The incident took place in Weymouth town centre Google Maps
A “very dangerous” asylum seeker who sexually assaulted a teenager cannot be jailed as it could breach his human rights due to the torture he experienced in Syria, a court has heard.
His sentencing at Bournemouth Crown Court was adjourned on Monday after his defence barrister argued imprisonment could violate his rights under Article Three of the European Convention of Human Rights.
The Syrian immigrant’s lawyer said Hayleh, who required an Arabic interpreter in court, suffers from PTSD after being tortured in a jail under the Assad regime.
CCTV footage showed Hayleh driving around Weymouth town centre at 3.25am on December 18, 2022, looking for vulnerable women to target. He spotted the victim sitting alone on the pavement after leaving a nightclub while waiting for her father to collect her.
After helping her up from the ground, he placed his hands down her trousers and inside her underwear before trying to get her into his car. The victim refused and shouted for help to three passing members of the public, telling them Hayleh had touched her.
Defence barrister Graham Gilbert told Judge Robert Pawson: “The doctor’s report only came in on Saturday and it expressed concerns about Hayleh’s PTSD.”
“He has several symptoms of PTSD which would be made worse by a custodial sentence. It would also be made worse without the support of his wife and friends,” Gilbert said.
Judge Pawson responded: “A lot of prisoners’ mental health gets worse during a custodial sentence…However we are going to take the upmost care and caution due to Mr Hayleh’s PTSD due to his time suffering torture in a Syrian prison under the Assad regime. Placing him in prison would provide echoes of that experience.”
Article Three of the European Convention of Human Rights prohibits torture, inhumane treatment and degrading punishment. The judge must now interpret UK criminal law in a way that is compatible with the Human Rights Act 1998. Hayleh, of Wentworth Close, Weymouth, was released on conditional bail until his next appearance in April.
The Syrian arrived in the UK in 2020 and had been living in Weymouth, Dorset. When questioned by police, Hayleh claimed it was a misunderstanding, saying he had only tried to help the victim by pulling up her exposed trousers after she hugged him.
At a previous hearing following his conviction, Judge Pawson told Hayleh: “You were driving around in the early hours on a Sunday morning hoping that you would find exactly what you did find, a young and vulnerable drunk woman who you wanted to get into your car so that you could sexually abuse her.”
The judge had also stated: “On the evidence before me you are potentially a very dangerous man. I shudder to think what might have happened.”
The case has drawn criticism from former politicians, with some arguing that victims’ rights should take precedence over offenders’ human rights considerations.
Villach, Austria is a city proud of being multicultural with its mix of German, Slavic and Romanesque identities, delightful to visit on the waters of the Drava River and already appreciated by the Romans for its thermal springs. A Syrian, shouting “Allahu Akbar”, lunges at passers-by with a knife and kills a 14-year-old boy. Then he sits down, smiles and waits to be arrested. They also call this multiculturalism.
The German-Syrian journalist and blogger Manaf Hassan publishes the photo on 𝕏 and writes: “The blood and tears have not dried. And now we move on to the next assassination attempt. A Syrian man accidentally stabs passersby in Villach. A 14-year-old is dead. And the perpetrator? He laughs and raises his finger. He laughs in our faces and is not afraid. Incredible.”
The start to 2025 is full of “facts,” but they dismiss them: a Kalashnikov shooting in the Brussels metro, a hand grenade in a Grenoble bar, an explosion a day in Sweden, two Israeli tourists stabbed in Athens, a church burned each week.
And thank goodness Europeans were outraged by US Vice President JD Vance’s criticism of European migration policies. “If we now have to start apologizing for having shown a friendly face,” said a frustrated Angela Merkel as the consequences of her 2015 invitation to migrants became clear, “then this is not my country.”
Indeed, she is right. Many of these are no longer our countries: Brussels, Grenoble, Sweden, Villach, Monaco…
At the same time as the Villach murder, a two-year-old girl and her mother died in hospital in Monaco, after an Afghan drove his Mini at full speed into a crowd. What was he shouting? No point in asking. You know.
But now get ready for a great story about the “power of hope, help and love”.
