Police forces from the states of Baden-Württemberg and Hesse have arrested two Lebanese brothers aged 15 and 20 and a 20-year-old Turkish man. The public prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe has accused them of ‘preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state’. This was announced by the prosecution on Tuesday. The arrest took place on Sunday.
According to the statement, the three suspected terrorists had already procured ‘an assault rifle with the corresponding ammunition’. The investigators have a well-founded suspicion ‘that the two brothers have made concrete preparations for an attack due to their strong religious ideology and profound sympathy for the Islamist terrorist organisation “Islamic State (IS)”’. In addition to the assault rifle, the police found ‘a balaclava, a tactical waistcoat, several knives and various mobile phones and data carriers’. The latter are currently still being analysed.
The two Lebanese men from Mannheim and the Turkish man from the Hochtaunus district have already been brought before a magistrate and are in custody. The public prosecutor’s office assured: ‘There was no concrete danger to the public at any time.’
The leftist government in Britain has come under fire from former military top brass over plans to use electric vehicles on the battlefield as a part of its green energy agenda push.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is reportedly set to accelerate tests of battlefield electric vehicles in the coming year. Although initially thought up under the so-called Conservative government in 2019, the experimental testing is an expansion by the recently-elected left-wing Labour Party government, The Telegraphreports.
A government source told the broadsheet: “New and emerging technologies can support decarbonisation efforts and improve battlefield capability, reducing the supply chain vulnerability of liquid fuel and also reducing the heat signature and noise of vehicles on the battlefield.”
According to the paper, the Labour government has ploughed over £400,000 in contracts to defence firm Magtec, which specialises in installing electric drive systems in vehicles.
Last week, Prime Minister Starmer said that the green agenda will be a key focus of his government’s defence strategy, which would seek to “support net zero, regional growth, and economic security and resilience”.
The plans have come under heavy criticism from prominent retired military officials over concerns that the government may be prioritising its ideological vision over the safety of British troops on the battlefield.
The former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Colonel Richard Kemp, said: “What this amounts to is virtue signalling by MoD, trying to get into the climate change agenda. I suspect it will be wasting quite a lot of people’s time and resources in trying to show they are playing their part. At the moment, the technology is just not there.”
Colonel Kemp explained that keeping traditionally powered vehicles supplied with fuel is already a difficult task and said that he “can’t see how it would possibly work with EVs.”
“Fighting battles is an extremely difficult activity – to make it unnecessarily even more difficult seems to be a crazy endeavour. I would be pretty confident that it is just not at all a starter in terms of maintaining the level of battleground capability that we have now.”
The former leader of the Royal Irish Regiment in Iraq, Colonel Tim Collings added that he “doubts” that enemy forces will be considering converting their vehicle fleets to electric anytime soon, as they will “be looking for immediate effect, not approval ratings or whatever.”
“I doubt a battery can currently provide the horsepower necessary for warfare. What’s driving this? Is it battlefield necessity or fashion? If it’s fashion then it’s a bad idea. Renewables alone aren’t sufficient to deliver the power we need for potential conflicts,” he said.
An MoD spokesman said that the “rapid advancement of electric vehicle technology has opened up new possibilities for military applications” and the planned tests will be to determine if the EVs can “match or exceed” the performance of traditional vehicles.
“The Ministry of Defence remains committed to pursuing innovations that could enhance the operational effectiveness of our Armed Forces, while also supporting sustainability where possible.”
The panel began the episode by looking at a clip of an interview with former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in which he finally admitted that the Russia-Ukraine war is a “proxy war” between the West and Russia.
“Let’s face it, we’re waging a proxy war. We’re waging a proxy war. But we’re not giving our proxies the ability to do the job. And we’re in for years and years now, we’ve been allowing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. And it has been cruel; it has been cruel. And we need now to give them what they need,” Johnson said in the interview.
Wright emphasized that Johnson’s admission is fitting because he played a major role in NATO’s efforts to destabilize Russia and absorb it into the West.
