French Philosopher Describes 'Massacre Of Nigerian Christians, Massive In Scale And Horrific In Brutality' Underway, Turkish Presence, And Qatari Influence

War on Christianity turning into genocide in Nigeria

with help from Turkey, Qatar and China.

In a series of reports in French and American media, renowned French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy narrated a visit he made to Nigeria where he found that a massacre of Christians "massive in scale and horrific in brutality" is taking place. He also mentioned the Turkish presence and Qatari influence there.

In a December 20, 2019 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled "The New War Against Africa's Christians," Levy wrote about the violent Islamic extremists "more or less linked with Boko Haram" among the Fulani ethnic group. A bishop whom he met explained the Fulani extremists' pattern of attack: "They usually arrive at night. They are barefoot, so you can't hear them coming unless they're on motorcycle... Before villagers can take shelter or flee, the invaders are upon them in their houses, swinging machetes, burning, pillaging, raping. They don't kill everyone. At some point they stop, recite a verse from the Quran, round up the livestock and retreat. They need survivors to spread fear from village to village, to bear witness that the Fulani raiders fear nothing but Allah and are capable of anything." A Westerner living in Nigeria reportedly said that "Boko Haram 'instructors' have been spotted in Bauchi, another northeastern state, where they are teaching elite Fulani militants to handle more-sophisticated weapons that will replace their machetes." 

Recounting testimonies of victims whom he met, Levy wrote that one woman whom he met said that On July 15, "Fulani extremists rode into her village on long-saddle motorcycles, three to a bike, shouting 'Allahu Akbar!' They torched houses and killed her four children before her eyes" before cutting off her arm. Fulani extremists cut three fingers off the right hand of another woman, cut the nape of her neck with a machete, shot her, and poured gasoline on her and lit it on fire. She somehow survived.

Bernard-Henri Levy wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the Fulani extremists.

While in Nigeria, Levy encountered a Turkish member of a "religious mutual assistance group" that the man said was opening madrassas for the daughters of Fulani people. Levy describes an armed Fulani man wearing a jacket with Turkish- and Arabic-language badges. While sitting among Fulani men, one of whom says: "The Christians are dogs and children of dogs. You say Christians. To us they are traitors. They adopted the religion of the whites. There is no place here for friends of the whites, who are impure," a postcard vendor offers Levy portraits of Osama bin Laden and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

A report that MEMRI published on December 18, 2019, discussed an audio recording uploaded to YouTube in March 2014 reportedly featuring a phone call between a senior Turkish government official and a Turkish Airlines executive in which the latter says: "I am transporting dozens of materials, they are going to Nigeria right now, okay? [I do not know:] Are they going to kill Muslims or are they going to kill Christians? We are in sin right now, so you know" (see MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 8421 March 2014 Audio Reportedly Features Phone Call Between Turkish Airlines Executive, Erdoğan Advisor About Turkish Arms Shipments To Nigeria: 'Are They Going To Kill Muslims Or Are They Going To Kill Christians? We Are In Sin Right Now', December 18, 2019). On November 26, 2019, Nigerian news outlets reported that a spokesman for Nigeria's Defence Headquarters, had said that the Nigerian government was investigating claims that the Turkish government was sending weapons to Nigeria-based terrorist organization Boko Haram.

Buhari a Fulani

In a French-language article about the subject published on December 5 on the website of the French weekly Paris Match, Levy wrote: "A man came out to tell me I had nothing to do here. He spoke English. I had the time to make him admit... that he was Turkish, a member of a network of religious mutual aid funded by Qatar and responsible for opening, in the northern and central localities, madrasas for Fulani girls." The same article read: "And President Buhari... who already reigned between 1983 and 1985, following a coup, and who is still in today thanks to subsidies from Ankara, Qatar, and the Chinese, is himself a Fulani."

Following is the text of Bernard-Henri Levy's article as it appeared in the Wall Street Journal on December 20, 2019:

"Fulani Extremists Have Become Deadlier Than Boko Haram And Accounted For The Majority Of The Country's 2,040 Documented Terrorist Fatalities In 2018"

Please click on link for the full article on WSJ.

