In case you missed it on the news — easy to do since it’s rarely mentioned — Europe is in the throes of the third wave of the pandemic.
Their rollout of the vaccines has been fraught with shortages and supply problems. It’s gotten so bad that the EU has halted vaccine exports for six weeks.
Along with the increased numbers of positive test results come the dreaded — and inevitable — calls for lockdowns. Italy may as well declare a perpetual lockdown as the nation will be shuttered over the Easter holidays. Partial lockdowns in France and most other EU countries will make it a grim Easter in Europe for the second year in a row.
Germany, with Europe’s most modern healthcare system and a reputation for government organization, was actually on top of the pandemic — at first. But their well-oiled system of tracing and isolating outbreaks has fallen apart, and German numbers have been as bad as the rest of Europe’s.
Seeing an alarming spike in positive tests and hospitalizations, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for a total lockdown of the country from April 1-5. There was a problem with that announcement: even experts said that a total lockdown wasn’t necessary.
The political firestorm caused Merkel to beat a hasty retreat and apologize for her “mistake.”
“We must try to slow down the third wave of the pandemic. Nevertheless, it was a mistake,” Merkel said during a press conference, according to German news outlet Deutsche Welle. “At the end of the day, I carry the last responsibility.”
“It’s now important for me to say so here. A mistake should be called a mistake and above all, it should be corrected, preferably in good time,” she added, according to the news agency.
Critics of the move, which included health experts and business leaders, said the lockdown could cause more harm than good, particularly the plans to allow grocery stores and supermarkets to open for a limited amount of time over the holiday — a move likely to cause crowds to gather. Others questioned the lost working hours and wages the move would entail.
“It was well reasoned, but was not really doable in such a short time,” Merkel said Wednesday, reflecting on the original lockdown proposal. “Too many questions, from missing wages through to the loss of time in factories and facilities, could not be adequately answered in time.”
Health officials in Germany are concerned that this third wave of the pandemic may be the worst yet.
Speaking at a joint press conference with Health Minister Spahn, Wieler appealed for people to reduce their social contacts over the Easter holidays.
Although 10% of the German population has now received a first dose of the vaccine, the gains from vaccinations are being eaten away by the high infection rate, he said.
Spahn also cautioned that the current trajectory of infections could overwhelm Germany’s hospitals in the next few weeks.
“At the moment, the figures are rising too fast and the variants are making the situation especially dangerous,” he said. “If this continues unchecked, we run the risk of our health system could reach its breaking point in April.”
Germany had more than 21,500 new cases on Friday — 4,000 more cases than were reported daily last week. Since the country has barely emerged from the previous lockdowns, those numbers reflect the futility of locking down an entire nation for a year, making little progress in slowing the spread of the virus.
Merkel will get away with her “apology” in the media, but what do ordinary Germans think? Merkel’s popularity has plummeted during the last year as people get angrier and angrier at a government that seems powerless to do anything about the pandemic.
As chairman of the largest mosque community in Göttingen, Keskin was also a public speaker – whether at the anniversary of the synagogue building or at the New Year’s reception of the Catholic Church. Again and again he pleaded for peace and tolerance. Then in February he suddenly resigned. In the social networks on the internet, Keskin apparently showed a different face. The Lower Saxony regional association of the “Sozialistische Jugend – Die Falken” (Socialist Youth – The Falcons) accuses the former chairman of the German-Islamic Mosque Association (DITIB) Göttingen of, among other things, hate messages against Jews and Armenians. (…)
Shortly after the allegations became known, he admitted to the Catholic News Agency (KNA) that the posts were his. However, he claims that he does not have an anti-Semitic attitude. He never said that the Holocaust was a lie. The controversial posts were primarily directed against Israeli policy. And he would continue to criticise Israeli policy, Keskin told the Catholic News Agency (KNA). He wanted to take legal action against the accusations.
The Göttingen public prosecutor’s office is now investigating Keskin. He is accused of incitement of the people ” by means of anti-Semitic propaganda”, senior public prosecutor Andreas Buick said at the request of the broadcaster NDR.
The AfD has called on the federal government to take tough action against refugees entering Germany through Greece despite the fact that they already have protection status Greece. Reportedly, there are a thousand such cases every month.
“Germany must put an end to this asylum tourism from Greece immediately and prevent entries. It cannot keep occuring that the Greek authorities issue travel documents to asylum seekers who then can board the next plane to Germany, their chosen host country,” said Leif-Erik Holm, the AfD parliamentary group deputy leader in the Bundestag.
Holm had previously asked the federal government what steps it takes against the entry of asylum seekers already registered in Greece as the current rules governing asylum indicate that migrants should remain in the first safe country they enter. The Federal Ministry of the Interior largely gave real answer based on a request from the German newspaper Junge Freiheit. The matter is being discussed with representatives of the Greek government and authorities, stated the ministry.
