Police in Germany’s southern state of Bavaria are investigating two officers suspected of performing the illegal Hitler salute.

The German constitution makes it a crime to exhibit Nazi symbols and the incident is likely to feed into a heated debate about racism and the rise of the far right after a record influx of mainly Muslim migrants three years ago.

Police said in a statement on Saturday the two policemen had shouted anti-immigrant remarks and made the salute in a pub in the city of Rosenheim on Thursday. It based its information on a witness who was in the same beer garden as the two officers.

A third man, described as a security guard in the police statement, had also taken part and made the salute. The policemen have been suspended.

German politicians have been urging action to combat a rise in hostility toward foreigners after skinheads last Sunday clashed with police in an eastern city where a man was fatally stabbed and two migrants were identified as the main suspects.

Skinheads raised their arms in Nazi salutes, chased people who appeared to be outsiders and wrestled with police in Chemnitz after police identified the suspects as a Syrian and an Iraqi.

The leaking of the arrest warrant for one of the two stabbing suspects to the anti-Islam group PEGIDA raised concerns that some justice officials in the state of Saxony, where Chemnitz is located, were sympathetic to the far right.

“We will not allow the extreme right to infiltrate our society,” Justice Minister Katarina Barley told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday, urging authorities in Saxony to investigate far-right groups.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal immigration policy remains deeply divisive in a country that has taken in more than 1.6 million people over the last four years.

The influx contributed to the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which entered parliament for the first time in an election last year with a campaign that proclaimed Islam to be incompatible with the German constitution.

Some 8,000 people took part in a demonstration organised by the AfD and the anti-Islam group PEGIDA in Chemnitz on Saturday. About 3,000 people attended a rival protest by leftist groups.

Police said on Sunday that the demonstrations were largely peaceful.

Leftist groups will hold a concert in the city on Monday to denounce xenophobia and hatred against refugees and foreigners.

An Islamist party in Pakistan called for the expulsion of the Dutch ambassador on Wednesday as it launched a protest against a far-right Dutch politician’s plan for a cartoon competition featuring caricatures of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed.

Several thousand activists gathered in the eastern city of Lahore for the demonstration organised by Tehreek-e-Labbaik, a party that amassed the fifth largest number of votes in a general election last month having campaigned as a defender of the laws and punishments for crimes of blasphemy.

Party leader Khadim Hussain Rizvi set out from Lahore’s historic centre at the head of a protest he aims to take through the towns of Punjab province to the capital Islamabad, where protesters will stage a sit-in to pressure Pakistan’s new Prime Minister Imran Khan to cut diplomatic ties with the Netherlands.

“The Dutch ambassador should be immediately deported,” Labbaik spokesman Ejaz Ashrafi told Reuters. “We will only stop when the government meets this demand.”

Pakistan has already complained to the Dutch government about far-right parliamentarian Geert Wilders’ plans for a cartoon contest that will upset and provoke Muslims.

Wilders intends to display the cartoons on the walls of his political party’s room in parliament. He says he’s had “hundreds” of entries.

“The Foreign Office called the chargé d’affaires of the Netherlands and issued him a Demarche’ to record a protest,” the Pakistani prime minister’s office said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte said last week that the cartoon competition “was not something I would do” and his government was not associated with it.

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said he planned to take up the issue with the United Nations and several world leaders.

“They don’t understand how much they hurt us when they do such acts,” Khan, a cricketer-turned-politician, said on Tuesday, a day after the upper house of parliament condemned the proposed cartoon competition.

Officials from the Punjab provincial government met with Labbaik leaders in Lahore in a vain attempt to persuade them to call off their protest.

“We told them to stop the protests because the Pakistan government is taking up the issue effectively,” an official involved on the talks told Reuters, adding that Labbaik representatives insisted the protest would only end once the Dutch envoy was expelled.

Last year, in a stand-off with the previous government, Labbaik shut down a main highway leading into Islamabad for nearly three weeks over a small change in wording to an electoral law changing a religious oath to a simple declaration. Labbaik said the change amounted to blasphemy.

The ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz was forced to accept the resignation of law minister Zahid Hamid, who Labbaik held responsible for the change, after seven people were killed and nearly 200 wounded in a failed attempt by police to disperse protesters.

Far-right groups spread “fake news” on social media to mobilise their supporters for violent protests targeting migrants after the fatal stabbing of a German man, said officials in the eastern German state of Saxony where they took place.

German police have arrested a 22-year-old Syrian man and a 21-year-old Iraqi man over Sunday’s stabbing in the town of Chemnitz, which provoked two days of protests, including clashes between far-right and leftist demonstrators.

