The New Berlin Wall

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/ma...icle_popular_5

December 4, 2005

The New Berlin Wall

By PETER SCHNEIDER

"On the night of Feb. 7, 2005, Hatun Surucu, 23, was killed on her way to a
bus stop in Berlin-Tempelhof by several shots to the head and upper body,
fired at point-blank range. The investigation revealed that months before,
she reported one of her brothers to the police for threatening her. Now
three of her five brothers are on trial for murder. According to the
prosecutor, the oldest of them (25) acquired the weapon, the middle brother
(24) lured his sister to the scene of the crime and the youngest (18) shot
her. The trial began on Sept. 21. Ayhan Surucu, the youngest brother, had
confessed to the murder and claimed that he had done it without any help.
According to Seyran Ates, a lawyer of Turkish descent, it is generally the
youngest who are chosen by the family council to carry out such murders - or
to claim responsibility for them. German juvenile law sets a maximum
sentence of 10 years' imprisonment for murder, and the offender has the
prospect of being released after serving two-thirds of the sentence.

Hatun Surucu grew up in Berlin as the daughter of Turkish Kurds. When she
finished eighth grade, her parents took her out of school. Shortly after
that she was taken to Turkey and married to a cousin. Later she separated
from her husband and returned to Berlin, pregnant. At age 17 she gave birth
to a son, Can. She moved into a women's shelter and completed the work for
her middle-school certificate. By 2004 she had finished a
vocational-training program to become an electrician. The young mother who
had escaped her family's constraints began to enjoy herself. She put on
makeup, wore her hair unbound, went dancing and adorned herself with rings,
necklaces and bracelets. Then, just days before she was to receive her
journeyman's diploma, her life was cut short.

Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu's capital crime was
that, living in Germany, she had begun living like a German. In a statement
to the Turkish newspaper Zaman, one brother noted that she had stopped
wearing her head scarf, that she refused to go back to her family and that
she had declared her intent to "seek out her own circle of friends." It's
still unclear whether anyone ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it is
the father of the family who decides about the punishment. But Seyran Ates
has seen in her legal practice cases in which the mother has a leading role:
mothers who were forced to marry forcing the same fate on their daughters.
Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German author who has interviewed dozens of women on
this topic, explained, "The mothers are looking for solidarity by demanding
that their daughters submit to the same hardship and suffering." By
disobeying them, the daughter calls into question her mother's life - her
silent submission to the ritual of forced marriage. Meanwhile, the two elder
brothers have papered their cell with pictures of their dead sister.


here is a new wall rising in the city of Berlin. To cross this wall you have
to go to the city's central and northern districts - to Kreuzberg, Neukölln
and Wedding - and you will find yourself in a world unknown to the majority
of Berliners. Until recently, most Berliners held to the illusion that
living together with some 300,000 Muslim immigrants and children of
immigrants was basically working. Take Neukölln. The district is proud of
the fact that it houses citizens of 165 nations. Some 40 percent of these,
by far the largest group, are Turks and Kurds; the second-largest group
consists of Arabs. Racially motivated attacks occur regularly in
Brandenburg, the former East German state that surrounds Berlin, where
foreigners are few (about 2 percent). But such attacks hardly ever happen in
Neukölln. As Stefanie Vogelsang, a councilwoman from Neukölln, put it to me,
residents talk about "our Turks" in an unmistakably friendly way, although
they are less friendly when it comes to Arabs, who arrived decades after the
Turks and often illegally.

But tolerance of Muslim immigrants began to change in the aftermath of Sept.
11, 2001. Parallel to the declarations of "unconditional solidarity" with
Americans by the German majority, rallies of another sort were taking place
in Neukölln and Kreuzberg. Bottle rockets were set off from building
courtyards: a poor man's fireworks, sporadic, sparse and joyful; two rockets
here, three rockets there. Still, altogether, hundreds of rockets were
shooting skyward in celebration of the attack, just as most Berliners were
searching for words to express their horror. For many German residents in
Neukölln and Kreuzberg, Vogelsang recalled not long ago, that was the first
time they stopped to wonder who their neighbors really were.

When a broader German public began concerning itself with the parallel
Muslim world arising in its midst, it was primarily thanks to three female
authors, three rebellious Muslim musketeers: Ates, who in addition to
practicing law is the author of "The Great Journey Into the Fire"; Necla
Kelek ("The Foreign Bride"); and Serap Cileli ("We're Your Daughters, Not
Your Honor"). About the same age, all three grew up in Germany; they speak
German better than many Germans and are educated and successful. But they
each had to risk much for their freedom; two of them narrowly escaped Hatun
Surucu's fate. Necla Kelek was threatened by her father with a hatchet when
she refused to greet him in a respectful manner when he came home. Seyran
Ates was lucky to survive a shooting attack on the women's shelter that she
founded in Kreuzberg. And Serap Cileli, when she was 13 years old, tried to
kill herself to escape her first forced marriage; later she was taken to
Turkey and married against her will, then she returned to Germany with two
children from this marriage and took refuge in a women's shelter to escape
her father's violence. Taking off from their own experiences, the three
women describe the grim lives and sadness of Muslim women in that model
Western democracy known as Germany.

Reading their books brought to mind a forgotten scene from seven years ago.
Every time my daughter, who was 14 at the time, invited her schoolmates for
a sleepover, the Muslim fathers would be standing at the door at 10 p.m. to
pick up their daughters. My wife, an immigrant herself, was indignant. I
didn't like these fathers' dismissive, almost threatening posture, either,
but I was a long way from protesting. Nor did I worry much when my daughter
told me that one or another girl in her class was not taking biology or
physical education and no longer going on field trips.

