Divisions between her conservatives and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) over benefits for refugees prompted coalition leaders to cancel a special cabinet meeting planned for Monday where they had hoped to agree measures to speed up the processing of asylum seekers. But the biggest fight was within Merkel's own conservative ranks as members of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) lined up to condemn their Bavarian sister party for humiliating the chancellor at a congress in Munich on Friday evening.

With Merkel standing next to him, Horst Seehofer, the leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), openly criticised her for refusing to put a formal cap on the number of refugees entering Germany. He was cheered loudly by members of his party as Merkel stood fidgeting uncomfortably on the stage.

Elmar Brok, a senior member of Merkel's CDU, denounced Seehofer's behaviour as "impolite, unseemly and unacceptable" in an interview with the Tagesspiegel newspaper. Other CDU members said the CSU leader had broken a taboo in how the two parties behave with each other. Seehofer refused to back down, telling German television station n-tv that he could not in good conscience tell a "fairy tale of harmony and consensus" when major differences remained.

The barbs flew as Merkel marked her 10-year anniversary in office on Sunday.

And of course, because of that, Andrew Neil has had to spend the morning on Twitter defending himself from the charge his commentary was an attack on Islam in general, and members of the Muslim community in particular.

Yes, Andrew Neil has received a lot of praise for his broadcast too. But the criticism of him was revealing. He had condemned, in very specific terms, Islamist – not Islamic – terrorists. And then found himself condemned for making a generic link between the Paris attacks and Islam. He hadn’t. It was actually Andrew Neil’s critics, not Andrew Neil himself, who had drawn the connection.

Whenever one of the atrocities occurs, we begin another sterile debate about whether there is “a link” between the attacks and the Islamic faith. And the time has come to draw a line under it. There is a link between Islam and terror. That is an indisputable fact. Those carrying out the Paris attacks claimed to be doing so in the name of the Islamic faith. All the attackers self-identified as Muslims. Their statements made clear that – perverse though their interpretation of it may be – Islam was their ideological inspiration.

At the camp, dozens of migrants and refugees queue to give their fingerprints, have a photo taken and be quizzed by agents from European border agency Frontex. It's a seemingly detailed security check, but jihadists have already proven they can bypass it with ease.

The suspected architect of the Paris attacks that killed 130 people, 28-year-old Abdelhamid Abaaoud, escaped from Europe to Syria and returned without being detected. More than 650,000 migrants and refugees have reached the Greek islands so far in 2015 using the eastern Mediterranean route from Turkey, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said earlier this month.

Now you know why Pope Francis pushes so very hard for “all the world” to take in these illegal Muslim migrants. He’s getting paid millions to do it. Someone once said that when something doesn’t make sense, there’s a buck in it. In this case, there were 79 million of them.

Ann Corcoran’s Refugee Resettlement Watch website notes that Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Syracuse, New York, was closed down by the Catholic Church and has been leased to an Islamic society which renamed it Mosque Of Jesus The Son Of Mary.

“There are slim copper crescents where, for 100 years, there had been crosses,” reports Marnie Eisenstadt of the Syracuse Post-Standard and Syracuse.com. She adds, “The six crosses were removed and replaced at the end of June. Four of them were massive: 600 pounds of concrete each, and more than 4 feet tall. The step was the last, and most visible, in the building’s change from church to mosque.” The situation is even worse in Europe, where Islam is replacing Christianity as the dominant religion.

A peace plan agreed to last weekend by 17 nations meeting in Vienna says nothing about Assad's future, but states that "free and fair elections would be held pursuant to the new constitution within 18 months." To clarify the timeline, the State Department said this past week that the clock starts once Assad's representatives and opposition figures begin talks on a constitution. The vote would determine a new parliament, though not necessarily a new president.

Getting to constitutional talks will be difficult. It implies that Syria's warring parties first reach a cease-fire and establish a transition government - something unattainable so far. Neither Syria's government nor its fractured opposition has endorsed the strategy yet or done much to advance it.

