If there had been any doubt about the intention to murder – the accused himself dispelled it in his last statement. On Tuesday, February the 23rd, he had to pay the penalty: life imprisonment!The judges at the Hagen Regional Court were convinced that David G. (25) killed his girlfriend Violetta R. (38) with 49 stabs with a knife. The case made national headlines because the killer should have been in custody pending deportation at the time of the crime.

“He literally begged for a life sentence, I have never seen anything like that in my professional life,” said Heike Hartmann-Garschagen, the presiding judge.

The accused himself had made it clear that he regarded the victim as his property and that he had the right to do with her as he pleased. This made it a case of murder for base motives.David G., who had previously been sentenced to twelve years in prison for human trafficking in his home country, remained calm about the verdict. He appeared in court carefully coiffed, with a conspicuous goatee and designer Gucci jumper.

In his relationship with Violetta R., a mother of three, there had been frequent assaults. The refugee is said to have repeatedly made unfounded accusations against his partner. For example, David G. accused Violetta of having aborted his unborn child – in fact, the victim suffered a miscarriage. Finally, he had accused her of snitching on him to the police – also unjustly, the judge explained.

Therefore, the court was convinced in the end, the Syrian, who was known to the police, killed Violetta in her flat on the night of June the 10th 2020.According to the court’s findings, he gave Violetta’s daughter Kiara (3) a tablet and headphones and locked her in the children’s room. Then he attacked Violetta – and got a fresh knife twice, because the others were broken during the attack! Several stabs were fatal, the forensic expert explained at the trial.

Creepy: On the corpse, the killer probably still placed photos showing him, Violetta and Kiara. “He probably wanted to show what he thought had been destroyed,” says Hartmann-Garschagen.

The verdict is not yet final, the accused can appeal against it. His lawyer had demanded a prison sentence for manslaughter.

https://m.bild.de/regional/ruhrgebiet/ruhrgebiet-aktuell/hagen-es-war-mord-david-g-25-muss-lebenslaenglich-in-den-knast-75513776,view=amp.bildMobile.html

The number of anti-Semitic hate crimes in Germany surged to a two-decade high in 2020, according to new statistics released by the German government. Anti-Semitism in Germany has been steadily growing in recent years, fueled in part by far-left anti-Israel activists and by mass migration from the Muslim world. The problem is now being exacerbated by the Coronavirus pandemic, which far-right conspiracy theorists are blaming on both Jews and Israel.

German police reported a total of 2,275 anti-Semitic hate crimes — an average of six per day — in 2020, according to preliminary data provided by the federal government. The tally represents a more than 10% increase over the number of anti-Semitic crimes reported in 2019, itself a record-breaking year for such offenses. The official numbers represent only the crimes reported to the police; the actual number of incidents is presumably much bigger.

The new data, published on February 11 by the newspaper Tagesspiegel, shows that police were able to identify 1,367 suspects — but that only five individuals were ultimately arrested. The statistics also show that 55 (roughly 2.5%) of the crimes involved violence. This implies that most of the other incidents appear to involve anti-Semitic hate speech on the internet, property damage or propaganda crimes such as anti-Jewish graffiti.

The number of anti-Semitic crimes registered in 2020 was the highest since the Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA) introduced the so-called Politically Motivated Crime (Politisch motivierte Kriminalität, PMK) recording system in 2001.

Identifying the Perpetrators

It remains unclear why so few perpetrators have faced legal consequences for their crimes, especially when government officials repeatedly claim that fighting anti-Semitism is a top priority. A reason may be that it is politically incorrect to identify the true suspects.

The anti-Semitism statistics for 2020 do not include information about the backgrounds of the perpetrators. Tagesspiegel, as is common with German media outlets, automatically blamed the far-right:

“From the point of view of the police, most anti-Semitic crimes can be attributed to right-wing perpetrators. Islamist, left-wing and other Jew haters are only a small minority in the statistics.”

Independent studies, however, have found that right-wing extremists have been responsible for only a fraction of anti-Semitic attacks in Germany in recent years. The Berlin-based Research and Information Center on Antisemitism (Recherche- und Informationsstelle Antisemitismus, RIAS), for instance, reported that that the far-right was responsible for less than 20% of anti-Semitic hate crimes in Berlin in 2018.

A 2017 survey of German Jews by the University of Bielefeld found that 60% of anti-Semitic attacks were said to have been carried out by Muslims, compared to 19% by far-left extremists and 19% by far-right perpetrators. Muslims were also said to be responsible for 81% of anti-Semitic attacks involving physical violence. The survey found that 70% of German Jews believe that mass migration from the Muslim world has fueled anti-Semitism in Germany.

