Kind of ironic that it’s SA’s King Fahd who laid down the funds to construct this moque in Athens, when he himself won’t permit nonMuslim places of worship to be constructed on Saudi soil.
The attitudes expressed by the mayor and the people of this village, are pretty sad. Intolerance comes in all forms and backgrounds.
**Villagers try to block Athens mosque plan**, Helena Smith, 16 September 2003, The Guardian
It was meant to showcase Athens as a modern, multi-ethnic city in the year that it stages the Olympic Games.
Instead, a plan to erect the first mosque serving the capital since the end of Ottoman rule has unleashed a row pitting the reform-minded government against the Greek Orthodox Church.
The rumpus has highlighted the fact that Athens is the sole EU capital without a proper Muslim place of worship.
Now as construction workers prepare to move in, the people of Peania, which lies near the new Athens international airport, 12 miles from the capital’s centre, have stepped up a campaign to stop their area being graced with a giant dome and minaret.
Because of its proximity to the new airport, Peania was chosen as the ideal site for the mosque.
“There are no Muslims in our area. If it goes ahead, residents will react very badly,” the mayor, Paraskevas Papacostopoulos, warned. “We will not be able to control them.”
Greece’s Socialist government had hoped that the multimillion-pound mosque, which is being funded by Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, would be completed in time for Muslim athletes and spectators to use during the 2004 Olympics.
Mosques have only been built in northern Greece, home to the 120,000-strong Muslim minority. Across the capital, Greek Muslims are forced to cram into makeshift mosques in homes, shops and garages.
“Migration has made the necessity for a mosque even greater, because Athens’ Muslim population has got that much bigger,” Greece’s foreign minister, George Papandreou, told the Guardian.
“It will be built in the spirit of the multi-cultural democratic Europe of which Greece is a part.”
Many residents of Peania, pop 20,000, do not see it that way, but Mr Papacostopoulos insists opponents of the plan are not displaying “intolerance for religious freedom”.
The opponents blame 500 years of Ottoman Turkish rule for the anti-Muslim sentiment.
Last week, the Orthodox Church stepped into the fray. It urged the government to change the proposed mosque site, claiming it would give visitors the wrong impression about predominantly Christian Greece.
The government should instead concentrate on helping clerics to construct a church in a “very visible” location near the airport to convey the “Greek Orthodox stamp of the nation”, the church’s leader, Archbishop Christodoulos, said.
Even worse was the government’s intention to erect an Islamic study centre alongside the mosque.
“Its existence contains dangers which are known from similar centres in other European countries,” the archbishop wrote in a veiled reference to Islamic terrorism.
They’ve got a lot of problems and the coming Olympics is giving all these idiots extra PR than usual. In this case I think it may be a good thing. BUT there is a point and a danger there, “There are no Muslims in our area. If it goes ahead, residents will react very badly”.. that is probably quite accurate. But this, “It will be built in the spirit of the multi-cultural democratic Europe of which Greece is a part”, is not. It will be built in the spirit of having a statistic before the bulk of the media is focused on you and avoiding the public’s and thus politicians’ wrath.