Antisemitism, Antizionism, Jihadism and the Reunited Germany. News by Fred Alan Medforth
On today’s #NCFNewspeak, NCF Director Peter Whittle, Senior Fellows Dr. Philip Kiszely & Rafe Heydel-Mankoo and Amy Gallagher of Stand Up To Woke discuss:
Patients in Great Britain are speaking out about the injuries they experienced after receiving COVID-19 vaccines, with some going so far as to allege a link between the controversial shots and cancer diagnoses.
The Daily Mail reported that 16,824 claims have been submitted to the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS), and 188 Brits so far have received compensation for vaccine-related ailments as of the end of November 2024 at a maximum of £120,000 apiece (potentially reaching a total of more than £22 million). Most claims have been denied, but 8,018 are still pending.
The vast majority of the claims were linked to the AstraZeneca COVID shot, which was widely used in Europe but not in the United States. Last year, the company withdrew its vaccine worldwide; AstraZeneca insisted the move was for business reasons, but it shortly followed a wave of lawsuits from families over reported injuries due to the shot as well as a court ruling linking it to serious blood clotting.
In its latest report, the Mail tells the stories of several applicants, arguably the most concerning of which is 38-year-old bank fraud investigator Jennifer Furno’s. She received her first AstraZeneca shot in March 2021 and a second four months later. Shortly after the follow-up, she began suffering from leg tingling and numbness, gastric distress, and mild rashes, and was later found to have a blood clot on her lung.
Not yet considering a connection, Furno took a Moderna COVID booter in November 2021, and later the same month experienced worsening rashes, limb and joint swelling, and a pulmonary embolism on her lung.
A doctor initially diagnosed her with “an over-active immune response,” but despite taking immune suppressing medications her symptom continued to worsen. “’I was convinced it was some sort of cancer. I felt so unwell,” she recalled.
In December 2022, one rheumatologist finally told her that there did “appear to be a temporal link between the onset of her symptoms and her first COVID-19 vaccine dose,” and the following July the London Clinic performed a skin biopsy that found “aggressive” blood cancer, specifically cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. “The vaccine is likely the causative thing, something like this it can trigger,” she says she was told.
Thankfully, she was eventually able to secure a bone marrow transplant and reported, “I’m now cancer-free, vaccine-free.” Her injury claim has not yet received a verdict.
“Certainly, hospitals and doctors are not believing young people who were fit and healthy before,” Furno says. “Young people need to be listened to and not judged as being health anxious. There needs to be less of a stigma about vaccine injuries and that it is recognised condition that needs treatment.”
A large body of evidence has indicated serious problems with both the safety and effectiveness of the COVID shots, about which the federal government and medical establishment have been evasive and dismissive.
In America, the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 38,264 deaths, 219,594 hospitalizations, 22,134 heart attacks, and 28,814 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of December 27, among other ailments. CDC researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
An analysis of 99 million people across eight countries published in February in the journal Vaccine “observed significantly higher risks of myocarditis following the first, second and third doses” of mRNA-based COVID vaccines as well as signs of increased risk of “pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis,” and other “potential safety signals that require further investigation.” In April, the CDC was forced to release by court order 780,000 previously undisclosed reports of serious adverse reactions, and a study out of Japan found “statistically significant increases” in cancer deaths after third doses of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines and offered several theories for a causal link.
In January, a long-awaited Florida grand jury report on the COVID vaccine manufacturers found that while a low percentage of the millions of vaccinations resulted in serious harm based on the data it had access to, such events do occur, and there are “profound and serious issues” in pharmaceutical companies’ review process, including reluctance to share what evidence of adverse events they did find.
Salwan Momika, an Assyrian Catholic refugee from Iraq, was murdered in Sweden by Muslim terrorists.
Momika, like many dissidents, knew that the track he was following by protesting against Islam would lead to his death. “I know very well that Muslims will kill me one day, but I am not afraid and I will not back down from my principles and defending Sweden and the West, and I am ready to pay the price for that,” he wrote.
Before his murder, the Swedish justice system had dragged Momika through a trial for burning Korans. That trial likely helped bring him to the attention of his killers and led directly to his murders.