Nevertheless, German police, possibly under orders from political authorities, systematically assign unsolved anti-Semitic hate crimes to the far right. In one well-known case, police blamed far-right extremists for chanting the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil” at an Islamist al-Quds rally in Berlin.

The director of RIAS, Benjamin Steinitz, said that slogans like “Sieg Heil” or “Jews out,” which are automatically attributed to right-wing extremists, are also popular in Islamist circles. He added that most anti-Semitic incidents are attributed to German citizens, but the statistics do not reveal whether they are Muslim immigrants who have obtained German citizenship.

An April 2017 report by the Independent Expert Group on Anti-Semitism (Unabhängigen Expertenkreises Antisemitismus), which advises the German government, found:

“Xenophobic and anti-Semitic crimes are always assigned to the far right if no further specifics can be identified and for which no suspects have been identified. This may result in a distorted picture of the motivation for the crime and its perpetrators.”

In May 2019, after the German Interior Ministry blamed 90% of the anti-Semitic attacks in Germany on “right-wing” perpetrators, the influential German blog Tichys Einblick wrote:

“The number of anti-Semitic acts in Germany has increased to a worrying degree…. This includes anti-Semitic graffiti or damage, threats against Jews or physical, violent assaults. Anti-Semitism is shameful for the whole country. In the statistics, 90% of the crimes are right-wing extremist perpetrators. But… most of the perpetrators are anonymous and are never caught. How do you know whether a swastika graffiti or an insult against Jews comes from right-wing German perpetrators? The police simply ‘suspect’ this.

“Only recently, a parliamentary inquiry revealed that a large part of the anti-Semitic crimes there — 120 of 253 cases — were assigned to the ‘right’ in the statistics, although the perpetrators’ motives were unknown….

“The well-known historian and anti-Semitism expert Michael Wolfssohn described Muslim anti-Semitism as the most dangerous threat to Jews in Germany and Europe.

“Why are the majority of anti-Semitic acts attributed to ‘right-wing’ German perpetrators? One can see a political motive behind this — growing anti-Semitism can be used politically as a weapon ‘against the right.'”

In July 2019, after police provided the German Senate with inaccurate statistics on the perpetrators of anti-Semitic hate crimes, the newspaper Die Welt wrote:

“There has been criticism from experts for a long time that the allocation of the vast majority of anti-Semitism cases to right-wing extremist perpetrators is incorrect and that other groups of perpetrators, for example from Islamist and other Muslim circles, are given too little attention.”

In January 2021, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs wrote about anti-Semitism in Germany:

“Police sometimes don’t even interfere in antisemitic incidents and instead stand nearby watching. In most cases, they don’t react because they don’t recognize an antisemitic incident or don’t understand that expressing antisemitic statements is a problem, and thus don’t see any reason to interfere. This lack of awareness also leads to the fact that most complaints by victims of antisemitic crimes are not being processed by the police.

“In addition to this, the police continue to assign antisemitic incidents to the ‘Right’ when no further specifications are identifiable, and the suspects are unknown. The Bundestag [Parliamentary] reports, which are based on the data reported by the police, attribute the overwhelming majority (94%) of incidents to rightwing motives. As in previous years, this number is being contested by organizations monitoring antisemitism, politicians, Jewish leaders and experts, as well as the Federal Commissioner for Antisemitism, who argue that the police’s system of categorizing incidents leads to a distorted picture concerning the motive and the perpetrators’ circle, and thus hampers effective policy making.”

In 2020, the highest-profile anti-Semitic incident in Germany involved the Chief Rabbi of Munich, Shmuel Aharon Brodman. On July 9, while exiting a tram, he was verbally assaulted by four men who insulted him and made disparaging comments about the State of Israel. According to Brodman, the men spoke both English and Arabic. Police later said that the alleged suspects were between 20 and 30 years of age and of Arab descent.

To be sure, the far-right also bears responsibility for anti-Semitism in Germany — just not all of it, as is often claimed. One of Germany’s leading anti-Semitism scholars, Monica Schwarz-Friesel, has noted that what makes the far right particularly frightening — and therefore more newsworthy — is that they are completely open about their hatred of Jews and Israel. By contrast, she said, Jew haters on the far left tend to shroud their anti-Semitism behind the guise of anti-Zionism and Palestinian activism.

