Germany finds itself at a historic turning point that could redefine what it stands for and what it wants to project to the world. As the far right makes significant electoral inroads, the country is in a deep identity crisis, facing serious structural economic and societal challenges.

While in the Weimar Republic a century ago, demagogues and populists thrived on “othering” German Jews, today this “other” is the migrant - more specifically, those with Muslim backgrounds.

As in other European countries, this broad-brush approach to political Islam has become widely accepted in the German mainstream, where any form of Islamic activism is regarded as a potential “gateway drug” to the world of jihadism.

The Islamist bogeyman is a beautifully simplistic narrative in populist fear-mongering. Mirroring the story told in the video posted by Bavaria’s interior ministry, any contact with Islamic discourse is portrayed as automatically putting the participant on a conveyer belt from moderate Islamism to al-Qaeda-style terrorism.

The oft-debunked “conveyer belt theory” has been pushed by Israeli and Emirati networks in the counter-extremism space in an effort to securitise political Islam in all its diverse shapes and forms.

The analysis found that oil companies have long influenced universities to focus on climate efforts that would enshrine a future for fossil fuels, despite experts' repeated warnings that the world must stop burning coal, oil and gas to avert the worst climate impacts.

"The science has been telling us that fossil fuel phase-out is the No 1 thing that we need to focus on, but within our universities, there's very little research on how to do fossil fuel phase-out," said Jennie Stephens, a climate justice professor at Maynooth University in Ireland and study co-author. "This provides some explanation for why society has been so ineffective and inadequate in our responses to the climate crisis."

Despite the authors’ efforts, the scope of fossil fuel funding on campus remains unclear because the vast majority of university research centers do not disclose their donors publicly. One 2023 report from the non-profit Data for Progress found that fossil fuel companies donated at least $700m to 27 US universities over the past decade, but the authors noted this was almost certainly an undercount.

libs continue midwifing fascism

The Israel Air Force is crafting a recommendation to increase production of bombs, missiles and other ammunition at home, in an attempt to reduce its dependence on other countries, especially the United States, a senior air force officer says.

The air force's stance echoes one by Israel in 1967. After the Six-Day War, French President Charles de Gaulle imposed an arms embargo on Israel, which included tanks, missile boats and Mirage jets.

Israel then switched over its dependence on a foreign power to the United States, which provides the air force with all of its fighter planes and some of its bombs, missiles and intelligence equipment – on top of the development of joint weapons systems for all three layers of air defense.

The senior air force official told Haaretz that without the Americans' supply of weapons to the Israel Defense Forces, especially the air force, Israel would have had a hard time sustaining its war for more than a few months.

A woman in Texas, United States has been formally indicted by a grand jury in the attempted drowning of a three-year-old Palestinian American girl earlier this year that police said was motivated by racial hatred.

The suspect, identified as Elizabeth Wolf, aged 42, was charged by a grand jury in Tarrant County in an indictment filed last month that included a hate crime enhancement, according to court records that came to light on Tuesday.

According to a police report, the attack in May occurred at an apartment complex swimming pool in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Euless.

At the time, the suspect approached the mother of the three-year-old girl, who was also at the pool with her six-year-old son, and asked where they were from. The suspect then tried to drown the three-year-old and also attempted to grab the six-year-old boy, the police report said.

The mother was able to pull her daughter from the water, police said, and local medics responded to the scene and the children were medically cleared. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Texas) said earlier this year that the accused approached the mother of the children “with racist interrogations” and then grabbed the children – who were in the shallow end of the pool – and pulled them into the deep end in the alleged drowning attempt.

Human rights advocates have warned about rising threats against Palestinian Americans, Muslims, Arabs and Jews since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza.

In late November, three Palestinian men in their early 20s were shot near a university campus in Vermont in the US, injuring all three of them.

A month earlier, a six-year-old Palestinian American boy was stabbed to death in Illinois. Police charged a 71-year-old man with murder and a hate crime for stabbing the child to death and seriously injuring his mother.

According to the police, the elderly attacker targeted the victims as a response to the war in Gaza and their religion.