The German metropolis of Hamburg has been considered a stronghold of Islamists for years. The Federal Ministry of the Interior initiated an investigation into the Islamic Center Hamburg in November 2023 after the security organs had proven enough evidence of the IZH’s extremist attitude for decades.
In today’s Germany one can find paradoxical situations that have different consequences for society. What happens in right-wing extremist incidents and what in Islamist ones? When representatives of the right-wing AfD listen to the ideas of a New Right thinker in Potsdam about deporting “unassimilated naturalized people,” or when hundreds of people gather in Hamburg-Billbrook to listen to the ideas of a well-known Salafist? Far fewer German citizens are likely to have heard about the second event than about the infamous Potsdam meeting, which the media constantly reported on.
What is happening in Hamburg is explosive – and a potential threat to internal security. Around 1,000 people gather at an event location, mostly by the Islamist group “Muslim Interaktiv”, a suspected front organization of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT), which is banned in Germany, for example with the title “The places of worship and the promise Allah”. According to the Hamburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution, their goal is to establish a caliphate in Germany. The speaker is Marcel Krass, a man whom the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution describes as a “fixed figure in the Salafist scene in Germany”.
While the text from the research network Correctiv about the Potsdam meeting of some right-wing and right-wing extremists quickly made waves, the Salafist meetings are hardly noticed. This reveals a political double standard when it comes to extremist phenomena. As a reminder: just one day after the article “Secret plan against the right” was published, the Chancellor spoke out. In a post on Platform Nancy Faeser wrote about the meeting in Potsdam: “This ethnic ideology is directed against the foundation of our democracy.” But both Social Democrats and other established politicians have so far remained silent about the Salafist event in Hamburg.
The Interior Minister in particular would be asked here. Faeser, who wants to “turn over every stone” when it comes to right-wing extremists, seems strangely lax on the subject of Islamism. To this day she is committed to dissolving the Political Islamism Expert Group. Instead, her ministry published a questionable study on the subject of anti-Muslim sentiment – which it recently had to meekly withdraw after losing a legal battle with the publicist Henryk M. Broder.
This is symptomatic of a government that seems to fail to recognize that Islamism is in no way inferior to the threat of right-wing extremism. In the Hamburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the “human potential” is assessed as high. The number of violent Islamists rose from 1,330 in 2021 to 1,450 in 2022. In the area of right-wing extremism, however, the same authority registered 130 violent people in 2022 and 120 in the year before. If you look at the Federal Prosecutor’s Office’s investigations in 2023, the impression is confirmed: Islamists are the greatest risk to internal security. “Islamists, Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists and Hizb ut-Tahrir are striving for a form of society that is absolutely incompatible with our democracy. There are no fundamental rights in such a caliphate,” confirmed a spokesman for the Hamburg State Office for the Protection of the Constitution. After the publications about the Potsdam meeting, “defensive democracy” was often invoked. Both in the German Bundestag and at the nationwide demonstrations against right-wing extremism, which the SPD also called for. However, it seems much less likely that the Social Democrats will call for protests against radical Islam.
All publishing rights and copyrights reserved to MENA Research Center.