For a German of my generation, one of the most holy legacies of the past was
the law of tolerance. We Germans in particular had no right to force our
highly questionable customs onto other cultures. Later I learned from
occasional newspaper reports and the accounts of friends that certain Muslim
girls in Kreuzberg and Neukölln went underground or vanished without a
trace. Even those reports gave me no more than a momentary discomfort in our
upscale district of Charlottenburg.

But the books of the three Muslim dissidents now tell us what Germans like
me didn't care to know. What they report seems almost unbelievable. They
describe an everyday life of oppression, isolation, imprisonment and brutal
corporal punishment for Muslim women and girls in Germany, a situation for
which there is only one word: slavery.

Seyran Ates estimates that perhaps half of young Turkish women living in
Germany are forced into marriage every year. In the wake of these forced
marriages often come violence and rape; the bride has no choice but to
fulfill the duties of the marriage arranged by her parents and her in-laws.
One side-effect of forced marriage is the psychological violation of the men
involved. Although they are the presumed beneficiaries of this custom, men
are likewise forbidden to marry whom they want. A groom who chooses his own
wife faces threats, too. In such cases, according to Seyran Ates and Serap
Cileli, the groom as well as the bride must go underground to escape the
families' revenge.

Heavily veiled women wearing long coats even in summer are becoming an
increasingly familiar sight in German Muslim neighborhoods. According to
Necla Kelek's research, they are mostly under-age girls who have been
bought - often for a handsome payment - in the Turkish heartland villages of
Anatolia by mothers whose sons in Germany are ready to marry. The girls are
then flown to Germany, and "with every new imported bride," Kelek says, "the
parallel society grows." Meanwhile, Ates summarizes, "Turkish men who wish
to marry and live by Shariah can do so with far less impediment in Berlin
than in Istanbul."

Before the murder of Hatun Surucu there were enough warnings to engage the
Germans in a debate about the parallel society growing in their midst. There
have been 49 known "honor crimes," most involving female victims, during the
past nine years - 16 in Berlin alone. Such crimes are reported in the
"miscellaneous" column along with other family tragedies and given a
five-line treatment. Indeed, it's possible that the murder of Hatun Surucu
never would have made the headlines at all but for another piece of news
that stirred up the press. Just a few hundred yards from where Surucu was
killed, at the Thomas Morus High School, three Muslim students soon openly
declared their approval of the murder. Shortly before that, the same
students had bullied a fellow pupil because her clothing was "not in keeping
with the religious regulations." Volker Steffens, the school's director,
decided to make the matter public in a letter to students, parents and
teachers. More than anything else, it was the students' open praise of the
murder that made the crime against Hatun Surucu the talk of Berlin and soon
of all Germany.


During 50 years of continuing immigration, the Germans, most of the time
under conservative governments, deluded themselves that Germany was not a
country of immigrants. Suddenly, the obvious could no longer be denied.
Alarmed by the honor killings, Germans began to investigate the parallel
society: a society proud of its isolation; purist and traditional yet, in
its own terms, creative, forward-looking and often contemptuous of the
German host society. The recent riots in France have increased the sense of
alarm. German politicians and experts lined up in the news media to point
out why such riots are unlikely in Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart or Hamburg.
They claimed that young Muslims in Germany (although up to 50 percent of
them are unemployed) had full access to the German welfare state and were
not isolated in high-rise projects as in the suburbs of Paris. True, there
were some cars set on fire in Berlin, but such incidents were interpreted as
purely imitation crimes, nothing to be taken seriously. Yet in all these
official declarations you sensed an undertone of panic. Germans' confidence
that their nation can continue as it had been - integrating immigrants
without an integration policy, remaining true to the traditional German
identity, preserving the reassuring post-1945 chronology of advancing
modernism - is on the line. It turns out that in the heart of German cities
a society is growing up that turns modernity on its head.

How could this happen? The Turkish writer Aras Oren, who has been living in
Berlin for 40 years, once told me about one of his first plane trips from
Istanbul to Berlin. He was sitting next to a farmer from Anatolia, who had
evidently never been in an airplane before. The man had no idea what to make
of the seat belt, the overhead warning lights, the tray table - nor did he
understand his neighbors' explanations. When Oren saw him sitting there, in
his sandals, with his cap on his head and his prayer beads between his thick
fingers, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that his fellow
countryman was enclosed in an invisible time capsule he wasn't going to
leave even after he landed in Germany. It made no difference whether the man
was traveling to Istanbul or to Berlin. This farmer had never seen a city;
he was living in the 18th or 19th century and would carry the customs and
rites of his homeland with him to his living room in Berlin. And he would
cling to them doggedly if the Western democracy where he was living and
working did not make a determined effort to acquaint him with its rules and
laws. For decades, Oren has been preaching that it has never been so much a
question of multicultural sensitivity as of turning peasants into city
dwellers.

After 1945, Germany, in the process of reconstruction, needed great numbers
of workers and initiated recruitment campaigns in the poor countries of
Europe and on the Mediterranean rim: in Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey,
Tunisia and Morocco. The arrival of the 100,000th immigrant worker, in the
1950's, was cause for celebration; the exhausted man climbed out of a train
at a German station and was immediately handed a check. But from the
beginning, the invitation came with a certain reservation on the part of the
host and the proviso, often repeated, that Germany was not really a country
of immigrants, not a melting pot. It was no accident that the foreign
workers were called gastarbeiter, guest workers. Guests are expected to
leave after a while.

The first Muslim immigrants came without their families. They slaved away
repairing streets or working below ground, generally slept in men-only
dormitories and for the most part had the same expectations for themselves
as their employers had for them: they would work for a few years, send as
much of their earnings home as possible and then, if all went well, drive
back to their villages in a used Mercedes with enough capital to buy a
house.

