January 1. Some 2,000 “highly aggressive” migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East gathered at the central train station in Cologne and the square in front of the iconic Cologne Cathedral, where mass sexual assaults occurred on New Year’s Eve 2015. A massive police presence consisting of 1,700 officers deterred mayhem. Police reported three sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve 2016, compared to more than a thousand on the same day in 2015.

January 1. In Berlin, at least 22 women were sexually assaulted during New Year’s Eve celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate, despite the presence of 1,700 police officers. Police initially reported six assaults, but after inquiries from local media raised that number. In Hamburg, at least 14 women were sexually assaulted. Police arrested three Iraqis, three Syrians, two Afghans, one Eritrean and one German-Russian.

January 2. Greens Party Leader Simone Peter accused the Cologne Police Department of racial profiling after a tweet referred to North African migrants as “Nafris.” The head of the DPolG, Ernst Walter, explained that “Nafri” is not derogatory but rather a technical acronym used by the police to refer to “North African intensive offender” (nordafrikanische Intensivtäter). “If a North African person is suspected of committing a crime, he is a ‘Nafri,'” Walter said. Cologne Police Chief Jürgen Mathies added: “From the experiences of the past New Year’s Eve, from experience gained by police raids as a whole, a clear impression has emerged here about which persons are to be checked. They are not gray-haired older men or blond-haired young women.”

January 2. Police in Saarland arrested Hasan A., a 38-year-old asylum seeker from Syria who solicited €180,000 ($192,000) in funds from the Islamic State in order to carry out a high-casualty terrorist attack in Germany. The prosecutor’s office in Saarbrücken said the man asked the Islamic State for the money to purchase eight vehicles (€22,500 each) which would be camouflaged as police cars, loaded with 400-500 kilos of explosives, and exploded into a large crowd. Hasan said he wanted the money to support his family in Syria, not to carry out attacks in Germany.

January 3. Amnesty International called for an investigation of the police in Cologne for the alleged “racial profiling” of North African migrants who were suspected of promoting violence on New Year’s Eve.

January 3. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière called for a “reorganization” of the security structures in Germany in order to confront the challenges of terrorism, large influxes of asylum seekers and cyberattacks. He said the federal government should be given more powers than it has now.

January 5. North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) Regional Criminal Police Director Dieter Schürmann revealed that Anis Amri, the 24-year-old Tunisian Salafist who carried out the jihadist attack on the Christmas market in Berlin on December 19, 2016, was known by authorities to be a threat to security as early as February 2016 but that they had found no evidence to arrest him. Schürmann also said that Amri had also used a total of 14 different identities under multiple names to collect social welfare benefits.

January 6. Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel called for a “culture war” to defeat Islamism. “If we are serious about the fight against Islamism and terrorism, then it must also be a cultural struggle,” he said. “We must strengthen the cohesion of society and ensure that neighborhoods are not neglected, villages are not degenerated and people are not becoming more and more radicalized,” he added. Gabriel also said that “Salafist mosques must be banned, the communities dissolved and the preachers deported, as soon as possible.”

January 7. A group of five “Black Africans” (Schwarzafrikanern) sexually assaulted a 28-year-old woman in Hamburg. The woman, a nurse at the Asklepios-Klinik St. Georg, was walking to her car after her shift ended when she heard someone screaming for help in an adjacent park. When she went to lend a hand she was ambushed by the men, assaulted and robbed.

January 7. Asif M., a 26-year-old asylum seeker from Pakistan, appeared in court on charges he raped one woman and attempted to rape five others in Berlin-Steglitz. He insisted that he was the victim: “As a refugee, it is difficult to find a girlfriend.”

January 7. An Emnid poll for Bild am Sonntag found that 58% of German women believe that public places have become less safe due the migration crisis. Nearly half (48%) say they avoid certain areas in their place of residence when it is dark, and 16% now carry pepper spray when they are on their own after dark.

January 7. Intelligence Chief Hans-Georg Maaßen warned that Germany’s Salafist scene is not only growing, but also becoming more decentralized, thus making it more difficult to monitor. He said the number of Salafists in Germany was 9,700, up 500 from 9,200 in October 2016.

January 11. The Interior Ministry reported that a total of 321,371 migrants arrived in Germany in 2016, compared to 1,091,894 in 2015. Of the new arrivals in 2016, 280,000 were asylum seekers, compared to 890,000 asylum seekers in 2015. As if the statistics were not sufficiently complicated, a total of 745,545 people applied for asylum in 2016, compared to 476,649 who applied for asylum in 2015. The 2016 figure includes migrants who arrived in Germany in 2015 but did not apply for asylum until 2016. Around 35% of the asylum seekers in 2016 were from Syria, 17% from Afghanistan and 13% from Iraq.

January 11. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said that Germany’s security apparatus must be updated in order to combat Islamic terrorism. “Our security architecture dates back to the fifties and sixties when we were dealing mostly with regional crime,” he said.

