Mass anti-Islam rallies planned across Europe next month

Members of LEGIDA, the Leipzig arm of Pegida, hold a placard showing German Chancellor Angela Merkel as they take part in a rally in Germany earlier this month.Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

The anti-Islam group Pegida is organising rallies against the "Islamisation" of Europe in 14 countries including the UK next month.

The rallies will take place on February 6 in Birmingham in the UK and other countries including the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Switzerland, organisers said.

Pegida, a German group whose name is an acronym for "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident", regards the "not welcome" campaign as equivalent to Australia's "stop the boats" asylum policy. 

Tatjana Festerling, of Pegida, said after a meeting with other sympathetic groups in Roztoky near Prague, that the influx of 800,000 unskilled predominantly Muslim men into Germany alone was a "disaster" and projects for 2016 indicated there could be even more this year. 

In a press release on the group's Facebook page, she says: "It's a population exchange. Only a fraction of these people will integrate in the labour market."

She claims German chancellor Angela Merkel's policy has isolated Germany within Europe and that she does not represent the majority of the German people.

"For the peoples of Europe, only two possibilities remain: subjugation or rebellion," Festerling writes. "We here from the international organisation team belong to those who fight for the freedom and the preservation of the wide and varied cultures of Europe. This resistance must take place now and can only be carried out by a merging of all Islam-and-asylum critical civil movements and parties in Europe."

Pegida and similar groups have experienced a surge in support after incidents such as the sexual assaults and robberies on women in Cologne on New Year's Eve. In the United States, Republican front-runner Donald Trump has called for a ban on all Muslims entering the country.