In Berlin, activists fight Muslims' anti-Semitism

BERLIN, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- Young Muslims living in Germany are increasingly anti-Semitic, experts say, but a group of activists from Berlin, some of them Muslims, is trying to change that.

Aycan Demirel points to a photograph of a crying woman clutching her child. The woman's hair is in disarray; the building behind her is demolished.

"What do we see here?" he asks a group of eighth-graders at a school in Berlin's immigrant-dominated Moabit district. The children's families predominantly hail from the Middle East and Turkey.

"It looks like a war," says a girl. "Maybe the Gaza Strip or Lebanon," adds a boy wearing a red sweater. "No, no," says another child. "She's Turkish."

And he's right. Demirel is showing the pupils a magazine cover picturing the 2003 attacks on two synagogues in Istanbul that killed 24 people, injuring 240 more. Later, he reads aloud a comment harshly condemning the attacks and asks the students who might have said it.

"Maybe a Jew," replies one teenager. "Or someone paid by the Jews," says another.

When Demirel reveals that the person was Turkey's grand mufti -- the country's highest Islamic authority -- an awkward silence grips the classroom.

It's exactly this reaction Demirel, who emigrated to Germany from Turkey 20 years ago, wants. Demirel has been fighting anti-Semitism for many years. He said he was shocked when he encountered outspoken anti-Semitism among youths in his Kreuzberg neighborhood, Berlin's famous multicultural district. Together with like-minded colleagues, Demirel founded the Kreuzberg Initiative against Anti-Semitism, or Kiga, which is developing concepts and programs to tackle anti-Semitism in multiethnic schools.

Efforts like Kiga's are desperately needed, experts say.

"Anti-Semitism among German youths -- whether they have a German or a migrant background -- is an urgent problem and needs to be tackled resolutely," Wolfgang Benz, who heads the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at Berlin's Technical University, told United Press International in a telephone interview Tuesday.

There are very few studies on anti-Semitism among Germany's 4-million-strong Muslim population but polls indicate that more than 20 percent of young Muslims have anti-Semitic views. (The numbers for ethnic Germans are similarly high.)

For nearly all of them, the source of friction is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

"When the Middle East conflict heats up, then we are feeling the effects here in Berlin," Demirel said.

Instead of criticizing Israel's foreign policy, Jews in general become the target of attacks based on selective facts, conspiracy theories and ugly stereotypes.

In one break, a 15-year-old named Taher -- who Demirel said is a rare and extreme case -- questioned the Holocaust and indicated the Jews had sparked World War II and their own deportation by raising prices too much.

Most of the children have never met a Jewish person, they know very little about the Holocaust and very few of them have been to a concentration camp memorial site.

Demirel says they pick up anti-Semitic stereotypes from a combination of outside influences, including peer groups, family and the media. The youths watch Arabic television such as the Hezbollah-affiliated TV channel Al-Manar.

While it's easy to condemn their anti-Semitic views, the children's reality is much more complicated than it seems at first glance.

In Germany and across Europe, young Muslims don't feel accepted. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States, Europe has been gripped by growing Islamophobia that puts Muslims under general suspicion.

"The migrant kids here call Turkey, Syria or Lebanon their home -- countries where they have been maybe two times in their life," Demirel said. "In Germany, where they are born, they feel sidelined."

As a result, they over-identify with a far-away conflict and are open in their hatred toward Jews.

Demirel and his colleagues try to counter this development.

During the workshop in the Moabit school, they told children that the Istanbul attackers, militants with ties to al-Qaida, killed many innocent bystanders, including Muslims. They told the story of a Muslim consul on the Mediterranean island of Rhodos, then administered by Turkey, who saved dozens of Jews from being sent to concentration camps by granting them Turkish passports. And they talked about the creation of Israel and the Middle East conflict by conveying facts instead of hearsay.

Whenever there is someone like Taher, "you have to tackle his stereotypes but you have to stay cool," Demirel said.

"It doesn't help if I simply silence or out-argue him, because I can't force him to question himself," he added. "He has to make this step by himself. I can only present him with alternative views that he doesn't get in his environment."

Demirel's colleague Yasmin Kassar admitted that the children's attitudes don't completely change after a single workshop. "But very often, they start questioning them," she said.

Kassar knows this from experience. Born to a German mother and a Syrian father, the 29-year-old said she grew up with anti-Jewish rhetoric and started to question them as a teenager. During her master's studies at Berlin's Free University, in 2008, she interned with Kiga and has worked for the group since.

Kassar and Demirel form a powerful educational team. Their migrant background lends them an authority and credibility that ethnic Germans have a hard time acquiring with the migrant children.

"In my case, they see a Muslim who has nothing against Jews. That's startling for them at first but it makes it easier for them to question their views." Demirel said.

Kiga has received state funding but there are questions whether aid money will keep flowing beyond this year in times of strained budgets, Demirel said. Observers say they hope Kiga can continue its good work, which has been emulated all over the country.

Andrea Hoffmann, who teaches German and history at the Moabit school, said she was surprised by how engaged and alert the students were during the Kiga workshop.

Demirel and Kassar weren't so surprised. They know that the migrant children are eager to learn and to get ahead in life. Their anti-Semitic opinions are not carved in stone. They can be changed and often are.

Mohamad, 15, a bright boy whose family hails from Syria, during the workshop challenged Taher's cliches.

"There are good Jews and bad Jews, just like there are good Muslims and bad Muslims," he said.