A Million People Are Jailed at China's Gulags. I Managed to Escape. Here's What Really Goes on Inside

Rape, torture and human experiments. Sayragul Sauytbay offers firsthand testimony from a Xinjiang 'reeducation' camp

By David Stavrou (Stockholm)

STOCKHOLM – Twenty prisoners live in one small room. They are handcuffed, their heads shaved, every move is monitored by ceiling cameras. A bucket in the corner of the room is their toilet. The daily routine begins at 6 A.M. They are learning Chinese, memorizing propaganda songs and confessing to invented sins. They range in age from teenagers to elderly. Their meals are meager: cloudy soup and a slice of bread.

Torture – metal nails, fingernails pulled out, electric shocks – takes place in the “black room.” Punishment is a constant. The prisoners are forced to take pills and get injections. It’s for disease prevention, the staff tell them, but in reality they are the human subjects of medical experiments. Many of the inmates suffer from cognitive decline. Some of the men become sterile. Women are routinely raped.

Such is life in China’s reeducation camps, as reported in rare testimony provided by Sayragul Sauytbay (pronounced: Say-ra-gul Saut-bay, as in “bye”), a teacher who escaped from China and was granted asylum in Sweden. Few prisoners have succeeded in getting out of the camps and telling their story. Sauytbay’s testimony is even more extraordinary, because during her incarceration she was compelled to be a teacher in the camp. China wants to market its camps to the world as places of educational programs and vocational retraining, but Sauytbay is one of the few people who can offer credible, firsthand testimony about what really goes on in the camps.

Please go to Haaretz.com for the complete article.

Rejected Asylum-Seeker ‘Slit Throat’ of Elderly German Man Who Gave Him Job & Shelter at His Home

The scene of crime. © dpa / Axel Heimken via Global Look Press

An Afghan migrant has been arrested in Germany for allegedly slitting the throat of an elderly man whose home he worked in. The man’s daughter, a charity worker, had suggested he hire the asylum seeker.

Arriving in Germany with no job, the 20-year-old Afghan was given a helping hand by the victims’ daughter, a refugee aid worker. Last August he was hired to work as the 85-year-old man’s carer, and he was hired again over the weekend to carry out some gardening and cleaning work around the house.

The asylum seeker repaid his hosts’ kindness in blood. In the early hours of Saturday morning, the Afghan allegedly took a knife to the victim’s throat, killing him as he slept, before stealing the man’s car and fleeing the scene, public prosecutors announced on Sunday.

The victim was identified as Dietrich P., while the suspect’s name is being withheld, as is standard practice in Germany. Dietrich P. lived in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where German tabloid Bild reports he had been active in the agricultural wing of the socialist GDR party that ruled East Germany during the Cold War.

“Everyone here knew Dietrich,” a neighbor told Bild. “He was always friendly and helpful. It's unbelievable that this could happen to us.”

Dietrich’s daughter met the young man at a refugee center in Zwickau district in the state of Saxony, where she was volunteering and where the Afghan was living at the time.

According to the prosecutors, the murder was witnessed by a Bosnian man, who was working as a live-in carer to the aging Dietrich. The Bosnian carer saw the murder on a baby monitor he had installed to check on Dietrich, and at first thought that the Afghan was leaning over Dietrich to straighten his blankets.

Only later did he realize the grizzly reality, and called the police.

The suspect apparently stole a car and tried to flee, but crashed the vehicle and continued on foot. He was intercepted by a police patrol and taken to hospital, but was soon identified as a wanted person and detained. A judge ordered him to be placed into pre-trial custody.

The state police said the suspect has no criminal record in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and that they were checking with law enforcement in other parts of Germany for more information about him. It is known that the man’s claim for asylum was rejected and that his permission to stay is to expire at the end of January 2019.

The police said the Afghan man had not stolen anything from Dietrich’s house and that he has not spoken about the murder.

Interior Minister for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Lorenz Caffier warned against using the crime for political speculation. After a spate of Afghan crimes in Germany, Caffier’s call echoes that of UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi in September.

