John Rosenthal is a journalist and commentator who focuses on European politics, transatlantic relations, and international affairs. He contributed extensively to The Weekly Standard from 2010 to 2015, covering topics including French and German politics, European media narratives, terrorism, anti-Semitism, and U.S. foreign policy. His work frequently offered critical analysis of European press coverage and political developments for an American audience.
"Oh, you Jews! Allah has permitted us to kill your brothers on French soil and here on the soil of the Islamic State.” So says the speaker in an Islamic State video released in March, which allegedly shows a Palestinian Mossad agent being shot dead by a child executioner. Standing next to the boy…
Back in the heady days when the Western world was still enthralled by what was then known as the Arab Spring, the 2012 Egyptian presidential elections represented a watershed – if albeit a mixed one, given the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi. The coming-to-power of Morsi…
The new novel Les Événements (The Events), by the French author Jean Rolin, tells the tale of a France that has descended into a chaotic and multifaceted civil war involving jihadist, nationalist and Marxist militias, in various and fluctuating combinations, as well as remnants of the regular army.…
As reported by the Austrian daily Der Standard, some fifty Bosnian soccer fans broke into a chant of “Kill, kill the Jews!” during a pro-Palestinian rally in Vienna’s central Saint Stephan’s Square last week. The incident appears to have occurred on Tuesday, when the Bosnian national team was in…
The question as to why Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot of Germanwings flight 9525 would intentionally bring about the crash of the plane is at the source of much of the perplexity surrounding the Germanwings tragedy. Even if we suppose that Lubitz was suicidal, it is obviously one thing to commit…
Blogs and social media has been abuzz with talk of a supposed “German news report” indicating that Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot of Germanwings flight 9525, was a Muslim convert. In fact, there is no such report. The rumor that Lubitz converted to Islam got started on the German site Politically…
The recent controversy over a Fox News segment on “no-go zones” in France, culminating in Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo’s threat to sue the American channel, was a surreal experience for French-speakers, connoisseurs of France, and, above all, the French themselves. For while the original remarks by Fox…
Just two days before Sunday’s presidential elections, news broke that French judicial authorities are contemplating bringing rape charges against former IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn in connection with the so-called Carlton Affair. Strauss-Kahn has hitherto “merely” been under investigation…
Arid Uka, the 22-year-old Kosovo native who shot and killed two American airmen at the Frankfurt airport in March of last year, was sentenced to life in prison by a German court on Friday. Despite the terminology, however, a “life” sentence in Germany does not in fact mean life, and Uka could be…
Last month, German bank WestLB rolled out a new “Islam-compliant” investment product named the Islamic Strategy Index Certificate. The value of the certificate is based on the value of the WestLB Islamic Deutschland Index, consisting of shares of ten German firms “whose business activities are…
One of the European parliament’s most influential members, the German Christian Democrat Elmar Brok, has declared that Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade the credit ratings of nine eurozone member states is part of a “currency war” being waged by the United States against the euro and Europe…
The Romanian news agency Mediafax reports that an Iranian refugee who has been condemned to death for “apostasy” in Tehran has had his request for political asylum in Romania refused by the Romanian immigration office.
Two employees of the Sofitel hotel in New York walk into what appears to be a storage room, exchange a few words, and then break into a “dance of joy” – as it is has been termed in the French media – ending with an emphatic shoulder bump. The entire sequence, captured by a Sofitel security camera,…
"It seems . . . that we are in fact dealing with a new form of right-wing extremist terrorism,” German interior minister Hans-Peter Friedrich announced last month, following the revelation that a trio of neo-Nazis from Jena had been responsible for the murder of nine “foreigners” in Germany, as…
My report last Friday on the planned South Korean towers that resemble the World Trade Center enveloped in an explosive “cloud” on 9/11 provoked an angry message from a spokesperson for MVRDV, the Dutch architectural firm that designed the towers. In my article, I quoted MVRDV spokesman Jan…
The unveiling of pictures of planned luxury residential towers scheduled to be built in Seoul, South Korea, has sparked instant controversy. The reason is obvious. The towers, which include a so-called “cloud” feature connecting them around the 27th floors, clearly resemble the World Trade Towers…
Standard & Poor’s warning that no less than fifteen eurozone states, including Germany, could lose their AAA credit rating has been met with howls of protest from leading German politicians. The general secretary of the Social Democratic party (SPD), Andrea Nahles, described the Standard and Poor’s…
On Sunday, October 16, the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal was awarded the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade at Frankfurt’s historic St. Paul’s Church. Sansal is the author of six novels, including the widely praised The German Mujahid (Europa Editions, 2009), the first of his novels…
On June 2, the convicted Italian terrorist Cesare Battisti walked out of a Brazilian prison a free man. He did so after Brazil’s supreme court upheld the decision of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to refuse to extradite Battisti to Italy. A member of the left-wing terror group Armed…
One of the most typical reactions of French commentators to the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in New York has been a kind of knee jerk disparagement of the American criminal justice system – or the “atrocious” American criminal justice system, as one “expert” put it on the French news channel…
Both the so-called Republican Forces loyal to the new Ivoirian president Alassane Ouattara and French officials have been at great pains to insist that deposed president Laurent Gbagbo was captured by Ouattara’s troops and not by French troops. This is not what was initially reported. But, in any…
