Entrance to mosque in Germany bricked up

In an apparent Islamophobic incident, the entrance to a mosque in a small town in Germany was bricked up last week.

As Muslims in Parchim gathered to offer prayers last Friday, they found the door to the mosque jammed with concrete blocks and anti-Muslim flyers stuck on them. “You call yourselves believers. We call you invaders,” one of the flyers read.



Another flyer contained lines from a poem recited in public by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “The mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the faithful our soldiers”.

The incident, which left the Muslim community shaken, is being investigated by police. It is suspected that a far-Right group is responsible for the vandalism. The small town of 19,000 people only holds 150 Muslims, who do not have a purpose-built mosque. Prayers are held in a disused transformer station which has no minaret and no call to prayer is given. The makeshift mosque was under renovation at the time of the incident.

The blocks were removed from the mosque entrance within a few hours and someone put up a new flyer in answer to the ones left by those who had blocked the door. “Walls are there to be torn down,” it read. “Never give up hope. Be strong and stay happy.”



“What’s next?” Dirk Flörke, the mayor of Parchim, told the local Parchimer Zeitung newspaper. “Integration can only succeed if we all talk to each other. And we are now faced with the task of integrating the refugees.”

The Muslim community is made up of mostly Syrians and Turkish Kurds and includes both new comers seeking asylum and families who have lived there for 20 years. The state is due to hold regional elections at the weekend, with the far-Right Alternative for Germany neck-and-neck with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) in the polls.

This article originally appeared on Telegraph.