It has been announced that Omid Nouripour will lead the Greens together with Ricarda Lang, but the male portion of the male-female leadership duo is being singled out for comments he made in the past.
The Muslim Nouripour seems to have a special connection to the Sharia, with him saying in 2017 that parts of it should be integrated into Germany’s basic law. The former Muslim civil rights activist Ali Utlu pointed out his speech on Twitter, writing: “The color of this party is the same as that of Islam. Green. Will homosexuals eventually be killed and have their limbs cut off? Resist this from the beginning!”
So what did Nouripour actually say in his speech? He had been responding to an Alternative for Germany (AfD) politician’s speech criticizing Sharia and listing a number of crimes and cases of anti-Semitism, ostensibly due to Germany’s rising Muslim population.
Nouripour responded: “There are many types of Sharia. Our job here is to ensure that the parts that are compatible with the Basic Law can also be applied. But there are numerous types of Sharia, and I wonder what type he is referring to. Do you know what you’re talking about? And the second question is: The history of Islam is a very long history of possible interpretations, and up to the end of the 19th century there was always a sentence under every expert opinion that said, ‘But nobody really knows except the God of the believers’.”
Nouripour also said that certain parts of Sharia are simply not compatible with Germany’s constitution. However, he never elaborates about which types of Sharia are compatible with Germany’s Basic Law and which are not.
Sharia law is not just a brutal code that leads gay people to be killed or women to be oppressed, but also sets forth a number of rules for Muslims to live by, ranging from dietary restrictions to prayer. The code is meant to regulate Muslim behavior within the family and greater society.
Much of it runs completely contrary to the open society that Germans pride themselves on in a democratic state. It decides what people drink, who they marry, how women are treated, along with how homosexuals and people of different faiths and minorities are treated. Much of the rules around sharia law are simply incompatible with Germany’s constitution as it stands.
As a result, worries are being raised about Nouripour’s remarks even if they contained a number of qualifiers. The new German Green Party leader was born in Tehran in 1975 and moved to Germany 13 years later. He gave up his studies in 2002 to become a professional politician and remains a member of the German parliament to this day. He is considered to be Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s designated successor if she were to resign.
Nouripour, who also has Iranian citizenship, served on the advisory board of the German-Palestinian Society (DPG), which openly sympathized with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign directed at Israel. He also supported a motion labeling products coming into Germany in order for consumers to know if they were made or produced in Israel or in the occupied Palestinian territories.
