The Central Council of Muslims responded in unequivocal terms to a hard anti-Islam stance announced by the populist Alternative for Germany party over the weekend.
"For the first time since Hitler's Germany there is a party that once again is discrediting a whole religious community and threatening its existence," Central Council of Muslims chairman Aiman Mazyek told public broadcaster NDR on Monday morning.
He was responding to interviews with the AfD leadership published on Sunday that commit the party to a tough anti-Islam line.
“Islam is a political ideology that is incompatible with the [German] constitution,” AfD spokeswoman Beatrix von Storch told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) in an interview.
While she allowed that “many Muslims belong in Germany,” she insisted that “Islam does not belong in Germany.”
The party's deputy chairman Alexander Gauland went further in comments to the FAS, turning to medical terms and dubbing Islam a “foreign body” in German society. [The Local] Read more