The stabbing and the protests have exposed deep divisions in German society over the influx of more than one million migrants, mostly Muslims fleeing Middle East conflicts, after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to let them in.

On Tuesday Merkel repeated her condemnation of both the stabbing and the protests, saying scenes – depicted in amateur video clips – of migrants being chased through the streets were completely unacceptable in a state based on the rule of law.

Michael Kretschmer, the premier of Saxony and a close Merkel ally, vowed to deal firmly with extremists in his state, long a hotbed of support for far-right parties.

“We believe that at least some of the calls that were circulated online (to join the protests) were based on false information, on fake news,” he told a news conference in the state capital Dresden.

For example, a report circulated widely on social media that the 35-year-old man who was stabbed had been defending a woman from migrants, adding that there was no evidence to support the claim, Kretschmer said.

Local authorities were bracing for further demonstrations in Dresden and Chemnitz on Tuesday, and German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said federal police stood ready to provide additional assistance if needed in Saxony.

HITLER SALUTES

Saxony’s interior minister, Roland Woeller, said the protests had drawn far-right supporters and anarchist groups from Berlin, nearby states of Brandenburg and Thuringia and as far away as North-Rhine Westphalia in northwestern Germany.

“We saw a significant mobilisation effect – that means that anarchists travelled from far beyond the region and state borders, especially right-wing violent actors … from the hooligan scene and from the football scene,” he told reporters.

At least five people are facing charges for performing the ‘Hitler salute’, which is banned in Germany, and a comprehensive investigation is continuing, police officials said.

They also said nearly 20 people had been injured in Monday’s demonstrations, where fireworks were thrown.

German security officials are monitoring the situation in close consultation with state officials at a special command centre for combating far-right activism in Cologne, security sources told Reuters.

Many far-right supporters in Chemnitz joined a small but growing party called “Third Way” after a Nazi-inspired group was banned about four years ago. The new party is also under observation by intelligence agencies, according to the latest report by the BfV domestic intelligence agency.

“The fact that we have a Syrian and an Iraqi suspect is no reason – no reason at all – for a general suspicion of all foreign residents,” said Kretschmer.

“We need a jolt in Germany and Saxony. We need broad public support to win this fight.”

A leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has poured cold water on plans by Steve Bannon, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former political strategist, to forge a wide populist alliance to undermine the European Union.

“We’re not in America,” Alexander Gauland, one of two co-leaders of the anti-immigrant party, told the Funke Mediengruppe newspaper chain in an interview published on Saturday.

“The interests of the anti-establishment parties in Europe are quite divergent,” he added in comments that amounted to a blunt rebuff of Bannon from one of Europe’s most influential far-right parties.

The former Trump strategist last month announced he had created a Brussels-based political organization called The Movement to rally nationalist and populist voters in European Parliament elections next May, with a goal of undermining and paralysing the bloc.

But Gauland said that while his co-leader Alice Weidel had met once with Bannon, he saw no possibility of cooperating with him. “Mr Bannon will not succeed in forging an alliance of the like-minded for the European elections.”

He said the AfD only had close contacts with Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO), junior party in Austria’s coalition government. Former AfD leader Frauke Petry had always wanted to work with France’s National Front, but that had not worked out.

Raheem Kassam, a spokesman for The Movement, said of Gauland’s comments: “The Movement is a clearing house of ideas, not a campaigning organisation that would seek to have anything to do with AFD’s national policy or election campaigns. We are content that senior AFD figures understand the project and are in touch with us every day. We look forward to working alongside those who want to do so, for the causes we all believe in.”

Gauland told Funke Mediengruppe that his party was polling at 17 to 20 percent in recent surveys, and its support could grow beyond that as long as Chancellor Angela Merkel remained in power.

The party won 12.6 percent of the vote in national elections last September, making it the third largest party and catapulting it into the German parliament for the first time.

Gauland said the AfD needed to become stronger, but he expected it to be ready to take on a governing role in the medium-term.

Political experts say the party could become the strongest party in the eastern German states of Saxony and Brandenburg in regional elections next year, raising the question of whether mainstream parties will reverse course and agree to form coalitions with it.

Hundreds of students and left-wing activists took to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, as a rally to mark the anniversary of last year’s white nationalist gathering turned largely into an anti-police protest.

With chants like, “Cops and Klan go hand in hand,” the protesters’ criticisms of both police and the University of Virginia underscored the resentment that still exists a year after torch-bearing neo-Nazis marched through campus, shouting anti-Semitic messages and beating counterprotesters.