“The power of hope, help and love…The story of Rashad from Afghanistan to Auburn, who is making a difference in Australian public hospitals.”
This is how they introduced Rashad Nadir. It was 2021. A boy who escaped from Afghanistan to go and live the Western dream in the lucky country. What could possibly go wrong?
Now fast forward to 2025.
Rashad Nadir is still making a “difference in Australian public hospitals” as a nurse while studying for a master’s degree.
“You have no idea how many Israeli dogs have come to this hospital and I,” Rashad says before making a throat-slitting gesture to an Israeli.
Hope and love.
In the video, his female colleague also announces that she will kill (or has killed?) Israeli patients at her hospital in Sydney.
Nadir adds: “You have no idea how many Israelis have come to this hospital and I have sent them to Jehannam (hell).”
Asked what would happen if an Israeli patient entered the hospital, Abu Lebdeh says: “I will not treat them, I will kill them.”
Ahmad Rashad is from Afghanistan, a country 3,083 kilometers from Israel, but Ahmad has continued to harbor a pathological hatred for Jews.
And then one wonders why Jews who go to Australian public hospitals hide their identities.
Don’t they know the “power of love”?
While nurses in Norway on October 7 chanted for Hamas and in New York they had to fire Palestinian nurses and doctors who chanted support for the massacre at the Nova Festival, in Belgium a doctor refused to treat an elderly Jewish woman, Bertha Klein from Antwerp. “Send her to Gaza for a few hours, you will see that she will not feel any pain anymore,” he said. Hershy Taffel, Bertha’s nephew who reported the episode, later declared: “What happened reminds me of what happened in Europe 70 years ago. I never thought it could happen again”.
Naive and ungrateful one, it is a beautiful world of love and hope. And Jewish patients should not be afraid to be admitted to European hospitals: they should close their eyes, everything will be fine.
In Antwerp, more than half of the primary school students are Muslims and if this trend continues a will be an Islamic city by 2050.
Let’s now talk about Farhad, the Afghan attacker in Munich.
Born in Kabul in 2001, like Rashad, he arrived in Germany from Italy as an “unaccompanied minor” at the end of 2016, but his asylum application was rejected. The young Afghan was granted a temporary residence permit and his deportation was suspended. He began his life in the magnificent German welfare system. He took part in the Bavarian Bodybuilding Championships. He has a very large following on social media: 33,000 followers on TikTok and 68,000 on Instagram. Many of his videos are accompanied by Islamic chants. In several photos he thanks “Allah, the Greatest”. He uses the emoji of the Kaaba in Mecca. He raises his index finger, the gesture of Islamists. He worked at Ralph Lauren in Munich.
Farhad was not doing badly. Better than many young Germans. Now German police say he had a “religious motive” for plowing his car into a crowd in Munich. It would be laughable if it weren’t all so tragic.
Europe is in grave, grave danger.
But let’s move forward with the power of love.
Farhad arrived in Germany during the same period as “the refugee girl who won over the Germans”, Reem. She was Palestinian Arab and had been chosen to speak to Angela Merkel in a school. The fruits of “diversity” had to be reaped. Reem had explained to the Chancellor that her father was unemployed because his residence permit was not being extended. Merkel had responded: “The procedures must be changed, we cannot wait that long. But not everyone will be able to stay”. And fourteen-year-old Reem burst into tears. Who hadn’t sympathized with the little refugee?
Ten years later, Reem is 24, they have given her German citizenship for the sake of “diversity” and now she publishes posts in which she says #fromtherivertothesea. And posts a map without Israel.
Reyaad Khan was born and raised in Europe and his story was also about the “power of love and hope”, obviously before he became one of the leaders of the English cell under the orders of the caliph Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. Reyaad said that another world is possible. “The world can be a lovely place, but you have to eliminate evil. If everyone chose good, evil would go away”. The same one who does not see anything wrong with cutting off heads, stoning women and crucifying Christians.
There is a photograph that portrays Reyaad in the company of Ed Balls, then Minister of Education of the United Kingdom, visiting the youth centre of Cardiff, a multicultural institute. At university Reyaad said he wanted to “become the first Asian minister of the United Kingdom”. He did not succeed, so he thought of killing Queen Elizabeth.
