Berlin to Establish Permanent Expert Commission on Anti-Muslim Racism After Hearing Testimony from Leader of Group Tied to Muslim Brotherhood

Ger­man media is report­ing that on 5 Octo­ber 2022, the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee of the Berlin House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives announced it will estab­lish a per­ma­nent pan­el of experts mon­i­tor­ing anti-Mus­lim racism in the Ger­man cap­i­tal. Accord­ing to an arti­cle by Tagesspiegel:

The state of Berlin will have a per­ma­nent pan­el of experts on anti-Mus­lim racism. This was announced by Jus­tice Sen­a­tor Lena Kreck (Left) on Thurs­day in the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives. [Trans­lat­ed from Ger­man original.]

Read the rest here.

Jus­tice Sen­a­tor Lena Kreck from Berlin’s rul­ing Left Par­ty said the pan­el would be tasked with ana­lyz­ing struc­tur­al dis­crim­i­na­tion of Mus­lims in the Ger­man cap­i­tal and rec­om­mend­ing pol­i­cy changes. The pan­el would be a con­tin­u­a­tion of an exist­ing six-mem­ber com­mis­sion that was set up in 2021. Over the past year and a half, it ana­lyzed issues per­tain­ing to anti-Mus­lim racism in Berlin, close­ly coop­er­at­ing with civ­il soci­ety actors and social sci­en­tists. Accord­ing to the arti­cle, Kreck also spoke in favor of abol­ish­ing Berlin’s neu­tral­i­ty law, which large­ly pro­hibits the wear­ing of reli­gious sym­bols in parts of the pub­lic ser­vice, espe­cial­ly in the judi­cia­ry and edu­ca­tion. This was pro­posed as part of an expert hear­ing before the Berlin Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee, where Ger­man activist Lydia Nofal was giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to make sev­er­al pol­i­cy rec­om­men­da­tions, includ­ing cre­at­ing guide­lines for the State Crim­i­nal Police on how to deal with Islam­o­pho­bic crimes and abol­ish­ing said neu­tral­i­ty law. Nofal is head of Insaan, a Mus­lim advo­ca­cy group pre­vi­ous­ly under sur­veil­lance by the Ger­man domes­tic intel­li­gence agency and known to have his­tor­i­cal ties to the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (GMB) in Germany.

In April 2021, the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed that the Berlin com­mis­sion on anti-Mus­lim racism includ­ed two indi­vid­u­als with close ties to the GMB and the Hamas sup­port infra­struc­ture in Ger­many. In Sep­tem­ber 2022, the GIOR report­ed that the com­mis­sion had pub­lished its first set of pol­i­cy rec­om­men­da­tions to curb Islamophobia.