Politics & Power Quote by Otto Schily

Schily’s sentence is built like a legal brief: establish a protective generalization, then introduce an exception big enough to justify state action. “The vast majority” functions as a preemptive shield against the accusation of blanket suspicion, a rhetorical inoculation common to officials navigating civil-rights sensitivities. But the pivot word - “Unfortunately” - does the real work. It converts a statistical claim about peaceful daily life into a problem statement, inviting the listener to treat “Muslim groups” less as neighbors and more as a security category.

The subtext is managerial: Germany can be tolerant, but only on terms it controls. By pairing “religious and political fanaticism,” Schily collapses belief and activism into a single threat frame, suggesting that faith-based identity and anti-democratic politics bleed into each other. That’s an old European move with a modern target: the state positions itself as the adult in the room, tasked with sorting acceptable private religion from unacceptable public religion.

Context matters. Schily, a high-profile interior minister in the post-9/11 era, spoke from an office where “integration” and “security” routinely competed in the same sentence. His language reflects that era’s balancing act: acknowledge Muslims as citizens to preserve social cohesion, then keep the door open for surveillance, stricter association laws, or tougher immigration controls. The result is a seemingly moderate formulation that quietly normalizes suspicion, not of individuals, but of “groups” - a word that makes community sound like infrastructure for extremism.