ISIS radicals planning terror attacks in Europe ARE entering the continent hidden among migrants, says German police chief

ISIS jihadis determined to carry out attacks in European cities are entering the continent hidden among migrants, a German police chief says.

Hans-Georg Maasen, a federal police chief, claimed ISIS extremists hardened on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria are blending in with the migrants and are planning 'combat missions' in Europe.

In the wake of the Paris attacks it was revealed several of the gunmen and suicide bombers - who helped slaughter 130 people - had reached the city via Greece posing as asylum seekers.

According to the Austria Press Agency, Mr Maasen said his office was aware of almost 8,000 Islamic radicals in Germany.

He said all of these extremists advocate violence to advance their goals, with some trying to win over migrants, and his office receives one or two 'fairly concrete tips' of planned terrorist activity a week.

He went on to describe ISIS extremists as 'combat-hardened professionals' more dangerous than those from al-Qaeda.

His warnings comes just nine days after it emerged eight migrants have reached Europe using documents almost identical to those carried by one of the Paris suicide bombers.

The passport, found near the body of one of those who participated in the massacre of 130 people, identified him as Syrian.

It showed he claimed asylum on the Greek island of Leros last month with the fake Syrian passport in the name of 25-year-old Ahmad Almohammad.

But nine days ago Serbian police revealed they had arrested a man carrying a Syrian passport which was almost a carbon copy of the one found on the ISIS bomber’s corpse.

It had the same name, date of birth and place of birth. The only difference was the photograph.

Serbian officials said as many as six other men this year had entered the EU with virtually identical passports.

The discovery has heightened fears that all the documents are fakes made by the same forger in the Middle East to dupe authorities into believing the holders are asylum seekers.

And worse, it has sparked concerns that the bogus papers could be in the possession of jihadists now lurking undetected in the EU’s passport-free Schengen travel zone.

The shocking ease with which the terrorists who murdered 130 innocent people in Paris were able to travel across Europe has sparked a renewed debate about the open borders policy.

The development raises fresh worries over the potential security threat posed by 670,000 asylum seekers who have arrived in Greece this year after fleeing war and poverty.

Meanwhile, today Czech President Milos Zeman stated Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka was endangering his country by not fully recognizing the danger asylum-seekers are posing.

In an interview published in Thursday's edition of the Mlada Fronta daily, Zeman say that unlike the prime minister he considers the migrant wave 'an organized invasion'.

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Why do we tolerate the jihadis in our midst? 

By Peter McKay

More than 400 suspected jihadis have returned to the UK from Syria. More than 100 are being ‘monitored’ by police in London alone, we are told.

‘Hundreds more’ are under surveillance nationwide. Yet only eight have been prosecuted so far, it’s reported. Why so few?

The fact that they will enjoy robust defence advice — paid for out of public funds, of course — is a factor. The police will be reluctant to bring cases that are not water-tight. Some civil rights campaigners feel that returning jihadis should not be prosecuted at all.

The argument is made that these prodigals might redeem themselves by providing valuable information about their erstwhile Islamic State commanders — a somewhat Walt Disney-like scenario. Does it seem believable to you?

Some returning fighters will claim they had joined Syrian opposition groups fighting President Bashar al-Assad. Can we prove otherwise?

Their lawyers can point out that, until recently, at least, Assad was also regarded as our enemy by the Prime Minister, David Cameron. So aren’t Assad’s enemies — the jihadis — the PM’s friend?

In Belgium and France, armed police are busily breaking down doors and dragging alleged Islamic State conspirators off to prison. Soldiers are patrolling the streets of Paris and there’s a three-month state of emergency.

When the fear and anger following the Paris slaughter dies down, as it surely will, we’ll hear again about the great British virtue of tolerance which sets us above cruel and backward peoples elsewhere.

But as the great philosopher Sir Karl Popper — himself a foreigner accepted by the UK and knighted by the Queen after a distinguished career — said in his book, The Open Society And Its Enemies: ‘If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.’

Popper suggests: ‘We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law. And we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.’

We accept the State’s suppression of intolerance when it involves racism. We are emphatically not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, creed or religion.

Muslims here are protected by such laws like everyone else. It’s why some of them came to the UK in the first place. So why is it so difficult to prosecute those who live here — often claiming welfare benefits — who plot with like-minded fanatics abroad to do us harm and destroy our way of life? We parrot meekly that Islamic State’s murderous discrimination against non-Muslims is a perversion of Islam. But is that entirely true?

In Arab countries such as Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, non-Muslims are openly discriminated against. Not believing in Islam is a crime punishable by death, in law if not always in practice.

Do they hope that we’ll be terrorised into coming around to their point of view one day, which boils down to ‘accept Islam or die’?

Bombing Islamic State terrorists in Syria is justified, but pointless on its own. ISIS has to be encircled and destroyed, in Syria and everywhere else it proliferates.

The nations which have acted as its ‘enablers’ must be tackled, too. Lord West, a former Sea Lord, says: ‘We should confront states such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which have financed ISIS and bought its oil supplies on the black market.’

And here in Britain, surely it isn’t enough to ‘monitor’ those who actively support the aims of Islamic State? Or must we wait until they commit an atrocity before rounding them up? It’s in the interests of the overwhelming Muslim majority here who mean us no harm to remove those in their midst who give active support to Islamic terrorists.

That majority must understand — as Sir Karl Popper put it — that unlimited tolerance leads to its disappearance. Isn’t escaping intolerance the reason they, or their ancestors, came here in the first place?

