@coldjoint,
Yeah, because NeoNazis love muslims and are secret Islamists!
Its nice to see you document your opinion with some reasonable sources. Thankyou.
German neo-Nazis increasingly target Islam
Islamic State violence appears to result in increasingly racist sentiment against immigrants
This week, nearly 10,000 supporters of PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident) -- a German right-wing alliance of anti-Islamic protesters, among them many Neo-Nazis -- gathered in Dresden. The group's aims are to promote "law and order" and a stricter asylum legislation in Germany. The preservation of German identity, the group says on their Facebook page, would go together with a struggle against what PEGIDA calls "asylum abuse" and the "misleading mainstream media." They see themselves as a movement of the people.
AFP Photo/Tobias SchwarzAFP Photo/Tobias Schwarz"Women wearing headscarfs walk across a street market in Berlin's Neukoelln district on December 12, 2014"
Indeed, it is not only the weekly rhythm, but also the overall nationalist tenor and aesthetics of the protests that make them look like an infamous East German tradition: the Monday demonstrations, in which protesters rallied against the German Democratic Republic (GDR) regime before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. PEGIDA has taken on a similar sentiment. One could say that the group simply copied that very tradition and injected it with a heavy dose of anti-Islamic racism. Lutz Bachmann, the demonstrations' initiator and a previously convicted right-wing activist, denies that his group is targeting Muslims or foreigners per se. "What we don’t like here are economic refugees mooching on the German system", he told the New York Times.
Clearly, PEGIDA has sparked a broad political debate. German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently criticized the protests. "There is no place for agitation against religious people or xenophobia," a representative spokeswoman said. However, the government had to take people's concerns into consideration, she added, indicating that immigration issues will be discussed. German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière showed himself to be skeptical about PEGIDA's leadership, yet he demanded understanding towards the demonstrators. "Some of them feel foreign in their own country," he said in the leading Tagesthemen evening news. Bernd Lucke, head of the competing German AfD-party (Alternative for Germany) and whose position on immigrant integration is farther to the right than the CDU, even welcomed the protests.
Such positive responses to the group are surprising since, according to the Federal Office for Migration in Germany, the number of asylum applications is relatively low, with a little more than 150,000 in 2014. In fact, only 2.2 percent of Saxony's residents have an immigrant background. Essentially, PEGIDA's activities seem to rely more on external than internal events. Ever since the media focused much of its attention on the Islamic State and its recruitment of Europeans, racist undertones have been unmistakable.
Prior to Merkel's statements many condemned PEGIDA. Heiko Maas, a member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), called upon all German parties to unite in opposition to the group. Religious representatives followed. "The slogans of these demonstrators show that xenophobia and anti-Semitic racism have become socially acceptable," said Aiman Mazyek, director of the Central Council for Muslims in Germany. He especially warned of sympathies with PEGIDA's positions within the German establishment and demanded a more explicit distancing from officials.
AFP Photo/Arno BurgiAFP Photo/Arno Burgi"Demonstrators protest against the PEGIDA movement, or "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamification of the Occident," at a rally on December 8, 2014 in Dresden, Germany"
Church representatives opposed the group's claim that it relies on Christian thinking. In a public appeal, they stated that PEGIDA uses the current fears of Islamic terror to generally incite against refugees and foreigners. Eventually, also Jewish voices condemned the group's goals. Nora Goldenbogen, the head of the Dresden Jewish Community, publicly emphasized how important it is to help people in need during a counter-protest being held against PEGIDA, according to a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The number of victims during the Holocaust would have been much higher, she said, "if there hadn’t been people who were ready to receive refugees."
Hannah Tzuberi, a German-Jewish scholar of Jewish Studies in Berlin, criticized the double-standards in the discussion.
"One cannot deny anti-Semitic excesses in the demonstrations against the war on Gaza earlier this year," she told i24news. "But it is simply impossible to disconnect the discussion about this anti-Semitism from the anti-Muslim demonstrations in Dresden these days. This is not legitimate anger. It is cultural racism as a mass phenomenon."
Two recent legal approaches in the CDU coalition seem to indicate a different form of double-ethics regarding the condemnation of PEGIDA on the one hand and efforts to push towards a fiercer agenda on immigration and integration on the other. Firstly, the proposed ban on the Muslim burqa following the French 2010 model by CDU politician Julia Kloeckner. Secondly, a draft law by the CDU's Bavarian sister-party CSU proposing that foreigners who seek to have permanent residency in Germany should be urged to speak German, both in public and at home.
Whereas the second has been widely criticized and ridiculed on grounds of its general reasonableness – especially since it came from a German state whose local accent is, even for Germans, far from understandable –, the first claimed to defend women's rights and thus escaped accusations of Islamophobia.
Nevertheless, critics have interpreted both as attempts to pander to voters on the right in light of the rise of the AfD-party. "Islamophobia is on the rise in Germany," writes one of those critics, German journalist Yassin Musharbash, in a recent contribution to the Guardian. "Politicians here have sensed that something is building. But until very recently, they mostly just maintained that people’s grievances should be taken seriously, rather than criticizing the racist sentiment that came with their complaints." Following those lines of thought, it doesn't seem to be a coincidence that the proposed burqa ban and the CSU's ragged advances against bilingualism followed shortly after PEGIDA's demonstrations.
Hanno Hauenstein is a journalist covering events in Berlin and Tel Aviv.
