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Cologne Cathedral to Turn Out Lights in Protest at Anti-Muslim March

By on January 3, 2015 in Anti-Loons, Loon-at-large


Cologne Cathedral and the Hohenzollern railway bridge along the river Rhine, March 29, 2014. Ina Fassbender/Reuters

Cologne Cathedral to Turn Out Lights in Protest at Anti-Muslim March

One of Germany’s most famous landmarks, Cologne Cathedral, will be plunged into darkness on Monday evening in protest at a march by a growing grass-roots anti-Muslim movement through the western German city, cathedral authorities said.

The rise of the group, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West (PEGIDA), has shaken Germany’s political establishment, prompting Chancellor Angela Merkel to say in her New Year address that its leaders were racists full of hatred and citizens should beware being used.

PEGIDA’s last weekly rally in the eastern city of Dresden attracted some 17,000 people, and the movement plans further marches in other cities, including through the center of Cologne on Monday night with a rally by the cathedral.

“PEGIDA is made up of an astonishingly broad mix of people, ranging from those in the middle of society to racists and the extreme right-wing,” Cathedral Dean Norbert Feldhoff told Reuters.

“By switching off the floodlighting we want to make those on the march stop and think. It is a challenge: consider who you are marching alongside.”

Dresden’s famous Semperoper opera house also extinguished its lights in protest during the last PEGIDA march in the city.

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  • Friend of Bosnia

    Why yes, a lot of SS men were criminals already before they joined up.
    Like a lot of cetniks who committed the worst atrocities during 1992-95 were criminals, Zeljko Raznjatovic Arkan being one of the worst of them all (but by no means the only one).
    Like most professions, that of genocidal executioner demands a specific personal and psychological profile. It’s only natural that such murderous individuals are attracted to a murderous profession.

  • George Carty

    About the kind of people who become “willing executioners”, I suppose it is significant that when the Nazis took over Germany, the future Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss was already a convicted murderer.

  • George Carty

    I prefer RationalWiki’s expansion: “Pissed Evil Germans Initiating Deportation of Arabs” 🙂

  • Friend of Bosnia

    Yes, that surely explains a lot.

  • George Carty

    The appalling carnage in Syria is ultimately the fault of the Turks — in their efforts to develop Turkish Kurdistan (and thus cut the legs out from under the PKK terrorists) they ended up stealing about half of the Euphrates river flow, with devastating consequences for downstream Syria.

    The areas where most of the Daesh terrorists were recruited from were those worst affected by the resulting drought.

    To me it seems like the medium-term solution would be to build some nuclear desalination plants in Syria.

  • Friend of Bosnia

    Well thanks to you. I too must keep an open mind; and not start hurling abuse the moment anyone says things I don’t like.
    Once I came across a young Bosnian Serb who also talked to me that way at firsdt. It turns out that some Bosniak thugs (because I must admit there are evil guys among the Bosniaks too) had murdered some of his relatives in cold blood. And when I was told that I undersatood his anger. I coud sympathize with that guy. It was good that I could convince him not to hate all Bosniaks as such, and he told me that he had Bosniak relatives and would seek them and talk . Wow, I never thought I could do that.
    It’s good to know.
    I would say that it was high time that we Muslims interpret our Scripture in a pragmatic way. In fact quite a few of us already do but we see there is still much to be done.
    As for extremists in the West, there are laws, they just need to be inforced.
    What I can’t understand is why such attempts and sneak attacks can’t be foiled in time, before they do so much damage. Especially when the perpetrators and what they are up to are known. Let me illustrate it with some examples:
    – The attempt to murder Franz Ferdinand failed at first when Nedeljko Cabrinovic threw his bomb but missed. Yet the authorities of Sarajevo and Franz Ferdinand himself reacted in a strangely naive and reckless way. Franz Ferdinans’s car stopped in front of Gavrilo Princip’s nose, offering him a perfect target.
    – The American military intelligence concluded that the Japanese would attack the American armed forces in the Pacific on a Sunday morning. And so it was. Not on November 30th, 1941 as they iriginally thought but one week later. Yet on December 7th security was very lax. A Japanese midget submarine was sighted trying to sneak into the harbor, it was attaced and sunk, the alarm was given but not acted upon. The Opana radar reported a large flight of planes coming in from the nort and that wasn’t acted upon eithe. And boom, there you have it.
    – Lee Harvey Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union and by the standard of the day should have been a suspect person. They captured him so quickly, they must have known about him. All other questions of whether he acted alone or who stood behind him and the strange circumstances in which he was murdered notwithstanding.
    – The American secret services knew what a danger Mohammed Atta and his associates posed yet they did not prevent them from coming to the USA and boarding those planes.
    -The guys who perpetrated the Paris attempt were well known to the police; some time before there had been an attack on Charlie Hebdo so they should have been warned.
    I’m no conspiracy theorist but such carelessness again and again really makes one think if there are some who say “Let him/them do it, from this a favorable situation will result.”

  • Friend of Bosnia

    I mean, we surely agree that shooting unarmed people is always a crime, whether it’s 16 or 8.347; for what they are, for what opinion they espouse, for being there, for being Muslim, Jewish, Tibetan Buddhist, Tutsi, Rohingya, social democrats, whatever.
    Charlie Hebdo responded to the attempt commited against them with a drawing. That drawing may at first glance seem offensive to Muslims, cliché, grotesque, sinful, etc. Not to me however. Sure, it’s not exactly flattering. Even so, I understand and appreciate it.
    And even if I hated such images and their makers: I have no right to go out and attack them just because I don’t like it. I can protest. If a drawing were a direct couse of genocide then I would spport violence against its author but (I really don’t know them that well) I haven’t seen any drawings of Charlie Hebdo that can be construed as genocidal. On the contrary I have seen some I wholeheartedly approve of. On the other hand, is Kurt Westergaards drawing offensive? To me, no doubt it is, but since I have no proof whatsoever that it has led to any acts of anti-Muslim violence I have no right to slap his face. To say “it stinks”, yes, that’s my opinion, but to touch him, most surely no.
    About cartoons, I have been taught about Islam that it rejects the graven image. Yet even in the early days of Islam there were pictures, even of the Prophet himself, showing his face, or even of, yes, naked women (on the walls of the Ummayad palace of Quseir Amra in Jordan). So if back then they could take it easy why not now? A lot of people already do.
    Sadly it looks as if today extremists and radicals have the say.
    The black flag of the salafists is not my flag. They are like the Kharijis of old. They only can make trouble. I just want to live in peace; how I pray and so on is just my private affair and I don’t try to impose it on everybody else. I try to take it easy. I just want that my beloved Bosniak people will survive and live in dignity.
    I can only speak for myself, however.
    I believe in the Four Freedoms Franklin D. Roosevelt enunciated; sadly it seems that today even the West has, for various reasons, lost them.
    Surely, some very evil individuals exist, also among the Muslims, and they surely have a part in this development. However not all Muslims are to blame. We all know that.
    We will surely have different opinions on which we will have to agree to disagree.
    At least, let us both not make war. Let’s try to keep a cool head in those interesting times we must live in.

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