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.

The Louise Casey review of the state of integration within communities in the United Kingdom may well be launched soon and in the coming months. The Government’s Integration Czar, she has taken a measured, yet honest view based on hard evidence of what is impacting on communities in the United Kingdom.

Some of the focus of the report will be on barriers to employment and cultural practices that hold back women from employment. Evidence over the last decade has shown that Pakistani and Bangladeshi women do suffer significant barriers to employment, yet anyone who knows Dame Louise Casey will know that she will not pull any punches on forensically looking at areas that may also be sensitive and she is right in doing so. Cultural and gender identified roles do not have a part to play in modern society and neither should religion be used to hold back the social, mental and emotional development of women within communities.

The review will also look at areas of extremism and immigration and changes at local levels in communities. Casey’s work has extended over a year now and was first initiated by the previous Prime Minister. With decades of experience on working on anti-social behaviour and child safeguarding, she is best placed to have led this work and to have some honest discussions about immigration when the report is launched. Granted these discussions will not be easy, but they have to happen if we are to reduce barriers between communities and to take the oxygen out of extremist groups using this topic to recruit predominantly vulnerable young men.

Extremism

There are findings which will shape how this Government moves ahead on extremism in the future. Islamist groups who continue to build barriers between statutory agencies, including the Government, will be highlighted. The narrative of ‘them and us’ which has gone unchallenged for far too long, may well be highlighted and if so, it is essential so that young people are not fed half-truths and downright lies that the Government ‘spies’ on Muslims because they are Muslims. This simply exacerbates fractures in communities and ensures that Muslims never reach their full earning or social potential as they withdraw into a world of conspiracy theories.

Equally, by looking at issues like immigration, we hope that the Casey review will be able to start a discussion which means that extremist far right groups can have the oxygen on which they fuel their activities, taken away from them.

We need a new momentum in the coming Parliament, one which is realistic around integration and extremism and there are links across these areas. Those who suggest that they are not, are deluding themselves.

What we also need is less of a focus on supporting integration by the ‘kumbaya politics’ of interfaith work that is promoted by some organisations and with pictures and soundbites doing nothing more than feeding the egos of the leaders of some interfaith groups. We need substantive hard discussions if we are to fill the real vaccum that has developed around integration for some communities.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump met with minority Republicans in New York on Thursday (August 25), a day after calling his rival Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as a “bigot”.

Trump says his campaign is connecting with African Americans and Hispanics, although few in New York City’s Harlem community suggested the feeling was mutual.

“Since he plummeting in the polls, now he’s reaching out to Hispanics and Afro-Americans and he’s trying to use us as a stepping stone in order for him to get to the White House so he could put us in the dog house,” said one man.

“I think he don’t like the blacks and Latinos, he’s just using them now because he needs their votes,” said another. “He’s a very racist man.”

Trump has been heavily criticized by minorities so far in the campaign for his proposals on immigration, which include deporting millions of undocumented foreigners, building a wall along the Mexican border, and suspending Muslim immigration to shore up national security.