Naturally, things did not work out as expected. The Swiss author Max Frisch
recognized the contradiction early on: "Workers were called," he wrote, "and
human beings came." These were people who wanted their families to join
them, people who after a long, hard working life wanted to spend their
remaining years in Germany, people who wished to provide their children with
an education and a better future in that country. Germany did not give guest
workers passports or the vote, but it did repay them by incorporating them
into the social system and giving them the opportunity for social
advancement. A result was the rise of a Muslim middle class - relatively
broad in comparison with those in France or in England - contributing around
39 billion euros annually to the gross national product and billions to the
national pension funds. But as the German economic miracle came to an end,
the most important condition of this precarious idyll changed. Although
active recruitment was stopped as early as 1973, more and more Turks and
Kurds moved to Germany, in accord with a ruling on reuniting families. And
these parents, wives, husbands and children took their traditional lifestyle
onto the German streets. Whereas during the first years of immigration,
Turkish women wore Western clothing, they now appeared in long flowery
skirts, hand-knitted jackets and tightly bound head scarves. The plastic
trunks in which they had brought sacks full of dry beans, bulgur wheat and
chickpeas metamorphosed into Turkish grocery stands. And with the food and
the family members, traditional celebrations in the Muslim districts
gradually became more and more like those back home as well. In the back
rooms of the vegetable stands and halal butchers, prayer rooms sprang up,
and in time these rooms became mosques. The German-Turkish author Necla
Kelek sums it up this way in "The Foreign Bride": "The guest workers turned
into Turks, and the Turks turned into Muslims."

Growing unemployment in Germany (now 4.8 million people, roughly 12 percent
of the work force) hit the Muslim immigrants doubly hard - especially the
youth, who frequently drop out of school before obtaining a diploma.
"Seventy percent of the newcomers," according to Otto Schily, a former
minister of the interior, referring to the period since 2002, "land on
welfare the day of their arrival." Whole enclaves sprang up consisting of
extended families living on the dole.

Necla Kelek asked a group of "import brides" who had been living in Germany
for years how they had actually prepared for their future in Germany. Their
answer: incredulous laughter. Prepare? How and for what? "But how can you
stand living here?" Necla Kelek went on. "You don't have anything to do with
this country, you despise its culture and the way people live here." But we
have everything we need here, was the answer; we don't need the Germans.

Those with no work and no future were looked after by the mosques, which
increasingly became the most important place of communication. Inside their
apartments, women resumed their traditional ways - apart from the "unclean"
who ate pork, drank beer and let their daughters go unchallenged to parties
and discos. Amid the German refrigerators, televisions and mobile phones, a
rural culture was celebrating its resurrection, where Turkish was spoken,
where people ate, prayed, fasted and celebrated according to custom, and
where the surrounding local culture of unbelievers and the unclean was
looked down upon. The riddle of the time capsule brought up by Aras Oren
came to an unexpected solution. Some hundred thousand Muslim immigrants were
able to take up, in Germany, the life of their ancestors in Anatolia.
Indeed, maybe life in Anatolia was meanwhile more modern and secular than in
the Muslim districts of Berlin.


Many sociologists attribute the growth of a Muslim parallel society to the
discouraging social circumstances of the third Muslim generation of
immigrants - high unemployment, high dropout or failure rates in public
schools. But this explanation is incomplete, to say the least. It turns out
that the Muslim middle class has long been following the same trend. Rental
agencies that procure and prepare rooms for traditional Turkish weddings and
circumcisions are among the most booming businesses in Kreuzberg and
Neukölln.

Cem Ozdemir, a German deputy (of Turkish origin) to the European Parliament,
tells two different stories concerning ritual circumcision. He himself grew
up in the south of Germany; his own circumcision three decades ago was an
absolute nightmare. It took place in a gymnasium, where six boys between 4
and 9 years old lay stretched out in six beds, and was performed by the
local Turkish doctor, who took his instruments out of the tool case he'd
brought along and started cutting away. He made a wrong cut on Ozdemir and
sewed up the wound after the local anesthetic had worn off. To drown the
child's deafening cries, a Turkish band started up with traditional music,
and relatives danced in honor of the circumcised.

More recently - in other words, some 30 years later - Ozdemir took part in
another, more modern type of circumcision, this time as a godfather. The
parents had the operation performed by a doctor in a hospital. There was no
ritual, and the patient went home the same day. Some days later, when the
boy was fully recovered, the parents gave a party that, as Ozdemir explains,
"really was for the circumcised, and not for the relatives." All the
participants, the boy included, enjoyed themselves.

For Ozdemir, the difference in these two stories showed that Muslim
immigrants can hold onto their rituals by transforming and modernizing them.
But there is a third story unfolding today in the rented halls of Kreuzberg
and Neukölln, a story that emphasizes separateness and a communal rejection
of compromise. The technical standard of the circumcision might be of the
highest order, but it will have to happen in the presence of family and
friends. The father of the circumcised might carry a German passport and run
a successful company; but he will also worry about how his son's
circumcision is judged by his friends and neighbors.


his conservative, fearful trend is likely to guide the next generation. For
more than 20 years the Islamic Federation of Berlin, an umbrella
organization of Islamic associations and mosque congregations, has struggled
in the Berlin courts to secure Islamic religious instruction in local
schools. In 2001 the federation finally succeeded. Since then, several
thousand Muslim elementary-school students have been taught by teachers
hired by the Islamic Federation and paid by the city of Berlin. City
officials aren't in a position to control Islamic religious instruction.
Often the teaching does not correspond to the lesson plan that was submitted
in German. Citing the linguistic deficiencies of the students, instructors
frequently hold lessons in Turkish or Arabic, often behind closed doors.