Many questions have been raised about Julian Assange’s and WikiLeaks’s association with the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Israel Shamir. (See, notably, Michael Moynihan’s detailed exposé on Reason.com here.) Among other things, Shamir defends the “veracity” of The Protocols of the Elders of…
The Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal is the author of The German Mujahid. The book addresses a unique theme for an Arab author: the Holocaust. Via the reflections of two young brothers in a Parisian banlieue, it tells the story of Hans Schiller: a German SS officer who immigrates to Algeria,…
In a major development that has been largely ignored or misrepresented in the American media, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has obtained access to the full stash of over 250,000 classified American diplomatic cables previously obtained by WikiLeaks. The paper has been posting a steady stream…
The below photo appears on the first page of yesterday’s edition of the German daily Die Welt:
Germany’s Der Spiegel has made it something of its bread-and-butter to promote scares with sensationalist cover stories and spooky cover art. But Americans might be especially surprised by the identity of Der Spiegel’s latest big threat: the social-networking site Facebook. Yes, just three weeks…
251,287. That’s the number of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks claims to have obtained. 1,897. That’s the number of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables that, according to WikiLeaks’s own count, have thus far been published on its website: not even 1 percent of the reported total.…
Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation is the principal fundraiser for WikiLeaks and indeed, on its own account, WikiLeaks’s de facto financial manager. In “Tax Deductible WikiLeaks,” I noted that donations to WikiLeaks via the foundation are even tax deductible for German contributors. This is because…
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,…
Last Friday, the American embassy in Rome held a panel discussion on the subject “Is the Internet Changing People’s Engagement in Democracy?” Fair enough. But the curious part is the identity of the featured speaker: one Sam Graham-Felsen, identified on the embassy website as “the Chief Blogger of…
Last month, the joint “Media Academy” of Germany’s two public television networks, ARD and ZDF, hosted a three-day seminar in Wiesbaden on the topic of “Islam in the Media and in Society.” As reported in Germany’s Islamische Zeitung, or “Islamic Newspaper,” the final day of the seminar featured…
In the annals of mind-bendingly obfuscatory teaser lines, the following from the New York Times surely must be given pride of place: “Germany may have secured one of the new nonpermanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, but with the rise of China, Europe’s influence is waning.” The teaser leads…
The European edition of Newsweek has discovered the face of European extremism. It peers out from the cover of the October 4 issue of the magazine. It consists neither of the hoary features of French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, nor the fresher look of the blond-coiffed Dutch anti-Islam…
Other than among associates of Feisal Abdul Rauf, one could well believe that 9/11 “trutherism” is largely a thing of the past. The main target of the “9/11 truth movement” was always, after all, the supposedly nefarious cabal otherwise known as the Bush administration. With the end of President…
Late last month, EU Home Affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmström announced the resumption of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP), under which American counterterror investigators have consulted and analyzed selected data on international bank transactions originating in Europe. (Note that…
Another interview and another controversy for Thilo Sarrazin, the embattled board member of the German Bundesbank. Last autumn, Sarrazin found himself embroiled in controversy and accused of racism following the publication of a wide-ranging interview in which he questioned the capacity for…
Changes in the earth’s atmosphere, the additional greenhouse effect and the resultant changes in the climate . . . represent a global danger for humanity and the entire biosphere of the earth. If no effective counteracting measures are taken, dramatic consequences are to be expected for all of…
Courtesy of the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the news media has been full of reports in the last few days about last month being the “hottest June” yet recorded and 2010 being on track likewise to be the hottest year. Such reports concern the “global…
In an article in the Sunday edition of the German tabloid Bild, the head of the German police union, Rainer Wendt, slammed the German government’s decision to accept two Guantánamo detainees slated for transfer. Noting that both detainees had received training at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan,…
On Tuesday, one day after Israeli commandos raided a supposedly “humanitarian” flotilla headed for the Gaza Strip, Israeli Ambassador to the EU Ran Curiel appeared before the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee in what would become a raucous session. Even before Curiel had the chance to…
The State Department was reportedly supportive of Brazilian president Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva’s visit to Tehran last weekend. An unnamed State Department official was quoted as saying the trip represented “perhaps the last big shot at engagement" in the conflict over the Iranian nuclear…
On first glance, the report in the popular German tabloid Bild could have seemed like a bad joke. “Guantánamo Detainees Slated to Go to Hamburg,” the headline ran. “Despite protests…,” the article began, “[German] Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maizière appears to be determined to accept three…
“Courage is contagious.” So runs the pithy motto adorning the bottom of the upload page of the currently minimalist WikiLeaks website. The original site is no longer online. It disappeared from the web shortly before the new year, allegedly to make way for a necessary fundraising drive. “We protect…
In what was billed as “his first U.S. appearance since the Bush administration barred him from the country in 2004,” the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan spoke last night to a nearly full house at the Great Hall of the Cooper Union in New York City. It may well in fact have been his first public…
Germany has finally discovered the nuclear threat. For years, German politicians and press played down American concerns about the nuclear ambitions of, first, the Iraq of Saddam Hussein and, later, the Iran of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.