“Despite the fact that the Rand Corporation published the strategy in 2019, which was to overextend and destabilize Russia by bleeding it on the battlefield and, therefore, plunder Russia afterwards, absorbing it into the [Western] sphere. The idea that it was a proxy war was dismissed as a conspiracy theory and the idea that Boris Johnson might have had a hand in starting that proxy war was also a conspiracy theory – which, of course, he did many weeks after the war actually began, when he went to Kiev in a surprise visit to sabotage the peace deal,” Wright said.
“This is Boris Johnson’s war from start to finish, and it’s fitting that it should be he who comes on to the mainstream media and finally names it appropriately,” he added.
A bit later in the episode, the panel turned to news from the Vatican, where Pope Francis recently wrote to an Italian grandmother who was distressed about her children’s lack of affection for raising her grandchildren in the faith. The Pontiff told her to “accompany” them but notably not to “insist” on her grandchildren’s baptism.
Fr. Murr underscored that grandparents can play a pivotal role in the catechesis of their grandchildren and have every right to insist on their grandchildren being baptized.
“If the Holy Father would have said, ‘Don’t nag, don’t nag your sons or daughters to death,’ I understand that. But to push and to insist, and to show how important it is to me as your grandfather, your grandmother, they have every right to do that, every right to do that,” Murr said.
“And they should continue; they should also [do] as much as they can – it’s hard today because the distractions are incredible to young people – but as much as they can to catechize those grandchildren when they have them there. Just take one question from the Catechism and sit down and explain it for five minutes, and then [have] 10 minutes of chocolate or something. The grandparents certainly have a role. We’re not disconnecting family. And I think His Holiness is off base again,” the priest added.
For more discussion on Boris Johnson’s admission that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war, the Pope’s stunning response to a distressed grandmother, and much more, tune in to this week’s episode of Faith and Reason.
Salafists are trying to convert young women to radical Islam online. With increasing success. The ultra-conservative ideas are being spread in a very modern way by influencers on social networks. The aim is for the victims to cover themselves up, obey men and bear children.
Investigators cannot say how often it happens. However, it is certain that there has been a sharp increase in cases recently. And the victims of radicalisation are getting younger and younger. According to a report by public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk, the age of initiation is now 14 to 15. The State Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter-Terrorism in Upper Austria has also made this observation.
In November, the newspaper JF reported exclusively on a secret report by the authority. It speaks of Catholic girls who are persuaded to convert to radical Islam. They are then quickly married off to Muslims with the aim of ‘giving birth to fighters’. The radicalisation is said to take place on the internet.
A woman who has left the scene now tells German broadcaster BR how these radicalisations take place. Male and female influencers with tens of thousands of followers spread propaganda and present themselves as religious authorities on social networks. ‘If you talk a lot about Islam, young girls think you are a scholar,’ the report quotes the anonymous insider. The messages conveyed are explosive. ‘Women can do jobs, but with controls’, preaches a Salafist on TikTok, for example. But the influencers have no real interest in the girls. ‘The moment you convert to Islam, you are marginalised,’ the dropout is quoted as saying.
A spokesperson for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Bavaria adds: ‘At the beginning, simple questions from everyday life are used – for example, finding a partner, raising children or clothing. Women are attracted by such topics, and only later does the ideologisation follow.’ Just how serious the problem is is made particularly clear by one figure: in Germany alone, authorities speak of 11,500 known Salafists living here.
A group of five Arab-looking men brutally beat up a 26-year-old man in the Treptow district of Berlin. The victim was draped with a Syrian flag over his shoulders to celebrate the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad.
According to the police, the Syrian lost consciousness during the attack. A passer-by who witnessed the attack alerted the officers. Apparently, the perpetrators had literally hunted down people who were celebrating the downfall of the regime in their home country with flags. According to the police report, five Arabs jumped out of a car while the man was waiting at a bus stop on Köpenicker Landstraße shortly before midnight. According to the victim, the perpetrators spoke Lebanese Arabic. The man was taken to hospital with lacerations to his face and bruises.