Since the introduction of Islamic religious instruction, the number of girls
that come to school in head scarves has grown by leaps and bounds, and
school offices are inundated with petitions to excuse girls from swimming
and sports as well as class outings.

There are no reliable figures showing how many Muslims living in Germany
regularly attend a mosque; the estimates vary between 40 and 50 percent.
Councilwoman Stefanie Vogelsang stresses that the majority of the mosques in
Neukölln are as open to the world as they ever were, and that they continue
to address the needs of integration. But the radical religious communities
are gaining ground. She points to the Imam Reza Mosque, for instance, whose
home page - until a recent revision - praised the attacks of Sept. 11,
designated women as second-class human beings and referred to gays and
lesbians as animals. "And that kind of thing," she says, fuming, "is still
defended by the left in the name of religious freedom."

This is the least expected provocation of the three author rebels: a frontal
assault on the relativism of the majority society. In fact, they are
fighting on two fronts - against Islamist oppression of women and its
proponents, and against the guilt-ridden tolerance of liberal
multiculturalists. "Before I can get to the Islamic patriarchs, I first have
to work my way through these mountains of German guilt," Seyran Ates
complains.

It is women who suffer most from German sensitivity toward Islam. The three
authors explicitly accuse German do-gooders of having left Muslim women in
Germany in the lurch and call on them not to forget the women locked behind
the closed windows when they rave about the multicultural districts.

German immigration policies (and liberal multiculturalism) are only one side
of the problem. The other side is the active refusal of many in the Muslim
community to integrate. It is an illusion to believe that a German - or
French or Dutch - passport and full rights of citizenship are enough to make
all Muslims loyal citizens. "The attacks in London," Seyran Ates says, "were
in the eyes of many Muslims a successful slap in the face to the Western
community. The next perpetrators will be children of the third and fourth
immigrant generation, who - under the eyes of well-meaning politicians -
will be brought up from birth to hate Western society." It's only a question
of time, Ates says, before Berlin experiences attacks like those in London
and Madrid. When we spoke, the riots in France had not yet happened.


It is encouraging that some Muslim residents of Germany are forcefully
calling on Germans to defend our democratic achievements against Muslim
traditionalists and fanatics who incite hatred of democracy under the banner
of respect for cultural difference. "What I am asking of the Germans," Necla
Kelek says, "is nothing more and nothing less than equal treatment. I'm
entitled to the same rights as any German woman."

Merely citing "lessons from the German past," as Germans tend to do, does
not guarantee that these lessons are correct. It is a perversion when, out
of respect for the "otherness" of a different culture, Germans stand aside
and accept the fact that Muslim women in Germany are being subjected to an
archaic code of honor that flouts the fundamental human rights to dignity
and individual freedom. This has nothing to do with Germany or the "guiding
German culture" that German conservatives want to put through; it has simply
to do with humanity, with the protection of basic human and civil rights for
all citizens of all ethnic backgrounds.

Politicians and religious scholars of all faiths are right in pointing out
that there are many varieties of Islam, that Islamism and Islam should not
be confused, that there is no line in the Koran that would justify murder.
But the assertion that radical Islamic fundamentalism and Islam have nothing
to do with each other is like asserting that there was no link between
Stalinism and Communism. The fact is that disregard for women's rights -
especially the right to sexual self-determination - is an integral component
of almost all Islamic societies, including those in the West. Unless this
issue is solved, with a corresponding reform of Islam as practiced in the
West, there will never be a successful acculturation. Islam needs something
like an Enlightenment; and only by sticking hard to their own Enlightenment,
with its separation of religion and state, can the Western democracies
persuade their Muslim residents that human rights are universally valid.
Perhaps this would lead to the reforms necessary for integration to succeed.
"We Western Muslim women," Seyran Ates says, "will set off the reform of
traditional Islam, because we are its victims."

Peter Schneider is a writer based in Berlin. This article was translated
from the German by Philip Boehm.

/



x

News are NOT travel, they are just news.
Are you trying to frighten us ?

"Gregory Morrow"
gregorymorrowEMERGENCYCANCELLATIONARCHIMEDES@eart hlink.net a écrit dans le
message de news: . net...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/ma...icle_popular_5

December 4, 2005

The New Berlin Wall

By PETER SCHNEIDER

"On the night of Feb. 7, 2005, Hatun Surucu, 23, was killed on her way to
a
bus stop in Berlin-Tempelhof by several shots to the head and upper body,
fired at point-blank range. The investigation revealed that months before,
she reported one of her brothers to the police for threatening her. Now
three of her five brothers are on trial for murder. According to the
prosecutor, the oldest of them (25) acquired the weapon, the middle
brother
(24) lured his sister to the scene of the crime and the youngest (18) shot
her. The trial began on Sept. 21. Ayhan Surucu, the youngest brother, had
confessed to the murder and claimed that he had done it without any help.
According to Seyran Ates, a lawyer of Turkish descent, it is generally the
youngest who are chosen by the family council to carry out such murders -
or
to claim responsibility for them. German juvenile law sets a maximum
sentence of 10 years' imprisonment for murder, and the offender has the
prospect of being released after serving two-thirds of the sentence.

Hatun Surucu grew up in Berlin as the daughter of Turkish Kurds. When she
finished eighth grade, her parents took her out of school. Shortly after
that she was taken to Turkey and married to a cousin. Later she separated
from her husband and returned to Berlin, pregnant. At age 17 she gave
birth
to a son, Can. She moved into a women's shelter and completed the work for
her middle-school certificate. By 2004 she had finished a
vocational-training program to become an electrician. The young mother who
had escaped her family's constraints began to enjoy herself. She put on
makeup, wore her hair unbound, went dancing and adorned herself with
rings,
necklaces and bracelets. Then, just days before she was to receive her
journeyman's diploma, her life was cut short.

Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu's capital crime was
that, living in Germany, she had begun living like a German. In a
statement
to the Turkish newspaper Zaman, one brother noted that she had stopped
wearing her head scarf, that she refused to go back to her family and that
she had declared her intent to "seek out her own circle of friends." It's
still unclear whether anyone ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it
is
the father of the family who decides about the punishment. But Seyran Ates
has seen in her legal practice cases in which the mother has a leading
role:
mothers who were forced to marry forcing the same fate on their daughters.
Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German author who has interviewed dozens of women
on
this topic, explained, "The mothers are looking for solidarity by
demanding
that their daughters submit to the same hardship and suffering." By
disobeying them, the daughter calls into question her mother's life - her
silent submission to the ritual of forced marriage. Meanwhile, the two
elder
brothers have papered their cell with pictures of their dead sister.


here is a new wall rising in the city of Berlin. To cross this wall you
have
to go to the city's central and northern districts - to Kreuzberg,
Neukölln
and Wedding - and you will find yourself in a world unknown to the
majority
of Berliners. Until recently, most Berliners held to the illusion that
living together with some 300,000 Muslim immigrants and children of
immigrants was basically working. Take Neukölln. The district is proud of
the fact that it houses citizens of 165 nations. Some 40 percent of these,
by far the largest group, are Turks and Kurds; the second-largest group
consists of Arabs. Racially motivated attacks occur regularly in
Brandenburg, the former East German state that surrounds Berlin, where
foreigners are few (about 2 percent). But such attacks hardly ever happen
in
Neukölln. As Stefanie Vogelsang, a councilwoman from Neukölln, put it to
me,
residents talk about "our Turks" in an unmistakably friendly way, although
they are less friendly when it comes to Arabs, who arrived decades after
the
Turks and often illegally.

But tolerance of Muslim immigrants began to change in the aftermath of
Sept.
11, 2001. Parallel to the declarations of "unconditional solidarity" with
Americans by the German majority, rallies of another sort were taking
place
in Neukölln and Kreuzberg. Bottle rockets were set off from building
courtyards: a poor man's fireworks, sporadic, sparse and joyful; two
rockets
here, three rockets there. Still, altogether, hundreds of rockets were
shooting skyward in celebration of the attack, just as most Berliners were
searching for words to express their horror. For many German residents in
Neukölln and Kreuzberg, Vogelsang recalled not long ago, that was the
first
time they stopped to wonder who their neighbors really were.

When a broader German public began concerning itself with the parallel
Muslim world arising in its midst, it was primarily thanks to three female
authors, three rebellious Muslim musketeers: Ates, who in addition to
practicing law is the author of "The Great Journey Into the Fire"; Necla
Kelek ("The Foreign Bride"); and Serap Cileli ("We're Your Daughters, Not
Your Honor"). About the same age, all three grew up in Germany; they speak
German better than many Germans and are educated and successful. But they
each had to risk much for their freedom; two of them narrowly escaped
Hatun
Surucu's fate. Necla Kelek was threatened by her father with a hatchet
when
she refused to greet him in a respectful manner when he came home. Seyran
Ates was lucky to survive a shooting attack on the women's shelter that
she
founded in Kreuzberg. And Serap Cileli, when she was 13 years old, tried
to
kill herself to escape her first forced marriage; later she was taken to
Turkey and married against her will, then she returned to Germany with two
children from this marriage and took refuge in a women's shelter to escape
her father's violence. Taking off from their own experiences, the three
women describe the grim lives and sadness of Muslim women in that model
Western democracy known as Germany.

Reading their books brought to mind a forgotten scene from seven years
ago.
Every time my daughter, who was 14 at the time, invited her schoolmates
for
a sleepover, the Muslim fathers would be standing at the door at 10 p.m.
to
pick up their daughters. My wife, an immigrant herself, was indignant. I
didn't like these fathers' dismissive, almost threatening posture, either,
but I was a long way from protesting. Nor did I worry much when my
daughter
told me that one or another girl in her class was not taking biology or
physical education and no longer going on field trips.

For a German of my generation, one of the most holy legacies of the past
was
the law of tolerance. We Germans in particular had no right to force our
highly questionable customs onto other cultures. Later I learned from
occasional newspaper reports and the accounts of friends that certain
Muslim
girls in Kreuzberg and Neukölln went underground or vanished without a
trace. Even those reports gave me no more than a momentary discomfort in
our
upscale district of Charlottenburg.

But the books of the three Muslim dissidents now tell us what Germans like
me didn't care to know. What they report seems almost unbelievable. They
describe an everyday life of oppression, isolation, imprisonment and
brutal
corporal punishment for Muslim women and girls in Germany, a situation for
which there is only one word: slavery.

Seyran Ates estimates that perhaps half of young Turkish women living in
Germany are forced into marriage every year. In the wake of these forced
marriages often come violence and rape; the bride has no choice but to
fulfill the duties of the marriage arranged by her parents and her
in-laws.
One side-effect of forced marriage is the psychological violation of the
men
involved. Although they are the presumed beneficiaries of this custom, men
are likewise forbidden to marry whom they want. A groom who chooses his
own
wife faces threats, too. In such cases, according to Seyran Ates and Serap
Cileli, the groom as well as the bride must go underground to escape the
families' revenge.

Heavily veiled women wearing long coats even in summer are becoming an
increasingly familiar sight in German Muslim neighborhoods. According to
Necla Kelek's research, they are mostly under-age girls who have been
bought - often for a handsome payment - in the Turkish heartland villages
of
Anatolia by mothers whose sons in Germany are ready to marry. The girls
are
then flown to Germany, and "with every new imported bride," Kelek says,
"the
parallel society grows." Meanwhile, Ates summarizes, "Turkish men who wish
to marry and live by Shariah can do so with far less impediment in Berlin
than in Istanbul."

