The Austrian government has agreed on the anti-terror pact designed as a reaction to the attack in the city centre of Vienna. No more major changes were made compared to the appraisal. This means that there will be a separate criminal offence for religiously motivated extremism and the possibility will be created to monitor relevantly convicted offenders by electronic ankle tag during their probation.
The latter was weakened insofar as the sentence must exceed 18 months. In addition, the judge must specify certain places where the conditionally released person is not allowed to stay, for example mosques where radicalisation has taken place. Here, the regulations are based on those for sex offenders, as Justice Minister Alma Zadic (Greens) explained Friday afternoon at the announcement of the measures.
As far as the new criminal law, which was criticised as unnecessary in the evaluation, has been clarified in the explanations. Here it is explicitly made clear that this regulation is not directed against a specific religion, as Zadic emphasised. The Minister of Justice justified the introduction of the law at all by saying that no loophole should be created. It is aimed at cases where the paragraph dealing with anti-state connections might not apply.
Integration Minister Susanne Raab ( Austrian People’s Party) also emphasised that the legislative package was not directed against Muslims. Rather, it is about combating religiously motivated extremism. Her part of the package contains, for example, the imam directory, which is also not without controversy.
The Minister of the Interior, Karl Nehammer ( Austrian People’s Party), for example, has introduced a tightening of the law on the use of symbols. According to this, the political sphere of Hezbollah will also be covered and further action will be taken against the Identitarians.
One month before the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, in which the AfD is expected to become one of the strongest forces, there are signs of hope for conservatives from Spain and Great Britain. Right-wing parties triumphed in regional elections on Thursday in Great Britain and on Tuesday in Madrid.
The British Labour Party already experienced its first Waterloo in the general election in December 2019, when it historically fell by 60 seats and Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. Now the debacle was repeated at community level: According to current forecasts, the “Red Fire Wall” collapsed dramatically.
In Hartlepool, which has been ruled by Labour since 1974, the Tories won the majority. In an early parliamentary election, the Conservative Jill Mortimer won, becoming the first Tory MP from Hartlepool since 1959. The Tories will also rule Northumberland for the first time since the 1970s, as well as left-wing strongholds such as Sunderland, Harlow in Essex, Nuneaton & Bedworth and Dudley.
The results are eagerly awaited in Scotland, where the national, socialist Scottish National Party around Nicola Sturgeon has announced another referendum on staying in the United Kingdom in the event of an election victory, cheered by Berlin and Brussels. The Scottish National Party incidentally celebrated Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and opposed the war with Nazi Germany.
In Madrid, the conservative People’s Party and the right-wing Vox won regional elections on Tuesday. The Partido Popular around the right-wing regional leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso was able to double its share of the vote from 22,5 percent to 45 percent, with the immigration-critical Vox party coming to ten percent, The two have already promised a coalition. The ruling socialists lost ten percent and came down to only 17 percent. The turnout of 76 percent was the highest ever in the Spanish capital with its 6,6 million inhabitants.
As regional boss in Madrid, Díaz Ayuso had refused the lockdown and kept bars and restaurants open. According to an interview with the IPG Journal, she had declared the elections in Madrid “to be a vote on the policy of the progressive central government” and made it clear beforehand that she “had no fear of contact with the right-wing populists in the still relatively young Vox party”.
Díaz Ayuso ran with the slogan “Freedom or Communism”. She commented on her policy slogan: “I have no problems making a pact with Vox. If they call you a fascist, you are on the right side of the story,” said Díaz Ayuso.
“We stopped the communists in Madrid,” said Vox boss Santiago Abascal in response. Violent left-wing extremists attacked him with stones at a demonstration in April and 35 people were injured, including 21 police officers. Vox is now calling for legal action against the violent left- wing extremist and leftist leader Pablo Iglesias, who called for violence and announced his withdrawal from politics after the devastating defeat.
Despite the pandemic, nearly 5,1 million voters turned out to vote, with turnout estimated at 76 percent, an increase of more than 10 points compared to the previous election. “Today, Madrid adopted a motion of democratic censure” against Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish Socialist Prime Minister, said the head of the PP Pablo Casado, evoking a “point of inflection in national politics”.
