Germany: Politician Blasted for Support of Islamic Law

Via Spiegel:

Most politicians in Germany have gotten the message: The quickest way to spark a career-damaging controversy is to make a facile comment about Nazis or the Holocaust. Media critics and political opponents are quick to pounce.

But that isn’t the only way to attract unwanted attention, as Jochen Hartloff, the interior minister of the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, found out this week. In an interview with the Berlin tabloid BZ, Hartloff said that Sharia law, in a “modern form,” would be acceptable in Germany. In comments published on Friday in the center-left daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, he added that Islamic moral code “is certainly conceivable when it comes to questions pertaining to civil law.”

Hartloff, a politician from the center-left Social Democrats, made clear that he was referring specifically to family law issues such as divorce settlements and alimony, but also certain instances of contract law in which devout Muslims seek to avoid paying interest. Applying Sharia rules, he said, could help avoid hostility in such cases.

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Germany: Muslim arbitration affects court decisions

Via DW:

Joachim Wagner, who has written a book on the topic called “Judges acting outside the law,” can see the positive aspect of that tradition, but his research has also yielded many negative examples.

In an interview with DW, Wagner describes one of 16 cases he analyzes in his book. In that case, a man shoots another in the foot. Later, the victim’s brother takes revenge and shoots the perpertrator in the leg. Both cases go to court.

According to Wagner, Muslim mediators from Sweden and Germany are consulted, resulting in a watering-down of the original statements in the course of the lawsuit. The shooting in the foot is now seen more as accidental.

Wagner claims the case is a typical example of how statements change and lead to a wrong and unfair ruling. In the end, the German court handed down a sentence of nine months on probation – too lenient in Wagner’s opinion. If both the victims and the perpetrators had stuck to their original statements, the sentence would have most likely been harsher.

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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.

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“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.

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Germany: Muslim car-pool service

Via TAZ (German, h/t Snaphanen)

Selim Reid (24) is the founder of MuslimTAXI, a Muslim ride-sharing service. The service is free, and is ad-supported. He says he thought of the idea because of complaints he heard that regular carpools don’t implement gender discrimination.

Reid immigrated from Iraq to Germany with his parents in 1996. He studied automotive and aircraft technology in Hamburg. He says he once organized a ride for his parents from Hamburg to Berlin, but when he brought his parents to the meeting point, it was clear that the driver did not like foreigners. The driver assumed the parents couldn’t understand German and since they couldn’t get off in the middle of nowhere, they had to listen to his rants the whole way.

Reid says his service is no different from how some Christian communities organize to help their members. He says non-Muslims are also invited to join.

His site allows people to choose the gender of the driver and passengers. He says until now it was difficult for Muslim women to use regular carpool services unaccompanied. He also says he’s heard of many affairs that started in such cars and that destroyed marriages.

He says the best thing about it is that it encourages Dawa. Since the Muslims who meet on his rides have only one thing in common – Islam. And this way other faiths get introduced to Islam. He goes on to say that Islam unites all religions and that there is only one true God.

Asked whether gender segregation isn’t a thing of the past, Reid answered that more and more people are converting to Islam, many of them women, and they adopt the headscarf of their own free will. Islam is unchanging and its principles are lasting, and so women will want to keep the headscarf even 1000 years from now. Islam is the true religion and since God is flawless, so is the religion he gave.

Reid says he already got 2,000 sign-ups, as well as thank-you calls and emails. He was also criticized, but he says that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

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.

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Germany: “Discrimination with a smile”

Via Deutsche Welle:

Experts call it “discrimination with a smile” when describing the practice of gently fobbing off those who don’t typically look like they fit in. They might be given a paltry, but friendly excuse such as “the flat is no longer available,” or “the restaurant is closed for to a private function” or “the hostel is fully booked.”

But there is also the daily discrimination that is intended to be friendly. “Your German is pretty good,” is actually an insult for many fully integrated Germans, born and raised in the country but deemed “pretty good” because they don’t fit another person’s definition of what a German looks like.

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Germany: Majority of Turks believe state supports far-right terrorists

Via Spiegel:

Turkish immigrants in Germany have lost faith in the German state as a result of the murder series allegedly committed by the Zwickau neo-Nazi terror cell, a new study shows. Three-quarters of respondents fear there will be further racially motivated killings.
Info

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The authors of the study interviewed a representative sample of 1,058 people of Turkish descent living in Germany aged 15 years and over, between Dec. 5 and Dec. 15. More than half of the people surveyed — 55 percent — believed that the far-right terrorists were protected or even supported by the German state. About one-third were even convinced that there was “extreme” state support for the Zwickau-based neo-Nazis. Only about 21 percent believed there was no state support.

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Germany: Anti-Islamic websites come under greater scrutiny

Via the National:

German authorities have announced a plan to place anti-Islamic websites under surveillance because of growing concern that they are becoming more radical and fomenting right-wing violence.

The domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, said last week it had set up a working group to assess whether German-language sites such as Politically Incorrect and Nürnberg 2.0, whose stated aim is to oppose the “Islamisation of Europe” are in breach of the constitution.

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Germany: Foreigners set up a third of all new firms

Via the Local:

Foreigners are three times as likely to start a new business as Germans, according to a new study which showed that nearly a third of all new companies founded in 2009 were set up by migrants.

The study commissioned by the Economy Ministry showed around 130,000 new companies were started in 2009 in Germany by people without German citizenship – around 30 percent of all new firms set up that year.

The number of companies started by foreigners in Germany has risen by about a quarter since 2005, the report compiled by consulting group Evers & Jung concluded, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.

The report said foreigners were three times as likely to start a new company as Germans.

“New firms are lifeblood for the German economy,” German Economy Minister Philipp Rösler, told the paper.

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In 2005 nearly a third of foreigners who started companies in Germany were from countries which had been targeted for guest workers in the 1960s – Turkey and Italy. In 2009 however, the share of foreign company founders from these countries had dropped to around a fifth.

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Germany: Israeli-Arab killed in antisemitic attack

According to an Israeli news source, German police have an Arab suspect in custody. The victim’s mother is Jewish, and police suspect this was the reason for the murder.

Via YNET News:

A 26-year-old Israeli Arab woman was found dead Wednesday in her apartment near the University of Göttingen, Germany.

According to the local German media, the cause of death has yet to be determined. Authorities have launched an investigation into the circumstances of the woman’s death.

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