Head of German anti-Islam group in court for hate speech

No 1st Amendment in Germany

The founder of Germany's xenophobic and anti-Islamic Pegida movement faced court Tuesday on hate speech charges for branding refugees "cattle" and "scum" on social media.

Lutz Bachmann, founder of the far-right "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident" movement, was charged in October with inciting racial hatred through a series of widely-shared Facebook posts.

The trial was held under tight security in Dresden in the former communist east, the birthplace of Pegida, which bitterly opposes Chancellor Angela Merkel's liberal migration policy that brought more than a million asylum seekers to Germany last year.

The court said the 43-year-old's comments, which date back to 2014, also "disrupted public order" and constituted an "attack on the dignity" of refugees.

If found guilty, Bachmann could face between three months and five years in jail.

The Pegida founder's offending comments were published in September 2014, as the movement started life as a xenophobic Facebook group.

SOURCE 

Judging by the behavior of the recent immigrant influx into Germany, I imagine that a lot of Germans would by now agree with Herr Bachmann, if they were allowed to