Berlin Strengthens Islamist Structures

The 15th of March is to become a day of action and remembrance against Islamophobia in Berlin starting this year. The decision had already been agreed in March 2025 by the city’s governing coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD). The initiative follows a resolution adopted by the United Nations in 2022. As justification, the UN cited the attack by a far-right extremist on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 51 Muslims were killed.

The 2019 massacre was unquestionably horrific. Yet the question arises as to why the international response took the form of a global UN campaign.

In the same year there was a series of Islamist attacks that received far less attention and did not lead to any international day of remembrance. On 21 April – Easter Sunday – Islamist suicide bombers killed 253 people in coordinated attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka. In October, a French police officer who had converted to Islam stabbed four colleagues to death in Paris. In November, an Islamist carried out a knife attack in London. Numerous Islamist attacks also occurred across the Muslim world, a catalogue of which would fill many pages.

Other years show a similar pattern. Islamism has become one of the scourges of the modern age. Islamist militants have carried out countless assassinations of politicians, artists and scientists whom they regarded as heretics. Christian schoolgirls have been abducted, Yazidi women enslaved and populations across large parts of Asia and Africa subjected to regimes of religious violence that punish opposition with torture and executions.

The Iranian revolution as a starting point

The Islamist war against the West began in 1979 with the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 1983, attacks on French and American facilities in Beirut killed 370 people. In 1998, 224 people died in bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Both attacks attracted relatively little attention in the West.

That changed in 2001, when Islamist terrorists hijacked four aircraft in the United States. Two were flown into the towers of the World Trade Centre. A third was directed at the Pentagon, and a fourth was intended for the White House in Washington. Since then, Islamist terrorism has become a persistent reality in both the United States and Europe. Wherever large-scale Muslim immigration has taken place, everyday life has changed profoundly.

City festivals and Christmas markets must be protected by concrete barriers. Liberal Muslims require police protection. Satirical magazines that once competed in their mockery of the Church now avoid the subject of Islam with great care. Since the Danish Mohammed cartoons published in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten – which triggered worldwide attacks that left 139 people dead – as well as the assault on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the beheading of the teacher Samuel Paty, who had dared to discuss freedom of speech in his classroom, it has become clear that perceived insults can provoke deadly reprisals.

Protesters in Baghdad demonstrate against the publication of the Mohammed cartoons in European newspapers, February 2006. Photo: Akrma Sale/Getty Images

Humour about Islam has largely disappeared from public discourse. Despite extensive security measures and widespread self-censorship, no one can be considered entirely safe. Such attacks require neither long preparation nor specialised equipment nor complex planning. A car driven into a crowd – as in Nice, Berlin or Magdeburg – or a knife is enough to kill and later claim the act as one pleasing to God.

Yet there is no international day against Islamism. Indeed, no such proposal has even been made – neither at national level nor at the United Nations.

International lobbying to suppress criticism of Islam

Why does such blindness to reality persist? The answer lies largely in highly organised lobbying efforts at both international and national level. Internationally, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) plays a central role. All Muslim-majority states belong to the organisation.

Under its previous name, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, it adopted the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam in 1990, placing all human rights under the condition that they comply with Sharia law. The OIC presents itself as the united voice of Muslims worldwide.

It maintains delegations within the UN and the European Union and exercises considerable influence. From the outset, one of its central objectives was to discredit criticism of Islamism. For that purpose it popularised the concept of Islamophobia. The term has been defined, among other things, as a ‘combination of fear, hate and prejudice against Islam’, as ‘insulting Prophet or sacred symbols’, or as ‘discourses of Islam disseminating fear of Islam’. In this way, discussions about violence committed in the name of Islam could be dismissed as anti-Muslim hostility. That was precisely the aim of numerous campaigns initiated by the OIC.

The campaign also reached Germany through Islamist lobbying organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which is well connected internationally. Of particular importance are the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe (FIOE), the European Council for Fatwa and Research, the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations and the European Forum of Muslim Women. These groups maintain branches in several Western European countries and advance their agenda with considerable skill. They are able to draw on an existing anti-discrimination and inclusion agenda that exists both at the level of the European Union and within national states.