Sending Afghans home, Grandi said, is a “complex issue,” despite a series of much-publicized attacks by Afghan nationals, like a stabbing in Chemnitz, a rape in a Berlin elementary school this September, and the rape and drowning of a teenage girl in Freiburg in 2016.

Nevertheless, it seems German authorities are more concerned about the welfare of Afghans who have been deemed unfit for asylum in Germany, than they are for innocent Germans. If a person is refused asylum, he should be sent back immediately. Whatever the obstacles to that, they are not worth the rape and murder of innocent people.

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern

Sweden Slowly Waking Up to the Crime Wave That Accompanied Mass Migration

Gang shootings, rapes and no-go zones? Government blamed as Sweden battles crime wave

FILE PHOTO: Firemen in the suburb of Rinkeby © Fredrik Sandberg / Reuters

Swedish authorities held an emergency meeting this week to discuss the recent spate of gang shootings that have plagued Sweden’s cities and made crime a major issue ahead of elections in September.

The centre-left government in Stockholm has been facing a backlash over the recent crime wave — and the elephant in the room is migration.

1. Gang violence on the rise

A record-high number of people (43) were killed in shootings in Sweden in 2017 — up massively from just eight in 2006. Sweden’s Justice Minister Morgan Johansson acknowledged to news agency TT that there had been “a lot of shootings and deaths in a short time.”

Police forensics investigate the scene in central Malmo, June 18, 2018. © Johan Nilsson / Reuters

In one of the latest incidents, six men were shot and three of them killed in a drive-by shooting last month in the southern city of Malmo — a place where more than 40 percent of the population are non-Swedish. The victims were members of one of a number of gangs, the police said.

According to data from the World Health Organization, Sweden has one of the highest levels of lethal gun violence in Europe. More than 300 shootings occurred in Sweden in 2017 and a report that year suggested that more than 90 percent of shooting suspects came from immigrant backgrounds.

2. Nearly 250,000 migrants between 2014-2015

A line of refugees arriving from Denmark at the Hyllie train station outside Malmo, Sweden, November 19, 2015. © Johan Nilsson / Reuters

Sweden has accepted more migrants per capita than any other European Union member state, welcoming nearly 250,000 people between 2014 and 2015. At the time, those that warned against inviting in such huge numbers of people were often branded as prejudicial — but three years on, the government is accused of being blind to the problems that many say the wave of migration has caused. Links have been consistently drawn by politicians, the media and many ordinary Swedes themselves between migration and the increasing levels of certain kinds of crime.

Unwillingness to listen to those who express genuine concerns has now led to increasing numbers of people turning towards right-wing politicians who are not shy about expressing their anti-immigrant sentiments and inflaming the situation further.

3. No-go zones?

Firefighters are seen as several cars were set on fire in Rinkeby suburb © Christine Olsson

Across Europe, the term ‘no-go zone’ is typically used to describe a crime-ridden, immigrant-dominated area where people — even the police — are often afraid to venture into. The existence of these ‘no-go zones’ has been the subject of much controversy and debate, with some suggesting the very concept is discriminatory.

Is it discriminatory if it's true?

But if anything confirmed the existence of such places, it was the suggestion in January this year by Prime Minister Stefan Lofven that the government could deploy military units to cut crime in immigrant-dominated areas of Swedish cities.

In 2017, Nima Gholam Ali Pour, a member of the nationalist Swedish Democrats party, said these areas do in fact exist in Sweden. Ali Pour said that while the government had begun to spend more money on policing, there are areas “where the police have issues doing their job — the so-called ‘no-go zones’.”

These so-called no-go zones, however they are defined, are starkly different, culturally, from the areas in their surrounds. This creates both social alienation and resentment on behalf of those living in the areas — and those on the outside who feel threatened by newcomers and their lack of social integration.

That lack of integration is due to a host of reasons including lack of education and jobs, inability to speak the local language, hostility from natives — and indeed unwillingness by some migrants to fully assimilate into the culture of their host city and country.

They leave Islam because it is not fit to live in, come to Europe, and bring Islam with them. How utterly insane!

