The reputation of the German government has been shaken by abject scandal after it arrested its own former national intelligence chief under “strong suspicion of espionage constituting treason”.
The former President of the Federal Intelligence Service [Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND] Dr. August Hanning was arrested in a dawn raid on his home on Tuesday morning and taken away in a black van over allegations that he had stolen thousands of intelligence documents to sell to foreign powers.
80-year-old Hanning held a series of senior positions in the German government over a long and distinguished career, but as reported by best-selling newspaper Bild he has lately experienced “considerable financial difficulties” after a bank he was on the board of collapsed. During the Cold War Hanning was West Germany’s de facto ambassador to Communist East Germany, and from 1998 to 2005 was the President of the BND.
From 2005 to 2009, he held a supervisory role overlooking German intelligence agencies as the State Secretary of the Federal Interior Ministry of the Federal Republic of Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel.
According to Die Welt, it is alleged by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office that from 2010 Hanning paid his former chief of staff, ‘Manfred D.’, who remained in the intelligence service and served under subsequent BND Presidents, to pass him documents that Hanning would then sell on to foreign clients under the guise of being an independent security consultant. It is claimed that Hanning bought almost 2,000 secret German intelligence files and their intended destinations included foreign intelligence agencies.
Which countries were buying these reports was not made clear in the government press release, but Bild reports Hanning is said to have had links with Russia and China including an alleged “direct line” to the Kremlin. The Welt report states the case has links to Israeli intelligence, and that a government source had previously identified him as an informant for Russian intelligence.
The paper noted it had previously put that specific allegations to Hanning and that he had denied it.
August Hanning was arrested on suspicion of “treasonous espionage, uncovering state secrets, attempted treason, and intelligence activity”, and Manfred D., who remained an employee of the BND until Spring 2026, was arrested on suspicion of “aiding and abetting attempted treason and treasonous espionage”. Both are due to appear before a judge this week. Police raided addresses in Bavaria, North-Rhine Westfalia, and Berlin, including Hanning’s home near Münster.
Italian prosecutors have asked a court to sentence a 19-year-old man of Moroccan origin who holds Italian citizenship to 14 years and eight months in prison, calling him a “sexual predator” in a case involving the rape, beating and robbery of a 54-year-old woman and two earlier attempted sexual assaults.
The request came Monday in an abbreviated trial before a Modena court, according to Il Resto del Carlino. Prosecutor Ilaria Corbelli sought the term due to aggravated sexual violence, injuries and robbery.
The main attack occurred Aug. 19, 2025, on the Vivi Natura path in San Damaso, a district of Modena. Investigators say the defendant, who had no prior record, approached the woman while his face was covered, dragged her into some bushes, bound her, and sexually assaulted her. He also stole her electric bicycle.
After the assault he placed a cord around her neck, she told authorities.
“Now that you’ve seen me, I’ll kill you,” the defendant threatened, according to the victim’s lawyer, Peter Martinelli, who has asked the judge to return the case file so prosecutors can add an attempted murder charge.
Martinelli cited the cord, the pressure on her neck and the injuries.
The same defendant is accused of attempted sexual assaults on Feb. 12 in Castelfranco Emilia and on May 23 near the Sant’Anna lakes, close to the site of the August attack. Police identified him in part through the 54-year-old woman’s description and an identikit she helped produce shortly after the assault.
A court-appointed psychiatric expert, Matilde Forghieri, concluded he was fully capable of understanding and willing his actions at the time. The report also noted a significant cognitive deficit. The defendant has confessed to the offenses, defense lawyer Enrico Fontana said.
“For us this is an excessive and disproportionate sentence,” Fontana said. “We do not dispute our client’s responsibility, which he has confessed. We will ask that he be sentenced to a just penalty provided by law for these facts.”
Fontana said the defendant, who was 19 at the time, attempted suicide in jail and handed over a handwritten letter of apology to the victims and his family.
The 54-year-old woman attended the hearing.
“It is hard to relive that day. I have confidence in the judge’s decision,” she said. She also thanked the mobile police squad led by Mario Paternoster for the investigation that led to the arrest. In comments reported by Gazzetta di Modena, she said, “That man should stay in prison. To women, I say report it; trust the institutions.”