Germany applies the rule “that those refugees affected generally have travel documents issued by Greece and are therefore fundamentally entitled to enter and stay in Germany for a short time,” emphasized the Interior Ministry.
At the same time, the federal government admitted that it had no information on the total number of asylum seekers who were already in Germany and who had already been granted international protection in another member state.
Holm also considers it unacceptable “that Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has been watching this going on for months that it must now be called deliberate.”
Holm added that the federal government openly admitting it has no idea whether asylum seekers in Germany have entered asylum proceedings in other countries “is a first-class scandal.”
Holm stated that while at the moment every German traveler has to face general suspicion from authorities, illegal migrants travel by plane every day into Germany. The AfD parliamentary deputy had already called last August not to treat German vacationers like Covid-19 threats.
As Die Welt reported at the beginning of March, around 1,000 people a month settle in the Federal Republic of Germany who has already been recognized as refugees in Greece, “without Germany doing anything effective against it.”
According to the daily, around 2,100 people applied for asylum at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees in January and February despite already receiving protection status in Greece. Holm had used this as a stepping stone for his inquiry. He concluded that the federal government is not doing anything effective against this type of immigration.
In addition to the asylum seekers who have been provided with travel documents by the Greek authorities, Germany accepts a large number of refugees from the Greek islands. The federal government had agreed to do this repeatedly, most recently after the fire in the Greek Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos last September. As an AfD survey recently revealed, Germany has already flown in 2,380 such migrants from Greece since January 2020.
Flyer of the Palestinian Community in Germany. Hajjaj was a speaker at this protest – Source: Screenshot PGD
On February the 26th, the “Expert Commission on Anti-Muslim Racism” set up by the State of Berlin began its work. The committee is to develop “recommendations for the further development of prevention work on anti-Muslim racism” by spring 2022, the responsible Senate Department for Justice, Consumer Protection and Anti-Discrimination of Senator Dirk Behrendt (Greens) announced at the time.
Two of the six members were sent by the Islam Forum of the Integration Commissioner: Lydia Nofal and Mohamad Hajjaj, the chairperson and managing director of the Islamic association Inssan.
Research published by the newspaper WELT shows that Inssan and the persons named have links to Islamist organisations, some of which have been or are being monitored by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Nevertheless, Inssan has been funded for years with large amounts of federal and state money. The Berlin-based association was founded in 2002. According to its own statements, its aim is “to promote the development of a German-language Islam”.
Nofal and Hajjaj are active in numerous committees and organisations. Both are members of the regional board of the Central Council of Muslims in Berlin, both are members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) working group of Muslim Social Democrats. Nofal was also appointed by the Berlin Senate Chancellery to the advisory board of the Institute for Islamic Theology at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
However, there were and are also activities in other associations. In 2014, Hajjaj was quoted in an interview with the internet portal web.de as the head of the capital city office of the Palestinian Community in Germany (PGD). Regarding this association, the Berlin Interior Administration informed in autumn 2014 that it was considered an organisation of supporters of the Islamist terror organisation Hamas. Hamas is represented in Germany by the PGD, according to the Hamburg report on the protection of the constitution from 2016.
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When asked, Hajjaj denied having been active with the Palestinian Community in Germany. “I am not and have not been associated with this association in any way,” he informed. The journalist of the text had misquoted his stance in a student group. WELT has an email from Hajjaj in which he authorised his statements from the interview to the journalist. It was written from an email address belonging to the PGD homepage.
The Turkish news agency Anadolu also quoted Hajjaj in January 2014 with a different spelling of his first name as belonging to the PGD, on the occasion of a demonstration against the siege of the Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk in Syria. The article was not about him personally, Hajjaj said. “I actually know the Muhammad Hajjaj mentioned there. However, I am Mohamad Hajjaj.”
When WELT subsequently confronted him with a photo of exactly this demonstration from January 2014, which was posted by the PGD on Facebook and in which Hajjaj can be seen, he informed them that the rally had not been organised by the PGD and that he had taken part as a spokesperson for a student group. WELT is in possession of a PGD flyer calling for the rally on the day in question.
When asked if Hajjaj was still vice-chairman of the Teiba Cultural Centre, he did not answer. A recent search of the register of associations at the Charlottenburg district court shows that Hajjaj still holds this position. In a handout as well as in the report of the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution from 2016, the Teiba Cultural Centre is mentioned under the items “Islamist mosque associations and aid organisations” and “Connections of Berlin associations to the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Community in Germany”, respectively.
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In September 2010, the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle interviewed an activist of the “German Initiative to Break the Gaza Blockade”, once referred to as Mohamed Hajjaj and once as Mohammed Hajja. When asked, Hajjaj stated that he had not participated in the initiative, but that it had been ” monitored via the media” by his student group. He did not answer the question whether he denied having given the interview to Deutsche Welle in 2010.