Coronavirus-Related Anti-Semitism

The surge in anti-Semitism in Germany in 2020 is also related to the Coronavirus pandemic, which fringe groups are using as a pretext to spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Some of the conspiracy theories consist of medieval anti-Jewish scapegoating repackaged for a modern pandemic. A common claim is that Jews manufactured the Coronavirus to advance their supposed global control.

Most Coronavirus-related anti-Semitism is spread on the internet. A comprehensive assessment of Coronavirus-related anti-Semitism in Germany can be found in the 2020 Annual Report on Anti-Semitism published by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs on January 27, 2021:

“In 2020, a total of 42.3K German posts, written by 11.24K users, were categorized as antisemitic by the ACMS [Anti-Semitism Cyber Monitoring System]. New Antisemitism [manifested as opposition to Zionism and criticism of the Israeli government] (39.1%) and Classic Antisemitism [manifested as demonization of Jews, Jewish conspiracy theories and call for explicit violence against Jews] (40.5%) accounted for almost the same share of antisemitic discourse, and Holocaust Denial and Distortion accounted for 20.4%….

“The number of posts featuring Holocaust trivialization and antisemitic conspiracy theories referencing Covid-19 have been on the rise since March. The most common types of antisemitic posts relate to different forms of conspiracy theories and among them 53.4% contained Classic Antisemitism….

“Other altered antisemitic codes include theories surrounding ‘Jewish influence,’ and claims the pandemic serves the Jews to amass enormous profits from the vaccines, and thus take over the world’s economy, and ultimately, world domination….

“Well-known Jewish personalities such as members of the Rothschild family or George Soros are referred to as backers, masterminds, or profiteers of the pandemic because of their alleged influence on the pharmaceutical industry.

“Anti-vaxxers also compare alleged ‘vaccination stations’ to Auschwitz, and claim that the police are developing a dictatorship which will persecute those who refuse the vaccine by sending them to concentration camps….”

Coronavirus Protests

As in other European countries, central and local governments in Germany have tried to contain the pandemic with lockdowns and other severe restrictions on personal movement. The extended social distancing measures, which have caused widespread economic and financial distress, have sparked anti-government protests.

Germans opposed to government lockdowns hail from across the political spectrum: this is not a strictly left or right issue, but one of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly to protest against what many perceive to be a massive government assault on civil liberties.

Some of the protests are being organized by a small but growing grassroots movement called Querdenker (“Unconventional Thinkers” or “Out-of-the-Box Thinkers”) that opposes German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “Merkill Corona dictatorship.”

The Querdenker movement was founded by Michael Ballweg, a Stuttgart-based software entrepreneur, to pressure the Merkel government to lift the Coronavirus-related restrictions on basic constitutional rights. It’s manifesto states:

“We insist on the first 20 articles of our constitution: human rights; personal rights; freedom of belief and conscience; freedom of opinion; freedom of assembly; freedom of movement. We are non-partisan and do not exclude any opinion.”

The movement, which now has 70 branches across Germany, has organized more than 100 Coronavirus protests, which, according to the group, have been attended by at least 100,000 people.

One of the largest Querdenker demonstrations to date took place in Berlin on August 29, 2020. An estimated 40,000 people — libertarians, constitutionalists, Greens, esoterics, naturopaths, LGBT activists, pandemic deniers, anti-vaccine and anti-mask activists and families with children — gathered to protest the government’s Coronavirus policies. The protests turned violent after being infiltrated by several hundred far-right agitators waving Nazi-era flags.

Since then, dozens of anti-Semitic incidents have been reported at such rallies. Some protesters have been seen wearing t-shirts with Nazi-era yellow stars in which the word “Jew” was replaced with “unvaccinated.” Others have carried posters with the inscription, “Vaccination makes you free,” a reference to the “Work makes you free” slogan placed at the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Some have referred to the “final solution of the Corona question” as well as of “vaccination in Dachau.”

Other protesters have trivialized the Holocaust by putting themselves on the same level as the Jews persecuted by the Nazi regime and by referring to themselves as resistance fighters opposing an allegedly undemocratic government. Some protesters have claimed that the government-imposed quarantines are equivalent to Nazi-era prison camps. Others have said that after being in quarantine, they now know how Anne Frank felt.

“By comparing the measures taken to contain the pandemic to the Holocaust, the Shoah is being trivialized,” said Alexander Rasumny of RIAS. “Something like that is hurtful for all people who have a personal point of reference to the Shoah, actually for all Jewish people.”

Foreign Minister Heiko Maas recently warned that many of the conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus pandemic had made it clear: “Even today, anti-Semitism is not just a phenomenon of the right-wing extremist fringes. It reaches into the middle of our society.”