FIDESZ has called on Foreign Minister Anita Orbán and Prime Minister Péter Magyar to take diplomatic action after Balázs Hidvéghi, along with Milos Kerkez, was added to Ukraine’s “black list.” Foreign Minister Anita Orbán has since condemned the stigmatization, blacklisting, and threats directed at Milos Kerkez, a defender on the Hungarian national soccer team, and Balázs Hidvéghi, a FIDESZ member of the National Assembly.
In a statement on Monday, the opposition party wrote that it calls on the prime minister and the foreign minister to immediately take the necessary diplomatic steps, restore Hungary’s prestige, and reject Ukraine’s unfriendly actions.
They stated that the Ukrainian leadership “views Péter Magyar and his government as clowns.” By openly listing not only a national soccer player but also a member of the National Assembly on the list of Ukraine’s enemies, Ukraine is clearly demonstrating its dominance “over the weak, powerless, Brussels-friendly Hungarian government,” they added.
According to FIDESZ, this is the result of Péter Magyar and the TISZA government’s unprincipled, submissive foreign policy, which seeks to repay the support provided during the campaign—as well as the EU funds to which Hungary is already entitled—through compromise and subservience.
They called it unprecedented that a member of the National Assembly is being threatened and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs remains silent.
The Russian state news agency TASS previously reported that Milos Kerkez, a defender on the Hungarian national soccer team, had also been added to the list on a website called Mirotvorec (Peacemaker), which has been operating in Kyiv since 2014. The database, created following the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, publishes information on individuals it considers to be “enemies of Ukraine” or pro-Russian.
The Hungarian left back and his father were added to the list after he got into an altercation with a Ukrainian player during the Hungary-Ukraine Nations League match (0-1) in late September, and his father later posted a video of the incident on social media with music by a Russian rap group playing in the background.
Balázs Hidvéghi, a FIDESZ member of the National Assembly, called it a disgrace at a press conference in early October that the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had not stood up for Milos Kerkez and his father.
On Monday evening, Anita Orbán wrote on her Facebook page: “I strongly condemn the stigmatization, any form of blacklisting, or potential threats against Hungarian citizens—Milos Kerkez and Balázs Hidvéghi.” She said she had held discussions throughout the weekend with Ukrainian officials, the Hungarian Football Federation, the embassy, and her colleagues to help resolve the situation.
Bishop Heiner Wilmer at the inauguration. Kirchentag 2025 Hannover.Wikimedia Commons, Kadellar. CC-BY-SA-4.0
The president of the German Bishops’ Conference (DBK) promised to bring the “experiences” of homosexual couples with him to Rome for the Vatican’s upcoming conference on Amoris Laetitia.
Bishop Heiner Wilmer, the DBK president, said that he prepared for the Vatican summit by meeting with a wide variety of couples – including same-sex couples and those living in a second civil marriage after a divorce – according to the German language news outlet katholisch.de.
Bishop Wilmer’s stated intention to bring those experiences with him to the Vatican meeting signals a continued movement toward normalizing homosexuality within the Catholic Church.
The Vatican’s upcoming conference will be held from October 7 to 14, exposing a tightly controlled structure designed to examine Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia by how the document has been “lived.”
Earlier this year, Pope Leo XIV praised Amoris Laetitia as a guiding text for the Church and signaled his intention to honor Pope Francis’ highly controversial apostolic exhortation, elements of which many consider to be heretical.
In March, Pope Leo issued a message marking the 10th anniversary of Amoris Laetitia in which he described Francis’ post-synodal apostolic exhortation as a “luminous message of hope” and confirmed its central role in contemporary teaching on marriage and the family.
“On 19 March 2016, Pope Francis offered the universal Church a luminous message of hope regarding conjugal love and family life,” Pope Leo wrote. “On this tenth anniversary, we give thanks to the Lord for the stimulus that has encouraged reflection and pastoral conversion in the Church, and ask God for the courage to persevere on this path.”
