images-1The Berlin Christmas Market attack should never have happened.  How could the German police get it so wrong?  German voters will decide in September who can best protect them and the freedom they love.

Stuttgart, January 15, 2016: Germany is already in full campaign mode with nine months to go until the elections and the public want to know who will keep them safe? After a year of terror attacks and terror threats and other forms of migrant violence, politicians are falling over themselves to reassure the public.  But all agree, the Berlin Christmas Market attack could have been prevented; that “mistakes were made,” and “we must learn from our errors.” 

images-3Paris: France is bankrupt. In terms of the Maastricht criteria, French public debt is 97% of GDP, or roughly two trillion euros. But add to this, the off-balance-sheet debt (estimated at over three trillion euros) such as pensions (19 billion euros a year deficit), unemployment insurance (over five billion/year deficit), health care system (15 billion/year deficit) and other social guaranties supposed to finance themselves and the real debt of France is an astronomical 242% of GDP. Yet, labor in France refuses to hear of reform. Students, who have never worked a day in their lives, are marching with public service employees and fighting police in the streets.

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Böhmermann deliberately insulted the Turkish president.

Tübingen, Germany: When German comedian, Jan Böhmermann, did a satirical sketch on state run ZDF TV this month, accusing the Turkish president of “repressing minorities, kicking Kurds and slapping Christians” as well as suggesting he has “sex with sheep and goats,” Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan went ballistic and called for the satirist to be prosecuted under a little known German defamation law. The row has opened a Pandora’s box of troubles for German Chancellor Angela Merkel: should the law be scrapped; how far does free speech and satire go; what grip does the Turkish president have around the Chancellor’s throat?

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How do someone else’s children become Europe’s problem?

The EU must pressure foreign governments to punish parents who send their children on the perilous and illegal journey to Europe or face financial consequences. All too many parents in poverty stricken countries readily send their under-age children on the dangerous trek to Europe knowing that, if they make it, Europeans will care for them. These parents hope their children get papers and that they can join them in Europe later under Europe’s liberal family regroupment rules and that one day they get work and send money home.  Europeans are alarmed that about 10,000 of these children are unaccounted for.

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Armies of single, fighting-age, Muslim males

“Invasion.”  I can think of no other word to describe it when hundreds of thousands of people illegally enter your country.  But who are these people and what do they really want?

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Lasagna Bathily, who saved lives during the January 2016 terror attacks, receiving French citizenship

I angered one of the softest and nicest guys I know so much that, if he were a boxer, he would have punched me out with the simple American-style question of “when did you arrive in Europe?” It was another rude lesson in Europe is not the United States.

In the 1960s, France brought in hundreds of thousands of Muslim North African immigrants to fill their factories and keep wages down.  The more illiterate they were, the better.  These immigrants were supposed to go home.  They did not. 

The man who got on a Parisian bus with me Wednesday was an Arab who had not shaven in four days. He had dark olive skin and kinky black hair and was visibly unbalanced: drugs? He sang to a popular tune “I’m going on Jihad. Won’t you come on Jihad with me too?” He risks five years in prison and a 75 thousand euro fine.

In the first six days after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, 54 people were charged with “apology for terrorism” under a tough law voted in the French parliament last November which can jail someone, if they express their “support for terrorism” on the electronic media: FaceBook, Twitter etc., to up to seven years and fine them 100 thousand euros .

France’s “war on terrorism” has begun. The new law allows the “apologists” to be brought before a judge as soon as they are arrested in a process called “comparution immediate”; that is without time to prepare a defense.  It is a law for a time of war.

The silence of the western press on the situation in Libya is deafening. This is no surprise as the pessimistic predictions of the critics of NATO’s war to oust Qaddafi become reality.

Recently elected President of Niger, Mahamadou Issoufou, is a soft speaking man with a big problem not of his doing. He was in Paris Wednesday to speak to French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, about the problem: NATO’s war on Libya.