Before the murder of Hatun Surucu there were enough warnings to engage the
Germans in a debate about the parallel society growing in their midst.
There
have been 49 known "honor crimes," most involving female victims, during
the
past nine years - 16 in Berlin alone. Such crimes are reported in the
"miscellaneous" column along with other family tragedies and given a
five-line treatment. Indeed, it's possible that the murder of Hatun Surucu
never would have made the headlines at all but for another piece of news
that stirred up the press. Just a few hundred yards from where Surucu was
killed, at the Thomas Morus High School, three Muslim students soon openly
declared their approval of the murder. Shortly before that, the same
students had bullied a fellow pupil because her clothing was "not in
keeping
with the religious regulations." Volker Steffens, the school's director,
decided to make the matter public in a letter to students, parents and
teachers. More than anything else, it was the students' open praise of the
murder that made the crime against Hatun Surucu the talk of Berlin and
soon
of all Germany.


During 50 years of continuing immigration, the Germans, most of the time
under conservative governments, deluded themselves that Germany was not a
country of immigrants. Suddenly, the obvious could no longer be denied.
Alarmed by the honor killings, Germans began to investigate the parallel
society: a society proud of its isolation; purist and traditional yet, in
its own terms, creative, forward-looking and often contemptuous of the
German host society. The recent riots in France have increased the sense
of
alarm. German politicians and experts lined up in the news media to point
out why such riots are unlikely in Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart or Hamburg.
They claimed that young Muslims in Germany (although up to 50 percent of
them are unemployed) had full access to the German welfare state and were
not isolated in high-rise projects as in the suburbs of Paris. True, there
were some cars set on fire in Berlin, but such incidents were interpreted
as
purely imitation crimes, nothing to be taken seriously. Yet in all these
official declarations you sensed an undertone of panic. Germans'
confidence
that their nation can continue as it had been - integrating immigrants
without an integration policy, remaining true to the traditional German
identity, preserving the reassuring post-1945 chronology of advancing
modernism - is on the line. It turns out that in the heart of German
cities
a society is growing up that turns modernity on its head.

How could this happen? The Turkish writer Aras Oren, who has been living
in
Berlin for 40 years, once told me about one of his first plane trips from
Istanbul to Berlin. He was sitting next to a farmer from Anatolia, who had
evidently never been in an airplane before. The man had no idea what to
make
of the seat belt, the overhead warning lights, the tray table - nor did he
understand his neighbors' explanations. When Oren saw him sitting there,
in
his sandals, with his cap on his head and his prayer beads between his
thick
fingers, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that his fellow
countryman was enclosed in an invisible time capsule he wasn't going to
leave even after he landed in Germany. It made no difference whether the
man
was traveling to Istanbul or to Berlin. This farmer had never seen a city;
he was living in the 18th or 19th century and would carry the customs and
rites of his homeland with him to his living room in Berlin. And he would
cling to them doggedly if the Western democracy where he was living and
working did not make a determined effort to acquaint him with its rules
and
laws. For decades, Oren has been preaching that it has never been so much
a
question of multicultural sensitivity as of turning peasants into city
dwellers.

After 1945, Germany, in the process of reconstruction, needed great
numbers
of workers and initiated recruitment campaigns in the poor countries of
Europe and on the Mediterranean rim: in Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey,
Tunisia and Morocco. The arrival of the 100,000th immigrant worker, in the
1950's, was cause for celebration; the exhausted man climbed out of a
train
at a German station and was immediately handed a check. But from the
beginning, the invitation came with a certain reservation on the part of
the
host and the proviso, often repeated, that Germany was not really a
country
of immigrants, not a melting pot. It was no accident that the foreign
workers were called gastarbeiter, guest workers. Guests are expected to
leave after a while.

The first Muslim immigrants came without their families. They slaved away
repairing streets or working below ground, generally slept in men-only
dormitories and for the most part had the same expectations for themselves
as their employers had for them: they would work for a few years, send as
much of their earnings home as possible and then, if all went well, drive
back to their villages in a used Mercedes with enough capital to buy a
house.

Naturally, things did not work out as expected. The Swiss author Max
Frisch
recognized the contradiction early on: "Workers were called," he wrote,
"and
human beings came." These were people who wanted their families to join
them, people who after a long, hard working life wanted to spend their
remaining years in Germany, people who wished to provide their children
with
an education and a better future in that country. Germany did not give
guest
workers passports or the vote, but it did repay them by incorporating them
into the social system and giving them the opportunity for social
advancement. A result was the rise of a Muslim middle class - relatively
broad in comparison with those in France or in England - contributing
around
39 billion euros annually to the gross national product and billions to
the
national pension funds. But as the German economic miracle came to an end,
the most important condition of this precarious idyll changed. Although
active recruitment was stopped as early as 1973, more and more Turks and
Kurds moved to Germany, in accord with a ruling on reuniting families. And
these parents, wives, husbands and children took their traditional
lifestyle
onto the German streets. Whereas during the first years of immigration,
Turkish women wore Western clothing, they now appeared in long flowery
skirts, hand-knitted jackets and tightly bound head scarves. The plastic
trunks in which they had brought sacks full of dry beans, bulgur wheat and
chickpeas metamorphosed into Turkish grocery stands. And with the food and
the family members, traditional celebrations in the Muslim districts
gradually became more and more like those back home as well. In the back
rooms of the vegetable stands and halal butchers, prayer rooms sprang up,
and in time these rooms became mosques. The German-Turkish author Necla
Kelek sums it up this way in "The Foreign Bride": "The guest workers
turned
into Turks, and the Turks turned into Muslims."

