THE POSTS MOSTLY BY GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

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Boston artist Steve Mills - realistic painting

Thursday, May 4, 2017

Guy Millière : French Elections: Emmanuel Macron, a Disaster


  • Anti-West, anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish diatribes were delivered to enthusiastic crowds of bearded men and veiled women. One hundred and fifty thousand people attended.
  • Emmanuel Macron promised to facilitate the construction of mosques in France. He declared that "French culture does not exist" and that he has "never seen" French art. The risk is high that Macron will disappoint the French even faster than Hollande did.
  • On the evening of the second round of elections, people will party in the chic neighborhoods of Paris and in ministries. In districts where poor people live, cars will be set on fire. For more than a decade, whenever there is a festive evening in France, cars are set on fire in districts where poor people live. Unassimilated migrants have their own traditions.
Paris, Champs Elysees, April 20, 8:50 pm. An Islamic terrorist shoots at a police van. One policeman is killed, another is seriously wounded.
The terrorist tries to escape and shoots again. The policemen kill him. One hour later, the French Ministry of Interior reveals his name and his past. His name is Karim Cheurfi. He is a French Muslim born in an Islamized suburb of France. In 2003, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison for the attempted murder of two policemen. He was released before the end of his sentence. In 2014, he targeted a policeman and was sentenced again. And released again. In March, the police were informed that he was trying to buy military-grade weapons and that he contacted a member of the Islamic State in Syria. An inspector discovered that he had posted messages on jihadist social media networks expressing his willingness to murder policemen. The police searched his home and found several weapons and a GoPro video camera similar to the one terrorists use to film their crimes. The police and members of the French justice system did not think they had sufficient evidence place him under surveillance.
The Champs Elysées attack clearly shows that the French justice system is lax regarding dangerous people and that the French police pay only limited attention to suspects who are communicate with terrorist organizations and who seem to be hatching terrorist projects.
This terrorist attack summarizes everything that is broken in terms of security in France today.
Men with a profile similar to that of Karim Cheurfi have, in recent years, been responsible for most of the terrorist attacks in France and Belgium: Mohamed Merah, who killed three Jewish children and the father of two of them in Toulouse in 2012; Mehdi Nemmouche, who attacked the Brussels Jewish Museum in 2014 ; the Kouachi brothers, who committed the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015; Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered four Jews in the Saint Mandé grocery Kosher store Hypercacher; Samy Amimour and others who maimed and murdered 130 innocent people in the Bataclan theater in November 2015; Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a truck into the crowd in Nice in July 2016, killed 86 people and wounded many others, and, among others, those who beheaded a priest in Normandy a few weeks after the attack in Nice.
The successive French governments under the presidency of François Hollande showed themselves to be appallingly weak and impotent.
A climate of fear has overtaken the country. Attendance at theaters has declined. The particularly targeted Jewish community -- two-thirds of the attacks in France in the last five years targeted Jews -- feels abandoned. When a Jewish cemetery was vandalized on March 30 in Waldwisse, eastern France, neither the media nor the political leaders reacted. A week later, in Paris, a Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, was tortured and then thrown out of a window by a non-radicalized Muslim, simply because she was Jewish: the French media and political leaders, with the exception of the courageous MP Meyer Habib, also did not react. A silent gathering below the window was organized by some leaders of the Jewish community. Only Jews came; they were greeted by anti-Semitic insults by Arab Muslims in the neighborhood. The implantation of radical Islam in the country is intensifying. The annual meeting of "Muslims of France" (the new name of the French branch of the Muslim Brotherhood), took place on April 14-17 in Le Bourget, ten miles north of Paris. Anti-West, anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish diatribes were delivered to enthusiastic crowds of bearded men and veiled women. One hundred and fifty thousand people attended.
Economically, France is in terrible shape. The unemployment rate remains above 10%. Nine million people are living below the poverty line --14% of the population. Economic growth is stagnant. Government spending accounts for 57% of GDP -- 13% more than in Germany, France's main economic competitor in Europe.
Month after month, polls shows that the French population is anxious, angry, immensely disappointed with current French policies. François Hollande ends his term with a popularity rating close to zero. He was so rejected and discredited that he decided not to run again for the presidency.
The first round of the French presidential election took place in this context, and one could expect that the French population would reject everything that looks like François Hollande's policies and choose a new direction for the country.
That is not what happened; quite the opposite.
Benoit Hamon, the Socialist Party's candidate, suffered a disastrous blow and received a mere 6% of the vote. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left candidate who left the Socialist Party a few years ago and who supported Hollande in 2012, received a much higher score: 19% of the vote. He is an admirer of Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. Immediately after the anti-Semitic Islamic attack in Saint Mandé, he claimed that "Jewish extremism is more dangerous than Islamic extremism". That statement did not hurt him.
Above all, Emmanuel Macron, a candidate close to Hollande won the race and will be elected President on May 7. He was Hollande's senior economic advisor for more than two years, and the main architect of Hollande's failed economic policies. He then became Minister of the Economy, Industry and Digital Affairs, and held that post until he entered the presidential race.

