The Saudi Offer

Among the various news bits in Germany this morning.....this odd offer by Saudi Arabia.  The Saudis would like to help out the new immigrants and refugees coming into Germany.....by building 200 more Mosques.

Yeah.....200 newly constructed Mosques.

A nice round number?  Well, that's the first and most obvious thing about this offer.  No one says much why it's 200.  How many of the 850,000 refugees expected for 2015 are Syrian or Muslim?  Virtually unknown, and I doubt if the government will ever publish that statistic.  With the economic refugees.....virtually none of them are Muslim....so it's hard to figure relationship of the 200 Mosques to the 850,000 potential refugees.

Where would the 200 Mosques be built?  Unknown.  I think in several East German states....if this became common knowledge....it would double-up the frustration of the anti-immigration crowd.

Presently, because of the Konigstein Key agreement, the bulk of the refugees are being divided up among three western states in Germany.  It's a small percentage of refugees who will end up in eastern Germany.

How many Mosques exist today in Germany?  It's roughly 160 full-up Mosques and roughly 1,000 facilities used as prayer or support facilities.

My guess is that the Saudis would slant the majority of the 200 Mosques that they'd fund toward prayer or support facilities, and it'd be less than 25-percent that were full-up Mosques.  But no one has said much over this....so it's a virtual unknown.

Shock value among Germans?  No, I don't think it'll even rate for a nightly news item on tonight's German news.  It might get mentioned in the newspapers, and some Germans will talk about it in a negative way because they really didn't think of this implication.

Then you come to the last part of this story.....will the Germans even allow the Saudi offer to go through?  That's the curious thing.  The money would be funneled to Mosque charity operations already in Germany, and I have doubts that the German government could ask questions or forbid anything.  It'll just happen quietly.  And the guys who'd have to come in and run the Mosques as religious trainers?  Well....it's best not to ask about that part of the deal.