Andrew Hammel Profile picture
Ami lawyer/writer/translator in Düsseldorf. Words German & English. Moist takes, praise of Düsseldorf, cats. "Sanitized for your protection©".
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Dec 21 24 tweets 4 min read
1/ ** CJEU: Even Violent Criminals Get to Stay Forever **
European courts, specifically the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) (formerly the European Court of Justice, ECJ) bear indirect responsibility for the Magdeburg Christmas attack. 2/ This sounds like right-wing rage clickbait (maybe it is!), but it's true, let me explain. Recent reports claim that Saudi Arabia asked Germany to extradite Magdeburg Christmas attacker Taleb al-Abdulmohsen to Saudi to face non-criminal charges.
Dec 5 16 tweets 4 min read
1/ Angela Merkel is on a book tour and she's not giving a centimeter on the decisions she made. But she's having to scrape the very bottom of the barrel for arguments. Here, she defends her decision to destroy the German nuclear-power industry by pointing to...Africa (!). 2/ In Africa, she notes, "no country is building nuclear power plants", which means Africa is showing the world that we can "switch to CO2-free energy sources without nuclear energy." To anyone who has met Africa, this argument is obviously not just wrong, but delusional.
Nov 9 12 tweets 2 min read
1/ Ralph Ghadban was born in Lebanon in 1949 and emigrated to Germany in 1972. For decades, he has been a part of networks helping Lebanese refugees adapt to life in Germany. He has also studied the dynamics of Arab (mostly Lebanese) welt.de/regionales/nrw… 2/ criminal clans in Germany. The more polite word for them, which most German mainstream media feel obliged to use, is "large families". The clans are usually named after their most senior leader or found, for instance the "Abu Shaker" clan.
Nov 6 20 tweets 3 min read
1/ I've been predicting a Trump win for a while, but I didn't think it would be this big. This looks like a referendum on the modern Democratic Party. Harris ran an OK campaign, but was a terrible candidate. 2/ She had won elections only in deep-blue states and accumulated the most liberal voting record in the Senate.
Nov 1 4 tweets 1 min read
1/ The state of Berlin, whose finances are a catastrophe, has rented a hotel complex with three high-rises for €143 million over ten years to house 1,200 asylum-seekers, most of whom are unemployed. A meeting where local residents were confronted welt.de/politik/deutsc… 2/ with this fait accompli was turbulent, with local residents complaining that local resources in the area such as playgrounds and grocery stores were already strained, and that they had not been consulted about the move.
Oct 21 11 tweets 2 min read
1/ "90% of young doctors are foreigners, and 75% of them don't speak adequate German". A German doctor pseuodnym "Bernd Ahrens" gives a frank, anonymous interview. Like so many other German institutions, the health-care system here is quietly collapsing. welt.de/politik/deutsc… 2/ There aren't enough places in German medical schools, and the best students often leave Germany because conditions here are dire -- earning potential is low, funding is scarce, and the bureaucracy is stifling. So Germany is dependent on foreign doctors.
Sep 23 10 tweets 2 min read
1/ A few thoughts about the state election in Brandenburg. Brandenburg is the state surrounding Berlin. Not very large but somewhat important geographically. Greens drop below the 5% barrier, as in Thuringia, meaning they drop out of the state parliament.
dw.com/en/germany-bra… 2/ This is the latest disaster for the Greens. Brandenburg is more liberal than many East German states, and the Greens were over 10% in the last election. Failing at the 5% barrier is a major catastrophe for any state party.
Sep 22 11 tweets 2 min read
1/ --German Protestants Want to Keep a Tajik ISIS Member here in Deutschland--
Here's an amusing tale which summarizes the German asylum system. After multiple attacks in Germany by people who were supposed to be deported but weren't, the Green Party welt.de/politik/deutsc… 2/ "Minister for Integration and Flight (Flucht)" (the title is a bit of virtue-signalling meant to imply that all migrants are "Flüchtlinge", or refugees) decided to grit her teeth, swallow her pride, and actually start deporting dangerous foreigners from Germany.
Sep 3 9 tweets 2 min read
1/ The German way is often: First the government makes something unaffordable, then it forces you to buy it. Case in point, veterinarians. Germany, unlike almost any other country, has a federally-mandated fee schedule for veterinary services. juraforum.de/news/kastratio… 2/ In November 2022, the vet lobby won a gigantic financial windfall: The Fee Ordinance for Veterinarians (GOT) was changed to drastically increase vet bills. Prices in general had only risen 19% since the last time it was updated, but the new GOT increased fees by 30-40%
Sep 2 6 tweets 2 min read
1/ Yesterday's elections highlight a flaw in Germany's political system. During the Weimar era, there were constant shifts in the political winds, which brought a succession of shaky coalitions to power. The Chancellorship changed hands almost every year, alphahistory.com/weimarrepublic… 2/ bringing a new cabinet, and there were 9 general elections in 14 years. After WW II, the framers of the modern constitution, the Basic Law, saw the Weimar Reichstag's instability as one cause of the Nazi rise to power. So they created a system designed to be much more stable.
Aug 26 10 tweets 2 min read
1/ The revelation that the Syrian Islamic extremist Issa al H. who killed three people and injured eight in Solingen was a failed asylum seeker who should have been deported is making some waves. But how likely are such attacks? Let's do the math.
faz.net/aktuell/politi… 2/ Last year, 351,000 illegal immigrants were allowed into Germany after saying the word "asylum" either at the border or when they walked into a local police station. That's literally all you need to do.
Aug 25 7 tweets 3 min read
1/ Here's an incomplete list of things that would be happening right now if the murder rampage at the Solingen Diversity Festival had been committed by a right-wing German: 2/ 1. Politicians would have already promised to allocate hundreds of millions of Euros for "right-wing radicalization prevention" measures. tagesschau.de/inland/faeser-…
Aug 25 6 tweets 1 min read
1/ If you're wondering why news about the Solingen knife rampage suddenly disappeared from the mainstream media overnight, it's because a suspect was identified and was, predictably, a Muslim foreigner. 2/ At that point, mainstream journalists suddenly lose all curiosity and move on to more important stories such as gay penguins or Ozempic prices.
May 25 10 tweets 2 min read
1/ 8000 SEXUAL ASSAULTS BY ASYLUM SEEKERS IN GERMANY SINCE 2015