Even though Momika had come from Iraq, he was accused of racism and put on trial. This was likely done to silence him and appease Sweden’s growing violent Muslim colonial population and the Islamic terrorist state of Turkey.
In death, the media covered him by implying he was a bigot.
The Washington Post whose infamous obituary for the Caliph of ISIS described him as an “austere religious scholar” dismissed Momika as an “Iraqi at the center of Koran burnings shot dead before court verdict” while the New York Times headlined its story “Salwan Momika, Man Behind Quran Burning in Sweden, Is Killed”.
Media outlets tend to cover Koran-burning protests as acts of hate. And that’s one way to look at them. Most people believe that other people’s holy books shouldn’t be burned and that’s a reasonable position. Burning those books seems like an act of hate.
But Momika was burning the Koran to draw attention to exactly what happened to him. Muslims call their terrorists ‘martyrs’, but Momika was an actual martyr willing to die to warn the West of what was coming.
He died, along with many others, to wake us up.
The tension at the heart of Koran burning is that religion within Islam is not a private matter, it is a matter of inflexible theocracy that demands the murder and enslavement of non-Muslims, the suppression of women and every evil we see from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan to Iran to Afghanistan.
Burn a Bible and Christians and Jews will be outraged, but they won’t kill you. Muslims will kill you for burning a Koran, but not just burning a Koran. The list of things they will kill you for is as long as the texts of Islamic Sharia law. That is the hard unhappy reality the West is up against.
As a refugee from an Islamic theocracy, Salwan Momika, like dissidents the world over, burned the Koran to be free even knowing, as many in Iran do, that doing so would likely cost him his life. Burning Korans, like women in Iran removing hijabs, is not an act of hate, it is a love of freedom. In those flames, they defy tyranny and declare that they would rather die as free men and women than live as miserable slaves of Allah.
Salwan Momika’s protests were flames of freedom. His death is another desperate warning that the time is drawing near where we will all have to choose between freedom and slavery.
The Murder of Salwan Momika and Why Koran Burning Matters | Frontpage Mag
A prominent surrogacy agency in Europe is under investigation following accusations that its pedophile owner sexually assaulted an employee. José María Hill Prados, 63, is being accused of forcing a young employee to perform sexual acts as part of his employment with Gestlife.
Gestlife is one of the largest surrogacy firms in Europe, operating offices in 11 countries dedicated to facilitating child exchange contracts. On its site, it boasts that it has helped “2100 children be born,” and that over 55% of its clientele are “LGBTQIA+ couples.” But authorities in Barcelona are now investigating the company after an employee came forward to accuse the owner of sexual assault.
According to the complaint, the 20-year-old victim, who will be referred to as Alejandro, was in a precarious financial situation when he came upon a job advertisement on Instagram which promised regular work with a stable income. His confidence was bolstered by the fact that he knew the job offer to have associations in the “gay world.”
Interested in applying for the position, Alejandro responded to the advertisement and was connected with a man named “Albert,” who was in fact Gestlife’s owner, José María Hill Prados, using a false name. The two began chatting over Telegram via messages which automatically set to be deleted after 60 seconds.
During their conversation, Prados, as “Albert,” offered Alejandro employment “in exchange for him maintaining a sexual relationship with the head of the company,” referring to himself. Because Alejandro was struggling to make ends meet, and the salary far exceeded his current compensation, he accepted the job.
At the time, in April 2021, Alejandro did not have many friends, and similarly lacked a strong relationship with family members, making him particularly vulnerable to influence.
Alejandro was then scheduled for another interview with Prados, this time in person, who once again took on a fake identity of “Diego.” Under the false identity, Prados questioned Alejandro about his sexual interests and if he would be “willing to let himself be penetrated.” Prados also stated that the victim must agree to sexual intercourse once a week.
However, over time, the situation worsened. Prados took Alejandro to his home in Premià de Dalt, Barcelona, where he sexually assaulted the young man in order to “verify” that the nature of his employment contract was “understood.” Prados then contracted Alejandro as an office worker for Gestlife.
