Tom Heneghan: German row over Islam a distraction from bigger issue

The escalating row, sparked off when a Bundesbank board member slammed Muslims as dim-witted welfare spongers, has mixed some social problems and some Muslim customs into a vision of Islam as a looming menace to German society.

When president Christian Wulff tried to build bridges by saying Islam was now part of German society, critics retorted the country was based on "Judeo-Christian values" and should not accept any more immigrants from foreign cultures. Amid the uproar, many politicians and media have lumped together about four million residents - Turks, Arabs, Afghans, converts and others, many with German citizenship - simply as Muslims and tarred them all with problems many do not have.

The debate crackles with harsh terms like "Germanophobia" and "integration refusers" which signal growing frustration with the difficulty Germany has had with people it allowed into the country but did not welcome into the society.

"The discourse about Muslims in Germany is taking on hysterical forms," wrote Andreas Petzold, editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine Stern. "It's very off-putting to watch this cascade of debates that, in the end, all focus on Islam."

The criticism comes mainly from the ruling Christian Democratic (CDU) and Free Democratic parties, whose ratings have slumped so badly this year because of economic problems that their opponents accuse them of using Islam as a scapegoat.

Polls by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation last week, which is close to the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD), showed 58 per cent of those surveyed said Muslims' rights to practice their religion in Germany should be considerably limited.

The group agreeing with the statement "I don't like Arabs" rose from 44 per cent in a 2003 poll to 55 per cent this year.

The study said opinions once limited to neo-Nazism were spreading across German society. "A high level of right-wing extremist views can be found (in] different groups of the population," it said.

The current debate flared up in August when then-Bundesbank council member Thilo Sarrazin published a book portraying Muslims as a lumpenproletariat due to outbreed native Germans.

He resigned under pressure from the bank, but polls showed many Germans supported him.The bright red cover of his polemic Germany Abolishes Itself stands out like a warning signal on bestseller tables at bookshops around the country.

Mr Wulff acknowledged a demographic fact in his 3 October German Unity Day address when he said Islam was now part of Germany because of all the Muslims living here, but several politicians have since rushed to deny this.

Horst Seehofer, head of the Christian Social Union (CSU) in heavily Catholic Bavaria, called for an end to immigration from "foreign cultures" and insisted German society was based on "Judeo-Christian values" that Islam did not share.

Noting reports of some immigrant youths bullying German pupils in school, family affairs Minister Kristina Schroeder warned about a rising "Germanophobia", a jarring new term meant to describe a kind of Muslim reverse racism against Germans.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has ratcheted up her own comments, declaring sharia could not replace German law - an issue almost nobody was debating - and Germany's attempt to create a multicultural society had "utterly failed".

Germany never really tried to be a multicultural society and long denied it was a country of immigration, while newcomers and German-born residents with a so-called "migrant background" grew to one fifth of the population.

"Muslims have come to symbolise all immigrants, but not all Muslims are migrants and not even half of all immigrants to Germany are Muslims," Islam expert Riem Spielhaus said.

The real problems are broader than the Islam issue. Strained by reunification and economic crisis, the once cosy West German welfare state is being rolled back. Germans and immigrants alike now face an increasingly harsh and competitive society.