The popular Sunday political talk show Anne Will has sparked outrage in Germany after an appearance by a known radical Muslim wearing a full-face niqab veil to debate on the radicalisation of young German Muslims.
Nora Illi, women’s representative of the Islamic Central Council of Switzerland, showed up in the full face veil, spoke on a panel of guests on the subject of Islamic radicalism among young Muslims, reports Die Welt.
Illi was forced to defend an essay she had written in 2014 in which she praised Muslims who had gone to fight in Syria. She claimed that Muslims had felt discriminated against and those that went to fight against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had “civil courage”.
Illi, nicknamed “Niqab Nora”, is a Swiss woman who converted to Islam at the age of 18 and has been an ardent supporter of traditional Islam including in 2014 defending her husband’s Islamic right to have more than one wife.
Former Islamist Ahmad Mansour was also on the panel and he, along with Christian Democratic Union (CDU) MP Wolfgang Bosbach, expressed that it wasn’t appropriate for a public broadcaster like ARD to have Ms. Illi on as a guest as she trivialised the Islamic State terror group and glorified the war in Syria.
Mr. Mansour even went as far to say of the appearance of Ms. Illi: “This should not be done on public television. This is open war propaganda.”
CDU Federal Councillor Sebastian Steineke also spoke out on social media after the broadcast had ended saying: “The fact that you can offer such a platform on TV to radical Islam is something that I find ridiculous.”
Young Muslims are becoming increasingly more radicalised in Germany and across Europe due largely in part to Islamic State and Salafist propaganda materials being made available on the internet. French academic Gilles Kepel, a political science professor, has said third generation Muslims and new migrants are sympathising more and more with radical Islam.
Professor Kepel called the new emerging generation of Muslims “Generation Jihad” and warns that if left unchecked could take Europe down the path of a potential civil war.