January 12. Germany’s largest Islamic association, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), admitted that some of its preachers acted as informants for the Turkish government. DITIB is financed by the Turkish government’s Directorate for Religious Affairs, known in Turkish as Diyanet. DITIB has been described as the “extended arm” of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who uses it to promote Turkish nationalism and to prevent integration among the Turkish diaspora. The spies sent information about followers of Fethullah Gülen, a 78-year-old cleric based in the United States and whom Turkey accuses of plotting a failed military coup in July 2016.

January 13. A YouGov poll found that 52% of Germans believe that police in Cologne did a good job on New Year’s Eve. The poll also showed that 63% of Germans do not find racial profiling problematic, compared to 27% who do. The poll followed criticism of a police operation in Cologne on New Year’s Eve in which hundreds of “Nafris” — a term for North African criminals — were arrested.

January 14. A “southerner” (südländischer Typ) assaulted an 80-year-old woman in Leipzig-Neulindenau. The woman was working in her garden at 3 o’clock in the afternoon when she noticed that a man was loitering nearby. He lunged at the woman and beat her so badly that she was hospitalized. Before getting into the ambulance, she asked someone to take a photograph of her bloody face to draw public attention to rising migrant crime. Her picture was published by Bild, the largest-circulation newspaper in Germany. “It cannot be that you have to be afraid of being on the streets even during the middle of the day,” she said. The perpetrator remains at large.

January 18. Member of the German Parliament Burkhard Lischka revealed that German authorities lost track of three of the 547 jihadists who are being monitored by German intelligence.

January 18. A 27-year-old Kosovar was sentenced to one year and ten months of probation for sexually assaulting a 27-year-old woman in Freiburg. The man followed the woman into a restroom at a night club, told her that he was a narcotics detective, forced her to undress and then tried to rape her.

January 19. German authorities issued 105,000 visas for so-called family reunifications in 2016, a 50% increase over the 70,000 visas issued in 2015, according to Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Almost all the visas were issued to Syrians and Iraqis. Family reunifications — individuals whose asylum applications are approved are subsequently allowed to bring additional family members to Germany — are not included in asylum application statistics. In other words, the 105,000 visas for family members were in addition to the 280,000 new asylum seekers who arrived in Germany in 2016.

January 19. Germany took back some 12,000 migrants from other European countries, in accordance with the so-called Dublin Regulation, a law that requires people seeking refuge within the EU to do so in the first European country they reach. Germany took 3,700 migrants from Sweden, 1,686 from the Netherlands, 1,277 from Switzerland, 1,109 from Denmark and 763 from Belgium, according to the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung. The migrants involve asylum seekers who submitted asylum requests in Germany but moved on to other European countries before the requests were processed by German authorities.

January 19. Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel threatened to cut development aid to countries which refuse to take back asylum seekers whose applications have been rejected. The threat applies mainly to North African migrants from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. “It cannot be that a country takes the development aid, but not its own citizens, if they cannot get asylum with us because they simply have no reason to escape from their country,” he said.

January 20. The trial began of Abubaker C., a 27-year-old Pakistani man who strangled 70-year-old Maria Müller in her bed in Bad Friedrichshall, and then painted verses from the Koran on her bedroom walls. Prosecutors said the murder was religiously motivated: The Sunni Muslim apparently murdered the woman because she was a devout Roman Catholic.

January 21. A 47-year-old asylum seeker from Syria was sentenced to one year and nine months in prison for raping a 44-year-old mentally disabled woman in Soest. The suspect, who has been living in an asylum shelter in Welver at German taxpayer expense since 2003, had 23 previous convictions for offenses including assault, robbery and fare evasion. A neurologist who tended to the Syrian during his 13-year stay in Germany told the court that the man is “untreatable” (Therapieunfähig). “When he is drunk, he is unpredictable,” she said.

January 23. Muslims in Hamburg are finding it difficult to bury their dead: German burial laws are incompatible with Islamic Sharia law, according to Die Welt. “The different burial cultures must be brought together,” the paper stated. “The German funeral and cemetery regulations are incompatible with Islam in some respects. Believing Muslims reject cremation. The dead must be buried as soon as possible and in linen cloths. It is important that the earth is ‘virgin’…the soil should not be polluted by ‘unbelievers.’ The dead must also be able to rest for eternity…a re-occupation of the tomb is impossible even if the remains of the deceased are completely disappeared.”

January 25. Social security fraud perpetrated by asylum seekers is costing taxpayers in the state of Lower Saxony millions of euros, according to the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung. Police reported 2,644 known cases of fraud in 2016, including 487 cases by asylum seekers, up from 351 such cases in 2015. The fraud involves migrants using multiple identities to collect social welfare benefits in different cities and towns. In the city of Braunschweig alone, some 240 migrants defrauded the state of €4.8 million ($5 million) in 2016. Police say Sudanese migrants, many of whom were allowed to enter Germany without having their fingerprints taken, have “created a business model” out of social security fraud. Local officials have been accused of covering up the fraud, which came to light after an employee at a social security office contacted the police. In January 2016, she had handed her boss a file with 30 cases of suspected fraud. After he refused to act, she contacted the police in May 2016. She was fired for “overstepping her authority.”

