Free Republic

BERLIN – Germany is considering a request from Turkey to prosecute a TV comedian who wrote a crude poem about the Turkish president, Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said Monday. The request poses an awkward choice for the German leader as she relies on Turkey to reduce the influx of migrants to Europe. Turkey sent a diplomatic note making "a formal request for criminal prosecution" of comedian Jan Boehmermann, Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert said. Seibert told reporters Monday that officials would take several days to decide whether to allow prosecutors to proceed in the case, but stressed that Merkel holds free...

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lost a German court battle against a top media boss Tuesday when his appeal in a bitter row over free speech was thrown out. Erdogan had sought a court order to stop the Axel Springer media group's chief Mathias Doepfner from repeating support for a TV satirist who crudely insulted the Turkish leader. After failing to get an injunction from a lower court last month, Erdogan also lost an appeal before the higher regional court in the western German city of Cologne. The judges said they considered Doepfner's letter of support "a permissible expression of...

A French waitress was allegedly assaulted by two Muslim men for serving alcohol during Ramadan. The woman, a practising Muslim of Tunisian origin, was working on the terrace of the Vitis Café in Nice when she was reportedly insulted by two passers-by on Wednesday. The men are said to have started to abuse her when they saw she was serving alcohol to customers, The Times reported. She said one of the men screamed she was a “whore” and slapped her across the face, leaving her with a black eye after she was knocked to the ground. The incident has been...

A Syrian man who was detained in France and exposed a terror ring in Germany, told officials that the cell contained more people than the three who were arrested last week, according to officials familiar with the man’s testimony. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the man’s revelations are increasing concerns that the Islamic State (ISIS) could be close to carrying out an attack in Europe once again.

Visiting Berlin on Wednesday (2 June) NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that Germany is “at the heart of Europe and of the NATO Alliance”. Speaking with the media in a joint press conference with Chancellor Merkel, Mr. Stoltenberg said that Germany makes “outstanding contributions” to NATO operations in Afghanistan and Kosovo. “You play a major role in our Baltic Air Policing mission, and you also have a lead role in our new high-readiness joint task force, and Germany was key in establishing our presence in the Aegean Sea coping with the migrant and refugee crisis”, he said. The Secretary...

The international movement calling for a boycott against Israel on Thursday said its website was repeatedly attacked earlier this year and raised suspicions that Israel was behind the attacks. The BDS movement released a report Thursday showing that its main website suffered six attacks in February and March. The denial of service attacks, which work by flooding a target website with bogus traffic, knocked out the BDS website for several hours at a time. The report, compiled by nonprofit online security service eQualit.ie, said the attacks had a level of “sophistication and commitment” it normally does not see. It also...

Three Syrian men suspected of planning an ISIS terrorist attack in Duesseldorf have been arrested in Germany. Prosecutors say a fourth suspect, who informed officials in Paris about the plot, was already in custody in France. The federal prosecutor's office said the three men were arrested in three different German states on Thursday.

The massive feminization of culture has had a major impact on European politics and the decisions which have lead to the European Migrant Crisis. Iben Thranholm joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the deficiency of masculinity in European culture, how feminism has programmed women to see men as the enemy and the future of western civilization. "As the refugee crisis erupted and overwhelmed Europe, its political leaders - spearheaded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel - acted like timid mother hens, not as strong men responsible for guarding their country from an invasion." - Iben Thranholm Iben Thranholm is one of Denmark’s...

BDS Flounders Amid String of Humiliating Defeats How anti-BDS legislation has neutered the group and hampered its ability to function. May 31, 2016 Ari Lieberman    It’s been a really bad month for the anti-Semitic BDS movement, a strange alliance of radical leftists and Islamists who advocate the destruction of Israel through economic and cultural boycotts.  The hate group suffered a number of major setbacks in recent weeks. Some of these reversals represent mere moral victories but others have far reaching consequences that may well spell doom for BDS’s future operations and ability to function.  In May, the Strasbourg-based...

Turkey is offering to "join forces" with Washington for a special operation inside Syria on condition it doesn't include a Syrian Kurdish militia blacklisted by Ankara but seen as an ally by the US, the foreign minister said. Washington's support of Kurdish fighters in Syria in the fight against Islamic State (ISIS) jihadists has angered Ankara, especially after AFP pictures last week revealed US commandos wearing patches of the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) outlawed by Turkey. "If we join forces, they (the US) have their own special forces and we have our special forces," Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told...

