German Has Higher Islamophobe Incidents Than Spain

Berlin, MINA – According to reports, there were 950 attacks reportedly on Muslims and mosques in Germany in 2017. The number is higher rather than Spain who experienced more than 500 incidents in the same year.

According to Al Jazeera, last January, German police began registering Islamophobic crimes under a special category, after calls by the country’s Muslim community to take more serious measures against the growing number of anti-Muslim hate crimes.

In most of the incidents, the perpetrators were part of Germany’s far right, according to the ministry. The case has similarity with Spain.

In Germany, at least 33 Muslims were injured in the attacks, which included assaults against Muslim women wearing headscarves and attacks against mosques and other Muslim institutions, the Interior Ministry said in its reply to a parliamentary question.

The ministry recorded at least 60 attacks last year that targeted mosques and other institutions of the Muslim community.

Anti-immigration protests took place in the German town of Kandel on Saturday, with some protesters carrying placards that read “Freedom instead of Islam.”

Germany, a country of 81.8 million people, has the second-largest Muslim population in Western Europe after France.

Among the country’s nearly 4.7 million Muslims, three million are of Turkish origin. Many of them are second or third-generations of Turkish families who migrated to Germany in the 1960s.

The EU’s largest economy has witnessed growing Islamophobia and hatred of migrants in recent years triggered by propaganda from far-right and populist parties, which have exploited fears over the refugee crisis.(T/RE1/P2)

Miraj News Agency (MINA)