Prado’s demands for “sexual favors” quickly became constant, and Alejandro was forced to endure being raped by the convicted pedophile several times a week while also being threatened by him. In his legal complaint, Alejandro states that he was raped by Prados repeatedly, even after he asked him to stop, and that the surrogacy business owner would, at times, refuse to wear a condom.
Though Prados continued to use the fake identity of “Diego,” Alejandro soon discovered his real name, and learned that Prados had previously been sentenced to eight years in prison for sexually abusing two children, and for creating illicit pornography of the acts he subjected them to.
As previously reported by Reduxx, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a Paris-based consortium of investigative journalists, exposed Prados as a serial child sexual abuser who, before entering the surrogacy industry, founded a Russian children’s foster organization called Padres para Siempre (Parents forever).
In 1996, Prados, who was 36 at the time, was investigated by a Barcelona court for the crime of corruption of minors and several more sexual assaults of which his four adopted children, aged between 12 and 17, were reported to be victims. However, the details of the case were sealed from the public.
Defense lawyer Jordi Rojo used Prados’ children, those he abused, to argue against his imprisonment, and told the court that his client “loves his children very much and is very concerned about what could happen to them now.” The four minors, two brothers aged 17 and 16 and another two boys aged 13 and 12, had been taken into the care of the Generalitat’s Children’s Department during the court proceedings.
On the day the children were expected to testify in court regarding the allegations, they suddenly backed down and denied that they had ever been sexually abused. As the children had not yet made a statement on the record, Prados could not be convicted.
But soon afterwards, in 2007, Prados was sentenced to eight years in prison for sexually abusing two children at the Casal Dels Infants del Raval center for minors in Barcelona. Prados was alleged to have exposed the children to pornographic films in order to groom them at his home in Cervelló, Spain, where he also sexually assaulted them. Prados was convicted of raping both of the children and for creating pornography of the assaults.
During court proceedings, it was alleged that there were more than 30 children who had been victims of rape and sexual abuse at the hands of Prados and nearly a dozen other men while he worked at the Casal Dels Infants del Raval. A total of 13 individuals were arrested in addition to Prados. It has come to be known as one of the most shocking modern pedophilia scandals in Barcelona.
The sentence was ultimately anonymized, with Prados’ identity being obscured as ‘Carlos Jesús’ by the court. However, his identity, along with the identity of one of the child victims, was later revealed after the boy came forward to recant his allegations and claim that he was pressured into making the accusations. But the judge disagreed, finding that there was sufficient evidence to sustain the conviction. Prados would go on to serve his full prison sentence.
In 2015, Prados set up a surrogacy company called Subrogalia based in Spain, according to corporate records. The company, one of over a dozen currently owned by Prados, was quickly mired in controversy and allegations of child trafficking.
Prados’ business partner in the ventures is Didac Giménez Sánchez, who has been revealed to have been one of the child victims Prados had been convicted of raping in 2007.
The OCCRP probe into Prados’ extensive criminal empire found that Subrogalia had been investigated in at least two countries out of the nine where it now operates. Alleged crimes include selling and trafficking of babies, in addition to providing clients with infants that were not biologically related to them.
Subrogalia has operations in as many as nine countries, according to the OCCRP, including Russia, Greece, and, briefly, Mexico. But the primary source of the company’s revenue can be traced to its clinics in Ukraine. The OCCRP investigation cites a former manager who said that, before the war, women in Ukraine bore approximately 100 babies annually for paying parents, each earning the company around €8,000 (approx. $8,600 USD) in profit.
Before the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, the Eastern European nation earned a reputation as an international hub for the sale of babies through surrogacy contracts. The industry has been known to target women who are struggling financially, offering them payments of approximately $11,000 for a healthy baby – more than three times the average yearly salary in Ukraine.
In order to distance the company from the litigation, Subrogalia Ukraine rebranded as Eurosurrogacy in 2017. Concurrently, Subrogalia Spain was renamed to Gestlife.
Prados’ enterprises have a specific focus on providing gay men children, and Gestlife boasts that the majority of its clients are gay couples and single men.
