The leader of a German organization against the perceived “Islamization” of Europe, which has taken pains to distance itself from neo-Nazi groups, provoked a firestorm Wednesday after a picture surfaced showing him with a Hitler mustache and hair combed over like the Fuehrer.
Top-selling Bild newspaper published the photo of Lutz Bachmann, co-founder of the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West, or PEGIDA on its front page.
Bild quoted him as saying he had posted the picture on his Facebook page, apparently some time ago, as a joke.
“One has to be able sometimes to make fun of oneself,” he said. Bachmann did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.
If it was a joke, nobody was laughing.
“Anyone in politics who poses as Hitler is either a total idiot or a Nazi,” Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel told Bild, taking the opportunity to reiterate the government’s call for people to stay away from PEGIDA’s weekly demonstrations in Dresden.
“Reasonable people do not follow idiots, and decent people don’t follow Nazis,” he said.
PEGIDA organizer Rene Jahn said the leadership was meeting Wednesday to discuss the issue.
“The incident with the Hitler picture must have consequences,” he told Bild. “That’s unacceptable. I won’t have anything to do with such a thing.”
PEGIDA’s regular weekly rally in Dresden was canceled Monday after police said authorities had monitored a Tweet calling for one of the organizers to be killed. The week before, PEGIDA attracted 25,000 people at its largest rally since they started in October.
Elsewhere, the bishop of Muenster, Felix Genn, said he had withdrawn a priest’s right to preach or speak on behalf of the church for comments he made about Islam. Father Paul Spaetling had taken part in a PEGIDA offshoot’s rally in the western city of Duisburg on Monday.
(AP)
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2 Responses
When we will get over the emotion of this news article, we might reflect about the message in this development in Germany.
Angela Merkel, President of Germany, has stated that due to the propensity of Germans to have less that two children on average per family, Germans are not replacing themselves. Muslims in Germany though, are having large families. Thus, she averred, Germany will become an Islamic republic by the year 2030.
Now, how is Germany going to combat this problem. Democracy and tolerance cannot solve it. It therefore makes sense for Germans to do what they usually do with demographies that they cannot diminish by humanitarian means: kill them.
Although there is no official movement to employ this tactic, Malcolm Hoenlein has said that he heard talk of it in German social organizational circles. That means that in about 15 years from now, someone might try to implement it.
PEGIDA says they supporttraditional Judeo Christian values. Like the ones that murdered six million.