Meanwhile, On The Other Side Of The Ocean: "Europe's Mosque Wars"

"The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers."
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey


Soeren Kern, Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group, writes about the movement to build mosques going on across Europe. According to Kern, the groups behind them are motivated as much by politics as by religion.

Europe's Mosque Wars
by Soeren Kern

As Americans debate the appropriateness of building a Muslim mosque near Ground Zero in New York City, similar discussions have been taking place in towns and cities across Europe, where the spread of Islam is far more advanced than it is in the United States. Although Muslims and their supporters in Europe usually frame the issue of mosque construction within the context of granting religious freedom to minorities, most, if not all, of the more controversial European mosque projects are motivated by politics at least as much as by religion.

There currently are an estimated 6,000 mosques in Europe. Many of them are housed in makeshift structures such as small shops, basements, offices, garages and rented rooms. But as the Muslim population in Europe increases by more than one million people per year, Muslims across the continent are becoming increasingly more assertive in their demands to build high-profile mosques that clearly are meant to challenge the European status quo.

Critics say the construction of mosques is part of a strategy for the Islamization of Europe. They point to comments by Muslim leaders like Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has bragged: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers." Erdogan has also told Turkish immigrants in Germany that "assimilation is a crime against humanity."

Although Europe's postmodern political elites, especially on the left, have encouraged the rise of Islam in Europe, often in a deliberate attempt to undermine the influence of Judeo-Christian values on the continent, growing numbers of ordinary Europeans are saying that the social experiment called multiculturalism has gone too far. Voters in countries ranging from Austria to Spain, and many places in between, have been pushing back against the unfettered expansion of Islam in Europe. Many Europeans are especially angry at the refusal of younger Muslims to integrate into their host countries. In some European countries, opponents of the construction of new mosques have achieved limited successes. But for the most part, the construction of new mosques in Europe continues apace.

In Britain, plans to build Europe's biggest mosque in London were scrapped in January 2010, after some 250,000 people petitioned the government to prevent the project from moving forward. The so-called mega-mosque, which was being promoted by Tablighi Jamaat, a secretive Islamic sect that has been tied to Al Qaeda, would have held four times as many worshippers as Britain's largest Anglican cathedral. It was intended to be operational in time for the 2012 London Olympics. Critics of the mosque, including a number of other Muslim groups, said it would have given Tablighi Jamaat "a huge national platform, right by the Olympics, for them to promote their ideology." Overall, there are an estimated 1,600 mosques in Britain, almost half of which are under the control of the hardline Islamic Deobandi sect, whose leading preacher, Riyadh ul Haq, supports armed jihad and preaches contempt for Jews, Christians and Hindus.

Read the whole thing--including the spread of mosque-building in Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Holland, Italy, Austria and Belgium

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