German PEGIDA cancels rally over death threats

German PEGIDA movement, which stands against ‘the Islamization of the West’ has canceled next week’s rally in the city of Dresden after threats were issued against one of its top organizers.

The Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) movement has been holding protests every Monday in the eastern German city of Dresden since October.

The rallies, which initially gathered no more than 500 people, hit a record attendance of 25,000 last week.

PEGIDA announced on its Facebook page that the rally planned for January 19 has been called off after the police said “there is a specific threat against a member of the organization team.”

According to DPA news agency, the threats were filed by Islamic radicals against the movement’s co-leader, Lutz Bachmann.

The German police were informed of the threats against Bachman by foreign secret services, the agency added.

A spokesman for the Dresden police said that they had placed a “general ban” on all public gatherings on Monday, Reuters reported.

“The police in Dresden have received information of a concrete threat against the weekly PEGIDA rally,” a statement by Dresden police said. “Assassins have been called up to mingle among the PEGIDA protestors and murder one of the individuals leading the rally.”

Instead of taking to the streets, PEGIDA called on all Europeans who oppose “religious bigotry any kind” to hang the national flag of their country out of their windows and light a candle on Monday.

PEGIDA is currently the most supported anti-immigration movement in Germany as rallies by similar organizations in other cities have so far been unable to draw anywhere near as much people.

The Dresden group was criticized by many German politicians, with Chancellor Angela Merkel calling PEGIDA “racists full of hatred.”

Thousands rally in Dresden against criminal immigrants

On Monday night, an estimated 15,000 people joined Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West, in a march through Dresden, Germany, carrying banners bearing slogans such as “Zero tolerance towards criminal asylum seekers”, “Protect our homeland” and “Stop the Islamisation”.

The Anglo-Saxon presstitutes were unsurprisingly wild-eyed with indignation about the “extremists”, but could find no Nazi’s at the rally.

Lutz Bachmann, the head of Pegida, a nascent anti-immigration campaign group, led the crowds, either waving or draped in German flags, in peacefully chanting “Wir sind das Volk”, or “We are the people”.

The slogan was adopted by protesters in the historic “Monday demonstrations” against the East German government in the runup to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

According to the British Guardian “unnamed sources” in the rally said Muslims were “plotting to infect German food chain with their excrement”, but the “sources” were probably from the Guardian itself.

It was the ninth week in a row that Pegida had taken its protest to the city’s streets in the eastern German state of Saxony, but nobody looked worried about tainted food. Rather they decried the recent decision by local politicians to increase the number of homes for asylum seekers, inviting more in.

Its first march, advertised on Facebook and other social media, attracted just 200 supporters. By last week the figure had risen to 10,000. By Monday night it had grown to an estimated 15,000.

A middle-aged woman in a red leather jacket, said she was shocked that “asylum seekers in Germany have expensive mobile phones, while I cannot afford such luxury and others still cannot afford to eat properly”.

There were no racist slogans and marchers spoke of the “demise of the West” due to the rise of Islam, salafism, sexual abandon and licentiousness.

Old and young men and women, including families with children in pushchairs, many of whom said they had no political affiliation, joined the march.

Almost two-thirds of Germans, according to a poll for news magazine Spiegel by the TNS institute, believe that Angela Merkel’s government is not doing enough to address concerns about immigration and asylum seekers, and 34% think Germany is enduring a process of “Islamisation”.

According to the Anglo-Saxon press, these citizens should all qualify as Nazi’s while the foreigners and immigrants are “open-minded” folks who refuse to speak German.

The Guardian went beyond the farcical in denouncing the rally, claiming that Germans “bark” when they speak.

Led by Bachmann, a 41-year-old butcher’s son who runs a PR agency, Pegida has many clones across Germany. Legida is the name of the Leipzig branch, Bogida the Bonn branch, while in Darmstadt it is known as Dagida.

At a recent rally in Dresden, Bachmann’s hometown, he explained that while asylum seekers enjoyed luxury accommodation, many impoverished German pensioners were “unable to even afford a single slice of Stollen” (German Christmas cake).

Bachmann maintains that he plays a small part of the movement. “I’m just a small cog in a much bigger wheel,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung in a rare interview.

German resentment over a sharp rise in the number of refugees seeking political asylum in Germany, many from war-torn countries including Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, has grown in recent months.

All these countries have been ravaged by Anglo-Saxon meddling and expansionist imperial policies.

Last Friday, a newly refurbished home for asylum seekers in Nuremberg in southern Germany was badly damaged in an arson attack. Anti-foreigner slogans and swastikas were found daubed on the walls.

The attack may have come from worried security agents desperate to smear Pegida.

Swedish government on brink of collapse

Collapse looms after far-right party vows to strike down government’s budget

Sweden’s minority, centre-left government teetered on the brink of collapse after just two months in office when a far-right party announced it would vote against the 2015 budget, effectively dooming it to defeat.

