Multicultural neighbourhoods in Berlin are now home to Islamic imams giving marriage counselling to underage girls following a mass influx of Palestinians and other hardline Muslim migrants, an integration officer has claimed.
Güner Balci, a Turkish-born integration officer for the Berlin borough of Neukölln, told news magazine Der Spiegel that she has moved out of the neighbourhood where she grew up in the German capital so that her “daughter could develop freely” after the area became a hotbed for Islamism.
Balci said that when she grew up in Neukölln, there was only one mosque, but now around 30 are located in the area, many of which she claimed preach adherence to hardline Islam.
“I know of imams who offer marriage counselling for 14-year-old girls and find it acceptable for a man to take a second wife. If you look behind the structures, you quickly see: Ah, one mosque is financed from Qatar, the other has connections to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and so on,” she told the paper.
Balci, who is tasked with helping migrants integrate into Berlin society, said that while Neukölln was never “particularly woman-friendly”, the area has seen “culturally and religiously determined gender separation” be established and enforced by clan criminals and radical imams.
She said that it “began with the influx of Palestinian families from Lebanon” in the 1980s and has only continued to grow since.
“They brought with them a very patriarchal culture. The girls in this milieu were almost invisible; you actually only saw them when they took their younger siblings to kindergarten or went shopping with their mothers,” Balci said.
The Berlin integration officer said that politicians often fail to recognise what is happening before it’s too late to stop the process of transformation. Sometimes the government is even complicit, she said, claiming that a radical Shiite mosque in Neukölln is currently constructing a daycare centre with state funding.
“At the front, you can see women wearing black veils coming out – and a daycare centre is now to be built at the back? I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Balci warned.
It comes amid increasing concern over the failure of Muslim migrant communities to assimilate into European cultures.
According to a French government report published in May, the Muslim Brotherhood network specifically targets migrant communities to ensure adherence to strict Islamic practices like wearing the veil or observing Ramadan fasting.
The intelligence report found that the Muslim Brotherhood installs trained operatives in community roles ranging from local shops, sports groups, private education services, to even dating sites, with the purpose of “supervising the life of the Muslim”.
Additionally, the French government warned that the Islamic network has spent decades on a “Western conquest strategy” of infiltrating government institutions across the European Union to subvert democracy with the ultimate goal of instituting Sharia law. Germany was cited by the report as another key area of operation for the Muslim Brotherhood, given its history as one of the “first lands of establishment of the movement” in Europe.
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