January 26. A court in Celle sentenced a 16-year-old German-Moroccan female jihadist to six years in prison for stabbing and seriously wounding a police officer, the first lone-wolf terrorist attack in Germany inspired by the Islamic State. The incident occurred at the central train station in Hanover on the afternoon of February 26, 2016, when two police officers noticed that the girl — identified only as Safia S. — was observing and following them. The officers approached the girl, who was wearing an Islamic headscarf, and asked her to present her identification papers. After handing over her ID, she stabbed one of the officers in the neck with a six-centimeter kitchen knife. According to police, the attack happened so quickly that the 34-year-old officer was unable to defend himself. “The perpetrator did not display any emotion,” a police spokesperson said. “Her only concern was for her headscarf. She was concerned that her headscarf be put back on properly after she was arrested. Whether the police officer survived, she did not care.”

January 26. Upkeep for the 13,600 unaccompanied child migrants (unbegleiteten minderjährigen Flüchtlingen) in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) will cost German taxpayers €632 million ($670 million) in 2017. Child migrants are arriving in NRW at the rate of 300-400 each month. Each child migrant costs €4,500 a month to maintain, in addition to an annual administrative fee of €3,100 (Verwaltungspauschal). The children are from more than 60 countries, including Afghanistan (37%), Syria (36%) and Iraq (11%). Over 90% of child migrants are male.

January 27. Due to positive net migration (more people entering the country than leaving it), the German population increased by 1.14 million in 2015, and by another 750,000 in 2016, to reach an all-time high of 82.8 million at the end of 2016, according to preliminary estimates by Destatis.

January 27. Muslim students at the Emscher-Lippe school in Gelsenkirchen refused to participate in Holocaust remembrance activities. Some 40% of the 550 students at the school are Muslim.

January 27. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble revealed that the migrant crisis would cost German taxpayers €43 billion ($46 billion) during 2016 (€21.7 billion) and 2017 (€21.3 billion).

January 28. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said that Anis Amri, the 24-year-old Tunisian who carried out the December 19 jihadist attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, could have been deported in October 2016, but that officials in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) failed to do so. De Maizière’s statement contradicted claims by NRW Interior Minister Ralf Jäger, who said he had no legal authority to deport Amri, whose asylum application had been denied.

January 30. Süleyman D., a 25-year-old German of Turkish descent, was arrested for raping one woman and attempting to rape two more at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

January 30. The Bishop of Regensburg, Rudolf Voderholzer, said there could be no reconciliation between Christians and Muslims. Islam is a “post-Christian phenomenon, with the claim to negate the core content of Christianity,” he said. “Only those who do not know their own faith or do not take it seriously can consider a comprehensive integration of Islam as possible.”

The Bishop of Regensburg, Rudolf Voderholzer, said on January 30 that there could be no reconciliation between Christians and Muslims. Islam is a “post-Christian phenomenon, with the claim to negate the core content of Christianity,” he said. “Only those who do not know their own faith or do not take it seriously can consider a comprehensive integration of Islam as possible.” (Image source: Wikimedia Commons/StagiaireMGIMO)

January 1. The Interior Ministry announced the most anticipated statistic of the year: a total of 945 cars and trucks were torched across France on New Year’s Eve, a 17.5% increase from the 804 vehicles burned during the annual ritual on the same holiday in 2015. Car burnings, commonplace in France, are often attributed to rival Muslim gangs that compete with each other for the media spotlight over which can cause the most destruction. An estimated 40,000 cars are torched in France every year.

A van burns during a recent riot in a Paris suburb. Car burnings, commonplace in France, are often attributed to rival Muslim gangs that compete with each other for the media spotlight. An estimated 40,000 cars are torched in France every year. (Image source: RT video screenshot)

January 2. Approximately 3.7 million crimes were reported in France in 2016, a 4% increase over 2015, according to Le Figaro. Seine-Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb which has one of the highest concentrations of Muslims in France, ranks as the most dangerous part of the country, with 18.2 attacks per 1,000 inhabitants. It is followed by Paris, with 15.7 attacks per 1,000 inhabitants and Bouches-du-Rhône with 11.5 attacks per 1,000 inhabitants.

January 2. The Criminal Court of Paris sentenced Nicolas Moreau, a 32-year-old French jihadist, to ten years in prison for fighting for the Islamic State. He is the brother of Flavien Moreau, the first French jihadist to be sentenced for such an offense upon his return from Syria in November 2014. Born in South Korea, adopted by a French family at the age of 4, Nicolas became a delinquent after the divorce of his adoptive parents. He converted to Islam in prison, where he spent five years. Nicolas said he fled the Islamic State after 17 months due to its “excesses.”

January 3. Jean-Christophe Lagarde, the president of the Union of Democrats and Independents, a center-right political party, attributed the closure of a PSA Peugeot-Citroën automobile factory to an excess of religious demands by Muslim employees. “There have been difficulties even in my department, for example in Aulnay-sous-Bois. It has never been said, but part of the reason for the closure of PSA was due to the omnipresence of religion and the fact that there were religious demands at work, work stoppages, decreased productivity. PSA’s decision to close Aulnay was influenced by this aspect.”