In Berlin, thousands of mainly male Syrians celebrated the victory of the rebels under Islamist leadership in their home country. Large crowds gathered everywhere in the capital to take to the streets with Syrian flags. A total of one million Syrians live in Germany – five per cent of the citizens of the Arab state.
History is interesting because it isn’t over yet. At the Battle of Tours, a.k.a. the Battle of Poitiers, Charles Martel prevented Islam from doing to Europe what it did to Syria. This took place 1,292 years ago. Yet the outcome of the battle is still contested:
Three young adults suspected of plotting a jihadist attack on various targets, in particular the town hall of Poitiers, were arrested on Wednesday by police officers from the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) in several departments, including Loire-Atlantique and Gard.
Explosives were involved.
According to their texts, this target was envisaged because of the symbolism of the Battle of Poitiers, in which Charles Martel’s troops were victorious against the Arab-Berber forces in 732. The three young men had also spoken of attacking the [General Directorate of Internal Security] headquarters or going to Syria.
Syria would be a great place for them, now that the Biden Regime has boastfully helped HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, formerly of ISIS, to power.
Their affiliation to a jihadist group is unclear, as the suspects mention both the Islamic State and HTS, the extremist Syrian rebel group once allied with Al-Qaeda.
It seemed al Qaeda and ISIS were behind us. But when it comes to history, objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear.
NCF Senior Fellow Rafe Heydel-Mankoo joined Mike Graham on TalkTV to review the morning papers. They discussed the fall of the Syrian dictator, who has fled to Russia, and the repercussions this will have.
Photo: Romanian Police on Facebook, 1 December 2023
Romania’s unprecedented political turmoil around the canceled presidential election seems unlikely to subside anytime soon, as authorities continue to uncover further details about the campaign of a little-known independent candidate, Călin Georgescu, and his shocking victory in the first round of the now-annulled race.
As we also reported, the country’s Constitutional Court ordered the entire election to be redone from scratch after declassified intelligence reports claimed a foreign actor (i.e. Russia) interfered in the election campaign by promoting Georgescu on social media with 25,000 fake accounts while real influencers were paid from separate but undisclosed domestic sources to do the same.
Despite these allegations, the Romanian Left and Right seem to be united in their outrage over the last-minute cancellation of the elections. The court’s decision was strongly criticized by politicians and parties across political lines, including by Georgescu’s pro-EU, liberal second-round contender Elena Lasconi, who accused the socialist-aligned judges of “destroying democracy” just to give the ruling socialist party (PSD) another chance at the presidency.The move might also serve as a dangerous precedent for the future of democracy across Europe. You don’t like the outcome? Just blame Russia and annul the vote, easy.
Nonetheless, the police conducted several raids linked to Georgescu over the weekend, no doubt seen by many as the establishment’s newest attempt to discredit him and retroactively justify the election annulment.
One of the raids involved searching the homes of a businessman suspected of having illegally assisted Georgescu’s campaign by financing undisclosed pro-Georgescu content on TikTok with nearly €1 million. In a separate operation, the police detained 20 people reportedly belonging to Georgescu’s private security team on their way to a polling station after finding an “arsenal” of illegal weapons and large sums of money in their cars, including their leader who runs a mercenary group in the Congo.
The financier behind Georgescu’s ‘0 lei’ campaign
The three properties raided in the city of Brașov belong to programmer-turned-business owner Bogdan Peșchir, who allegedly financed Georgescu’s campaign with €1 million, mostly through a South African firm, including at least €360,000 paid directly from his TikTok account “bogpr” to other influencers on the site at a rate of up to €950 per post.
Undisclosed political promotion is not only against TikTok’s terms of service but is also against the law, especially given that Georgescu’s officially declared campaign budget was €0 and he proudly flaunted his ‘grassroots’ support in every interview leading up to the election.
“The searches concern the possible involvement of a natural person in the illegal financing of the electoral campaign of a candidate for the presidency of Romania, through the use of sums of money that there are indications that they might be derived from the commission of crimes, being subsequently introduced in a money laundering process,” the authorities said on Saturday.