Emmanuel Macron, then Minister of the Economy, Industry and Digital Affairs of France, at the Annual Meeting 2016 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 22, 2016. (image source: World Economic Forum/Michele Limina)
Most of Macron's speeches are copies of the speeches Hollande made during his 2012 presidential campaign. What is known of Macron's positions on most subjects show that they are the same position Hollande had during the last months of his mandate.
Throughout the campaign, Macron virtually never spoke about the danger of Islamic terror; when he did, he used words even weaker than those used by Hollande. After the Champs Elysees attack on April 20, he said: "imponderable" events had occured, and they "will be part of the daily life of the French in the years to come". The next day, when asked what he would do to prevent other killings, he said that he could not "devise a plan to fight terrorism overnight".
When he speaks about the economy, he sounds like Hollande: he uses vague terms, such as the need for more "social mobility" and "success for all". He insists that he will maintain all the sclerosis dear to so many, such as the compulsory 35-hour workweek or the legal age for retirement: 62. He said that he would leave the almost-bankrupt retirement system the way it is. He promised additional regulations aimed at "saving the planet" and, in a classically socialist way, tens of billions of euros of government "investments" supposed to finance "ecological transition" and "public services".
Sometimes, he makes remarks so dismaying that even Hollande would not have said them. In Algeria, in the presence of the National Liberation Front representatives, an organization that came to power by terrorism and massacring hundreds of thousands of "harkis" (Algerians who had chosen France), he said that the French presence in Algeria was a "crime against humanity", and later promised to facilitate immigration from the Arab world and from Africa to France by preserving an "open and welcoming" France. He promised to facilitate the construction of mosques in France. He declared that "French culture does not exist " and that he has "never seen" French art.
He quite often has shown that he is a political novice and that it is his first election campaign. He stumbled upon the words of his speeches and admitted to those listening to him that he did not understand the meaning of the sentences he had just read, which showed that he had not read what was written for him before reading it to the public.
How to explain his success in these conditions?
The first explanation lies in the moderate right candidate's elimination. François Fillon had a credible and coherent program for the country's recovery, but he could hardly speak about it. His campaign was quickly engulfed in a fake jobs scandal. He presented himself as an impeccable candidate: he appeared not so impeccable. A book recently published revealed that the scandal was meticulously orchestrated from a "shadow Cabinet" in the Elysee Palace. Fillon was never able to recover from it. His excuses were weak and contradictory. He confirmed his weakness by announcing his unconditional support for Macron immediately after the first round results were published. For the first time in more than fifty years, the moderate right will not have a candidate in the second round of a French presidential election. Showing their own weakness, most of the moderate right leaders followed Fillon example and decided to support Macron.
The second explanation for Emmanuel Macron success lies in a very elaborate communication strategy.
Emmanuel Macron continuously benefited from François Hollande support and most of the last five years socialist ministers, but an allegedly neutral and apolitical political structure was created for him. It was called En marche! ("On the Move!"). The socialist ministers who joined him rallied On the Move!, and remained silent. Francois Hollande only announced his full support very late in the race. The communication strategy could work because Emmanuel Macron received the support of left-wing billionaires whom he helped when he was Minister of Economy, and who have close relations with the powers that be: Pierre Bergé, Xavier Niel and Patrick Drahi. These people also own most France's mainstream media and were able to carry out strong media campaigns in support of Macron. No candidate in the French presidential election history has been on the cover of so many magazines and newspapers. Emmanuel Macron also enjoys main French investment banks support: he is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, which trains all senior civil servants and almost all French politicians since it was established in 1945 and, before joining Francois Hollande, he had a career in a financial institution.
The third explanation for Emmanuel Macron's success is that the communication campaign in his favor has been largely devoid of any political content, just like On the Move. He was presented as a young man, embodying the "future", a "renewal", a "hope", a "change". For most of the campaign, Emmanuel Macron had no program. His program was only published on the internet six weeks before the election. The text is often meaningless. Fear is defined as a "daily anguish". It says that France must offer "opportunities" and Europe must be a "chance". Emmanuel Macron told socialists he is a socialist, then said that he is not a socialist at all when he addressed other audiences. Opinion polls have shown that many of those who voted for him in the first round were unaware of his proposals on any topic.
Those who designed Emmanuel Macron's campaign took a lot of inspiration from Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, and the result shows that they were right.
The result is also very distressing, because it shows that a massive communication campaign can be effective, even if it is full of empty words and seems to considers voters as idiots. Emmanuel Macron's campaign effectiveness is also due to the fact that in France, virtually no media is likely to contradict what is said in the mainstream media: the French economy is a very state-based economy in which creating and sustaining media independence from the government and from government subsidies is almost impossible.
The second round of the French presidential election will take place on May 7. Emmanuel Macron will face the only remaining candidate, populist Marine Le Pen.
During the entire campaign, she was almost the only one to speak clearly about the Islamic terrorist threat (François Fillon did, too, but more discreetly) and to offer credible solutions to fight it. She was the only one to speak of the rise of radical Islam in France and to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood gathering at Le Bourget. She was the only one to stress the increasing perils resulting from uncontrolled immigration, and the risk of French culture disappearing. She was also the only one to mention the demographic change that occurs in France and in Europe because of the new migrants. She was the only one to denounce the Islamic anti-Semitism that relentlessly kills Jews in France. Unfortunately, she has a nearly Marxist economic program, close to that of Jean Luc Melenchon. She is the leader of the National Front, a party founded by her father, an anti-Semite, Jean-Marie Le Pen; although she has excluded her father and virtually all her father's anti-Semitic friends from the National Front, she is nonetheless the party leader and is regarded as her father's daughter.
Marine Le Pen and the National Front will be used as scarecrows to urge voters to rally massively behind Macron, in the name of a "Republican front" against "fascism." The strategy was developed thirty years ago by the French left, under President Francois Mitterrand. It has always worked, and in a few days, it will work again.
Macron now has the support of the entire Socialist party, and the support of virtually all other politicians. He also has the support of all French Muslim organizations. The rector of the Great Mosque of Paris said that Muslims must "massively vote" for him. The Jewish community leaders also rallied on behalf of Macron. On May 7, he will likely get more than 60% of the vote.
Most will not be based on the support for a project; the risk is high that Macron will disappoint the French even faster than Hollande did. The French may quickly discover that he is just a man chosen by the French left to preserve an unsustainable status quo a little longer, and a member of the self-appointed élites who do not care about ordinary people's problems, who consider that terrorist acts are "imponderable events", and who believe that national identities can melt in a no-border globalized world. When the French discover who Macron is, there will be nothing they can do to change what they voted in.
The risk to France in the next five years will probably be painful for the French. According to the Police, more than 12,000 radicalized Muslims live in the country and most of them are not under surveillance. The Police do not have the means to do more than they currently are doing, and Macron does not seem to care. The justice system is in the hands of judges who appear lenient to terrorists, and Macron seems to accept it. The flow of migrants will not stop, and Macron apparently does not intend to do anything about that. More and more, Muslims segregate themselves from French society in expanding Islamist mini-states.
Nothing Macron proposes can reverse the decline of the French economy and French society. Terror attacks will undoubtedly occur. Jews and others will undoubtedly be killed. Riots and discontent will undoubtedly take place.
On the evening of the first round of the election, there were riots in Paris and Nantes. On the evening of the second round of elections, people will party in the chic neighborhoods of Paris and in ministries. In districts where poor people live, cars will be set on fire. For more than a decade, whenever there is a festive evening in France, cars are set on fire in districts where poor people live. Unassimilated migrants have their own traditions.
In the next election, in 2022, Catholic France may well see a Muslim candidate run -- and win.
Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.