January 3. The Administrative Court of Poitiers dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Coalition against Racism and Islamophobia (CRI), which tried to ban a 14-page document aimed at preventing radicalization in schools. The document called on teachers to monitor several criteria, including “uncut long beards,” “shaved hair,” “Muslim clothing,” “refusal of tattoos,” and “weight loss associated with frequent fasting.” The document also referred to behavior such as “identity withdrawal,” “selective exposure to the media,” and “political rhetoric” concerning Palestine, Chechnya and Iraq. The document urged teachers to monitor closely students interested in the “history of early Islam.” The court emphasized the strictly internal nature of the document, which was deemed to be “devoid of any legal effect” because it contains “no mandatory provisions.”

January 4. Of the 230 French jihadists who have been killed in Iraq and Syria, seven were killed by American drones, according to Le Monde. “The French targets had a twofold status: they were military objectives, the elimination of which is theoretically governed by the law of war, and they were also targets of judicial proceedings in France. In the name of the ‘self-defense,’ which the coalition states claim, military logic prevailed over the right to legal defense,” the paper complained.

January 4. Jean-Sébastien Vialatte, the deputy mayor of Six-Four-Les-Plages, ordered police to visit the Reynier Primary School there on two occasions after he heard rumors that the school was requiring students to attend Arabic language classes. The courses, which were optional, not mandatory, have since been cancelled.

January 5. The Magistrate’s Court of Rennes sentenced a 34-year-old man to 17 months in prison on charges of domestic violence for striking his female companion because she refused to convert to Islam. The woman said the man had “profoundly changed” after he visited Mali. “He has become radicalized,” she said. “He promises Allah will take revenge against the disbelievers who do not convert. Religion has taken an increasingly important place in his life. He believes he is good and all others are evil.” The man denied he ever “forced someone to be a Muslim.” He added, “Before, I was like her, I smoked, I drank, but it is over now.”

January 5. Farid Benyettou, a 35-year-old former French jihadist who indoctrinated the gunmen who attacked the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris in January 2015, admitted that he was partly to blame for the violence. “I bear a share of responsibility, I cannot deny it,” he said in an interview with Le Parisien. “I preached hate, I distilled this ideology even though it was not me who told him to commit this massacre. I served my prison sentence, I paid my debt to society, but not my moral debt.” He tells his story in a new book, “My Jihad: Journey of a Repenter.”

January 6. A statistical analysis carried out by François Desouche, an influential French blog, found a dramatic increase in the popularity of Muslim first names given to children born in France during the past 20 years. In Paris, for example, 17.1% of babies born in 2016 received Muslim first names, up from 9.4% in 1996. In Seine-Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb, 42.9% of babies born in 2016 received Muslim first names, up from 17.3% in 1996. The trend repeats itself across France.

January 6. Zineb El Rhazoui, a 35-year-old Moroccan-born journalist, quit her job at Charlie Hebdo because the magazine is now following an editorial line that “Mohammed is no longer drawn” — as demanded by Islamists before the January 2015 attacks. She said Charlie Hebdo now feels “too alone to go to the front.” But our colleagues “must not have died for nothing. If it were up to me, I would continue,” she said.

January 6. The Nice Criminal Court acquitted Pierre-Alain Mannoni, 45, for helping three Eritrean women who crossed the border into France from Italy. Mannoni, a teacher-researcher at the French national research center (CNRS), was arrested at the Turbie toll booth just beyond the Italian border in October 2015 and charged with “assisting the entry, movement and residence of irregular migrants.” The charge incurs five years in prison and €30,000 ($31,000) in fines. The prosecutor argued that people are not allowed to help illegal migrants move about the country. Mannoni said he was “protecting their dignity and integrity.” Christian Estrosi, the president of the Nice Côte d’Azur Riviera region, said the ruling was “an insult to the work of the security forces who put their life in danger to protect ours.”

January 10. Around 5,000 Jews emigrated from France to Israel in 2016, according to the Jewish Agency of Israel, which released the data to mark two years since attacks on the Charlie Hebdo and on a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015. The departures in 2016 add to the 7,900 who left in 2015 and 7,231 in 2014. In total, since 2006, 40,000 French Jews have emigrated.

January 12. Salah Abdeslam — a Belgium-born French national of Moroccan descent and the main suspect in the November 13, 2015 attacks that killed 130 people in Paris — said, “I am not ashamed of what I am. I am a Muslim, that is to say, submissive to Allah who created me and who by his grace has harmoniously shaped me.” Abdeslam is reportedly receiving stacks of mail “from Catholics with questions about his faith, from women who declare their love for him and say they want to bear his child, from lawyers who offer their services, it is incessant,” according to Libération.

January 12. A French couple were given suspended sentences for selling Islamic State flags online. They were caught after neighbors saw them boasting about their business in a television documentary about jihadi recruitment and called the police.

January 16. Asian tourists are avoiding France due to fears over terrorism and spiraling crime, according to Le Parisien, which interviewed Jean-François Zhou, President of the Chinese Association of Travel Agencies in France. Some 1.6 million Chinese tourists visited France in 2016, compared to 2.2 million in 2015, a 27% decline. The number of tourists from South Korea also declined by 27%, and the number of Japanese tourists declined by 39%. “Our tourists have turned to Russia, which is less attractive but at least it is a safe country,” Zhou said. “For Putin, it is an economic windfall.” Zhou explained:

“The decline is explained above all to the scourge of petty delinquency aimed especially at Chinese tourists. They are robbed in the Palace of Versailles, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, in front of their hotel, when they exit the buses. In high season, there is not a day without tourists being assaulted. I saw an 80-year-old man seriously injured because he was trying to resist thieves. Women are pushed and when they fall their bags are stolen with all their papers. This has created a panic on Chinese social networks. The Chinese began turning away from France last year.

