Last week, I posted about allegations of a needle attack on Alternative für Deutschland co-chair Tino Chrupalla. On October 4th, at a rally in Ingolstadt ahead of the Bavarian state elections this past Sunday, Chrupalla was posing for selfies with supporters when two fans hugged him. His right arm suddenly felt heavy and within minutes he was near collapse. An ambulance rushed him to hospital and he spent several days under medical observation in intensive care.
There have now been important developments in this case.
In the days after the attack, Ingolstadt prosecutors acknowledged that police were investigating, but insisted they had “no evidence… that Mr. Chrupalla was approached or attacked”. As intended, this gave the right-thinking press space to jeer that that the AfD was “exaggerating shamelessly” for political gain ahead of the elections, and for the Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) to deplore “how perfidiously and deceitfully the AfD is trying to capitalise on these incidents… in the state elections.”
Amid Herrmann’s bizarre fulminations, AfD-adjacent newsweekly Junge Freiheit (JF) reported that Chrupalla’s own doctor had diagnosed an “intramuscular injection” with an unknown substance in Chrupalla’s deltoid. Police immediately summoned the doctor for interrogation, after which he mysteriously distanced himself from the diagnosis, pleading that in his assessment he had merely provided “a description of the injury based on Chrupalla’s statements and not an actual determination of an injection”. Public prosecutors again said that allegations of an attack had “no basis in witnesses’ statements… including the testimony of Mr. Chrupalla and his bodyguards”.
Only this Wednesday did Chrupalla feel well enough to give his first public statements on the attack. Because the police would do nothing, he said he was forced to enlist a Dresden pathologist to investigate his needle injury. The doctor took a skin sample from the injection site on his arm, confirming that an injection had occurred. Chrupalla also said that he still felt unwell and that he’d lost 3.5kg in the days since the Ingolstadt rally, and he added an additional detail that the press had not yet reported: immediately after the attack, federal police had noticed a blood-stain on his right shirt sleeve, corresponding to the injection site. All those official claims that police had no evidence of a needle attack were lies, in other words; they had clear indications from the first moment.
Hours after Chrupalla’s statements, Ingolstadt prosecutors suddenly reversed themselves, finally acknowledging the obvious:
Expert opinion has confirmed that the blood stain on MdB Chrupall’s clothes is his own blood. According to our current assessments, this blood stain probably corresponds to the diagnosed puncture wound. The investigations of the Ingolstadt public prosecutor’s office continue to focus on the open question of when and how Chrupalla’s diagnosed puncture wound… occurred during the campaign rally… in Ingolstadt, and who caused it. In order to clarify these matters, we are identifying and questioning further witnesses, evaluating video recordings and seeking out expert assessments.
What happened here could not be clearer:
Chrupalla suffered a needle attack less than two weeks after a serious ‘security incident’ against his co-chair Alice Weidel on September 23rd. Worried that these possibly coordinated efforts against AfD leadership might have consequences for the elections in Hesse and Bavaria, the German press played down the Weidel incident, suggesting that she was just seeking any excuse for a holiday on Mallorca. In the case of Chrupalla, police and prosecutors collaborated towards the same ends, denying the attack until the elections were over and mounting evidence, procured by Chrupalla himself, stripped their stupid efforts of all credibility.
Aside from the Federal Republic of Germany, is there any other developed Western nation where the police, the press and the political establishment react with such obviously calculated indifference to serious assaults on leading opposition party officials?
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The press in the West appear to me to be more activists than journalists.
People talk as though being objective is impossible. It isn’t. Years back, when the BBC first started, they did it rather well. Because back then we lived in a society where there were principles regarding objectivity and truth. It was the golden age of principled public administration. When you have worked in a large business, you learn exactly how to write objective business documents. I was taught to avoid all emotion words and unjustifiable superlatives (the latter I have neglected severely in my own social media comments – but I’m aware of that and also aware how easy it is to correct if I just try a bit harder, which I do from time to time). When this is done with commitment, the result really is VERY objective. So hearing objectivity is hard and “subjective” is simply wrong.
Then the next commitment of principle, is to avoid missing out key relevant data. Sins of omission are important to avoid. Now of course there is always the constraint of length. An article can’t go on forever, so some selection is inevitable. Nevertheless the journalist who places objectivity highest will quite easily be able to identify the most pressing and hard felt issues by the public and find a way to introduce or balance those points. Even if space constraints are such that it is inevitable some data is omitted, the public very quickly gain a sense when a journalist is authentic and trying hard in principle to be balanced across the range of their output. Current examples are few and far between but include Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and Michael Shellenburger. All oddly have felt forced to be independent of the establishment press.
The establishment press, the BBC etc. would simply have has believe it is hard to be objective because, IMO, put simply, they don’t want to be.
Note there, I added IMO, because I am speculating on motive. How hard is that to do? Not very if even a modicum of effort is applied.
Also, because I have tried a little harder for this comment – I went back to the first line and turned it from a definitive statement into one saying “appear to me” to make it clear that is personal opinion. Really that isn’t so difficult is it?
It seems like many “professions” have been taken over by people whose primary motivation is not to make a living or to execute their chosen field in a professional manner, but to save/change the world. Journalism, teaching, senior management roles in many fields, academia, “public health”, TV, films, advertising all spring to mind.
Thatcher started it in the UK by allowing Whitehall to develop one-to-one contacts with external commercial interests.
Its been downhill all the way for the past 40 years.
Now we have corruption throughout Whitehall which is driving a lot of what is happening now – serving foreign and home commercial interests against our interests.
If you want to know where woke comes from one of the places to look is Whitehall.
The downvote on my above post is by CivilServant.
LOL – ye can’t win ’em all.
Yes. In Britain. Farage was repeatedly attacked and had many threats. Party members were often given the same treatment. The police and Home Office refused to provide any protection for the leader of a party that won the last EU elections we had.
I wonder why that might have been.
I also have to wonder if the organs of the state in Germany might have been involved in the attacks on Afd
The same thought occurred to me. Indeed, injection is a method of assassination well known to intelligence agencies – think of the Markov case from the eighties – since it is intended to leave the slightest possible trace. Given the “long march” through the institutions; given the fanatical ideology which motivates it; given its flight from common standards of objectivity and decency (witness the establishment response to the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas), is it serious to dismiss as “conspiracy” the proposition that members of this revolutionary cult might now be stooping to murder in pursuit of their cause? Let us take some random examples: they “de-bank” Farage and then arrange an “enquiry” to deny that “de-banking” takes place; they do their best to squash the result of a referendum; they say masks don’t work and then impose them, denying that they offered the first point at all. The list of their squalid manoeuvres has been lengthening year on year. That murderous assault lies at the end of this squalid road is not “conspiratorial” but a matter of simple probability. And after all, they consider their opponents as fair game, do they not, since they are nothing but “fascists”? Imagine two close associates from university, now perhaps in their later twenties; one has joined the civil service the other lurks on the fringes of academe and drifts around extremist circles – are they really so far apart?
“After a Week of Politically Motivated Denial Prosecutors Admit AfD Co-Chair Was Assaulted”
Just like here – corruption by public office holders.
It is everywhere I look. Dodgy cops, dodgy NHS, dodgy health officials with dodgy health scares, dodgy politicians [yes and that is even the ‘honest’ ones], dodgy civil servants, dodgy schools with dodgy woke indoctrination of our kids, dodgy judges ….
Anyone got any more to add to the list?
Oh, and boatloads of fighting age young men coming into the country every week.