Germany: Police Kill Extremist After Knife Attack

Really? I accessed it just fine, but I wasn't in Oz, so maybe that's it. Here's a complete mirror of the article:

Pegida movement rises in the wake of the migrant crisis

THE AUSTRALIAN SEPTEMBER 12, 2015 12:00AM

“The megalomaniacal master race man is back,” 51-year-old former business executive Tatjana Festerling exhorts to an enthralled crowd of more than 12,000 banner-waving PEGIDA supporters in the eastern German city of Dresden this week.

The mother of two may look sweetly mild-mannered, but she previously had implored this weekly crowd of concerned Germans to think about new book burning and the totalitarian opinion of the Left and green supporters. Now she expands on the Nazi narrative when opposing the new local €37 million ($59m) centre for 700 refugees: “The new master race also builds again the concentration camps — here in Dresden!”

In this deepest recess of the former East Germany everyone fears the unthinkable: a return to the extremes that spawned their evil Third Reich. The simmering tensions that lie very close to the surface have risen sharply in the wake of the migrant crisis, particularly in the past three months and escalating in the past three weeks.

Even those who have strongly opposed the far-right message believe the enormous influx of unchecked migrants, most with divergent religious beliefs, will fuel even more extreme views and promote violence. German vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said yesterday Germany had registered 37,000 new asylum-seekers in the first eight days of this month, on top of 105,000 last month.

Germany will receive 800,000 refugees from the Middle East this year but the quota in this part of deeply conservative Germany is much less than the industrial north, yet the serene scenery along the River Elbe belies a fierceness of fear. Those with left-leaning views are frightened about the ­vehemence of the Right, but the Right is similarly scared of the Left.

PEGIDA, which stands for Patriotic Europeans Against Western Islamisation, sprang from a gathering of far-right hooligans in Cologne less than 12 months ago but has cemented its roots in Dresden with a weekly march in the town on Monday evenings. The protests have struck a chord with many more moderate Germans who resent the large intake of migrants and their vastly different cultural backgrounds, and are indignant that they receive taxpayer benefits at the cost of developing local amenities.

Claudia Lauser, a local hotelier south of Dresden, says the movement is dangerous and all-pervasive in this area of “brown mist” — a frequently used reference here to the uprising of extremist sentiment that has connotations to the Nazi paramilitary stormtroopers, the Brownshirts. “Those at the PEGIDA marches wave red, white and black flags, which are the old colours of Germany in the Third Reich, which aren’t banned, but I always associate those colours with that period,” she says.

“Another flag they carry is the Wirmer flag, which has a weird association as Joseph Wirmer supported the circles of General (Claus von) Stauffenberg, who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler.” PEGIDA says its flag is showing democracy.

Festerling is the outspoken face of PEGIDA, the far-right, grassroots movement that is not yet a political party but has ambitions, and increasing connections to Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, and has arisen to counter the Bundestag’s benevolence to the migrants.

Festerling was drawn to the PEGIDA movement after writing an inflammatory appraisal of some marches in Cologne last year that was shared more than 250,000 times. Four days after the article appeared online, she says, she was sacked from her job working with train company Veolia. Feeling persecuted, she moved to Dresden to become more involved with PEGIDA.

“I am now married to PEGIDA, PEGIDA is my partner,” she says, laughing, when I ask about her husband. She says the movement encompasses all ages and is more mainstream than the “lying media” propagation that it is full of Nazi sympathisers.

Festerling insists it is not PEGIDA that is fuelling divisions, instead blaming German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other politicians who work to ensure the country continues to feel guilty for Nazism and the Holocaust and adroitly uses that sense of shame to quell rebellion.

She says free speech to protest about the biggest issue — how Germans live their lives — is being curtailed, and likens it to the psychological brainwashing of the 1930s. She says the hearty ­welcome of the asylum-seekers at Munich airport — almost resembling a welcome home for heroic war veterans — was a symptom of this national self-condemnation.

“Germans always want to be the best, the world champions, in football in humanities; it’s OK, but now the Left and green domineering man 2.0 wants to show the world how to do welcoming ­culture so ‘right’,” she says.

Festerling arranges our meeting in a quiet Dresden cafe because of violent attacks on her house, including the distribution of hundreds of posters with her phone number, address and labelling her a racist. She arrives after her security man has scouted the place.

Meanwhile in Heidenau, 5km away, 600 asylum-seekers sleep on makeshift beds in a mega-barn of a failed hardware store, opposite a huge supermarket and next door to a timber yard, surrounded by high fences and police.

The refugees sleep five or six in a temporary divided room and authorities are still building more showers and toilets. Aziz, a 35-year-old from Daraa in South Syria, where there has been fierce fighting, says of his five-day stay so far: “We are welcome here, it is good.” But Pakistani Qadratullah, 24, says he has been at the centre a month, witnessed a surge of violent anti-migrant protests in the streets of this and surrounding towns and wants out. A week ago neo-Nazis demonstrated against the refugee centre, attacking buses bringing the latest arrivals who had been warmly applauded at the Munich train station just a day before. A dozen police were injured in these riots. At Nauen, closer to Berlin, a school being converted into a refugee centre was torched, one of more than 200 arson attacks related to the migrants in the country this year.

Qadratullah says: “I don’t like this camp, no welcome. I have here a month and I (still) don’t have a medical. I can’t get money until medical.” As he points to his fellow Pakistanis, he says the reality is harder than he expected. He thought they would be quickly processed, offered a house and a job. “Look at the clothes, all old, we need new and warm jackets.”

Festerling stood for mayor in Dresden earlier this year and attracted 10 per cent of first round votes. “That is the level of support after such a short time, less than 12 months,” she says. It was also before the huge wave of asylum-seekers arrived after Hungary dispensed with checking papers.

She says: “When it started with the refugees we thought it was all about Christians, Yazidis, secularists and liberal Syrians, about families and traumatised children from war zones, but our politicians are so damn stupid they keep borders wide open and bring in everything, lots of Islamists … hordes of young male invaders who have unleashed violence and rubbish like in Balkans and in Pakistan.”

Germany’s Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere has acknow­ledged the sharp divisions in German reaction to the migrants.

“At the same time as we see a wave of people wanting to help, we have a rise in hate, insults and violence against asylum-seekers,’’ he says. “That is unworthy of our country. Anyone who acts like that faces the full force of the law.”

Merkel went to Heidenau to make a strong address about the migrants on August 31 and, in the face of ugly protest scenes, said the unrest was shocking and shameful. On Thursday she was in Berlin urging refugees to learn German. Meanwhile, the residents in Dresden all have an opinion but are reluctant to be identified, fearing reprisals from extremists on both ends of the spectrum.

Says a restaurateur in Dresden: “Germany doesn’t need to apologise for its history, I am proud of my Germany where I live and I don’t see why we need to be ­tolerant to these Muslims. Why don’t they go to other Muslim countries? Not here. They will not integrate.”

A 29-year-old female schoolteacher says PEGIDA support and broader concern about the migrants are increasing because people in this part of Germany aren’t often exposed to different cultures. “This is foreign to us and I fear that what the government is doing is pushing more people to support PEGIDA. I don’t support them, but the government is out of control being so overly generous and saying ‘come’. We have no houses to put the migrants, our district doesn’t have the money to pay for the migrants, they don’t know our language and they hang around doing nothing. I feel sorry for them (the refugees) because it is not their fault, but local people are upset. The migrants get money and free transport that not even the poorest German gets.”

Certainly, this area of Germany is at the pointy end of the lack of tolerance. Just how widespread the divergent views spread may well depend on how Merkel ­handles the political differences in the next few weeks

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