Growing unemployment in Germany (now 4.8 million people, roughly 12
percent
of the work force) hit the Muslim immigrants doubly hard - especially the
youth, who frequently drop out of school before obtaining a diploma.
"Seventy percent of the newcomers," according to Otto Schily, a former
minister of the interior, referring to the period since 2002, "land on
welfare the day of their arrival." Whole enclaves sprang up consisting of
extended families living on the dole.

Necla Kelek asked a group of "import brides" who had been living in
Germany
for years how they had actually prepared for their future in Germany.
Their
answer: incredulous laughter. Prepare? How and for what? "But how can you
stand living here?" Necla Kelek went on. "You don't have anything to do
with
this country, you despise its culture and the way people live here." But
we
have everything we need here, was the answer; we don't need the Germans.

Those with no work and no future were looked after by the mosques, which
increasingly became the most important place of communication. Inside
their
apartments, women resumed their traditional ways - apart from the
"unclean"
who ate pork, drank beer and let their daughters go unchallenged to
parties
and discos. Amid the German refrigerators, televisions and mobile phones,
a
rural culture was celebrating its resurrection, where Turkish was spoken,
where people ate, prayed, fasted and celebrated according to custom, and
where the surrounding local culture of unbelievers and the unclean was
looked down upon. The riddle of the time capsule brought up by Aras Oren
came to an unexpected solution. Some hundred thousand Muslim immigrants
were
able to take up, in Germany, the life of their ancestors in Anatolia.
Indeed, maybe life in Anatolia was meanwhile more modern and secular than
in
the Muslim districts of Berlin.


Many sociologists attribute the growth of a Muslim parallel society to the
discouraging social circumstances of the third Muslim generation of
immigrants - high unemployment, high dropout or failure rates in public
schools. But this explanation is incomplete, to say the least. It turns
out
that the Muslim middle class has long been following the same trend.
Rental
agencies that procure and prepare rooms for traditional Turkish weddings
and
circumcisions are among the most booming businesses in Kreuzberg and
Neukölln.

Cem Ozdemir, a German deputy (of Turkish origin) to the European
Parliament,
tells two different stories concerning ritual circumcision. He himself
grew
up in the south of Germany; his own circumcision three decades ago was an
absolute nightmare. It took place in a gymnasium, where six boys between 4
and 9 years old lay stretched out in six beds, and was performed by the
local Turkish doctor, who took his instruments out of the tool case he'd
brought along and started cutting away. He made a wrong cut on Ozdemir and
sewed up the wound after the local anesthetic had worn off. To drown the
child's deafening cries, a Turkish band started up with traditional music,
and relatives danced in honor of the circumcised.

More recently - in other words, some 30 years later - Ozdemir took part in
another, more modern type of circumcision, this time as a godfather. The
parents had the operation performed by a doctor in a hospital. There was
no
ritual, and the patient went home the same day. Some days later, when the
boy was fully recovered, the parents gave a party that, as Ozdemir
explains,
"really was for the circumcised, and not for the relatives." All the
participants, the boy included, enjoyed themselves.

For Ozdemir, the difference in these two stories showed that Muslim
immigrants can hold onto their rituals by transforming and modernizing
them.
But there is a third story unfolding today in the rented halls of
Kreuzberg
and Neukölln, a story that emphasizes separateness and a communal
rejection
of compromise. The technical standard of the circumcision might be of the
highest order, but it will have to happen in the presence of family and
friends. The father of the circumcised might carry a German passport and
run
a successful company; but he will also worry about how his son's
circumcision is judged by his friends and neighbors.


his conservative, fearful trend is likely to guide the next generation.
For
more than 20 years the Islamic Federation of Berlin, an umbrella
organization of Islamic associations and mosque congregations, has
struggled
in the Berlin courts to secure Islamic religious instruction in local
schools. In 2001 the federation finally succeeded. Since then, several
thousand Muslim elementary-school students have been taught by teachers
hired by the Islamic Federation and paid by the city of Berlin. City
officials aren't in a position to control Islamic religious instruction.
Often the teaching does not correspond to the lesson plan that was
submitted
in German. Citing the linguistic deficiencies of the students, instructors
frequently hold lessons in Turkish or Arabic, often behind closed doors.

Since the introduction of Islamic religious instruction, the number of
girls
that come to school in head scarves has grown by leaps and bounds, and
school offices are inundated with petitions to excuse girls from swimming
and sports as well as class outings.

There are no reliable figures showing how many Muslims living in Germany
regularly attend a mosque; the estimates vary between 40 and 50 percent.
Councilwoman Stefanie Vogelsang stresses that the majority of the mosques
in
Neukölln are as open to the world as they ever were, and that they
continue
to address the needs of integration. But the radical religious communities
are gaining ground. She points to the Imam Reza Mosque, for instance,
whose
home page - until a recent revision - praised the attacks of Sept. 11,
designated women as second-class human beings and referred to gays and
lesbians as animals. "And that kind of thing," she says, fuming, "is still
defended by the left in the name of religious freedom."

This is the least expected provocation of the three author rebels: a
frontal
assault on the relativism of the majority society. In fact, they are
fighting on two fronts - against Islamist oppression of women and its
proponents, and against the guilt-ridden tolerance of liberal
multiculturalists. "Before I can get to the Islamic patriarchs, I first
have
to work my way through these mountains of German guilt," Seyran Ates
complains.

It is women who suffer most from German sensitivity toward Islam. The
three
authors explicitly accuse German do-gooders of having left Muslim women in
Germany in the lurch and call on them not to forget the women locked
behind
the closed windows when they rave about the multicultural districts.