Soeren Kern : A Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in Germany: March 2017


  • Police knew as early as March 2016 that Anis Amri, the 31-year-old Tunisian who carried out the December 19 jihadist attack on the Christmas market in Berlin, was planning an attack, but he was not deported because he did not have a passport.
  • Humboldt University will become the sixth university in Germany to teach Islamic theology. Berlin Mayor Michael Müller revealed that the institute is being paid for by German taxpayers. Humboldt University President Sabine Kunst rejected calls for a joint "Faculty for Theology" for Christians, Muslims and Jews.
  • "What is clear is that the financing of mosques by foreign actors must stop." — Jens Spahn, a member of the executive committee of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU).
March 1. More than 4,000 millionaires emigrated from Germany in 2016, compared to 1,000 millionaires who left the country in 2015, according to the 2017 Global Wealth Migration Review. Before the migration crisis erupted in 2015, millionaires were leaving Germany at the rate of only a few hundred per year. Most of Germany's millionaires, citing deteriorating security, left for Australia, Canada, the United States, Dubai and Israel. The mass exodus of wealth is hollowing out Germany's tax base at a time when the German government is spending tens of billions of euros for the upkeep of millions of refugees and migrants from the Muslim world. The report's editor, Andrew Amoils, warned that the wealthy are a kind of early warning system for society. Due to their financial status, education and international contacts, they can emigrate more easily than others. Over the longer term, however, their exodus portends increased emigration from among the middle class, according to the report.
March 2. A 36-year-old Syrian migrant identified only as Abdalfatah H. A. was arrested in Düsseldorf on charges of murdering 36 people in March 2013 in Syria in the name of the Al-Nusra jihadist group. He arrived in Germany with his pregnant wife and three children, aged three, five and seven, in October 2015. He had been collecting €2,400 ($2,600) a month in social welfare benefits since April 2016.
March 2. Administrators of the Johannes Rau Gymnasium, a secondary school in Wuppertal, asked teachers to prohibit Muslim pupils from engaging in "provocative praying" in public. An internal memo stated: "In recent weeks, it has been increasingly observed that Muslim pupils in the school building are praying, clearly visible to others, signaled by ritual washings in the toilets, the rolling out of prayer mats, and taking up certain postures. This is not permitted."
March 3. An 18-year-old asylum seeker from Somalia was charged with murdering an 87-year-old woman at a retirement home in Neuenhaus. Police said the accused entered the facility through an unlocked back door with the aim of having sexual intercourse with elderly residents. He sexually assaulted a 59-year-old paralytic, entered an adjacent room and sexually assaulted an 87-year-old man. He then beat the man's wife, who was sleeping in the same room. The woman died from her injuries. The accused is being housed in a psychiatric hospital.
March 4. Spiegel Online reported that more than 900 people, including many women, have left Germany to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Roughly one-third have returned to Germany, while another 145 are believed to have been killed in battle. A state prosecutor warned that the returnees are especially dangerous: "They often have had extreme experiences of violence, are strongly radicalized and have few prospects in Germany."
March 7. The German-language version of the ISIS magazine Rumiyah called on lone wolf jihadists to kill "apostate" imams in Germany and Austria. An article entitled, "Kill the Infidel Imams in Germany and Austria," specifically mentioned the following "apostate" imams: Aiman Mazyek, Secretary-General of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany; Abdul Adhim Kamouss, an imam in Berlin of Moroccan origin; Hesham Shashaa, an imam at the Darul Quran mosque in Munich; and Omar Al-Rawi, a Vienna city councilman.
March 9. A 37-year-old migrant from Kosovo, identified only as Fatmir H., was arrested after he injured nine people, including two police officers, with an axe at the central train station in Düsseldorf. Police said Fatmir H. suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and was in an "exceptional mental state" at the time of the attack.
March 10. An unidentified man brandishing a machete attacked an 80-year-old man in the Kalkum district of Düsseldorf. The perpetrator remains at large. In Hamburg, six people were injured when two youths with tear gas attacked a train carrying 50 people. The perpetrators remain at large.
March 10. Germany spent more than €23 billion ($25 billion) on the reception, accommodation and care of migrants and refugees in 2016, according to Bundestag Vice President Johannes Singhammer. The average annual cost per migrant was approximately €11,800 ($13,000). In Berlin alone, the actual amount of money spent on migrants was twice as much as initially budgeted: €1.27 billion rather than €685 million.
March 10. The Bundesrat, the upper chamber of the German parliament, rejected a law that would have fast-tracked deportations to Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia by classifying those states as "safe countries of origin." The German Constitution defines safe countries as countries "in which, on the basis of their laws, enforcement practices and general political conditions, it can be safely concluded that neither political persecution nor inhuman or degrading punishment or treatment exists." The decision, led by federal states with left-leaning governing coalitions, means that criminal migrants from the Maghreb will indefinitely remain in Germany.
March 11. Police in Essen foiled a jihadist attack on a shopping center at the Limbecker Platz. Essen Police Chief Frank Richter said he had received "very concrete indications" on the plot to attack the facility, which has more than 200 stores and an average of 60,000 visitors on any given Saturday. Police arrested two Salafists from Oberhausen, including one who had fought for the Islamic State in Syria.
March 12. The number of crimes committed by asylum seekers and refugees in Baden-Württemberg increased significantly in 2016. Statistics showed a total of 251,000 criminal suspects, of whom 107,417 were non-Germans, mostly from Turkey, Romania and Italy. Of the non-German criminals, 25,379 were asylum seekers and refugees (up from 18,695 in 2015). They committed 64,329 crimes in 2016, an increase of nearly 20% over 2015. Syrians were the most frequent offenders 4,053 (2015: 1,253), followed by Gambians 2,346 (2015: 1,592) and Afghans 1,934 (2015: 638). The number of suspects from Kosovo fell from 1,531 to 1,094 and Serbs from 1,488 to 1,224. Criminals from those two countries were increasingly being deported in 2016. Police noted a 95.5% increase in the number of physical assaults involving at least one migrant, to 7,670 cases in 2016.
March 13. The number of crimes committed by asylum seekers and refugees in Bavaria increased significantly in 2016. Statistics showed a total of 274,633 criminal suspects of whom 180,023 were Germans (+0.3%) and 94,610 were non-Germans (+14.9%). Of the non-German criminals, 26,332 were asylum seekers and refugees, an increase of 57.8% compared to the previous year. The proportion of migrant suspects to all suspects was 9.6%, an increase of 3.2% (in 2012 the share was 1.8%). Among the migrant suspects, Syrians were the most frequent offenders at 16.1% (2015: 11.1%), followed by Afghans with 14.3% (2015: 10.1%), Iraqis with 8.8% (2015: 4.6%) and Nigerians with 6.8% (2015: 5.4%). "The increase in crime in Bavaria in 2016 is mainly due to foreign suspects, especially immigrants," said Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann.
