The future German skyline?
First, let's check Germany's birth rates...
Population growth rate: -0.12% (2007 est.)
Birth rate: 8.3 births/1,000 population (2007 est.)
hmmm... whose fault is this?
Not in My Backyard, Say an Increasing Number of Germans
By Jochen Bölsche
The planned construction of over 180 mosques [woah, mama!] in Germany is mobilizing right-wing xenophobes but also an increasing number of leftist critics [right, label them... because Moslems will only kill right wing xenophobes...]. They fear the Muslim places of worship will facilitate the establishment of a completely parallel society.
The issue at hand wasn't the construction of a missile base or a new nuclear power plant. Yet the media reported "turmoil" and an "enraged" audience in a school auditorium in Ehrenfeld, a district of the German city of Cologne. The mood was almost comparable to that of the protest gatherings once held against nuclear missiles or reactors.
Instead the outrage was directed at a huge mosque planned for the area. Still, the words used by the project's opponents called to mind the protests of earlier times. "The minarets even look like missiles," railed one woman [interesting observation...]. A man said the mosque's dome reminded him "of a nuclear plant."
Ill will over mosques like the one being built in Cologne is spreading rapidly throughout Germany, often to the surprise of local politicians. For a long time the establishment of Muslim prayer rooms provoked little protest, housed as they were mostly in residential buildings, shops and back courtyards. Recently, though, there has been an increasing number of acts of protest, some violent. Molotov cocktails were thrown through mosque windows in the Bavarian town of Lauingen; Christians set protest crosses inscribed with "Terra christiana est," or this is Christian land [uh, not any more, fella; you actually have to practice it...], on the grounds of a mosque in Hanover; and construction trailers went up in flames in the Berlin district of Pankow.
The anti-Islam protest movement has also begun to spill over into city politics. In Cologne, for example, the extreme right anti-mosque initiative Pro Cologne captured five local government seats in recent elections. Now the group is aspiring to enter the national scene as Pro Germany, together with other like-minded organizations, some from the far-right fringe [again...]. Their approach follows the example of populist Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, whose anti-immigration party garnered a surprising degree of support before he was murdered in 2002.
In Germany there is also a market for these "single-issue parties," suggests trend researcher Adjiedj Bakas, who himself emigrated from Surinam to the Netherlands. In the populous Ruhr Valley region of western Germany the Voter Initiative Recklinghausen (whose acronym "WIR" is the German word for "we") has found resonance with its message. The group claims it is fighting against "creeping Islamization," and is allied in the local government with the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), one of Germany's major political parties. WIR members say they aren't alone in their opposition to Islam and their concern "that in 20 years in Recklinghausen, as in all large German cities, the majority of the residents under the age of 40 will be Muslims." "Discomfort is already spreading in some parts of the city," says Georg Schliehe, a WIR representative on the local city council, "but policy, public authorities and scholars downplay the problem." [you gotta love how secular liberals hate Christianity so much that they will even legislate themselves into the harsh submission of Islam rather than give up their 'freedoms' from conservative morals... ironically, Islam is more oppressive. Strange.]
Read the whole thing here.
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