|
Bavarian Mega-Mosque: Threat to Pork Eating Beer Guzzlers
MUNICH: Helga Schandl says she has nothing against Muslims. For three decades, she worked in Munich's wholesale food market, where many of her colleagues were immigrants from Turkey. "I have experienced integration first hand," she said.They were faking it; Muslims want Shariah, not Schnitzel. Yet Schandl, a 67-year-old Bavarian, is leading a fierce campaign to halt plans to build a mosque in a working- class district here. "It is a provocation," she said of the mosque, which would sit across a graceful square from her Roman Catholic church - its minarets an exotic counterpoint to the church's neo-baroque steeples. "The mosque doesn't have anything to do with religion," she said. "It is a power play." In the many ways that Christians and Muslims rub up against each other in this country, the construction of mosques has become one of the most contentious. Symbols of a foreign faith, rising in the middle of German cities, they are stoking anti-foreign sentiment and reinforcing fears that Christianity is under threat. Why, Schandl asked, do the Turks want to build their mosque right here, on a site opposite St. Korbinian? Like churches everywhere in Germany, it is struggling to survive in a secular society. A few empty churches are being converted into banks or restaurants. Why? Because the Big Mosques will become mini-Reichstags. Then they take Berlin. For Onder Yildiz, a soft-spoken but intense leader of the Turkish community, the answer is simple: "A mosque next to a church helps intensify dialogue between the religions," he said. Yah, c'mon over for some pork ribs and Shine. On one level, Yildiz is right: St. Korbinian, and the mayor of Munich, Christian Ude, have welcomed the mosque, which would be the third, and most prominent, in Munich, the heartland of German Catholicism. But a vocal minority of residents has resisted, holding protest meetings, collecting signatures, and filing a petition with the Bavarian Parliament. "Bavarian life," the petition declares, "is marked by the drinking of beer and the eating of pork. In Muslim faith, both are unclean and forbidden." Already American Muslims have attempted to interfere with Campus drinking. The West is Dar-Harb (House of War) to the slaves of allah. With the support of Bavaria's conservative state government, the residents have been able to tie up the project in court. Mosques have existed in Germany for decades, but only in recent years has there been a building boom The Holy Ghost and Yahwah and Krishna disapprove. Posted by: Sneaze Shaiting3550 2006-12-11 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=174667 |