BERLIN (AP) — German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday warned the country’s citizens not to participate in weekly anti-Islam rallies that have attracted growing numbers of supporters in the eastern German city of Dresden. Merkel condemned the organizers of the protests and said they were driven by prejudices and hatred against foreigners.
The chancellor used unusually direct words in her New Year’s speech on Wednesday for the rallies organized by a group calling itself Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West, or PEGIDA which have been attended by thousands.
The number of participants at PEGIDA’s weekly demonstrations in Dresden, a region that has few immigrants or Muslims, has swelled from a few hundred in October to more than 17,000 in December. Similar groups elsewhere haven’t mobilized anywhere near as many people, and there have also been large protests against them.
Merkel’s speech was released in print early Wednesday and will be shown on public television in the evening.
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One Response
Prejudices? Hatred of foreigners? Is that really what PEGIDA is about? Those who join these rallies are rightly alarmed not about “foreigners” but about Muslims, not only foreign Muslims who come to Germany, settle deep within, but bring with them an ideology that prevents them from ever accepting the laws and customs and attitudes of the Infidel land whose largesse they crave, but also native, German converts, whose pre-existing pathologies lead them naturally to Islam, and whose adoption of Islam leads them to being more dangerous than they were before. To be against the islamisation of your own country, to refuse to accept the nonsense that your own politicians and media figures — those who have a responsiblity to protect and instruct — keep offering, when they ignore or misstate the truth, and show no sympathy for a widespread and growing, and fully justified, alarm and, among those best informed, even a kind of despair. Merkel, Schauble, all of them have failed — and it is only a few, such as Thilo Sarrazin, who are telling the truth, and expressing what must be expressed.