Rashad, Reem, Reyaad, Farhad…
Years and then decades will pass, in the meantime fortune and well-being will have produced a civilization heir to Voltaire’s Candide, incapable of seeing the world and civilizations for what they are. So in the end we will all live in a great Antwerp where “diversity will be our strength” and nothing will be able to stop the “power of love and hope,” certainly not your life.
A trans-identified male in New Jersey is suing a Korean health spa after being denied access to the women’s nude area. Alexandra “Allie” Goebert first launched the discrimination suit against King Spa in Palisades Park in 2022, and is now moving to obtain compensation from the spa on the grounds of violating the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination.
According to newly-filed court records, the incident occurred in August of 2022 when Goebert visited the location with a female companion. Upon registration, Goebert was provided wristband granting him access to the men’s locker room instead of the women’s. Goebert immediately complained, telling staff he was a “transgender woman” and was legally recognized as “female” by the state of New Jersey.
After making a phone call, the staff member gave Goebert access to the restricted women’s area. But after entering, Goebert came to the attention of a locker room attendant who quickly called the manager. The manager then began to question whether Goebert had undergone genital surgeries, at one point asking if Goebert still had “boy parts.”
From the suit filed by Goebert against King Spa.
Goebert responded that he did not have “boy parts” because he is a “woman,” implying that he had attempted to argue his penis was not an inherently male anatomy. But the manager continued to press on whether he had changed his anatomy, to which Goebert eventually admitted he was fully intact. The manager then told Goebert he needed to leave the female area of the spa.
King Spa is a venue modeling itself after a jimjilbang, a traditional Korean health facility which requires nudity in some areas. For that reason, the nude areas of the spa were strictly sex-segregated.
After being told to use the men’s side of the spa, Goebert protested and said he would be uncomfortable in the men’s area because he identified as a woman.
The manager then went to get the General Manager, Youn Park, who attempted to make a concession for Goebert in the form of allowing him to use the women’s area, but only if he wore a bathing suit. Goebert refused, stating he did not have a bathing suit to wear and accused the spa of being in violation of the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination. He was offered a refund on his admission and told to leave.
Less than two months later, Goebert, who is a US Army Veteran and law school graduate, filed a complaint against the spa with the state’s Department of Law and Public Safety.
Throughout the course of the proceedings, Goebert’s counsel has complained that King Spa has “misgendered” him in court filings.
From the suit filed by Goebert.
In their position statement, lawyers for King Spa explained that Goebert had previously attended the spa and presented ID with his sex listed as “male,” prompting confusion from staff.
“When the agent, servant, and employee of [the spa] saw that the license indicating female and recognizing that this was the same individual who had utilized the male facilities, the question was posed as to has the front changed,” the position statement reads.
“This was an attempt at not being insulting, but deemed a necessity given that there are many other male and female customers who utilize the Spa and do so in the nude. Once this individual indicated that he had not change his front, to wit, that he had male genitalia, the agent, servant, and employee of [the Spa] made a reasonable accommodation. They indicated that the individual could certainly use the facilities, but not in the female nude area. To do otherwise would simply cause havoc and expose all the other nude females to a fundamental invasion of their privacy and certainly expose the [spa] to extensive liability for the same.”
The position statement also notes that there is an apparent exception in New Jersey’s statues denoting that public places are allowed to impose “reasonable restrictions” where facilities are reserved for “individuals of one sex,” such as summer camps, day camps, resort camps, bathhouses, dressing rooms, and more.
This exception has been challenged by Goebert’s lawyers, who claim the single-sex provision does not entitle facilities to discriminate on the basis of gender identity.”
Alexandra Goebert. Photo: X/TWITTER
“Nowhere in the LAD is there an exclusion for the wholly-fabricated ‘invasion of privacy’ or ‘extreme emotional distress’ the Defendant is convinced would befall all of the other female guests of the spa were [Goebert’s] gender identity to be respected,” Goebert’s lawyers claimed.