Several students said they were angry that the police response was far larger this year compared with last year, when people carrying tiki torches the white nationalist rally went mostly unchecked.

At one point on Saturday, dozens of officers in riot gear formed a line near where the rally was taking place, prompting many protesters to rush over yelling, “Why are you in riot gear? We don’t see no riot here.”

The standoff ended without any clashes as organizers urged the crowd to move away and begin marching off campus. Police, who appeared to be avoiding a confrontation, rode bicycles ahead of the march to stop traffic.

The newly installed president of the University of Virginia, James Ryan, apologised for the school’s inaction last year while speaking at an event to memorialize the anniversary.

Saturday’s march capped a day of hope, grief, anger and remembrance in Charlottesville, one year after the “Unite the Right” rally brought racially charged street violence to the scenic college town.

The organizer of last year’s rally, local blogger Jason Kessler, has planned a sequel for Sunday in Washington after being denied a permit in Charlottesville.

With hundreds of police maintaining a tight security perimeter around a 15-block downtown area, Charlottesville’s normally bustling business district was relatively quiet on Saturday. The buzz of a police helicopter overhead was a constant throughout the day.

The massive police response was not welcomed by everyone, including some residents and business owners who complained that the restrictions were an overreaction.

The result, however, was a day largely devoid of conflict. Authorities arrested three men for minor offences, including a 64-year-old disabled man who appeared to deliberately challenge the prohibition on certain items in the secured area.

The man, John Miska, who was wearing a handgun in a shoulder holster, visited a drugstore and purchased razor blades, which qualified as contraband under the city’s emergency declaration. The gun, however, was not banned, based on state law.

When he refused an officer’s request to take the razors to his car, he was arrested for disorderly conduct.

“This is the loss of our constitutional rights here in Charlottesville,” he shouted, as officers led him away in plastic hand ties.

A group of anti-fascist protesters, sometimes known as “Antifa,” marched in the afternoon, carrying signs with messages like “Good Night White Pride.” They stopped to pay their respects at the corner where a local woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when an Ohio man drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters following last year’s rally.

While some businesses closed for the weekend, many merchants remained open in a show of solidarity.

“It’s my town, and I’m not afraid,” said Karen Walker, whose floral shop Hedge was open on Saturday even though she did not expect much business. Outside her front door, a bucket of freshly cut flowers was available for passersby to take for free.

Many local residents also made a point of coming downtown to mark the anniversary. Kathe Falzer, 67, changed a flight to California so she could spend Saturday in town.

“I felt the need to be here and support the businesses,” Falzer said as she ate lunch at a diner on Main Street.

Director Spike Lee says he wants U.S. President Donald Trump to see his new movie “BlacKkKlansman,” an impassioned, tense but often funny movie about race relations in the United States across the decades.

“BlacKkKlansman,” based on the true story of an African-American police detective in the 1970s who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, arrives in movie theaters on Friday.

Lee has said the movie is specifically timed to mark the anniversary this weekend of last year’s violent clashes between white nationalists and anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which one woman died.

Trump last year drew broad criticism for blaming both sides for the violence and news footage of the protests is included in the film.

“I want the guy in the White House to see it too. I don’t say his name though,” Lee told Reuters Television at a Beverly Hills premiere of the film on Wednesday.

“When I saw the horrific act of domestic, American homegrown terrorism, I knew right away I wanted to do this,” Lee said of the events in Charlottesville.

Topher Grace, who plays 1970s Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, said the cast and crew were struck by the movie’s contemporary relevance while filming.

“It gets more and more timely with every second that passes, sadly. This film shouldn’t be more timely now than when it takes place, but unfortunately it is,” Grace said.

“BlacKkKlansman,” also starring Adam Driver and John David Washington, has won warm reviews, scoring a rare 100 percent approval from top critics on aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. Several critics have called it Lee’s best film in years.

The New York Times called it “a furious, funny, blunt and brilliant confrontation with the truth. It’s an alarm clock ringing in the midst of a historical nightmare.”

Brazilian far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro on Sunday tipped as his running mate a controversial retired military general who said last year that a military coup was possible in the country.

General Antonio Hamilton Mourão warned last September that the military could seize power if Brazil’s courts do not punish corrupt politicians. Mourão was later removed from his post as the army’s finance chief after similar remarks that the military could step in the event of chaos in Brazil.

Going into Brazil’s most wide open presidential election in decades, Bolsonaro leads in opinion polls that exclude jailed former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Bolsonaro, running as a candidate for the small Social Liberty Party (PSL), has pegged much of his candidacy on controversial remarks, whether defending the past military dictatorship or suggesting acts of violence against homosexuals.