“The police have increased their numbers to protect tourists. But since the terrorist attacks, these forces have been mobilized elsewhere. We want France to stop its laxity. We, along with my traveling colleagues, are counting on the future government to get things done. I have been in France for twenty-five years, and I myself have seen the decline of France in terms of security. Before, the Chinese tour operators deplored the insecurity in Italy, today it is France and more particularly Paris and Marseilles which we speak. There are many regions in France where tourism can be leisurely pursued, but Paris is ranked No. 1 in Europe in terms of the increase in delinquency.”

January 17. The Magistrate’s Court in Paris acquitted Pascal Bruckner, a renowned intellectual and author, on charges of defamation after he remarked on the “28 minutes-Arte” television program that pro-Muslim activist groups such as “The Indivisibles” (Les Indivisibles) and “The Republic’s Natives” (Les Indigènes de la République) were “ideological accomplices” of jihadism. The decision was hailed as a “victory for the freedom of expression” in France, which does not have legal protections such as the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, guaranteeing the freedom of speech.

January 18. One of the suicide bombers who blew himself up outside the Stade de France during the November 2015 attacks on Paris turned out to be an Iraqi jihadist, according to France’s DGSE intelligence agency. Until now, only one of the three bombers had been identified: a 20-year-old Frenchman living in Belgium. DGSE believes that one of that man’s accomplices, who was carrying a fake Syrian passport, was from the Iraqi city of Mosul. He and the third attacker, whose identity is still unknown, are believed to have slipped into Europe with a group of refugees who landed on the Greek island of Leros on October 3, 2015.

January 20. The Council of State (Conseil d’État), France’s highest administrative court, ruled that the mosque in Stains (Centre Culturel et Islamique de Stains) in Seine-Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, will remain closed. The Salafist mosque, which was identified as the last place of prayer for several French jihadists before they joined the Islamic State, was shuttered in November 2016 as part of a state of emergency.

January 21. Kevin Guiavarch, a 24-year-old convert to Islam, was charged with terrorism offenses after being extradited from Turkey. He is believed to have been a member of both the Islamic State and the former Al-Nusra Front. He was arrested in Turkey in June 2016 after leaving Syria with his four wives and six children. Guiavarch, a Breton who converted to Islam at the age of 14, is believed to have gone to Syria in 2012.

January 23. The Grand Mosque of Paris announced that it was withdrawing from the Foundation for Islam of France (Fondation de l’Islam de France), a new, government-sponsored foundation charged with “contributing to the emergence of an Islam of France that is fully anchored in the French Republic.” In a statement, the mosque, which represents 250 of the 2,500 of the mosques and Muslim associations in France, said that it denounced “any form of interference in the management of Muslim worship.” Others said the mosque’s rector, Dalil Boubakeur, 76, was angry that he was not named to be president of the foundation.

January 23. The Administrative Court of Marseilles effectively terminated a project to build a €22 million ($23 million) mega-mosque with a capacity for 7,000 worshippers. In July 2007, the municipality granted a Muslim association a parcel of land in the 15th arrondissement to build the Grand Mosque of Marseille, but the project has been plagued by legal and financial problems. The cornerstone was laid in 2010, but since then nothing else has been built. In October 2016, the city terminated the lease for the land because the association had not paid the rent since 2013. According to the court, “the materiality of all the facts alleged against the association does not appear to be seriously contestable.”

January 23. Benoît Hamon, the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, lashed out at critics of Islam:

“There is ultimately a desire to say that Islam is incompatible with the Republic. This is not true. It is unbearable that we continue to make the faith of millions of our compatriots a problem in French society. Let us stop making Islam an adversary of the Republic.”

January 25. The trial began of Georges Bensoussan, a highly regarded Jewish historian of Moroccan descent, who is being prosecuted for talking about anti-Semitism among French Arabs. During a debate on Radio France Culture, he said:

“An Algerian sociologist, Smaïn Laacher, with great courage, just said in a documentary aired on Channel 3: ‘It is a shame to deny this taboo, namely that in the Arab families in France, and everyone knows it but nobody wants to say it, anti-Semitism is sucked with mother’s milk.'”

Bensoussan was referring to a documentary entitled “Teachers in the Lost Territories of the Republic,” aired on Channel 3 in October 2015. In this documentary, Laacher, who is a French professor of Algerian origin, said:

“Antisemitism is already awash in the domestic space. It rolls almost naturally off the tongue, awash in the language. It is an insult. When parents shout at their children, when they want to reprimand them, they call them Jews. Yes. All Arab families know this. It is monumental hypocrisy not to see that this anti-Semitism begins as a domestic one.”