"Nothing can start before defeating the terrorists who occupy parts of Syria," Assad recently told Italian state television. Assad considers anyone fighting him, including moderate rebels, to be terrorists.

“They often act too late, or fail to see a complete picture of what's happening due to a lack of ‘human intelligence,’” he said in an interview with NBC News, as cited by Reuters, adding that the mafia’s knowledge of individual movements and interaction with locals gives it the upper hand, even compared to the latest surveillance technologies.

Gambino, who is trying to carve out a career as a Hollywood screenwriter, says that, following the horrendous terror attacks in Paris on November 13, protection is more important than ever. "The world is dangerous today, but people living in New York neighborhoods with Sicilian connections should feel safe," he said. "We make sure our friends and families are protected from extremists and terrorists, especially the brutal, psychopathic organization that calls itself the Islamic State,”

Gambino Jr, who was brought up in Torretta, a mountainous area overlooking Palermo, the capital of Sicily, says that Islamic State (formerly ISIS/ISIL) fear the Sicilian mafia, and this has been one of the main reasons why they have not tried to set up any underground cells in Sicily.

Whether the authors' conclusions are well-founded or complete lunacy isn't the point here. Amazon.com has selectively targeted this book for censorship due to the political incorrectness of the authors' conclusions. Remember, Amazon.com went out of its way to ban Confederate flags in the aftermath of another shooting, enforcing a grotesque, almost Stalinist political correctness in its decision to pull Confederate flag merchandise from its online store (including children's toys like the General Lee car from Dukes of Hazzard).

Yet at the same time, Amazon sells tens of thousands of books asserting all sorts of bizarre things, from authors who believe the Earth is literally flat to Adolf Hitler's pro-genocidal Mein Kampf. Amazon's banning of Fetzer's book is a dangerous precedent of banning books based on their non-conformity with political correctness. "Amazon gave me no reason," Fetzer told Natural News. "The situation is completely absurd… if you disagree with a government version of anything, Amazon can pull your book."

This brings up the possibility that Amazon might soon ban US history books that show the country's Founding Fathers in a positive light, for example. Will books on Thomas Jefferson soon be memory holed by the Amazon Ministry of Truth? What about books that question the cancer industry or Monsanto's GMOs? Notably, Jeff Bezos is both the founder of Amazon.com and the owner of the Washington Post, a highly politicized paper whose "science" writers parrot Monsanto talking points with absolute obedience.

Amazon's censorship effort should be disturbing to all of us, regardless of whether we agree or disagree with the conclusions of the author of this banned book. By banning this book because of its speech, Amazon.com now believes it has a right to determine "truth" in books and ban those books that contradict the company's opinions on current events.

Amazon.com, in other words, has just become your Big Brother, and it's going to decide what you can and cannot read. To me, that's far more alarming than anything we might find in the pages of "Nobody Died at Sandy Hook," regardless of whether it's truth or fiction.

The students pointed out that Wilson was a racist who, as president of the United States, had federal government agencies segregated, reversing progress toward civil rights for black people. Many observers have wondered which historical figure honored on American campuses would next capture critical attention.

The answer appears to be Thomas Jefferson. At both the University of Missouri at Columbia and the College of William & Mary, critics have been placing yellow sticky notes on Jefferson statues, labeling him - among other things - "rapist" and "racist."

Once again, students are raising the question of whether men seen as heroes in American history were decidedly unheroic when it came to issues of race - and black students are demanding that colleges consider the impact of various honors for people whom they do not consider heroes.

The leaflets, which fluttered to the ground about 45 minutes before the strikes, simply said: "Get out of your trucks now, and run away from them. Warning: airstrikes are coming. Oil trucks will be destroyed. Get away from your oil trucks immediately. Do not risk your life." "We combine these leaflet drops with very low altitude passes of some of our attack aviation, which sends a very powerful message," the colonel added.

He said the decision to drop warnings came after they "assessed that these trucks, while although they are being used for operations that support ISIL, the truck drivers, themselves, probably not members of ISIL; they're probably just civilians." "So we had to figure out a way around that. We're not in this business to kill civilians, we're in this business to stop ISIL - to defeat ISIL."

