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MUSLIM

New anti-Islam march draws 17,000 people

Thousands of people joined a march by the anti-Islamisation PEGIDA movement on Sunday, the group's first rally since threats surfaced against the group and its leader resigned over "Hitler" photos.

Published: 25 January 2015 22:20 CET
New anti-Islam march draws 17,000 people
The Pegida demonstration in Dresden on Sunday. Photo: Arno Burgi/dpa

The new demonstration in Dresden came after Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier voiced concern that the group's anti-Muslim sentiments were harming Germany's image.

Police estimated that 17,000 people had turned up for the rally. Many carried signs saying "They don't do anything, they move here and they deal", "For a sovereign country", "Honest people, get up at last" and "Thank you Pegida".

There were also chants of "We are the people", a reference to the spontaneous movements that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Sunday's rally was the first since PEGIDA's founder and leader Lutz Bachmann stepped down on January 21 after a photo of him with a Hitler-style haircut and moustache appeared on Facebook, along with racist slurs.

It was also the first since a rally was cancelled in Dresden after threats were made against Bachmann and other leaders of the self-styled "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident".

PEGIDA marches — which have voiced anger against Islam and "criminal asylum seekers" — began with several hundred supporters in October and have since steadily grown, drawing a record 25,000 people on January 12 just after the Paris Islamist attacks.

"We are not against Muslims who want to work in Germany, we are not neo-Nazis. But those who want to live in Germany should adapt to the reality of the country," 57-year-old Gabriele Schönherr told AFP at the rally.

Steinmeier said Germany underestimates the damage caused by "PEGIDA's xenophobic and racist slogans and placards".

International scrutiny makes "it all the more important that we say clearly and strongly that PEGIDA does not speak in Germany's name," he said in an interview with daily newspaper Bild.

He also said that mobilising crowds with attacks on scapegoats like immigrants and asylum seekers was "easier than by (raising) complex subjects like insufficient infrastructure or the ageing of the population."

The movement has also prompted anti-PEGIDA protests in Germany. 

On Saturday, Aiman Mazyek, chairman of the Central Council of Muslims, condemned the increasing Islamaphobic attacks in Germany, including "insults" against veiled women, mosques "vandalised" and violence against imams.

ISLAM

German spy agency calls anti-Islam Pegida protest group ‘anti-constitutional’

German intelligence services said Wednesday that they would widen their surveillance of the Islamophobic protest movement Pegida in its home state of Saxony, as the group had become a "extremist" and "anti-constitutional".

Published: 7 May 2021 13:38 CEST
German spy agency calls anti-Islam Pegida protest group 'anti-constitutional'
A Pegida protest in Cottbus in October. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Annette Riedl

While Pegida had previously attracted “heterogeneous” support and taken “moderate” positions, it had developed “an increasingly right-wing extremist orientation” Saxony’s domestic intelligence agency LfV said in a statement.

“By regularly offering right-wing extremists a platform to propagate
anti-constitutional ideologies, this movement acts as a hinge between
extremists and non-extremists,” said agency president Dirk-Martin Christian.

He added that “all people and activities” within the group would now be put under surveillance, with the exception of those merely taking part in peaceful demonstrations.

READ ALSO: German city of Dresden declares official ‘Nazi emergency’

Pegida, which campaigns against what it calls the “Islamisation of the
West”, was born in October 2014 with xenophobic marches every Monday evening.

Its protests gained momentum during the refugee crisis of 2015, when
Germany became deeply polarised over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to keep the country’s doors open to hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, many from Iraq or Syria.

The movement’s popularity coincided with the rise of the far-right AfD
party, which entered parliament for the first time in 2017 on an anti-refugee and anti-immigration platform.

Pegida has previously been declared as extremist and put under observation by spy agencies in other German states such as Bavaria.

One of its leading members, Lutz Bachmann, has faced multiple convictions for sedition, most recently in December 2020.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agencies monitor a range of individuals and groups from across the political spectrum who are suspected of extremist tendencies.

In a move later blocked by Germany’s Consitutional Court, the national intelligence service BfV said in March that it was placing the entire AfD party under surveillance for posing a threat to democracy.

Two weeks ago, the agency said it would also monitor members of the
so-called “Querdenker” (Lateral Thinkers) movement, which has emerged as the loudest voice against coronavirus curbs and an active promoter of conspiracy theories that deny basic facts about the pandemic.

READ ALSO: Germany’s spy agency to monitor ‘Querdenker’ Covid sceptics

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