“We believe in the right of everyone to seek his fortune and live, to the respect for the other and tolerance,” said Merkel. “We know that our free life is stronger than any terrorist. Let’s give the terrorists the answer by living our values confidently. And as we affirm these values throughout Europe. Now more than ever.”

Just last month, top security experts warned Merkel that the middle class in Germany is becoming “radicalized” in response to the migrant influx and that domestic unrest may occur as a result. The warning was “circulated among high-ranking security officials in the federal government,” according to the report.

With Poland already announcing that it will refuse to take in any more refugees after the bloody attacks in Paris, Merkel’s open border policy, already under fierce criticism, is likely to face intense opposition given ISIS’ vow to smuggle in jihadists amidst the waves of migrants. Meanwhile, Front National leader Marine Le Pen struck a far different tone to Merkel, calling on France to tighten its borders.

“France must determine who its friends are and who its enemies are. France’s enemies are those who maintain links with Islamism. Once and for all, France must recapture control of its borders,” said Le Pen.

“Islamist fundamentalism must be destroyed, radical mosques must be closed and radical clerics must be expelled. French terrorists must be stripped of their citizenship and banned from this country.”

Someone had sprayed a gallows on the front of his house, along with Herbst's name and the word "Volksverraeter" - traitor to the German people. "Now we indeed have a new situation," Herbst said in a telephone interview the day after the incident. "You start worrying about your safety and that of your family."

The incident reflects a growing public tension in Germany, where far-right groups were quick to seize on the Paris terror attack as evidence of a need to curb immigration. While it's the extremists on the far right who are grabbing most of the headlines, mainstream Germans are increasingly being drawn into inflammatory rhetoric - and at times anti-foreigner sentiment.

The country's normally staid - some might say dull - political debates have in particular become inflamed with vitriol amid the influx of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in recent months. Nazi comparisons, once considered beyond the pale of polite political discussion in a country still grappling with its genocidal past, have become a common slur.

That US-driven rift between Europe and Russia must not be allowed to widen any further. The risks to Europe now are far too great for Paris, Brussels and Berlin to be squandering allies in favor of fickle friends — and Friday’s attacks in the French capital highlight the total absurdity of the West continuing to treat Russia as its enemy in the face of such a menacing common threat.

The pressure from the US side however, might be too great. The Obama administration has demonstrated, for whatever reasons, that cooperating with Russia on an equal footing is not something they feel they can lower themselves to. Washington will attempt to seize the moment and dominate the Vienna talks. The fact that Barack Obama yesterday evening took to a podium to comment on the Paris attacks while the siege was still ongoing — and before even the French president himself had spoken publicly — is evidence enough of that.

Of course, the roots of this go much further back than Syria. The US handed the EU the pen to sign its own death warrant when George Bush invaded Iraq and paved the way for a group as horrifically barbaric as the Islamic State to rise from the carnage and destruction. Terrorism is a global threat. The heinous attacks in Paris prove that nowhere is safe from this menace. Not a small concert venue on a Friday night. Not a friendly football game between neighboring nations. Not an inconspicuous Cambodian restaurant in a Parisian neighborhood.

Truth be told, no one knows how to deal with ISIS. Not Washington, not Paris and not Moscow. There isn’t a rulebook — but there is certainly a list of tried and tested failures that can inform our decision making. What is also clear is that this threat does demand solidarity among nations who should be able to put their minor differences aside to face a common threat.

To allow Washington to fan the flames of a useless rift between Europe and Russia is pure insanity. The longer Europe remains blind to this reality, the longer we treat Russia as an enemy rather than a partner in dealing with IS, the longer we must prepare ourselves for endless violence — in Syria and in our own front yards.

The invasion is occuring with complete disregard for what it is taking away from in terms of basic developmental needs, as well as for screentime’s negative influence on nervous system health. Health and development risks aside, research suggests computer use in schools drags down test scores.