4. Rapes rising, police ‘can’t cope’

A police officer at the campsite at Bravalla Festival in Norrkoping, Sweden July 1, 2016. © Izabelle Nordfjell / Reuters

The issue of the rising numbers of rapes in Sweden has also been a contentious one — and has frequently been linked to the sudden influx of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

In 2017, when a journalist asked why a man suspected of raping a 12-year-old child two months prior had still not been interviewed, police said they“cannot cope” with the growing number of rapes cases in the country. Justice Minister Johansson said it was “not right” that police think they “don’t have time” to investigate rapes. “They need to review their priorities,” he said.

But, in his interview, Ali Pour backed up police claims, saying they “just do not have enough resources” and that they have “lacked political support” to properly do their jobs. He said the migrant issue is “part of the problem” and that police were “not prepared” for problems that would result from the wave of migration.

Stefan has sacrificed the Swedish way of life and how many dozens of young Swedish girls to his insanely stupid, far-left, politically correct beliefs. He was completely unprepared, the country was completely unprepared, but the media supported him 100%. Now you have a mess on your hands that is not going to go away by itself, nor can it be fixed by those fools who created it. You need a big change in Sweden both in the government and media.

"The Good" Think I Should "Move Home" if Sweden does not Fit

20+ years ago Bianca Muratagic immigrated from Bosnia to Sweden. Now, when she complains about the rapid decline in Swedish culture and values in the name of political correctness and far-left ideology, she's told to 'go home'.

This article appeared in Katerina Magasine in Swedish and the Google translation is a little poor in places, but the article is worth reading to get a sense of what sensible Swedes are thinking about Stefan's immigration lunacy.

"When I criticize how Sweden is governed and what happens to the country, I am often told that I should move back if I'm so unhappy. But it is not the racists who speaks - but those who consider themselves to be good. Then, I say unto you, I will never keep quiet and bow myself to you that sounds "right values" go before the public safety and facts. I speak out of concern for Sweden and I'm here to stay", writes Bianca Muratagic, former refugee from Bosnia, in her guest column on Katerina Magasin.

I have been told as an immigrant to return "home", that today's Sweden does not suit me. And no, it's not the racists who want to send me out - it's the nice people, the politically correct, those who beat their chests and talk about human equality. Obviously I am worthless because they want to send me when I raise my voice and criticize all that is about to get really wrong here in my home country since more than twenty years. But I say unto you, I will never keep quiet and bend them to let the "right values" go before the public safety and facts.

When the state saves money on pregnant women by closing the maternity clinics and start courses in bilförlossningar (Its purpose is to prepare the parents as much as possible before the long car ride and make them feel secure, while in labour many miles from hospital), while seventy police stations close during the summer due to lack of financial resources, library bar again because of threats and violence against staff, public transport is set to it occurs riots and stone throwing in the suburbs, music festivals and bath houses are affected by sexual harassment, so I can not understand what it is I should be grateful for? Should I close my eyes and look away?

When 147,000 people have been long-term unemployed for more than a year and over 77,000 people in more than two years, over 230 000 Swedish pensioners live below the poverty line, 75 000 old and sick people go hungry every year and 15,000 at risk of dying of starvation ... Retirees who worked and toiled all their lives are told by the rich and privileged to renounce their welfare that Sweden will get to play a humanitarian superpower. The Swedish pensioners should keep quiet and be thankful because old people in Romania are much poorer and have it so much worse? Should I just stand by and watch these enormous injustices and accept them without a blink?

And then there are the dissidents who do not fit into 'the good guys' world with the "right values." They must be silenced by the good "värdegrundsexpertena" engaged in activism, preaching and spreading false messages and statements such as "Do not be afraid" and "Sweden has never been safer" when the rapes, crimes, murders, violent riots and terrorist threats escalate and the lesser privileged may become victims of moral police, IS sympathizers and criminals, in segregated neighborhoods and exclusion areas far from the white middle class secure sanctuary, where artists, journalists, political leaders and policymakers live. And you need me to be grateful, accept help but protest?

