Is PEGIDA a Bastard Child of ISIS and PKK?
It is, says, Lutz Bachmann, the founding father of PEGIDA.
PEGIDA is an acronym for the young German group, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident in English.
Kobane, Rojava, is, unfortunately, its “inspiration,”—well, sort of—the way Vienna, Austria was the inspiration for much of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.
65 million people lost their lives to the manifestation of the latter ideal; let’s hope and pray PEGIDA will remain nonviolent and not plunge Europe into another catastrophic crisis.
Mr. Bachmann, to be sure, has never been to Kobane—whereas Adolf Hitler spent several miserable years in Vienna.
And yet Kobane has changed Mr. Bachmann’s life completely making him a household name in Europe!
It all happened on October 10, 2014.
He was out on a stroll when he came across a solidarity rally for Kobane—some of the participants were carrying the flag of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), others of Kurdistan—in his hometown of Dresden.
A week before, the barbarians of Islamic State (ISIS) had actually breached Kobane’s perimeter and were fighting its outgunned resisters house to house and boasting of total victory in four days.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey seconded their imminent victory.
Secretary of State John Kerry, the one time American warrior in Vietnam, wrote off Kobane as not “strategic.”
But the besieged Kurds vowed to fight to the last person and their compatriots took to the streets, in the Middle East and Europe, to express their solidarity with the brave fighters and protest those who were siding with ISIS.
In Dresden, while the Kurdish protest that Mr. Bachmann was witnessing remained peaceful, that of Hamburg took a turn for the worse.
Because the Islamic State doesn’t have an official presence in Europe, the Kurds of the Hanseatic City went to a local mosque, rumored to be sympathetic to ISIS, to vent their peaceful angst.
Waiting for them were not only machetes, but also believers who were willing to use them, noted Claudia Roth, a member of German Parliament.
While for Ms. Roth, the line was clear between a lawful protest and an unlawful use of violence by mosque goers, for Mr. Bachmann it was a triviality that he couldn’t be bothered with.
To him, both groups represented danger to the German way of life.
He took steps to establish a group called PEGIDA and chose for its symbol a person throwing four flags into a thrash can.
They were NAZI, PKK, German Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) and ISIS emblems.
I have been thinking about the discarded PKK flag ever since and I suspect you, the reader, are, also, scratching your head.
I once asked a well-read and well-travelled Kurdish student from Berlin—socially German—who was the most famous Kurd in Germany.
She blurted out, Abdullah Ocalan, without thinking.
The answer begs another question: How has Mr. Ocalan represented us to the Germans?
Not well, says not just Mr. Bachmann, but also many other Germans who come across as tolerant of their minorities.
Mr. Ocalan remains a national hero to some Kurds even though he has abandoned the cause of independence and promotes “democratic autonomy” that is supposed to succeed under the shadow of Turks like Erdogan, Persians like Khamenei and Arabs like Assad or Abadi.
Pomegranates have a better chance of flourishing on the dark side of the moon than Kurdish autonomy thriving under those leaders who can’t be distinguished from autocrats!
But leaving that far-fetched fantasy aside, why do Mr. Bachmann and his fans, now numbering thousands across Europe, equate the PKK with ISIS?
According to Siegfried Däbritz, co-founder of PEGIDA, Kurds are “just as big a danger” to Western civilization as “all other Mohammedans.”
That white-hot thunderbolt should jolt all thinking and caring Kurds!
We must honesty confront the undeniable truth about how Kurds portray themselves—and more importantly, how others see us.
Like it or not, as Katherine Hepburn once observed, others perceive us exactly as we represent ourselves.
Kurdish followers of Mr. Ocalan, who claim to fight for humanity, reject the European way of life.
They glorify communal living—not just in war times but also in peace times—and the dictatorship of laborers, supposedly, fighting for the common interest.
Mr. Bachmann grew up in communist East Germany ruled by iron-fisted Erich Honecker, a Lenin admirer who also supposedly sanctified the common good. But his wife hypocritically spat on that by flying to Paris for her hairdos!
Common interest is a fine fantasy if you’re a dirt-poor Kurd.
What is better is to calibrate it with self-interest in a country of laws, ideally Kurdistan, with freely elected representatives.
Kurds are free to be selfless of course, but they should know that East Germans will curse them as fools and fling their symbols to the ground, as they did of Lenin and Honecker.
P.S. Mr. Bachmann resigned from PEGIDA last week when his pictures of impersonating Hitler appeared in the media. Thanks to capitalist America, Kobane is free at last!
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.