The German government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, warned that the Coronavirus pandemic is becoming a breeding ground for anti-Jewish agitation:

“Unfortunately, it is not surprising that Jews and Israel are primary targets. Anti-Semitic hate speech spreads quickly on the internet and in particular on the common social media platforms.

“We are talking about a Jewish takeover of the world economy, Jewish profits from a possible vaccine, biological weapons developed by Israel, or a Jewish attempt to reduce the world population. The crudest forms of anti-Semitism are breaking out.

“The past has tragically shown that words can become deeds. Each and every individual is challenged here by intervening and reporting anti-Semitic defamations to the platform operators.”

Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht announced more intensive action against anti-Jewish statements on the internet. “We will require more accountability from online platforms. They must not to allow themselves to be misused to agitate and hurl conspiracy theories.”

Meanwhile, German analyst Stefan Frank has detailed how left-leaning media in Germany and elsewhere are also responsible for pushing anti-Israel and anti-Zionist memes related to the pandemic:

“Anti-Israel activists in the media are currently running a downright fake news campaign aimed at giving the public the false news that the Palestinians are not getting vaccines and that Israel is to blame. Not only AP and ZDF, but also a number of others are involved….

“Behind this is not just a general aversion to Israel, but the conscious strategy of never reporting anything positive about Israel. If the vaccinations have started in Israel, readers might get the idea that this is a good thing. That is why the message has to be turned into its opposite by omitting relevant information, distorting it and outright lies.”

Select Commentary

The 2020 Annual Report on Anti-Semitism published by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs on January 27, 2021 noted:

“In 2021, Germany will be celebrating 1,700 years of Jewish life in its territory [the first documentary evidence of settlement of Jewish communities north of the Alps comes from the year 321. In an edict, Emperor Constantine allowed the magistrate of Cologne to accept Jewish members] but is still struggling with antisemitism….

“We identified a massive increase in consumption of conspiracy theories claiming that Jews sought to profit from the Coronavirus from the pharmaceutical industry, that Jews were disproportionately responsible for spreading the virus, or that Jews are using the virus to create a New World Order that will tighten their grasp over world economies. Anti-vaxxers wore yellow stars in demonstrations and posted them to their social media profiles; comparing coronavirus restrictions to the Nazi restrictions placed against Jews during the Holocaust while claiming they were being led to the vaccine ‘like sheep to the slaughter.’

The head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, said:

“In view of the numerous anti-Semitic incidents at the Corona-denial demonstrations last year and the conspiracy myths on the internet, it was unfortunately to be expected that the number of anti-Semitic crimes would rise again. Now it is a sad certainty. The preliminary statistics show that the radicalization of society is advancing and respect for minorities is falling.”

The German government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, added:

“The rise in anti-Semitism must be a warning to us. In the course of the so-called Corona protests, the limits of what can be said were shifted, the Shoah was relativized, and well-known anti-Semitic hate images renewed.

“The increase in criminal offenses is a clear sign that democracy must show itself to be defensive, especially in crises such as the ongoing pandemic. Social cohesion is measured especially here in Germany by how firmly we stand together against hatred of Jews.”

In a Die Welt essay — “More Than Two Thousand Crimes but Only Five Arrests?” — columnist Henryk Broder concluded:

“With the exception of Bremen and Hamburg, every federal state has an ‘anti-Semitism officer,’ and in Berlin there are even four. They all agree: ‘There is no place for anti-Semitism in Germany.’ Negative consequences of the Enlightenment? People who cling to conspiracy theories might be tempted to believe in a correlation, possibly even a causality: the more anti-Semitism is fought, the more it spreads. Awareness campaigns can also have negative consequences. People do exactly what they are warned not to do. Smoking, drinking, having unprotected sex, eating an unhealthy diet, driving a car faster than allowed. That is why, for example, suicides are reported very cautiously, and nobody should be encouraged to imitate them.

