An academic survey of asylum seekers in Graz, Austria, has found increasing religiosity and deeply worrying attitudes towards Jews, gay people, women, and ‘infidels’.
The study was carried out by Ednan Aslan, Professor of Islamic Religious Education at the University of Vienna, on behalf of local authorities responsible for integration, the Kurier reports.
“We wanted to know, who lives with us?” explained Kurt Hohensinner, a city councillor for the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), which currently governs alongside the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ).
Professor Aslan interviewed a sample of 288 of the approximately 4,000 predominantly Afghan asylum seekers in state care in Graz, and discovered that some 54.5 per cent believe Jewish people do not care about anyone but themselves, with 44.2 per cent saying that Judaism is actively harmful to the world.
“For certain refugees anti-Semitism is a matter of course, which has given the refugee movement a new dimension,” Professor Aslan observed.
More than half – 51.7 per cent – of migrants said they regarded homosexuality as immoral, with 59 per cent voicing opposition to same-sex marriage.
Two-thirds of those surveyed were young men under 30, and Professor Aslan found attitudes which would be considered decidedly misogynistic by Western standards: 44.2 per cent said they would support the use of violence against wives who were disloyal to their husbands.
However, the Muslim women Professor Aslan surveyed appeared no less prone to extremism than their male counterparts, with 62 per cent saying they attached great importance to wearing the Islamic headscarf in public, and 44.3 per cent saying they would refuse to shake hands with a man.
Perhaps most striking was a finding that almost half of the migrants surveyed — 49.8 per cent — said Islam played a bigger role in their lives in Austria than it had in their native countries.
“Mosques have a certain influence on these people,” observed Professor Aslan, with 70 per cent saying they attended prayers every Friday, and 55 per cent saying they believed unbelievers would burn in Hell.
Breitbart London has previously reported concerns that Graz’s mosques have already turned the city into a “stronghold” of radical Islam, with experts saying that 11 out of 20 are under constant surveillance for extremist links.
It is possible that hardline attitudes may be even more prevalent than Professor Aslan’s study suggests, too, with European Union Counter-Terrorism Co-ordinator Gilles de Kerchove noting that “most fanatics disguise their convictions [through] increasing use of taqiyya” after the Barcelona terror attacks.
Taqiyya is a form religiously-sanctioned deception which allows Muslims to lie about their beliefs in the service of a greater cause or to avoid “persecution”, without the threat of punishment in the afterlife.
Indeed, a Bosnian migrant who ran down and killed four people in Graz in 2015, including a small child, was found to have lied about being a Christian, when he was really a devout Muslim who attended mosque six times a week.
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