Laacher was not prosecuted but Bensoussan was. The court’s decision will be rendered March 7. “This witch-hunt against Bensoussan is symptomatic of the state of free speech today in France,” wrote the French journalist Yves Mamou.

January 26. The Administrative Court of Bastia in Corsica validated a burkini ban in the village of Sisco. Mayor Ange-Pierre Vivoni argued the ban was necessary to avoid a repeat of fighting between local youths and Muslims in August 2016, when five people were hurt. The court rejected a similar ban in Ghisonaccio, due to a lack of evidence that the garment was a threat to public order.

January 27. Pascal Bruckner, a renowned author and intellectual, in an essay entitled “An Imaginary Racism,” wrote that Islamophobia is a “weapon of intimidation” and an “invention to forbid debate.”

January 27. “The Halal Market: The Invention of a Tradition,” a new book by anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, argues that “buying halal is not a religious obligation.” Although the Koran and Sunnah (the teachings and practices of Mohammed) prohibit pork, blood and alcohol, they do not impose rules dictating behavior, according to Bergeaud-Blackler.

“Eating halal is presented today as an obligatory practice for Muslims, even though the term did not exist in the Muslim world before it was exported by developed countries,” she told FRANCE 24. Bergeaud-Blackler, who has studied halal for the past 20 years, said the market has flourished in non-Muslim countries because of immigration. “There’s a recent poll by the Montaigne Institute which shows that 40% of France’s Muslim population thinks eating halal is a pillar of Islam; this notion is false,” she said.

In reality, the halal food industry is a product of the “random convergence of neo-fundamentalism and neo-liberalism” during the early 1980s, Bergeaud-Blackler explained. “At the time, these two ideologies were dominant on the international scene. Their convergence would change the theological definition of halal from ‘recommended’ to ‘required’ and which is a hallmark of fundamentalism,” she said.

January 29. Three months after French authorities demolished the “Jungle” migrant camp, migrants are returning to Calais at the rate of around 30 a day. Most of them are unaccompanied minors hoping to smuggle their way across the English Channel to Britain.

February 1. Jim Walker, a 71-year-old volunteer at Carnforth Station, was banned from the premises after someone complained about an alleged racist comment. Walker, who, for more than a decade, has been winding a famous clock at the station, was overheard discussing a newspaper article about young migrants entering Britain from the French port of Calais. Walker said:

“Carnforth Station Trust received a complaint from a visitor who was not happy about me speaking to somebody about the issue…. What they are doing is outrageous. It is absolutely unbelievable, it is a violation of free speech….

“I must be the only man in Carnforth who has a document saying where he can and can’t walk and all for expressing a point of view and quoting an editorial from a newspaper. Now [winding the clock] is no longer possible.”

February 1. Prime Minister Theresa May told the House of Commons that women should feel free to wear the hijab, a traditional Islamic headscarf. Several European countries have imposed bans on parts of Muslim religious dress. “What a woman wears is a woman’s choice,” May said after she was asked — on world hijab day — if she supported the right of women to wear the garment.

On February 1 (“world hijab day”), UK Prime Minister Theresa May said that women should feel free to wear the hijab, a traditional Islamic headscarf, stating: “What a woman wears is a woman’s choice.” Pictured above: Theresa May (then Home Secretary) wears a headscarf while attending an interfaith event at Al Madina Mosque in East London, in February 2015. (Image source: Imams Online video screenshot)

February 2. Six Muslim men shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they were sentenced at Sheffield Crown Court for a total of 81 years for sexually abusing two girls — including one who became pregnant at age 12 — in Rotherham. Three brothers and three other men were convicted of crimes including rape, indecent assault and false imprisonment after the pre-teen victims were “systematically groomed.”

February 4. Almost half of the new homes built in the next five years will go to migrants, according to government figures. Soaring immigration means that Britain will need to accommodate as many as 243,000 new households each year for the next 22 years. It is estimated that an extra 5.3 million new properties could be needed to meet the growth in population, and an extra 2.4 million of the new homes will be needed for migrants alone. In other words, one new home must be built every five minutes to house Britain’s burgeoning migrant population.

February 5. Muslim pupils outnumber Christian children in more than 30 church schools, including one Church of England primary school that has a “100% Muslim population,” according to the Sunday Times. St. Thomas in Werneth, Oldham, is reported by the local diocese to have no Christian pupils, while at Staincliffe Church of England Junior School in Batley, West Yorkshire, 98% of pupils “come from a Muslim background.” The Church of England estimated that about 20 of its schools had more Muslim pupils than Christians and 15 Roman Catholic schools had majority Muslim pupils, according to the Catholic Education Service. Some church schools include Islamic prayers in their services.

February 6. The Deputy Mayor of London, Sophie Linden, warned that people who inflict female genital mutilation (FGM) on girls have escaped justice “for too long.” Linden said that “inconsistencies in the way these crimes are recorded” had allowed perpetrators to avoid charges, despite FGM being a “widespread” problem. Although FGM has been illegal in Britain since 1985, no one has ever been successfully prosecuted for such offenses.

