RUTHFULLY YOURS

Multiculturalism’s Child Brides
Recent reports of under-age marriages in Australia are evidence that the authorities need to do more to enforce marriage laws in Western nations, and in particular to restrict the practice of unregistered ‘clandestine’ religious marriages, particularly Islamic marriages.

This article was first published on Quadrant Online (here).

Two cases recently came to public attention of NSW girls being married to older men in unregistered religious ceremonies, allegedly with the approval of their guardians. The first case was of a 14-year-old girl who reported she was deceived into marrying a 21-year-old. After being subjected to years of sexual and physical abuse she fled the relationship. Her case came to light in October, 2013, when she needed to pursue custody of her daughter through the courts.

The second case was of a 12-year-old married to a 26-year-old overseas student by her father, an Australian-born convert to Islam. Imam Riaz Tasawar, who allegedly conducted the ceremony, has been charged by the police, which is remarkably the first prosecution in NSW for at least 20 years of someone for solemnizing a marriage without being an authorized marriage celebrant. The father has also been charged with procuring his daughter for sexual intercourse and being an accessory to a sexual offence against a child.

During a press conference on January 14, French President François Hollande revealed that French intelligence services believe more than 700 French nationals and residents have travelled to fight in Syria. This figure is more than double the previous estimates.

One month into 2014, Islam-related controversies continued making headlines in newspapers across Europe. The most salient topic involved the dramatic increase in the numbers of European jihadists participating in the war in Syria.

An ominous foreboding is unfolding over Europe, as counter-terrorism officials intensify their warnings about the negative security implications surrounding the return of hundreds—possibly thousands—of battle-hardened jihadists to towns and cities across the continent.

But Syria is only one of many concerns. What follows is a brief survey of some of the more noteworthy stories involving Islam in Europe during just the month of January 2014.

In Britain, a Muslim extremist who hacked a soldier to death on a London street in May 2013, launched a taxpayer-funded appeal against his murder conviction. Michael Adebolajo, 29, who tried to behead the British soldier Lee Rigby with a meat cleaver, maintains he should not have been convicted because he is a “soldier of Allah” and therefore Rigby’s killing was an act of war rather than premeditated murder.

Adebolajo and his co-defendant, Michael Adebowale, 22, were found guilty by a jury in December 2013, but have yet to be sentenced. The judge in the case, Nigel Sweeney, is said to be considering a whole-life prison term, but is awaiting legal guidance from the Court of Appeal of England and Wales. That court is currently reviewing a ruling by the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights, which states that whole-life terms violate the rights of prisoners.

Also in London, a Muslim woman was arrested by counter-terrorism police at Heathrow Airport on January 16 as she was preparing to board a flight to Turkey. Nawal Masaad, 26, is accused of trying to smuggle £16,500 ($27,000; €20,000) in her underwear to jihadists in Syria. She and her alleged co-conspirator, Amal El-Wahabi, 27—a Moroccan who does not work and claims British social welfare benefits for herself and two young sons—are the first British women to be charged with terrorism offenses linked to the conflict in Syria.

In a separate but related incident, two 17-year-old schoolgirls were arrested at Heathrow over suspected terrorism offenses. Police say they were “inspired by jihad” and were attempting to fly from Britain to Syria to fight in the civil war there.

The head of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism unit, Commander Richard Walton, revealed that 14 British minors were also arrested on charges linked to the Syrian conflict in January, compared to 24 for the whole of 2013. Calling the figures “stark,” Walton said it was shocking to see “boys and girls enticed” to join jihadists fighting in Syria. He said he believes it is “almost inevitable” some fighters will try to mount attacks in Britain upon their return.

In a sign of further challenges ahead for Britain, an analysis of recent census data published by the Daily Telegraph on January 10 shows that nearly ten percent of the babies and toddlers in England and Wales are Muslim. The percentage of Muslims among children under five is almost twice as high as in the general population. By way of comparison, fewer than one in 200 people over 85 are Muslim, an indication of the extent to which the birth rate is changing the religious demographic in Britain.

The long-running war on free speech in Britain continued apace in January, when a British Muslim lawmaker was threatened with beheading after he posted an image of Jesus and Mohammed on his Twitter account.

Liberal Democrat Maajid Nawaz (an MP who is also the co-founder of counter-extremism think-tank the Quilliam Foundation) posted a cartoon on January 12 of Jesus and Mohammed greeting one another with the caption, “This is not offensive and I’m sure God is greater than to feel threatened by it.” Furious Muslims launched a petition to have Nawaz removed from Parliament.

http://www.israelhayom.com/

Sheinbein finally gets what he deserved

On Sunday, inmate Samuel Sheinbein, 34, was killed at the Rimonim prison near Tel Aviv, after shooting and seriously wounding three guards. The Israel Prison Service and police are now investigating the incident.

How Sheinbein obtained a weapon and managed to fire it without detection are among the questions being asked. Accusations are starting to fly, with Sheinbein’s lawyer claiming that she had alerted the IPS to her client’s “great stress,” but to no avail.