On February 14, 2025, Goebert’s counsel moved to request the court enter judgement in Goebert’s favor, and allow the matter to proceed to a jury trial to determine how much compensation he is entitled to.
While Goebert has now deleted most of his social media presence, Reduxx found that his Instagram profile had followed a wide range of fetish-related accounts.
Among them are women’s lingerie company Honey Birdette and sex toy retailer Wet For Her. Hashtags followed by Goebert include “lesbian”, “boyinadress”, “menindresses”, and the misspelled “nuedisnormal”, which features photos of naked or nearly-naked women, often in sexualized poses.
Goebert’s lawsuit is not the first involving a trans-identified male lashing out at a Korean bathing establishment due to its sex-segregated policies.
In 2023, a court in Seattle, Washington, ruled that a female-only nude spa lacked the “constitutional right” to bar males from their facilities. The decision came after the spa sued the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC), which had forced them to change their sex-exclusive policy due to the complaint of a transgender patron.
The complaint was made by Haven Wilvich, who had sought a membership at the Olympus Spa in January of 2020, but had been denied on the basis that he had not undergone “gender reassignment” surgeries and his penis was fully intact. The WSHRC ruled in Wilvich’s favor, and demanded Olympus Spa revise its policies to ensure trans-identified males who claimed a female identity could access the female nude areas.
In March of 2022, Olympus Spa sued Andreta Armstrong, the executive director of the Washington State Human Rights Commission, asserting that the actions taken against them violated their First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of association.
But a Washington District Court dismissed their lawsuit in January of 2023, upholding the ruling by the WSHRC and affirming that the measures taken to prevent the spa from having a female-only policy were lawful.
The arrival of the Bayrou government in office coincided with the accelerated implementation of a new, openly militant sex education programme in French schools, completely excluding parents from the process. Despite the mobilisation of parents’ associations, there is no indication that the Ministry of Education intends to back down.
All the indicators are red; the skill level of young French children is plummeting year after year; the basics—reading, writing, arithmetic—are not mastered by the time they start secondary school; but the stated priority of the Ministry of Education is “relational, sexual and emotional” education.
The new sex education curriculum has been in the works for almost two years. The project was created on the initiative of former Education Minister Pap Ndiaye, known for his militant progressivism, who made it one of his priorities.
An initial version, made public in December 2024 by the previous government, raised concerns among parents and family associations. Even the then-minister for school success, Alexandre Portier, expressed his reservations at the time—before being pilloried by the press and teachers’ unions for being too conservative.
In the meantime, the government fell apart. Portier was not reappointed to his post, and a new minister of education arrived in the person of Élisabeth Borne, former prime minister. The learning framework has been reworked—and the changes made do nothing to correct the flaws already observed in the previous version.
35,000 people had signed a petition calling for a revision of the text. They were not heard, and the Higher Council for Education (Conseil supérieur de l’éducation) has just definitively validated an extremely worrying curriculum, which is to be applied in all French schools from the next school year—whether they are state schools or private ones under contract with the state.
A symbolic and particularly revealing element sets the tone for the spirit in which the course of study was conceived. Parents were supposed to be informed in advance of the “education in emotional, relational and sexual life” (Education à la vie affective, relationnelle et sexuelle, or EVARS) sessions, but this clause has been removed. The refusal to inform parents about what their children will be told shows that the forces behind the development of this programme know full well that it is a militant tool that does not respect the basic principles of healthy pedagogical neutrality on highly sensitive subjects.
The stated objectives were to strengthen equality between men and women, to combat violence, and to raise awareness of harassment from an early age. But the means used are clearly inappropriate, even counterproductive. The Syndicat de la famille (Family Union), an offshoot of the La Manif Pour Tous movement formed at the time of the adoption of same-sex marriage, has carried out an in-depth analysis of the course outline.
The fight against gender inequality is transformed, from nursery school onwards, into a systematic deconstruction of images of the feminine and masculine in young children: “on the obviously laudable grounds of equality, the fight against gender stereotypes is omnipresent from nursery school onwards, in the form of a systematic challenge to all the mental representations that children may have of the feminine and masculine,” the Family Union’s report laments.
