BERLIN: The German government on Wednesday banned a Muslim group, accusing it of violating human rights and the country’s democratic values, and conducted raids against two other Muslim groups across the country.
The Interior Ministry said the organization which it banned, Muslim Interaktiv, represented a threat to the country’s constitutional order by promoting antisemitism and discrimination against women and sexual minorities.
The group is known for a savvy online presence used to appeal especially to young Muslims who may feel alienated or discriminated against in Germany’s Christian majority society.
The German government argued the group was a particular threat because it promoted Islam as the sole model for the social order and maintained that Islamic law should take precedence over German law in regulating life in the Muslim community, including in areas such as the treatment of women.
The German government has in recent years been acting more forcefully against extremism, and banned several extremist groups – including several far-right and Muslim organizations. The crackdown comes after a spate of attacks, both by Muslim extremists and far-right groups plotting to overturn the country’s order.
“We will respond with the full force of the law to anyone who aggressively calls for a caliphate on our streets, incites hatred against the state of Israel and Jews in an intolerable manner, and despises the rights of women and minorities,” German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said.
The ministry also announced that investigations were underway against two other Muslim groups, Generation Islam and Reality Islam.
“We will not allow organizations such as Muslim Interaktiv to undermine our free society with their hatred, despise our democracy, and attack our country from within,” the minister added.
The ministry said in its statement that the group “is particularly opposed to gender equality and freedom of sexual orientation and gender identity.”
“This expresses an intolerance that is incompatible with democracy and human rights,” it added.
Authorities on Wednesday searched seven premises in the northern city of Hamburg, and also conducted searches in 12 premises in Berlin and the central German state of Hesse in connection with the other two groups under investigation.
The government said Muslim Interaktiv sought to indoctrinate as many people as possible and “thus create permanent enemies of the constitution in order to continuously undermine the constitutional order.”
The interior state minister of Hamburg, Andy Grote, where the group was especially active, applauded the ban and called it a blow against “modern TikTok Islamism,” according to German news agency dpa.
In a recent report, the domestic intelligence service of Hamburg wrote that in their online posts and videos, the leaders of Muslim Interaktiv addressed socially relevant topics in order to exploit them “to portray a supposedly ongoing attitude of rejection by politics and society in Germany toward the entire Muslim community,” dpa reported.
Ahmad Mansour, a well-known activist against Muslim extremism in Germany, wrote on X that “it is right and necessary that Interior Minister Dobrindt has banned this group.”
Muslim Interaktiv, Mansour wrote, “is part of an Islamist network that has become significantly more aggressive and dangerous in recent months. They carry out intimidation campaigns, specifically mobilize young people, and attempt to indoctrinate them with Islamist ideology.”
The online presence of Muslim Interaktiv seemed to have been taken down on Wednesday morning and the group could not be reached for comment.
Germany cracks down on Muslim groups viewed as threats to its constitutional order
https://arab.news/p7j6a
Germany cracks down on Muslim groups viewed as threats to its constitutional order
- Interior Ministry: Muslim Interaktiv represents a threat to the country’s constitutional order by promoting antisemitism and discrimination against women and sexual minorities
- The group is known for a savvy online presence used to appeal especially to young Muslims
Italian fruit detective racing to save forgotten varieties
- The Italian agronomist-turned-detective seeks descriptions of bygone local fruits in centuries-old diaries or farming documents, and sets out to find them
CITTA DI CASTELLO: Isabella Dalla Ragione hunts in abandoned gardens and orchards for forgotten fruits, preserving Italy’s agricultural heritage and saving varieties which could help farmers withstand the vagaries of a changing climate.
The 68-year-old’s collection of apples, pears, cherries, plums, peaches and almonds, grown using methods of old, are more resilient to the climate shifts and extremes seen increasingly frequently in the southern Mediterranean.
The Italian agronomist-turned-detective seeks descriptions of bygone local fruits in centuries-old diaries or farming documents, and sets out to find them.
Others she identifies by matching them to fruits in Renaissance paintings, where they often appear in depictions of the Madonna and Child.
Of the 150 or so varieties collected from Tuscany, Umbria, Emilia-Romagna and Marche and grown by her non-profit Archaeologia Arborea foundation, the small, round Florentine pear is among Dalla Ragione’s favorites.
“I’d found it described in documents from the 1500s, but I’d never seen it and believed it lost,” she told AFP.
“Then 15 years ago, in the mountains between Umbria and Marche, I found a tree almost in the middle of the woods,” thanks to an elderly local woman who told her about it by chance.
While old varieties are flavoursome, most disappeared from markets and tables after the Second World War as Italy’s agricultural system modernized.
- ‘Urgent’ -
Italy is a large fruit producer. Its pear production ranks first in Europe and third globally, but just five modern varieties — none of which are Italian — account for over 80 percent of its output.
“There used to be hundreds, even thousands, of varieties because each region, each valley, each place had its own,” Dalla Ragione said as she showed off wicker baskets full of fruit, stored in a little church near the orchard.
Modern markets instead demand large crops of fruits that can be harvested quickly, easily stored and last a long time.
But as global warming makes for an increasingly challenging climate, experts say a broader range of plant genetic diversity is key.
“Heirloom varieties... are able to adapt to climate change, to more severe water shortages, to extremes of cold and heat,” said Mario Marino, from the climate change division of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
“However, a much more severe disease arrives, one that improved varieties are normally more resistant to... and the local varieties perish, or perhaps don’t produce fruit,” he told AFP.
The answer lies in creating new varieties by crossing modern and old-fashioned ones, he said.
Marino, who advises Dalla Ragione’s foundation, said her work was “urgent” because “preserving one’s heritage means preserving the land, preserving biodiversity... and (allowing) us to use that DNA for new genetic resources.”
- Oral testimonies -
Researchers can access the collection, while Dalla Ragione also recreates historical gardens which can host recovered varieties as part of an EU-funded project.
“We don’t do all this research and conservation work out of nostalgia, out of romanticism,” she said as she harvested pink apples from her trees in the hilly hamlet of San Lorenzo di Lerchi in Umbria.
“We do it because when we lose variety, we lose food security, we lose diversity and the system’s ability to respond to various changes, and we also lose a lot in cultural terms.”
Dalla Ragione has sought answers to fruit mysteries in monastery orchards, the gardens of nobility and common allotments. She has pored over local texts from the 16th and 17th centuries.
She once traced a pear to a village in southern Umbria after reading about it in the diary of a musical band director.
But one of her richest sources on how best to cultivate such varieties has been oral testimonies — and as the last generation of farmers that grew the crops die, much local knowledge is lost.
That has made it difficult to know how to divide her time between researching and looking for a new variety, though she has learnt the hard way that the urgency “is always to save it.”
“In the past if I’ve delayed, thinking ‘I’ll do it next year’, I’ve found the plant has since gone.”