Our rulers refuse to listen to the people. SD (Sweden Democrats - considered anti-immigration and far-right by some) has become the second biggest party and growing stronger among the working class, immigrants, and especially women who have had enough of oppression with honor motive. But the incumbent politicians continue to deny reality. They continue to freeze out, ignore and demonize the democratic selected portion, although this method had a totally opposite effect. That people who sympathized with V (left-wing party, some, like me, might call it far-left) wants to add its voice to SD in the next election says a lot about the journey Sweden made the last eight years. That our political leaders forget is that their arrogance and megalomania raises a huge frustration among ordinary honest working people, running over and denigrated every time their concern and dissatisfaction is silenced and ignored.

No, I refuse to keep quiet. I refuse to bend my neck, and accept what is going on. I refuse to stand by and watch when people lose their jobs, friends and family for their "wrong" views on Facebook. I refuse to accept that those who question the power elite are humiliated and portrayed as Nazis and those who criticize Islamism and religious fundamentalism accused of Islamophobia. No, all you who call yourselves the good people with your right values, you should not tell me that I should move and leave Sweden just because I criticize or question the power elite hypocrisy, lies and ignoring of facts. We have freedom of speech in Sweden and I will fight for and avail myself of it.

Obviously I'm grateful to Sweden and the opportunities I was given here. But I'll never agree to my refugee status being used against me, to silence me when I am speaking critically about the irresponsible and failed immigration policy where both the Swedes and refugees suffer greatly. When you demean, ridicule, silence, and stamp us as racist who have been victims of terrorism, Nazism, religious fundamentalism, persecution, war and honor, when we actually dare oppose and criticize the view corridor you have created, you have lost all credibility. It's actually you who is the biggest obstacle to get Sweden back on its feet. Dressed in anti-racism mantle, you demonize people like me and you diminish me and my opinions. But now your arrogance has come to the surface. Admit that you are bothered by competent and independent immigrants; perhaps you even feel threatened by us because we see through your fake acting and hunger for political power, the ruthlessness with which you crush a well-functioning country. 

No, I'm not going to shut up and be grateful for sacrifices you have given us immigrants so you can strengthen your positions and build your political career. And I'm definitely not going "home".

Bianca Muratagic

Bianca Muratagic works as a vocal coach, artistic director, concert arranger and singer. She runs her own business Vocal Academy Bianca in Uppsala. 

Bless you, Bianca, for speaking out. Sweden is worth saving from the lunatic left!

African Migrants Raped & Murdered After Being Sold in Libyan ‘Slave Markets’ – UN

Will Syria become another Libya? Can we be that stupid?

© Reuters

A growing number of migrants passing through Libya are being traded in so-called slave markets before being held for ransom, according to the UN migration agency. Many experience malnutrition and sexual abuse, while some pay the ultimate price of death.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) spoke to African migrants who recounted their experiences of being bought and sold in garages and parking lots in the southern city of Sabha, one of Libya’s main migrant smuggling hubs.

Migrants are typically traded for as little as $200 to $500, and are held for an average of two to three months, Othman Belbeisi, the head of the IOM’s Libya mission, told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday.

“Migrants are being sold in the market as a commodity,” he said, as quoted by Reuters.

“Selling human beings is becoming a trend among smugglers as the smuggling networks in Libya are becoming stronger and stronger,” Belbeisi added.

Thank you NATO, Barack Obama and David Cameron for your major contribution to this atrocity!

Many of the migrants are used as day laborers in construction and agriculture. Although some are paid, others are forced to work without pay, before being sold onwards to new buyers.

Women often face extremely tragic fates.

“About women, we heard a lot about bad treatment, rape and being forced into prostitution,” Belbeisi said.

In a statement, the IOM recounted the story of a Senegalese migrant referred to as ‘SC,’ who spoke of being ‘bought’ and taken to his first ‘prison’ – a private home where more than 100 migrants were beaten and held as hostages.

SC was asked to pay 300,000 Central African Francs ($480) for his release, which he couldn’t pay. He was then sold to another Libyan, who set his release price at 600,000 CFA ($970).

The Senegalese migrant, who spoke of dire sanitary conditions and meals offered only once per day, was eventually able to get money from his family and work as an interpreter to avoid future beatings.

However, others aren’t so lucky. Those who can’t pay are often killed or left to starve to death, according to the IOM. They are buried without being identified.