So after all this time, they came up with a great plan; drop flyers on ISIS trucks so that the drivers, who may or may not be ISIS members, can run away in time. Meanwhile ISIS gets 45 minutes of warning. Now you know why we won't actually bomb ISIS' core forces. And so does ISIS. All it has to do is surround itself with civilians and it's invulnerable. Just like the Taliban did in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile ISIS has been financing its operations with money we could have taken away from it, but didn't because it might have meant harming its drivers. Just imagine this bunch of clowns fighting WW2 and we wouldn't need to imagine an alternate version of history in which the Nazis won. If the left stays in power, the Islamic Nazis will win in this version of history.

The disastrously uncoordinated response to the refugee crisis had already discredited the notion that this was a unified federation in which all member states had an equal voice. The grand verbiage of solidarity and cooperation simply dissolved when faced with a global humanitarian disaster – precisely the sort of event which the whole edifice was originally constructed to avert.

And then, with Paris, it became horrifyingly obvious that the open borders policy – the most sacred of the EU founding principles – was unsustainable. As Abdelhamid Abaaoud and his army of butchers had clearly known all along, and the migrant-traffickers were able to promise their desperate customers, once you set foot on the holy ground of Europe you may as well be invisible.

But it is not only the free movement of peoples and goods (which turned out to include Kalashnikovs) which has come into question. Along with the right to “tighten” France’s borders, whatever that turns out to mean in practice, François Hollande also demanded – and got – permission to ignore EU budget limits so that he could increase government spending on security and defence.

So, to return to my original question: what’s left? If national borders may be reinstated by individual governments either with hasty barbed wire or officially reconstituted checkpoints, and EU budget rules can be thrown out whenever circumstances require, what does the authority of the EU Commission and Council and Parliament amount to?

Possible answer: a largely useless, self-perpetuating, massively overpaid bureaucracy presiding over Potemkin institutions whose deliberations count for nothing when the lives of real people living under real governments are at stake.

The conclusion is inescapable: the institutions of the EU are not fit for purpose and its conception of democracy is a sham. There is a good reason why member states cannot simply put aside their own interests and the concerns of their own populations for the sake of a Europe-wide policy: because their internal democracy is the real thing.

Today, too many are either on the margins or not communicating members of our society at all. Letting this happen, to coin a phrase, is “like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. That phrase was Enoch Powell’s, whose so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech in April 1968 warned us of the dangers of “communalism”, and specifically of those caused by mass immigration. He feared that the concentration of immigrants and their descendants in large communities killed the prospects of integration.

Powell was reviled for his remarks, though mainly for those in which he quoted constituents. He was not a man to think, let alone utter, bigoted thoughts himself. The toxic situation created by the response to his speech – a mixture of Leftist grandstanding and self-righteous smugness by many Tories who thought it politic to denounce him – provided an excuse to politicians for years afterwards not to question the imposition of multiculturalism on Britain.

I recall one former cabinet minister – a Tory – whose cowardice was typical of dozens like him, saying to me 20 years ago that although he and his colleagues knew mass immigration was causing problems, “Enoch” had made it impossible to discuss them.

That is one of the great lies of recent politics. It was not Powell who made this discussion impossible: it was the fear of generations of politicians since him to state the obvious, that there was a group within Britain’s community of predominantly decent, law-abiding and highly civilised Muslims who were determined to impose a primitivism and savagery first on their co-religionists and then, if they could, on the rest of society.

To refuse to tolerate that was not racism, it was common sense and an appeal for reason and decency; to use what Powell had said as an excuse for doing nothing was simply the expression of a desire for a quiet life. We cannot allow our citizens to dine à la carte from the menu of our laws and customs. We welcome those from other cultures here: all we ask is that they live by our rules.

Neither President Obama nor other officials in his administration, however, have spoken of shutting down radical mosques in the US. But US reticence about taking actions now being implemented by France and Belgium isn’t for a lack of mosques in this country in which hatred for American values and support for jihad terrorism are regularly heard.