February 7. Zakaria Bulhan, a 19-year-old Norwegian national of Somali origin, was sentenced to indefinite confinement at Broadmoor Hospital after he admitted to killing American tourist Darlene Horton and wounding five others in a rampage in central London on August 3, 2016. Bulhan, from Tooting, South London, pled guilty at the Old Bailey to “manslaughter by diminished responsibility” on the grounds that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia at the time of the attacks. He had been charged with murder and attempted murder, but the court accepted his plea. During his arrest, Bulhan repeatedly muttered “Allah, Allah, Allah,” and police found a Muslim prayer book, “Fortress of the Muslim,” in his pants pocket. The court decided that Islam was not a factor in Bulhan’s behavior.

February 7. A Chatham House survey of more than 10,000 people from ten European countries found that an average of 55% agreed that all further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped, 25% neither agreed nor disagreed and 20% disagreed. Majorities in all but two of the ten states agreed, ranging from 71% in Poland, 65% in Austria, 53% in Germany and 51% in Italy to 47% in the United Kingdom and 41% in Spain.

February 9. A 44-year-old man from Hertfordshire was arrested at Gatwick Airport on terrorism charges after he disembarked from a flight from Iraq. He was charged under Section 5 of the 2006 Terrorism Act: suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts.

February 12. A National Health Service (NHS) project based on research by Leeds University claimed that Muslims with mental health issues could be helped by re-embracing Islam. Traditionally, therapists have shied away from talking about religion as part of treatment. Lead researcher Dr. Ghazala Mir, of the university’s Leeds Institute of Health Sciences, said:

“We know that in Muslim populations people can get quicker results from faith-sensitive therapies that have been tested elsewhere in the world. They tend to use religion as a coping resource more than people in other religious groups.”

Mir has helped to create a new treatment. Patients are asked if faith was part of their life when they were well. Those who stopped being religious because of depression are re-introduced slowly using a self-help booklet, which highlights passages from the Koran that illustrate that “even people with strong faith” can become depressed and that it does not mean Allah is displeased.

February 13. Nadeem Muhammed, a 43-year-old Pakistani national, appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London after security officials at Manchester Airport discovered a pipe bomb in his hand luggage prior to boarding a flight to Italy. Muhammed, who lives in Greater Manchester, was arrested on January 30 but was later released on bail and was allowed to travel. He was re-arrested when he returned to Britain on February 11 and charged with possessing an improvised explosive device.

February 14. Clayton McKenna, a 22-year-old Briton who converted to Islam while in prison, appeared at Newcastle Crown Court after he carried an axe through the streets of Boldon Colliery, apparently with which to confront his Christian father over “religious differences.” McKenna allegedly told police that he was on his way to his father’s home “to ask him to bow down to me.” Judge Penny Moreland told McKenna:

“It appears you were sober, you had not been drinking or taking drugs. There has been an examination by the mental health team and they are satisfied there are no mental health issues I ought to be taking into account.

“You made a series of statements, both at the scene and in interview shortly afterwards, as to what you intended to do and what was in your mind. It is right to say they were confused and contradictory.

“The statements included a suggestion that you were going to use violence against your father, amongst a number of reasons you said was because he was a Christian and you were a recent convert to Islam.

“I am concerned that there is no real explanation for your confused thinking that morning, nor for those threats made, even though they appear to have been without substance.”

February 15. Faisal Bashir, a 43-year-old father of two from Ilford, was forced to move out of his home after he renounced Islam and stopped attending mosque. Bashir said he was subject to harassment, but police dismissed his pleas for help as “just a nuisance.” He explained:

“These people knew I had become an atheist and soon enough my whole family was being harassed. At least once a week they would hang around near my house, shouting and swearing at me. I was called an apostate, a non-believer, I was told I had betrayed my God and my faith. Sometimes they would even say things to my children — they are far too little to know what was happening, they were very frightened.

“Police always said they could not really do anything because no physical altercation ever took place. But I am not the kind of person to get violent with anybody. Also, it was always different people so they claimed they could not log it as similar complaint. Eventually a police officer told me I should just move house to get away from it all.

“We were not left with any other choice…. The new house is over a mile away, but they still managed to find us again.”

The Chairman of the Ilford-based British Pakistani Christian Association (BPCA), Wilson Chowdhry, said:

“Police and councils up and down the country just don’t understand the level of animosity people choosing to leave Islam can face.”

February 16. Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, Britain’s top police officer, urged Muslim scholars to step up their efforts to counter the violent ideology of the Islamic State. He said he believed that IS fighters and terrorists were “political criminals” who were carrying out “horrific violence” which had no justification in Islam. In an interview with the Evening Standard, Hogan-Howe repeated the politically correct dogma that the Islamic State is not Islamic:

“The hardest part for the Western world is to interrupt this philosophy that Daesh [Islamic State] is perpetuating which is that Islam in any way supports this horrific use of violence.

“There is no interpretation I would argue that could say that, but some people are getting away with that. Muslim scholars have got to come up and be really challenging of that and be very clear that this can never be acceptable. There is no interpretation that can ever conclude it is okay to kill people. We cannot be at all sensitive to religious beliefs. We have all got to say that is wrong.

“The Muslim community feel particularly sensitive because Islamism is about people who profess to be Muslims. I would argue that they are political criminals — it just happens to be masked in religion. But when you are dealing with that issue you have to be sensitive to the majority who are good people trying to do the right thing.”