“More than 55% of our parents are single men, gay couples, or single gay men, who, at a certain point in their lives, have received the call of parenthood. Surrogacy for gay couples, or for single men, is the best way to achieve parenthood, due to the practical impossibility of a successful international adoption process. The number of surrogacy cases in Spain has, in the last two years, surpassed the number of international adoptions,” reads Gestlife’s website on a page aimed at “LGBT” customers.
Prados and Sánchez were also business partners with one of the largest IVF clinic chains in the world, the BioTexCom Clinic in Kiev, which has implanted embryos for about 95 percent of Eurosurrogacy’s Spanish clients.
In 2018, Sergii Antonov, a Kiev-based lawyer specializing in the medical field, told the press that of the estimated 2,000 infants born through surrogacy in Ukraine every year, nearly half were through BioTexCom.
BioTexCom told the press that its management was unaware of Prados’ criminal record when they went into business together. This claim is not entirely without merit: in addition to his surrogacy network, Prados is also the figure behind a shadowy corporation dedicated to burying and erasing incriminating information from the internet.
“We erase your past,” boasts Eliminalia, a business led by the convicted pedophile, which has netted millions in revenue over the past decade for restoring the online reputation of hundreds of clients who have been convicted and investigated in 54 countries for corruption, money laundering, sexual abuse and drug trafficking.
Earlier this month, Reduxx received a legal threat via email ostensibly sent on behalf of Diego Sánchez Giménez, the alias of Didac Giménez Sánchez, Prados’ victim and business partner. The email demanded the full retraction of Reduxx‘s article naming Prados and Sánchez.
“The content of the article links my client to criminal activities, specifically child trafficking, document forgery and fake marriages, in an unfounded and gravely defamatory manner, causing irreparable harm. These allegations are entirely false, lack evidentiary support, and have been refuted in various judicial instances,” read the email, which was signed Alvaro Rocha.
But while claiming to be a communications from “legal counsel”, the email was sent from a business address linked to a company known as iData Protection. Reduxx discovered that Prados had recently renamed his criminal online reputation enterprise Eliminalia to iData Protection – meaning that the legal threat demanding the removal of incriminating information about his various corporations had come directly from Prados himself.
A vote on a law to limit immigration to Germany failed to gain enough support in the parliament —the Bundestag—on Friday, January 31st. However, the debate surrounding the bill was almost entirely focused on the fact that for the second time in three days, the centre-right CDU/CSU had allowed the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party to support its proposals.
The leaders of the two governing parties, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens, put on a show of over-the-top emotional outbursts as they lambasted CDU leader Friedrich Merz for “opening the gates of hell.”
Their harsh criticism was aimed at the fact that a non-binding motion aimed at turning back illegal and undocumented migrants at the nation’s borders was passed on Wednesday—the first time in the history of the Bundestag that the AfD has been involved in gaining a majority. The vote marked a significant shift in German politics, as the centre-right had enabled the so-called firewall to crumble.
This was followed on Friday with the AfD supporting the CDU/CSU’s so-called Influx Limitation Act—a law that would have suspended family reunification for some migrants and granted police further powers to detain illegal migrants and people due for deportation.
The law was rejected, however, with 338 MPs voting for it and 350 rejecting it. Apart from the CDU/CSU and the AfD, the left-wing nationalist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht had expressed its support for the bill, as did members of the liberal FDP.
In the debate on Friday, Rolf Mützenich, the leader of the SDP parliamentary group, urged Friedrich Merz to “close the gateway to hell” and restore the ‘firewall’—the cordon sanitaire—against the AfD. The Greens’ foreign minister Annalena Baerbock called the AfD “smirking right-wing extremists,” and warned Merz not to go down the “path of Putin and Orbán.” She derided the migration proposals, saying that the economy “is desperately looking for skilled workers.”
Friedrich Merz defended his actions, emphasising that “there are many who are concerned about democracy, but there are many who are concerned about security and order in this country and expect decisions to be made.”
The motions introduced to the parliament are a response to the tragic knife attack in which a 2-year-old child and a 41-year-old man were killed last week in the city of Aschaffenburg. The incident is part of a troubling trend of knife-related crimes over the past year, predominantly involving Afghan and Syrian migrants—many of whom have evaded deportation due to lenient immigration policies.
