Jürgen Todenhöfer (born 12 November 1940) is a German author, journalist, politician, and executive. Early life and education Todenhöfer was born in Offenburg in what is now the current German state of Baden-Württemberg, and studied law at the universities of Munich, Paris, Bonn and Freiburg. He graduated as a doctor of law in 1969 and worked as a judge from 1972 on. Politics Todenhöfer became a member of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) in 1970 which he left on 12 November 2020, his 80th birthday, to found a new political party and was a member of the Bundestag from 13 December 1972 to 20 December 1990 (five election periods) where he represented Tübingen and was affiliated with the pejoratively named "Stahlhelm-Fraktion." He also acted as party spokesman for development policy and arms control. He was vice chairman of the executive board of German media company Hubert Burda Media until 2008. He is considered to be a pacifist although he pointed out that he is not. He participates in the Bundestag election 2021 with his own party, Team Todenhöfer. He is a Christian. Journalism In 1980 he visited Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and started to raise money for refugees. Todenhöfer is one of the most prominent German critics of the US-led wars against Afghanistan and against Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively. He claims that during the war in Iraq the Bush administration was deceiving the public and that the US war in Iraq has killed several hundred thousand Iraqi civilians. He has visited Iraq several times and did original research for his book Why do you kill, Zaid? Following the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant against the Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, he sent an open letter to the Prosecutor General of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. He asked for the reasons which led the prosecutor to indict the Sudanese dictator but not the US president George W. Bush or the British prime minister Tony Blair, seeing that neither Sudan nor the US have recognized the International Criminal Court. In June 2019, he was shot in the back with a rubber bullet by an Israeli sniper in a protest. First western journalist to visit ISIS In the summer of 2014 Todenhӧfer sent a message on Facebook to more than 80 German ISIS soldiers asking whether he could visit the ISIS fighting cadre. His goal was to understand the motivations of ISIS. On