France's Jewish community, the largest in Europe, chose a Sephardi Jew as its leader Sunday for the first time in half a century. Francis Kalifat, 63, said his priority as president of the CRIF umbrella grouping of Jewish organizations was to "fight against anti-Semitism in all its forms." He succeeds 79-year-old Roger Cukierman for a three-year term, breaking the dominance of Ashkenazi Jews in the organization which groups together 70 associations.

In this one-off documentary BBC Three examines America’s recent upsurge in Islamophobia; meeting both Texan anti-Islam groups and American Muslims as tensions rise at some of America’s mosques. Award Winning director and producer Steph Atkinson asks how did America get here and are the fears between these different groups justified?

The UK Prime Minister David Cameron on Sunday said that Turkey would only be able to join the European Union “in about the year 3000,” hitting back at claims that Britain would lose the power to vote over Turkey’s membership if his country leaves the bloc. ‘Vote Leave,’ a cross-party campaign, is urging British citizens to vote to leave the EU all together in a June 23 referendum. The ‘Leave’ campaign predicts that 142,000 Turkish citizens could head to the UK every year if Ankara joins the EU. But for Cameron, who wishes for the UK to stay in the...

David Cameron has made Britain a “semi-pacifist” nation more interested in protecting “welfare and benefits” than adequate defenses, one of the country’s most senior retired generals has warned. General Sir Richard Shirreff, former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, said the UK had “shrunk in to itself” and carries an “increasingly impotent stick”. He said the country now risked losing its post-Falklands global reputation for military might. …

A new study shows that potentially thousands of Christians have been attacked and harassed in German migrant homes by Muslim guards and fellow migrants. Multiple human rights organizations are warning the German government of the conditions that Christians in asylum homes are being subjected to. One organization in particular has chronicled 231 specific cases of the harassment of Christians by Muslim migrants and Muslim security guards in asylum homes. Open Doors is a humanitarian relief organization that specializes in helping Christians who are persecuted worldwide. Markus Rode, a member of the group, said that the study is only “the tip...

Poland is right to push to leave the EU and in doing so, to scrap all of the garbage that it accepted from the Euro system The whole “hate crime” idea, so popular in the West, is one of the biggest legal scams in our history. Think about it- who commits an actual crime because they like somebody or something? Hate is a precondition of criminality. Nobody rapes, murders, or beats somebody into a bloody because they love that person. The only reason that “hate crimes” exist is to create social sigma so that one group in society might subjugate...

The European Union expressed concern Wednesday about the rule of law in Poland and warned that it will take action by next week unless Warsaw makes progress on fixing the problem. The EU's executive Commission has been holding informal talks with Warsaw since November amid concerns about the conservative government's respect for Poland's Constitutional Court and the way judges are appointed. The Commission said if the tribunal "is prevented from fully ensuring an effective constitutional review, there can be no effective scrutiny of compliance with fundamental rights of legislative acts." Warsaw has until Monday to respond.

Top European leaders have blasted Bill and Hillary Clinton following a war of words about the commitment to democracy of both the Polish and Hungarian governments. One leading figure insisted Mr. Clinton “needs a medical test” following his remarks.

Truncated title. Full title:Europe’s Leaders Blast Bill Over Democracy Jibe: ‘The Mouth Belongs To Clinton, The Voice Belongs To Soros' Top European leaders have blasted Bill and Hillary Clinton following a war of words about the commitment to democracy of both the Polish and Hungarian governments. One leading figure insisted Mr. Clinton “needs a medical test” following his remarks. Bill Clinton upset NATO allies in a broadly unreported gaffe accusing Poland and Hungary of thinking “democracy is too much trouble” and wanting to have an “authoritarian dictatorship.” This is despite the fact that Poland recently held elections turfing out the...

Hundreds of thousands of people whose personal fates could hinge on whether Britain leaves the European Union won't even have a vote in next month's referendum: Polish migrants. Among other EU citizens, up to a million Poles live and work in Britain. They're allowed to do so, because of free movement of workers in the EU. At a typical construction site in a leafy suburb of London, a brick row house is under renovation. There's a radio on for the builders, and it's all in Polish — Polish Radio London, a digital radio station that launched in 2006, two years...