yet the majority of her neighbours are English-speaking and is taught in German – but in the school yard she speaks “Kiezdeutsch” – which for her is a mix of all these language.

(source)

Switzerland: Radical Muslim group to launch TV station

Via the Local:

The Islamic Central Council of Switzerland (ICCS) has announced plans to set up an internet TV channel, while it is also in talks with various companies to provide its members with a Swiss-Muslim discount card.

The new TV studios, due to become operational this summer, will play host to a political show, a weekly series on a range of topics seen from a Muslim perspective, and a sermon series, newspaper SonntagsZeitung reports. Sermons are to be given mainly in German, but also in Arabic, Bosnian and Albanian. German subtitles will also be available.

(source)

Netherlands: Dutch language gaining ground in mosques

Via RNW:

Dutch mosques are beginning to phase out Arabic-only sermons. Research at Utrecht University has shown that Surinamese Muslims are leading in this respect.

Researcher Nico Landman told the ANP agency that such a development is logical, seeing that Dutch is the language that the Surinamese commonly speak in the Netherlands. There are approximately 20 Surinamese mosques in the Netherlands.

In the Moroccan-Dutch community preaching in Dutch is growing, according to Amsterdam imam Yassin Elforkani. He pointed to the Ulu mosque in Utrecht and the Blue mosque in Amsterdam as two prominent examples. The rise of Dutch can be explained by the desire to reach young Dutch Muslims, most of whom do not speak Arabic, Elforkani said. Dutch-Moroccan youths also prefer Dutch when communicating on Facebook and other social media.

(source)

Belgium: Shooter didn’t feel Moroccan, wasn’t Muslim

Via the New York Times:

Belgians sought to make sense on Wednesday of a spasm of killing by a man with a history of trouble with weapons and drugs who unleashed his attack near a Christmas market at a historic square, bringing random death to a familiar scene of European holiday bustle.

(…)

“He didn’t feel at all Moroccan,” one lawyer said, adding that he “didn’t speak a word of Arabic and wasn’t a Muslim,” and that “he felt Belgian.” At other points, the interview quoted the lawyers as saying that he “was crazy about weapons, but as a collector”; “he felt that he’d not had much luck in life”; he “thought he’d been unfairly treated by the justice system.”

One said his action was that of “a tormented soul who was at the end of his tether, cut off from the justice system and from society.”

(source)

See also here for more on Amrani’s history.

Germany: Allotment gardeners told to prune racial quotas

Via the Local:

A group of allotment owners in northern Germany have been told to turn over a new leaf after they set a limit on how many people with foreign roots should be allowed to join their garden community.

The mayor of Norderstedt, near Hamburg, demanded the group drop their “migrant quota” which sets a 12.6 percent limit on what share of the allotment spaces known as Schrebergärten be granted to people of foreign heritage.

(…)

Of the 12.6 percent of allotments set aside, 25 percent would be granted to those with Turkish or Arabic backgrounds, a further 25 percent given to those with eastern European roots and the other 50 percent for miscellaneous “others.”

(source)

Netherlands: MPs against ‘pedophile imam’

Via Volkskrant, Elsevier (Dutch):

MPs Ahmed Marcouch and Kadija Arib (PvdA/Labour) are asking the government to deny imam Mohammed al-Maghraoui of Morocco a visa to the Netherlands. Al-Maghraoui was invited to a conference in the Hague by the As Soennah mosque. In honor of its new construction the mosque is organizing a 5-day Arabic conference on “the Muslim between steadfastness and temptation”.

In 2008 Al-Maghraoui published a fatwa authorizing marriages with 9-year old girls. The fatwa caused an uproar in Morocco, where such marriages are illegal.

Moroccan-Dutch women in the Hague are unhappy about the imam’s arrival and do not understand why the municipality is allowing an imam who encourages pedophilia to come and preach ideas which conflict with Dutch law.

The PVV joined the Labour request to ban the imam, and said that if he does indeed come, the mosque should be shut down.

MP Tofik Dibi (Greens) came out in support of the imam’s freedom of speech and said that ‘causing repulsiveness and disgust’ are not reason to deny a visa.

