The Islamic Center Hamburg (IZH) was under investigation for several months over its alleged support for Lebanon’s Hezbollah group which is backed by Iran. Hezbollah is classified as a terrorist group by Germany.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on Wednesday that the Islamic Center Hamburg (IZH) would be banned for propagating extremism and that its famous “Blue Mosque” was being searched by police.
“It is very important to me to make a clear distinction here: we are not acting against a religion,” Faeser said, but just against a group accused of undermining the German state as well as women’s rights.
The Imam Ali Mosque, known locally as the Blue Mosque, is one of Germany’s oldest mosques and is operated by the IZH.
Israel and Hezbollah can both be bad at the same time
I wish more people understood this. It’s like the people cheering on the Houthis, who use child soldiers and have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of them.
Just because they are fighting Israel does not necessarily make them the good guys.
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Sorry… my own children have to be killed for me to find recruiting child soldiers to be a bad thing?
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Please clarify this for me: Are you saying that it is good that the Houthis are using child soldiers?
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That is not an answer. I will clarify, and give you one more chance to answer a yes or no question: Are you justifying the Houthis’ use of child soldiers which is, under no shadow of a doubt, a war crime, even in internal conflicts?
https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/child-soldiers
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Cheering on the Houthis because they are protecting their people from Saudi Arabia and America. The people responsible for their deaths are the ones dropping bombs on the children.
Once Saudi Arabia isn’t dropping American bombs on Yemeni school buses, then I can criticize the Houthis.
Are you justifying the use of child soldiers? It is a war crime.
I am against the use of child soldiers, but I’m not going to talk about the Houthi’s because our criticism of the Houthi’s can have no effect on whether they use child soldiers, but it does have effect of supporting western action against them, which includes induced famine and bombing schools and hospitals.
You see how blatant it is when Israelis talk about LGBT+ rights in Gaza as if gays are immune to Israeli bombs. It’s no different pretending to care about children in Yemen while bombing and starving those same Yemeni children.
This is about whether the Houthis are a good group or not.
So you are arguing that a group that commits war crimes is good as long as they are fighting Israel and Saudi Arabia. Correct?
You understand that Israel and Saudi Arabia are committing far, far worse war crime here?
Resisting annihilation is good. I’m making no statements on whether the group would be good in a vacuum because that’s not useful for anything except justifying even greater war crimes.
They are not committing war crimes in a vacuum. They are committing war crimes right now. Those war crimes involve killing thousands of children.
I will give you one more chance, as a moderator, to clarify your position. Not with whatabouts, not with whether or not some of what they are doing is good.
Are they good? Yes or no.
Such a simple evaluation misses context and nuance.
But no, they’re not good, but they’re infinitely better than the guys dropping bombs my country supplies on their schools.
Many things are war crimes, I don’t see anyone getting worked up over it. International law is “only for africans” as one official has put it to the ICC.
Are you justifying the use of child soldiers?
No. I’m just saying that just throwing that as a gotcha moment isn’t worth anything nowadays. You can’t spin an entire conversation around the fact X entity is committing/aiding war crimes. At that point you’d have more reasons to hate your own country than the Houthis most likely. It’s just a way to deflect from the conversation: “oh look that guy is justifying use of child soldiers”, says the guy sitting in a home probably 90% filled with products built by child workers from China, while wearing clothes made in Uyghur concentration camps. It’s completely besides the mark
There is no moral quandary here. Either using child soldiers makes a group bad or not. Killing children is either a bad thing or it isn’t.
This is what I keep trying to tell people about this war. There are no good guys. There is no right side of history to be on.
There are sides. And people are perfectly welcome and justified to take a side. But you have to understand that whichever side you take, they have done terrible things to innocent people for terrible reasons.
Sure. Weird how the people the German government wants to suppress to just happen to be bad people trying to take away women’s rights in Germany. I’m sure it’s entirely unrelated.
Maybe it’s because I’m not done with my coffee but I’m not picking up what you’re putting down.
This is motivated by politics and islamophobia, no different than NYPD building a bunch of bullshit cases against muslims after 9/11.
We’re talking about a country that considers “from the river to the sea” to be hate speech and requires new citizens affirm their support of a genocidal settler colonial project.
The German authorities claim they have proof of the connection between the IZH and Hezbollah. If they do have the proof, which they now under obligation to provide of course, it is not politics and Islamophobia, it is doing what the law requires.
Now you may think the law should require doing similar things to such organizations aiding Israel. I wouldn’t disagree. But that doesn’t mean you let other organizations that aid a different group that commits atrocities and want a theocracy just because they’re fighting Israel out of some sense of fairness.
Where did you read that they are under obligation to provide anything? They aren’t lol. And won’t. If they wanted to, they could’ve provided it a long time ago.
I don’t mean legal obligation.
