Thousands of people demonstrated in downtown Dresden on Monday night in a rally organized by a group calling itself “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West,” while thousands more protested against them.
Police in the eastern city said the 10,000-strong rally by the group known by its German acronym PEGIDA, and the counter-demonstration by about 9,000 others, were peaceful.
Posters with slogans like “Foreigners out!” are absent at the weekly demonstrations by the group “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West.” Instead, the group known in Germany by its acronym PEGIDA is trying to paint a more friendly picture by drawing on the German flag, slogans like “We are the people” and Monday marches intended to recall the Monday demonstrations that preceded the fall of the East German government 25 years ago.
PEGIDA’s professionally designed banners are vague: “For the preservation of our culture” – “Against religious fanaticism” – “Against religious wars on German soil.” The organizers distance themselves from right-wing extremism, speak of “Judeo-Christian Western culture” and differentiate between Islam and Islamism, between “war refugees” and “economic refugees,” the latter a reference to perceived “benefits shopping” by Eastern European immigrants.
And yet, it’s possible to read between the lines. For at least some participants, “Islamist” likely means Muslim, and “economic refugee” is conflated with refugees in general.
The group’s approach has been successful. Though the Dresden-based organization’s first march in October drew just a few hundred, last Monday’s (01.12.2014) brought 7,500.
Left Party politician Kerstin Köditz has already sounded the alarm that notorious Nazis, hooligans and punks are among the demonstrators. But they are mixing with less politically extreme citizens, who are fearful of “Islamic State” terror or new refugee homes popping up near their own residences. “So, it’s a conglomeration of carriers of racist ideologies and concerned citizens, who are radicalized in the process,” said Köditz, the Left’s speaker on anti-fascist politics in Saxony’s state parliament.
Other cities, meanwhile, are trying to copy the concept – with mixed results. An Islamophobic demonstration in Chemnitz attracted about 400 people in late November, but an equal number of counter-demonstrators also turned up. In Kassel last Monday, 80 demonstrators were stopped in their tracks by 500 counter-demonstrators. Kassel now has its own “KAGIDA” Facebook page, as do Bonn, Darmstadt and numerous other cities. While it’s easy to set up a Facebook page, it’s not yet clear whether the Dresden concept can be mobilized in other cities.
Dresden’s case is unique: No known neo-nazi bodies preceded PEGIDA. Its organizers were previously of no political import, says Danilo Starosta of Saxony’s cultural affairs office, which monitors the right-wing scene in Dresden. He says those they mobilized were simply in the immediate vicinity. “These are small business owners and people living hand-to-mouth – the little man and the little woman, if you will,” he told DW. Only in the weeks following the initial demonstrations, he says, did PEGIDA draw the better-organized neo-Nazis.
Andreas Zick, who directs a conflict and violence research institute in the western German city of Bielefeld, says he believes it’s no coincidence that the new movement was formed in Dresden, where neo-Nazi marches once took place on the anniversary of the city’s bombing toward the close of the Second World War.
“They’ve been fought back successfully,” Zick told DW. “Now, a populist, right-wing movement has formed that’s far more difficult to protest against, since they’re less vulnerable to extremist labels. Though a counter-demonstration last Monday succeeded in stopping Dresden’s PEGIDA demonstration, counter-demonstrators were the minority, numbering just a thousand.”
Many institutions and organizations affiliated with PEGIDA hope to change that. Next Monday, they’re planning a large protest march through Dresden.
Each year, Zick’s institute conducts a large study on how common hostility is toward various minorities. “While it’s clear that right-wing extremists are retreating,” he says, “At the same time, there are quite stable groups – this is the well-to-do middle class – who strongly oppose immigration and whose default setting is chauvinistic.”
The PEGIDA movement, according to Zick, has the potential to spread nationwide, since the group’s fodder already exists: About one in four in Germany are susceptible to populist ideas, he says.