Despite the protests of the curriculum’s editors—for whom “gender theory does not exist”—pride of place is given to an ideology which deliberately disconnects sex and gender, to make students think that gender (i.e., the social and cultural expression of sexual identity) is totally independent of sex (biological).
Beyond its practical recommendations, the teaching plan claims to fight against extremely serious problems currently blighting childhood and the adult world—sexual violence, harassment—but is unable to produce an alternative positive discourse that allows young people in the process of developing their personality to envision positive and inspiring values. Nothing on the couple, nothing on motherhood, nothing on fatherhood. The programme prides itself on considering relationships not only in sexual terms but also in ‘relational and emotional’ terms but is reluctant to connect love and sexuality—a necessarily retrograde vision in the eyes of its writers—not to mention the connection between love, sexuality, and family.
The document reveals the total and systematic evacuation of any form of morality. Thus, the notion of consent, so beloved of the progressive Left and brought to the fore by the “#me too” movement, is reduced to a banal dichotomy: I want to / I don’t want to—without any reflection on the merits of the act, for oneself, for the other, or on the harmony to be sought between the body and the heart. This sketches a sad and dreary landscape where depression and suicide attempts among young people can boom. If no one speaks to them seriously and no one cares about offering them an inspiring ideal and a real prospect of fulfilment, how can we be surprised?
The scourge of pornography, which does so much damage to teenagers and children alike—and at an increasingly early age—is totally underestimated, because here again, a firm condemnation of its ravages implies the integration of a moral reflection. We now know full well that children as young as primary school age are already being exposed to pornography, but the curriculum does not address this until the 4th year (13-year-olds), with a guilty shyness. Let us be logical: moral safeguards cannot be put in place when those behind the instructional content claim to be ‘taboo-free’ and advocate unbridled sexual liberation—which gives rise to the very ills they claim to be fighting.
Finally, we note the predictable but oh-so-dangerous complacency towards transgenderism and gender transition among young people: nothing on the dangers of puberty blockers, nothing on the risks of hormone intake and gender reassignment surgery. If gender has nothing to do with biology, then anything goes, and information on these subjects will, unsurprisingly, be left in the hands of duly blessed militant associations and authorized and recommended by the Ministry of National Education.
A curriculum of similar substance has already been implemented in French-speaking Belgium. Four administrative appeals for the annulment of the educational plan are pending before the Belgian constitutional court. In France, teachers’ unions are crying out against the “fundamentalist offensive” protesting the new plan. In terms of fundamentalism, it is simply a matter of recalling Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”
The debate over free speech in Germany has taken a new turn following the case of Markus Roscher, a 61-year-old lawyer from Braunschweig, who was fined €3,000 for criticizing the government’s heating law.
Roscher described Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock as “malicious failures” in a post on X back in 2021. He was subsequently issued a penalty notice under the controversial Paragraph 188 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalized defamation against individuals engaged in public political life.
Roscher, who has been active on X for over 14 years and is well accustomed to the legal boundaries surrounding political debate, insists that his post was within the bounds of political criticism.
“I actually know myself to be quite well within the red lines,” he told Bild. “You have to formulate things pointedly to be heard. The lines of freedom of opinion have slipped with the red-green government (ed. the coalition of Social Democrats and Greens).” He further described his hefty fine as a “scandal for freedom of expression.”
Paragraph 188, introduced in April 2021, criminalizes insults against politicians if they significantly hinder their public work. It was initially passed under a coalition government of the CDU and SPD but has been increasingly enforced under the current administration. The law has led to numerous prosecutions against individuals who have criticized government officials online.
In Roscher’s case, the penalty order claimed that his statements portrayed politicians as “corrupt, stupid, and arrogant,” constituting “abusive criticism” that allegedly impeded their political activity. Following the charge, authorities also moved to revoke his gun license, citing “unreliability.”
Furthermore, his case was forwarded to the Kassel and Braunschweig Bar Associations, raising concerns that he could face professional sanctions. “If I now claim the same or something similar and get another conviction exceeding 90 daily rates, I can lose my license,” Roscher warned. “Then you get a job ban as a 61-year-old lawyer!”