“What we know is that migrants who fall into the hands of smugglers face systematic malnutrition, sexual abuse and even murder,” the IOM’s director of operations and emergencies, Mohammed Abdiker, said. “We are hearing about mass graves in the desert."

When migrants die or are released, kidnappers simply return to the market to ‘buy’ more migrants to replace them, SC told the IOM.

Libya is a major gateway for migrants hoping to reach Europe via the Mediterranean Sea, with more than 450,000 people making the crossing over the past three years.

Fatalities are all too common for those making the treacherous journey. So far this year an estimated 26,886 migrants have crossed to Italy,more than 600 are known to have died at sea, while an unknown number perish during their journey north through the desert, according to the Reuters. 

Last year marked a record for the number of migrants trying to reach Europe via the Mediterranean route from North Africa, with 181,000 people registered at Italian ports.

A record number of fatalities was also recorded in 2016, with the UN’s refugee agency stating more than 5,000 people died, or were presumed dead, while making the journey.

The influx of migrants to Europe is unlikely to end any time soon, according to the president of the European Parliament, who has predicted that violence, civil wars, and poverty may force up to 30 million Africans to come to Europe within the next 10 years. 

Most of these countries are Muslim where violence and lawlessness reign supreme unless there is a very strong leader. Libya had a strongman leader and America and Britain took him out. The consequence is hundreds of thousands of migrants crossing to Italy, and thousands, if not tens of thousands suffering horribly and dying on the way - unintended consequences of illegal and immoral geopolitical interference. It looks like we are doomed to repeat the stupidity in Syria.

A Plain-Spoken German Populist may have a Shot at Ousting Angela Merkel

Newly appointed leader of the Social Democratic Party and candidate for chancellor, Martin Schulz, shown in Berlin on Jan. 29, 2017. (Clemens Bilan / European Pressphoto Agency)

Erik Kirschbaum

He is a recovering alcoholic who dropped out of high school and spent most of his political career abroad.

So when Martin Schulz returned home to Germany with the goal of unseating Chancellor Angela Merkel, perhaps the world’s most powerful woman, it was understandably viewed as a suicide mission.

Merkel had made mincemeat out of the last three challengers from Schulz’s Social Democratic Party, and there was little doubt that she could do so again.

But in an era when voters worldwide seem prepared to throw off the establishment and take a chance with an untested populist, Schulz, a jovial former bookshop owner from Germany’s Rhineland region who until recently was president of the European Parliament, has quickly been embraced as a serious challenger.

In just two weeks since taking over his party’s leadership, Schulz has shattered the conventional wisdom that he and his party have no chance and has given the Social Democrats their first lead in polls over the conservatives since 2006.

After Britain’s unexpected vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s against-long-odds victory in the U.S. presidential election, the Social Democrats’ rally in opinion polls has raised serious doubts about whether Merkel can win a fourth term.

Then-European Parliament President Martin Schulz and German Chancellor Angela Merkel

at European Union Council headquarters in Brussels in June 2015.

(Julien Warnand / European Pressphoto Agency)

Her reelection was once seen so certain that even then-President Obama unexpectedly weighed in late last year, telling German voters on a visit to Berlin that if he could vote here, he would vote for Merkel. It was an unprecedented intervention on behalf of the conservative party leader —  and an astonishing affront to the party that is Germany’s closest equivalent to Obama’s Democrats.

The German election is suddenly an open contest, according to opinion polls.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD), which last beat Merkel’s center-right party outright in 1998 and lost control of the government to her party in 2005, has surged eight percentage points to 31% in the last two weeks after years of stagnating just above 20%, according to a poll by the INSA institute for Bild newspaper. Meanwhile, the conservative bloc, consisting of Merkel’s Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, fell from 33% to 30%.

“It’s caught everyone by surprise that Schulz was able to help the SPD make such a powerful break out of the doldrums they’d been trapped in for such a long time,” said Thorsten Hasche, a political scientist at Goettingen University. “The lesson learned is that he has proven what was until recently not thought possible: that the right candidate on the left can unify the party and mobilize the masses.”

We’ve suffered for a long time in the polls,

and now we’ve got something to cheer about.