Back in 2015, as a million young males from the most unstable and sexually repressed nations on earth streamed into Germany without any background checks, I predicted we might have a problem. welt.de/politik/deutsc… 2/ You see, these young males would have basically never seen any woman in public with her ankles or hair uncovered, much less her midriff or legs. But they *do* get Western pornography on their cellphones. So, I asked, what are we to expect when arrive in Germany?
May 7 12 tweets 2 min read
1/ So, a short legal primer. I am a US lawyer who has lived in DE for 20 years and translated German constitutional-law treatises, so I am an expert. Like most European countries, Germany has laws prohibiting group libel (Volksverhetzung). 2/ Article 5 of Germany's post-war constitution, the Basic Law, protects freedom of speech.
Apr 28 28 tweets 5 min read
1/ 400,000 YOUNG AFGHAN MALES IN GERMANY -- WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

One of the many taboos in the German immigration debate is why it's mostly young males (73% males, 78% under 34) who apply for asylum in Germany -- a trend which is becoming more pronounced.
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2/ If you point out this fact, you will be met with feel-good moralizing ("Asylum has no gender") or puerile strawmanning ("Oh, so you're going to exclude them just because they're males. Great. Now I understand who I'm dealing with.")
Apr 26 10 tweets 2 min read
1/ HOW GERMANS GET HYPNOTIZED BY RULES

A tendency of Germans and especially their bureaucrats is a fixation with enforcing rules to the exclusion of common sense and (in certain eras) basic humanity. Wait for the 2 stingers at the end of this insane tale. swr.de/swraktuell/bad… 2/ This is a story told by Boris Palmer, the Green Party mayor of Tübingen, Germany. Former Green, actually -- he was basically forced out of the party for questioning Green orthodoxy.
Apr 7 9 tweets 2 min read
1/ Federal crime stats for Germany from 2023 have been leaked to a German newspaper prior to general publication. Here are the year-on-year increases over 2022:
✅ Overall crimes: +5.5% vs. 2022, +9.3% vs. pre-pandemic 2019,
welt.de/politik/deutsc… 2/ ✅ # of criminal suspects: +7.3% (2,246,000)
✅ # of suspects w/o German nationality: 41% (+ 17.8% yoy)
✅ % of recent immigrants among suspects: 18% (+ 29.8% yoy)
✅ Burglaries: 77,819 (+ 18.1%); burglaries in Berlin: +35.2%
✅ Violent crimes: 214,099 (+8.6%)
Feb 19 21 tweets 4 min read
1/ WHY GERMANY CAN'T DEPORT ANYONE

Die Welt just published an important article on why Germany can't deport anyone. Currently there are 250,000 people living in Germany who have no right to be here. welt.de/politik/deutsc… 2/ Most of these are rejected asylum seekers or people who have committed serious crimes. They're called "Ausreisepflichtige" because they have been informed they have a "duty" (Pflicht) to leave the country. Only a trivial fraction leave voluntarily, since life in Germany
Feb 14 10 tweets 2 min read
1/ MY PIECE ON ANTISEMITISM IN GERMANY

I'm chuffed to reveal that Quillette has published my piece on antisemitism in Germany, which I think highlights some pretty serious journalistic malpractice. quillette.com/2024/02/13/nar… 2/ If you read English-language press coverage of Germany in the New York Times or Guardian or NYRB or almost anywhere else, you've probably come across the claim that according to German government statistics, "90%" or "the overwhelming majority" of antisemitic hate crimes in…
Jan 8 6 tweets 2 min read
1/ About a year ago, I predicted that Germany would soon start seeing the kinds of protests that often topple Third-World governments, in which masses of people protests cuts to fuel or food subsidies. In poor countries, dw.com/en/germany-far… 2/ millions of people live from jobs which require them to use fuel, but which don't pay enough to allow these people to buy fuel at market rates. So millions depend on the government to provide them fuel at artificially low prices. These subsidies of course have a distorting