Roscher believes that his support for the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) has played a pivotal role in his prosecution. He asserts that the penalty order was politically motivated, arguing that he stood little chance in a legal battle, which led him to pay the fine without challenging it in the courts.
The scrutiny of political affiliations within Germany’s public sector was also highlighted by a leaked memo last month revealing that federal police officers who join or actively support the AfD could face disciplinary action, including dismissal. The memo cited a decree by Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, explicitly stating that officers suspected of affiliation with the party could see their employment terminated.
The controversy has drawn international attention from U.S. billionaire Elon Musk and most recently from U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who labeled Germany’s online speech laws this week as “Orwellian.” Responding to a CBS “60 Minutes” interview with German prosecutors, Vance argued that Germany was effectively “criminalizing speech” and urged Europeans to “reject this lunacy.”
Roscher’s case is part of a broader pattern of speech-related prosecutions in Germany. Other recent incidents include a Lower Saxony man, Daniel Kindl, who was fined €1,800 for allegedly insulting Green Party MP Janosch Dahmen in an online post. Kindl’s remark, which dismissed Dahmen’s concerns about an alleged attack on Robert Habeck, was deemed criminal by prosecutors.
Several other individuals have faced legal consequences for online speech. A pensioner was fined €800 for a satirical comment about Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, joking that she had hit her head too many times on a trampoline. Another was arrested for retweeting a meme that called Economy Minister Robert Habeck an “idiot,” classified as a “politically motivated right-wing crime.” A Bavarian woman was fined €6,000 for calling Baerbock a “hollow brat” but was later acquitted after a lengthy legal process. Additionally, a civil engineer was sentenced to 30 days in jail after failing to appeal a fine for calling SPD politician Manuela Schwesig a “storyteller.”
A few months after taking office at the municipal council of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, Mohammed Kalandar is in trouble and his office seems to be on the brink of collapse. Will Mohammed Kalandar be able to weather the turmoil that started on Tuesday the 18th of February? La Libre uncovered old statements in which the Molenbeek councillor for sport and health made polemical remarks that the RTBF equated with ‘extremism’, in this case Islamist extremism. Local politicians let the press know that the maintenance of the municipal majority could be in danger.
Mohammed Kalandar, who comes from Iraq, was already denounced for this reason on the 22 January, when the Belgian parliament questioned him about a text message from 2020 in which he welcomed the capture of his hometown of Mosul by the Shiite militia Hashd al-Shaabi. At the time, he had stated that he was mainly celebrating the expulsion of the Islamic State from that city and that he knew nothing of the human rights violations committed by Hashd al-Shaabi. His apology was approved by the local council.
Only this Tuesday, the alderman’s past resurfaced. In 2014, he celebrated the assassination of a Danish cartoonist who had cartooned Muhammad: ‘Please publish this information because a sister in Palestine had a vision that God will make anyone who publishes this information happy […] Time brings great joy, but he who endeavours to resist will suffer great sorrow,’ he wrote. Two years earlier, he had also shared a photo showing Bashar Al Assad, Hassan Nasrallah and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the leaders of Syria, Hezbollah and Iran, respectively representatives of the Shiite axis formed by Tehran.
Mohammed Kalandar admits that he ‘used social networks inappropriately’ and that he would no longer do so today. Nevertheless, several party members are likely to call for the deputy’s removal from office, as members of the local section of the Socialist Party confided to the newspaper Le Soir. One socialist MP even assured the RTBF that there would otherwise no longer be a majority. The mayor Catherine Moureaux (PS) has not yet reacted officially.
Vienna’s Westbahnhof railway station…Austria’s constitutional police say they have prevented a planned Islamist attack on Vienna’s Westbahnhof railway station. The suspect is a 14-year-old Austrian, according to the Interior Ministry. Wien Westbahnhof – Google Maps
According to their own statements, Austria’s constitutional protectors have prevented a planned Islamist attack on Vienna’s Westbahnhof train station.
The suspect is a 14-year-old Austrian who was arrested on February 10, according to the Ministry of the Interior.
