Local DITIB Head Convicted of Incitement

Ger­man media is report­ing that Mustafa Keskin, a local head of the Turk­ish mosque asso­ci­a­tion DITIB, has been indict­ed for incite­ment to hatred based on his insults to Jews and Arme­ni­ans and con­spir­a­cy myths. Accord­ing to the Zeit Online report:

Feb­ru­ary 10, 2022: Mustafa Keskin, the for­mer DITIB chair­man of Göt­tin­gen, has been con­vict­ed of incite­ment of the peo­ple and approval of crim­i­nal acts. The for­mer offi­cial of the Ger­man-Turk­ish mosque asso­ci­a­tion had spread at least five mes­sages on social net­works and the inter­net between 2015 and 2021 that con­tained insults to Jews and Arme­ni­ans and con­spir­a­cy myths. This was announced by the Göt­tin­gen dis­trict court. The court imposed a prison sen­tence of ten months, sus­pend­ed for two years. Keskin must also pay a fine of 1,200 euros in install­ments of 75 euros each to a char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion. Accord­ing to a court spokesman, the defen­dant did not appear at the hear­ing. The ver­dict was issued in the form of a penal­ty order and is not yet legal­ly bind­ing. [Trans­lat­ed by DeepL with edits]

Read the rest here.

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed in March 2021 that Keskin had resigned over accu­sa­tions of anti­semitism. In August 2021, we report­ed that he had been indicted.

The Turk­ish-Islam­ic Union for Reli­gious Affairs, also known as DITIB, man­ages over 900 mosques in Ger­many. The Turk­ish Direc­torate of Reli­gious Affairs (Diyanet) deter­mines the the­o­log­i­cal guide­lines for the imams’ ser­mons, and the Turk­ish con­sulate pays their salaries. As GIOR addi­tion­al­ly report­ed in March 2021, DITIB dis­tanced itself from Keskin fol­low­ing the rev­e­la­tion of his statements.