PEGIDA demonstration in Dresden on 1 December
The eastern German city of Dresden is bracing itself for one of the biggest far-right marches the country has seen in years. City officials said Friday that organizers have told them 8,000 people will take part in the protest, which is billed as a march against Islamic extremism.
Monday’s protest is organized by a group called PEGIDA, a German acronym for ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West.’ Experts say the group has managed to attract people who wouldn’t normally associate with the far right, by banning any neo-Nazi symbols or slogans and trying to present themselves as a mainstream movement. But past protests have drawn praise and support from neo-Nazi groups and far-right parties, including the National Democratic Party.
Over the past two months PEGIDA has organized seven protests in Dresden, growing from 200 at the first march to 7,500 people at the start of this week. Speakers at those events have focused on the rising number of asylum seekers and the threat posed by radical Islam, even though the state of Saxony, where Dresden is located, has comparatively few Muslims.
For the past seven weeks, activists protesting Germany’s immigration policy and the spread of Islam in the West have been marching each Monday in Dresden, a city in eastern Germany. In response, counter-protests have been organised to denounce rampant xenophobia. As tensions between the two groups increase, the situation is quickly heading towards a face-off. Read more…
Only about a hundred participants came to the first protest organised seven weeks ago by the group calling itself “European Patriots against the Islamisation of the West” (or PEGIDA). Since then, the movement has quickly gained momentum, with an estimated 7,000 people attending the protest held on Monday. However, the opposition to these far right gatherings has also been gaining in numbers. On the same day, 1,200 people, most of them left-wing activists, joined a counter-protest.
In the past year, there have been numerous protests against the influence of Islam on German society. On October 26, about 4000 “hooligans” and far -right activists joined a protest called “Hooligans against Salafists,” which was organised in Cologne by an Islamophobic group.
A regional official of Germany’s ruling CDU has demanded a ban on burkas in public places. The Rhineland-Palatinate official has reasoned that the veil is more a sign of suppression of women than of religious diversity.
On Monday, Julia Klöckner, deputy chief of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Rhineland-Palatinate, spoke in favor of banning the burka, a head-to-toe veil worn by women in some Islamic cultures that covers the whole body other than the eyes.
She told the German newspaper Rheinische Post that, for her, burkas “did not stand for religious diversity, but for a degrading image of women.” She said that the German constitution emphasized that women and men were of equal value and that “looking at people’s faces” also belonged to the culture of an open society.
A report released by Parliament’s Human Rights Commission following the burning of three mosques in Germany in August has reached interesting conclusions in its study of Islamophobia in Germany, revealing that the vast majority of perpetrators of such crimes have gone unpunished.
Human Rights Commission President Ayhan Sefer Üstün reported on the comprehensive research carried out in Germany. The parliamentary report states that of the 297 attacks on mosques from 2001 to the present day, 244 (88 percent) of the crimes’ suspects or perpetrators have not been captured. According to the report, “A large portion of these attacks on mosques remain unpunished … opening the way for fear, worry and insecurity among members of the Muslim population.”
Hundreds of Germans, self-styled hooligans and far-right extremists, gathered in a controversial rally in Hanover on Saturday.
The demonstrators shouted racist slogans: “Germany for the Germans,” “Foreigners out,” “Germany wake up,” during the “Europe against the terror of Islam” rally, organized by a recently formed group “Hooligans against Salafists,” an alliance of hooligans and neo-Nazis, also known as the HoGeSa.
The police have taken heavy security measures in Hanover on Saturday after violent clashes took place in Cologne last month in the first major protest of the extremist group. A series of confrontations occurred during the day when some of the demonstrators tried to break through the barricades; police used pepper spray on several protesters.
On the same day, leftist and anti-fascist groups held counter-demonstrations in the eastern part of the city. Green Party lawmaker and Deputy Speaker of the German Parliament Claudia Roth and Social Democrat mayor of Hannover, Stefan Schostok were among the politicians who participated at the counter-demonstrations.