The left suffered a real collapse: From the number one party in the capital in 2019, it passed to third, from 37 to 24 seats. It is now Más Madrid who takes up the torch from the left: the party has 24 seats, or 16,9 percent of the vote.
In March this year, German public broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk aired a 75-minute television documentary following five Muslim women wearing headscarves. In the film ” My head. My Scarf” (Mein Kopf, mein Tuch), the women talk about how they do not want to constantly justify their decision to wear the headscarf. According to WDR, the women shown in the documentary are united by “the conviction that prejudices can be overcome by dialogue, openness and commitment”.
Among those portrayed is Houaida Taraji, who runs her own practice as a gynaecologist in North Rhine-Westphalia. Many people in Germany still cannot imagine that women wearing headscarves are also doctors. That is why it is basically a good idea to confront the audience with such prejudices. However, Houaida Taraji is clearly the wrong choice of protagonist for this.
What is not mentioned in the film is the 55-year-old’s many years as an official for the German Muslim Community (DMG), which until 2018 was called the Islamic Community in Germany (IGD). According to the latest report on the protection of the constitution, this association is considered “the central organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Germany”. This implies that it wants to establish a social and political system based on Sharia law, the report continues. Taraji says she was vice-president from 2006 to 2010 and, according to the register of associations at Cologne’s local court, a member of the association’s board between 2015 and 2018. She is also a board member of the Central Council of Muslims.
Taraji’s husband Almoutaz Tayara also made an appearance in the documentary and talked about having first met his wife while eating ice cream together. Until 2020, Tayara was the chairman of the board of the aid organisation Islamic Relief Germany, which, according to the German government, has “significant personal connections to the Muslim Brotherhood”. Tayara attracted attention in 2014 through Facebook postings glorifying the Kassam Brigades, which belong to the Islamist terror organisation Hamas, and portraying the then US President Barack Obama as a Jew.
WDR viewers are also left in the dark about this background. The broadcaster simply presents Taraji and Tayara as completely normal Muslims, although they were active for years as functionaries for Islamist organisations. When asked by Sigrid Herrmann-Marschall, an expert on Islamism, the editor in charge even admits that the background was known. “In the documentary, the Taraji couple advocates an open society and thus shows no connection whatsoever to extremist theories,” the newspaper’s WELT reply states. As if uncritical portrayal is only problematic when extremism is openly manifested.
But this is not so. Those who make functionaries of political Islam legitimate representatives of Muslims act at the expense of those freedom-loving Muslims and people from Muslim families who want nothing to do with patriarchal sexual and honour concepts as well as rigid norms of behaviour, dress and gender. WDR has made matters worse by the documentary editors’ explanation that the links to the Muslim Brotherhood were deliberately ignored because the film was limited to the present due to time constraints.
He killed his wife after she told him she wanted to separate from him. For this, Moez S. (43) was sentenced to eight years in prison for manslaughter on Thursday.
The Bonn Regional Court considered it proven that the man, who lives in Euskirchen, first strangled the mother (26) of their common son (3) for over 30 seconds during an argument last September. In the ensuing scuffle, the woman fell onto the edge of a bed and suffered a bleeding head wound.
Afterwards, the trained cook hit his wife’s head so hard against the laminate floor that she suffered most serious injuries and died two days later in a hospital.
At the beginning of the trial, the Tunisian had said via his lawyer Michael Hakner: “I was then no longer able to control myself and regret what I had done”.
Already in 2018, the 43-year-old allegedly beat his wife during an argument. At the time, she reported to the police, but later forgave him for the beatings.
John Dowling, killed by a jihadist in Paris, 2018. Photo private
A former student, of Pakistani origin, had fatally stabbed this teacher in front of the Leonardo da Vinci university in the suburbs of the city of Paris in December 2018.