In a subsequent statement on Sunday, December 8th, the prosecutor’s office said it had seized crypto wallets worth over $7 million from Peșchir’s computers and transferred them to the accounts of the National Agency for the Administration of Unavailable Goods (ANABI) until the investigation determines the money’s origin.
There is a strong suspicion that the businessman came to his fortune illegally, as last week’s unclassified intelligence report mentions that “Bogdan Peșchir displays a standard of living that does not correspond to the activities carried out through the owned company.”
Bodyguard mercenary on a late-night stroll
On Saturday night, Romanian police detained 20 professional mercenaries who reportedly belong to Georgescu’s private security team after finding an “arsenal” of illegal firearms and bladed weapons, as well as large sums of cash in their cars. Their leader, Horațiu Potra—a local councilor in the city of Mediaş who runs a mercenary group in the Congo—was picked up from his luxury car, which also contained weapons and cash, heading the convoy towards the capital.
When asked where Potra and his entourage were headed with pistols and machetes, he said he was on his way to vote at a polling station in Bucharest, despite the elections being canceled and the fact that he lives in a different city.
Authorities suspect he was trying to orchestrate an intimidation campaign or instigate public unrest in and around the capital. Potra may have been heading to the same polling station near the capital where Georgescu organized his protest against the annulment on early Sunday, demanding the right to vote with around a hundred of his supporters.
The mercenary leader was seen being escorted out of the Prahova police station in handcuffs on Sunday night and prosecutors said he was charged with non-compliance with weapons and ammunition regulations as well as public instigation for violence against politicians on social media. His lawyers, however, say the charges are not linked to his connections to Georgescu or the fact that he is reportedly in charge of the independent candidate’s security.
Whatever may be the truth in these allegations, it’s clear that the court’s reckless decision to overturn the democratic will of the people has transformed Romania into a powder keg with no apparent way out of the chaos.
Germany’s Free Democratic Party (FPD) is seeking to prohibit the re-election of two female members who voted against the nation’s radical self-identification law. Katja Adler and Linda Teuteberg are the only two women in the FDP who voted against the law, with both expressing concerns about the implications gender ideology has for women’s safety.
In April of 2024, the German Bundestag voted for the Self-Determination Act, which allows people to simply change their sex and first name at the registry office and threatens with a fine of €10,000 if someone reveals their previous first name and real sex. With 251 votes against, two women from the FDP, Katja Adler and Linda Teuteberg, also voted against this proposed law.
In a personal statement, Adler pointed out that the law would result in women having fewer rights to single-sex spaces, and that it contradicted with the German Constitution’s guarantee that “men and women have equal rights.” Adler argued that the clause would be rendered unenforceable if men were capable of declaring themselves “women” at any time.
During an online event with women’s rights group Frauenheldinnen, Adler also expressed concerns about how the law impacted minors. The Self-Determination Act allows parents to change their child’s name and sex marker from birth, but also allows children to seek legal name and sex marker changes without parental consent via a youth court order. Reflecting on the dramatic changes, Adler said: “I cannot and will not agree to that.”
In her federal state of Hessen, Adler has already been dismissed from the FDP and has lost her place on the voting list, which would have guaranteed her return as a member of the German Bundestag.
Disturbingly, Adler’s social media history had apparently been scrutinized by her colleagues for some time without her knowledge, and her following on social media was apparently analyzed and presented at a state executive board meeting.
During the meeting, political data scientist Benjamin Läpple came to the conclusion that her followers are politically further to the right than the average position of the FDP. Adler described the revelations as feeling as thought she were being “pilloried.” In her federal state, only members of the FDP who voted in favor of the Self-Determination Act are now listed for the upcoming new elections.
