Stefan Herre (blogger)

Stefan Herre (born August 23, 1965 in Cologne ) is a German blogger and political activist . He is the founder and co-operator of the weblog Politically Incorrect , which has established itself as the journalistic home of right-wing extremists and Islamophobes .

Life

Family, youth and work

Stefan Herre grew up in the Thielenbruch district of Cologne in a middle-class family. He says he is a physical education teacher, according to Yasemin Shooman a primary school teacher.

Political activities

From the 1980s onwards, Herre mainly wrote letters to the editor in German daily newspapers, commenting on national and international politics, advocating strong ties between Germany and the USA and, above all, criticizing the Alliance 90 / The Greens and Islam party . In 2004 he founded the blog Politically Incorrect , with which he opposed an anti-American attitude in the German media that he had identified ; he also took part in pro- Bush demonstrations during his visit to Germany. After the Mohammed caricatures appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005, his side turned more and more to an anti-Islamic course and became one of the most popular German-language blogs. Herre's strong position also gave Herre a prominent position in the spectrum of German anti-Islamic organizations, media and parties. He made various contacts, for example to the right-wing populist pro-movement , the citizens' movement Pax Europa or its member René Stadtkewitz , then a member of the Berlin CDU parliamentary group. Herre was also the author of Junge Freiheit for a time .

According to his own statements, Herre has received repeated death threats since 2007, after which he largely withdrew from the public eye. Herre relocated PI's server location abroad and, according to his own communication, handed over responsibility to an anonymous person from abroad (but only for official and public presentation, not PI-internally). As later became known, this was the Swiss pastor Christine Dietrich . Since then he has rarely given press interviews. In mid-2010 the relationship between Herre and the pro-movement began to cool down. Politically Incorrect , which had previously reported benevolently on Pro Köln , became more critical in its reporting and significantly reduced its contributions on the pro-parties. Herre and Stadtkewitz traveled to the Netherlands in 2010 and invited the politician Geert Wilders to give a speech in Berlin. In September 2011 various newspapers in the DuMont Group reported that Herre did not withdraw from active work at Politically Incorrect and that he had officially handed over management to Christine Dietrich, who had already announced her departure from the blog in 2007. The reports in the newspapers particularly emphasized the influence and contacts that Herre had on the German and international anti-Islamic scene. In September 2011, Der Spiegel also confirmed in its own documentation of the leaked Skype communication of the blog makers after the 2011 attacks in Norway that Herre was still part of the “leadership circle” of Politically Incorrect .

reception

Herre is assigned a key function in the right-wing populist and Islamophobic spectrum in Germany. In addition to tendencies in their reports, they are also accused of having a benevolent attitude towards offensive as well as potentially racist and inflammatory comments from users of the blog, which the moderators of the website deliberately do not remove. Herre, on the other hand, explains this with the high volume of comments that overwhelmed the moderation.

Award

• 2011: Hiltrud Schröter Freedom Prize, Pax Europe

literature

• Jochen Bittner : I love George W. In: Die Zeit , No. 8, 2005.
• Christian Dorn: Politically incorrect. In: Junge Freiheit , July 6, 2007.
• Astrid Geisler , Christoph Schultheis: Ideal worlds. Real everyday life in Germany. Carl Hanser , Munich 2011. ISBN 978-3-446-23578-6 .
• Steven Geyer, Jörg Schindler : In the Net of Islamophobes. In: Berliner Zeitung , September 14, 2011.
• Yasemin Shooman : Islamophobia on the World Wide Web. In: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 17, 2008. ISBN 978-3-940938-20-6 , pp. 87-88. In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Islamophobia and its context. Documentation of the conference Feindbild Muslim - Feindbild Jude . Metropol Verlag , Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-940938-32-9 , pp. 70-84.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Roman Pletter: Roland Tichy: The ventriloquist . In: The time . No. 06/2017 ( online ).
2. ↑ Moritz Baumstieger, Florian Skrabal, Johannes Gunst, Andrea Röpke , Felix Hutt, Nina Plonka, Oliver Schröm, Anton Maegerle : The open society and its enemies. In: Stern.de , April 16, 2012.
3. ↑ "Islamophobic and proud of it" Article by Yasemin Shooman in: di.wan - From the Middle East to Berlin, Issue 7 (July 2009)
4. ↑ Bittner 2005 .
5. ↑ ^{a b c d} Geyer & Schindler 2011.
6. ↑ Geisler 2010, pp. 139–141.
7. ↑ Baumstieger et al. 2011, p. 36.
8. ↑ Thomas Knellwolf: "Brave Christine": Double life of a Swiss pastor. In: Tages-Anzeiger , September 17, 2011. Accessed on September 24, 2011.
9. ↑ Geisler 2010, p. 122.
10. ↑ Markus Feldenkirchen , Holger Stark: “Our bums burn” . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 2011, p. 38 f . ( online ).
11. ↑ Shooman 2008, pp. 87-88.
12. ↑ Baumstieger et al. 2011, p. 37.