In an interview last year with Reuters, the candidate for the Social Liberty Party (PSL) played down Mourão’s remarks.

“It was just a warning. Nobody wants to seize power that way,” Bolsonaro said. “Maybe we could have a military man winning in 2018, but through elections.”

Bolsonaro had struggled to find a running mate as other parties tried to distance themselves from his controversial comments. Other proposed vice presidential candidates – including another general, an astronaut and a sitting senator – ultimately fell through.

Mourão’s selection was part of a flurry of political announcements in Brazil on Sunday, the final day for parties to choose candidates for the October election.

Lula’s Workers Party selected Fernando Haddad to run as his vice president, according to the ex-president’s official twitter account, confirming the former São Paulo mayor who had long been considered for the role.

Lula, who has been jailed since April, is widely expected to be barred from standing for office under a law that excludes those with corruption convictions upheld on first appeal. Polls suggest support for Haddad would jump if Lula were to back him as the presidential candidate in his stead.

Senator and former agriculture minister Katia Abreu accepted an offer to run alongside left-wing presidential contender Ciro Gomes of the Democratic Labor Party (PDT), according to a representative for Abreu.

Gomes had sought to ally with a wide array of parties but was rebuffed, leading him to choose fellow party member Abreu as his running mate.

Every few weeks, Susan Bro walks down 4th Street in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, until she gets to a brick wall covered in chalked messages like “Love over hate” and “Gone but not forgotten.”

“I come just to absorb the energy of the place,” Bro, 61, said on Tuesday as she stood on the block now named for her daughter, Heather Heyer, who was killed a year ago while marching against a white supremacist rally.

Since August 12, 2017, when James Fields rammed his car into counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heyer and injuring several others, Bro has channelled her rage and grief into spreading the same message that drew her daughter downtown that day.

Bro said she made a promise to her daughter at her funeral, when she saw her bruised, broken body for the first time and broke down in tears.

“I held her hand and said, ‘I’m going to make this count.'”

Heyer’s death capped a day of clashes after hundreds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and others descended upon the city, drawing national attention to the “alt right” movement that had grown bolder since President Donald Trump’s election.

Trump faced intense criticism after the protests when he seemed to equate the white nationalists with the counter-protesters, saying there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Bro said she chose not to return several phone calls from the White House after learning of the president’s remarks.

As the city prepares for the first anniversary of the so-called “Unite the Right” rally, Bro is readying herself for another difficult milestone in a year full of painful moments without Heather.

“The ‘firsts’ are always hardest,” she said, her voice cracking. “I got through the others: Mother’s Day, her birthday, Christmas. This will be the last one.”

Bro said she would bring flowers to Heather Heyer Way on August 12 before speaking at an event to mark the anniversary.

Law enforcement agencies have made extensive plans to combat any potential violence, though the leader of last year’s gathering, local white nationalist Jason Kessler, failed to secure a permit for a sequel this year. Instead, he has obtained a permit to hold a rally in Washington outside the White House.

Before last summer, Bro, a former elementary schoolteacher, led a relatively quiet life, doing secretarial work and living in a modest trailer home about 30 minutes north of Charlottesville.

At Heyer’s memorial service, which drew nearly 2,000 mourners and was broadcast live on large screens, Bro said the national response to the tragedy was “just the beginning of Heather’s legacy.”

“They tried to kill my child to shut her up. Well guess what? You just magnified her,” she said, drawing a standing ovation.

Within weeks of Heyer’s death, Bro created the Heather Heyer Foundation, in part to install a formal and legal structure to handle the hundreds of thousands of dollars in funds that poured in from sympathizers around the country.

Bro runs the foundation from her home and from an office at a Charlottesville law firm, filled with tributes to Heyer that she has received over the last year: a portrait painted by an artist, a humanitarian award given posthumously by the Muhammad Ali Center, notes written by Heyer’s friends at her memorial service.

The foundation has organised a scholarship programme and is planning to launch a social justice youth programme.

Bro found herself making appearances on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show and at MTV’s Video Music Awards. She acknowledged that the intense media attention has caused resentment among some activists in Charlottesville who feel the focus on Heyer, a white woman, has distracted from the racial issues at the core of the clashes.

It has been a bit of a balancing act, she said, to amplify Heyer’s message without making it seem as though her daughter was the only victim who mattered. She noted that violence against black people often does not generate the same level of interest and warned against the “white-centred” narrative that portrayed Heyer as a leader rather than simply one of many people who decided to march.