Merz said he is forced to accept the votes of the AfD as the ruling parties refuse to find a common solution on toughening asylum laws. He reiterated, however, that he would never cooperate with the AfD, and would not enter into a coalition with them.
Despite the outrage feigned by the SPD and the Greens, a recent survey says 66% of Germans agree with the CDU/CSU’s proposals of rejecting migrants at the border. According to another survey, 48% of respondents don’t have a problem with the AfD’s participation in pushing through tougher migration laws, while only a third say that cooperation should be refused.
During Friday’s debate, AfD’s vice chairman Bernd Baumann criticised the CDU/CSU alliance for copying their migration policies and suddenly wanting to seem tough on migration less than four weeks before the elections.
The establishment parties deplore the AfD, their biggest political rival, which is riding high in the polls, and is expected to finish second in the upcoming national elections at the end of February.
The right-wing party, founded twelve years ago, has gained a lot of support due to its tough stance on immigration, and for calling out the current and previous governments for their incompetent handling of the economy and the energy crisis.
Vilifying both the party and its supporters, the mainstream political forces are actively using both political and legal methods to try and undermine the AfD’s credibility, with prominent politicians even suggesting banning the party outright.
The decision by the parliament on Wednesday to pass a motion with the aid of the AfD sparked such an excessive backlash that radical left-wing protesters have issued death threats against CDU politicians and damaged CDU party offices in different parts of the country. On Thursday evening, as a precaution, all employees of the party headquarters in Berlin were asked to leave the building before evening protests began outside.
Former CDU leader and chancellor Angela Merkel derided her successor Friedrich Merz for cooperating with the AfD, calling his tactical manoeuvre “wrong.” She said democratic parties seeking to prevent terrible attacks like the one in Aschaffenburg must work together “honestly, moderately in tone and on the basis of applicable European law.”
Merkel is responsible for shifting the traditionally conservative CDU to the left and for overseeing the influx of millions of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, resulting in terrorist acts, soaring crime rates, and the creation of no-go zones in larger cities.
The debates this week will surely leave a sour taste in the mouths of both the centre-right and the leftist parties. If the election frontrunner CDU/CSU does indeed intend to ignore the AfD following the elections on February 23rd, it will have to form a government with either the Social Democrats or the Greens, the third and fourth strongest party in the polls.Whether Friedrich Merz sticks to his guns on migration policy remains to be seen.
A 17-year-old Syrian refugee in Germany has been arrested on suspicion of raping a 34-year-old woman in Hannover during the early hours of Sunday morning. Authorities believe the suspect followed the woman from a train before attacking her in a secluded area.
The Hannover public prosecutor’s office confirmed the arrest, stating: “With regard to the youthful age of the suspect and the victim’s interests worthy of protection, we will not provide any further information.”
According to Bild, the suspect, identified as Abdulrahman A., had only been in Germany for a few months before the alleged attack.
On the night in question, he was reportedly traveling by train within the Hannover metropolitan area, where he noticed the victim.
The 34-year-old woman had attended an event and was heading home when she boarded the U3 line towards Altwarmbüchen at Hannover’s main train station. She exited the train at Paracelsusweg stop in the Bothfeld district (photo) around 3 a.m., unaware that the suspect had followed her.
Authorities suspect that the 17-year-old pursued her, overpowered her, and dragged her into nearby bushes, where the sexual assault allegedly took place. The location of the attack was just a few hundred meters from a police station.
After the assault, the suspect is believed to have returned to a refugee shelter located about a kilometer away by boarding another train.
Police investigators were able to quickly identify and track him down using footage from surveillance cameras on the train system.
So far, authorities report that the Syrian teenager has not made any statements regarding the allegations. Additionally, he was not previously known to law enforcement for any criminal activity.
The attack is the latest in a long line of incidents involving Syrian refugees in Germany.
This month alone, Remix News has reported on a 25-year-old Syrian man’s arrest after he caused panic at Dortmund’s main train station, arguing with passengers on a regional train and threatening to kill them before brandishing a replica AK-47 assault rifle.
In Schwerte, North Rhine-Westphalia, last week, three Syrian migrants were arrested for the brutal multiple stabbing of a Romanian teenager after tracking the boy down and stabbing him repeatedly in the back until he collapsed. They are being held on suspicion of attempted murder.
