German Anti-Muslim Demonstrations Drew 15,000 Yesterday (Up from 10,000 Last Week)

German Anti-Muslim Demonstrations Drew 15,000 Yesterday (Up from 10,000 Last Week)

Lutz Hagen, a professor at Dresden’s Technical University, said it was wrong to write off all PEGIDA supporters as far-right nuts.

“It’s already a broad movement and could become even broader,” he said. A new grass-roots movement that assails the German government for ignoring its fears of being overrun by Muslims and other immigrants attracted a record 15,000 marchers on Monday in the eastern city of Dresden.

The fast-growing movement that calls itself PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, has drawn support from the far-right as well as some ordinary Germans alarmed by a sharp rise in refugees, many fleeing conflict in the Middle East.

The rallies have spread rapidly across Germany since starting with a local social media appeal in Dresden two months ago. They are now beginning to unsettle the German political establishment, which has spent decades restoring Germany’s image as an "open, tolerant country after the devastation of the Nazis".

“The politicians in Germany have lost touch with the people and that’s why they can’t comprehend what’s happening here,” Lutz Bachmann, the 41-year-old gravel-voiced leader of the movement, told marchers from a makeshift stage.

In recent weeks, media reports have exposed Bachmann’s own criminal record for among other things burglary, drunk driving and drug dealing.

At the rally on Monday he lashed out at the media for what he said were lies about the movement, eliciting chants of “Luegenpresse! Luegenpresse!” (media lies!) from a fired-up group of demonstrators, mostly white men over 40 wearing shabby clothing.

Bachmann started PEGIDA in October to protest plans to add 14 centres for roughly 2,000 refugees in Dresden.

The number of asylum-seekers in Germany has surged to some 200,000 this year, more than any other western country, due in part to an influx of Syrians. [The US will be taking 9,000 Syrian Muslims in FY2015, already underway.—]

Even though foreigners are scarce in Dresden and the Saxony region compared to other parts of Germany, Bachmann’s protest reverberated and his Monday rallies have grown from a few hundred to 10,000 a week ago and now to 15,000.
We are the people!

Marchers on Monday carried banners reading “Courage for the truth”, “Stop immigrants abusing our social welfare system” and “We miss our country”.

They chanted: “If you don’t love Germany, leave it” and “We’re the people” – the slogan used by pro-democracy demonstrators whose marches in eastern cities like Dresden led to the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago.

Extremely dangerous for Merkel!

Political scientists say that the ferocity of the PEGIDA movement has caught the country’s political leaders off guard.

“It’s extremely dangerous for Germany and its reputation as a country that is open to the world,” said Thomas Jaeger, a political scientist at Cologne University.

“It’s also extremely dangerous for Merkel because a political movement is now opening up to the right of her conservative party and that had never happened before,” he said.

(Refugeere Settlementwatch)

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