In the Pope’s message, he explicitly placed Amoris Laetitia alongside Familiaris Consortio issued by John Paul II. “Since the Council, the two Apostolic Exhortations, Familiaris Consortio – issued by Saint John Paul II in 1981 – and Amoris Laetitia, have both strengthened the Church’s doctrinal and pastoral commitment to the service of young people, married couples and families.”
Contradicting John Paul II and many others, Amoris Laetitia states that “it can no longer simply be said that all those in any irregular situation are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace. More is involved here than mere ignorance of the rule.”
In a searing analysis penned for LifeSiteNews in 2018, a priest who required anonymity maintained that Amoris Laetitia’s infamous Chapter 8 that allows individual conscience to trump objective moral law would effectively eliminate the notion of intrinsic moral evil.
“The real issue is not Holy Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried. After all, Pope Francis had already streamlined the annulment process, to allow declarations of nullity which were generally easy to attain, to be even easier,” he wrote.
“The real issue is all about sodomy, and normalizing – even blessing – this behavior called by the Catechism ‘intrinsically disordered’” he explained.
“This could be the first election in Sweden where the Muslim immigration that we have had is decisive in a parliamentary election,” predicted the leader of the Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Åkesson, days before Sweden’s election on September 13.
He was right. Sweden’s center-right Sweden Democrats government indeed lost the elections by a razor-thin margin – reportedly just 50,000 votes – corresponding to just three seats in parliament.
The next government will almost certainly be a socialist one.[1]
“Voters who, or whose parents, grew up outside Europe overwhelmingly favoured the Left,” Brussels Signal wrote in its analysis of an exit poll by SVT, Sweden’s national public broadcaster:
“The Social Democrats received 38 per cent of their votes, the Left Party 21 per cent, the Greens 7 per cent and the Centre Party 4 per cent. Together, these parties accounted for 70 per cent, against 27 per cent for the four parties of the outgoing right-wing bloc.”
The tiny socialist majority was won through heavy voter mobilization within immigrant communities, which tipped the balance. Turnout rose around 3 points to 67.5% in the almost exclusively urban districts, where mainly Muslim immigrants live.
“This election has in part been about voter mobilisation, which is unusual in Sweden,” noted to Gustav Karreskog Rehbinder, founder of AI analysis firm Vera Policy, which broke down the election results for Reuters.
According to Fredrik Karrholm, a member of the Swedish parliament and the author of Gangster Violence:
“A poll by the respected Novus institute before the election found that of Muslim respondents, around 80 per cent intended to vote for either the Social Democrats or the Left party.
“In some districts with large immigrant populations, the results are striking. For example, in Rosengård Centrum in Malmö, the Social Democrats and Left Party together received, according to the preliminary count, 95.2 per cent of the vote…
“This pattern predates the present government…
“During the last parliamentary term, around 200,000 people were given citizenship under rules that imposed very few demands on applicants – not even a requirement to speak or write Swedish. The majority of those granted citizenship were from outside Europe….
“Immigration to Sweden has not only brought crime, social problems and unemployment – now the government that was successfully starting to solve these problems has been voted out because of immigration itself.”
For a brief moment, it had seemed as if Sweden was finally beginning to turn things around. In 2022, Sweden voted in a center-right government that ruled with the parliamentary backing of the Sweden Democrats – a first in Swedish politics. This government sought to implement the most restrictive overhauls of Swedish asylum and immigration policies in Swedish history with crackdowns on asylum and migrant flows, while making it harder for immigrants to acquire permanent residence and Swedish citizenship.
After decades of lawlessness, the center-right government, now voted out, had also sought to crack down on crime by finally openly linking migration to gang violence, parallel societies, and integration failures.
The results were dramatic: In December 2025, Reuters reported:
“The number of shootings in Sweden has more than halved since hitting a peak in 2022, reflecting new policing approaches introduced by the right-wing government, which is readying for parliamentary elections next year. Shooting incidents fell to 147 so far this year, a 63% decrease compared to 2022 when there were 390 shootings and a 49% decrease compared to 2024, according to a Reuters analysis of official figures.”
