Researchers identified anti-Muslim racism as something that has become politically weaponized across spectrum
Muslim Network TV—June 23, 20260
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BERLIN (MNTV) — Some of Germany’s most authoritative voices on conflict and security have issued a stark warning: the country’s internal cohesion is being eroded by an entrenched and increasingly normalised hostility toward Muslims, fuelled by political debates that treat an entire religious community as a security threat.
The assessment comes from the 2026 Peace Report, the annual flagship analysis jointly produced since 1987 by Germany’s four leading peace and conflict research institutes — the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in Hamburg, the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies, and the Institute for Development and Peace.
The directors of all four presented the report at the Federal Press Conference in Berlin on June 8.
While the bulk of the report examines a global landscape the researchers describe as the most violent since the end of the Cold War — with 61 armed conflicts recorded across 36 countries between 2021 and 2024 and global displacement exceeding 120 million people — one of its most pointed sections turns inward, to the state of social peace within Germany itself.
“Blanket suspicion” of entire community
The report’s core finding on the domestic front is unambiguous: anti-Muslim racism, the researchers write, is structurally entrenched in German society and reinforced by the way security policy is debated.
The problem, they argue, lies in a persistent failure to distinguish between the overwhelming majority of law-abiding Muslim residents and the tiny number of individuals who pose any genuine extremist threat.
The consequence of that failure is sweeping.
When terrorism and migration are discussed without that distinction, the report says, the entire Muslim community is placed under blanket suspicion of representing a collective security danger — a framing that treats millions of ordinary citizens and residents as potential threats on the basis of their faith alone.
The researchers go further, identifying anti-Muslim racism as something that has become politically useful across the spectrum.
It has come to serve, they write, as a vehicle for embedding right-wing agendas and rhetoric throughout the entire political mainstream — a process intensified by a migration debate increasingly built around the construction of anti-Muslim “enemy images” and accompanied by demands for ever-harsher measures.
A warning to Merz and mainstream
Perhaps the report’s most politically charged message is directed not at the far right but at the centre.
The researchers caution mainstream democratic parties — explicitly including Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative bloc — against adopting the rhetoric of the far-right Alternative for Germany in the hope of winning back voters tempted by it.
Doing so, they warn, is self-defeating. When established parties echo polarising and racist framing on migration and asylum, they do not neutralise the far right; they legitimise and advance its agenda.
The report urges democratic parties to actively counter the spread of such discourse rather than mirror it, stating plainly that the alternative is to indirectly promote the objectives of authoritarian and right-wing extremist movements.
The recommendation lands at a sensitive moment. Merz’s government took office in 2025 having campaigned on a notably harder line on migration, and the AfD — which emerged from the most recent federal election as a major force and has consistently led or placed near the top of national polling — has made hostility toward Islam and immigration central to its identity.
The Peace Report’s authors are effectively warning that the strategy of competing with the far right on its own terrain risks normalising precisely the worldview it claims to oppose.
Data behind warning
The researchers’ concerns are grounded in hard figures showing a sharp deterioration. According to Human Rights Watch’s most recent assessment, German authorities registered 1,848 anti-Islamic crimes in 2024 — a 26 per cent increase on the previous year.
Civil society organisations, applying a broader human-rights-based definition, documented 3,080 anti-Muslim cases over the same period, representing a 60 per cent jump from their 2023 figures.
These increases form part of a wider surge in politically motivated crime. Official statistics recorded an unprecedented 40 per cent rise in politically motivated offences in 2024, with right-wing extremist acts accounting for roughly half of the more than 84,000 registered offences.
The number of right-wing extremists identified by Germany’s domestic intelligence service grew steadily from around 32,000 in 2019 to over 50,000 by 2024.
Antisemitism, but not where narrative places it
The report also addresses antisemitism — and in doing so directly challenges a framing that has become dominant in German political discourse. While stressing that antisemitism is widespread in German society and must be taken seriously, the researchers insist it must not be attributed to Muslim communities.
This is a pointed intervention. Since the onset of Israeli genocide in Gaza, German political and media discourse has heavily promoted the concept of “imported antisemitism” — the idea that Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities are the principal source of contemporary anti-Jewish hatred.
Experts, including Jewish researchers and civil society groups, have long argued that this narrative deflects attention from the reality that the overwhelming majority of antisemitic crimes in Germany are committed by right-wing, non-Muslim Germans.
By insisting that antisemitism be addressed without being pinned on Muslims, the Peace Report aligns itself with that critique and implicitly questions a central pillar of the government’s approach.
A convergence of repression
The report’s warnings arrive against a backdrop of mounting concern about how Germany’s security and migration apparatus is being deployed against Muslim and communities supporting Palestinian rights.
Civil liberties organisations have documented cases of Palestinians denied naturalisation over their political views, residence rights revoked from international students who participated in peaceful protests for Palestinian rights, and a new citizenship framework that allows authorities to revoke nationality retroactively if an applicant is later judged to have failed loyalty or anti-antisemitism tests.
Legal scholars have separately noted that Germany’s hate-speech laws — originally designed to protect minorities in light of the country’s Nazi past — are increasingly being turned against the very communities they were meant to shield, particularly through the prosecution of Muslims and Palestinians during demonstrations.
The result, critics argue, is a system in which a predominantly white political and administrative class effectively decides which minorities merit protection and which face prosecution.
What researchers recommend
The Peace Report’s prescription is direct: policymakers should treat anti-Muslim racism, antisemitism, and other forms of racism as serious social problems and respond to them as such — rather than allowing them to be absorbed into security and migration agendas that deepen division.
For a body of researchers whose primary concern is the prevention of violent conflict, the framing is significant.
By placing anti-Muslim racism alongside the world’s armed conflicts in their annual assessment, Germany’s leading peace institutes are making an argument that domestic social cohesion is not a separate, lesser issue but part of the same broader question of how societies hold together or fracture.
Their conclusion is that a Germany which allows suspicion of its Muslim citizens to become structurally embedded, and which permits its mainstream parties to traffic in the language of the far right, is a Germany placing its own internal peace at risk.
Categories: Germany, Islamophobia, Racism