“If this were also the case with anti-Semitism, the concept of anti-Semitism would have to be rethought. The traditional recipes have proven to be of little help: reading the diaries of Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész, visits to concentration camps, conversations with contemporary witnesses. The movie ‘Schindler’s List’ arrived at German cinemas in 1994 and had more than six million (!) viewers. The film ‘changed the image of the Nazi dictatorship and the historical awareness of the murder of European Jews’ (Deutschlandfunk Kultur). Viewed in this way, Germany should have long been an anti-Semitism free zone, a role model for the whole world, with a foreign minister who ‘went into politics because of Auschwitz.’ It’s really bad that you cannot force reality to behave as theory would like it to.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17095/germany-covid-antisemitism

The Celle Higher Regional Court has sentenced the alleged German leader of the Islamic State terrorist militia to ten and a half years in prison. The court found the 37-year-old Iraqi Abu Walaa guilty on Wednesday of supporting and being a member of the terrorist organisation. According to the judges, the hatemonger and his network radicalised young people, mainly in the Ruhr area and Lower Saxony, and ordered them to join the IS war zones. Three codefendants were given prison sentences of between four and eight years.Abu Walaa was imam of the mosque of the now banned association Deutschsprachiger Islamkreis Hildesheim.A codefendant, a Serb holding a German passport, who was given eight years in prison, allegedly used his flat in Dortmund as a place of prayer and also temporarily harboured the Islamist Anis Amri there. Amri carried out an attack on a Christmas market in Berlin in 2016, in which twelve people died.In the course of the trial, the court dealt with a large number of other Islamists who were allegedly radicalised by the man from Dortmund and a codefendant from Duisburg in the back room of the latter’s travel agency. The Duisburg man was sentenced to six and a half years in prison. Two of the recruits are said to have carried out suicide attacks in Iraq causing numerous deaths.The federal prosecution had requested eleven and a half years in prison for Abu Walaa, and between four and a half and ten years for the other defendants. The lawyer, on the other hand, had pleaded for acquittal or significantly lighter sentences.The activities of Abu Walaa’s group did not remain unnoticed by the security authorities. In Dortmund, there was a regular presence of “Murat”, an undercover agent of the North Rhine-Westphalia State Criminal Police Office, who also traced Amri’s activities. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office also relied on information from this confidential informant, who, however, was not authorised to testify at the trial. Its key witness was a young man from Gelsenkirchen who fell into Islamist groups as a youth, but then turned away from IS and cooperated with the authorities.However, the lawyer doubted the credibility of this key witness. They accused the undercover man of inciting attacks himself. The lawyer considered the accusations of the prosecution to be by and large not provable.

https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article226983185/Abu-Walaa-IS-Chefanwerber-in-Deutschland-zu-zehneinhalb-Jahren-Haft-verurteilt.html

France’s Minister of Higher Education, Frédérique Vidal, has been criticised for a study she commissioned on “Islamo-gauchisme”. The study is to examine whether left-wing and pro-Islam sentiments restrict the selection of research topics. Whether the universities really have an ideology problem and how it could be combated is the subject of much controversy in the national press.

The daily Le Figaro sees a

“a much more all-out ideological war being waged relentlessly under the alias of ‘academic standards’. In the US, it’s called ‘wokism’; here, it leads to a fixation on race, gender and identity, from academia to the radio studios. …

What threatens academic freedom, and soon freedom of expression in general, is not Frédérique Vidal, but rather these doctrinal adherents who doggedly fight against a civilisation they judge to be intrinsically guilty. The Islamo-Left is only one aspect of this sophisticated stupidity. And therein lies the great danger: decay of intelligence, extinction of culture, resulting, according to Allan Bloom, in ‘disarmed souls’.

https://www.eurotopics.net/de/256828/sind-frankreichs-unis-zu-links-und-islam-nah

While the COVID-19 pandemic completely overshadowed the issue of migration to Europe in the media, that does not necessarily mean migration slowed down much. Although the number of migrants decreased year-on-year, the report published by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Eurostat, and Frontex shows that the number of asylum applications in some EU countries increased.

The key information of the pertinent statistics would probably be that the number of migrants who illegally crossed the EU’s external borders fell by about 13 percent year-on-year in 2020. Instead of migrating from the outside, however, the migration within the continent has become a major problem for some EU countries.

For example, Austria reported even more asylum applications last year than before the pandemic broke out.

The spread of the virus and the subsequent measures have slowed down migration to Europe, but it did not cease. Last year, 124,000 migrants crossed the EU’s external border, and around half a million people applied for asylum. For comparison, in the record year of 2015, there were 1,395,000 applicants and 762,685 the year before. The statistics include the EU countries as well as the United Kingdom, Norway, and Switzerland.

In addition to a year-on-year decline in asylum applications, a different trend has begun to emerge. Most countries are unable to deport rejected asylum seekers, with many of them moving within the EU. A consequence of that has been a decrease in asylum applications in some states and an increase in the number of asylum seekers in other countries.

That is the case in Austria where 13,700 people applied for some form of asylum last year, more than before the pandemic when there were 12,558 applications. Even the otherwise very liberal Austrian Die Presse daily attributed this to the fact that migrants in the country are entitled to more social support than elsewhere in the EU.

