View on "integration" from the mainland.

[von-Scharnhorst]

German schools are increasingly grappling with cases of Muslim girls pushing for exemption from co-ed swimming and sports on religious grounds, sorely testing the country's ability to integrate its Muslim population.


With her flawless German, good grades and ambition to study towards a career, Ayse Yilmaz seems a model of Muslim integration at her Berlin high school.
She considers herself part of a growing group of young, educated Muslims who have "a modern understanding of Islam," as the 18-year-old student of Turkish-Kurdish origin puts it. But Yilmaz --whose name has been changed here to protect her anonymit -- has angered school authorities by refusing to take off her headscarf during sports class and going on school trips with her classmates.
“I felt uncomfortable about the alcohol, partying and fooling around that takes place there,” said Yilmaz of the trips. As for her headscarf, Yilmaz says, "There is no question of me taking it off just for sports or something. It's just part of me."
Yilmaz’s arguments are becoming familiar ones to school authorities across Germany, as Muslim students and their parents clash with schools over whether the tenants of their faith should be allowed to bend the rules of Germany's secular school system. Though no reliable statistics are available, school authorities across the country say that an increasing number of Muslim parents are demanding exemptions for their daughters on religious grounds from co-ed swimming, sports and biology classes.
Thwarting integration efforts?
The issue has turned into a potent flashpoint in German schools struggling with Muslim integration.
“It’s a difficult situation,” said Marion Berning, director of the Rixdorfer primary school, one of the largest in Berlin’s Neukölln district, where girls with headscarves are a common sight. “We have Muslim girls who say they don’t want to swim with the boys. It’s obvious the parents exert pressure on them, but they (the parents) have to accept that co-education is part of German schools."
At another school in Berlin's dominated Kreuzberg district, principal Annette Spieler worries Muslim girls exempted from biology class are missing out on lessons vital to teenagers.
"When it comes to sex education, it’s shocking how little the Muslim students know about the topic. It’s absolutely taboo in their homes,” she said.
Resurgent Muslim identity
In the absence of a common law governing the issue, some schools have attempted to appease Muslim parents by offering gender-segregated biology and swimming classes, discussing the issue with them in parent-teacher meetings or allowing Muslim girls to wear loose-fitting clothing during sports.
But that hasn’t stopped some Muslim parents from appealing to the courts to enforce their religious rights.
In 1993, a landmark ruling by Germany’s Federal Administrative Court allowed a 13-year-old Turkish girl to be exempted from co-ed sport lessons if the school failed to proved gender-segregated sports class. The girl’s father argued that his daughter would face a moral conflict if she was forced to do sports with boys in tight-fitting clothes.
In another instance, a court in Münster in 2002 exempted a Muslim girl in the 10th grade from a class trip after her parents argued their faith forbade their daughter to stay overnight outside of the house without the company of a male relative.
The court cases point to what Islam experts say is the growing need within the Muslim community to assert themselves in Western society.
“The message is ‘we’re here, we’re proud, we’re going to live our religion and not going to hide ourselves anymore’,” said Riem Spielhaus, an Islamic studies lecturer at Berlin’s Humboldt University.
But teachers and experts say such court rulings run the risk of subverting German school law, which clearly states that sports and swimming is mandatory for all children. In addition, making exceptions for Muslim students amounts to giving preferential treatment to one religion and could lead to their isolation, said Turgut Hüner.
The chairman of the Turkish Parents Organization in Berlin-Brandenburg believes the trend among Muslim parents to exempt their children from class has been fueled by the introduction of Islamic religious classes in German schools.
While learning their own language and religion is vital to second-generation Muslims living in the country, Hüner warned that it’s important to know just what is being taught under the guise of religious instruction.
He criticized Berlin school authorities for allowing organizations such as the strongly-conservative Islamic Federation, which is on German law enforcement's watch list, to impart Islamic instruction in 28 schools in the German capital.
“It’s a slippery slope," said Hüner. "That’s when some parents get old-fashioned ideas into their hands and decide not to send their daughters to biology or swimming class."
Living in a Muslim virtual world
Indeed, the Islamic Federation ran into trouble recently with the Berlin education ministry for allegedly handing out application forms printed from the Internet to Muslim parents to get their daughters exempted from co-educative classes.
A look at the virtual world shows just how easy that is. A Web site called Muslim-Markt.de run by two Muslim brothers offers Muslims links and information to Muslim doctors, lawyers, hairdressers, companies and so on.
The site "Muslimrecht," based in Hamburg, offers detailed moral and legal guidelines to Muslim parents wanting to free their daughters from co-ed sports and swimming lessons. “If you don’t stand up for your rights, it won’t just become a disadvantage to you, but will also lead to a restriction of rights for the coming generation of students,” it warns its readers.
Headscarf equals "problem child"?
While the debate simmers, some experts say it also reflects German teachers’ poor understanding of the delicate integration process underway.
“Many have no idea how difficult it can be for a Muslim girl caught between her traditional parents and a more permissive western society where she’s growing up,” said Spielhaus.
Yilmaz knows that only too well.
“As a Muslim girl with a headscarf you’re immediately labeled ‘dumb’," she said. "I have to work extra hard at school to earn the recognition of my teachers so that they don’t think I’m a problem child."

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1152539,00.html

[kieronantony]

Why are they trying to create problems, it's not hard to take off a bloody scarf, what is wrong with these people, they are always complaining that we as westerners are troublesome to their way of life in one form or another, maybe they should see how we see it, or maybe they know how we see it and are just trying to piss us off.