On December 5, 2018, a former student of the Leonardo da Vinci university in La Défense (Hauts-de-Seine) had fatally attacked an English teacher, John Dowling, 66 years old, with a meat cleaver. On Thursday, May 6, the court considered that the 37-year-old Pakistani was “criminally irresponsible” for his act, according to French daily Le Figaro. The cause: the individual seemingly suffered from “paranoid psychosis”, according to experts. He therefore will not stand trial. The investigation chamber ordered his “hospitalization, under duress”.
This Pakistani – who speaks only Urdu and English – had been admitted to the Leonardo da Vinci university in 2016, but had not passed his school year. He was excluded from the course in August 2017. At the time, the public prosecutor of Nanterre, Catherine Denis, had described the murderer as “not delusional, but not in tune with the facts”. He allegedly admitted to having “killed his teacher with several stab wounds”.
The images of CCTV cameras, located in front of the university, had confirmed this. Around noon on that day, the English teacher left for lunch. He walked past the students scattered in Mona-Lisa Square. They watched this near-retired teacher walk towards Ali Hassan Rajput, a former student many preferred to avoid. Images showed the suspect chatting “calmly” with the victim before he suddenly attacked him with a meat cleaver he had hidden on his person.
The 37-year-old man appeared, in 2018, “totally obsessed with his eviction from college”. Also, the magistrate had specified that the suspect had been personally angry with his victim. The English teacher John Dowling had “made a drawing that he had distributed in class in 2016”.
The alleged murderer had viewed it as “insulting the prophet” Mohammed. However, “nothing confirmed this version” according to his defence lawyer, because “nobody remembered such an incident”. The individual apparently never exhibited “an element of radicalization” but had been perceived as a Muslim who was “very religious, very pious, very practicing”.
But Rajput himself told investigators that he wanted to avenge the prophet, insulted by Dowling in class. He told the judge that John Dowling was “against Islam” and he had presented “a drawing insulting” the prophet but also “a photo between a man and a woman which is not natural”. According to French tabloid Le Parisien, the day after his act, Rajput told investigators he had no regrets. “I am calm, peaceful. It was a burden for me.” Rajput had demanded “a Muslim lawyer, and not a woman” to represent him. The national anti-terrorism prosecution has never looked into the case.
He was not known to any intelligence service and had no criminal record, at least not in France. Investigators from the Hauts-de-Seine judicial police, however, spoke of a “worrying” profile, expressing “obsessive” resentment. Rajput’s Facebook account (entitled “C’est la Rana”) indeed revealed a personality with extremist ideas, for example openly supporting Khadim Rizvi, founder of a radical and violent Islamist party in Pakistan, in favour of the systematic death penalty for blasphemy.
At the end of November 2018, Ali Hassan Rajput wrote on the social network: “We need an insurrection, a revolution, a complete destruction of the rule of white men and the law of al-Saud” [the reigning dynasty in Saudi Arabia – editor’s note].
He also called for jihad, “battle for the stability of peace, fighting against demons like Israel, America, France and the hypocrites among us” and considered that Muslims “have the right to raise their voice of truth, to preach and even to kill disbelievers who are against Islam”.
The Pakistani had lost his right to be on French soil in September 2017 after his student visa expired. As Le Figaro pointed out on Thursday, May 7, the victim, Dowling, had been teaching in the establishment for twenty years. Of Irish origin, this English teacher was “appreciated by all”, according to his management. The autopsy revealed 23 wounds, including five in the head, three on the neck, six on the thorax and several “defensive lesions” on the arm.
It is interesting to note that the current Minister of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti is distinguished by his hostility towards Marine Le Pen. He appears to be the designated person to fight the president of the National Rally and any criticism of immigration. His focus explains the recent spate of judgements in favour of Islamic killers, some have argued.
Since Dupond-Moretti’s appointment to the government at the head of the Ministry of Justice last summer, the minister of “anti-racism” with “mixed blood” has spent a significant part of his media interventions to castigate Le Pen.