It’s at times like this that I envy Roman Catholics. There was no airy-fairy Welbyspeak from Pope Francis, who said that using God’s name to justify the massacre was equivalent to blasphemy.

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French ban on Muslim headscarves is upheld by human rights court after woman sacked for refusing to remove hers loses appeal

Europe's leading human rights court upheld the France's ban on Islamic headscarves in the case of a Muslim social worker who was sacked because she refused to take hers off.

Christiane Ebrahimian lost her job at a psychiatric department of a hospital in Nanterre because patients complained about her refusal to remove her head covering.

She lost her appeal at the European Court of Human Rights today.

The French government bars public employees from displaying their religious beliefs on the job.

In 2004, the country banned the wearing of 'conspicuous religious symbols' including the Muslim face veil, known as the niqab.

The ban was eventually extended to schoolchildren and even parents who wanted to accompany classes on trips.

In 2010, the country banned face coverings of all kinds, including masks, niqabs and the full body dress known as a burqa, in public spaces 'except under specified circumstances'.

Ms Ebrahimian was born in 1951 and lived in the capital Paris at the time of the ruling, according to Dr Georg Neureither who founded the online religious platform, Religion Weltanschaaung Recht.

He said she was recruited to the hospital on a fixed term contract as a social worker. On December 11, 2000, she was told that her contract would be terminated because patients complained she would not take off her headscarf.

In May 2000, the hospital wrote to her to remind her that the 'the secular State... prevented public officials from enjoying the right to manifest their religious beliefs while discharging their functions'.

It added: 'Wearing a visible symbol of religious affiliation constituted a breach of a public official's duties.'

A local government in Switzerland imposed a similar rule this week by threatening to issue fines of up to £6,500 to women caught wearing the burqa in shops, restaurants or public buildings.

Officials in the state of Ticino, southern Switzerland, approved the ban after a referendum in September 2013 which saw two out of three voters backing the move.

Ticino government had wanted to ban burqas and niqabs as well as masks worn by demonstrators and balaclavas, it was reported.

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Cory Bernardi: Australia must reconsider refugee intake in light of Paris attacks

Screening process for refugees is open to inaccuracies

The government must reconsider its decision to take an extra 12,000 refugees from Syria and Iraq in light of the Paris attacks, Liberal backbencher Cory Bernardi has said.

Bernardi told ABC TV on Monday he supported the initial cabinet decision to offer an additional 12,000 visas to refugees from Syria and Iraq, on top of the 13,750 existing humanitarian visa places.

But since this month’s attacks in the French capital, Bernardi has changed his mind.

“I do think that cabinet now needs to reconsider the decision to take in 12,000 additional refugees on the basis of evidence that’s come to light over the last week,” he said.

“In our previous refugee intake we’ve had examples where people who have been accepted as refugees have gone on to commit terrorist acts or planned terrorist acts in this country. Why do we think that suddenly this is going to be any different?”

Bernardi said the screening process for refugees was open to inaccuracies, as security agencies were unable to go to Syria to do background checks. He also objected to handing over the decision of who could come to Australia to the “bunch of unelected bureaucrats” at the United Nations refugee agency.

“A lot of the most persecuted minorities in the Middle East – the Jews, the Christians, the Yazidis – don’t even go to UNHCR camps, they don’t register there because they’re scared for their lives by the Muslim communities there,” Bernardi said.

He said he wanted a rethink of the way the whole system worked.

“I do believe we should be reassessing our refugee humanitarian intake,” the Liberal senator said, adding his views were shared by many Australians.

“For many years I’ve been voicing my concerns about extremist elements in the country and the lack of political will to confront that and of course I’ve been called all sorts of names for my trouble by my colleagues and the media,” Bernardi said.

“But the point is I’ve been right about it and it is now a widespread community sentiment. We have extremist elements at work in this country. Why risk bringing in more to add to their ranks, even potentially, and bear the financial and social burden that comes with that?”

Bernardi’s call to axe the 12,000 refugee intake was promptly shot down by the attorney general, George Brandis, who reiterated the government’s determination to proceed during a statement to the Senate condemning the Paris attacks.

“These attacks give no reason to reduce our commitment to helping those who flee the barbarism of Isil and other terrorists,” Brandis said during question time on Monday. “Indeed, they demonstrate more graphically why it is necessary, both to stand resolutely against Isil, and also, to help as best we can its many innocent victims, including the 12,000 Syrian refugees we have rightly committed to take.”

The immigration minister, Peter Dutton, told the House of Representatives’ question time 2,800 Syrian and Iraqi refugees were in the process of having health and security checks as part of the 12,000 intake.

“The Australian government has in place the most robust security screening measures in relation to those coming in under the humanitarian program and we will not resile from that one bit,” Dutton said.

He said the government would cast aside any application of those seeking to come into Australia under the humanitarian visa system if the application presented security concerns.

The first five of the 12,000 intake, a Syrian family, arrived in Perth last week, in line with the government’s promise to resettle the first group by Christmas.

But the New South Wales refugee resettlement coordinator, Peter Shergold, told ABC radio on Monday morning the lengthy security process refugees had to undertake could mean the bulk of the 12,000 visa holders would not be resettled until 2017.

“I’m working on the basis that the vast majority will come next year, in 12 or 18 months, not six months,” he said. “I think it’s appropriate that screening, security, character checks are all done before they arrive.”

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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