— Martin Schulz

The Social Democrats’ sudden strength in polls is no guarantee of success in the Sept. 24 election, in which Merkel appears to have more coalition options. In Germany’s complex multi-party system, it will most likely take a two- or even-three party alliance to form the next government.

The Social Democrats would like to create a left-of-center government with the Greens and Left parties. Until recently, its only path to power was seen as being a junior partner in another “grand coalition” with Merkel’s party. Schulz’s surge has suddenly given his party a number of more palatable left-of-center options and even the chance to lead the next government.

“Schulz has managed to mobilize a lot of previously undecided voters and people on the left who had turned their backs on the SPD,” said Nils Diederich,  a political scientist at Berlin’s Free University. “There’s a lot of hope vested in Schulz right now. But I’m not sure yet if it’s just a lot of hype that will fade away by the election.”

In a country where frustration over professional politicians with fancy university degrees is growing, Schulz offers a more humble and straight-talking approach. He appears to be wooing back some supporters who abandoned the party 14 years ago when it agreed to tough, pro-business labor reforms and pension changes that hurt the working class.

“We’ve suffered for a long time in the polls, and now we’ve got something to cheer about,” Schulz told reporters on the campaign trail this week. “It confirms what we suspected all along, that people want an SPD government.”

Pollsters admit they were surprised by the scope of the party’s gains but aren’t sure whether they will last.

“Schulz is certainly attractive for the ‘little people’ because he understands what the working class voters are going through — they sense that he’s one of them,” said Peter Matuschek, a senior pollster at the Forsa institute in Berlin. “If you look at his resume, he's one of them: no high school diploma and no degree.”

As a young man, Schulz had wanted to be a professional soccer player, but his career was cut short by injury, leading to his bout with alcohol in the 1970s. Matuschek said he doesn’t think that past will hurt him politically — on the contrary, it might help him among voters who see someone “who made it back after hitting rock bottom." After he quit drinking, he became more and more involved in politics, becoming his town’s mayor at 31.

His unvarnished way of speaking has touched a nerve, especially among the country’s legions of working-class voters who had abandoned the Social Democrats in droves when the party’s last chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, pushed it from the left into the political center from 1998 to 2005. 

“It’s time for a change,” said Miriam Dieter, a Berlin student. “The others talk a lot without saying anything. Schulz is different. He talks directly about what’s on people’s minds.”

In one talk show interview, Schulz deftly zeroed in on Merkel’s biggest weakness: her party ally Horst Seehofer, the leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria, who has attacked her relentlessly for refusing to introduce an upper annual limit of 200,000 on the number of refugees coming into Germany.

The Social Democrats have generally taken a pro-refugee position while Merkel’s conservatives remain badly split on the issue: Merkel and her Christian Democrats (CDU) are for allowing in refugees while the Bavarian party is opposed.

Still, the question of refugees is not expected to play a major role in the campaign. Neither Merkel’s conservatives nor the Social Democrats have any interest in putting a spotlight on the arrival of more than 1 million people seeking asylum from wars and turmoil in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Polls show a shrinking majority of Germans continue to support Merkel’s policies of opening the country’s gates to refugees. But her position is far more controversial among conservatives than among Social Democrats .

“If the CDU and CSU continue to fight about the number of refugees and don’t get their act together on that fast, it will hurt them massively in the fall election,” said Matuschek at Forsa. “The SPD under Schulz have a unified position supporting refugees. The conservatives don’t.”

'A unified position supporting refugees' is a unified determination to the eventual destruction of Germany. Look at what is happening in Sweden - criminal gangs of Muslim refugees causing extortion, assaults, drug smuggling, assaulting police, 55 no-go zones and, at least, daily rapes of Swedish women and girls - all by Muslim men. 

In Sweden, they hide this from the public by police code R291, which requires a 'secret' classification for any police action involving asylum seekers. Is there such a conspiracy of silence in Germany too; or are Germans just way smarter than Swedes?

Instead of bringing in millions of Muslim asylum seekers, why not house them temporarily some place closer to home with the goal of returning them to their home countries. Then putting forth intense efforts to secure peace in those countries instead of selling weapons to groups that will guarantee there will be no peace.