When Germans
Convert
by
Colin M. Adams
Germans
recoiled in horror in September when police charged three suspects with
planning a terrorist bombing attack on a U. S Army base in Hanau, near
Frankfurt. Concern skyrocketed, not so much because of the threat of renewed
terrorism in Germany, bad as that might be, but rather because two of those
arrested were German converts to Islam.
The integration of Muslims into German society—or lack
thereof—has long been an issue in Germany. But news of a growing cohort of
converts to Islam, and the attachment of converts to radical, anti-Western
strains of Islam, have been particularly unwelcome. What followed was a
vigorous autumnal debate about how to balance security interests with
concerns about anti-Muslim bigotry and the preservation of general liberty
during the global “war on terror.”
Crystallizing this debate, perhaps coincidentally, was a
remark made by one of the suspects arrested in September, who had been
quoted in Stern, the German newsweekly, on the topic of Muslim
radicalism a few weeks before his arrest. “Radicalism can be found
anywhere,” Fritz Gelowicz told the magazine on July 13. “One does not have
to go to Arabia to find it.”
Gelowicz and the two others charged (identified publicly
only as Daniel S and Tolga D because German law prohibits the release of the
last names of criminal suspects) had been observed by police keeping watch
on the American barracks at Hanau on New Year’s Eve in 2006. For the next
nine months, the men were kept under close surveillance.
They were observed by police officers purchasing 12
canisters of hydrogen peroxide in Hanover, storing them in a shed in the
Black Forest, and eventually transferring them to their apartment in the
small Saarland village of Oberschlehdorn. The police secretly switched the
original peroxide with a much weaker, diluted form of the chemical.
Despite the exemplary cloak and dagger work of law
enforcement, most of the early German press coverage focused on the fact
that two of the three suspects (Fritz G and Daniel S) were Germans who had
converted to Islam in their teens. Most articles then went on,
inconclusively, to ask how severe the threat posed by radical Islam within
Germany might be.
German Muslims then reacted defensively, as on September 6,
when Michael Muhammad Abdu Pfaff, president of the German Muslim League,
told Stern that he “would not call these men typical converts. They
are clearly in the clutches of a radical ideology that, in my opinion, is
not the preaching of Islam, but of an anti-West ideology.” Pfaff added that
those Muslims who do become radicalized had fallen into the “wrong circle”
and been “brainwashed” by others. “This group is for me not a Muslim group.
Terror contradicts Islam.”
The same day, Goekalp Babayigit, a reporter for the
Sueddeutsche Zeitung of Munich, directed attention toward a mosque, the
Islamic Information Center, in Ulm in southern Germany. Both Fritz G and
Tolga D belonged to the mosque, which had already been a target of federal
investigation, and which officials described as a bastion of extremism.
“It is seen as a place of refuge for those converts who
sympathize with extremism, and as an intersection for the unclear Islamic
network around Ulm.” The center is seen as a “recruiting center” for young
Muslims, particularly young converts who are sometimes more likely to
radicalize in an attempt to “prove” themselves as good Muslims.
The next day, the same newspaper’s Annette Ramelsberger
summed up the new threat of “home grown terrorists” in Germany: “The
pictures of the blue containers and the police reports of the months-long
observation of the suspects show without a doubt that the Holy War has come
to Germany.”
What was lacking in the coverage was attention to the
Islamic Jihad Union, the group that claimed responsibility for the planned
attack but which was never clearly linked by German reporters to the Islamic
Information Center. Articles from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and
Berliner Zeitung claimed that the group had close ties to Al-Qaida
without going into any further detail.
The Islamic Jihad Union, according to a Sueddeutsche
Zeitung article September 11, originated in Uzbekistan and is apparently
motivated by its objection to German involvement in the war in Afghanistan:
“The planned attacks were aimed at combating the deployment
of German troops in Afghanistan. The declaration named the air base at
Termez in Uzbekistan, which the German air force uses, as a particular point
of antagonism. The Islamic Jihad Union was hoping that the attacks would end
the German presence at the base.”
In the wake of the thwarted attack, a handful of German
politicians, mostly connected to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU),
described radical converts as a real threat and proposed new security
measures to constrain them. “One would think that those who grow up here and
enjoy the many advantages of our free society would be immune from
radicalism,” Wolfgang Schaeuble, federal interior minister,” told Das
Bild. “But a few are still susceptible.”
Schaeuble led an effort in the weeks following the arrests
to make changes to the German Constitution that, he argued, would protect
the German people from future terror attacks. Along with the interior
minister of the German state of Hessen, Volker Bouffier (also of the CDU),
he proposed making it illegal to visit Islamic training camps in Pakistan
and other areas in the Middle East.
