The protests are part of a burgeoning grassroots movement calling for an end to the spread of Islamic Sharia law in Germany.
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By Soeren Kern, Sun, December 14, 2014 Der Spiegel
Thousands of German citizens have been taking to the streets to protest the growing “Islamization” of their country.
The protests are part of a burgeoning grassroots movement made up of ordinary citizens who are calling for an end to runaway immigration and the spread of Islamic Sharia law in Germany.
The guardians of German multiculturalism are fighting back: they are seeking to delegitimize the protesters by branding them as “neo-Nazis” and by claiming that the Islamization of Germany is a myth contrived by misinformed citizens.
But there is a mounting public backlash over what many perceive as the government’s indifference to the growing influence of Islam in German society. This backlash represents a potentially significant turning point—one that implies that the days of unrestrained German multiculturalism may be coming to an end.
The latest protest took place in the eastern German city of Dresden on December 8, when more than 10,000 people defied freezing temperatures to express their displeasure with Germany’s lenient asylum policies.
Germany—which is facing an unprecedented influx of asylum seekers, including many from Muslim countries—is now the second most popular destination in the world for migrants, after the United States.
The Dresden protest was organized by a new citizens initiative, “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West,” better known by its German abbreviation, PEGIDA, short for “Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes.”
PEGIDA, which has been organizing so-called “evening walks” (Abendspaziergang) through downtown Dresden every Monday evening since October, has seen the number of protesters increase exponentially from week to week.
Similar anti-Islamization protests have been held in the western German cities of Hannover, Kassel and Düsseldorf, where 400 people showed up on December 8 for demonstration organized by a PEGIDA offshoot, named DÜGIDA.
These protests are similar to, but separate from, other mass demonstrations organized in Cologne and other German cities by a group called Hooligans against Salafists, or HoGeSa.
PEGIDA was launched by Lutz Bachmann, a 41-year-old Dresden native with no background in politics, after government officials in the eastern German state of Saxony announced that they would be opening more than a dozen new shelters to house some 2,000 refugees.
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Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook. Follow him on Twitter.
This article appeared originally on GatestoneInstitute.org
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1400 yrs 1.3 billons local converts in each nation 350 millions killed by follower of $1 book of arabs and our intellectuals still have no guts to declare islam as the enemy of human race. All local converts in each nation destroying own race and nations Arbs enjoy the result of this book and are happy. No carb soldiers come to kill you any more your own local converts wild a good job destroying own nation. Stop them now . New laws to ban to deport them .
State and Church may have different streets but they do share the crossing where you need to give proper share to the travelers of both sides.
DENYING THE SHARIA SOCIETIES IN GERMAN COUNTRY BY GERMANS IN THOUSANDS IS THEIR WISH AND THEIR BROAD LOOK FOR FUTURE. THE SHARIA SOCIETIES ARE LINKED AND LIKED BY THE TRUE MUSLIMS AS THEY WERE DESIGNED IN SUCH A WAY TOLD BY QURAN AND HADID USUALLY. NOW SOCIETIES GROWING IN COMPUTER CONTROL AND THE SPEED HAS ENHANCED AND THE RESULTS ARE WELL IN POSITION WHEN COMPARED WITH SHARIA DEALINGS. MAN MADE LAWS ARE CAN BE AMENDEDIN FUTURE WHERE AS SHARIA LAWS CAN NOT. THE MORAL VALUES IN SHARIA SOCIETIES MORE WHEN COMPARED TO MODERN GERMAN SOCIETIES. BUT THE SPEED IS LESS AND THE RESULTS POOR. THIS IS TOWARDS ISLAMIZATION. IT IS ALWAYS CHASING THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND MAKING GERMAN SOME WHAT WEAK IN SOCIETY OF MODERN TIME. TIME WILL BE THE MASTER WHEN SOME UNWILLING SITUATION COMES BEFORE.