Tag: Germany

  • EU Report Says That Racism On the Rise in Germany

    EU Report Says That Racism On the Rise in Germany

    Wednesday, 29 August 2007

    By Leyla SURMELI (JTW)

    Frech2The European Union (EU) report says that racism is on the rise in Germany. The EU report on racism in Europe severely critised Germany. The criticism for Germany comes on several fronts, including violent crimes and discrimination against foreigners in the job and housing markets.

    Racism has recently become a hot issue in Germany after an apparently xenophobic attack on eight Indians (more…) in the eastern German town of M+-geln. The Germany Turks, biggest minorty group in the country, have also confronted serious racist attacks everyday.

    The EU report says that violent racism in Germany appears to be on the increase. According to the report the incidents of racist violence and crime in Germany increased by 14 percent between 2005 and 2006, going up from 15,914 incidents in 2005 to 18,142 in 2006.

    The “Report on Racism and Xenophobia in the Member States of the EU” also shows that crime with an extremist right-wing motive also in increase, going up from 15,361 incidents in 2005 to 17,597 incidents in 2006, a 14.6 percent increase.

    The incidence of anti-Semitic crime in Germany however remained fairly constant, with 1,662 incidents in 2006 compared to 1,682 in 2005.

    The “Report on Racism and Xenophobia in the Member States of the EU” was published Tuesday by the Vienna-based European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) — an agency which was created on Mar. 1, 2007 to replace the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia.

    Turkish Weekly

  • Turkish community warns of continued racism in Germany

    Turkish community warns of continued racism in Germany

    Sunday, 1 June 2008
    Frech1
    (IRNA) – Germany’s Turkish community warned of continued racism in the country, while marking the 15th anniversary of an anti-foreigner arson attack in the western city of Solingen which killed five Turkish women and girls, the press reported Thursday.

    There is still a high degree of xenophobia in Germany society which has to be combated through better education, stressed the Turkish community of Germany (TGD) and the Foundation of Turkish Studies (ZfT) in a statement.

    “Aggressive behaviour and prejudices are already being taught at the age of a child. Therefore, one must act pedagogically at an early stage,” ZfT director,Faruk Sen was quoted saying.

    There are 7.5 million foreigners living in Germany of which 2.5 million are Turks.

    A recent confidential government report revealed widespread xenophobia among millions of teenagers in Germany.

    Almost every German youth said there are too many foreigners living in Germany.

    Nearly every 9th grader has Islamophobic tendencies while every 13 teenager admits to having committed a right-wing motivated criminal act.

    Germany has been the scene of a series of vicious neo-Nazi attacks in recent months, especially against foreigners.

    German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has repeatedly warned of a growing far-right problem in his country, branding it a “steadily growing danger.”

    Schaeuble had voiced concern that the number of far-right crimes between 2005 and 2006 rose from 15,000 to 18,000 offenses, indicating a 9.3 percent increase.

    Meanwhile, the number of anti-foreigner attacks hovered at 511 in 2006, showing a 37 percent rise from the previous year.

    Political observers link the dramatic rise in the number of far-right crimes to the recent success of neo-Nazi parties in key regional elections in several east German states.

    Young neo-Nazis feel also more and more emboldened to commit hate crimes, knowing that police won’t charge them with an offense.

    Most of the suspects implicated in far-right crimes are juveniles.

    Hate crime experts and sociologists have repeatedly stressed that Germany’s political leadership lacked a clear and effective strategy to fight neo-Nazi and racist crimes.

    1 June 2008

    Turkish Weekly

  • Exposés:Highlights the organisational set-up, the secret locations and the people running the fascist party

    Exposés:Highlights the organisational set-up, the secret locations and the people running the fascist party

    Jim Dowson: How a militant anti-abortionist took over the BNP. Part I of a three part investigation.

    Through the keyhole

    A

    Today we start a serialisation from the current issue of Searchlight Magazine which features a special investigation into the heart of the BNP. We highlight the organisational set-up, the secret locations and the people running the fascist party. We expose how the running of the party has been outsourced to a rabid Loyalist anti-abortionist in Belfast and we reveal that this man is receiving European Union money for peace and reconciliation.

    We have also been busy working with the media. Many of the revelations and exposés we have read in the newspapers over the past few weeks have originated from Searchlight.

    Forty-seven years after Searchlight was first formed we are proving that we are still ahead of the game.

     

    From rags to riches

    By Gerry Gable

    Ten years ago Jim Dowson (pictured) was a down-at-heel anti-abortion campaigner and hardline Protestant, who had marched with a loyalist band that played songs in praise of the convicted loyalist murderer Michael Stone (pictured below).