Meanwhile, the larger controversy surrounding Sheinbein’s incarceration is barely being mentioned, even by members of the media covering the shootings. Perhaps it is considered old news, the details of which are only worth repeating for background information.

But if there ever was a case that needed rehashing, it is this one.

In 1997, when Sheinbein was 17, he and Aaron Needle — a friend from the Charles E. Smith Jewish day school in Maryland — committed the premeditated murder of another teenager, Alfredo Tello, Jr., due to rivalry over a girl.

The murder was meticulously planned and carried out by Sheinbein and Needle, who lured their victim to a designated area, incapacitated him with a stun gun, choked him with a rope and stabbed him in the neck and chest with a knife. They then took his dead body to Sheinbein’s family garage, where they dismembered and burned it. Afterwards, they stuffed it into a garbage bag, placed it in the trunk of Needle’s car and deposited it in a vacant home for sale that belonged to a different classmate.

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/rank-john-kerry-by-ruth-king.html

Is John Kerry the most anti-Israel Secretary of State ever? John Foster Dulles and James Baker set the bar high. Is he the most dishonest? He is not responsible for the cover-up, the betrayal and the outright lies regarding the Benghazi attack.

Is he the dumbest? Madeleine Albright was tough competition. Poor dear. Imagine the shock of finding out in advancing middle age that you are Jewish, and never having guessed anything, even though all your cousins and their sisters and their aunts were Jewish. On the other hand, even she would probably not have claimed, as Kerry just did, that “climate warming is a weapon of mass destruction” and “the greatest challenge of our generation” and dismiss out of hand the huge number of skeptics: “We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific fact.”

Kerry certainly gives Madeleine Albright a run for the money as our most inept Secretary of State. Remember his claim on the war in Iraq? “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.” So let’s cut him a little slack here. Maybe he actually was a friend of Israel before he wasn’t. Or is it that he wasn’t before he was or never was. He was always confused. In October 2003, Kerry said Israel’s unilateral construction of a security fence was “a barrier to peace.” “I know how disheartened Palestinians are by the decision to build the barrier off the Green Line,” he told the Arab American Institute National Leadership Conference. “We don’t need another barrier to peace.” In February 2004, he reversed himself, calling the fence “a legitimate act of self-defense,” and saying “President Bush is rightly discussing with Israel the exact route of the fence to minimize the hardship it causes innocent Palestinians.”

Will Kerry claim one day that he was actually against negotiations with Iran before he wasn’t? The Ayatollah continually affirms :“There is no use [to the negotiations]… It will not lead anywhere.” And it’s reported “Senior Iranian officials say they won’t accept any major curtailment of the program.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371784/when-failure-success-victor-davis-hanson

Losing a job is freedom from job lock. A budget deficit larger than in any previous administration is austerity. A mean right-wing video caused the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. Al-Qaeda was long ago washed up. The Muslim Brotherhood is secular. Jihad is a personal journey. Shooting people while screaming Allahu akbar! is workplace violence. Unaffordable higher premiums and deductibles are the result of an Affordable Care Act. Losing your doctor and your health-insurance plan prove you will never lose your doctor and your health-insurance plan — period! Being a constitutional lawyer means you know how to turn the IRS and the FCC on your enemies. Failure is success; lies are truth.

President Obama’s polls are creeping back up again. They do that every time the latest in the series of scandals — the IRS, AP, NSA, Benghazi, and Obamacare messes — recedes into the media memory hole. The once-outrageous IRS scandal was rebranded as psychodramatic journalists being outraged. The monitoring of AP reporters and of James Rosen is mostly “Stuff happens.” The NSA octopus was Bush’s creation. You can keep your doctor and your health plan — period — begat liberation from “job lock” and the ability to write poetry because you don’t have to work.

There will be more momentary outrages on the horizon, as a president who would fundamentally transform America continues to circumvent the Constitution to do it. The latest are the failed efforts of acting FCC director Mignon Clyburn — daughter of a Democratic stalwart, Representative James Clyburn. She dreamed about monitoring news outlets to ensure that they prove themselves correct in matters of race/class/gender thinking.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2014/02/why_mrs_clintons_entire_history_matters.html We are about to be bombarded by the mercenaries of progressivism, who will harangue us to agree that all or part of Hillary Clinton’s past has no bearing on what kind of president she would be.  To a lesser degree, some have offered a variation on this theme, suggesting that when weighing Mrs. Clinton’s past, […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/pentagon-budget-cuts-army-to-pre-wwii-strength-despite-more-volatile-world/?print=1

WASHINGTON — Stating that a postwar environment was the time to do some shrinking, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel unveiled a budget proposal Monday that reduces the Army to pre-World War II levels despite “a world that is growing more volatile, more unpredictable, and in some instances more threatening to the United States.”

