The Free Democratic Party (FDP) politician in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Lorenz Deutsch, urged the director of the music and cultural festival Ruhrtriennale to pull the plug on an appearance from an academic supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)movement targeting Israel who has also trivialized the Holocaust.Writing in late March, Deutsch told the director of the festival, “The BDS movement is not characterized by factual criticism of Israeli government acts, but aims at demolishing its existence through demonization, delegitimization, and disinformation. Achille Mbembe, who you invited, is unfortunately an example of this way of dealing with Israel.”

Deutsch termed the BDS an “antisemitic movement” and noted that, in 2018, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia banned public funds for institutions that provide BDS activists a platform. The Ruhrtriennale festival, which runs from  August 14 to September 20, is a recipient of tax-payer money.Deutsch, who is the cultural spokesman for the FDP, noted that Achille Mbembe signed a petition calling for an academic boycott of the Jewish state.The FDP politician said he finds this education boycott “attitude fundamentally questionable among academics. In addition, he [Achille Mbembe] also stands out in a recent publication with theses on Israel and the occupied territories, which have no factual basis and fall under the categories mentioned above.”Deutsch cited Achille Mbembe’s essay titled, “The Society of enmity” in the publication Radical Philosophy from 2016 to show that he equates Israel with South Africa’s former apartheid system, which is well-known from BDS circles.Deutsch wrote that Mbembe even surpasses attacks of comparing Israel with the former apartheid system. He cited additional passages from Achille Mbembe’s essay: “However, the metaphor of apartheid does not fully account for the specific character of the Israeli separation project. In the first place, this is because this project rests on quite a unique metaphysical and existential basis. The apocalyptic and catastrophist elements that underwrite it are far more complex, and derive from a longer historical horizon than those elements that used to support South African Calvinism. Moreover, given its ‘hi-tech’ character, the effects of the Israeli project on the Palestinian body are much more formidable than the relatively primitive operations undertaken by the apartheid regime in South Africa between 1948 and the early 1980s.”

The 62-year-old Cameroonian philosopher Mbembe continued that “This is evidenced by its miniaturization of violence – its cellularization and molecularization – and its various techniques of material and symbolic erasure. It is also evidenced in its procedures and techniques of demolition – of almost everything, whether of infrastructures, homes, roads or landscapes – and its fanatical policy of destruction aimed at transforming the life of Palestinians into a heap of ruins or a pile of garbage destined for cleansing. In South Africa, the mounds of ruins never did reach such a scale.”Deutsch responded to the academic paper, stating that “Here completely different situations become the same in an impermissible way,” adding that Mbembe uses terms such wall, border separation, destruction, etc. in an attempt to create supposed connections.Deutsch wrote that “a second apartheid comparison [in Mbembe’s essay] has left me speechless. Here the South African apartheid system is compared with the Holocaust, the two ‘manifestations’ of a ‘separation fantasy.'”Achille Mbembe wrote: “The apartheid system in South Africa and the destruction of Jews in Europe – the latter, though, in an extreme fashion and within a quite different setting – constituted two emblematic manifestations of this phantasy of separation.”Deutsch accused Mbembe of “relativizing  the Holocaust” and “placing the Jews of Israel today in the logic of the overall argument of national socialist white criminals – a well-known pattern. It seems to confirm that many people can deal better with dead Jews than with living Jews.”Mbembe did not immediately respond to a Jerusalem Post press query sent to his South African email address at The University of the Witwatersrand.In his public letter, Deutsch cited a quote from the American author and expert on antisemitism, Bari Weiss: “Anti-Semitism that originates on the left is a far more subtle and sophisticated enterprise [than on the right]. It’s typically camouflaged in language familiar to Jewish tongues and ears: the language of social justice and anti-racism, of equality and liberation.”Mbembe was a guest professor at the University of Cologne in 2019 and is slated to talk at the festival about “planetary life.” Carp, who oversees the festival in the city of Bochum located in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, has faced criticism over the years for her sympathy with the BDS campaign.

https://www.jpost.com/BDS-THREAT/German-politician-urges-festival-to-disinvite-BDS-academic-624161

On Wednesday, the Berlin Fire Department reported a blaze in a new building connected to Berlin’s city castle. The building stands on the Palace Square in central Berlin, just off Alexanderplatz. It is a reconstructed copy of the old royal and imperial palace of both the Kingdom of Prussia and the German Empire.

The fire department stated that one person was reported injured and that at least 80 firefighters were working to put out the fire. A spokesperson for the city fire department told the newspaper, Bild, that the fire must have started after an explosion that took place outside the castle.

royalcentral.co.uk/europe/fire-at-rebuilt-imperial-palace-in-berlin-140461/

A knife attack between residents of the refugee shelter on the Friedberg in Suhl has turned into a mass brawl.

