PEGIDA Munich marches up and down Ludwigstrasse – amongst them Turkish ultra-nationalist

pegida 210915 12 - PEGIDA Munich marches up and down Ludwigstrasse - amongst them Turkish ultra-nationalist

Once again PEGIDA Munich rallied against refugees, asylum seekers and the “Islamization of Germany”. This weeks PEGIDA rally took place on a new route – displayed on the map below:


The route was quite unspectacular but seemed to be hard to handle for the Munich Police department. PEGIDA had to march surrounded by riot police officers, banners where hardly possible to see from the sidewalk and counter protestors were constantly shouting louder than the PEGIDA members. A video I tweeted on site displays this quite well (counter protestors are shouting roughly translated: “There is no right for nazis to display there propaganda”)

Several times counter protestors attempted to block the route, leading to stops of the march and redirections from the originally planned route (onto the other side of the street).

Still some interesting developments took place that i will enlist below:

First off I will start with a rather funny getting in contact to a PEGIDA member. He – an old man at the age of approximately 70 years – was photographing colleagues and me as we were doing our job. He then started handing out flyers with the name and the face of a colleague and the words: “GOOGLE HIM!” I asked him if I could have one he then handed the flyer to me. Five minutes later he walked up to me asking how many pictures of PEGIDA I have taken so far – I ironically answered: “Between 5000 and 6000 – the Mossad pays per picture” With a kind of shocked look he walked away. Another five to ten minutes later he walked back up to me telling me: “Now I know – you needed my fingerprints” I could not hold back and started laughing quite hard. I can not understand how important he thinks he is – he later handed over some flyers to me for “my intelligence service”.

Something rather confusing happened today at PEGIDA. Ramazan S. – the hooligan that attacked my colleague on sunday at the Turkish nationalists rally showed up at PEGIDA again. Accompanying Thomas Schatt – convicted neonazi terrorists – and other neonazis known from “Die Rechte” rallies and “Der III. Weg”. For comparison pictures from PEGIDA on the Odeonsplatz and him amongst the Turkish nationalists at almost exactly the same spot one day before:

Almost at the Siegestor one PEGIDA marshall started loudly confronting a counter protestor walking next to the demonstration. He was shouting at him that they should meet without police and as the counter protestor walked up to him to talk to him he pushed him away and started acting even more aggressively.

As usual the Munich riot police force pulled and pushed people trying to block the march route violently of the street. Several times I was pushed into counter protestors and police officers ignored my press ID.

All in all PEGIDA was still quite unspectacular and with less then 100 members the numbers are shrinking again. A collection of my pictures – that are available on Demotix – below:

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