March 14. A migrant from Kosovo who has lived in Germany for 28 years and is an active member of the hardline Islamic Salafist movement demanded that the Meierfeld secondary school in Herford provide his ninth-grade son with a prayer room "so that he can perform the Friday prayer on time and without disturbance." The man also prohibited his son from attending music lessons, which he said are banned by Islam. Previously, the man demanded that the Friedenstal secondary school, also in Herford, provide a prayer room for another of his sons.
March 14. More than 400 police and counter-terrorism officers raided a mosque in Hildesheim. The Interior Minister of Lower Saxony, Boris Pistorius, said the Deutschsprachigen Islamkreis Hildesheim (DIK) was a "hotspot of the radical Salafist scene" and ordered it closed because it was "indoctrinating Muslims to go to Iraq and Syria."
March 14. A 17-year-old Somali migrant raped a 43-year-old woman at a train station in Bamberg. A "southerner" (südländischer Typ) raped a 14-year-old girl at a playground in Döbeln.
March 15. A 40-year-old German man of Turkish descent stabbed to death his 34-year-old wife in front of a child daycare center in Kiel. Neighbors said the couple, who were separated, had quarreled about moving their children to Turkey.
March 16. Prosecutors in Gelsenkirchen charged a 23-year-old German man of Turkish origin, identified only as Anil O., with membership in a terrorist organization for joining the Islamic State in Syria. He traveled to Syria in August 2015 to work as a medic but, according to prosecutors, he became disillusioned with the Islamic State. Upon his return to Germany, he was arrested.
March 17. A ten-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan sexually assaulted a 75-year-old woman in Tyrol (Austria). Police said they believe he has committed at least five other offenses of the same kind.
March 17. German immigration authorities are testing software that will be able to recognize the dialect of migrants to determine whether they are legitimate asylum seekers. Some 60% of migrants who have arrived in Germany since 2015 do not have identification documents. "The idea is to record speech samples from asylum seekers and carry out an automatic dialect analysis," said Julian Detzel of the Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF).
March 18. Five Arab migrants were accused of gang raping a seven-year-old girl at a refugee reception shelter in the Bahrenfeld district of Hamburg.
March 19. Two Syrian asylum seekers, aged 17 and 23, stabbed two female passersby in broad daylight in the pedestrian zone of Dessau-Roßlau.
March 21. Two North African asylum seekers were charged with attempted manslaughter after they pushed a 40-year-old man onto the tracks of an oncoming train at the station in Dresden-Zschachwitz. The conductor brought the train to a halt a few meters from the man, who was prevented from getting back onto the platform by the perpetrators, a 23-year-old Moroccan and a 27-year-old Libyan. Chief Prosecutor Lorenz Haase initially dropped charges against the men, concluding that there was "no evidence" of murderous intent. Haase reversed his decision on day later after a nationwide outpouring of anger.
March 21. Three Muslim teenagers were handed sentences of between six and seven years in prison for the April 16, 2016 bombing of a Sikh temple in Essen. The judge ruled that the motive for the attack, in which three people were injured, was hatred of other religions. The three were members of the hardline Islamic Salafist movement.
March 22. The German Press Council (Presserat) loosened its guidelines (Pressekodex) for reporting crimes. Journalists are now allowed to provide information about the ethnic or religious background of suspects or perpetrators of crimes if there is a "justified public interest" to do so. Previously, journalists were only allowed to provide such details if it was absolutely necessary (begründeter Sachbezug) to understand the reported event. The change followed complaints from German media outlets that the old guidelines were difficult to interpret.
March 23. The Mannheim Labor Court rejected a lawsuit filed by a 40-year-old Muslim nurse who claimed that she was unfairly terminated after only one week by a nursing home because she refused to wash male patients. The woman, who has been living in Germany for three years, told the court that she wants to integrate into German society but does not understand why her former employer could not accept that her religion forbids her to wash men. The court ruled that the employer was entitled to dismiss employees during the six-month period of probation.
March 23. The Interior Minister of Hesse ordered a "permanent ban" the Al-Madina Mosque in Kassel for promoting Salafi-jihadism and for "exchanging and inviting hatred and violence against other religious groups, states and peoples, as well as generally differently thinking people."
March 23. The number of prisoners in the state of Baden-Württemberg has increased by 615 to 7,400 since 2015, and all 17 of the state's prisons are overcrowded. The reason for the increase in the number of inmates is the influx of migrants: The proportion of foreigners among the prison population increased from 39% to 46% in the last two years alone, according to the Stuttgarter Nachrichten.
March 24. The Berlin Police Department announced the creation of a special task force to investigate acid attacks. At least six women in the city have been attacked with acid since the beginning of 2017. The latest attack occurred on March 14, when a 41-year-old pedestrian was attacked by an unknown cyclist in Prenzlauer Berg district of the capital.
March 24. A 31-year-old Afghan migrant brandishing a hammer attacked a 59-year-old man riding a bicycle in the Bergedorf district of Hamburg. Police said the attacker, who was found soaked in his victim's blood, was "psychologically ill."
March 24. A 30-year-old man shouting "Allahu Akhbar" and "you are all going to die" forced the temporary closure of the central bus station in Bamberg. Police said the man showed "clear signs of mental illness." They added that an arrest warrant was not issued due to his illness.
March 24. A 36-year-old Tunisian jihadist evaded deportation by requesting asylum in Germany. Haykel S., who was arrested during a counter-terrorism raid in Frankfurt on February 1, was already on the commercial airplane that was to fly him to Tunis when the Frankfurt administrative court ordered that he be allowed to remain in Germany. Haykel S. first arrived in Germany in 2003 on a student visa. Due to his subsequent marriage to a German, he was granted residency. He later returned to Tunisia and then returned to Germany in August 2015. Since then, he has repeatedly been arrested for criminal activity.
March 25. A North Rhine-Westphalia police report leaked to Bild am Sonntag revealed that police knew as early as March 2016 that Anis Amri, the 31-year-old Tunisian who carried out the December 19 jihadist attack on the Christmas market in Berlin, was planning an attack, but he was not deported because he did not have a passport. The report stated: "Amri presents a threat in the form of a suicide attack. The commission of a terrorist attack by Amri is expected."
March 27. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that Turkey's National Intelligence Agency had provided Germany's BND intelligence service with a list of names of hundreds of alleged followers of the Islamic Gülen movement in Germany. The movement is led by Turkish preacher Fethullah Gülen, who has lived in the United States since 1999. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has blamed Gülen for the failed military coup in July 2016. The list, which includes addresses, telephone numbers and photographs of those concerned, proved that the Turkish government has been secretly spying on persons, associations, schools and other institutions linked to Gülen in Germany.

