Scene from a Pegida Demonstration on Saturday

The scene above is from a Pegida demonstration held today in Birmingham, England. It’s a screen shot I lifted from the video below…

If you advance the video to about 1:41:00 you’ll hear one of the speakers say the following:

“We are called ‘far right’ because we dare to criticize Islam. We’re called ‘fascists’ and we’re called ‘Nazis,’ but if you look at the ideology of Islam, and you look at the ideology of Nazism, they are exactly the same side of the same coin. One leader who wants to rule the world for a thousand year reich–another leader who wants to rule the world under a global caliphate. Both leaders, Mohammad and Adolph Hitler hate the Jews and want to kill them. Both leaders want to kill the homosexuals. Both leaders are not ever allowed to be criticized. Both leaders are exactly the same people. Radical Islam is Nazi incarnate and is here in this country.”

I guess some of the members of Pegida haven’t quite figured out that Israel and America have been among the chief backers of terrorists in Syria or that ISIS was created to wreak havoc and destruction in nations that have opposed the West. And I guess they haven’t paused to consider that, after something like a year and a half now in the public spotlight, ISIS still hasn’t launched a single attack on Israel.

I don’t know where exactly you’d place Pegida on the political spectrum, but it’s beginning to look like the left, the right, the far left, the far right, the left of center, the right of center and the center itself are all equally clueless these days.

Richard Edmondson

Richard Edmondson is an author, novelist, poet, and journalist whose writings often focus on Middle East issues, the Zionist lobby, and religion. His latest novel is The Memoirs of Saint John: When the Sandstone Crumbles, a story about an archaeological team doing a dig in Syria and set amidst the current conflict in the country.

In 2014 Richard attended an International Conference on Combating Terrorism and Religious Extremism, held in Damascus. The book is part two in the Memoirs of Saint John series.

Two other books by Richard are Rising Up: Class Warfare in America from the Streets to the Airwaves, relating his experiences founding and operating an unlicensed or “pirate” FM radio station in San Francisco in the 1990s, as well as a volume of poetry entitled American Bus Stop: Essay and Poems on Hope and Homelessness.

Richard is cognizant of the words of the early Christian writer Tertullian, who in the second century-basically prognosticating the fall of the Roman Empire-wrote: “We have made merry amid the ludicrous cruelties of the noonday exhibition.”

richardedmondson.net