Sweden: Arabic in Europe

Via SvD (Sweden):

‘Rena rama arabiskan’ is a new show by Swedish journalist Nadia Jebril being broadcast on Swedish Educational TV.

Jebril set out to find out far one can manage in Europe speaking Arabic. Her search took her through Sweden, Denmark, the UK, Italy, Malta, Spain, Bosnia and finally to Lebanon.

“We had a meeting to do something about Arabic. But everybody discussed just Islam and the Middle East, as if it must be about that typically.”

She thought: “Yes, many of us are Muslims. Yes, most of us speak Arabic. But we live here! and we don’t speak Arabic like in the Middle East, we blend it.”

“My generation is a special group. We grew up in one context and have parents who grew up in another. It’s exciting to think what’s happening in the minds of people like us. There’s a mass of context-meetings in people all over Europe. It’s something new and it’s never paid attention to!”

Denmark: Supreme Court rules to deport immigrant drug dealer

Fez Fez will appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

Via the Copenhagen Post:

Convicted drug dealer and gang member Mahmoud Khalil Salem, otherwise known as ‘Fez Fez’, has been expelled from Denmark by the Supreme Court.

Earlier this year, in an evenly split decision, the Western High Court ruled that the 41-year-old from Odense, who has lived in Denmark for nearly 20 years and is currently serving a six-year prison sentence, could not be deported out of consideration for his wife and eight children who reside in Denmark.

The Supreme Court today overturned that lower court ruling, with six judges ruling for deportation and the seventh recommending a so-called ‘suspended deportation’.

(…)

They noted that he speaks poor Danish, although he has lived here for almost 20 years, and that the family only speaks Arabic at home, communicating with and sending money to relatives in Lebanon and Syria on a regular basis.

Fez Fez moved to Denmark from Lebanon in 1993, but is a stateless Palestinian. Since 2004 he has had state disability status and collected disability welfare checks. Police discovered that he had, however, sent approximately 71,000 kroner to family members in both Lebanon and the Palestine territories. In addition, police documented that he was trying to buy a flat in Damascus at the time of his arrest in 2009.

(source)

Iceland: The Escape from Iraq to Akranes

Via Iceland Review:

“How is it to live in a tent in a refugee camp in 50°C?” This was the title of a symposium I attended at the University of Iceland earlier this week to celebrate the launch of the book Ríkisfang: Ekkert – Flóttin frá Írak á Akranes (“Nationality: None – The Escape from Iraq to Akranes”) by Sigríður Vídis Jónsdóttir.

The book tells the story of eight Palestinian women and their children who fled Iraq to be resettled in Akranes, a small fishing village in west Iceland.

At the symposium, Lína Mazar, one of these eight women, described life in the Al Waleed refugee camp. She spoke about the difficult conditions in the camp—the repressive heat, the lack of hygiene—and the hardship she and her children faced.

What do you do under such extreme weather conditions? What about when a sandstorm hits?

The women left everything they knew in Baghdad and found themselves in unfamiliar surroundings—a camp in the desert. Later they would do the same, only this time they left for Iceland.

“I didn’t speak Icelandic or English, and people in Iceland don’t speak Arabic,” Mazar said of one of her first hurdles in the new country. Three years later, Mazar speaks fine Icelandic.

(Source)

Netherlands: Muslim MP launches anti-fatwa campaign

(final fatwa)

Via RNW:

Coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the US, Dutch Green Left MP Tofik Dibi is launching an internet awareness campaign aimed at making Muslims think for themselves.

Presented in Dutch, English and Arabic, his campaign, entitled “The Last Fatwa”, aims to “free Muslims from top-down decrees issued by a handful of scholars”. Muslims, the Dutch MP says, “should learn to think independently and make their own choices”.

The move is intended to create a movement that will end “the kidnapping of the Islamic faith”. Those who hijacked the planes on 11 September 2001 and destroyed 3,000 lives, Mr Dibi maintains, also “took our deepest principles hostage”.

(source)