The rise to prominence of the Alt-Right Breitbart website has brought a set of unsavory European right-wing militants to the attention of American conservatives. Breitbart helps to promote white nationalist solidarity by favorable reporting on what most analysts view as Neo-Fascist groups.
One of Breitbart’s Euroheroes is Lutz Bachmann, the founder of PEGIDA a far-right anti-immigrant party in Germany. PEGIDA, which stands for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, is a rising power in Germany. Like other violent anti-immigrant movements in Europe and the United States, PEGIDA has seen it profile raised by its opposition to Syrian refugees fleeing ISIS.
Breitbart recently praised Lutz Bachman for his “affability.” The newly prominent American Alt-Right propaganda outlet gushes that “far from the “far right” thug that Mr. Bachmann is often portrayed as, the man exudes the charisma of a confident young man, almost as if he were just beginning his career.”
Although Bachman made his name campaigning against Muslims, he has also gone after the Jewish practice of circumcision. He told Breitbart that “Circumcision should be your own choice,” he said… “At your 18th birthday, fine”. He said that other rightist parties were afraid to challenge religious circumcision because they are “scared of Germany’s past with Jewish people”. By “Germany’s past with Jewish people” he means the Holocaust.
While Bachmann warns that immigrants entering Europe are criminals, the Washington Post reports that “Bachmann’s criminal record includes theft, physical assault, drug dealing and burglary — something he rarely discussed publicly.” Ironically, the Post reports, “the face of Germany’s anti-immigration movement has become a migrant himself. Saying that he has faced “persecution” in Germany, Bachmann now spends most of his time in Tenerife in the Canary Islands off the West African coast.”
Bachmann says he fled to Tenerife to avoid “persecution” in Germany, making him a refugee. Bachmann has called those coming to Germany seeking asylum “scum.” Now he claims to have left Germany “for my safety and the safety of my family.” Mr. Bachmann is apparently unaware of what The Independent newspaper calls the “irony” of “a person who has denied the existence of ‘real refugees’ fleeing to another country for his safety.”