In the night to today’s Thursday there had been “tumultuous incidents within the area”, as Daniel Wiegmann, the head of the Suhl fire brigade, said during the night. The perpetrators caused fear and terror in the facility. This turned into a brawl between about 50 residents. The men allegedly attacked each other with wooden sticks, iron bars and stones, according to the police. In the facility itself, fire extinguishers were used to spray around, which also triggered fire alarms. According to the fire department, there was no fire. In the widespread panic, a woman jumped out of the window on the third floor and broke her leg. She was taken to hospital. When the paramedics arrived, several men attacked the ambulance and hit it. A total of about seven people have been injured. Some of them so badly that they needed medical care. One man is in hospital with stab wounds, according to the police. But he is not critically injured. To treat numerous residents on site, the ambulance staff had erected a tent in front of the facility.

.insuedthueringen.de/region/suhl_zellamehlis/suhl/Massnahmen-nach-juengster-Massenschlaegerei-in-Fluechtlingsheim;art83456,7207905?fbclid=IwAR0tYJhSp50-1yX6KusMRc-zB0ThE1qX6Aee3gLwLbzRSWxE6ix85euxOyY

In a few small ways, Pope Francis is a traditionalist. He opposes abortion, gay marriage (although he supports gay civil unions), and the notion of infinite genders.

In most other ways, though, the Pope constantly demonstrates that he emerged from a Marxist background. Despite being the Catholic Church’s preeminent man of God, he has a Gaia-centric view of nature. He also brings a Marxist’s understanding of economics (i.e., simplistic and wrong) to the papacy.  That’s why, on Wednesday, the Pope suggested that COVID-19 is the earth’s revenge for climate change and then implied that politicians concerned about the economy are akin to Hitler in 1933.

To understand how the head of the Catholic Church can make statements so perfectly aligned with leftism, one has to go back to the left’s long March through the Church.

The Latin American Catholic Church went Leftist in the 1950s and 1960s, when it developed “liberation theology.” This was also when Pope Francis came of age as a Catholic priest. “Liberation theology” is a pure Leftist doctrine tacked onto Catholicism:

Liberation theology proposes to fight poverty by addressing its alleged source: sin. In so doing, it explores the relationship between Christian theology — especially Roman Catholic theology — and political activism, especially in relation to social justice, poverty, and human rights. The principal methodological innovation is seeing theology from the perspective of the poor and the oppressed.

Liberation theology’s defining concept is “social justice.” That’s how a Latin American leftist now heads the institution that, under Pope John Paul II, once stood firmly with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the West’s existential fight against socialism.

Francis’s push to the left began early in his papacy when, in December 2013, hepreached economic Marxism to the flock. The Pope’s Marxist world view also means he supports the whole idea of anthropogenic climate change. In his 2015 encyclical on ecology, Laudato Si, Pope Francis said that climate change is realand is primarily “a result of human activity.”

Both these beliefs came to the fore on Wednesday when The Tablet andCommonwealth magazines published an email interview with the Pope. Regarding COVID-19, Francis reverted to animism – that is, the view of Nature as a living, god-like being:

“We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18 months ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods?” the Pope said.

“I don’t know if these are the revenge of nature, but they are certainly nature’s responses,” he added.

Ignore the silliness of glacial melt. What’s significant is that this viewpoint is totally antithetical to Judeo-Christian doctrine. The Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments, long ago abandoned animism in favor of a single divine entity, that created the earth and all that is upon it.

In the same interview, Pope Francis took a swipe at Donald Trump, who is very worried that extreme measures against COVID-19 will destroy the American economy, leading to Depression and everything that flows from it (e.g., suicide, depression-related health events, drug addiction, alcoholism, etc.). That’s not how Pope Francis sees things, though:

The Pope also warned against the rise of populist politicians — who he said are giving speeches reminiscent of Hitler in 1933 — and others who are focusing solely on the economy.

The Catholic Church has survived for close to 2,000 years, so it’s not likely that a single Marxist pope can destroy it. Nevertheless, traditionalists have to be worried when the Pope starts speaking of Gaia with the same immediacy he speaks of God. Moreover, everyone should look askance at a Pope who joins with the world’s Marxists to attack Trump with Hitler insults because Trump is worried about the economic costs attendant upon flowing from the same questionable models that have led to twenty years of climate change hysteria.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/pope_franciss_approach_to_covid19_is_a_reminder_that_he_is_a_leftist.html

https://vladtepesblog.com/

BY RICK MORAN

Oh, put a sock in it, Francis.

Pope Francis is certainly not letting a planetary crisis go to waste. He is trying to piggyback the religion of climate change on the back of the coronavirus pandemic.

MSNNews:

“We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18 months ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods?” the Pope said.