“[F]oreigners who receive training in these camps must be
refused re-entry into Germany,” Bouffier told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung
on September 7. “If they have already re-entered the country, we must create
the opportunity to deport them.”
Schaeuble’s proposed amendment was immediately opposed by
leaders of other German political parties, and especially by federal
Attorney General Brigitte Zypries, a member of the Social Democratic Party
(SPD). Speaking to the Bild am Sonntag September 9, Zypries laid out
her disagreement with Schaeuble’s proposed amendment: “It is customary in
Germany to punish someone only when they have actually done something or at
the very least, made preparations to do something.” A week later, she
repeated her position to Stern: “Mere ideology should not be
punished.”
Zypries’ position was echoed by Sueddeutsche’s
Heribert Prantl in a September 10 column: “Visits to a terror camp is of
course the wrong word; it is not about criminalizing a journalistic visit to
a camp, but about criminalizing the preparation of a crime. And the intent
to commit a crime is already punishable today.”
Other opponents thought that the proposed legislation was
too hastily drawn up and would not be effective in all situations. “I do not
participate in the footrace for popular, yet not completely thought-out
proposals, Schleswig-Holstein’s SPD interior minister, Ralf Stegner, told
Die Welt September 13. “Thus if a Brit who has attended a foreign terror
camp goes back to Britain and then comes to Germany, they will not be
checked under this proposed law.”
But visits to terror camps abroad was not the only issue
being debated in the Bundestag. Talking to the Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger
on September 8, Hans-Peter Uhl of the Christian Social Union (CSU) said,
“The knowledge that led to the arrest of the suspects came from computer
inspections by American intelligence agencies.”
Support for the government’s right to use online searches
and to collaborate with American intelligence immediately came from members
of both CDU and CSU. The interior minister of Niedersachsen, Uwe Schuenemann
(CDU), told Sueddeutsche Zeitung, “There must not be any protected
communication space for terrorists in our country.” Opponents of the
resolution from the SPD were “not categorically against online searching,
but would like to know what the technical details of the proposal look like
first,” according to the paper.
The biggest outcry from the SPD and the media came after
comments made by CDU politician Wolfgang Bosbach that seemed to propose a
new register for all Germans who converted to Islam. In the September 12
Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Bernd Oswald complained in a column, “It is the
same story every time: If a grave felony is foiled in Germany, one can bet
that radical proposals will move into the discussion.”
Oswald explained that the convert registry “deals with
people who change their religious affiliation; but of course it does not
deal with people who convert to Buddhism, Hinduism, or Roman Catholicism.
No, it deals only with those Germans who become Muslims.” Such extreme
measures “stigmatize and segregate a section of the population. Such a
register could further fuel the hate for our social order had by those who
already hold radical beliefs.”
Bosbach’s idea was soundly rejected by members of the SPD
and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP). As Nordrhein-Westphalia
interior minister Ingo Wolf (FDP) told Stern, “There is no purpose in
lumping all converts together.” Even members of the CDU opposed the
legislation. “We do not,” said Niedersachen’s interior minister Uwe
Schuenemann (CDU), “need a new index for converts.”
But speaking to the Koelnische Rundschau, Bosbach
denied ever making the suggestion. “I have neither called for a register for
all converts, nor do I think that the introduction of such an index is
reasonable,” he declared, claiming to have been speaking not about converts
but “about the small group of agitators who are in contact with the militant
Islamic scene.”
Whether or not Bosbach was misquoted, the damage had already
been done. “Even if it is all a mere misunderstanding, many Muslims will
take the feverish discussion as proof that the State is not concerned about
the radical Muslims, Annette Ramelsberger wrote in a September 12 commentary
in Sueddeutsche Zeitung. “It is rather about putting all Muslims
under general suspicion, and that Christian society’s fear of Islamic terror
is so great, that it prompts them to cower in fear.”
Bernd Oswald expressed similar sentiments in the same issue
of Sueddeutsche: “The man from the party with the capital ‘C’ is
putting the entire religious group of Muslims under general suspicion, even
if Bosbach himself denies it.”
Although the measures proposed by Schaeuble and Bosbach were
ultimately blocked, hostility towards Muslims in Germany remained palpable.
Many commentators, indeed, saw the CDU as turning into an “Anti-Terror
Party.” They themselves were persuaded that the urgent problem of how to
move Muslims in from the periphery of German society—the “integration
problem”—would not be advanced by aggressive online intelligence sweeps and
convert registers.
At the end of
his interview with Stern, Michael Muhammad Abduh Pfaff had
this advice to offer: “Intensifying the laws and striking suspicion works in
the favor of the extremists. If our society cannot show that it is better,
freer, and more just than these fanatics, then our freedom itself will be
constricted. If all Muslims are placed in a corner, integration will be
hindered instead of enabled.” |