Quadriga - Anti-Islam Protests - A Shame for Germany?

Are these protests, as Justice Minister Heiko Maas has stated, "a shame for Germany"?
Chancellor Angela Merkel also weighed in condemning the wave of PEGIDA marches and cautioning Germans against falling prey to xenophobic "rabble rousing."

Pegida is an acronym for "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West" Why do the protestors not try to change things by becoming active in party politics? Do they feel their concerns are neglected by the mainstream? Are they over-burdened by globalization, the EU financial crisis and the immigration debate?

How should the established political parties respond? Should they pay more attention to the concerns of the protesters? If they don't, is there a danger that disaffected voters will transfer their allegiance to the extreme right and to anti-EU parties like the Alliance for Germany? What role does the media play in all of this?

Anti-Islam Protests - A Shame for Germany?
Tell us what you think? Quadriga[at]dw.de

Our guests:

Zafer Şenocak - is a writer and essayist. He was born in Ankara, grew up in Istanbul and Munich, and has been living in Berlin since 1989. He studied German literature, politics and philosophy at university and has been publishing poetry, essays and prose in German since 1979. His writings have been translated into many languages. Şenocak has been a professor in the US at Boston and Berkeley and his thoughts on Islamic traditions and Turkish identity are regularly printed in German newspapers.

Bettina Gaus- is a political correspondent for the German daily newspaper "taz." After studying political science she attended the German School of Journalism (DJS) in Munich and worked as a free-lance journalist, later reporting from Nairobi about East and Central Africa. From 1996 to 1999 she headed the parliamentary office of the "taz." Bettina Gaus has written several books, most recently a work about Africa's middle class.

Alison Smale- is a British journalist who graduated from Stanford University in the US. In December 2008, she became the first woman to take up the post of Executive Editor at the International Herald Tribune. In an article about the IHT's redesign in April 2009, which Smale oversaw, The Independent called her "the most powerful British female editor overseas." In her reporting days, Alison Smale was AP's bureau chief for Eastern Europe. As Deputy Foreign Editor at The New York Times she organized much of the paper's coverage of the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan. She is now the New York Times bureau chief in Berlin.