It appears the only thing that could stop the anti-Islamization protests in Germany finally did on Monday. The weekly protests, which began with only 200 supporters in mid-October and spiked to a record 25,000 last Monday, were canceled after a “concrete threat” against a member of pegida, the organizer of the protests.

The police department in Dresden—pegida’s headquarters—issued a statement affirming the terrorist threat, and cautioned: “Assassins have been called up to mingle among the pegida protesters and murder one of the individuals leading the rally.”

pegida, the German acronym for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, has gained record supporters over the past 13 weeks at its Monday-night protests against the growing influence of Islam and Islamism in Germany and Europe. Most of the 25,000 who demonstrated last week did so in solidarity to the victims of the blatant Islamist attacks in France just a week prior.

But pegida has also attracted enemies. Some of those enemies have been relatively mild: Other groups in Germany have conducted counterprotests alongside pegida, but they have been peaceful.

High-ranking German authorities also expressed both their shame and disapproval of the anti-Islamist protests. Justice Minister Heiko Maas said the protests were “simply disgusting.” Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Germans to dissociate themselves from pegida protesters, saying that some of them had “prejudice, coldness, even hatred in their hearts.”

But who is the real prejudiced, cold and hateful enemy? Referring to the death threat on one of pegida’s organizers, Dresden police chief Dieter Kroll commented that “on analyzing the current situation, we now no longer believe this is an abstract danger, but rather a concrete one.”

Kroll did not specify the source of the threat, but according to pegida’s Facebook page, the “execution was ordered by [Islamic State] terrorists.” The threat followed a similarly incendiary tweet in Arabic that described pegida protesters as “enemies of Islam.”

The threats were so concrete that pegida asked its thousands of supporters to only light a candle and fly their national flags in their windows, instead of protesting outdoors.

These latest threats appear to give Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West an even greater reason for being. Germans are being threatened—on their home turf. Even Chancellor Merkel admitted feeling concerned. “As chancellor, I have an interest that demonstrations can take place anywhere in Germany because it is a fundamental right,” she said on Monday. “Such a great good must be protected as far as possible.”

It will not take much to rally people against radical Islam, as pegida’s success has demonstrated. pegida’s leader and the Islamists’ most likely target, Lutz Bachmann, for example, is just an ordinary Dresden local without any prior background in politics. Bachmann even has a criminal record, but he has managed to use the menace of radical Islam to rally thousands.

Bible prophecy indicates a man will soon come on the scene in Germany, who, unlike Bachmann, will possess a background in politics—enough to “obtain the kingdom by flatteries” as “a king of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences” (Daniel 11:21; 8:23). This king will attack radical Islam and its sponsors “like a whirlwind.”

For more insight, read Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s article “The Whirlwind Prophecy.”