March 28. Humboldt University of Berlin announced it will open an Islamic theology institute. The objective of the program is "to impart academic foundations in Islamic theology for training imams and to qualify students for a school teaching post." Humboldt University will become the sixth university in Germany to teach Islamic theology. Berlin Mayor Michael Müller revealed that the institute is being paid for by German taxpayers: €13.5 million ($14.5 million) of government funding will secure the institute's finances through 2022. Humboldt University President Sabine Kunst rejected calls for a joint "Faculty for Theology" for Christians, Muslims and Jews: "The first step is to set up the Institute for Islamic Theology at the HU. We want this to be a success. It is important that this key project is not overloaded by a much broader idea."

Humboldt University of Berlin has announced that it will open an Islamic theology institute. It will be the sixth university in Germany to teach Islamic theology. (Image source: Friedrich Petersdorff/Wikimedia Commons)
March 30. Jens Spahn, a member of the executive committee of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), called for an Islam Law to regulate the practice of Islam in Germany. He demanded German language tests for imams, saying that many of the preachers who delivered sermons in German mosques come from abroad, cannot speak German and are paid by other countries. Spahn also said that mosques should be registered, saying that authorities "did not know how many mosques there are in Germany, where they are or who finances them." In addition, Spahn, called for the training of imams, teachers of religion and counselors to be paid for with tax money. "What is clear," he said, "is that the financing of mosques by foreign actors must stop."
Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter.