The government also began to scrutinize the detrimental effects of Islam in Sweden, including the launch of a government investigation into the Islamist infiltration of Swedish society. This past spring, the government announced that it would be dropping the entire concept of “Islamophobia.”
Sweden, in short, had been on the road to becoming Swedish again – but if the election results lead to a new socialist government, that will no longer happen: The Left Party alone is deeply infiltrated by Islamists and terrorist supporters, with several of its politicians caught celebrating the October 7, 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel, with some handing out candy on the streets to mark their joy at the massacres of Israelis. In addition, several candidates were found to have shared content praising or expressing support for designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the PFLP and Al-Qaeda, while multiple candidates shared classic antisemitic tropes, Holocaust denial and homophobia.
These revelations, all dug up by the Swedish press, forced the Left Party to remove at least 33 of its most extremist candidates, an astounding number.
Many other radicals within the party kept their parliamentary seats, including MPs Ilona Szatmári Waldau and Samuel Gonzalez Westling, who sent open letters of support to Palestinian terrorists held in Israeli prisons for serious offenses, such as ordering suicide bombings and torturing and murdering an Israeli soldier. In October 2025, the party’s top leadership, including party leader Nooshi Dadgostar, hosted two visiting Palestinians from the Fatah Revolutionary Council inside the Swedish Parliament. The two guests were known for having publicly praised terrorist acts and spreading Jew-hatred.
If you think any of this harmed the party, you would be wrong: The scandals actually served to boost it: they gained the party six new seats in the election.
There is a name for what just happened in Sweden: Ballot box jihad. It is an Islamist tactic, favored by the Muslim Brotherhood.
“In the Middle East, democracy and elections are various means to one end: the establishment of a decidedly undemocratic form of law — Islamic, or Sharia Law,” Raymond Ibrahim wrote about the Egyptian elections in 2012, which, for a brief moment, brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power.
“An Egyptian cleric, Dr. Talat Zahran, proclaimed that it is ‘obligatory to cheat at elections, a beautiful thing’ — meaning that voting is a tool, an instrument, the only value of which is to empower Sharia. Another cleric, Hazim Shuman… issued a fatwa that likened voting for Islamist candidates to a ‘jihad,’ or a holy war, adding that paradise awaits whoever is ‘martyred’ during the electoral campaign.”
The same tactic applies to the Islamist project of nonviolent conquest of the West. The late spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, speaking in Qatar in 2007, said that “Islam will conquer Europe without resorting to the sword or fighting. The conquest will be through da’wah [proselytizing] and ideology.”
Ballot box jihad is part of achieving this conquest. Sameh Egyptson, an Egyptian-Swedish academic, writer and expert on political Islam, has been warning about Islamist infiltration of the political system for years. He has recently cautioned, among other things, against clan voting as an erosion of democracy. Clan voting is when extended families and even entire ethnic communities vote collectively as a bloc for the same candidate or party. Although clan voting as such is not illegal in Sweden, two newly elected Muslim candidates from the Left Party are already suspected of electoral fraud, including bribing or unduly influencing voters to vote for them and pre-marking their own names on ballots.
This outcome is possibly what many socialists have been planning all along: To stay in power forever by importing new voters from the Third World.
Sweden is a warning, not only to the rest of Europe but to the Western world at large.
Nearly every woman waiting in northern France to cross to Britain in a small boat has probably been raped on the journey, the UK Home Secretary has said.
Shabana Mahmood made the claim in an interview with The Rest Is Politics: Leading, the podcast hosted by the former Conservative minister Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former adviser.
“We’re not in control of this border,” she admitted.
“The sifting of the people that end up in the north of France and are about to get on a dinghy is done by criminal gangs who are also, by the way, people traffickers. You can almost guarantee that every woman that’s in the north of France has probably been raped along the journey. Some of the men too, they’ve certainly been abused and threatened.”
That, she said, “is not the model that should decide whether somebody gets to come to the UK, make this their place of sanctuary and ultimately become one of us.”
In the same interview she turned on the demonstrators who have praised her border policy, telling them to “sod off” and saying they would want to drive her out of her own country because she is a Muslim.