The Islamforum Berlin, which sent Hajjaj and Nofal to the “Expert Commission on Anti-Muslim Racism”, is responsible for the Integration Commissioner of the Berlin Senate. A spokeswoman said: “The decision to send experts to the expert commission on anti-Muslim racism was made by the Muslim representatives. She did not give any details on the content of the appointments. The justice administration, which is responsible for the entire commission, only referred to the integration commissioner.
“The importance of Inssan cannot be overlooked,” said Sigrid Herrmann-Marschall, an expert on Islamism. The association has built up a large network in recent years. “Lydia Nofal is the incorporated double strategy and acts as a mediator between the majority society and the Muslim Brotherhood’s network of campaigns,” Herrmann-Marschall continued.
Nofal did not respond to a request for an assessment of these allegations. It already distanced itself from the Muslim Brotherhood in 2007. “It is important to us that we remain independent of any ideology or movement,” Mohamad Hajjaj said about the accusations.
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Inssan itself has also been under observation by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. From 2007 to 2009, the association was listed in the Berlin report as being close to the Muslim Brotherhood. In April 2018, Berlin’s interior administration announced that individual Inssan members had “personal connections” to the Islamic Culture and Education Centre Berlin (IKEZ) – according to Berlin’s 2017 report on the protection of the constitution, a “Berlin meeting place of Hamas supporters”. Both the IKEZ and Inssan and the Teiba Cultural Centre belong to the Islamforum Berlin, which was founded in 2005 on the initiative of the then Berlin Integration Commissioner.
The association Inssan, which belongs to the umbrella organisation Zentralrat der Muslime (Central Council of Muslims), has received large amounts of state funding since 2010. For example, the Inssan project “Network against Discrimination and Islamophobia” received funding from the Berlin state programme “Democracy. Diversity. Respect” received a total of 589,922 euros from 2010 to 2020. Since 2013, the annual payments have been increasing. For 2021, the planned sum is 116,599 euros, a spokesperson for the responsible justice administration announced.
The Inssan project “Mentors for Refugees” was funded by the Senate Commissioner for Integration between 2016 and 2019 with a total of 220,770 euros. Since 2020, the Commissioner has been funding the Inssan project “Active Strengthening of Muslim Activists”, so far with a total of 164,540 euros.
In July 2019, the judicial administration announced that Inssan had made it clear that the association was “committed to the values and norms of the Basic Law and the free democratic basic order”. Between 2017 and 2019, federal funding also flowed: the Inssan project “Not without my faith!”, which according to the federal government was about “empowering young Muslim women and men to deal with experiences of discrimination when accessing the labour market”, was funded by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs with a total of 284,104 euros. In total, Inssan has been funded by the government to the tune of 1,375,935 euros.
Inssan is also a co-founder of the Claim Alliance against Islamophobia and Muslimophobia. Claim was funded by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs with a total of 727,984 euros from 2017 to 2019. In addition, Claim was granted a total of 959,998 euros in 2020 and 2021 as part of the Competence Network Islamophobia and Muslimophobia, also by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs. Thanks to Nina Mühe, Claim is also represented in the Independent Circle of Experts on Muslimophobia, which was established in September 2020 by Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer ( Christian Social Union, CSU).
Carsten Frerk, head of the research group Weltanschauungen in Deutschland, has been observing Inssan for a long time. “It is impressive how successful the association is with its lobbying and how it can keep expanding state funding,” he told WELT. “The state should take the issue of discrimination seriously. To do so, however, it should not approach lobbying associations of political Islam.” Inssan should not continue to appear with a state seal of approval, he said.
The latest publication by Inssan was released last week. The association presented the “2020 case figures on anti-Muslim racism in Berlin”. With 228 incidents, a “dangerous development” was documented. The reports are submitted to the association in writing or online via a reporting form. When asked how the reports are checked, project manager Zeynep Çetin said that those affected have to provide an email address. “The reports are validated by us.”
When asked, the network presented six examples of reports. These clearly show discriminatory incidents, but four of the cases refer to the ethnic origin of those affected, only two explicitly to religious affiliation.
Katharina Eggers from the Islamism Competence Centre of Aktion 3. Welt Saar criticised that the documentation did not meet scientific standards and was tendentious. In a press conference, Inssan explained that the slight decrease in the number of cases last year was due to the fact that the Corona pandemic limited the number of empowerment workshops that could be held. Many of those affected were not sufficiently educated to recognise discrimination as such.
Eggers criticises: “Potentially affected people are being turned into immature children who first have to be taught by pedagogical means when they should feel discriminated against. Inssan also equates emancipatory criticism of Islam “with the agitation of right-wing Muslim haters”.
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