“Our force structure and modernization recommendations are rooted in three realities: first, after Iraq and Afghanistan, we are no longer sizing the military to conduct long and large stability operations; second, we must maintain our technological edge over potential adversaries; and, third, the military must be ready and capable to respond quickly to all contingencies and decisively defeat any opponent should deterrence fail,” Hagel told reporters at the Pentagon today.

“Accordingly, our recommendations favor a smaller and more capable force, putting a premium on rapidly deployable, self-sustaining platforms that can defeat more technologically advanced adversaries.”

For the Air Force, Hagel said, “an emphasis on capability over capacity meant that we protected its key modernization programs, including the new bomber, the Joint Strike Fighter, and the new refueling tanker.”

“To fund these investments, the Air Force will reduce the number of tactical air squadrons including the entire A-10 fleet,” Hagel continued. “…The Air Force will slow the growth in its arsenal of armed unmanned systems that, while effective against insurgents and terrorists, cannot operate in the face of enemy aircraft and modern air defenses. Instead of increasing to a force of 65 around-the-clock combat air patrols of Predator and Reaper aircraft, the Air Force will grow to 55, still a significant increase.”

In the Navy, the proposed funding is enough to maintain 11 carrier strike groups, but the USS George Washington aircraft carrier would be retired if sequestration-level cuts were to be reimposed.

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2014/02/24/the-human-face-of-obamacare/?print=1 If you like your president, you can keep him. Period. But what if you don’t? Stephen Blackwood, the president of the fledging Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, has a sad, infuriating piece about his mother’s experience with Obamacare this morning in the Wall Street Journal. [1] We’ve all heard stories — but not as […]

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/02/23/what-if-they-gave-a-review-of-your-life-and-you-had-to-come/?print=1

ditor’s Note: Click here for Part 1 of P. David Hornik’s new series: Near-Death Experiences—A New Take on Life, Part 1: Sam Parnia Explains Where the Field Is Leading. And click here to see his previous articles on the subject here: Do You Believe in Life After Death?

Out-of-body experiences, tunnels, bright lights, deceased relatives, a being of light—and life reviews. These are the most commonly reported elements of near-death experiences. They have been reported now for decades from all over the world, across cultures and religions. Of all of them, the life review may be the most difficult to imagine and “otherworldly.” Out-of-body experiences, encounters with dead people, mystical experiences of a deity—all these have long been on record outside of NDEs as well. The tunnel experience seems to have been represented in a painting by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch over five hundred years ago. Life reviews, however, may be the most “exotic” compared to our familiar modes of perception. Dutch cardiologist and NDE researcher Pim van Lommel quotes this life-review account of one of his patients:

All of my life up till the present seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic, three-dimensional review, and each event seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of good or evil or with an insight into cause or effect. Not only did I perceive everything from my own viewpoint, but I also knew the thoughts of everyone involved in the event, as if I had their thoughts within me. This meant that I perceived not only what I had done or thought, but even in what way it had influenced others, as if I saw things with all-seeing eyes…. Looking back, I cannot say how long this life review…lasted, it may have been long, for every subject came up, but at the same time it seemed just a fraction of a second, because I perceived it all at the same moment. Time and distance seemed not to exist….

This is only one account, but anyone who has delved even modestly into the NDE literature as I have knows there are numerous other, remarkably similar ones.

Life reviews, then, bear some resemblance to traditional religious conceptions of a judgment, a moral assessment, in the afterlife. They differ from those conceptions, though, in that—while many people report a compassionate presence of an otherworldly being during the review—no judgment occurs, except by the person.

As in this case, from the NDE of a woman during an emergency operation:

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/meet-the-richerals/?print=1

The new millennium has also given us a new American profile — the hip richeral. Richerals are, of course, well off. But they are even more cool and liberal. The two facts are not so much incompatible, as complementary.

For some, big money allows three things: wealth’s cocoon enables you to dream safely about utopia [1] rather than being laid off and broke; it exempts you from worrying much about the high taxes [2] and regulations [3] needed to pay for your redistributionist fantasy agendas; and it gives you the influence, capital, and opportunities to flee from the messy ramifications of your own ideology.

The other side of being liberal is just as important for the richerals. Guilt is a primordial human emotion — usually in civilization’s history assuaged by religion and the accompanying fear of damnation in the hereafter. But richerals are more likely than average to be either agnostic or atheistic. Yet that fact does not mean that they feel any less guilty about unfairness and inequality. So they do have deities of sorts — a hip Olympic pantheon of race, class, gender, and environmental gods. Their own privilege — be it the techie lifestyle of the Silicon Valley, the Ivy League quad, the Malibu gated estate, the Montana getaway, the Upper West Side ambiance — even under Obama just cannot yet be extended to everyone.

And that’s the rub, isn’t it? How can a richeral be redistributionist and statist when such ideologies are targeted at one’s own cherished lifestyle? So penance, medieval exemption, and confessions [4] step in as civilization’s age-old remedies for the guilt of such a pious sinner.