Vijeta Uniyal : Germany Hit by Merkel's Imported Crime Wave


  • According to the Germany's annual crime report, compiled by the Federal Crime Bureau (BKA), there has been a more than 50% rise in migrant crime in the country compared to the year before.
  • They not only indulge in petty crime but have come to dominate serious and violent crime in Germany.
  • European mainstream media may keep on putting a positive spin on Merkel's "courageous" and "selfless" stance, but her policy continues to incur heavy economic, social and human cost, not only on Germany, but on the cultural future of European civilisation.
At the height of the European migrant crisis in early 2016, when masses of migrants were pouring into Europe, the German Green Party Chairwoman Katrin Göring-Eckardt could not control her joy. "We have just received an unexpected gift in the form of people," she told her fellow Germans, reminding them to be grateful. This gift, she said, was going to make the country "more religious, more colourful, more diverse and younger." It was gift, it turns out, that keeps on giving.
According to the country's annual crime report, compiled by the Federal Crime Bureau (BKA), there has been a more than 50% rise in migrant crime in the country compared to the year before.
The German newspaper Die Welt, which received an advance copy of the annual crime report, wrote:
"The number of immigrants suspected of criminal acts in 2016 has risen by 52.7 percent, to the figure of 174,438, compared to the previous year. To ensure a fair comparison with the rest of the population, crimes that only immigrants can commit, such as illegal entry to the country, have been taken out from the statistics. The annual police report (PKS) shows that there were total of 616,230 crime suspects of foreign origin last year. The migrant share [of total crime figures] was disproportionately large, namely 174,438 -- more than a quarter."
These staggering crime statistics are even more alarming if one looks through the narrow definition German government uses to denote a "criminal migrant". As Die Welt explains, these crime figures do not take into account "foreigners who have been living and working in Germany for some time, but only a specific group of protection-seekers [refugees]."
In a sane world, the government would take steps to protect its own citizens from such "protection-seekers". Not in Merkel's Germany.
What is relevant is not only what these official crime statistics reveal, but what they conceal. The actual crime share of these "protection-seekers" is much higher if one considers the fact that more than 30% of them are serial offenders and 5% of them have been booked on criminal charges at least 6 times -- a mind-boggling number given their relatively recent arrival in the country.
These new entrants make up less than 2% of the German population, but constitute 9% of Germany's criminal population. They not only indulge in petty crime but have come to dominate serious and violent crime in Germany. Nearly 15% of all suspects charged with serious bodily harm, rapes and sexual assaults come from this group, the police crime report reveals.
The German government's denial of surging migrant crime wave has led to the systemic under-reporting and suppression of information about migrant crimes. Take, for example, Berlin, where a left-wing state government keeps police chronically disarmed, even of defensive gear such as bulletproof vests, let alone firearms. The Berlin government prohibits law enforcement agencies from using video surveillance in the German capital, on the grounds of "civil rights".
To highlight the rampant lawlessness in Berlin, a TV crew from the German cable network SAT1 installed its own surveillance cameras around Berlin's well-known Kottbusser Tor no-go zone. Last year, the Berlin police registered 1,600 crimes around Kottbusser Tor. An ordinary television crew, however, managed to record hundreds of crimes in just 48 hours. According to journalist and moderator Claus Strunz:
"Our 9 cameras monitored the area [Kottbusser Tor] for 48 hours. And on the video feed -- we can't say the exact number -- but there are hundreds of crimes that would have otherwise gone undiscovered... And the parents [living in the area] say that in the year and a half since [uncontrolled migration began], they don't let their daughters walk alone on the street... either day or night."
As no act of journalistic insubordination against Merkel's "Refugees Welcome" directive goes unpunished, Claus Strunz was attacked by a journalist colleague for "politicising" his current affairs show. He was called a "populist" -- dog-whistle-talk for a far-right sympathiser -- a potentially suicidal career move for any journalist wishing to work in Germany.
Strunz was also one of the few German journalists who cared to highlight the plight of the families of the victims of the last year's Christmas market attack, in which a Tunisian Islamist migrant drove a truck loaded with 20 tons of steel beams into a busy Christmas market in Berlin. He murdered 12 people and injured 48 others.
The German mainstream media evidently decided not to personalize the stories of the Berlin terror victims. In a telling move, Merkel government categorized the victims of that attack as victims of regular "traffic accident". For Merkel and Germany's ruling establishment, apparently, the victims of migrant crimes and terror are nothing more than unfortunate roadkill on the way towards a multicultural paradise.
Rather than tackling the migrant crime wave, the Merkel government has chosen to spin the facts and bury the truth.
"Refugees aren't more criminal than Germans," a senior official from Germany's Ministry of the Interior claimed last summer. He further maintained that, according to the Ministry's calculations, "migrants hardly committed any sexual assaults and murders." That statement was made barely six months after mass sexual assaults on New Year's Eve in Cologne.
When Chancellor Merkel began her re-election bid five months ago, she described migrant crimes as "terrible isolated incidents" for which she wanted to see "tough sentencing."
So how does "tough sentencing" look like under Merkel's watch? For those New Year's Eve assaults in Cologne, where some two thousand Muslim men raped, assaulted and robbed more than 1200 women, almost all of the attackers managed to walk free. They did not even see a judge, let alone face punishment. Despite hundreds of testimonies by victims, countless reliable eyewitnesses and endless surveillance footage, the Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, where Cologne is located, admitted that "most of the cases will remain unsolved."
With five months to go until the German elections, Merkel's government has decided to address the problem by instituting an €18 million study to probe the issues of "migration and integration."
That is just peanuts compared to what Merkel is willing to pay for her "refugee" policy. Her decision to offer asylum to more than one million migrants will cost country's taxpayers up to €1.5 trillion, according to the prominent German economist Bernd Raffelhüschen. In the best-case scenario, Raffelhüschen estimates, the cost of Germany's migrant policy will be around €878 billion. "If the second generation [of the migrants] cannot be integrated into the workforce at par with the native population, these costs will go up to €1.5 trillion," Raffelhüschen told Die Welt. Raffelhüschen's calculations, published last year, only take into account the migrant intake of 2015; they do not include any present or future migrant waves.
Germany's Federal Integration Commissioner and Merkel-confidant Aydan Özoguz is pushing for migrants to be granted voting rights similar to German citizens in any national referendum -- regardless of their legal status. According to an advisory report recently co-authored by Özoguz, "people who permanently live in a country should be able to participate in democratic decision making."
Özoguz, who helped shape Merkel's refugee policy of opening up Europe to millions of migrants from Arab and Muslim countries, with her proposal to grant voting rights to migrants, is creating a roadmap for a radical transform of Germany -- and by default that of the continental Europe

To offset the recent rise of right-wing political party, Alterative für Deutschland (AfD), the German political establishment sees the empowerment of such a vast new wave of migrants as a political counterweight.