The Left and Islam side by side

A key factor is that the agenda allows an alliance with left-wing political forces that are likewise critical of the West.

One group consists of students, academics, journalists and employees in cultural and educational institutions who have completed degrees in the humanities and have been shaped by the ideology of postcolonialism. In many disciplines that ideology has become intellectually dominant. It portrays the West – more precisely the white West – as responsible for nearly every injustice in the world and assigns the inhabitants of the so-called Global South the role of victims.

Muslim communities succeeded decades ago in positioning themselves at the top of this hierarchy of victimhood. Many university graduates today believe that Muslims are invariably victims of Western societies. Even Islamist violence, they argue, is merely a consequence of discrimination, exclusion and lack of social participation – in other words, a reaction to discrimination. The real problem, in their view, is not Islamism but Islamophobia and right-wing populism.

That is why representatives of this group often call demonstrations ‘against the Right’ after Islamist attacks. Their principal concern is that political movements on the Right might gain strength if Islamist violence were openly acknowledged and named.

A second group in the West that forms alliances with Islamist activists consists of secular left-wing migrants who oppose the West for anti-imperialist reasons. They organise themselves in Palestine committees and in groups calling themselves Migrantifa, creating a link between migrant identity and anti-fascism. Both the postcolonial Left and these migrant anti-imperialists are largely secular and generally sceptical of religion. Yet when confronting a common adversary, such differences quickly become irrelevant.

Anti-discrimination and participation policies in many Western countries have enabled Islamist organisations to establish NGOs, receive public funding and gain privileged access to influential positions. Regulations and laws aimed at combating supposed Islamophobia have also been introduced. In Germany, the state funds a reporting centre for anti-Muslim racism known as MEDAR. In England, legislation is currently being prepared that critics fear could treat criticism of Islam as Islamophobia punishable by law.

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Claims that Islamophobia is a widespread problem in Germany are often based on quasi-academic studies in which selected Muslims, sometimes explicitly members of Islamist mosque communities, are asked whether they feel subjectively discriminated against. A subjective perception is then presented as an objective finding and disseminated as such in the media by the postcolonial Left.

In recent years the term Islamophobia has increasingly been replaced by ‘anti-Muslim racism’ in order to connect the debate with theories that describe Western states as ‘structurally racist’. Across Germany – at federal, state and municipal level – campaigns against racism now regularly focus particularly on ‘anti-Muslim racism’. Islamist organisations often play a decisive role in initiating such campaigns.

Berlin as a centre of Islamism

Against this background, Berlin’s new day of remembrance against ‘Islamophobia’ must be seen in context. The German capital has long been a centre of Islamist activity, with numerous Islamist NGOs and left-wing parties that display a particular affinity with such organisations. In the past they have repeatedly reacted aggressively to any attempt to address Islamist activities.

Yet such activities exist in abundance. In 2016 an Islamist terrorist carried out a devastating attack on a Christmas market. Members of criminal clans operate openly in public. In schools, teachers and pupils are threatened by Islamist-minded youths. Berlin’s police president even advised Jews to avoid certain Arab-dominated districts.

Nevertheless, left-wing parties and Islamist NGOs have succeeded in pushing such issues out of public debate while placing the alleged problem of ‘anti-Muslim racism’ at the centre of political discussion. The driving force behind the introduction of a day against Islamophobia is Raed Saleh, the leader of the SPD parliamentary group in Berlin. He even wants the fight against Islamophobia to be incorporated into the constitution and plans to provide NGOs and Islamic organisations with additional public funding.

Saleh represents a current within the SPD that increasingly presents itself as the party of migrants and Muslims and has already lost much of its traditional working-class electorate to the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

The decision of the CDU to support this agenda, which critics see as accommodating Islamist influence, may well carry political consequences in the next election. The party was elected largely because it promised greater security. Yet security is likely to deteriorate further if Islamist extremism faces even fewer restraints.