Then what’s even the point in mentioning it. There is no obligation. The only obligation that counts is the legal one
If you don’t think there’s an obligation, even if it’s not a legal one, to provide their information so the public can judge their actions, I don’t know what to tell you.
Read the VereinsG they’re required to justify a ban. Said justification has been handed to the IZH, they’re free to publish it or sue the state. Those kinds of things are way more thorough than what the ministries put out in a press release.
Not sure about the Hezbollah connection in particular, but the IZH already sued the Hamburg office for the protection of the constitution over their 2019 report. The office had to retract some bits and pieces, the court acknowledged the office’s difficult position wrt. having to prove something while keeping its confidential sources, well, confidential, but also ruled that that’s their problem, not the IZH’s. What the court did not have them retract was that the IZH is keen on abolishing the free and democratic basic order in Germany, is an arm of Iran’s regime aiming to export itself over the world, etc etc. It really was details.
And just as a side note the IZH is long suspended from Muslim umbrella organisations in Germany. They don’t like Islamists either.
Eh, I disagree. If they keep supporting Israel after this, it demonstrates that they are hypocritical. They are not following the law for its own sake, but as a cudgel, to bludgeon organizations they don’t like while supporting genocidal organizations they do like. And considering they are suppressing groups that directly oppose Israel, not just Muslim ones lately but also anti-Zionist Jewish ones, it becomes even more obvious. If you’re just picking and choosing which cultural groups to suppress, and purposefully letting the imperialist, colonialist Western backed, apartheid ethnostate-based ones through, even with the backing of the law, then you’re just kind of leaning into the targeted scapegoating of fascism.
Not to say that’s definitely what this is, we haven’t seen the investigation evidence yet, but Germany has been leaning into that direction lately.
Ever looked at recent weapons exports to Israel? Or rather their absence? The federation is not granting permission for anything but general military goods (helmets, vests, etc). Only reasonable legal reasoning behind it is that the government thinks that they could be used in a genocide, to commit war crimes, such things.
That is: They’re not saying it openly but the German federal government absolutely shit-binned Netanyahu and his Kahanites as genocidal maniacs. Also if we were still exporting weapons Germany’s streets would be way less calm right now.
Diplomatically speaking, Germany would very much rather sit this one out, and is silently hoping for non-fascists to come to power in Israel, again. People who then can at least be encouraged to restart the peace process. Because one thing’s for sure: There’s no Israeli security without Palestinian freedom, and there also isn’t Palestinian freedom without Israeli security. The two things depend on each other. Germany always understood this, and still does: That supporting Israel means supporting Palestine. The non-fascists on both sides, that is.
How do you know explain them arresting pro-Palestenian voices then during peaceful protests?
They are very much taking a side and it is not the side of Palestinians.
This matches up with the research I’ve done that Germany is sending arms to Israel. Seriously, everywhere I’ve looked shows they are and support Bibi completely. They are sending actual arms, like anti-tank weapons, ammunition, explosives, military vehicles, etc.
Apparently Germany is the second highest supplier of arms to Israel. And have promised to send more.
That’s from like, today lol. It seems they have claimed that most exports are no lethal before, to the Hague , but considering the more recent statement that the Chancellor said they’re going to send a bunch more weapons to Israel, plus all the other sources, and they’re refusal to stop sending weapons in the ICJ using the defense that Hamas is bad and not that they’re not sending weapons, I am going to believe him.
Not to mention other support they’ve shown, like withdrawing funding from the UNRWA which has contributed to the increasing famine and 200,000 deaths right there. Germany is very much not being neutral in this conflict at all. All of their pressure has been on pro-Palestinian voices (even Jewish ones), and all their support has been for Israel.
That is 150% not what he was arrested for. It may very well be the sign he held while being arrested, but one does not imply the other. Never fucking trust Al Jazeera on these things they’re far from neutral or factual.
Germany stopped arms exports days after the attacks. Before Nicaragua started its case at the ICJ, btw.
Will, when? Have, when? Certainly none since the 2000 PzF shortly after the attacks (anti-tank rockets, not really suitable for a genocide), I’d have heard of that. And when again? Presumably once the Israelis got around ousting Netanyahu and his goons. Scholz is very good at waffling and saying nothing, doubly and triply so when pressed, that’s precisely what he’s doing there. No official change in policy – but somehow still nothing gets exported.
It has not. Germany has resumed its responsibilities to UNRWA after Israel’s accusations turned out to be baseless, and no payments from Germany to UNWRA were due during the brief time payments were suspended – so none were missed. If there had been missed payments I’m sure Germany would’ve made up for it.
You should know all of that if you had read even a bit of the ICJ ruling. Which you probably should do before you accuse a country of supporting genocide.
Wait till you hear about countries closing linguistic institutions for being spy agencies.
Seems like a good cover for a spy agency tbh