Ever since Merkel opened Europe's borders in the spring of 2015 by arbitrarily suspending the existing EU-wide border regulations (Dublin II), Europe has been dragging itself ever deeper into a self-inflicted migrant crisis. European mainstream media may keep on putting a positive spin on Merkel's "courageous" and "selfless" stance, but her policy continues to incur heavy economic, social and human cost, not only on Germany, but on the cultural future of European civilization.

Vijeta Uniyal, a journalist and news analyst, is based in Germany.

Soeren Kern : Germany: Migrant Crime Spiked in 2016



  • Although non-Germans make up approximately 10% of the overall German population, they accounted for 30.5% of all crime suspects in the country in 2016.
  • Nearly 250,000 migrants entered the country illegally in 2016, up 61.4% from 154,188 in 2015. More than 225,000 migrants were found living in the country illegally (Unerlaubter Aufenthalt) in 2016.
  • The Berlin Senate launched an inquiry into why migrants disproportionally appear as criminals in the city-state compared to Germans.
An official annual report about crime in Germany has revealed a rapidly deteriorating security situation in the country marked by a dramatic increase in violent crime, including murder, rape and sexual assault.
The report also shows a direct link between the growing lawlessness in Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to allow in more than one million mostly male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
The report — Police Crime Statistics 2016 (Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik, PKS) — was compiled by the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA) and presented by Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière in Berlin on April 24.
The number of non-German crime suspects (nichtdeutsche Tatverdächtige) legally residing in Germany jumped to 616,230 in 2016, up from 555,820 in 2015 — an increase of 11% — according to the report. Although non-Germans make up approximately 10% of the overall German population, they accounted for 30.5% of all crime suspects in the country in 2016, up from 27.6% in 2015.
In this year's report, the BKA created a separate subcategory called "migrants" (Zuwanderer) which encompasses a combination of refugees, pending asylum seekers, failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.
According to the BKA, the number of migrant crime suspects (tatverdächtiger Zuwanderer) in Germany in 2016 jumped to 174,438 from 114,238 in 2015 — up 52.7%. Although "migrants" made up less than 2% of the German population in 2016, they accounted for 8.6% of all crime suspects in the country — up from 5.7% in 2015.
In terms of non-German crime suspects residing legally in Germany, Turks were the primary offenders in 2016, with 69,918 suspects, followed by Romanians, Poles, Syrians, Serbs, Italians, Afghans, Bulgarians, Iraqis, Albanians, Kosovars, Moroccans, Iranians and Algerians.
In terms of migrant crime suspects, Syrians were the primary offenders, followed by Afghans, Iraqis, Albanians, Algerians, Moroccans, Serbs, Iranians, Kosovars and Somalis.

Police in Bremen, Germany frisk a North African youth who is suspected of theft. (Image source: ZDF video screenshot)
The report's other findings include:
  • Violent crime surged in Germany in 2016. These include a 14.3% increase in murder and manslaughter, a 12.7% increase in rape and sexual assault and a 9.9% increase in aggravated assault. The BKA also recorded a 14.8% increase in weapons offenses and a 7.1% increase in drug offenses.
  • Non-German crime suspects committed 2,512 rapes and sexual assaults in Germany in 2016 — an average of seven a day. Syrians were the primary offenders, followed by Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Iranians, Algerians, Moroccans, Eritreans, Nigerians and Albanians. German authorities have repeatedly been accused of underreporting the true scale of the migrant rape problem for political reasons. For example, up to 90% of the sex crimes committed in Germany in 2014 do not appear in the official statistics, according to André Schulz, the head of the Association of Criminal Police (Bund Deutscher Kriminalbeamter, BDK).
  • Non-German crime suspects committed 11,525 robberies in Germany in 2016 — an average of 32 a day. Moroccans were the primary offenders, followed by Algerians, Syrians, Georgians, Tunisians, Albanians, Afghans, Serbs, Iraqis and Iranians.
  • Non-German crime suspects committed 56,252 aggravated assaults in 2016 — an average of 154 a day. Syrians were the primary offenders, followed by Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Moroccans, Algerians, Somalis, Albanians, Eritreans and Pakistanis.
  • Bavaria was the German state most affected by non-German criminality, followed by North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg, Hesse, Berlin, Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony, Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saarland, Bremen and Thüringen.
  • Berlin was the German city most affected by non-German criminality, followed by Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hanover, Stuttgart, Dortmund, Bremen, Leipzig, Nürnberg, Essen, Duisburg, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Dresden, Freiburg im Breisgau, Chemnitz, Aachen, Bielefeld, Wuppertal, Augsburg, Bonn, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen, Wiesbaden, Münster, Kiel, Halle, Krefeld, Braunschweig, Mainz, Lübeck, Mönchengladbach, Erfurt, Oberhausen, Magdeburg and Rostock.
  • The BKA also recorded 487,711 violations of German immigration laws (ausländerrechtliche Verstöße), up 21.1% from 402,741 violations in 2015. Nearly 250,000 migrants entered the country illegally in 2016, up 61.4% from 154,188 in 2015. More than 225,000 migrants were found living in the country illegally (Unerlaubter Aufenthalt) in 2016.
The new data contradicts claims made by the BKA in December 2016 — just four months before the current report — that migrant criminality was actually decreasing.
During a press conference in Berlin on April 24, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière admitted:
"The proportion of foreign suspects, and migrants in particular, is higher than the average for the general population. This cannot be sugarcoated. There is an overall rise in disrespect, violence and hate. Those who commit serious offenses here forfeit their right to stay here."
Separately, officials in Bavaria revealed that the number of crimes committed by asylum seekers and refugees there increased by 58% in 2016. They accounted for 9.6% of all crimes committed in the state, up from 3.2% in 2015 and 1.8% in 2012. Syrians were the primary offenders, followed by Afghans, Iraqis and Nigerians.
"The increase in crime in Bavaria in 2016 is mainly due to foreign suspects, especially immigrants," said Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann.
At the same time, officials in Baden-Württemberg noted a 95.5% increase in the number of physical assaults involving at least one migrant in 2016.
Meanwhile, the Berlin Senate launched an inquiry into why migrants disproportionally appear as criminals in the city-state compared to Germans. In 2016, 40% of all crime suspects in the German capital were non-Germans.
None of this seems to be having an impact on the German elections set for September 24, 2017. Polls show that if the election for German chancellor were held today, Angela Merkel, who is largely responsible for the migration crisis, would be re-elected with 37% of the vote. Martin Schulz, the Social Democrat candidate who has pledged to increase migration to Germany even further, would win 29% of the vote and the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany would win 8%. For now, German voters appear to believe that the alternatives to Merkel are all worse.
Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter.