No Home Office assessment quantifying sexual violence on the routes into northern France has been released alongside Mahmood’s interview.
Home Office statistics record the sex, age and nationality of those detected on arrival, not what happened to them before they embarked.
Women are a minority of those who do arrive. A House of Commons Library briefing, drawing on Home Office data, put detected small-boat arrivals at about 33,000 in the year to June 2026, of whom roughly 13 per cent were adult women, 72 per cent adult men and 15 per cent children.
The department’s own figure for that period was 33,374, down 23 per cent on the 43,309 recorded a year earlier. Eritreans, Sudanese, Afghans, Somalis and Iranians made up two-thirds of the total.
Imran Hussain, of the Refugee Council, welcomed the recognition that women and girls face sexual violence in the conflicts they flee and on the journeys that follow, and used the remarks to argue for wider safe routes than the sponsorship scheme the government has announced.
Mahmood said in June she would open new legal routes for what she called genuine refugees while closing loopholes that had been abused. The first of them, allowing communities and universities to sponsor arrivals, is due to open from this autumn.
The remarks come as opposition to the crossings has moved from the ballot box to the quayside.
On the weekend of September 5 and 6, men in black and balaclavas, linked to a group calling itself Patriot Platform, blocked roads at Dover and clashed with police in Portsmouth after about 140 people were landed at Eastney.
The group is run by Daniel Thomas, an associate of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the activist better known as Tommy Robinson, according to the campaign group Hope Not Hate.
Mahmood told chief constables on September 10 the scenes carried “obvious malign intent” and urged them to use their powers to ban face coverings.
The tactic has not stopped.
On September 22 hundreds gathered at a marina in Gosport, Hampshire, southern England, to meet a dinghy carrying 51 people. The boat was diverted and docked at Dover instead after 33 hours at sea, and six people were arrested.
Hampshire’s police and crime commissioner, Donna Jones, said the two operations had cost more than £250,000 (€287,000) and that she expected more to come.
On October 4, about 150 demonstrators gathered at a marina in Gosport as the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) brought ashore 149 people picked up in mid-Channel.
Flares were let off, police vans were blocked and there were scuffles. Hampshire Police had already prohibited face coverings. Twelve people were arrested, including on suspicion of assaulting officers, affray and racially aggravated public order.
Manchester Central Mosque held a funeral service for convicted terrorist Munir Farooqi | GOOGLE MAPS
A Manchester mosque visited and praised by Andy Burnham earlier this year has held a funeral for a convicted terrorist and former Taliban fighter serving multiple life sentences.
Munir Farooqi, who died in prison at the end of September aged 69, was buried following a janazah, or Muslim funeral, at Manchester Central Mosque on September 30.
More than 100 people are said to have attended the service, including members of Farooqi’s family.
According to Muslim news outlet 5Pillars, his relatives still “considers him a martyr who died doing what he loved”.
Farooqi, who was born in Pakistan, fought alongside the Taliban after the September 11 attacks before returning to Manchester.
He subsequently operated what prosecutors described as a recruitment centre, where he sought to encourage British extremists to “fight, kill and die” in Afghanistan.
In 2011, he was sentenced to four life terms after being convicted of preparing terrorist acts, soliciting murder and disseminating terrorist literature.
The funeral took place months after Mr Burnham, then Mayor of Greater Manchester, visited Manchester Central Mosque during Ramadan.
Months before the funeral in February, Mr Burnham attended an Iftar, the evening meal marking the breaking of the daily Ramadan fast, with members of the local Muslim community.
Labour MPs Debbie Abrahams and Afzal Khan were also present, alongside newly appointed mayor Bev Craig and Angeliki Stogia, the party’s candidate for the Gorton and Denton by-election, which was subsequently won by the Greens.
During the visit, footage shows Mr Burnham praising the mosque’s “togetherness”.
He said at the time: “We’re not about allowing any room for the politics of division in Greater Manchester and creating a climate where that can advance.”
The visit came shortly after a security incident at the mosque during Ramadan, where two men entered the building allegedly carrying weapons including an axe, a hammer and a knife.