“The issues have not changed,” Bro said. “We still have police shootings, over-policing, a lack of affordable housing, the prison pipeline.”

A year after burying her daughter, Bro reflected on the activism that brought Heyer to the protests.

“The point of Heather’s death is that we have a responsibility to rise up to address that hate,” Bro said. “Don’t sit by and wring your hands.”

At 9:37pm on May 18, 2016, Katie Hopkins tweeted ‘Give me strength. Stick up a chuffing sign for English Language School’. Her bombastic tone accompanied an image which suggested that road signs in Bradford now included Urdu.

Twitter users soon exposed the hoax.

@jake_conran @KTHopkins @Juliet777777 Er, same van in the background. 100% photoshopped.

— Adam Leyton (@AdamLeyton) May 18, 2016

@jake_conran @KTHopkins same van. Pull your head out of your arse pic.twitter.com/H53qut3OV2

— Graeme Rayner (@grimois) May 18, 2016

The origins of the hoax stem from a white nationalist hate site called The New Observer. Its content rallies against perceived ‘white genocide’. Editors of the site insist on labelling migrants and refugees as“illegal invaders” and “Third World colonizers.”

Nor does the content lose its traditional antisemitism. Articles are rich with Holocaust denial. And obsess over the ideas of an all powerful ‘Jewish lobby’. An article on September 6, 2015 was headlined ‘Jewish Supremacists Using “Holocaust Fable” to Promote Third World Invasion of Europe’.

The election of Sadiq Khan as London Mayor was ‘the first such formerly European city to officially fall before the nonwhite invasion of Europe.’

But to return to the Bradford story, the hoax goes beyond photoshopped roadsigns. Quotes are either invented or a product of plagiarism. It lifted quotes from a Guardian article published back in 2003. It also claimed that Bradford has its own Grand Mufti. A bizarre inaccuracy compounded by the fact that the individual died in 1974. In actuality, Muhammad Amin al-Husayni served as the Mufti of Jerusalem under the politicial authority of the British Mandate in Palestine. Nor is the text photoshopped in the image Urdu in origin.

The white nationalist Vanguard News Network (VNN) had also shared the story yesterday evening. Neo-Nazi hate site, the Daily Stormer, reposts content from The New Observer.

Twitter user @Juliet777777 was the source of Hopkins’ tweet. This pro-Pegida account often directs its 19.4k followers to hate sites like The New Observer.

As of writing, the hoax image tweeted by Katie Hopkins has received more than 300 retweets. It’s also possible that Hopkins saw the image as nothing more than an exercise in confirmation bias. Nor has she removed or apologised for the gross inaccuracy.

The post Why did Katie Hopkins share a white nationalist hoax? appeared first on Religious Reader.

A Slovak far-right party demanded a minute’s silence in parliament on Monday to mark what it called the murder of the head of the Slovak wartime Nazi puppet state who was hanged for treason in 1947; the chamber’s head refused the move.

The People’s Party-Our Slovakia party shocked many in a March election when it won three times as many votes as expected to enter parliament for the first time, mirroring a rise in far-right support around Europe and becoming an unwanted partner for other Slovak lawmakers.

On Monday, the party led by Marian Kotleba called for a commemoration of the 1939-45 State president and Catholic priest Jozef Tiso in an open letter to the parliament’s chairman.

Tiso allowed tens of thousands of Slovak Jews to be deported to Nazi death camps and was tried for treason after the war.

“Today is the 69th anniversary of an abominable judicial murder (of Tiso) who is rightly seen by every patriot as a martyr of Slovakia’s sovereignty and a defender of Christianity against Bolshevism,” People’s Party-Our Slovakia said.

Parliament Chairman Andrej Danko denied the request, which was made as parliament began debate on the programme of a new four-party government led by Prime Minister Robert Fico.

Kotleba’s party, which is in the opposition, has rejected suggestion of links with Nazi ideology.

In the past, members of Kotleba’s former ‘Slovak brotherhood’ party, dressed in black uniforms reminiscent of the Nazi-era Hlinka guard and appeared at rallies commemorating the 1939-45 Slovak State. The party was disbanded for spreading hatred in 2006.

Support for the far right has risen in the European Union as the bloc lurches from crisis to crisis, including an influx of asylum seekers from war-torn regions of the Middle East, which topped 1 million people last year.

Slovakia has taken a tough stance against migration and quota systems to redistribute asylum seekers among member states.

Analysts say the far right has capitalised on concerns over immigration as well as corruption among mainstream parties and poor public services.

The post Far-right Slovak party urges remembrance of hanged Nazi-era president appeared first on TELL MAMA.