According to the ministry, the teenager’s plans were very concrete. During a house search, sketches of attacks with knives and machetes on a train station and on police officers were found. Instructions for the production of explosive material to be used as a detonator for a bomb were also seized. Aluminum pipes and knives were also discovered during the house search.
The suspect refused to make a statement, according to the Ministry of the Interior. The constitution protection authority DSN had become aware of him after he had allegedly distributed Islamist content on the video platform Tiktok. On Saturday, a 23-year-old Syrian attacked people with a knife in the Austrian town of Villach, killing a teenager and injuring several people. Investigators also assume an Islamist background in this case.
German state broadcaster ARD has come under fire for allowing a Greens party politician, misrepresented as an “ordinary citizen”, to attack Alice Weidel, leader of the right-wing AfD party, on air with baseless claims about her party wanting to throw gay people into concentration camps.
In the Wahlarena on February 17, the 150-person studio audience could pose questions directly to the candidates of the four main parties – the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Social Democratic Party (SPD), AfD and the Greens – who will stand in the German general election on February 23.
The goal of the show was supposedly to “put the worries, problems and requests of citizens into the centre”. The questioners were selected seemingly at random by the show’s hosts.
After CDU Friedrich Merz and Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), Alice Weidel, leader of the right-wing AfD, entered the studio to face the questions of the gathered “citizens”.
First, a hospital priest from Kiel complained about the party’s demands for “remigration”, claiming it scared away nurses from India and Afghanistan who “were willing to integrate themselves in Germany”.
Weidel answered that it was important to distinguish between asylum seekers and skilled workers whom the German economy needed.
Then the microphone was passed to a young man who presented himself as merely as Samuel Everding from Hamelin, a mid-sized town near Hanover.
“My question concerns the future of this country,” he said. “If I look at your party’s programme I am scared. I am homosexual and I am scared. You should also be scared!,” he continued.
“Why so,” asked Weidel.
“Because members of your party want to throw homosexuals in prison or into a concentration camp. How can you as a homosexual be a member of this party?,” Everding continued.
Weidel is homosexual and has been in a relationship with her female partner since 2009.
“That is a real credibility issue. You represent everything AfD does not stand for. Why do you then want to implement these policies? How do you want to win over us young people?,” Everding asked.
Weidel ,who seemed taken aback by the accusations, answered that the AfD’s main goal was to give young people a perspective and a future.
“We want young people to be able to grow up in freedom and build their own fortune without being encroached by the state,” she concluded before moving on to the next question.
The accusation that the AfD would want to put homosexual people into concentration camps was left unchallenged by the show’s hosts.
Observers have since pointed out that Everding was in fact not an “ordinary apolitical citizen” but a Greens party politician.
He is a member of the Greens’ leadership panel in the Hamelin area. On the local party’s homepage he was quoted as saying: “We want to start innovative actions to get in touch with citizens directly.”
Other guests included a doctor worried about ever-more patients suffering from climate-related health issues and a young farmer who was also concerned about climate change – he was an activist for the leftist Fridays for Future movement, which was not disclosed on air.
The revelations have caused a storm of criticism. Hugo Müller-Vogg, former co-publisher of German newspaper FAZ, wrote on X on February 18: “The brutality with which the political activists in public broadcasting act in favour of Red-Green is remarkable”.
The Everding incident fitted with a long list of similar apparent misrepresentations. German state broadcasters have a long history of passing off leftist politicians and their own employees or paid actors as seemingly “ordinary citizens” who spout Socialist or Greens party talking points.
The show’s hosts, journalists Louis Klamroth and Jessy Wellmer, have also both been accused of partisanship in the past.
Wellmer is married to Sven Siebert, former press secretary of Ramona Pop, a Greens politician in Berlin.
Klamroth is married to climate activist Luisa Neubauer, another prominent Greens party member.
Klamroth recently caused outrage when, during another ARD show, he said refugees should not be blamed for the rise in gang rapes committed by foreigners in Germany as the culprits might also be “Australian exchange students”.
Video footage taken outside an abortion facility in Scotland shows police confronting a woman standing silently on the street as they enforce the country’s new abortion “buffer zone” law.