Both were arrested, with one later charged with possession of an offensive weapon and possession of Class B drugs, while the other faced no further action.
Speaking outside the mosque at the time, Mr Burnham said: “Everybody in our city region, whoever they are, whatever faith they follow, should be free at all times to practice that faith and to worship in their communities.
“We will never accept a city region where people have any fear of being at their place of worship, and that’s why we’re working with Greater Manchester Police to strengthen security at places of worship as much as we possibly can.”
The revelation of Farooqi’s funeral at the mosque prompted criticism from Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, who called for the Prime Minister to explain his connection to the venue.
Mr Philp said: “The Prime Minister must apologise if it is true he attended a Manchester mosque that disgracefully held a funeral for a convicted terrorist and ex-Taliban fighter.
“Islamist extremism is the biggest threat facing our society, and we must do everything in our power to combat it rather than pander to those proliferating it.
“It is deeply concerning the Labour Government does not have the backbone to confront this reality.”
A spokesman for Manchester Central Mosque said: “As an Islamic institution, we undertake the responsibility of performing funerals for all Muslims.
“Our core belief is that every person who has died deserves a respectful and dignified funeral. It is not our position, nor our role, to give judgments on a person’s actions, especially those who are deceased.
“As Muslims, we leave all judgments to God. Ultimately, heaven or hell is based on a person’s actions, and this is a matter for God alone to judge. Our duty is to serve the community and provide the necessary religious rites with dignity.
“Manchester Central Mosque welcomes all, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Our doors are always open. At this time, the family has requested for peace and privacy.”
Britain’s relentless crackdown on so-called “offensive” speech has produced yet another astonishing criminal conviction, this time against a retired police officer who spent nearly three decades serving the public.
Stephen Gray, 65, served nearly 30 years with Cleveland Police. He and his wife Alex, 62, have fostered children. None of that mattered once a neighbor he was already feuding with over a sewage pipe tipped off police about two posts Gray had reshared.
According to The Telegraph and the Free Speech Union, Gray was interviewed under caution, the Crown Prosecution Service initially decided there was no realistic prospect of conviction, and the neighbor then used the Victims’ Right to Review scheme to force the case back on. The neighbor was not Muslim.
At Newton Aycliffe Magistrates’ Court in April 2026, District Judge Steven Hood split the difference in the way only two-tier Britain can.
One post, “time for mass deportation,” paired with a caption about a supposed “12-year-old Mohammed” who wanted donors to move him from a three-star hotel to a five-star hotel with a better halal menu, free Wi-Fi, Sky, and a location nearer a girls’ school, was treated as politics.
The judge said it concerned an issue already debated in Parliament and acquitted Gray.
The second post was the one that counted. It showed a rasher of bacon next to a man in a turban, with the caption: “Fun facts about bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!”
Gray said the post was a reference to the traditional Islamic account of the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha and was intended to raise questions about the continued acceptance of child marriage in parts of the Muslim world.
Hood ruled that message “grossly offensive” under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, found it was “designed to be offensive,” and dismissed Gray’s defense that it raised a serious point about child marriage because it was “framed in a jokey way.”
Gray was convicted, handed a criminal record, and ordered to pay roughly £1,000 ($1,300) to £1,100 ($1,400) in fines and costs. GB News reported he now fears the conviction could wreck safeguarding checks tied to fostering.
Gray told the court the meme was satire aimed at a recorded Islamic tradition, not a random insult. He said it referred to accounts in the Hadith in which Muhammad married Aisha when she was six and the marriage was consummated when she was nine, and that he hoped it would force a debate about whether that example still feeds child marriage in parts of the Muslim world.
He has also said he does not believe a comparable joke about the Catholic Church and child abuse would have produced a conviction. Parliament abolished the old blasphemy laws in 2008. The Communications Act is doing the job anyway, for one religion.
The Free Speech Union is funding his appeal and has instructed criminal silk John Beggs KC. The case is expected to reach the Crown Court later this year.
FSU has described a sharp rise in cases punishing criticism of Islam and warned that non-statutory “anti-Muslim hostility” definitions are being used the same way.