“People follow the money,” the newspaper wrote. The evidence of this is also the migration within Austria. When the state of Lower Austria reduced the amount of social support for refugees, more of them relocated to “more generous” Vienna.

In Germany, which was the main destination for migrants at the beginning of the migration crisis, the number of asylum applications decreased, unlike in Austria, but still remains disproportionately high, according to many German politicians. Although Germany carries out more border controls during the pandemic and mobility has generally decreased, 102,000 refugees have applied for “asylum protection” last year. According to current statistics from the German Ministry of the Interior, a quarter of the cases involved applications for children under one year of age already born in Germany.

For comparison, in the whole of 2019, 142,000 applicants sought asylum in Germany. So anyone who expecting the number of asylum applications to fall to a minimum during the pandemic turned out to be wrong.

At the same time, German politicians talk about the so-called secondary migration, which concerns not only the movement between EU countries. It also describes a phenomenon of rejected migrants applying for asylum in other countries or reapplying in the same country, even though the laws do not allow it.

The problem is that only about 40 percent of rejected applicants get deported back to their home countries. The rest travel across borders and try to succeed again with a new identity or even a new “story”.

“We have cases of people who have initiated 18 asylum procedures in 18 countries,” Michael Spindelegger, head of the International Center for Migration (ICMPD), told Kurier.

German asylum organizations estimate that only a third of refugees who have already been denied asylum in Germany have returned to their country.

That is why many EU politicians call for a reform of the EU’s asylum policy so it would prevent both repeated asylum applications and migrants from traveling across the continent when they have already submitted their application.

“Secondary migration is our main problem today,” Mathias Middelberg, a spokesman for the German governing coalition CDU/CSU, told ZDF television.

In Germany, people from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are still the most common asylum seekers. Besides, in the past year, a migration route through the Canary Islands gained traction. According to some analysts, migrants, especially Moroccans and other Africans, do not apply for asylum with the Spanish authorities but immediately head deeper into Europe.

Overall, the development of migration in the pandemic year showed that although the coronavirus might have temporarily slowed down the migration wave, it certainly did not stop it. Once the danger disappears or eases, the number of refugees is likely to increase again. Such a conclusion was reached by the German Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which conducted a survey among young people from Tunisia and Lebanon, asking them about their willingness to emigrate. About a third of respondents expressed a desire to leave their home country, most of them giving economic reasons. As their destination, they mostly named “West”, especially Europe.

https://rmx.news/article/article/migration-to-europe-didn-t-cease-due-to-pandemic

Left-wing extremist groups in Germany are subsidized by the state. Every now and then, the real extent of this phenomenon is expressed in numbers: For example, in 2018 an AfD inquiry to the federal government revealed some hard facts.

The Amadeu Antonio Foundation, headed by the former Stasi informant Anetta Kahane, has received more than 3,5 million euros in state funding since 2010 .

These financial blessings are extended to other associations and institutions, with federal programs paying for clubs such as Demokratie leben! [Democracy lives!] Sometimes left-wing clubs do not receive the tax money directly. This is the case with the Peng! Collective, which sees itself as “an explosive mixture of activism, hacking and art in the fight against the barbarism of our time”.

With the term “barbarism”, the “artists” include, for example, the politics of the AfD, asylum measures or allegedly “historically burdened” streets and monuments. And their “subversive art of action” is sometimes as crude as the message of their political demands.

In 2015, the group called on Germans to become “escape helpers” and smuggle illegal immigrants into the country. Not that this issue is a contentious one in the least: Last year, half of the asylum seekers were unable to provide documents to prove their personal information when they entered Germany. “In 2020, the proportion of first-time asylum applicants aged 18 and over without identity papers was 51,8 percent,” the dpa news agency reported. The information was contained in a response from the Federal Ministry of the Interior to a request from the FDP parliamentary group’s migration policy spokeswoman, Linda Teuteberg. Compared to 2019, that represents an increase.

When the presentation of identity documents was statistically recorded for the first time in 2017, 61 percent could only give verbal information about their identity. Teuteberg admitted that many asylum seekers destroyed their ID cards because they figured that this would give them a better chance of being recognized in Germany.

The high number of migrants without ID presents the authorities with major challenges, because asylum should only be given to people “who need protection from political persecution”. But in January 2019 it became known that false oral identity information from asylum seekers had no consequences for their proceedings anyway. Only the submission of false or foreign documents is punishable by law.

