Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution as an Instrument for Character Assassination
To the OPC and not a few CSU politicians, Muslims are seeking to gain power and influence at the expense of Christians. “Clearly” a case for the OPC. But Muslims see it differently. Many consider they are discriminated against by being denied opportunities available to Christians in a nation with a constitution that grants equal rights. According to the U.S. State Department's 1998 human rights report, a mayor in the state of Hessia forbade 100 Muslim families from converting a building into a mosque. No mosque will be built there, he told them, until a Christian Church is permitted in Mecca. Perhaps the mayor believed he was trying to prevent infiltration by Muslims. But Germany is not Saudi Arabia; it is a democracy. Those who advocate intolerance are the first to call on the OPC to stigmatize religious minorities.
The conflict between Muslims and Christians is an old one with deep roots. Violence between them is part of history. And, as any historian will tell you, the Christian massacres, the purges to root out heretics, and even the Crusades were not inspired by religious fervour, but driven by wealth and power. And those who directed the killings made full use of the intelligence resources at their command.
The cross-pollination between the state and the established churches compounds the problem. In modern Germany, the idea of putting religious competitors under surveillance first came from apologists from the Catholic and Lutheran Churches. In 1985, Lutheran priest Wilhelm Haack demanded that the OPC be “made sensitive to the problems of sects.” Ten years later, the President of the Lutheran Church in this country called on the OPC to place the Church of Scientology under surveillance. The measure was adopted soon after, in large part at the urging of a Bavarian Minister of the Interior who is also on the Lutheran synod.