Just days after U.S. Vice President JD Vance called out the Scottish government over the censorious “Safe Access” law – which he decried as implementing “thoughtcrime” by outlawing “private prayer” – Rose Docherty was targeted by police while standing silently outside the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, and holding a sign which read: “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.”
🚨BREAKING🚨: Scottish police filmed applying “buffer zone” law to “silent vigil”, despite recent denials from the Scottish government! 👮♂️
“Am I committing an offence?”
“Yes, I believe you are conducting a silent vigil”
Following Vance’s comments criticizing the law, Scottish National Party representative Neil Gray said the American leader’s statement was “ludicrous,” while a government spokesman said that the people of Scotland “continue to have the right to protest and to free speech.”
However, video footage taken on Tuesday morning shows two police officers reading details of the “Safe Access Zones Act” to Docherty: “Examples of what would be classed as breaching the act would be approaching someone trying to persuade them not to access abortion services, surrounding people as they go in and out of the clinic, handing out leaflets, religious preaching, silent vigils.”
“So standing here saying nothing is a silent vigil,” the officer stated.
In response, Docherty noted that she was “just pointing out that coercion is against the law and that if anyone wants to come and speak to me they can. I’m not doing anything else.”
“I’m here to say that if anyone wants to come to speak to me of their own volition they can,” she added.
The policeman suggested that “there’s obviously a reason why you’re here; why you’re in this area” and that Docherty had historically participated in protests against abortion, before advising her “to move away from this area.”
Asking the officer if she was committing an offense by her silent presence, one of the officer’s responded: “Yes, I believe you are conducting a silent vigil, so I believe you would be [committing an offense].”
The “Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) (Scotland) Act 2024” came into effect on September 24 last year and establishes 200 m (656 ft.) “buffer zones” around abortion centers in Scotland wherein any act considered an impediment to “safe access” to the facility is now criminal.
According to the act, behaviour considered likely to “influence someone’s private decision to use abortion services, prevent or get in the way of someone using abortion services [or] harass or distress someone trying to use abortion services” is prohibited under law.
“Holding silent vigils” and “handing out leaflets” have been blacklisted as contravening the “buffer zone” law, including on private property. Praying silently inside one’s own home, therefore, could fall foul of the censorious law.
Penalties for breaking the ruling include fines of “up to £10,000 ($12,600) under summary procedure or to an unlimited amount under solemn procedure,” according to the Scottish government.
The video lasts one minute and 45 seconds and is full of controversy! An argument between a master baker and a Muslim customer escalated in Swabia. The police are now investigating racism, death threats and a smashed shop window. In the video, baker Frank Montagnese (60) can clearly be heard getting upset about customer Aisa S.’s face veil (nikab). ‘We’re not in the Middle Ages here,’ the owner scolds her twice and asks the woman to leave his shop. The businessman from the small town of Ditzingen ( in the state of Baden-Württemberg) with a population of 25,000 gets louder and louder, finally shouting: ‘You and your Muslim shit!’ However, Aisa S. is not squeamish either. The Bosnian Muslim woman calls the baker an ‘anti-social pack’ and later publishes calls for a boycott on social media. A storm of indignation followed, and her mobile phone video was clicked on 200,000 times on TikTok alone, with hateful comments. Users called for the master baker to be murdered (‘We won’t let someone like you live’) and demanded that his shop be burnt down.
Two days later, an unknown person smashes the window of Montagnese’s bakery in the Hirschlanden district of Ditzingen at night. Damage: around 3000 euros. The master baker, son of an Italian migrant worker and a German, told the newspaper BILD: ‘I regret that I said “Muslim shit”. Everything else is fine.’
Die Polizei ermittelt gegen alle Beteiligten, auch gegen die Internet-User, die zu Straftaten gegen Montagnese aufgerufen haben.
Montagnese: ‘I respect all religions and cultures, but I don’t want anyone wearing a face veil in my shop. That doesn’t fit in with Germany. Customers and employees feel uncomfortable, and the interior is under video surveillance. In an emergency, I need to know who I’m dealing with.’ Aisa S. could not be reached for comment. However, she is trying to contain the storm again, writing on the Internet: ‘Please don’t smash any windows or call the bakery.’