In 2016, a Peng! member pelted the two AfD politicians Beatrix von Storch and Albrecht Glaser with cream cake. Two years later, the Berlin public prosecutor was still busy with the self-proclaimed “antagonists of advertising agencies”.

Before the federal election in 20217, Peng! advertised the satirical campaign “VoteBuddy” to bring foreigners who are not eligible to vote together with Germans who are not willing to vote. The latter would then leave their postal votes to those not entitled to vote. The authorities could not find any attempted or actual election fraud however since this was difficult to prove.

Gestern zusammen mit der Grünen Jugend Chemnitz bei der Antifa-Austellung vom @Peng gewesen.

Wirklich interessant & sehr differenziert. Mal was anderes für Chemnitz. #Antifa #Chemnitz pic.twitter.com/dW164h2nqz

— Valentin Uhlemann (@ValentinCaUhl) August 21, 2020

In addition to these high-profile campaigns, the collective members are also content with less provocative, but probably financially more lucrative appearances and campaigns. A current request from AfD MP Joana Cotar to the federal government, which the Junge Freiheit has received, revealed that Peng!had received tax funds in the six-digit euro range since 2015.

According to the Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters (CDU), these did not flow directly to the club, but through federally funded institutions. For example, between 2015 and 2017 the German Federal Cultural Foundation supported a cooperation between Schauspiel Dortmund and Peng! with 150 000 euros under the title “The Populists – A PR Agency for Civil Society”. The Chemnitz exhibition “Gegenwarten”, in which around twenty local artists and Peng! also participated, received more than 450 000 euros. In addition, other sums between 500 and 7 500 euros flowed into the pockets of the group.

The Federal Government argues that the selection of the funded projects is based “on the advice and recommendations of independent specialist juries”. Their “independence” will also be guaranteed for future funding, they claimed. But shortly before the exhibition “Antifa – Myth & Reality” started in Chemnitz last August, the group announced that they had given 10 000 euros to left-wing extremists. In fact, Peng! used part of the tax money subsidy for “Gegenwarten” to “buy” ten items worth 1 000 euros each from left-wing extremist groups. The aim was to draw attention to the chronic financial shortage of the “civil society” initiatives in the eastern federal states.

AfD politician Cotar criticized the government for attempting to “disguise its support for the radical left with the help of ‘independent specialist juries’”. This is absurd, she said. “It is simply unacceptable that a government should financially support groups that openly call for violations of the law and attack those who think differently.”

Left-wing clubs do not need to worry about a lack of financial support in the future either because the Democracy Promotion Act will be launched in the coming months. In addition, there are dozens of other measures in the fight against alleged right-wing extremism and racism, with one billion euros from 2021 to 2024.

https://freewestmedia.com/2021/02/24/german-taxpayers-fund-left-wing-extremist-clubs/

Former Obama administration officials, including former Secretary of State John Kerry, went behind President Donald Trump’s back in backchannels with Iran, sources told The Washington Times. Some of the architects of the Iran nuclear deal met with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif after Trump withdrew from the deal.

A slew of former Obama officials, including Kerry, Obama’s Middle East advisor Robert Malley, and Obama-era Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, met with Zarif during the Trump years. Kerry, Malley, and Moniz led negotiations in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in which the U.S. provided sanctions relief and access to tens of billions of dollars in frozen bank accounts in exchange for Iran’s promises to limit nuclear enrichment.

Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal in 2018, citing the need for a tougher agreement that also addressed Iran’s support for terrorist groups and its destabilizing behavior in the Middle East. Yet a former senior U.S. official told The Washington Times that Zarif met with Democrats like Kerry multiple times in 2017, 2018, and 2019, before the Trump administration halted his visa in 2020.

The former official told the Times that Zarif’s meetings aimed “to devise a political strategy to undermine the Trump administration” and to build support for a new version of the Iran deal in case a Democrat returned to the White House in 2021.

Kerry acknowledged meeting with Zarif at least twice in the early years of the Trump administration. He told radio host Hugh Hewitt that there was nothing secret about his meetings with the Iranian minister. Kerry said he intended to find out “what Iran might be willing to do in order to change the dynamic in the Middle East for the better.”

The Associated Press reported that Moniz met with Zarif in 2018 and that Iran deal negotiator Wendy Sherman met with the Iranian foreign minister on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, also in 2018. President Joe Biden nominated Sherman to serve as deputy secretary of state.

Most of the Zarif meetings took place before Trump withdrew from the Iran deal, but Malley met with Zarif in 2019. Sources told the Times “it’s likely that Mr. Malley urged Iranian officials to wait out the Trump presidency with the expectation that a Democratic administration in 2021 would restore Obama-era policy.”