Muslims in America and Europe say discrimination against them has seemed more pronounced after the Islamic State terrorists beheaded American and British journalists and aid workers. Hate-filled remarks on social media have also become more prevalent, especially since 9/11, when Facebook and Twitter did not yet exist.
The riots in Cologne at the end of October show there is a new danger on Germany’s extremist right. Neo-Nazis and football hooligans have teamed up to go after Islamist Salafists. Many are wondering why officials didn’t recognize the development sooner.
On a continent where Muslim leaders are decrying a surge in discrimination and aggression, Alisiv Ceran is the terrorist who wasn’t.
The 21-year-old student at the University of Copenhagen recently hopped on a commuter train to this stately Scandinavian city, his bag bulging with a computer printer. Feeling jittery about a morning exam, he anxiously buried his nose in a textbook: “The United States After 9/11.”
A fellow passenger who reported him to police, however, saw only a bearded Muslim toting a mysterious bag and a how-to book on terror. Frantic Danish authorities launched a citywide manhunt after getting the tip. Ceran’s face – captured by closed-circuit cameras – was flashed across the Internet and national television, terrifying family and friends who feared he might be arrested or shot on sight.
“It was the first time I ever saw my father cry, he was so worried about me,” said Ceran, who called police when he saw himself in the news, then hid in a university bathroom until they arrived. “I think what happened to me shows that fear of Islam is growing here. Everybody thinks we’re all terrorists.”
Ceran’s ordeal is a sign of the times in Europe, where Muslims are facing what some community leaders are comparing to the atmosphere in the United States following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Then, fears were linked to al-Qaeda. Today, they are tied to the Islamic State – and, more specifically, to the hundreds of Muslim youths from Europe who have streamed into Syria and Iraq to fight. Though dozens of Americans are believed to have signed up, far more – at least 3,000 – are estimated to have come from Europe, according to the Soufan Group, a New York-based intelligence firm.
One French returnee staged a lethal attack in Belgium last year. After more alleged terror plots were recently disrupted in Norway and Britain, concern over the very real risk posed by homegrown militants is now building to a crescendo among European politicians, the media and the public.
“It’s a clash of civilizations,” said Marie Krarup, a prominent lawmaker from the Danish People’s Party, the nation’s third-largest political force. “Islam is violence. Moderate Muslims are not the problem, but even they can become extreme over time. In Islam, it is okay to beat your wife. It is okay to kill those who are not Muslims. This is the problem we have.”
Muslim leaders point to a string of high-profile incidents and a renewed push for laws restricting Islamic practices such as circumcision that suggest those fears are crossing the line into intolerance.
In Germany, a protest against Islamic fundamentalism in Cologne last Sunday turned violent when thousands of demonstrators yelling “foreigners out” clashed with police, leaving dozens injured.
Muslim leaders also cite a string of recent incidents in Germany, ranging from insults of veiled women on the streets to a Molotov cocktail thrown at a mosque in late August.
In Britain, Mayor Boris Johnson was recently quoted as saying “thousands” of Londoners are now under surveillance as possible terror suspects. In Paris last week, a woman in Islamic garb that obscured her face was unceremoniously ejected from a performance of La Traviata at the Opéra Bastille. Although France passed a ban on the wearing of full Muslim veils in public in 2010, the incident involved a rare enforcement of the law by private management who did not take the necessary legal step of calling police first.
Even moderate Muslims say they are increasingly coming under fire, particularly in the European media. A recent commentary in Germany’s Bild tabloid, for instance, condemned the “disproportionate crime rate among adolescents with Muslim backgrounds” as well as the faith’s “homicidal contempt for women and homosexuals.”
“This is the hour when critics of Islam are engaging in unchecked Muslim-bashing,” said Ali Kizilkaya, chairman of the Islamic Council of Germany. The current mood, Muslim leaders say, is less a sudden shift than a worsening of a climate that had already been eroding for years.