    B

    His luck changed when he formed an alliance with Justin Barrett, a far-right Catholic lawyer and leader of the notorious Irish anti-abortion group Youth Defence, which had previously stormed buildings in Dublin in their crusade against a woman’s right to choose. In 2000 Barrett had attended a rally of the German nazi National Democratic Party, where he met Roberto Fiore, the Italian fascist friend and mentor of Nick Griffin, the BNP leader. The trip was arranged by Derek Holland, one of Griffin’s old colleagues from the days of the National Front Political Soldiers.

    Barrett attracted attention as the lead spokesperson of the successful Irish campaign against the Nice Treaty in 2001 and money started to flow from far-right anti-abortionists in the United States.

    In 1999 Dowson had formed Precious Life Scotland and it was through cooperation between his group and Youth Defence that he met Barrett. The link proved beneficial when Barrett pitched £50,000 into Dowson’s organisation to pay for the production of anti-abortion CDs and video tapes to be distributed to schools and churches in Northern Ireland and Scotland.

    Dowson was a “rent-a-cause” extremist who had been kicked out of the Orange Order. He has a list of criminal convictions including breach of the peace in 1986, possession of a weapon and breach of the peace in 1991 and criminal damage in 1992. Although a Protestant, he was happy to sell thousands of photographs of the Pope at inflated prices to Catholics in the Irish Republic.

    Barrett faded from the public arena after the Nice Treaty vote was rerun and went the other way. His political demise was hastened after the publication of his book The National Way Forward, in which he described immigration as “genocidal”. He also became increasingly antisemitic, influenced by the nazi leaders he had met in Germany.

    In contrast, Dowson’s campaigning activities grew. He turned his sights on gay people and encouraged his followers to abuse and threaten people who attended or worked in abortion clinics.

    This resulted in Dowson parting company with some of his Precious Life fellow activists, but he was now in a financial position to go it alone, turning his faction into the UK LifeLeague. He never looked back.

    Dowson, 45, started working with the British National Party late in 2007, and he quickly revolutionised its fundraising. His first appeal, launched at the time the BNP was tearing itself apart in an internal rebellion, was carried out as a free sample to show the party what he could do, but since then he has worked on a percentage commission.

    His work for the BNP grew to encompass the provision of manage-ment training in Spain and revamping the party’s administration. Early in 2009 he set up the Belfast call centre, piggybacking it on his successful fundraising for the LifeLeague, thereby cutting costs and perhaps giving doubtful BNP officers the impression of a larger operation than it actually is.

    Over the past two years he has clearly raised huge sums for the party, although it remains financially strapped. Partly this is the result of scams, such as the truth truck, which Griffin claimed had been bought with thousands of pounds of supporters’ donations. It turned out still to belong to Dowson’s private company, Adlorries.com, and, like much of the other equipment the BNP claimed to have bought, it was only leased by the party.

    Today Dowson practically owns the BNP, which he briefly joined to placate his critics but left as soon as the heat was off him. He remains at loggerheads with many senior party officers and employees. One, whom he sacked in spring, is heading for an employment tribunal.

    B1

    Griffin’s claim that the BNP is being flooded with donations via Dowson’s call centre is a lie. Income is down to a trickle and membership is a mere 8,000 or so. People are not queuing up to join after the end of the three-month moratorium on membership, they are leaving in droves, especially since the latest membership list leak from Dowson’s Belfast bunker.

    All this comes on top of the party’s forced climbdown over its racist constitution, the non-appearance of its 2008 accounts and concern over the number of senior party officers who have been put on the European Parliament payroll as staff of the two BNP MEPs.

     

    Hope Not Hate

  • ‘Iran is our friend,’ says Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan

    ‘Iran is our friend,’ says Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan

    • We have no difficulty with Ahmadinejad – Erdogan
    • Warning to Europe not to ignore Turkey’s strengths

    A13With its stunning vistas and former Ottoman palaces, the banks of the Bosphorus – the strategic waterway that cuts Istanbul in half and divides Europe from Asia – may be the perfect place to distinguish friend from foe and establish where your country’s interests lie.

    And sitting in his grandiose headquarters beside the strait, long the symbol of Turkey‘s supposed role as bridge between east and west, Recep Tayyip Erdogan had little doubt about who was a friend and who wasn’t.

    Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran‘s radical president whose fiery rhetoric has made him a bête noire of the west? “There is no doubt he is our friend,” said Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister for the last six years. “As a friend so far we have very good relations and have had no difficulty at all.”

    What about Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, who has led European opposition to Turkey’s bid to join the EU and, coincidentally, adopted a belligerent tone towards Iran’s nuclear programme? Not a friend?

    “Among leaders in Europe there are those who have prejudices against Turkey, like France and Germany. Previously under Mr Chirac, we had excellent relations [with France] and he was very positive towards Turkey. But during the time of Mr Sarkozy, this is not the case. It is an unfair attitude. The European Union is violating its own rules.

