Category: Europe

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.

Rich nations not doing enough for Syrian refugees says Amnesty International

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

In advance of tomorrow’s United Nations “pledging conference,” Amnesty International took aim at most of the countries in the world for not taking in Syrian refugees.

Every time I see a story like this one, I look for what they are saying about the US and I continue to be amazed by the silence.  Are they protecting Obama (if this were the Bush Administration they would be tar and feathering him)?  The US has only taken a small number of Syrians (so far) and for that we are grateful, but why is the US conspicuously not mentioned.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia: Why would we want to take any of those Syrians (or Iraqis or Afghans or Somalis)? Let Obama do it! The US Muslim population is the one we are building. Photo: http://foreignpolicynews.org/2014/03/28/president-obama-meets-king-abdullah-saudi-arabia/

Or, do they know something we don’t know (yet).

They do blast Russia, China, most of Europe and the GULF ARAB STATES (which includes Saudi Arabia) which take zero refugees.

From Alarabiya:

Amnesty International warned Friday of the “catastrophic consequences” of failing to offer protection to Syrian refugees being “left out in the cold” a week after the World Food Program (WFP) said it was suspending aid to exhausted funding.

About 3.8 million Syrian refugees are currently scattered across five main host countries in the region, of which only 1.7 percent have been “offered sanctuary” by the rest of world since Syria’s civil war erupted in 2011, the Amnesty report said.

The report, “Left Out in the Cold: Syrian refugees abandoned by the international community,” said Syria’s most vulnerable refugees include unaccompanied children, alleged survivors of torture, and people with severe medical conditions.

“The shortfall in the number of resettlement places for refugees offered by the international community is truly shocking,” said Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Amnesty International’s Head of Refugee and Migrants’ Rights, in a statement.

“Nearly 380,000 people have been identified as in need of resettlement by the U.N. refugee agency, yet just a tiny fraction of these people have been offered sanctuary abroad,” he said.

[….]

Russia, China and Gulf states have “failed to pledge a single resettlement place” for Syrians, while the European Union (EU), with the exclusion of Germany, has only pledged to “resettle a paltry of 0.17 percent of refugees in the main host countries,” according to the report.

[….]

Amnesty International’s report was released only a few days ahead of a U.N. pledging conference due to take place in Geneva on Dec. 9.

What do you think the odds are that if the UNHCR offered Syrians a new home in China or Russia they would actually take it?

Germans hardening on Muslim immigration; large number want halt to mosque construction

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
Germans demonstrate against ‘Salafists’ in Cologne in October. Photo and story: http://headlinestodayss.blogspot.com/2014/10/protest-against-salafists-violent.html

 

According to this report there are 4 million Muslims in Germany (about 5 % of the population) while the US (supposedly) has only about 2.7 million.  CAIR claims 7 million in the US, but that would still put the US Muslim population below 3%.  I’ve been theorizing that 3% is a tipping point of sorts.  What do you think?  I would really like to know what some of you think about a tipping point and when it occurs.

From OnIslam (emphasis mine):

CAIRO – A new study on German perceptions of immigrants to the European country has shown a widespread view that Muslims are not German patriots, blowing away decades of integration of the four-million Muslim community.

“We wanted to find out what happened here after the immigration and who now belongs to the national collective” sociologist Naika Foroutan, Director of Empirical Integration and Migration Research (BIM), was quoted by Deutsche Welle.

[….]

According to Der Spiegel, 27 percent of respondents think that Muslims are more “aggressive than themselves”, while 30 percent believe that Muslims show less importance to education.

A fifth of respondents expressed a negative opinion about Muslims making demands in Germany, with about 20 percent seeing it as a sign of disrespect and 17 percent seeing it as a sign of ingratitude.

[….]

Moreover, 70 percent of respondents believed that the number of Muslims living in Germany was higher than it actually is.

Almost a quarter even believe that more than 21 percent of the population in Germany is Muslim, while in reality there is around five percent.

[….]

Sharing negative connotations about Islam and Muslims, a big percentage of respondents to the study rejected construction of new mosques.

The study showed that 42 percent demanded restricting the building of mosques.

[….]

Germans have grown hostile to the Muslim presence recently, with a heated debate on the Muslim immigration into the country.

A recent poll by the Munster University found that Germans view Muslims more negatively than their European neighbors.

[….]

The report (a 2012 study) indicated that 9 percent of Germans have adopted extreme right-wing beliefs, up from 8.2 percent two years ago.

For our complete ‘invasion of Europe’ series, go here. We have a lot on Germany too, here.  Will the 20,000 or more Syrians that Germany is about to resettle push it over the edge? We will be watching.