There are more than 80 radical mosques in the US, according to the Clarion Project, a non-profit group that describes itself as “dedicated to exposing the dangers of Islamist extremism.” These mosques or their leading clerics have radicalized attendees to become terrorists, supported terrorist organizations, made radical Islamist remarks or hosted others that have, or are financially backed by radical individuals or organizations.

“Islamist extremists have developed a sophisticated network of interconnected organizations across America,” according to Clarion. “The common thread among these organizations is their ideology of political Islam, which aspires to implement Shariah governance and to establish a global Islamic caliphate.” The FBI declined to tell TheDCNF if the nation’s top law enforcement agency has a similar list.

However, 90% of the people inquired were explicit that the most efficient means in the fight against the extremist organisation was the suspension of the financial flows and the arms deliveries. The poll carried out by the television channel clearly catches the tension that is squeezing through the seemingly calm German society after the series of terrorist attacks in Paris.

Although 61% of the respondents say they are not afraid of terrorist attacks in Germany, some 57% of the Germans insist for Berlin to spend more on the police and the military for the enhanced protection measures.

It was unclear just what these pre-emptive operations would be and why France is getting so dramatically involved in the campaign against ISIS. Not knowing the dramatic attack that was about to unfold (whose false flag origins have been quickly ignored as nobody has yet explained why a fake Syrian passport was found next to the suicide bomber), we speculated that this move had to do with the departure of the CVN-71 Theodore Roosevelt which had left the Persian Gulf region a month ago, leaving the entire 5th Naval Fleet without a US carrier presence for the first time in a decade.

One week later, we found out that Paris may have had an advance hint of what was about to unfold when on the night of Friday 13 it all fell into place. But with the French aircraft carrier full steam ahead toward the Syrian coast, the US could not afford to leave the airborne defense of the region to the French, so it did what was just a matter of time: it weighed anchor on the CVN-75, Harry Truman which was deployed toward the Middle East where according to the Daily Press it will "fight the Islamic State."

Where things get very interesting is what the Navy Times says next:

ISIS is not the only challenge that awaits the flotilla, which includes the cruiser Anzio, Carrier Wing Air 7, and destroyers Bulkeley, Gravely and Gonzalez. Russian, Chinese and Iranian marines have established their presence in Syria, and Russian warships from the Black Sea have relocated to the eastern Mediterranean to protect fighter jets conducting airstrikes in support of Syria's Assad regime. In preparation, the strike group's Composite Training Unit Exercise focused on adversaries that more closely resembled those of the Cold War.

Russians and Iranians we knew about, but Chinese? Does the US Navy know something that has not been made public previously? While we await the answer, what we do know is that suddenly the east Mediterranean is about to become a warship and aircraft carrier parking lot, with the Truman and de Gaulle side by side, just as we predicted it would be a month ago when we said that the summer of 2013 naval scenario is unfolding once again.

What happens when both the French and the US navies, both packing dozens of airplanes, arrive and convert the Mediterranean off the Syrian coast into one big warship parking lot. We can only hope that the sudden confluence of goodwill and best intentions by the superpowers to crush ISIS is genuine instead of merely a ploy to get everyone in the same place and result in the biggest ever Gulf of Tonkin redux and an "accidental" sinking of one or more ships... with or without a fake Syrian passport planted next to it.

The killings, part of the Obama administration’s targeted assassination program, are aiding terrorist recruitment and thus undermining the program’s goal of eliminating such fighters, the veterans added. Drone operators refer to children as “fun-size terrorists” and liken killing them to “cutting the grass before it grows too long,” said one of the operators, Michael Haas, a former senior airman in the Air Force. Haas also described widespread drug and alcohol abuse and said some operators had flown missions while impaired.

In addition to Haas, the operators are former Air Force Staff Sergeant Brandon Bryant along with former senior airmen Cian Westmoreland and Stephen Lewis. The men have conducted kill missions in many of the major theaters of the post-9/11 war on terror, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. “We have seen the abuse firsthand,” said Bryant, “and we are horrified.” The Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.