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Germany Tag

Authorities in Milan have killed the Tunisian man who drove a truck through a Christmas market in Berlin on Monday. The Wall Street Journal reported:
Italian police in the gritty Sesto San Giovanni neighborhood stopped Anis Amri just after 3 a.m. outside a train station for a routine check. When the officers asked the 24-year-old Tunisian for his identification, the man—who, according to Italian officials spoke fluent Italian—became agitated, pulled out a 22-caliber gun and began to shoot, shouting “Bastard police!”

“I am horrified, shocked and deeply saddened,” Chancellor Angela Merkel told the press after 12 people were killed and at least 49 people were injured in a terror attack on a Berlin Christmas market. Police are still looking for the perpetrators after reportedly releasing a previous suspect. Tunisian identity papers were recovered from the truck used in the attack. ISIS has taken responsibility for the Monday night's attack adding to a long trail of death and carnage left behind by the Islamic terror in recent months. Following the incident, a team of 250 police officers searched a refugee housing at the old Berlin-Tempelhof airport. Details of the investigation are sketchy, but a nationwide manhunt is still underway.

A truck ploughed through a Christmas market in Berlin today evening, killing at least twelve people and injuring 50 others. The attack took place on the Breitscheidplatz square, near Berlin's iconic Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church along the Kurfürstendamm shopping area. According to Associated Press, Berlin police have arrested the suspected driver, another accomplice reported died during the ramming attack. Authorities are treating the incident as a terror attack. German state-run DW News reports:
Nine people are reported to have died as a result of the incident; however, unconfirmed reports state that there may be more fatalities to come. Up tp 50 people have been reported as injured, according to the daily newspaper "Berliner Morgenpost." The police are treating the event as an apparent terror attack. The driver of the truck is believed to have fled the scene; however, no arrests have been made so far.

Despite Merkel government’s all-out effort to prevent the breakdown of law and order in German cites ahead of the New Year’s Eve, wide cracks are appearing in country's police preparedness. What reads much like a dispatch from a lost battlefront, the union of police officers in the eastern German state of Thuringa has penned an open letter describing the dire state of affairs amid an unstoppable migrant crime wave. “[You] are abandoning us to a superior force,” says the desperate note addressed to Interior Minister of Thuringa.
Time and again representatives of the police union have pointed out the dramatic consequences to the politicians and higher authorities, the letter further says, (Quote) “But what changes? Nothing. One instead gets a sense of disinterest.”  [Author's translation]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently suggested the banning in Germany of the full-face veil. The idea that a Western country such as Germany might have a right to make such laws, and to do so with motives other than racism, has certainly not been universally accepted. For example, a few days later this editorial about Merkel's statement appeared in BloombergView:
Now, elections are coming up in Germany, and Merkel rightly wants to deny support to the far-right AfD party, whose anti-immigrant thinking is driven not by prudence but by outright racism. In response, Merkel’s newly hardened position is both weak on the merits and plain bad tactics.

If Germany’s largest Muslim group gets its way, the country’s media would be getting a makeover soon. To fight “anti-Muslim media bias", Germany's Central Council of Muslims (ZMD) is calling for the government to appoint more Muslims to the top governing bodies of broadcasting corporations in the country. Media coverage of Islam and Muslims is "inadequate and biased", complained Aiman Mazyek, Chairman of Central Council of Muslims. "To show Muslims from their negative sides, say ISIS, al-Qaida, serves as ‘projection’ and ‘eye catcher’ for many talk shows and headlines. This establishes a negative narrative." With Germany again in the grip of a fresh migrant crime wave, public relations woes and media narrative are all this Muslim group cares about. Earlier this month, an Afghan "refugee" was arrested in connection with the rape and murder of a 19 year-old medical student in the city of Freiburg. In a separate incident, an Iraqi "refugee" was detained on suspicion of raping two Chinese students in university district of Bochum. Such crimes are becoming a daily occurrence in Merkel's Germany. Today, a 14 year-old girl in State of Thuringia was raped. The suspect was identified as a 22 year-old Afghan “refugee.”

What could only be described as a political sleight-of-hand, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is suddenly running as a conservative ahead of next year’s general election. Merkel who opened the floodgates of Europe to millions of Arab and Muslim migrants by scrapping the border controls (Dublin Protocol), is now talking tough on mass-migration and calling for a ban on the regressive Islamic garb, Burqa. “The full-face veil is not acceptable in our country,” Merkel said on Tuesday while addressing her party’s convention held in the city of Essen. “It should be banned, wherever it is legally possible.”

German domestic spy agency has caught an Islamist who had managed to infiltrate its ranks. According to the German weekly DER SPIEGEL, the 50-year-old man has partially confessed to the charges of infiltrating the spy agency and collecting information that might have led to a terrorist attack at the Cologne-based headquarters of Germany's domestic intelligence agency (BfV). A recent convert to Islam, the man was to communicating with other Radical Muslims on the internet and had offered fellow-Jihadis safe access inside the spy agency’s secure compound to launch an attack on “infidels” for "the cause of Allah".  According to the agency’s director Hans-Georg Maaßen, the mole had “radicalised himself” without anyone around him noticing anything. That’s another case of mysterious “self-radicalisation” that baffles liberals and mainstream media so much. What could easily be described as the worst HR move in the history since Emperor Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman senate, the fresh-convert to Islam was hired to monitor Islamist activities inside Germany.

