NP - While We Were Suising Charlie...

[David Morris]

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2015/01/while-you-were-suising-charlie.html

Yeah, we were having a great time, supporting Charlie Hebdo, maybe marching
or at least tweeting about it, we were making very strange bedfellows with
those gals and fellows up there. They're from the German anti-immigrant,
anti-Islam Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (or
Pegida, for German reasons). And that's from a rally on Monday in Dresden
where 25,000 pro-Pegida marchers rallied as a response to the murders of
the Charlie Hebdo staff, who, you know, were killed by Muslim extremists.
The rally happened after politicians urged people not to march with Pegida.
But march they did.

And this wasn't just wild-eyed skinheads and Nazi nostalgia-mongers: "The
Pegida rally Monday drew all kinds of people, with businessmen and families
marching down the streets of Dresden alongside known activists of the
National Democratic Party, the far-right, allegedly neo-Nazi party that led
similar marches in the 1990s." The last weekly rally drew 7,000. One
earlier march had attracted 18,000 people.  Another is scheduled for Monday.

[...]

A recent poll showed that "one in eight Germans would join an
anti-Islamization march if it were organized in their home town" and that
29% "believed that Islam was having such a strong influence on life in
Germany that the marches were justified." Let's put this in context: the
Tea Party doesn't enjoy that much support in the United States, yet look at
all the power it has here.

However, the group is not yet a political force, and it seems to be located
mostly in Dresden, which was part of East Germany back in the day. There
have been substantial counterprotests, with thousands of participants.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, pictured above in a hijab, has said the right
things, proclaiming that "xenophobia, racism and extremism have no place in
this country" and that Pegida is made up of "racists full of hatred." But
she still has to deal with the 1.2 million immigrants who came into Germany
last year, many of whom are refugees from conflict in places like Syria.
Pegida has said it supports anyone who comes to the country from a war-torn
region.

Still, it's hard not to be vaguely concerned when, on Monday, during the
march, Khaled Idris Bahraya, 20 year-old Muslim refugee from the conflict
in the Sudan, was stabbed to death near his apartment in Dresden. Three
days before the murder, someone had drawn a swastika on the door where
Bahraya lived with seven other asylum-seekers. A message with the symbol
read, "We'll get you all."
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