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ONE OF THE leaders of Germany’s far-right AfD party has sparked outrage by downplaying the crimes of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, saying they were “just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history”.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is the biggest opposition party in Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, with more than 90 deputies.
In remarks reported by Deutsche Welle and the German news agency DPA, Alexander Gauland, co-leader of the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam party, told a youth party congress that there was more to the country’s history than the 12 years of the Nazi regime.
“Yes, we plead guilty to our responsibility for the 12 years” of Nazi rule, he said.
But “we have a glorious history and one, my dear friends, that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years”, Gauland said.
Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.
Gauland has repeatedly attacked Islam, and argued that Germany should be proud of its veterans of two world wars.
In 2016, he took aim at star footballer Jerome Boateng, who was born in Berlin to a German mother and a Ghanaian father.
“People find him good as a footballer, but they don’t want to have a Boateng as a neighbour,” Gauland said.
The head of Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrat Union party quickly hit out at Gauland’s latest remarks, saying that the AfD was revealing its true face.
“50 million war victims, the Holocaust and the total war are nothing more than ‘bird shit’ for the AfD,” she tweeted. “That’s what the party really looks like behind its bourgeois mask.”
Set up in 2013 as an anti-euro party, the AfD recorded a surge in support after it began capitalising on unease in Germany over the arrival of more than a million asylum seekers since 2015.
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The media has a a vitally important democratic function to perform in making Trump and his current administration fully visible.
Media exposure will highlight what Trump is about.
@Johnny Leddin: only Trump worries about thumbs. It is his downfall.
@Tony Daly: like they did with clinton…right…
Exactly like Clinton. He was hounded by the media after his affair in office.
The media should be treated with contempt!
What do reporters think the new administration is playing at?…to me it seems like some sort of Bond plot where the obvious is a diversion to what is really going on…there are bigger things cooking in the background which they don’t want us to know about.
@winston smith: the focus is on Trump’s temperament at the moment and the increasing realisation that Trump is temperamentally unsuitable to be President of the US.
@Tony Daly: is that a fact or just your anti trump opinion….
Trump won because of a fawning uncritical ratings-driven media which gave him billions in free publicity.
@Were Jammin: he won because hillary took her eye of the ball and wouldn’t listen to the fears many people have in the US regarding immigration..she just called them all deplorables. That is a fact
@Were Jammin: he won because hillary took her eye of the ball and wouldn’t listen to the fears many people have in the US regarding immigration..she just called them all deplorables. That is a fact
@Were Jammin: Trump won because the media were uncritical of him – are you on drugs?
The media is ‘temperamentally unsuitable’ to cover the White House.
What’s most fascinating about this article is the constant use of “said one reporter” for even the most mundane observation. Did The Journal not get their names, or did the reporters insist on strict anonymity for reasons beyond my ken; or, more troublingly, does The Journal imagine itself a Player in DC political media who needs to keep their “sources” secret lest Trump’s team read this article?
The Media is frantically trying to do an about-face. From the time “President” nominated, they fawned over him because he gave them lots of meat and potatoes, encouraged by Murdoch, Kochs etc… Then, against all the pundits and odds, he became POTUS. 60+ days in, and the media are looking at themselves in horror, that they facilitated this Con Man get the Oval Office. Now, they’re falling over themselves to get him and his misbegotten, incompetent hangers-on out. There is enough blame to go around, so the media have now to start doing things right.
Surprised the Journal was allowed in.
You cannot hope to bribe or twist – thank God! – the average journalist…
have your say