Germany

Berlin

Only hours before German chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Berlin on Thursday, her government did a deal worth billions with the greatest threat to Israel’s existence.

Berlin

Yesterday, Israel seized another German-owned vessel containing Iranian weapons on its way to the terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Arif Uka is a 21-year-old German-Albanian Muslim whose family came from the ethnically divided region of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo. He is being held by German police after the shooting deaths Wednesday of two U.S. Air Force members, and injury to two more—one seriously—in a group headed for Afghanistan via the sprawling Frankfurt International Airport and nearby American military base at Ramstein.

Speaking to more than 10,000 supporters in Duesseldorf on Sunday night, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once again the source of some controversy across Germany when he called on his “compatriots” – many of whom hold German passports and were born there – to strongly resist assimilation and to make sure that their children master Turkish before they learn German.

The below photo appears on the first page of yesterday’s edition of the German daily Die Welt:

“We can only find the ways to communism if we get started and try them out, whether in the opposition or in the government,” Gesine Lötzsch, co-president of the German Left Party, declared earlier this week.

Germany’s journalists, human rights activists, and taxpayers are paying a painful price for its country’s woefully flawed “critical dialogue” policy with the Iranian regime.

Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation is the principal fundraiser for WikiLeaks and indeed, on its own account, WikiLeaks’s de facto financial manager.

Last weekend, PayPal announced that it was freezing the PayPal account used by WikiLeaks. In a statement, PayPal explained that WikiLeaks was in violation of the company’s acceptable use policy, which “states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.” But any violations of the law that WikiLeaks either encourages, promotes, facilitates, etc. are apparently not of interest to Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation, the principal collector of funds and de facto financial manager of WikiLeaks. At any rate, this appears to be the case for any violations of American law. German law, as will be seen below, is another matter.

The German equivalent of Charles W. Freeman Jr. has surfaced in a WikiLeaks cable from the U.S. embassy in Berlin. His name is Christoph Heusgen and he is a senior adviser on the Mideast to German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Berlin 

Observers of U.S.-German relations were probably not startled by former President Bush’s disclosure in his memoir, Decision Points, that former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder deceived the U.S. government about his pledge to support America’s toppling of Saddam's regime in Iraq.