    “Being in the European Union we would be building bridges between the 1.5bn people of Muslim world to the non-Muslim world. They have to see this. If they ignore it, it brings weakness to the EU.”

    Friendly towards a religious theocratic Iran, covetous and increasingly resentful of a secular but maddeningly dismissive Europe: it seems the perfect summary of Turkey’s east-west dichotomy.

    Erdogan’s partiality towards Ahmadinejad may surprise some in the west who see Turkey as a western-oriented democracy firmly grounded inside Nato. It has been a member of the alliance since 1952. It will be less surprising to Erdogan’s secular domestic critics, who believe the prime minister’s heart lies in the east and have long suspected his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development party (AKP) government of plotting to transform Turkey into a religious state resembling Iran.

    Erdogan vigorously denies the latter charge, but to his critics he and Ahmadinejad are birds of a feather: devout religious conservatives from humble backgrounds who court popular support by talking the language of the street. After Ahmadinejad’s disputed presidential election in June, Erdogan and his ally, the Turkish president, Abdullah Gul, were among the first foreign leaders to make congratulatory phone calls, ignoring the mass demonstrations and concerns of western leaders over the result’s legitimacy.

    Talking to the Guardian, Erdogan called the move a “necessity of bilateral relations”. “Mr Ahmadinejad was declared to be the winner, not officially, but with a large vote difference, and since he is someone we have met before, we called to congratulate him,” he said.

    “Later it was officially declared that he was elected, he got a vote of confidence and we pay special attention to something like this. It is a basic principle of our foreign policy.”

    The gesture will be remembered when Erdogan arrives in Tehran this week for talks with Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, that will focus on commercial ties, including Turkey’s need for Iranian natural gas. Ahmadinejad has voiced his admiration for Erdogan, praising Turkey’s recent decision to ban Israel from a planned Nato manoeuvre in protest at last winter’s bombardment of Gaza.

    Since the election, Iran has witnessed a fierce crackdown on opposition figures that has resulted in activists, students and journalists being imprisoned and publicly tried. Detainees have died in prison, and there have been allegations of torture and rape. Some of those alleging mistreatment have sought refuge in Turkey.

    But Erdogan said he would not raise the post-election crackdown with his hosts, saying it would represent “interference” in Iranian domestic affairs.

    He poured cold water on western accusations that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon, saying: “Iran does not accept it is building a weapon. They are working on nuclear power for the purposes of energy only.”

    Erdogan has overseen a dramatic improvement in the previously frigid relations between Turkey and Iran, which was viewed with suspicion by the pro-secularist high command of the powerful Turkish military. Trade between the two countries last year was worth an estimated £5.5bn as Iran has developed into a major market for Turkish exports.

    Erdogan’s views will interest US foreign policy makers, who have long seen his AKP government as a model of a pro-western “moderate Islam” that could be adopted in other Muslim countries. They will also find an audience with President Barack Obama, who signalled Turkey’s strategic importance in a visit last April and has invited the prime minister to visit Washington. They are unlikely to impress Israel, which has warned that Erdogan’s criticisms risk harming Turkey’s relations with the US.

    Erdogan dismissed the notion, saying: “I don’t think there is any possibility of that. America’s policy in this region is not dictated by Israel.”

    He insisted that the Turkey-Israel strategic alliance – which some AKP insiders have said privately is over – remains alive but chided the Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who he said had threatened to use nuclear weapons against Gaza.

    The Guardian

  • Turkey to ‘never give up’ EU bid

    Turkey to ‘never give up’ EU bid

    tTurkey has urged France and Germany to back its bid to join the EU, rejecting calls for a special partnership rather than full membership.

    “We will never give up,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters in Brussels.

    Turkey’s EU accession talks are going at a glacial pace and risk suspension if Ankara fails to open its ports and airports to Cyprus this year.

    France and Germany want to give Turkey a “privileged partnership” with the EU.

    But Mr Erdogan insisted “our goal is full membership”.

    He also said it was “populist and wrong” to use Turkey’s bid as an election issue.

    Some right-wing parties opposed to Turkey’s bid made gains in the recent European Parliament elections.

    Slow progress

    The BBC’s Oana Lungescu says both opposition inside the EU and insufficient democratic reforms in Turkey are hampering its bid.

    Next week will see a small step forward, when Turkey is due to start talks on taxation, one of the 35 areas where it is negotiating EU entry terms.

    Turkish diplomats argue that their country is of strategic importance to Europe and that its eventual accession would send a positive signal to the whole Muslim world.

    So far, Turkey has opened talks on 10 out of the 35 “negotiation chapters” in the accession process, which started in October 2005.

    But eight chapters have been frozen because of Ankara’s refusal to open up its ports and airports to traffic from Cyprus, an EU member.

    Turkey says it will not do this until the EU takes steps to end the Turkish Cypriot community’s economic isolation.

    BBC