Another Syrian, 48-year-old Sakr B., has been causing mayhem in Berlin after a spree of attacks against German institutional buildings. This week he hurled a granite paving stone at the Paul Löbe House, which is where the German federal parliament meets, demanding the transfer of €21 billion to Palestine.
The future of Syrians in Europe has been under discussion following the fall of the former Assad regime, with many conservatives suggesting now is the time for those who fled the administration to return home.
Germany’s Interior Minister Nancy Faeser recently said that Syrian refugees should be able to travel to their home country in order to go on an “exploratory trip” to see if it is safe to return to their homeland permanently.
Our Senior Fellow Rafe Heydel-Mankoo joined TalkTV to discuss Labour MPs attending a dinner and accepting awards from the Muslim Council of Britain, an organisation that successive governments refuse to engage with. Also, the truth about Axel Rudakubana and the asylum system.
Vandals have desecrated the grave of the recently deceased Jean-Marie Le Pen in the cemetery of La Trinité-sur-Mer (Morbihan) where the co-founder of the French National Front was born.
Since the act of vandalism between January 30 and 31, the cemetery has been closed to the public.
The Celtic cross in the Le Pen family’s vault was destroyed, apparently with a sledgehammer.
Gendarmes and representatives of the town hall went to the site on on January 31.
“In Brittany, it was thought that respect for the dead was more important than anything. Apparently not. Cowardice is added to abjection,” National Rally (RN) MEP and regional councillor of Brittany, Gilles Pennelle told BFMTV.
Le Pen’s daughter Marine Le Pen is the de facto leader of RN, the modern incarnation of the National Front.
“There are no words to describe individuals who attack what is most sacred. Those who attack the dead are capable of the worst against the living,” she said on X.
Jean-Marie Le Pen was buried on January 11 in the town where he was born. His gravestone only carries the dates of his birth and death and his first name alone.
The mayor of La Trinité-sur-Mer, Yves Normand, told BFMTV he would not make “any statement on the vandalism of the Le Pen family’s grave”.
“The gendarmes have been on site since this morning to carry out investigations.”
France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen’s grave desecrated by vandals – Brussels Signal
A man in Germany has been ordered to pay a €1,800 fine for allegedly insulting Green Party MP Janosch Dahmen in the latest case of German citizens facing legal consequences for criticizing politicians online.
A year after posting a comment on social media, Daniel Kindl from Lower Saxony was slapped with a penalty order that arrived unexpectedly last week.
The charge stems from a post on X Kindl wrote on Jan. 4, 2024, in response to Dahmen’s concerns over an alleged attack on Economic Minister Robert Habeck in Schlüttsiel. The incident was later deemed exaggerated, with reports indicating that farmers had merely staged a protest over the left-wing government’s environmental policies rather than engaging in violence.
In his post, Dahmen expressed his dismay at the political climate amid a rise in civil unrest against the federal government. He wrote, “I don’t like to imagine Robert Habeck’s concerns for his family and the security authorities in the face of such situations. Such attempts to assert themselves with volume and intimidation in our democracy must stop!”
Kindl replied with, “Heul leise, du Lappen, das ist erst der Anfang” which roughly translates to, “Cry quietly, you rag, this is just the beginning.”
According to Dahmen and prosecutors, this constituted an insult, and the left-wing politician filed an official criminal complaint against Kindl on Feb. 19, 2024.
Kindl, who resides in a village near Hanover, defended his remark, stating that it was meant to express the frustrations of rural citizens over government policies impacting farmers.
Speaking to Nius, he said: “At that time, it was already known that the attack on Habeck had not happened as widely claimed by the Greens. The farmers were simply protesting and voicing their displeasure. With my tweet, I wanted to make it clear that we rural citizens will continue to stand against hostile politics in the future.”
In December — more than 10 months after the post — police contacted Kindl regarding the case. He sought legal representation and refrained from making a statement. Despite his lawyer’s request for case files, none were provided before the penalty order was issued. Kindl has vowed not to pay the fine and has escalated the matter to his legal team.