He had already shown his very marked commitment against the National Rally in the past, going so far as to vote for the outright ban of the former National Front on France Inter in 2015. The Minister of Justice believes the fight against the “racism and xenophobia” of the anti-immigration Le Pen is the most important battle.
The German public broadcaster ZDF, more precisely the ZDFinfo section, commemorated Muslim Spain on Facebook on April 27: “1,310 years ago today, the Moors landed in Gibraltar and established a caliphate on the Iberian peninsula. The battle for Spain between Christians and Muslims lasted over 700 years.” The first thing that stands out is the verb “to land” – superficially a neutral word, but one that raises questions: did the Moors land like Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969 in a deserted land that they could simply claim for themselves? Or did they land like the Western Allies in Normandy in June 1944 to liberate Europe from an inhuman dictatorship? Neither the one nor the other is true. Rather, in 711, the bloody conquest of the Visigothic Empire began.
Under the heading “Spain was Muslim” (Portugal is simply omitted), the crescent moon with star – the symbol of Islam par excellence – is adorned on a red and yellow Iberian Peninsula. Apart from the fact that the colours red and yellow were not chosen for the Spanish flag until 1785, the colour of choice for a “Muslim Spain” would rather be green – so today the official flag of the country of Andalusia is green and white.
But these are trifles compared to the text under the map: “For over 780 years, cities like Cordoba and Granada were centres of art, science and often religious tolerance. After the completion of the Christian reconquest in 1492, Muslims and Jews had to convert or leave the country.”
There we have it again, the cliché that in Muslim “Spain” the three religions lived together wonderfully. It is true that art and science flourished especially during the time of the Caliphate of Córdoba (929-1031). It is true that we only know works of Greek philosophy through translations from Arabic into Latin. But what such a text conceals: The decline of the Muslim heyday on the Iberian Peninsula in the Caliphate of Córdoba was sealed by internal struggles between Arabs and Berbers and by the “landing” of the Almoravids and Almohads from North Africa, who established so-called Taifa empires.
The “often religious tolerance” that is opposed here to the expulsion of Muslims and Jews after 1492 turns out to be another cliché. For the first pogrom on European soil took place in 1066 in Muslim Granada, in which the Jewish population was largely murdered. Muslims were tolerant towards people of other faiths, only as long as they converted to Islam or paid the poll tax (jizya).
Christians were not the first to invent the banishment of people of other faiths: the Almohads were particularly intolerant. Their first caliph ordered the expulsion of those who did not convert to Islam. Even Andalusian Jews who accepted the Islamic faith had to wear a distinctive sign. That such facts are ignored in order to play off “intolerant” Christianity against “tolerant” Islam that is a bit much.
Refugee and migrant organizations in Japan have responded with outrage to a bill by the government in Tokyo. With the amendment to the immigration law, the liberal democratic government around Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga wants to enable deportations and reduce the long-term imprisonment of foreigners in migration facilities.
The Japanese broadcaster NHK reported that there had been demonstrations and strikes since the parliamentary debates began in mid-April. In addition, the “Solidarity Network for Migrants” submitted a petition with 106 800 signatures calling for the draft law to be abolished. Parliament may pass it on Friday.
One of the new measures provides that authorities are given the opportunity to deport asylum seekers if their refugee status is denied three or more times. They would then be returned from the island nation to their home countries. However, according to the United Nations, this is illegal as international law prohibits deporting asylum seekers to a country where they are likely to face persecution.
Compared to Germany, Japan accepts very few refugees. In the past few years, around one percent of the applications were accepted. In 2020, 47 people were granted refugee status. At the turn of the year, around 83 000 people are said to have been illegally in the country.
In Germany for example, more than 122 000 immigrants applied for asylum in the 2020 reporting year, that is from January to December. Of these, 43 percent were accepted. However, many rejected asylum seekers are also granted tolerance status.
Sweden has been the most welcoming European country with more than 160 000 “refugees”. For Migration Minister Morgan Johansson, Sweden must now return to standards which are those of “most other EU countries” as the current leftist coalition faces stiff opposition ahead of next year’s elections.
Allah's Willing Executioners 