Islam still considered a threat in France, Germany

Friday January 07, 2011 07:57:04 PM, IANS

London: Islam is still considered a threat by millions of French and German nationals and most believe that Muslims have failed to integrate properly in the society, a media report said Friday.

The results of a poll in French newspaper Le Monde revealed that 42 percent of French and 40 percent of Germans consider the presence of Islamic communities "a threat" to their national identities, the Daily Express reported.

France and Germany have the biggest Muslim communities in Europe.

"Islam and integration: French and Germans admit failure," said the headline of the article in Le Monde.

The poll, carried out with marketing firm IFOP, said 68 percent of French and 75 percent of Germans believe Muslims are "not well integrated into society".

Meanwhile, an editorial in Le Monde commented: "As Islam becomes a permanent and increasingly conspicuous fixture of European societies, public opinion is clearly tensing up, though disparities do appear between young and old and between Left and Right-wing."

Jerome Fourquet, of IFOP, said the results "go beyond linking immigration with security, or immigration with unemployment, to linking Islam with a threat to identity".

He said he would like to extend the research to countries such as Britain, where he believed the results would be very much the same.

The threat of terrorism has increasingly been linked with Muslim communities in all European countries, including Britain.

France is a secular society, but the most of its population are Catholics. No official figures are available but the country is estimated to be home to around six million Muslims, many from its former North African colonies.

German authorities estimate that their own Muslim population is about 4.5 million, many of them Turks who emigrated in the 1960s.

The Le Monde/IFOP survey polled 1,600 adults -- 800 in France and 800 in Germany.

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