The far-left leader of the British Green Party, Zack Polanski, has been banned from entering the state of Israel after his party adopted a motion declaring “Zionism is racism” as official policy on Sunday.
At its annual party conference in Brighton on Sunday, Green members voted by a measure of 1,022 to 813 in favour of a motion put forward by the Greens for Palestine group, which said that Zionism should be “treated as any other form of racism” by the party. The motion also said that the party should advocate for a “single Palestinian state,” essentially calling for the destruction of Israel as a country.
The motion, which is now official Green Party policy, added that Zionism is “based upon European settler-colonial systems of domination and oppression, which has also created racial hierarchies between Jews of different ethnicities in Palestine” and that it represents the “historic and ongoing dehumanisation, displacement, dispossession, disenfranchisement and destruction of Palestinians.”
Although Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, did not attend the vote as he was campaigning for the upcoming Holborn & St Pancras by-election, Israel’s Foreign Ministry announced on Sunday evening that it has ordered an entry ban on the leftist politician from entering the country, saying that the party he leads “gives legitimacy to terrorism.”
“The Greens have adopted not only the green of Hamas, but also its ideology: the elimination of the State of Israel through armed struggle,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Jerusalem added that the motion “legitimises armed struggle, calls for a Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’ — meaning the destruction of the State of Israel — and labels as ‘racist’ the aspiration of the Jewish people for self-determination.”
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid also condemned the motion, saying: “I am a Zionist. I believe in the Jewish people’s right to a state in our homeland, in our right to live in peace and security. As we prepare to mark three years since the October 7th massacre, the UK Green Party has chosen to side with terrorists and antisemites. It is not Zionism that’s racism, it is the Green Party.”
Far-Left UK Greens Adopt Motion Declaring ‘Zionism Is Racism’ as Party Policyhttps://t.co/Gbogu5RhV3
Prior to the vote, Polanski had sought to hedge his support, saying that while he is a committed anti-Zionist, he would only support the motion if the wording calling for a single Palestinian state was removed, and a carve-out was made for Jewish members to avoid being labelled as racist for attending synagogues and other Jewish community organisations that classify themselves as Zionist.
Nevertheless, Polanski said that he agreed with the sentiment, saying that “if your Zionism is the displacement of the Palestinian people, then that’s clearly racist”.
However, the motion has apparently caused a rift within the party between its traditional base of left-wing environmentalists and the recent influx of Muslims disaffected with the Labour Party.
Indeed, while relatively new arrivals like Deputy leader Mothin Ali supported the motion, others, such as former party leader Caroline Lucas, condemned it as being “divisive” and a “sign that Jewish people aren’t welcome in the party”.
Polanski, who oversaw a resurgence in the Greens’ popularity, is facing growing questions about his leadership, with some suggesting that a loss in the Holborn & St Pancras by-election to fill former PM Sir Keir Starmer’s vacated seat in Parliament could see him ousted as Green leader.
Polanski denied that his leadership is determined on a victory, tellingThe Guardian last week that his position “doesn’t depend on it whatsoever”, while describing the race as “probably 50/50 right now” and “really on a knife edge”.
France is not experiencing a student protest. It is watching the same leftist method that set Soweto alight in 1976 to test how much of the country it can burn before the state blinks.
The pretext in South Africa was allegedly Afrikaans in the classroom. The pretext now is missing teachers, overcrowded rooms, and buildings left to rot.
None of these complaints licenses what followed, any more than a language decree licensed the fires and the deaths that the organizers of Soweto treated as the necessary price of the spectacle.
By Wednesday the Interior Ministry had recorded 1,949 arrests for violence against police or property damage and 305 injured officers and gendarmes. Education officials counted 170 injured students and 65 injured staff. At least two dozen schools were ransacked or burned. A fire truck was attacked in Marseille. Buses were stoned and torched. In Toulouse a teacher who tried to hold off attackers with a fire extinguisher was knocked down. Footage from La Rochelle showed migrant youths beating a white teenager. Journalists were assaulted. Smoke rose over Bordeaux and a dozen other cities. This is not real adolescent anger. It is the standard operating procedure of the same postcodes that have supplied France’s rioters for twenty years: young men of North African and sub-Saharan origin for whom a burning bin is both entertainment and political credential.
