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Austrian Muslims Shocked At Mosque Destruction
VIENNA, March 28 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A community of Austrian Muslims expressed dismay Wednesday at the destruction of a makeshift mosque which local authorities tore down saying it had been illegally constructed.
News agencies said the mosque was built without authorization in 1998 in a storage hall, and the local municipality had notified the Muslim community that it would be destroyed if not vacated within two months, a local authority spokesman said.
Local Muslims ignored the warning, and last week 200 of them held a demonstration calling for the destruction order to be withdrawn, said Muslim community spokesman, Guenther Ahmed Rusznak who said he was "dismayed" at the destruction, although it was expected.
Local authorities had as yet not offered an alternative site for the Muslims to pray. "We haven't anywhere because there aren't many halls in Traun," said local authority spokesman Alois Rachbauer.
In the meantime, a local parish has allowed the local Muslim community to use one of its rooms for prayer. Of Austria's nearly eight million population, 350,000 are Muslim, the second largest religious community after the dominant Catholics.
Muslims, among other minorities and immigrants, have been increasingly faced with a wave of hate from right wing Austrian political parties, particularly from the Freedom Party after it came to office.
An Austrian Muslim last week won, for the first time, in local elections in Austria. After right-wing parties targeted Muslims in Austrian political life with several calls bluntly raised that Muslims should be thrown out of the country, the election of a Muslim to political office in this European country is unprecedented.
Vienna, the Austrian capital, has a long multi-ethnic history, from its glory days as center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, through the communist era on the frontlines of the Iron Curtain, to the influx of ex-Yugoslav refugees in the 1990s. Immigrants now make up some 20% of the city's one million-plus population. And it is precisely this which makes anti-foreigner attacks such a potent vote-catcher.
The official Islamic Commission in Austria has repeatedly called on Muslim youths in the country to "bear part of the responsibility for the campaigns that are waged against them", because they "keep aloof and do not join the mainstream of the country's cultural and political life."
The calls came in the wake of campaigns waged against the Muslim community by some elements in the country that called upon the authorities to issue special identity cards to "foreign communities".
"This is considered one form of discrimination, particularly in the wake of what a former Austrian Minister of Justice, Harad Ofter, had done," the commission had previously said referring to an intense campaign against the Muslims by the minister last year.
Ofter had said that Austria's Muslims posed both "a threat to its security" and country.
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