German immigration policies (and liberal multiculturalism) are only one
side
of the problem. The other side is the active refusal of many in the Muslim
community to integrate. It is an illusion to believe that a German - or
French or Dutch - passport and full rights of citizenship are enough to
make
all Muslims loyal citizens. "The attacks in London," Seyran Ates says,
"were
in the eyes of many Muslims a successful slap in the face to the Western
community. The next perpetrators will be children of the third and fourth
immigrant generation, who - under the eyes of well-meaning politicians -
will be brought up from birth to hate Western society." It's only a
question
of time, Ates says, before Berlin experiences attacks like those in London
and Madrid. When we spoke, the riots in France had not yet happened.


It is encouraging that some Muslim residents of Germany are forcefully
calling on Germans to defend our democratic achievements against Muslim
traditionalists and fanatics who incite hatred of democracy under the
banner
of respect for cultural difference. "What I am asking of the Germans,"
Necla
Kelek says, "is nothing more and nothing less than equal treatment. I'm
entitled to the same rights as any German woman."

Merely citing "lessons from the German past," as Germans tend to do, does
not guarantee that these lessons are correct. It is a perversion when, out
of respect for the "otherness" of a different culture, Germans stand aside
and accept the fact that Muslim women in Germany are being subjected to an
archaic code of honor that flouts the fundamental human rights to dignity
and individual freedom. This has nothing to do with Germany or the
"guiding
German culture" that German conservatives want to put through; it has
simply
to do with humanity, with the protection of basic human and civil rights
for
all citizens of all ethnic backgrounds.

Politicians and religious scholars of all faiths are right in pointing out
that there are many varieties of Islam, that Islamism and Islam should not
be confused, that there is no line in the Koran that would justify murder.
But the assertion that radical Islamic fundamentalism and Islam have
nothing
to do with each other is like asserting that there was no link between
Stalinism and Communism. The fact is that disregard for women's rights -
especially the right to sexual self-determination - is an integral
component
of almost all Islamic societies, including those in the West. Unless this
issue is solved, with a corresponding reform of Islam as practiced in the
West, there will never be a successful acculturation. Islam needs
something
like an Enlightenment; and only by sticking hard to their own
Enlightenment,
with its separation of religion and state, can the Western democracies
persuade their Muslim residents that human rights are universally valid.
Perhaps this would lead to the reforms necessary for integration to
succeed.
"We Western Muslim women," Seyran Ates says, "will set off the reform of
traditional Islam, because we are its victims."

Peter Schneider is a writer based in Berlin. This article was translated
from the German by Philip Boehm.

/



x

On Mon, 5 Dec 2005 00:11:48 +0100, "Runge" wrote:

News are NOT travel, they are just news.
Are you trying to frighten us ?

Several hundred lines quoted to add that?

Oh, and nowadays news is usually considered to be singular.

PS. In view of the huge amount of quoting I defend your top-posting in
this case!

Gregory Morrow
gregorymorrowEMERGENCYCANCELLATIONARCHIMEDES@eart hlink.net wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/ma...icle_popular_5

December 4, 2005

The New Berlin Wall

By PETER SCHNEIDER

I haven't got time to plough through over 4000 words. What point were
you trying to make about travel in Europe?
--
Richard J.

The moral of the story is "don't be an independent Muslim woman in
Berlin"...

--
Best
Greg


Richard J. wrote:
Gregory Morrow
gregorymorrowEMERGENCYCANCELLATIONARCHIMEDES@eart hlink.net wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/ma...icle_popular_5

December 4, 2005

The New Berlin Wall

By PETER SCHNEIDER

I haven't got time to plough through over 4000 words. What point were
you trying to make about travel in Europe?
--
Richard J.

OK

"Ken" a écrit dans le message de news:
...
On Mon, 5 Dec 2005 00:11:48 +0100, "Runge" wrote:

News are NOT travel, they are just news.
Are you trying to frighten us ?

Several hundred lines quoted to add that?

Oh, and nowadays news is usually considered to be singular.

PS. In view of the huge amount of quoting I defend your top-posting in
this case!

So nothing to do with travel, then.

"Gregory Morrow" a écrit dans le message de
news: ...
The moral of the story is "don't be an independent Muslim woman in
Berlin"...

--
Best
Greg


Richard J. wrote:
Gregory Morrow
gregorymorrowEMERGENCYCANCELLATIONARCHIMEDES@eart hlink.net wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/ma...icle_popular_5

December 4, 2005

The New Berlin Wall

By PETER SCHNEIDER

I haven't got time to plough through over 4000 words. What point were
you trying to make about travel in Europe?
--
Richard J.

Gregory Morrow wrote:

The moral of the story is "don't be an independent Muslim woman in
Berlin"...

Not just Berlin.

--
David Horne- http://www.davidhorne.net
usenet (at) davidhorne (dot) co (dot) uk
http://homepage.mac.com/davidhornecomposer http://soundjunction.org

On Sun, 04 Dec 2005 23:59:33 +0000, Ken wrote:

On Mon, 5 Dec 2005 00:11:48 +0100, "Runge" wrote:

News are NOT travel, they are just news.
Are you trying to frighten us ?

Several hundred lines quoted to add that?

Oh, and nowadays news is usually considered to be singular.

PS. In view of the huge amount of quoting I defend your top-posting in
this case!

Wow, someone who hasn't plonked him. Can I take a picture?
--
---
DFM - http://www.deepfriedmars.com
---
--

On 4 Dec 2005 20:45:07 -0800, "Gregory Morrow"
wrote:

The moral of the story is "don't be an independent Muslim woman in
Berlin"...

Better to not be Muslim.

What stops these people from simply shedding their religion and being
themselves?
--
---
DFM - http://www.deepfriedmars.com
---
--