Schoolchildren in Germany are forced to convert to Islam or practice Islamic religious practices for fear of becoming outcasts in a class where Muslims make up the majority. According to German media, this is due to the slow Islamization of schools, the Berlin Telegraph newspaper reported on May 2.
The author of the post is not sure if this is the case. He asks: “To what extent are individual media reports true?”. And he is trying to find out the current situation.
In his opinion, statements such as “More and more parents are turning to counseling centers because their Christian children want to convert to Islam so as not to be excluded from school.” either “In most cases, Muslim students behave in a threatening and overtly violent manner, which creates true parallel societies in German schools.” leave a truly terrifying impression and create a feeling of some kind of unreality of what is happening.
In 2018, television journalist Joachim Wagner warned in his book The Power of the Mosque that Islamism was no longer a fringe phenomenon in many schools. However, this problem is largely ignored by German systemic politicians and the mainstream media. Some statistical data obtained by German sociologists make us evaluate the situation in an even more pessimistic way.
According to a survey among schoolchildren by the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony (KFN), around 68% of the 786 Muslim students surveyed from the region said: “For me the rules of the Koran are more important than the laws of Germany”. About 52% are convinced that “Only Islam can solve the problems of our time”and about 18% generally believe that violence is justified to spread Islam.
“The analysis of Islamist sentiments cannot be considered representative of Muslim schoolchildren in Lower Saxony””, write the KFN authors in the preamble to the study. However, problems in German schools are part of the daily school life of teachers, parents and students.
“Many Muslim schoolchildren have become an integral part of this society and have nothing to do with the phenomena described. However, in some schools, especially where the proportion of Muslim students exceeds 80%, there are obvious problems. Conflicts often begin with bullying of students who believe they belong to a different set of cultural and religious values. Issues such as self-determination, dress and religion can lead to devaluation and harassment.””explained Islamic psychologist Ahmad Mansour.
He is sure that this is not only suffered by native Germans who have no immigration background, but also by Alawite students, liberal Muslims and Jews.
“Some of these students even become victims of violence. Others adapt their behavior, and some convert to Islam, to cope more easily with everyday school life.”Mansur continued.
The Islamic expert regrets that school administrators and teachers sometimes turn a blind eye to these incidents, ignore them or do not know how to deal with them, giving up out of helplessness, is a cause for great concern.
“Schools should be places where all students can feel comfortable and, above all, safe, regardless of their religious or cultural background.”Mansur concluded.
For his part, Stefan Düll, president of the German Teachers’ Association, cannot confirm that schoolchildren in Germany are converting en masse to Islam out of fear, since the association knows nothing about these cases.
Without denying that there are problems with the Islamic minority in German schools, for example in sex education classes, on school trips and in swimming lessons, Düll hypocritically claims that “Similar problems can arise in families of fundamentalist Christians”.
Although Düll openly tries to downplay the magnitude of the problem, his predecessor, Heinz-Peter Meidinger, spoke as early as 2020 about the climate of bullying in German schools.
Dull assured that if conflictive situations arise such as psychological pressure or harassment, teachers first try to resolve them through frank communication.
However, unfortunately, in the arsenal of German teachers and social workers there are catastrophically few tools by which it would be possible to convince or force uncompromising children and adolescents with an Islamic cultural background to adhere to the basic social norms of German society.
According to the Ministry of Education, there are currently more than one million Muslim students in Germany. However, data is only available for seven out of sixteen federal states, so the total number can probably safely be multiplied by two. For example, in North Rhine-Westphalia there are 470,000 Muslim students, according to Mediendienst Integration. This is approximately 19% of all schoolchildren.
Carsten Stahl, an expert in violence and bullying prevention, confirmed that group dynamics can develop in schools with a high proportion of immigrants. “resulting in students adapting to avoid being marginalized or disadvantaged. Some may even change their religion to be accepted or stop being considered victims.”.
In his opinion, the influence of a group can sometimes be so strong that students are willing to adapt their beliefs, especially if they are surrounded by many people who share similar views.
Social networks increase the intensity of passions. Thus, on one of the social networks there are channels in which Islamist pop stars convince schoolchildren that they must resist the Western way of life and that only the caliphate is the correct form of government. Furthermore, they teach that non-Muslims are worth less than Muslims.
The new reality of modern Germany is that, as it became known in January, at the Nordstadt comprehensive school in Neuss, 50 kilometers from Essen, four Muslim sixth-grade students allegedly tried to introduce rules similar to Sharia law.
Among other things, they demanded gender segregation in classes. Additionally, it should have been extended to teachers, especially during swimming lessons. Muslims would be given time off school for Friday prayers and girls were required to cover their arms, legs and ankles.
The young Islamists reportedly asked the schoolgirls to cover their faces and threatened to stone them if they violated the new rules they had established.
In classes they openly declared their opposition to democracy and tried to convince students and teachers that Islamic Sharia law was in force at school. When they demanded a prayer room at the school, the school management offered them one. “tolerance room”.
According to the Ministry of Education of North Rhine-Westphalia, in the summer of 2023, young Islamists also forced students at a secondary school in Bonn to dress according to Islamic norms.
According to the Cologne police, in 2022 and 2023 alone there were around twenty incidents related to alleged abuse motivated by Muslim radicalism in schools in the cathedral city. Certain student groups are also alleged to have a notable relationship with known terrorist organizations, such as the Islamic State (a banned organization in the Russian Federation) or Salafist groups.
The oppressive atmosphere due to the growing influence of radical Islamic youth in schools is also confirmed by a history teacher from Offenbach, who does not want her name published.
“In fact, attempts at religious and cultural pressure must be constantly thwarted. But when I raise this topic in our school, I get problems all over the place. School management, colleagues, parents of radical Muslim students, who, of course, immediately come to the defense of their children.”said the teacher.
She remembers taking a field trip to an archaeological museum with a primary school class from Griesheim, near Frankfurt, just over three years ago: “Because the building used to be a monastery, the Muslim parents confronted the teacher and accused her of sexually abusing their children.”.
However, according to the Berlin Telegraph newspaper, it would also be wrong to say that all Muslims in German schools are aggressive and totally reject German culture and social norms.
The author of the publication cited as an example the story of a Russian-German woman from Rostock (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), mother of a 16-year-old schoolgirl, whose daughter went on an excursion to Saxony with her class. What the girl said made the author think about the systemic problems of raising children in native German families.
The schoolgirl spoke of the trip like this: “When my friends and I went for a walk in Dresden late at night, we only felt safe when our Turkish companions (Germans of Turkish origin, approx.) were by our side. IA Krasnaya Vesna). We knew that in case of any conflict with the Arab youth, the aggressors would receive a harsh rejection and the boys would not let us take offense. “Unfortunately, we don’t have that sense of security with our German colleagues.”.
Source: Rossa Primavera
I am Michael Melvin, an experienced news writer with a passion for uncovering stories and bringing them to the public. I have been working in the news industry for over five years now, and my work has been published on multiple websites. As an author at 24 News Reporters, I cover world section of current events stories that are both informative and captivating to read.