Category: Asylum seekers

German anti-Muslim demonstrations drew 15,000 yesterday (up from 10,000 last week)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The demonstrators are “dangerous” because they are not right wing nuts!

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.

Marchers chanted: “We are the people!” Photo: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30478321

Reuters has a pretty informative story about how it went in Dresden yesterday:

(Reuters) – 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.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has been trying to shut them down suggesting they are xenophobic neo-Nazis, but it looks like it isn’t working.

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.

Our complete ‘Invasion of Europe’ series is here.  Our expanding archive on Germany is here.

UN blasts Sweden for “Afrophobia”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Move over Islamophobia!  For all of you who don’t want to see your countries overrun, the United Nations has identified a new phobia they claim you are suffering from.

 

 

Look at this incredible story at the Daily Sabah, a Turkish newspaper (hat tip: ‘Pungentpeppers)!

By the way, there is a lot going on in Europe right now and if it seems we are spending too much time discussing the invasion, we aren’t.  What is happening in places like Sweden offers a profoundly important message we all better heed (and quickly).

ISTANBUL — Sweden, a European country known for its long history of openness and tolerance, now suffers from growing racial discrimination towards people of sub-Sahara African descent. In response to “a heightened xenophobic and racist attitude against migrants and refugee communities with African descent,” the United Nations called on the Swedish government to take significant measures to end “Afrophobia” within the country.

“Afro-Swedes and Africans with whom we met expressed their experiences of multiple forms of discrimination based on their skin color, race, religion and sex,” the U.N. human rights experts said, following a five-day official visit to Sweden. The working group urged the Swedish government “to develop a Human Rights Strategy and other measures that would address racial discrimination against Afro-Swedes and Africans.”

Then get a chuckle here.  They don’t tell you that the recent riots*** were perpetrated by the immigrants.

As hate crimes prevail within the country, Sweden was hit by riots over the weekend. During heavy clashes between protesters and police in a poor suburb in Sweden’s capital of Stockholm, 11 young people were arrested for rioting and arson. Many Swedish suburbs with a large immigrant population have been hit by violence, as many fear that it could further boost the far-right anti-immigration movement in Swedish society.

So here is the lesson we should all learn from “welcoming” Sweden.  They invited the world to come and partake of their generous society and what do they get?—a kick in the teeth for it.

Sweden’s reputation as an open society has been deteriorating as more people of African descent are subjected to racial discrimination. As the world continues to suffer from conflicts and political extremism, Sweden received the most asylum applications in the world from 2009 through 2013, according to the U.N. refugee agency, and the country expects that the number of asylum seekers in 2015 will break records. “Our society should be prepared to receive between 80,000 and 105,000 asylum seekers in 2015,” said Sweden’s Migration Board, the government agency in charge of handling immigration issues. Sweden’s refugee policy is also praised by many international humanitarian agencies, as it stepped up its efforts for Syrians by granting permanent residency to refugees fleeing the conflict. In light of the worsening humanitarian crisis in Syria, Sweden opened its borders to all Syrian asylum seekers by granting them permanent residency.

However, Sweden’s liberal policy towards refugees has resulted in decreasing tolerance in Swedish society toward immigrants. [NO kidding!—ed] In the face of a massive influx of refugees and asylum seekers, Swedish nationalism has been on the rise, as far-right groups are deeply critical of the center-left government’s policies towards immigration.

Go here for our complete “Invasion of Europe” archive.  Tomorrow there is expected to be another big demonstration in Germany against Muslim immigration, if you see the news before I do, send it my way.

***See riots last week, you know if they were started by native Swedes they would be making that clear.

Germany: 10,000 rally in Dresden against Islam/asylum seekers

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update December 14th:  More demonstrations expected tomorrow, here.

Invasion of Europe breaking news….

“Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West” marched in Dresden earlier this week.

A day after the Obama Administration announced it is “welcoming” 9,000 Syrian Muslims to the US, Germans are expressing their anger loud and clear about the influx of Muslim asylum seekers. Germany is planning to take up to 20,000 Syrians in the coming months. Demonstrations of this size must be shaking up the European Union.  In October it was Cologne.

From Reuters at Yahoo News:

BERLIN/NUREMBERG (Reuters) – Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday condemned anti-Muslim demonstrations centered on the eastern city of Dresden, saying there was “no place in Germany” for hatred of Muslims or any other minority.

In a speech at a party congress of her Bavarian allies in Nuremberg, Merkel also denounced an attack on buildings in a nearby town being turned into refuge for asylum-seekers. The structures were set on fire and daubed with swastikas.

“It is unbearable when homes of asylum-seekers are defiled, when people try to make radical slogans,” Merkel said, adding that everyone coming to Germany had the right to be treated decently.

Earlier on Friday, Merkel’s spokeswoman Christiane Wirtz said: “In the name of the government and the chancellor I can say quite clearly that there is no place in Germany for religious hatred, no matter which religion people belong to.”

“There is no place for Islamophobia, anti-Semitism or any form of xenophobia or racism,” Wirtz said of the growing Monday evening marches in Dresden under the motto PEGIDA, standing for “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West”.

