DITIB Local Board Members Made Anti-Semitic and Anti-Constitutional Facebook Posts

Ger­man media is report­ing that local board mem­bers of a Turk­ish-Ger­man mosque orga­ni­za­tion con­nect­ed to the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment have made anti-Semit­ic and anti-con­sti­tu­tion­al Face­book posts. Accord­ing to the NDR report:

Novem­ber 10, 2021: Once again, DITIB board mem­bers are attract­ing atten­tion with anti-Semit­ic and anti-con­sti­tu­tion­al Face­book posts. The state asso­ci­a­tion regrets the com­ments and dis­tances itself. It is the state­ments of indi­vid­u­als. But the Face­book post­ings by board mem­bers of the DITIB mosques in Osnabrück, Hildesheim and Hanover raise ques­tions. Researchers at the Göt­tin­gen Insti­tute for Democ­ra­cy Research found the posts dur­ing ran­dom checks on social net­works. Polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Mar­vin Hild eval­u­at­ed the pub­licly acces­si­ble pro­files for his research. In total, there were 34 user accounts that are or were vis­i­ble to every­one. These were pri­vate accounts of men who, accord­ing to the web­sites of the DITIB com­mu­ni­ties, belong to the extend­ed exec­u­tive boards. Polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Hild explains: “We looked in par­tic­u­lar for Islamist-anti­de­mo­c­ra­t­ic state­ments, clear­ly anti-Semit­ic state­ments and those that can be attrib­uted to Turk­ish right-wing extrem­ism. The democ­ra­cy researcher found six pro­files. [Trans­lat­ed by DeepL with edits]

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The Turk­ish-Islam­ic Union for Reli­gious Affairs (DITIB) man­ages over 900 mosques in Ger­many. At the same time, the Turk­ish  Direc­torate of Reli­gious Affairs  (Diyanet)  deter­mines the the­o­log­i­cal guide­lines for imams’ ser­mons, and the Turk­ish con­sulate pays their salaries. DITIB, how­ev­er, main­tains that it is inde­pen­dent of the Turk­ish state.  Ger­man politi­cians have sought to have imams trained in Ger­many instead of sent over from Turkey, in part to reduce Turkey’s influ­ence in the country.