[von-Scharnhorst]

The reason being;

'The day is coming when British Muslims form a state within a state'
By Alasdair Palmer
(Filed: 19/02/2006)
For the past two weeks, Patrick Sookhdeo has been canvassing the opinions of Muslim clerics in Britain on the row over the cartoons featuring images of Mohammed that were first published in Denmark and then reprinted in several other European countries.
"They think they have won the debate," he says with a sigh. "They believe that the British Government has capitulated to them, because it feared the consequences if it did not.

"The cartoons, you see, have not been published in this country, and the Government has been very critical of those countries in which they were published. To many of the Islamic clerics, that's a clear victory.

"It's confirmation of what they believe to be a familiar pattern: if spokesmen for British Muslims threaten what they call 'adverse consequences' - violence to the rest of us - then the British Government will cave in. I think it is a very dangerous precedent."

Dr Sookhdeo adds that he believes that "in a decade, you will see parts of English cities which are controlled by Muslim clerics and which follow, not the common law, but aspects of Muslim sharia law.
"It is already starting to happen - and unless the Government changes the way it treats the so-called leaders of the Islamic community, it will continue."

Dr Sookhdeo continued to study Islam, doing a PhD at London University on the religion. He is currently director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity. He also advises the Army on security issues related to Islam.

"The Government, and Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, are fundamentally deluded about the nature of Islam," he insists. "Tony Blair unintentionally revealed his ignorance when he said, in an effort to conciliate Muslims, that he had 'read through the Koran twice' and that he kept it by his bedside.
"He thought he was saying something which showed how seriously he took Islam. But most Muslims thought it was a joke, if not an insult. Because, of course, every Muslim knows that you cannot read the Koran through from cover to cover and understand it.

The chapters are not written to be read in that way. Indeed, after the first chapter, the chapters of the Koran are ordered according to their length, not according to their content or chronology: the longest chapters are first, the shorter ones are at the end.
"You need to know which passage was revealed at what period and in what time in order to be able to understand it - you cannot simply read it from beginning to end and expect to learn anything at all."

The Prime Minister's ignorance of Islam, Dr Sookhdeo contends, is of a piece with his unsuccessful attempts to conciliate it. And it does indeed seem as if the Government's policy towards radical Islam is based on the hope that if it makes concessions to its leaders, they will reciprocate and relations between fundamentalist Muslims and Tony Blair's Government will then turn into something resembling an ecumenical prayer meeting.

Dr Sookhdeo nods in vigorous agreement with that. "Yes - and it is a very big mistake. Look at what happened in the 1990s. The security services knew about Abu Hamza and the preachers like him. They knew that London was becoming the centre for Islamic terrorists. The police knew. The Government knew. Yet nothing was done.

"The whole approach towards Muslim militants was based on appeasement. 7/7 proved that that approach does not work - yet it is still being followed.

For example, there is a book, The Noble Koran: a New Rendering of its Meaning in English, which is openly available in Muslim bookshops.
"It calls for the killing of Jews and Christians, and it sets out a strategy for killing the infidels and for warfare against them. The Government has done nothing whatever to interfere with the sale of that book.

"Why not? Government ministers have promised to punish religious hatred, to criminalise the glorification of terrorism, yet they do nothing about this book, which blatantly does both."

Perhaps the explanation is just that they do not take it seriously. "I fear that is exactly the problem," says Dr Sookhdeo. "The trouble is that Tony Blair and other ministers see Islam through the prism of their own secular outlook.

They simply do not realise how seriously Muslims take their religion. Islamic clerics regard themselves as locked in mortal combat with secularism.
"For example, one of the fundamental notions of a secular society is the moral importance of freedom, of individual choice. But in Islam, choice is not allowable: there cannot be free choice about whether to choose or reject any of the fundamental aspects of the religion, because they are all divinely ordained. God has laid down the law, and man must obey.

'Islamic clerics do not believe in a society in which Islam is one religion among others in a society ruled by basically non-religious laws. They believe it must be the dominant religion - and it is their aim to achieve this.

"That is why they do not believe in integration. In 1980, the Islamic Council of Europe laid out their strategy for the future - and the fundamental rule was never dilute your presence. That is to say, do not integrate.
"Rather, concentrate Muslim presence in a particular area until you are a majority in that area, so that the institutions of the local community come to reflect Islamic structures. The education system will be Islamic, the shops will serve only halal food, there will be no advertisements showing naked or semi-naked women, and so on."

That plan, says Dr Sookhdeo, is being followed in Britain. "That is why you are seeing areas which are now almost totally Muslim. The next step will be pushing the Government to recognise sharia law for Muslim communities - which will be backed up by the claim that it is "racist" or "Islamophobic" or "violating the rights of Muslims" to deny them sharia law.

"There's already a Sharia Law Council for the UK. The Government has already started making concessions: it has changed the law so that there are sharia-compliant mortgages and sharia pensions.

"Some Muslims are now pressing to be allowed four wives: they say it is part of their religion. They claim that not being allowed four wives is a denial of their religious liberty. There are Muslim men in Britain who marry and divorce three women, then marry a fourth time - and stay married, in sharia law, to all four.

"The more fundamentalist clerics think that it is only a matter of time before they will persuade the Government to concede on the issue of sharia law. Given the Government's record of capitulating, you can see why they believe that."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/19/nsharia219.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/02/19/ixnewstop.html


An EVERY capitulation, NO MATTER HOW SMALL, is part of that "master plan".

They do not see "allowing" teachers to wear binbags, as a favour, or an effort to be accepting. Rather a sign of weakness, to be jumped on like rats killing the old and weak in the pack.

[kieronantony]

Soon the British people will have had enough, soon the BNP will be in government and soon muslims will not have the ordacity to ask for such things, they will be made to obey British laws, respect British customs, and not even dare challenge our traditions, and if they do they shall be deported.