Yves Mamou : France: What is the Presidential Campaign Really About?


  • The result of this mess is that France as one country no longer exists.
  • People who voted for Le Pen seem to feel not only that they lost their jobs, but that they are becoming foreigners in their own country.
  • Macron, for many analysts, is the candidate of the status quo: Islamists are not a problem and reforming the job market will supposedly solve all France's problems.
The French presidential race is the latest election to shake up establishment politics. The Parti Socialiste and Les Républicains, who have been calling the shots for the past forty years, were voted out of the race. The "remainers" are Emmanuel Macron, a clone of Canada's Prime Minster Justin Trudeau; and Marine Le Pen, whom many believe will not win.
France is a fractured country. As in the US and the UK, the rift is not between the traditional left and right. Instead, it reflects divisions -- cultural, social, and economic -- that came with globalization and mass migration. A map released by the Ministry of the Interior after the first round of the presidential campaign illustrates the new political scenery.

Blue represents the parts of France where Le Pen heads the list; pink, the areas supporting Macron. The blue areas coincide with old industrial areas, deeply damaged by globalization and industrial relocation. Many blue-collar workers are on welfare; and the antagonism between Muslims and non-Muslims is high. People who voted for Le Pen seem to feel not only that they lost their jobs, but that they are becoming foreigners in their own country.

The areas in pink (Macron), represent the big cities and places where the better jobs are. It also represents the areas where the "upper classes can afford to raise invisible barriers between themselves and the 'other', immigrants or minorities," explains Christophe Guilluy, geographer, and author of Le crépuscule de la France d'en haut (The Twilight of Elite France).

The result of this mess is that France as one country no longer exists. One half the population (in blue-collar areas, small towns and rural areas) is shut out by the other half of the population (white-collar workers) who live in the big cities.
Guilluy adds:
"The job market has become deeply polarized and mainly concentrated in big cities, squeezing out the middle classes. For the first time in history, working people no longer live in the places where jobs and wealth are created."
...
"But social issues are not the only determinant of the populist vote. Identity is also essential, linked as it is to the emergence of a multicultural society, which feeds anxiety in working-class environments. At a time of fluctuating majorities and minorities, amid demographic instability, the fear of tipping into a minority is creating considerable cultural insecurity in developed countries. Unlike the upper classes, who can afford to raise invisible barriers between themselves and the 'other' (immigrants or minorities), the working classes want a powerful state apparatus to protect them, socially and culturally. So, the populist surge is re-activating a real class vote."
The question is if frustration and anger against globalization and immigration will succeed in electing Le Pen.

This frustration was not made lighter by the abysmal level of the debate. During the presidential campaign, the media focused only on political scandals: the presumed "fake job" offenses committed by François Fillon. Week after week, other presumed "political scandals" were continually released against him by a satirical weekly, Le Canard Enchaîné.
Organized or not, these allegations overtook any discussion about the real problems in France:
 the extraordinary proportion of people on welfare, for instance. France's unemployment rate stands at 9.9% (compared to 3.9% Germany and 4.7% in Great Britain); French GDP growth is one of the weakest of eurozone (1.1% vs 1.7% for eurozone, and 1.9% for EU); and France's public debt, which accounted for 89.5% of GDP in 2012, is expected to reach 96% of GDP in 2017.

Most of all, the "French Islamist problem" remained undebated and unchanged.

 After two years of continuous terrorist attacks, after five years of continuous Muslim immigration, after dozens of Muslim riots, big and small, in the suburbs of big cities, millions of French people were expecting a change -- or at least a public conversation. But, intentionally or not, these questions were avoided by the media.

The expected victory of Emmanuel Macron -- a perfect product of the French techno-sphere -- dashes any hopes of addressing the frightening questions of Muslim immigration; Muslim no-go-zones (more than a hundred); the spread of Salafism among Muslim youths, and of the general secession of the French Muslim community.

Macron, young and modern, cautiously avoided talking about these problems. Macron, for many analysts, is the candidate of the status quo: Islamists are not a problem and reforming the job market will supposedly solve all France's problems.


French presidential candidates Emmanuel Macron (left) and Marine Le Pen. (Image source: LCI video screenshot)

The results of the first round on April 23 showed that roughly 45% of the votes cast were motivated by protest and anger against globalization and dilution of the French nation's sovereignty inside the European Union. The leftist populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon (19% of the voters) refused to endorse Macron in the runoff.
Inside Les Républicains, the big party loser of the first round, no one knows if a significant percentage might turn to Le Pen.

On May 7, more than 228 years after the French Revolution, the destiny of France may be seriously different -- and whatever the result of the presidential election, possibly not for the best.
Yves Mamou is a journalist and author based in France. He worked for two decades for the daily, Le Monde, before his retirement.