Muslim immigrants seeking German nationality will have to pass a not-so-delicately devised test, while the German government is having answer to some tricky questions of its own, writes Rania Jaafar While students' riots in Paris continue a long tradition in European cities of anti-war campaigns and demonstrations, mass protests and political strikes, strikes of this kind in Germany are rare, if not non-existent, and people are usually motivated by solely economic reasons. Last week, however, Iraq and Guantanamo were top stories in the German press, following the latest photo releases of bloodstained naked Iraqis in Abu Ghraib. Der Spiegel published a selection of photographs under the heading "Archive of horror", and in online-editions of newspapers, images of half-naked Palestinians in the wake of Israel's pact with the United States and Britain to kidnap prisoners from Jericho were provided. Criticism was rare, however. Germany's increasingly neo-liberal paper Die Zeit is replacing serious analysis with blogs verging on the absurd. Titles such as: "Being a terrorist: the enemy of the world" by semi-professional journalists, or German laywomen, students mostly, who while studying in Egypt write in daily or weekly weblogs about life in the country, provide adequate indication of the general tone and approach to the subject. For the past three weeks, the news dominating national politics columns in the German press is the introduction and implementation of the highly controversial "disposition test" for Muslim immigrants, initiated by the governing Christian Democratic Party (CDU) and the CSU but rejected by the Social Democrats and the Greens. It was the opposition leftist newspaper Die Tageszeitung ( taz ) which first published an outline of the test, which Baden Wèrttemberg has implemented since January, and which is designed specifically for Muslim immigrants who want to become German nationals. The questions can obviously be interpreted as unconstitutional, especially because they target the alleged convictions of Muslims in particular and touch on sensitive issues such as the freedom of opinion and religion. Questions in the "conviction test", which is also called "immigration test" or "communication guide" seem to have been taken from the "Xenophobe's guide to Arabs", in which ignorance and prejudices about the neo-global reality in the Arab world make up the main body of questions, and current debates in the media are included without further reflection or adaptation. Notoriously, the test includes questions on terrorism, democracy, women in Islam, gender equality, the education of young girls as well as homosexuality. Other tests -- said to apply to non-Muslim immigrants as well -- have been criticised by intellectuals and academics for being too difficult and complicated on subjects many Germans and native-speakers would be hard pressed to answer including the German constitution, the party system, events during World War II, elections, the European parliament, the national anthem, and German scientists who have revolutionised the fields of physics and medicine. Following the torture and kidnapping of German-Lebanese citizen Khaled El-Masry from Macedonia at the end of December 2003 by US personnel, the question of Germany's ambiguous role in the Iraq war has been raised. The former German government under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in particular has been heavily criticised for its hypocrisy during the war. El-Masry said that he was held for a year in a US military prison in Afghanistan and was interrogated by German secret agents. According to the Washington Post former minister of Interior Otto Schily had been informed about the kidnapping by the US ambassador and kept silent. This tactic of kidnapping suspects in foreign countries and carry them off to another one is called "rendition". At the beginning of March The New York Times reported that German secret agents supplied American forces with Saddam Hussein's defence plan for Baghdad, apparently in the form of a handwritten sketch. It seems BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) -- German Intelligence Service and secret service agents -- have been operating in the Arab world during the war and ever since. According to tagessschau.de US agents in Germany kidnapped individuals -- most of Arab and Muslim origin -- shortly after or shortly before business trips by German politicians. It is said that the German government tried to polish its allegedly anti-American image in the media after they said "no" to the war on Iraq and attempted to improve relations with the US. The German press has been reporting extensively on demands by the Liberal democrats, the Greens, and the Left Party -- all opposition parties -- to call up an investigation committee on these unconstitutional operations and secret arrangements of the former German government. Minister of Interior, Wolfgang Schöuble (CDU) and other neo-conservative politicians in Germany have supported torture of alleged terrorists to get information on future attacks. However, public criticism on such verbal violations of human rights and the prohibition of torture has remained shockingly mild. A number of interesting critical essays and interviews have appeared in taz, the leftist German newspaper in Berlin. Kai Hafez, professor of mass communication in Erfurt wrote an essay about Hamas and the consequences of the pro-Israeli politics of Angela Merkel and the CDU/CSU. Hafez writes that Germany risks losing its alleged position as an honest broker -- earned after the Oslo Peace accords -- if it continues to creep closer towards US imperial policies by unconditionally supporting Israel and demanding that Hamas accept the existence of Israel. According to Hafez, Hamas can legitimately demand that Israel accept the existence of a Palestinian state before entering any negotiations and it is likely that Hamas will be able to implement a diplomatically changed and democratic Islamism in Palestine. Israel's tactic has been to delay all essential issues of a peace agreement such as the question of Jerusalem, water supplies, the settlements, and the withdrawal from its troops from the West Bank.
