What’s behind Germany’s raging Islamophobia?

On September 16, Germany started extending temporary controls along all its borders, to the chagrin of its European Union neighbours. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser clarified that the move is meant to not only curb “irregular” migration, but also to stop what she called “Islamist terrorism and serious crime”.

The announcement came in the aftermath of a deadly knife attack that killed three people in Solingen, western Germany; the attacker, a Syrian refugee who had been denied asylum status and was supposed to be deported, was accused of belonging to the ISIL (ISIS) group.

Some may be surprised that such a draconian measure has been imposed by the liberal-left coalition made up of the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Liberals. But the reality is there is a shift to the right across the German political spectrum accompanied by raging Islamophobia.

Analysts have pointed to the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a driver of the rightward shift. Indeed, the party has been making significant gains at the national and state levels. At the start of the month, it won the elections in the eastern state of Thuringia with 32.8 percent. In the eastern state of Saxony, it came second with 30.6 percent, just 1.3 percentage points behind the centre-right Christian Democrats.

But the electoral successes of the AfD are not a driver; they are a symptom of a general tendency in German politics to normalise and engage in the demonisation and scapegoating of Muslims.

Members of the ruling coalition have repeatedly denounced “Islamism” in Germany. The leader of the Green Party in the Bundestag, Katharina Dröge, went as far as claiming in a recent statement that “the poison of Islam reaches people’s minds also here, not just abroad”; later correcting herself that she meant “Islamism” instead of “Islam.”

Words of warning about an “Islamist threat” are not just in the mouths of German politicians, they are also all over official documents and policy declarations of German institutions. For example, the website of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a key domestic intelligence agency, warns: “Islamists aim to completely or partially abolish the free democratic basic order of the Federal Republic of Germany by invoking their religion”.

The Bavarian branch of this federal office has gone even further and introduced on its website the notion of “legalist Islamism”, which it defines as a way to pursue “extremist goals by political means within the existing legal system”. It clarifies: “Legalist Islamists attempt to influence politics and society through lobbying [and] present themselves as open, tolerant and open to dialogue to the outside world, while anti-democratic and totalitarian tendencies persist within the organisations.”

Essentially, this concept can criminalise any group of Muslims who organise politically or socially and conduct their activities within the bounds of the law. It marks any expression of tolerance or openness by Muslims as suspect because it can be a “legalist Islamist pretence”.

Using these concepts as a framework, various institutions at the state and federal levels have created “de-radicalisation” programmes that have targeted only Muslims. While such initiatives have been criticised and opposed in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States by many social justice workers, in Germany, on the whole, they are perceived as well-justified and effective.

One such programme, the Bavarian Network for Prevention and Deradicalisation, recently produced a video about “Salafi radicalisation” featuring racist tropes about Muslim men exploiting Muslim women.

Earlier this month, the video was posted on social media by the Bavarian state government – currently controlled by the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) – and immediately sparked criticism of its hateful representation of Muslims.

The decision to publish made clear that the German authorities perceive the outwardly observing Muslims as a security risk and a danger to German society.

The clip was eventually taken down and the Interior Ministry issued a statement to the media, apologising for the “irritation and misunderstandings” and claiming the video attempted “to show the approach of Salafists and other Islamists to garner new, young followers”. It further said that some scenes of the video would be “revised”.

What probably hastened the Bavarian government’s decision to remove the video was the reaction of some commentators who saw parallels between its imagery and that of anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda. In particular, the scene of a bearded man with evil-looking features devouring a woman looks very close to Nazi representations of a Jewish man devouring ethnic Germans.

The anti-Semitic tint of Islamophobic imagery produced by German institutions is hardly surprising. As Israeli-German philosopher Moshe Zuckermann has written, Islamophobia is the projection of an unutterable anti-Semitism.

The sentiments reflected in Germany’s old anti-Semitism cannot be publicly expressed anymore due to the state’s official embrace of philo-Semitism. That is why they are channelled through Islamophobia. What cannot be done to the Jew anymore, can easily be done to the Muslim.

The historical parallel here is hard to miss: far-right forces are rising, as a racist hysteria targeting one racialised group of people spreads through the German state and society. History may not repeat itself fully. Mass extermination may be replaced by mass expulsion as the far-right concept of “remigration” is quickly gaining ground; it has long left the far-right fringe to become increasingly more mainstream.

As German politicians of various stripes and colours jump on the bandwagon of Islamophobia, they may do well to remember that their predecessors doing exactly the same almost a century ago did not end well for them. Hate is never a “winning” strategy.