School toilets in Limpopo, South Africa today. As of late 2025, approximately 37.9% of South Africans, or 23 million people, live below the lower-bound poverty line (LBPL) of R1,300 per person per month. ‘Freedom’ evidently came at a steep price. Photo supplied
Soweto’s crowds were mobilized the same way—students pushed into the street by organizers who understood that a march becomes useful only when it meets bullets after setting the school alight.
The useful idiots and the stage managers have never left the stage. In 1976 the Black Consciousness networks, the ANC’s exile apparatus, and the South African Communist Party’s long cultivation of “youth struggle” turned an orchestrated school grievance and empty promises into a national uprising and then into a founding myth.
Intelligence services told the French government’s crisis meeting that the 2026 movement was an operation organized by La France Insoumise and its ultra-left trotskyite proxies. LFI did not bother with deniability. MP Mathilde Panot posted the images and wrote “Glory to the youth who are writing the history of the country. France, that’s them!”
The LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, turned up to sing and dance in front of an open fire after having already declared that violence can be legitimate resistance. Jean-Luc Mélenchon called the students harmless and accused the crackdown of racist undertones. These are deliberate statements exonerating the arsonists.
They are the same offer the left has always made to the street: we will supply the slogan and the absolution; you supply the bodies and the matches.
Éric Zemmour named the transaction exactly. The violence is “a dress rehearsal, a small-scale foretaste of the chaos that Mélenchon and the LFI are preparing for France.”
Robespierre had his sans-culottes, Lenin his Red Guards, the South African left its Soweto cohort; Mélenchon has his immigrant gangs. The era changes, the method does not. Every burned lycée and hospitalized teacher is campaign literature, just as every casualty in Soweto became poster and statute.
Hector Peterson, killed by a stray bullet, comes to mind. South African reporting from the early 2000s, citing Hector’s sister Antoinette Sithole, stated that the Pitso family changed his name to “Peterson” to appeal to the Scandinavian sponsors of the riots, but that the siblings had always treated the adopted name as something of a joke.
The banlieue now knows that LFI will excuse them, and it tells everyone else that electing anyone who promises order—above all Marine Le Pen—will be met with insurrection.
The left does not even conceal the bargain because it no longer calculates that concealment is necessary. It did not conceal it in 1976 either; it simply waited until the smoke cleared and claimed the students “had acted alone”.
PM Sébastien Lecornu’s emergency meeting and Education Minister Édouard Geffray’s offer of talks are the Republic negotiating with its arsonists while the fires are being lit. Student organizations have already promised further actions.
The staff victims, the education minister noted, were frequently attacked by people who were not their own pupils. The distinction between protester and predator was erased on day one, as LFI’s elected officials posed for the photographs. France has run this experiment before: 2005, injecting violence into the the yellow vests’ protests as well as into the 2023 Nahel riots triggered by the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk.
South Africa ran it in Soweto and then for decades afterward. Each time the same coalition—radical left rhetoric, mobilized youth muscle, official hesitation—produced the same ash and the same legend.
According to South African police IRIS data analyzed by researchers at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa currently logs between 10,000 and 15,000 crowd incidents annually. During peak periods of unrest, monitors like Municipal IQ have recorded recent years with thousands of protest actions over brief 90-day windows—sometimes averaging over 30 separate localized protests per day across different towns and townships. International news outlets ignore these since they are anti-ANC protests.
The novelty in October 2026 is the electoral calendar and the candor. The alliance is no longer whispered. It is dancing in front of the fire and calling the flames history, exactly as the organizers of Soweto called theirs. One revolt was aimed at a racial white minority state; the other is aimed at a white majority democracy that has already extended citizenship, schools, and welfare to the populations now burning them.
The instigators do not care about the optics. A grievance is a grievance, a crowd is a crowd, violence begets violence and a photograph of glory writes itself once the fires are lit. If the state continues to treat that as a misunderstanding rather than a strategy copied across fifty years and two continents, the dress rehearsal will simply become the performance.