Why collect copious amounts of data if the process of data collection itself negatively impacts student performance? Or the ability to acquire real-life skills? Not surprisingly, when education policies are ineffective and impractical but continue to move forward like a freight train, what’s typically greasing the wheels is – you guessed it – money.

"In helping to shoulder responsibility for family planning, men become heroes to their partners, to their families and to our future," said event co-founder Jonathan Stack. The event is being held as a report from campaigners and donors warned efforts to get modern contraceptives to women in some of the world's poorest countries are not on track, with millions fewer reached than had been hoped.

In Muslim-majority Indonesia, efforts to persuade men to get vasectomies have been hampered after the country's top Islamic clerical body several years ago declared the procedure "haram", or against Islamic law.

The United States, long accused of taking an incremental approach to the struggle, is under growing political pressure at home and abroad to do more and it is expected to examine ways to intensify the campaign, including through expanded air power. US officials say Washington will look in particular to European and Arab allies to step up their military participation in the war in Iraq and Syria.

It remains far from clear whether Paris and Washington would be willing to radically expand the scope of their current military engagement, given a deep aversion to getting dragged into a large-scale ground war in the Middle East. But President Barack Obama has been committing more to the fight in recent months, and lawmakers and counter-terrorism experts see the Paris attacks strengthening arguments for additional military might. Islamic State claimed responsibility for Friday's attacks, which killed 129 people in Paris, in the worst bloodshed in France since the end of World War Two.

In the past two weeks, there have been other major Islamic State-claimed attacks. Two explosions in suicide attacks in a Shi'ite Muslim district of southern Beirut in Lebanon killed 43, and 224 died when a Russian aircraft crashed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.

'What is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain and we have contained them,' Obama said in the interview. 'They have not gained ground in Iraq, and in Syria they’ll come in, they’ll leave, but you don’t see this systemic march by ISIL across the terrain.'

Since Friday's attacks in Paris, several social media users, including Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, have criticized the comments made by Obama, who set off for the two-day Group of 20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, on Saturday. 'President Obama said "ISIL continues to shrink" in an interview just hours before the horrible attack in Paris. He is just so bad! CHANGE,' Trump wrote on Twitter. Obama said in his interview that aired on Friday that he had been unable to 'completely decapitate ISIS'. 'What we have not yet been able to do is to completely decapitate their command and control structures,' he said.

'We’ve made some progress in trying to reduce the flow of foreign fighters, and part of our goal has to be to recruit more effective Sunni partners in Iraq to really go on offense rather than simply engage in defense.'

A senior administration official explained the connection between Obama's comments and Friday's attack on Paris to CNN. 'We, including the President, have said from beginning the fight against ISIL that it would be long and have both good and bad days,' the official said. ISIS has quickly grown during the Obama administration, from an organization the president once called al Qaeda's 'JV (junior varsity) team' to the force that it is today.

“I don’t think any sensible person would disagree that the invasion of Iraq led to the massive instability we’re seeing right now,” Sanders said. Sanders and O’Malley went on to discuss the consequences of regime change that Washington has enforced. “If you look at history… you will find that… these invasions, these toppling of governments, regime changes, have unintended consequences. I would say that on this issue I’m a little bit more conservative than the Secretary, and I am not a big fan of regime changes,” Sanders said.

“It’s not just about getting rid of a single dictator,” said the former Maryland governor, O’Malley. “It is about understanding the secondary and third consequences that fall next,” he added, emphasizing the need for better intelligence and planning on the ground in the Middle East.

Possibly believable evidence will be presented that the Paris attacks were real terrorist attacks. However, what do refugees have to gain from making themselves unwelcome with acts of violence committed against the host country, and where do refugees in France obtain automatic weapons and bombs? Indeed, where would the French themselves obtain them?