[….]

The latest PEGIDA march on Monday drew up to 10,000 people and almost as many counter-demonstrators. The organizers, who began two months ago with a few hundred people, say they are not against immigrants but want to protest against Islamic extremism and the influx of asylum-seekers.

For our ‘Invasion of Europe’ archive click here.

NYT: Germany under strain from influx of Syrian and other Muslim refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Not a new story here at RRW as we follow the ‘Invasion of Europe’ on a daily basis.  Yesterday the New York Times did the Germany story.  The headline should really be ‘Merkel calls emergency meeting as citizens riot.’

Angela Merkel has her work cut out for her. Germans want “Ruhe und Ordnung” and that is not going to happen if the Merkel government continues to put out the welcome mat.

(I’m looking for the day when the unrest in Europe over Muslim immigration (finally!) shows up on Fox News.)

We are watching Germany closely because the extraordinary numbers of refugees Germany has promised to take will result in a pretty swift answer as to whether the country will survive this folly, or not.

Go here to see that Germany, by far, tops the latest list provided by the UNHCR of countries “welcoming” Syrians. And these numbers do not include the Africans, Afghanis and Iraqis seeking asylum as well.

My guess is that Germany will not have the guts now to do an about-face and tell the UNHCR no more!

By the way, we are concerned about the fact that the US is listed by the UNHCR as “open-ended resettlement.” 

From the New York Times (emphasis is mine):

BERLIN — Ahmad Mahayni, a 38-year-old businessman from Damascus, is one of about 200,000 people expected to throw themselves on Germany’s mercy this year and apply for asylum.

Mr. Mahayni is resourceful, and he seems determined to build a future for his family. He helps out in the refugee facility where he was sent after arriving at the Berlin airport and telling the police that he was seeking asylum. A fairly fluent English speaker, he quickly figured out that “the key of success here is the language” and began taking 10 hours of German class each week.

But even as refugees like Mr. Mahayni work hard to adapt to their new homes in Germany, Germans are contending with a stream of new arrivals.

Three and a half years of war in Syria have produced the world’s worst refugee crisis, the United Nations says. In Germany now, refugees are arriving by the thousands, and even in the country where a Nazi past constantly evokes reminders of a special duty to help, the welcome mat is wearing thin.

To a large extent, the reluctance begins with a question of where to house ever more arrivals. Cities from Hamburg to Munich to Berlin have variously resorted to tents and modified shipping containers, and even talked of vast ships — a solution last used in the 1990s, when the Balkan wars created a similar influx into a recently reunited Germany.

The problem has grown so acute that Chancellor Angela Merkel has summoned the governors of Germany’s 16 states to meet in the coming weeks. Her vice chancellor, the Social Democratic leader Sigmar Gabriel, has already urged the allocation of an extra billion euros, or about $1.2 billion, in aid to hard-pressed communities. The authorities admit that they failed to anticipate such a wave of refugees and in recent years tore down too many empty buildings that could have been useful now.

Angry citizens — who say they have nothing against foreigners but voice fear for their children and the “Ruhe und Ordnung” (peace and order) so treasured by Germans — have berated officials and organized small but growing protests in several places where refugee centers are planned.

Not a “small” protest in Cologne a few weeks ago, here.

Read it all.  In typical mainstream media fashion, NYT reporter Alison Smale finds someone to say something nice and wraps up with a hopeful little quip.  There is nothing hopeful about any of this!

Our complete archive on Germany is here.

Update on Russian gays seeking asylum in the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here is Yahoo News filling us in on one of the latest projects of the Open Borders movement—getting Russian gays accepted in the US as refugees.

We have written about this ‘project’ previously here and here.

Aaron Morris, Legal Director Immigration Equality says his legal team has been very successful in getting grants of asylum for their Russian clients. Photo and bio: http://immigrationequality.org/our-staff/aaron-morris/

From Yahoo News (hat tip: Robin):

There are no firm statistics on the number of gay Russian asylum seekers; U.S. government agencies that handle applications do not report such details. However, the Department of Homeland Security’s latest figures show that overall applications for asylum by Russians totaled 969 in the 2014 fiscal year, up 34 percent from 2012.

To get an application approved, an asylum seeker must present a convincing case that he or she has a “well-founded fear of persecution” in their home country. Russia’s anti-gay policies and its record of anti-gay violence are factors that could strengthen an individual’s case.

[….]

Aaron Morris, Immigration Equality’s legal director, said most of the recent asylum inquiries came from gay men in their 20s and 30s who had been targeted by anti-gay attacks, while only a handful have come from gays or lesbians raising children.

We learn that in a small number of cities there are programs in place to help the Russian LGBT visa-holders submit their claims for asylum with lots of lawyers ready to help.  However, since the asylum seekers can’t legally work, obtaining housing and other living expenses is a problem.

The article does mention that lobbying efforts are underway at the US State Department to get Russian gays and lesbians designated as a refugee class which would mean we would go fetch them and bring them to the US rather than the present situation where they must get themselves here and apply for asylum.  If they were refugees chosen abroad, they would get all sorts of social services right off the bat.

Read it all.