Ich werde weiter machen, jedem Gegenwind und jeder Demontierung zum Trotz. Ich werde mir weder die Augen verbinden, noch den Mund verbieten lassen. Für unsere #Freiheit . pic.twitter.com/G8aSlh6Prp
But Adler is not the only FDP member who has been effectively ousted due to her stance on the Self-Determination Act. Linda Teuteberg, who represents the state of Brandenburg, may also be replaced by the party due to her comments criticizing the law.
In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Teuteberg had noted that feminists who viewed biological sex as a fact were often stigmatized as “right-wing extremists” by state-sponsored groups, thereby thwarting debates on socially controversial issues. As a result of her comments, the FDP is seeking to replace Teuteberg with Matti Karstedt, who will enter the German Bundestag for the first time and who considers the Self-Determination Act a good law.
Karstedt has criticized women who express concerns about the law, and has said that “truly liberal women” do not feel threatened by trans-identified males.
Whether Teuteberg will lose her position will be decided on December 21, 2024.
While Adler and Tueteberg are being pushed out of the FDP, the party has also seen multiple women defect due to disagreements with the Self-Determination Act.
Earlier this year, Schwachhausen representative Birgit Bergmann left the party in protest of the FDP’s support of the Self-Determination Act. In a statement she posted to Instagram, Bergmann said that women’s, children’s, and parental rights were being “thrown overboard” and politics must serve people, not an ideology.
Similarly, Kyra Großmann, who is responsible for press and public relations for her city’s FDP association, announced her departure from the party last week.
In a statement she posted to X, Großmann explained her frustration with the law.
“I am now no longer allowed to call a de facto man by his old name, but I have to accept that he is allowed to feel like a woman and is therefore allowed to enter protective spaces that women have fought hard for, such as women’s toilets, women’s showers and women’s shelters,” she said.
Since the Self-Determination Act came into force at the end of November, over 14.000 people in Germany have changed their legal sex, far above the initial prediction of 4,000 annual requests. Approximately 5% of the applicants are minors, and not all applicants opted to change their names and sex – with some only changing the former.
As previously reported by Reduxx, just one day before Germany’s new law came into force, a trans-identified male in Germany was sentenced to an indefinite stay in a psychiatric institution as part of his prison sentence for exhibitionism and violent attacks on women. He now has the right to change his legal sex and to be placed in a women’s ward.
Unbelievable revelations incriminate the President of the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Stephan Kramer. ‘We demand transparent clarification!’ says AfD national spokesperson and candidate for chancellor Alice Weidel in an initial reaction. Weidel lists outrageous accusations: ‘According to media reports, the head of the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Kramer, is alleged to have committed criminal offences, threatened employees with physical violence, illegally prepared AfD expert reports and passed on internal information to public broadcaster MDR.
But one thing at a time. According to research by the alternative medium ‘Apollo News’, Department 1 of the Thuringian Ministry of the Interior wrote a six-page letter to the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution back in 2019. It concerns the suspicion that Kramer had allegedly passed on ‘strictly confidential information about serious dysfunctions and internal tensions in the Office for the Protection of the Constitution’ to two MDR journalists without authorisation and unlawfully. He allegedly disclosed to the journalists that ‘several officials in the Office for the Protection of the Constitution were working against the President’. The alleged breach of official duties in this context may constitute ‘a serious criminal offence under Section 353d of the German Criminal Code’ and raises the question of whether Kramer ‘poses a serious security risk’.
After Kramer classified the AfD as a ‘ case under investigation’ in 2018, a head of department complained in writing that the responsible department had been ‘deliberately ignored’. When Kramer followed up years later with a legally highly questionable report against the AfD, a courageous employee wrote a 30-page supplementary report that did not fit the narrative of the AfD’s supposed hostility towards the constitution. Kramer is said to have prevented the supplementary report from being used and, according to witnesses, justified this by saying that he did not want to ‘provide the opponent with any arguments’. According to ‘Apollo News’ information, the author of the uncomfortable report is said to have approached the personnel department of the Ministry of the Interior and stated that Kramer had threatened him with physical violence. If even fractions of these allegations, which now need to be clarified, are true, we expect Stephan Kramer to resign immediately!
