PEGIDA must focus efforts on ending Western wars: Scholar

Press TV has conducted an interview with Shabbir Hassanally, an activist and Islamic scholar from London, to discuss PEGIDA protest rallies against the influx of refugees into Europe.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: When we look at PEGIDA, is it simply just the case of racism running a mock?

Hassanally: Unfortunately, it does seem to be a very xenophobic, very racist organization, but actually if you look in Europe we currently have, whether people admit it or not, a recession of thoughts.

And generally, you find that when times are hard, these types of groups gain a lot of attraction because you have this idea of ‘Oh, you’ve got all of these “foreigners” coming in and they’re going to take our work and benefits this time and the other.’

And you have politicians, certain unscrupulous politicians and of course the media, which feed this frenzy, and it gets people sort of rallied up and excited. It was refreshing, however, to see that there was a number of counter-demonstrations. I hope that the authorities in France and other countries are beginning to realize how dangerous this is, because if you’re opposed to just look 60-70 years ago to what happened in the WWII or what we’re told happened in the WWII, it all began in situations like this, where people had a problem with the other.

Whereas if humanity actually looks at itself, humanity has moved, has constantly been in a state of movement. 500 years ago, there was no Westerners and America, no white people in America, then they came and decimated the American natives. They came to Africa. They came everywhere.

These European people are the people who don’t originate in Europe, they have got ancestry across other parts of the world. So for people in such a place, like in England or in Germany or Poland or wherever, France, for them to turn around and say ‘Oh, we have a problem with the other, we have a problem with these foreigners,’ is extremely hypocritical and it shows lack of insight or lack of understanding.

In fact it shows the motive, which is to rally people up to get people fighting each other; so that the one percent, the politicians, can carry on, doing the damage and doing the criminal activities that they continue to do.

If people instead actually focused on working together; then, I believe the situation will be very different. So, this organization like PEGIDA and like now ... the EDL in the UK, these organizations are just, I really don’t know how to describe them but they’re really petty, they’re rallied on by the media and certain unscrupulous politicians for political gain.

So arguably using that definition, one could say they are terrorist organizations. They use terror and fear-mongering to push forward a political objective, but of course they have politicians, like I have said, supporting them in the background. This has been the case with other right-wing racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and other groups. So this is something, which I believe it comes in dips and troughs, right now we’re going through a peak because of the situation in the world.

But people need to look around and realize that the reason all these refugees want to come to Europe is not because they want to leave everything they have, it’s because their countries are being bombed by the politicians who are behind people like PEGIDA. If these politicians were not using taxpayer’s money to bomb places like Syria and other parts of the world and funding people like Daesh and Saudi and other people, then the refugees wouldn’t have turned out.

So instead of shouting and speaking against the refugees maybe these PEGIDA people if they had a half of brain cell between them should go and speak to the politicians and say ‘Excuse me, you need to stop dropping bombs and supporting terrorist regimes like Saudi.’ So, it’s very strange. Obviously, they have no insight.

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