What reasons lie behind the rising Islamophobia in Germany and other European countries?
Europe needed a new enemy. Its old enemies were largely the countries of the Warsaw Pact. But those countries became friends after Gorbachev’s reforms. There have been several Islamic movements, like the Islamic Salvation Front [FIS] in Algeria, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Khomeini movement in Iran, the Taliban movement in Afghanistan and [Necmettin] Erbakan’s movement in Turkey. Europe looked at this picture in the 1990s, and formed a picture of the enemy, which was Islam. Most recently Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin made controversial remarks about Turks, Arabs and Muslims. In his latest book, “Germany Does Itself In,” Sarrazin claimed that Muslim immigration and a high birth rate among Turkish immigrants will harm the country’s long-term economic potential. Sarrazin has always had prejudices. He reacted to our figures — which indicated that there are 74,000 Turkish employers in Germany — regarding Turkish immigrants’ economic contributions to the country. He alway
