German Group Hopes for EU Referendum on Minarets

Just weeks after Swiss voters banned minarets in the country, a German right-wing group is hoping to use a new European Union law to hold a minaret referendum across the 27 member bloc. Last month, the Swiss voted to ban minarets. Now, it may be Europe's turn.

Just a few weeks after Swiss citizens decided in a referendum to ban the further construction of minarets, a right-wing group in Germany is running a similar anti-mosque campaign to gain votes ahead of the state election in May 2010. According to an article in the German daily Die Welt, the North Rhine-Westphalia group Pro NRW -- an outgrowth of the anti-Muslim right-wing group Pro Cologne -- hopes to unite other European right-wing associations behind the campaign against Muslim prayer houses.

"We will run a state election campaign that is decidedly critical of Islam. We will use the posters from the Swiss minaret ban," Markus Wiener, general secretary of Pro NRW, told Die Welt. "We see the construction of mosques as an aggressive and powerful symbol of a Muslim conquest," he added (...)