Germany faces a growing threat from children raised in Salafist families, according to the country’s domestic intelligence service.
A recent report issued by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), warned that these children are “educated from birth with an extremist world view that legitimizes violence against others and degrades those who aren’t part of their group.”
The radicalization of youngsters is happening faster and earlier, according to Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germany’s BfV.
Frank Jansen, a journalist with Berlin’s centrist paper Der Tagesspiegel, and an expert on extremism in Germany, notes that most of the Salafist minors in the BfV report are younger than eight-years-old. According to Jansen, the report calls these children ticking time bombs.
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"Their education is especially fanatic when militant parents propagate holy war,” Jansen wrote.
Salafism is an Islamist ideology that advocates the replacement of democratic government and law with a theocratic state based on Sharia. Since it first appeared in Germany in 2004, the number of Salafists has nearly tripled to 10,800, with nearly a quarter of them under the age of 26. It is the fastest growing Islamist trend in Germany.
Although not all Salafists advocate violence, the report stresses, the affirmation of violence is an inherent part of Salafist ideology.
Many Salafists are German converts to Islam. Others come from Turkish Muslim families who have lived in Germany since the late 1960’s. The report does not take into account the 1.5 million Muslim refugees who came to Germany from Syria and Afghanistan in 2015-16, according to a BfV spokesman.
Salafism has special allure for marginalized Muslim adults and youth.
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“It’s like an ersatz family for some youths,” said Claudia Dantschke, an expert on Islam and head of the Office for Islamism and Ultra-Nationalism, a Berlin-based NGO. “It’s where they find recognition and security.”
It also appeals to those who feel they are victims of bias in German society. The movement asserts that devotion to Islam enables Muslims to have an identification beyond the nation where they live.
Salafist recruiters are effective because, unlike the imams at most German mosques who preach in Arabic or Turkish, they preach in German, often using teenage slang. The indoctrination and radicalization are also effective because recruitment often takes place in small circles and online, according to the report.
Salafism’s growing infiltration of the Berlin public schools also corresponds with an increase in anti-Semitism in the classrooms, according to an August 2017 study by the American Jewish Committee Office in Berlin.
Anti-Semitism is an essential element in the ideology of the entire Islamist spectrum, according to the BfV report. This propaganda uses age-old stereotypes and prejudices, prevalent from medieval times through the Nazi era.
Conservative members of the German parliament have reacted to the Salafist threat with a call for police monitoring of Muslim children under age 14, the lowest age currently permitted in most German states. Civil rights organizations, however, have voiced strong objections to such surveillance. Humanist Union, a civil rights group, says it is unreasonable to consider children a threat because their ideas and opinions are not fully developed and are subject to change.
“This is not about criminalizing people under the age of 14,” counters Patrick Sensburg, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, “But about warding off significant threats to our country.”
Gotz Nordbruch, co-head of Ufuq, a German-based organization that deals with primary prevention in the realm of religious extremism, objects to the amount of attention that is being focused on Salafist youngsters.
Nordbruch noted that the 24,000 rightwing, neo-Nazi extremists in Germany are more numerous than the Salafists and sworn to a more visible violence. No one would consider investigating their children, he said, pointing out that the debate stigmatizes Muslim youngsters and makes them afraid to talk about the things that are relevant to them.
While acknowledging that the relatively small number of Salafists may be reaching as many as 300,000 people through social media, Nordbruch is working to train teachers to engage constructively with vulnerable children.
“My view is that this exaggerated attention on these kids is actually polarizing society more than necessary,” he said, referring to the calls for police investigation of young Muslim children.