The Media Research Center’s Clay Waters complained in a Nov. 9 post:
PBS’s newest Frontline documentary, “The Rise of Germany’s New Right” concerns the rise of the AfD in Germany (Alternative for Germany) party and its supposed links to Nazism and Putin’s Russia. Director and correspondent Evan Williams has also made the Frontline docs Germany’s Enemy Within (2024) and Germany’s Neo-Nazis & the Far Right (2021).
Germany’s migrant problem surged after 2015, when former Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the borders to people (mostly fighting-age males, it seemed) fleeing the Syrian war. Over three million refugees and asylum seekers have entered Germany since, some bringing Islamic-style terrorism with them and causing understandable backlash toward the country’s open-border policy.
Yet terrorism involving migrants in Germany was barely noticed in the documentary and narrator Williams preferred to smear the AfD for noticing. He dredged up controversial statements and spurious links to Adolf Hitler. All the while, the main anti-Semitism on the ground in Europe today is coming from the pro-Hamas left.
Yes, Waters is trying to blame supposedly lax immigration policies for the rise of right-wing anti-immigrant parties. Note that Waters makes sure to avoid discussing actual links between AfD and Nazis; for instance, AfD politician Björn Höcke has been fined for using a Nazi slogan and accused of whitewashing Nazi crimes. And AfD’s obsession with hating immigrants would seem to prove the criticism against it; Waters makes no effort to deny it.
Waters went on to complain:
A scene featuring Elon Musk talking by video to an AfD rally looked straight out of a movie version of 1984, and the scare-mongering filmmakers made the most of it.
Given Musk’s history of making Nazi salutes — no matter how much the MRC tries to deny it — that’s completely understandable.
Waters then huffed: “Since the January 6 riots there has been a suspicious amount of love from journalists for intelligence services in the U.S.” Did Waters lose faith in intelligence agencies because of the Capitol riot? He doesn’t say. Instead, he continued to blame those filthy immigrants:
Williams couldn’t even mention terrorism when noting the 2015 influx of asylum seekers, skipping ahead to “unintended consequences…..A rise in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment.” Yet Williams discovered “a wave of far-right terror attacks in 2019 and 2020” which put the AfD under scrutiny.
[…]The sources for this hit piece seemingly have no clue that perhaps people who surveil a popular political party and strenuously attempt to keep them out of government aren’t actually supporting democracy. Perhaps they’re the baddies, after all?
Waters will not concede that his support of increasingly violent ICE operations doesn’t suggest that maybe he’s the baddie.