Buoyed by successes
in three key state elections last month, the AfD called at the weekend for
banning minarets and burqas in the country, warning of the threat of "the
Islamization of Germany".
But in an interview
with state broadcaster NDR, the chairman of the Central Council of Muslims,
Aiman Mazyek, said that for "the first time since Hitler‘s Germany there
is a party that again seeks to discredit an entire religious community and
threatens its existence."
Chancellor Angela
Merkel‘s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and its Bavarian-based Christian
Social Union (CSU) allies led the attack on the AfD from Germany‘s mainstream
political parties.
"The AfD is
becoming more and more radical," Franz Josef Jung, the CDU-CSU
parliamentary group spokesman for churches and religious communities, told the
daily Die Welt.
The anti-Islamic
statements from the AfD were "highly dangerous" and aimed at dividing
the nation, Carsten Sieling, the Social Democratic mayor of the northern German
city of Bremen, told dpa.
Sieling currently
heads the council representing the premiers of Germany‘s 16 states.
In weekend
interviews, AfD deputy leader Beatrix von Storch and the party‘s leader in the
eastern German state of Brandenburg, Alexander Gauland, warned about what they
saw as the dangers of Islam.
"Islam is in itself
a political ideology which is not compatible with the constitution," von
Storch told the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
"We are in
favour of banning minarets, on muezzins as well as full veils," said von Storch
who is also a member of the European Parliament.
"Islam is not
a religion like Catholic or Protestant Christianity, but instead is always
intellectually associated with a takeover of the state," Gauland told the
newspaper.
"That is why
the Islamization of Germany is a danger," said Gauland, who described
Islam a "a foreign body" in Germany.
However, Mazyek
insisted: "This is not an anti-Islam course, (but) an anti-democratic
course."
Source: Europe Online