Rudiger sues journalist who links him to terrorist group over Instagram gesture

Antonio Rudiger has dragged former journalist and director of Bild newspaper Julian Reichelt to the prosecutor’s office in Germany for claiming a finger gesture shared on his Instagram was a solidarity message to terrorist group ISIS.

In his comments about Rudiger’s gesture, Rechelt said: “For everyone who doesn’t want to recognize Islamism in Antonio Rüdiger’s Islamist gesture: The Office for the Protection of the Constitution calls this gesture the “ISIS finger” and sees the index finger as a clear sign of Islamism. You can’t sugarcoat it, the DFB has to comment on it.”

Reichelt further stated that. “[the ‘ISIS finger’] has been adopted by terrorists over the last two decades. It has become indisputably the greeting of ISIS and of Islamist murderers around the world, of people who also murdered in Berlin and bring disaster and immeasurable suffering to the world.”

Rudiger reported the journalist to the judge over claims of “insult, slander, inflammatory insult and sedition. ”

The German Football Federation (DFB) supported Rudiger and rubberstamped the case by reporting Reichelt for ‘hate speech’ assault on Rudiger.

Reichelt however refuses to back down. In another tweet, he said: “Whoever poses like this in public consciously shows a fanatic greeting and not an innocent and spiritual gesture. It is a normalization of a terrible ideology that has already occupied too much space in this country. Furthermore, and especially because this is a very popular international player, you should not be intimidated. It is important to note that this political ideology goes against everything our values ​​are.

“There are other ways to express one’s religiosity without resorting to a symbol that has been so heavily co-opted by terrorists,” he adds.

Rudiger made the Islamist gesture at the start of the Ramadan fast.