Back in September when the travelling press corps asked Hillary Clinton who her favourite world leader was, she was quick to name German Chancellor Angela Merkel as her top choice -- for good reasons. As Clinton was praising Mekrel, the German government was busy syphoning millions to the Clintons. Between July and September 2016, unwitting German taxpayers gave as much as $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, Germany newspaper Die Welt reveals. Die Welt asked if Chancellor Merkel was trying to influence the outcome of U.S. presidential election. According to a newly surfaced donor list, the Clinton charity received around $5 million from Germany's Ministry for Environment. Ministry's spokesperson said that they had “very positive experience” with the Clinton Foundation and the millions of dollars diverted to the Clintons were going to planting trees in countries like India, Mexico, and Vietnam.

The end is nigh for the European Union, predicts the chief architect of Brexit, Nigel Farage. Talking to an Italian TV station, the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) said, "In a few years time the European Union won’t exist.” Farage was asked about President-elect Donald Trump’s views on the E.U., Farage replied, "It doesn’t really matter," as the E.U. won't be around for long. Farage is the only European politician to have meet Trump since his election victory. The 52 year old British politician has been a lone voice calling for his country to opt-out of the Brussels Bureaucracy for most parts of the last 20 years. Once scorned and ridiculed by conservative and liberal elites alike, Farage has become a hero for various nationalist movements gaining strengthen within the E.U. member states.

It’s official! Merkel will run for a fourth term as German Chancellor. After months of speculations, Chancellor Merkel has announced her decision to lead the Christian Democrats (CDU) in next year’s election. The chief architect of Europe’s open border policy, 62 year old politician has been at the helm of Germany for the last eleven years. President Obama dropped in to lend a helping hand. On the last leg of his presidency, U.S. President gave Merkel a “glowing endorsement” -- to quote London-based Financial Times -- as he toured Germany last week. Obama asked Germans to “appreciate” Merkel. “If I were here and I were German, and I had a vote, I might support her,” Obama told reporters in Berlin.

The push back against the progressive left's agenda that culminated in the election of President-elect Trump had been gaining steam for a while now and not just on this side of the Atlantic. Faced with poor economic growth, an influx of refugees, a sense of losing their national identity, and a variety of country-specific reasons, the entire Western world seems on the verge of the same sort of election-revolution we just witnessed in America. Heralded as the "the liberal West's last defender," Angela Merkel has been under intense pressure based on her open door policy to refugees, and she now finds herself feeling the growing dissatisfaction of the German people even more powerfully than before Trump's victory.

German Chancellor Merkel’s is drumming together her team and will be chairing an “emergency meeting” this morning following the news of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. election, German state-run broadcaster ARD reports. In the run-up to the U.S. election, senior members of Merkel’s government had made no secret of their hostility towards Donald Trump’s candidacy. In August, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called Trump a "preacher of hate." Merkel's second-in-command, Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel warned American voters of impending doom if they elected Donal Trump. "[American's could expect] shrinking GDP, fewer jobs and higher unemployment," Gabriel told German magazine Der Spiegel.

Summit Crosses have adorned hill tops and mountain peaks in the Alps since the dawn of Christianity in the West. Roman legionaries are said of have brought Christianity to the Alpine region as early as second century of Christian era. In recent months, these religious and historic symbols are targets of vandalism in this mountainous region that runs between Germany and Austria. Since August, five such crosses have been severely vandalised or destroyed, Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung reports. Islamist have recently carried out several acts of vandalism against Christian statues and symbols across Germany. In 2014, police in Cologne apprehended a gang of Islamists responsible for desecrating number of churches, stealing Christian artefacts and sending the proceeds to Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

When I wrote about Obama's and Loretta Lynch's DOJ pondering how criminal background checks are inhibiting police "diversity," I wasn't aware that in Germany it is against the law for the military to conduct background checks prior to formal employment. Unsurprisingly, Germany is finding a number of its newer recruits are Islamists seeking formal military training. In fact, they are requesting to join for only a few months with the sole purpose of undergoing "intensive weapon and equipment training." i24 News reports:
Germany's military counter-intelligence agency (MAD) has discovered that a number of the country's enlisted soldiers hold Islamist beliefs and joined the army in order to receive training in advanced weaponry and tactics, according to German media reports.

A guest house in Germany’s Black Forest region caused an uproar on social media after it turned down Israeli guests saying, “Our apartments are not for them.” Communicating through an online booking service, guest house instructed Israelis to “cancel the booking.” Four Israeli families were hoping to book apartments at the guest house while planning a trip to Germany next summer. City officials and regional press are trying to downplay the incident as a misunderstanding, but the incident comes in the backdrop of rising antisemitism and antisemitic hate crimes in Germany. Earlier this year, Kempinski-Hotel in Berlin removed Israel from its phonebook. A hotel employee had explained the decision saying, "Majority of over clients are Arabs and they told us to remove Israel."