The millions of refugees from Washington’s wars who are overrunning Europe are bringing to the forefront of European politics the anti-EU nationalists parties, such as Pegida in Germany, Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party, and Marine Le Pen’s National Front Party in France. These anti-EU political parties are also anti-immigrant political parties. The latest French poll shows that, as a result of the refugees from Washington’s wars, Marine Le Pen has come out on top of the candidates for the next French presidential election.

By supporting for 14 years Washington’s neoconservative wars for US hegemony over the Middle East, establishment European governments eroded their electoral support. European peoples want to be French, German, Dutch, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, British. They do not want their countries to be a diverse Tower of Babel created by millions of refugees from Washington’s wars.

To remain a nationality unto themselves is what Pegida, Farage, and Le Pen offer the voters. Realizing its vulnerability, it is entirely possible that the French Establishment made a decision to protect its hold on power with a false flag attack that would allow the Establishment to close France’s borders and, thereby, deprive Marine Le Pen of her main political issue.

"Recognition of a Palestinian state by France would be a grave mistake," Netanyahu said, according to AFP. "The State of Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people, the only state that we have, and the Palestinians demanding a state do not want to recognize the right to have a state for the Jewish people," Netanyahu told members of Jews who immigrated from France.

Following Sweden's official decision and symbolic votes in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain, the European Parliament is expected to vote on a draft resolution that would recognize a Palestinian state.

And the problem will get a lot worse. In 2015, Germany will bring in at least half a million “migrants.” Only now that it’s too late does Germany appear to be regretting its decision to open the gates. The “migrants” are already running — and ruining — major cities. The police in Hamburg have “capitulated” to Muslim gangs that “outnumber and overwhelm them,” and Muslim rapists, also operating in gangs, are waging sexual jihad [Polizei kapituliert vor kriminellen Flüchtlinge, Die Welt, November 30, 2014].

The Gatestone Institute, an organization which tracks this kind of crime, has published a shocking report about the tragic fate of the homeland of Schiller, Beethoven and Goethe. More than 1,000 “unaccompanied minor migrants” teem on Hamburg’s streets. Feral gangs use any perceived slight to fight cops and other gangs.

Unsurprisingly, the Germans won’t deport these criminals because they are “minors” and because they fear accusations of racism. Indeed, the insanity runs so deep the government in Hamburg is seizing vacant commercial property to house them [Hamburg to seize commercial property to house migrants, BBC,October 2, 2015]. Hostile ethnic tribes are now dividing up what used to be German territory.

In Stuttgart, Gambian drug dealers run the criminal underground. In Dresden, Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians control the Wiener Platz, the large public square at the train station. An article at Bild complained these immigrants engage in drug dealing and pickpocketing, “usually with impunity. Police raids on the square have become a game of whack-a-mole, with a never-ending number of migrants replacing those who have been arrested.”

The change would happen as a result of conservative and Christian political parties gaining more votes caused by the increased refugee influx and the ongoing economic crisis. In addition, during the Greek debt crisis, Merkel didn't act tough enough towards Greece, infuriating a number of conservative politicians in the German parliament, Stratfor said.

"This view would keep several Central and Eastern European nations from entering the Eurozone… Moreover, because crises in the Eurozone periphery are far from over, the possibility of Greece and others leaving the euro cannot be ruled out," the Stratfor report said. Small changes will likely start happening in 2016, but a significant political transition of the EU's main powerhouse will definitely be felt after the German election in 2017.

In light of the EU's military policy, Washington should encourage the EU to "defend itself," says the author, an expert in an influential US think tank. While "Internationale Politik" is raising fundamental questions, NATO is opening a debate on a new "southern strategy." Since Russia is expanding its naval presence in the Mediterranean and establishing new military bases in Syria, the Mediterranean "is a contested space," according to NATO circles.

The deployment of drones in Sicily has been announced, along with plans to intensify cooperation with the countries of the region. "Advisers" are already active in Tunisia, Jordan and Iraq and should also be sent to Libya as soon as possible. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has announced that the debate will be continued at the meeting of NATO foreign ministers, scheduled for early December.