At the time, Malley led the International Crisis Group. In July 2019, a spokesman for the group said Malley’s meeting with Zarif was simply part of Malley’s “regular contacts with all parties, whether it be Iran, the U.S., Gulf states, or European countries.” Malley did not respond to the Times‘ request for comment.

A State Department spokesperson refused to address specific questions about Malley’s meetings with Zarif.

“We categorically reject baseless smears against dedicated public servants,” the spokesperson said.

Help us STOP Joe Biden’s radical agenda by becoming a PJ Media VIP member. Use promo code AMERICAFIRST to receive 25% off your VIP membership.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has tapped Malley for his Iran outreach. While Biden has offered to reinstate the Iran deal if Iran again pledges to decrease its uranium enrichment, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has refused to limit uranium enrichment to 20 percent, declaring that enrichment may go as high as 60 percent. Nuclear weapons require an enrichment level of 90 percent.

“Former administration officials can play a very helpful role in close coordination with a sitting administration to open and support sensitive diplomatic channels,” Mark Dubowitz, chief executive at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Times. “But it is not good practice for senior officials who served at the highest levels of a former administration, Democratic or Republican, to be trying to undermine the policy of a sitting administration by engaging actively with a known enemy of the United States.”

Indeed, Malley was reportedly engaging in this “shadow diplomacy” while Iran-backed militias targeted U.S. troops in Iraq, leading up to the assassination of Quds Force General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.

Sources also told The Washington Times that Zarif wields tremendous influence over the Iran lobby in the U.S. They described a “web” of activity linked to think tanks across the U.S. as well as lobbying efforts that reached into the Obama White House.

Many members of Congress, including Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), have hired current or former staffers with the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), an organization with links to Iran’s regime and which Iran state media has described as “Iran’s lobby” in the U.S.

Did the Obama administration architects of the Iran deal carry out a “shadow diplomacy” with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism in order to undermine President Trump, hoping that a Democrat would win in 2020 and return them to power? Did they work with the Iran lobby behind the scenes? This explosive report suggests the answers to those questions are “yes,” but the details are yet to be forthcoming.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/02/23/report-former-obama-staff-colluded-with-iran-to-undermine-trump-n1427758

Austrians are increasingly dissatisfied with the way the government is handling the epidemic, according to a survey commissioned by the Paul Lazarsfeld Society.

While at the time of the first wave of the coronavirus, last spring, 78 percent of those surveyed believed that Austria was better at managing the crisis than other countries, that proportion has now fallen to 7 percent. When asked whether Austria is worse off than other states, 30 percent of respondents said yes, up from 3 percent last year.

Dissatisfaction is also reflected in the support of the ruling parties. In April last year, the popularity of the right-wing Austrian People’s Party, led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, reached 48 percent, and in the same survey, 16 percent had the support of its governing partner, the Greens. This ratio has shrunk to 37 and eight, respectively, according to the latest poll.

Since the introduction of curfew restrictions in December, the Vienna government has managed to significantly reduce the number of new infections per day, which approached tens of thousands in mid-November, but which has not risen to over 2,000 in the past month.

The figures are, however, rising again. On Sunday 1,838 new cases of coronavirus were registered in the country. The six-week full closure ended two weeks ago with the reopening of shops selling non-essential necessities and hairdressers and beauticians, but stricter epidemiological measures came into force. It is now mandatory to wear the more effective FFP2 masks, to maintain a two-meter social distancing, to provide 20-square meters of space for each customer compared to the previous 10-square meters, and to show mandatory negative test results for services requiring physical contact. Restrictions related to entering the country have also been tightened.

“Further easing of restrictions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus is likely to take place only around Easter,” Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said last week, pointing out that the long-awaited March opening of restaurants and hotels should be postponed to keep the epidemic under control. Health Minister Rudolf Anschober also drew attention over the weekend when he said that even though the vaccine seems to be effective and the number of infected people is declining, care must be taken because of new mutations in the coronavirus.

With its strict closure last spring, Austria was the example to follow, but since then, the opening and closing of the country have swung back and forth. Now, the government promises to ease the restrictions, return life to normal, and is promising light at the end of the tunnel. However, the tunnel looks longer than the government had originally hoped, virologist Gerald Gartlehner said, referring to Kurz’s August statement who told Kurier newspper that he saw “the light at the end of the tunnel” in regards to the crisis.

https://rmx.news/article/article/austrians-increasingly-dissatisfied-with-cabinet-s-coronavirus-measures-poll