The leading candidate for Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Berlin’s upcoming state election accused The Left party on Monday of “denying reality” regarding Islamism following its response to a suspected terrorist attack on the city’s Pride events.<\/p>\n
CDU candidate Stefan Evers’ criticism followed an Instagram post by a Berlin district branch of the hard-left party that initially did not refer to investigators’ suspicion that Saturday’s attack was Islamist-motivated.<\/p>\n
One woman was killed and 29 other people injured on the fringes of Berlin Pride when a man reportedly drove into a crowd with a van and attacked passers-by with a machete before fleeing, leading to a day-long manhunt that ended with him being shot dead by police on Sunday evening.<\/p>\n
The 21-year-old, Berlin-born suspect, was known to police and was believed to have been part of the Islamist scene.<\/p>\n
In a social media post published after the attack, The Left’s Neuk\u00f6lln district branch blamed the rise of right-wing and anti-feminist forces for increasing hostility towards LGBT people and argued that such rhetoric paved the way for attacks.<\/p>\n
Speaking to broadcaster Welt TV, Evers said: “Denying reality when dealing with political Islam and Islamism is part of the problem with this Left Party.” He also accused the party of tolerating anti-Semitism and hostility towards police officers, adding: “I do not want to see this party in government in Berlin. I will do everything I can to prevent that.”<\/p>\n
Evers said The Left party had failed to recognize the scale of the problem and lacked the courage to describe it openly.<\/p>\n
Following criticism, the party added a clarification on Monday, saying its reference to right-wing and anti-feminist forces evidently included Islamic State and other Islamist extremist groups.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The leading candidate for Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Berlin’s upcoming state election accused The Left…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[18,47466,47190,480,47617,42558,8170],"class_list":["post-62177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-berlin","tag-berlin","tag-berlin-district","tag-berlin-pride","tag-christian-democratic-union","tag-pride-event","tag-stefan-evers","tag-terrorist-attack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}