Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attacked Austria’s impending closure of mosques and consequent expulsion of Turkish-funded imams, saying the move is anti-Islamic while promising a response.
“These measures taken by the Austrian prime minister are, I fear, leading the world towards a war between the cross and the crescent,” Erdogan said in a speech in Istanbul covered by AFP.
Austria’s populist government made the announcement on Friday morning at a press conference as part of the governing coalition’s campaign against radical Islamic ideology and the influence of countries like Turkey in the Austrian Islamic community, Kronen Zeitung reports.
Media reports that between 40 and 60 imams, including their families, could be expelled in total. The imams all stand accused of receiving funding from abroad. Official investigations have been launched in 11 cases. Two of the imams had already been denied extensions to their residency permits.
Among the mosques facing closure is the Mosque of the Grey Wolves on Antonsplatz, in the working-class Vienna district of Favoriten, where the Gallipoli reenactment took place.
The other six mosques are in Vienna, Upper Austria and Carinthia, in all of which hardline salafist teachings are said to be widespread.
Mr. Erdogan, speaking Saturday, said: “They say they’re going to kick our religious men out of Austria. Do you think we will not react if you do such a thing?”
“That means we’re going to have to do something,” he added without elaborating.
Around 360,000 people of Turkish origin live in Austria, including 117,000 Turkish nationals.
Relations between Ankara and Vienna have been strained since a failed coup against Erdogan in 2016 which was followed by a wave of arrests. Mr. Erdogan’s speech precedes presidential and legislative elections on June 24 in which he faces stiff opposition.
During last year’s Turkish referendum on expanding the president’s powers, tensions ran high between Vienna and Ankara after Austria said it would not allow campaign-related events.
The new policy comes after a number of scandals involving mosques in Austria, including one in which Islamists were plotting to overthrow the government to replace it with an Islamic caliphate. The ATIB association came under fire last week when a Turkish mosque posted images of young children swearing oaths to the Turkish state.
UKIP leader Gerard Batten, For Britain leader Anne Marie Waters, and former Breitbart London editor-in-chief Raheem Kassam joined Dutch opposition leader Geert Wilders and members of Tommy Robinson’s family for a massive rally outside Downing Street on June 9th.
Organisers claim around 20,000 people attended the rally, where speakers called on the Government to release the activist reporter and restore freedom of speech — despite allegations attendees were falsely told that the event was cancelled on the London Underground.
“Tommy Robinson is a political prisoner,” Batten told the crowds.
“Whatever the legal technicalities of his alleged contempt of court, he was imprisoned more for who he is and what he says rather than what he is supposed to have done.
“It’s not necessary to agree with everything he says, it’s not necessary to approve of everything he does, but history will judge him as being on the right side of a struggle between good and evil,” he predicted.
The member of the European Parliament described the “widespread, organised, paedophile rape of little girls by organised gangs” and the authorities’ decision to “brush it under the carpet” for years as the worst scandal in England’s history.
“Governments in this country and across Europe are now the enemies of their own people, [and] they promote policies that are against the interests of their own people,” he railed — citing efforts to sabotage Brexit, uncontrolled mass migration, and what he described as “Islamisation” in particular.
“A literalist interpretation of the Mohammedan cult is completely alien to everything our country stands for and our traditional way of life.
“And yet instead of opposing Islamisation, our government is submitting and surrendering to it. They have betrayed the British people,” he declared.
Kassam, who played a significant role organising the speech and helping to invite European speakers such as Wilders, introduced Sharia Watch founder Anne Marie Waters, a former Labour Party candidate who now leads the For Britain party and is standing in the Lewisham East by-election.
Waters thanked the crowds for showing their “commitment to freedom, to justice, and your opposition to the Islamic tyranny and supremacy that plagues our great country.”
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