One of Germany's most prominent nationalists said on Saturday that she would like to see not only the burqa but all headscarves banned in German public spaces.
Alice Weidel, who along with Alexander Gauland is representing the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party ahead of federal elections in September, called the religious garb sexist and inappropriate in German society.
"Headscarves do not belong in public spaces and should be banned on the streets," she told Berlin daily Tagesspiegel. Adding that it was an "absolutely sexist symbol," she compared the separation it makes between men and women to the apartheid system of racial segregation in South Africa.
In excerpts published ahead of Sunday's edition of Tagesspiegel, the former Goldman Sachs employee said that "the headscarf doesn't belong in Germany," echoing her party's official platform that "Islam doesn't belong in Germany."
She then suggested that on top of a headscarf ban, there should be a fine for anyone wearing a full-face veil or burqa.
While attacking the hijab, which is widely worn in Germany's Muslim communities, represented a new extreme - full-face veils in public have already been forbidden in Bavaria, Germany's conservative southeastern state, and for government employees carrying out official business.
Weidel did not apparently extend her suggestion to several other religions, including Orthodox Judaism, which require believers to don different kinds of head coverings.
European countries move to ban niqab, burqa
Different forms of Muslim religious garb have long been a point of contention throughout Europe as the continent comes to grips with new waves of immigration. In 2011, France became the first country to ban the full-face covering, or niqab, from being worn in public, citing security concerns. The Netherlands adopted a similar measure in 2015, and Austria followed suit this year.
On Friday, the deputy chairwoman of Britain's populist right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP) turned heads when she suggested the UK ban full-face veils on the grounds that they "prevent intake of essential vitamin D from sunlight."
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland
Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team's defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch - but people would not want "someone like Boateng as a neighbor." He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: "We can't be blackmailed by children's eyes."
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alice Weidel
Alice Weidel generally plays the role of "voice of reason" for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians "pigs" and "puppets of the victorious powers in World War II. Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Frauke Petry
German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must "use firearms if necessary" to "prevent illegal border crossings." Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year - leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts - but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers."
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Marcus Pretzell
Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote "These are Merkel's dead," shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Wendt
The member of parliament in Germany's eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Alexander Gauland - again ...
During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be "disposed of" back to Anatolia. The German term, "entsorgen," raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
... and again
Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany's responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
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AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Andreas Kalbitz
The Brandenburg state AfD chief admitted in 2019 to attending a 2007 rally in Greece by the ultranationalist Golden Dawn party at which a swastika flag was raised. "Der Spiegel" had published a leaked report by the German embassy in Athens naming him as one of "14 neo-Nazis" who arrived from Germany for the far-right rally. Kalbitz released a statement saying he took part out of "curiosity."
Author: Dagmar Breitenbach
