The Central Council of Muslims in Germany on Tuesday designated anti-Semitism a “sin.’’
“Anti-Semitism, racism and hatred are great sins in Islam, therefore, we will also never tolerate that,” the Council President, Aiman Mazyek, was quoted as saying by the Tuesday edition of local Dusseldorf newspaper Rheinische Post.
Mr Mazyek was responding to comments at the weekend by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to an Israeli broadcaster that Germany is experiencing “new phenomena whereby refugees and other people of Arab origin that are bringing a different form of anti-Semitism into the country.”
Mr Mazyek said Merkel’s comments had been “as usual differentiated’’ because she had stressed that anti-Semitism had not returned to Germany with the refugees; “the crime statistics prove that,” he said.
“However, we take it very seriously that there is anti-Semitism present among some refugees,” Mr Mazyek said, adding that the Muslim Council was organising meetings between Jews and refugees as well as running educational programmes.
Part of this effort was regular joint visits to the memorial sites at former Nazi concentration camps.
There have been a number of anti-Semitic attacks by Muslim people in Germany in recent weeks, the latest of which saw a perpetrator attack a man wearing a Jewish skullcap in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district while shouting “Yahudi,” an Arabic word for Jew.
The man, who was attacked said later he was not Jewish, but an Arab Israeli.
Jewish kindergartens, schools and synagogues are already protected by police around the clock.
dpa/NAN
