Islam versus Europe

The website PI (Politically Incorrect) is the focus of the German Counterjihad movement and claims to be the largest political blog in Europe. For the last two weeks, it has been under relentless attack from the German mainstream press. Various newspapers have used a stock of purloined private emails to insinuate that the people behind PI are somehow a threat to the German constitutional order. They are demanding that the website and the Counterjihad movement ("islamophobes") more generally be subject to surveillance by the domestic German intelligence agency, the BfV (similar to MI5).

If the past is any guide, this surveillance tends to be rather intrusive in nature, involving the use of infiltrators and agents provocateurs. Indeed, the last time the German state tried to ban the old skool far-right NPD party through the courts, the case collapsed when it emerged that virtually all of the party members who had done and said the most outrageous things were actually state infiltrators and informers!

Last week, no doubt inspired by this press hysteria, PI also came under relentless Denial Of Service attack and was unavailable most of the time.

Der Spiegel has been one of the cheerleaders of the witchhunt against PI. Here is one of its articles on the subject.

Officials from the BfV, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, will discuss the country's increasingly vocal Islamophobe scene at a meeting on Thursday. There have been calls to put right-wing populist and anti-Muslim groups under increased surveillance.

Islamophobes in Germany could come under increased surveillance by the country's domestic intelligence agency. There are concerns that the anti-Muslim scene is becoming increasingly dangerous, and some intelligence officials want it to be subject to greater scrutiny, despite stringent German privacy laws.

The subject will be discussed at a meeting on Thursday between the president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Heinz Fromm, and the agency's leaders in the 16 German states. Officials in Bavaria are considering putting right-wing populists under observation as a new form of extremism, while Hamburg has declared it is watching an internet discussion forum similar to anti-Islamic website "Politically Incorrect" (PI).

A spokesman from the North Rhine-Westphalia interior ministry told the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper that PI was not currently under observation by intelligence agents, but that the blog was being read closely and that the opinions and comments published on it were "undemocratic." The xenophobic comments were calculated to "incite young people", the spokesman added.

Most states are reluctant, however, and the federal interior ministry has also not yet committed itself on the matter. In essence, the question is whether the hatred of Muslims is enough to endanger freedom of religion and international understanding -- or whether it is a radical but legitimate expression of opinion by individual authors within the limits of the constitution.

Source: Der Spiegel