The fine consists of 30 daily rates of €60 each, plus €81 in court costs.
The case is part of a growing trend in Germany, where citizens have been fined or even imprisoned for remarks directed at political figures.
Other recent cases include a German pensioner who was fined €800 for submitting a satirical comment about Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock through the Foreign Office’s online contact form, where he jokingly claimed she had hit her head too many times against a ceiling jumping on a trampoline.
In November last year, another pensioner was arrested after retweeting a meme of Green Economy Minister Robert Habeck, which referred to him as an “idiot.” The case was recorded as a “politically motivated right-wing crime.”
A Bavarian woman who fought her initial €6,000 fine for calling Baerbock a “hollow brat” on X was acquitted late last year after nearly two years of legal proceedings.
Also recently, a civil engineer from Lower Saxony was sentenced to 30 days in jail for failing to appeal a fine he received after calling SPD politician Manuela Schwesig a “storyteller” and accusing her of spreading misinformation.
The convictions aren’t just reserved for comments against politicians, however.
German police raided the home of a 14-year-old boy in Bavaria last month after he allegedly posted the hashtag #AllesFürDeutschland (“Everything for Germany”), a phrase now deemed controversial.
Similarly, a German man who described a judge as “obviously mentally disturbed” — after the judge issued a light sentence to a Syrian who raped a 15-year-old girl — was slapped with a €5,000 fine for “insulting” the judge.
The increasing number of prosecutions has sparked concerns about freedom of expression in Germany. A November 2024 survey by pollster Insa revealed that 74 percent of Germans believe people are self-censoring out of fear of legal repercussions, with younger and right-leaning citizens particularly affected.
https://rmx.news/article/man-fined-e1800-for-insulting-german-greens-mp-on-x/
Bad Kreuznach county in the German State of Rhineland-Palatinate has been paying €40,000 per month for private security services to monitor an allegedly aggressive asylum seeker around the clock, it has been revealed.
Lengthy appeals to authorities to deport the man whose asylum claim had been rejected had until recently reportedly fallen on deaf ears.
The 20-year-old unnamed Afghan came to the area close to Frankfurt/Main in September 2023 and was first housed in a shared living facility in the municipality Rüdesheim.
Whilst there, claimed Markus Lüttger, mayor of the town: “He attacked his roommates with a stick, smashed crockery and destroyed windowpanes.”
Lüttger alleged the man often threatened others for religious reasons, accusing his roommates of not living in line with their faith correctly and waking them in the middle of the night to get them to pray.
German media have not disclosed the Afghani’s faith.
Administrators then transferred him to a shelter for refugees in Windesheim, reportedly believing the more controlled support there would stop any further aggression.
That apparently did not happen, with the man reportedly threatening and attacking residents and employees of the facility.
He has since been placed in a private facility to live where he is fed alone and does not interact with other residents on his own.
Bad Kreuznach at the same time hired a private security company to monitor the man – who is allowed to move around freely – accompanied by two officials.
According to district councillor Bettina Dickes, the surveillance has been costing the county – which numbers 160,000 inhabitants – €40,000 per month.
Dickes said she had already asked the integration ministry of Rhineland-Palatinate on November 22 last year to organise the man’s deportation, whose claim for asylum had previously been rejected. The ministry is led by Katharina Binz of the Greens.
In mid-January, the ministry said it had forwarded the request to the federal Interior Ministry led by Nancy Faeser, which would have to make the final decision.
It reportedly said the man’s deportation could only take place if German authorities organised a deportation flight to Afghanistan.
Germany has only sent one plane with rejected Afghan asylum seekers back to their country since the Taliban took over again in 2020.
In August 2024, following a deadly stabbing attack, allegedly by an Afghan, on a German critic of Islam and a policeman in Mannheim, the government deported 28 Afghan asylum seekers to Kabul. Many of them have reportedly been freed by the Taliban since arriving.
On January 24, the interior ministry confirmed that a second deportation flight to Afghanistan had been scheduled for February 22 – one day before the national elections.
The people of Bad Kreuznach were reportedly now hoping that the issue will be settled then. “We are close to despair,” said Bad Kreuznach councillor Dickes of the affair.