February 18. Britain’s first-ever “modest” fashion event was held in London with more than 40 designers displaying garments that comply with Muslim values. Event organizer Romanna Bint-Abubaker, founder of modest fashion website Haute Elan, told Sky News:

“The fastest growing global consumer is at the moment the Muslim market. By 2030, one in three people will be a Muslim in the world — that is a huge population.”

February 19. Counter-terrorism police launched an investigation into claims that Trish O’Donnell, head of Clarksfield Primary School in Oldham, was being forced to work from home after death threats from Muslim parents opposed to her Western values. O’Donnell reportedly has been subject to “harassment and intimidation” in the form of “aggressive verbal abuse” and “threats to blow up her car” from parents pushing conservative Muslim ideals. The school is mostly filled with Pakistani pupils who do not speak English as a first language.

February 20. Members of Parliament debated U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s state visit to Britain. Left-wing MPs called for the invitation to be withdrawn to protest Trump’s travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries. Conservative Party MPs accused their opponents of hypocrisy and insulting the American people. The debate was triggered after an online parliamentary petition seeking to prevent Trump from making a state visit attracted nearly two million signatures. A counter-petition received over 300,000 signatures. After three hours of debate, Sir Alan Duncan, the deputy foreign secretary, reaffirmed the government’s intention to host Trump on a state visit, tentatively set for October 5-8, 2017.

February 21. Rezzas Abdulla, a 33-year-old man from South Shields, was sentenced to eight months in prison, a sentence then suspended so that he could receive treatment for mental health problems, for assaulting a woman and her nine-month old baby. Rebecca Telford, 25, and her daughter Layla-Jean, were strolling in South Shields in January 2016 when Abdulla leaned into the baby carriage and spat into the baby’s mouth, and allegedly said, “white people shouldn’t breed,” before launching into a tirade of racial abuse. Telford told police:

“There was no eye contact and no words had been exchanged. I had never seen him before. I believe he spat on her purely because we are white, I was a lone female and an easy target.”

February 22. Jamal al-Harith, a 50-year-old British convert to Islam, blew himself up at an Iraqi army base in Mosul on February 20. He had received £1 million (€1.1 million; $1.2 million) in compensation from the British government after being freed from Guantánamo Bay in 2004. Al-Harith, originally named Ronald Fiddler, was born in Manchester to parents of Jamaican origin and took the name Jamal al-Harith when he converted to Islam. He was also known more recently as Abu-Zakariya al-Britani. Captured in Afghanistan in early 2002, and released from Guantánamo Bay after two years, he later joined IS.

February 23. The BBC paid “very substantial” libel damages and broadcast a full apology to Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, founder member of the Muslim Council of Britain, who was falsely accused of calling for the lynching of author Salman Rushdie.

February 26. Shahriar Ashrafkhorasani, a 33-year-old Iranian-born convert from Islam and who is set to be ordained as a Church of England priest, accused Oxford University of discrimination and bias after he was told he could not ask a lecturer critical questions about Islam. During a seminar about love in religion, Minlib Dallh, a research fellow at Regent’s Park College in Oxford, allegedly pointed at Ashrafkhorasani and said: “Everybody can ask a question except you.” Ashrafkhorasani said that Dallh had discovered during a coffee break that he was a convert from Islam. He said that Dallh refused to let him ask questions about the lecturer’s description of Islam as a religion of love and peace. Dallh’s project was partly being sponsored by the King of Jordan. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, who was a senior fellow at Wycliffe Hall until last year, said that a “politically correct” atmosphere is “very widespread in the university as a whole.” He added: “If people are taking money from these [Muslim] sources, then that can limit the critical approach to the study of Islam and Muslim civilization generally.”

February 27. A spokesman for the West Midlands Police wrote on social media that parents caught practicing female genital mutilation (FMG) on their children should not be prosecuted. He revealed that the force is opposed to “prosecuting/jailing” parents for FGM because it would be “unlikely to benefit” children who fall victim to the crime. He added that the best course of action is to focus on “education.” Tim Loughton, a member of the Home Affairs Committee, condemned the reluctance to pursue prosecution:

“It is absolutely key to expose perpetrators and to nail them for it. The police must go after offenders. This is deeply disturbing because a key part of eradicating the violence of FGM is exposing, prosecuting, and nailing the perpetrators. Every time a prosecution fails to materialize, it encourages those that are behind this that it is not a serious crime, and they can get away it.”

February 28. Patrick Kabele, a 32-year-old convert to Islam, was found guilty of preparing terrorist acts — namely attempting to travel to Syria — contrary to the 2006 Terrorism Act. During his trial, jurors at Woolwich Crown Court heard how Kabele, from Willesden in North London, tried to join the Islamic State in Syria, where he wanted to buy a “nine-year-old virgin, the younger the better.” He added that if he had enough money, he would buy four wives. Kabele was arrested after he tried to board a flight from Gatwick to Istanbul, Turkey on August 20, 2016 with £3,000 in cash. Kabele, who was born in Uganda and became a British citizen, told police after his arrest that he did not “owe an oath of allegiance” to the United Kingdom.