“I don’t know if these are the revenge of nature, but they are certainly nature’s responses,” he added.

Huh? What? Have the glaciers all melted? Why didn’t you wake me up? That would have been pretty cool to watch.

For the record, you cannot cross the North Pole. Climate scientists are predictingthat by 2050, it might be possible to “sail over the North Pole,” but not now, or 18 months ago, or 18 months from now.

The Vatican fact-checkers blew that one.

The theory that life systems on the world are all interconnected is a well-established one. But that doesn’t mean that a virus, originally found in bats, has anything to do with whatever stress is being placed on life on earth because the climate may be changing.

The coronavirus does not live outside the body. It does not interact with any other life form except the human or animal it’s living in. It can survive outside the human body for several days, making it extremely contagious, but it doesn’t interact with the air or water in our surroundings. In short, there is no evidence that climate change had anything to do with the creation or transmission of this virus.

I guess the pope thought he’d be laughed off the stage if he said it was “God’s response” to climate change, or that God is trying to tell us something about climate. But giving sentience to “nature” is appallingly stupid.

The Hill:

“There is an expression in Spanish: ‘God always forgives, we forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives,'” the Pope said in an  interview with The Tablet, a Catholic weekly produced in the United Kingdom, that was published on Wednesday.

In addition to climate change, the pope believes we should take the “opportunity” to consume less and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world.” Why do liberals always see opportunity in disaster, death, and destruction? Why not just see the tragedy and let “opportunity” take care of itself?

https://pjmedia.com/trending/pope-says-virus-is-natures-response-to-the-climate-crisis/

The United Kingdom has, at least temporarily, a new acting prime minister with Czech roots.

Boris Johnson has been in the intensive care unit of St. Thomas Hospital since Sunday evening due to his coronavirus infection, where he has received oxygen treatment and remains in stable condition.

Johnson asked Foreign Minister Dominic Raab to deputize for the prime minister where necessary. In the past, Dominic Raab also served as Minister for Brexit. He is a son of a Czech Jew who fled with his family from Nazi persecution. In the past, he himself said that he feels to be “half Czech“.

Dominic Raab’s Czech roots

Dominic Raab was born on February 25, 1974, in Buckinghamshire. He grew up in Gerrards Cross and studied law at Oxford, and later at Cambridge University.

In the late 1990s, he worked for the main Palestinian negotiator involved with concluding peace agreements between Israel and the Palestinians in Oslo. After 2000, Raab was head of a team at the British Embassy in The Hague, trying to bring war criminals to justice. After returning to London, he worked as an advisor for the Israeli-Arab conflict, for the European Union and for Gibraltar.

According to The Times, many of Raab’s relatives died during the Holocaust. His father came to the UK in 1938 at the age of six and could not speak any English. Eventually, he graduated from high school and started working as a manager at Marks & Spencer.

Commenting on his Czech origins, Raab said that while growing up, he would often listen to his parents talk about the unfortunate consequences of the Nazi and then Soviet rule over Czechoslovakia.

Raab’s Cabinet roles

The 46-year-old Raab first appeared in the British government in July 2018, when he replaced David Davis as Secretary of State for Brexit. He only remained in the office until November of the same year when he resigned, criticizing former Prime Minister Theresa May’s position on Brexit. He was an influential voice in increasing opposition to May’s withdrawal agreement with the EU.

After May announced she was standing down, Raab entered the contest to become the leader of Conservative Party, and thus a potential prime minister. However, he was defeated by Johnson and Michael Gove.

He then returned to the government shortly after Johnson was elected as the Conservative Party’s leader. Johnson entrusted him with the post of foreign secretary and first Secretary of State.

rmx.news/article/article/half-czech-takes-over-the-british-government-from-boris-johnson-after-coronavirus-hospitalization

The organization United Against Nuclear Iran published a report on Tuesday, disclosing that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is permitting Iranian banks sanctioned by the US government to operate within the federal republic.“The oldest Iranian bank operating in Germany is Bank Melli, established in 1965 in Hamburg. It is also Iran’s national bank, wholly owned by the Government of Iran (GOI), and its biggest company by revenue. The US Treasury sanctioned Bank Melli in 2018 for its support of the IRGC, having enabled the IRGC and its affiliates to move funds inside and outside Iran,” wrote the report’s author, Daniel Roth.

The Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist entity.The UANI report further noted: “Also in Hamburg is Bank Sepah, another state-owned sanctioned bank tied to Iran’s Ministry of Defense (MODAFL). Bank Sepah has provided ‘direct and extensive financial services’ to Iran’s key ballistic missiles procurement and development agencies, including Aerospace Industries Organization (AIO) and its subsidiary, Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group (SHIG).”UANI continued: “The third Hamburg-based bank and perhaps most notorious of all is the European Iranian Handelsbank (EIH). Unlike the others, EIH is in fact incorporated and headquartered in Germany, with branches in Tehran and Kish Island. Since its founding in 1971, it has financed billions of dollars of German-Iranian trade and is majority-owned by the sanction-designated Iranian state-owned bank, Bank of Industry and Mine.”The report said that “The US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) has named EIH as a money-laundering threat, having assisted several of Iran’s top military and defense agencies, including the IRGC, the Defense Industries Organization (DIO) and AIO.”According to UANI’s website, the organization “is a not-for-profit, bi-partisan, educational and advocacy group that seeks to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to obtain nuclear weapons.” UANI was founded in 2008 by Ambassador Mark D. Wallace, the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and Middle East expert Ambassador Dennis Ross.

Holbrooke served as the US ambassador to Germany (1993-1994) during US President Bill Clinton’s tenure.UANI wrote that “Germany’s financial center, Frankfurt, is home to both Bank Sepah and Bank Saderat, which was set up in the same year as the Iranian Revolution, in 1979. With branches across Europe and the Middle East, Bank Saderat is another large state-owned bank that has helped the regime support its terrorist proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).”The fifth bank is the Middle East Bank (MEB). The MEB opened its branch in Munich in 2019.UANI wrote that “there are reports that Sina Bank and Parsian Bank are also looking to set up in the Bavarian capital. Oddly, MEB is the only Iranian bank here not subject to ‘secondary sanctions’ – which exposes companies to penalties even outside US jurisdiction. On November 11, 2018, just three days after the initial application, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) removed the tag. It is unclear why OFAC did so, and the agency may wish to look again, but MEB advertises the fact prominently on its website. Nonetheless, MEB remains a risky, sanction-designated entity.”Germany remains Europe’s largest trading partner with Tehran. In 2019, German companies exported $1.64 billion worth of goods.According to the UANI report, the five Iranian banks are enabling trade with the Islamic Republic of Iran, while large German banks have avoided Iran because of sanctions.UANI wrote that “With less exposure to US markets and potential sanctions than the multinational household names, Germany’s Mittelstand [mid-size companies] are still willing to supply Iran’s demand for industrial goods. Given the records of the Iranian banks that are helping to facilitate it, however, the risks are only amplified.”The Jerusalem Post exclusively reported in 2018 that the German bank Varengold, in the city of Hamburg, conducts business with Iran Air – an airline sanctioned by the US government.The US classified Iran’s regime as the worst state-sponsor of terrorism. The Jerusalem Post reported in February and last year that German’s foreign ministry celebrated the revolution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

https://www.jpost.com/International/Germany-allows-US-sanctioned-Iranian-terror-banks-to-operate-623984

A report from the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) indicates that the Turkish government purposely incited riots last month at the Greek border by planting members of its security services among crowds of migrants.

According to German weekly Der Spiegel, the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has evidence of Turkey’s actions.

“The Turkish authorities forced several thousand migrants to board buses and transported them to the border. State security forces mingled among the crowds of refugees, inciting violence at the border,” the BND analysis reports.

When German authorities asked their Turkish counterparts for an explanation, Turkish security officials denied their involvement in the riots, the German tabloid Bild reported at the end of March.

However, Der Spiegel pointed out that Greek security forces also concluded that some of the riots, which included migrants throwing rocks and other missiles at Greek forces, were driven by professionals.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan opened the European border to migrants in late February. By mid-March, the Greek forces recorded over 50,000 attempts by migrants to cross the border.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis reported that due to the coronavirus outbreak, migrants had temporarily pulled back from the border with Turkey.

The migrants were evacuated by Turkey to facilities where they were placed into quarantine for two weeks.

However, Mitsotakis added that the move will not change the Greek plans of Greece on bolstering the border fence.

“A chapter may be closing, but have no doubt that this battle continues,” the prime minister reportedly told his ministers.

‘Europe cannot endure this, cannot handle this’

Turkey has also signaled that migrants will be back at the border once the coronavirus crisis is over, in a move that is sure to inflame tensions between Turkey in Europe.

“When this epidemic is over we would not prevent whoever wants to leave,” warned Turkey’s Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu.

Soylu has also been open about his motivations behind the pushing migrants into Europe.

In March, Soylu made a dire warning to Europe, saying that mass migration will change Europe’s governments, bring down Europe’s economies, and help collapse the stock market.

“Refugees who cross to Europe will soon top to a million, European governments will fall, their economies will be destabilized and their stock exchanges will tumble, and they can’t do anything about it,” said the interior minister during an interview on the Tarafsız Bölge show on CNN Türk

“Europe cannot endure this, cannot handle this,” he warned.

rmx.news/article/article/german-federal-intelligence-service-turkey-incited-migrant-riots-at-the-greek-border