The anti-immigration Sweden Democrat party, which holds the balance of power in parliament, said on Tuesday it would support an alternative budget proposed by the centre-right Alliance opposition bloc, leaving the government isolated.

Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said last-ditch talks with Alliance leaders to resolve the crisis sparked by the unaligned Sweden Democrats, who want to cut the number of asylum seekers by 90 percent, had proved fruitless.

“There is no one on the other side of the table, it is meaningless to hold talks,” Lofven told reporters after the meeting at the government headquarters, saying he would decide how to proceed after Wednesday’s debate in parliament.

“We may call snap elections later, when the constitution allows. We could also resign and there are other alternatives,” he said.

Rival budget

The leaders of the Moderate, Centre, Christian Democrat and Liberal parties, which make up the Alliance, said they would not budge from their pledge to vote for their own bill.

The budget by the ruling coalition, formed by Social Democrats and the Green Party, would partly reverse tax cuts implemented by the Alliance during their 2006-2014 reign.

Parliament is due to vote on the budget on Wednesday.

One of Lofven’s option to salvage the crisis is to send the budget back to committee for amendments to try to win backing from some or all centre-right parties, though prospects of success are remote.

He could also resign and try to put together a new government – potentially without the Greens.

A last resort would be to call a snap election – something that has not happened since 1958. A vote could be called in late December at the earliest, with the elections taking place within the following three months.

Acting Sweden Democrat leader Mattias Karlsson said his party was flexing its muscles to force a reversal of Sweden’s generous stance on immigration.

“If the Alliance doesn’t change its policies [on immigration], we would try to bring down a government of those parties too,” he said.

Costs for asylum seekers including housing, language lessons and welfare allowances totalled 1.5 percent of the country’s 2013 budget, with Sweden the biggest per-capita recipient of asylum seekers and refugees last year, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The Sweden Democrats doubled their support in the September election, taking 13 percent of the vote and becoming the third largest party in parliament.

Mainstream parties have shunned them, and the budget gives them a rare opportunity to show their political strength.

Source: Al Jazeera

‘Anti-immigration is not racist’

ukimmigrationThe success of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s flagship immigration policy was called into serious question on Sunday, dealing him a potential blow ahead of 2015 elections by playing into the hands of a populist anti-immigration party.

A report by lawmakers from across the political spectrum concluded that Britain’s migration statistics were grossly unreliable and “not fit” for purpose, undermining the credibility of Cameron’s assertions about the issue.

Immigration is a hot button issue in Britain, where Cameron is trying to stop an exodus of voters to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) before a parliamentary election in two years’ time, and polls show the issue is one that worries voters the most.

Concerns have been fuelled by warnings in the right-leaning press about “hordes” of Romanians and Bulgarians moving to Britain next year when EU freedom of movement restrictions lapse, at a time when Britons face rising competition for jobs.

To compound Cameron’s problems on immigration, a government pilot scheme that involves vans driving around London with billboards telling illegal immigrants to “go home or face arrest” has angered his junior coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, and prompted allegations of racism.

Questioning immigration was for years regarded as racist in Britain, but all three main parties have started to talk tough about the subject in response to rising public anxiety, campaigns in the country’s popular tabloid press, and the popularity of the anti-immigration UKIP.

Cameron’s ruling Conservatives, who are trailing the opposition Labour party in the polls, have promised a far-reaching immigration crackdown and say they have cut net migration – the numerical difference between people coming in and out of the country – by a third.

They have also pledged to cut that figure to tens of thousands of people a year from over 100,000 now.

Data ‘too uncertain’

But the report, by the lower house of parliament’s Public Administration Committee, said that government migration data was neither systematically nor rigorously collected.

“We are struck by the advice of the Migration Advisory Committee to the Government that it should aim for net migration of only 50,000 as the only means of being certain that net migration is in fact below 100,000,” it said.

Bernard Jenkin, a Conservative lawmaker who oversaw the report, told local media government statistics were “little better than a best guess and could be out by tens of thousands.”

Chris Bryant, a Labour lawmaker, said the report showed the government’s assertions on immigration could not be trusted.

“We should be able to count people in and out of this country,” he told Sky TV. “If the government is going to boast about having cut net migration then you would think that the statistics would be reliable ones. The truth is they’re not.”

Cameron’s Conservatives are trailing Labour in the polls, but several surveys show Labour’s lead, which until recently had been fairly steady at ten percentage points, is narrowing.

One opinion poll published earlier this month put the Conservatives in joint first place with Labour for the first time in over a year.

UKIP, which campaigns for Britain to leave the European Union and for a halt to “open door immigration,” made sweeping gains in May local elections, winning almost one in four votes.

But its poll rating has since fallen from a high of 22 percent. Some polls suggest it has lost one or two percentage points. Others suggest its fall in support may be more serious.

A spokesman for Britain’s Home Office (interior ministry) said the government was confident it was on the right track.

“We disagree with the report’s conclusions,” he said. “Government reforms on immigration are working and the statistics do show that net migration is at its lowest level for a decade.” – Reuters