German police rolled out red carpet for Hezbollah-affiliated group

The police president in Münster, Germany, appeared for a “nice evening” on November 25 at a pro-Hezbollah organization that proclaims its resistance against the Jewish state, ignoring his own state’s intelligence reports about the radical Islamic Hezbollah entity.

According to a Facebook entry on the website of the Hezbollah-affiliated Mahdi AG organization, Münster’s police president Hajo Kuhlisch met with members of the Imam-Mahdi mosque to discuss “anti-Muslim racism and Quran learning.”

“It was a nice evening and productive exchange,” wrote the organization that is filled with Hezbollah supporters, according to the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) intelligence reports, where Münster is located.

A photograph on the Facebook site of Mahdi AG, dated November 25, shows a smiling police president Kuhlisch standing next to members of Mahdi AG.

Last year, the chairman of the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic center Al-Mahdi urged his supporters to wage “resistance” against Israel.

“Israel is the enemy – we carry out resistance,” said Hassan Jawad, chairman of Münster’s Al-Mahdi cultural center. Resistance for the Lebanese Hezbollah militia is synonymous with armed struggle against Israel.

When asked by The Jerusalem Post in September if the minister president of North Rhine-Westphalia, Armin Laschet, plans to outlaw the Lebanese organization Hezbollah in North Rhine-Westphalia, he referred to the state’s interior minister who told the Post in 2017 “associations that support Hezbollah can presently be banned, if financial support [for them] is provable.”

The US, Israel, the Arab League, and Canada classify all of Hezbollah as a terrorist entity. Germany and the EU have merely proscribed Hezbollah’s so-called military wing a terrorist organization.

North Rhine-Westphalia has experienced a growth of Hezbollah members, who are in a position to raise funds and recruit new members.

According to the state’s 2017 intelligence report, the number of Hezbollah members increased from 100 in 2015 to 105 in 2016. There are 950 active Hezbollah members in Germany, according to German intelligence reports reviewed by the Post.

The German daily tabloid Bild reported that the police president did not inform the state’s intelligence agency prior to his meeting with the pro-Hezbollah group. The Münster police listed no notices on its website about the meeting or an explanation for why its president met with a pro-Hezbollah entity. Bild reported that Kuhlisch meets regularly with different religious groups in the city, including Christian, Jewish and Islamic communities, according to the police communication’s department.