The good news is that about 10,000 people protested against the Nazis.
German anti-immigrant, skinhead and neo-Nazi groups in the eastern city of Dresden staged one of their biggest demonstrations since German reunification in 1990 today, as 6,000 extremists marched through the streets, police said.
Groups tied to the National Democratic Party used the 64th anniversary of the 1945 firebombing of Dresden to hold a “mourning march” through the capital of the state of Saxony. Two counter-demonstrations, led by unions and political activists, drew almost 10,000, police spokesman Marko Laske said.
In 2003 the German government has tried to ban the NPD outright.
Black-clad youths gathered at the city’s main train station, waving black and black-white-and-red German nationalist flags as hundreds of police wearing body armor separated them from angry protesters, many of them screaming “Nazis out!”
“There’s nothing in Germany that could compare to the scale of this Nazi march,” said Robert Kusche, an activist with Kulturbuero Sachsen, which organized one of the counter- demonstrations.
For 10 years, anti-immigrant and skinhead groups have marked the anniversary of the bombing of Dresden in Allied air raids, which took place Feb. 13-15, 1945, at the end of World War II. Their aims have been bolstered since the NPD entered the Saxony state assembly in 2004.
“They’re trying to link the victims of Dresden with the victims of Auschwitz,” Hajo Funke, an expert on neo-Nazis at the Free University in Berlin, said in a phone interview. “They represent a call for reviving the German Reich, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.” Read on.
The BBC has video of the rioting.
It's hard to fathom what would lead a modern German to fascism. The
country was virtually destroyed by the Third Reich and has recovered
remarkably well since Hitler's exit, yet a significant
percentage of the population can't seem to shake it's anti-Semitic tendencies.
In May 2003, the Federal Office for Protecting the Constitution published a special study on anti-Semitism and its links with rightwing and neo-Nazi groups. The same institution recorded more than 1400 anti-Semitic crimes in 2001, confirming a steady rise including a 100 percent increase for Berlin. Anti-Israeli activities, however, such as attacks on the Israeli embassy, are not included in these reports because there is still no systematic monitoring of anti-Zionism.
In 2002, as the neoliberal FDP Party maligned Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and German Jewish leader Michel Friedman, anti-Semitism became an issue for the first time in a postwar German election campaign.
In April of that year, the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt am Main and the University of Leipzig confirmed a new height of anti-Semitism. In their joint study, 20 percent of the respondents agreed that "Jews are to blame for the major conflicts in the world," and another 26 percent shared this opinion to some extent.
In May 2002, the weekly magazine Der Spiegel published a survey in which 25 percent agreed that "what the State of Israel does to the Palestinians is no different than what the Nazis did during the Third Reich to the Jews."
As reported in 2003, studies now estimate overt anti-Semitism at around 23 percent, and covert anti-Semitism as existing among 30–40 percent of the German public
A more recent study determined that one third of Europeans blame the Jews for the economy.
The Anti-Defamation League said Tuesday that a survey it
commissioned found nearly a third of Europeans polled blame Jews for
the global economic meltdown and that a greater number think Jews have
too much power in the business world.
The organization, which says its aim is “to stop the defamation of
Jewish people and secure justice and fair treatment to all,” says the
seven-nation survey confirms that anti-Semitism remains strong.
The poll included interviews with 3,500 people - 500 each in Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain.
It says that in Spain, 74 percent of those asked say they feel it is
“probably true” that Jews hold too much sway over the global financial
markets. That is the highest percentage in the survey.
Nearly two-thirds of Spanish respondents said Jews were more loyal to Israel than they were to their home countries.
That's dangerously close to becoming a mainstream idea. An Idea that would destroy Europe all over again.
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