RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last night, I went to an event at the student central in Malet Street organised by supporters of the Labour Party. Part of the Birkbeck campus. The event was titled ‘Antisemitism, Zionism and the left’. The purpose was to address the ‘witch hunt’ taking place against anyone who criticises Israel. Something that is seen by some as part of a co-ordinated attack to unsettle Corbyn and remove him from power.

Given what was said, it is clear that Corbyn’s issue with antisemitism runs far deeper than a few councillors or MP’s. There were about 150 people there. Had there been a vote, every single card carrying Labour member present would probably have agreed, reposted or repeated, every single comment made by those suspended. Antisemitism is not a comment made in careless anger by these people, it is embedded in their world vision.

The panel was made up of 6 speakers.

Tariq Ali, writer, journalist and filmmaker
John Rose, author of the Myths of Zionism
Arthur Goodman:, Jews for Justice for Palestinians
Weyman Bennett, Unite Against Fascism
Lindsey German, Stop the War Coalition
Walter Wolfgang, veteran Labour Party activist
Labour and antisemitism denial

Thanks largely to Obama’s recent “engagement,” Stalinist Cuba has quickly become the absolute coolest place on earth.

Close on the heels of Katy Perry, The Rolling Stones and the Obama family itself, this week Karl Lagerfeld showcased his Chanel “cruise line” with a fashion-show extravaganza where Havana’s Prado Street served as the catwalk/runway for the world’s coolest models. Gisele Bundchen, Tilda Swinton and Vin Diesel monkey-shined for the paparazzi on the sidelines.

Not to be outdone, the Kardashians just arrived in Havana to shoot their next show.

Attaining such status for coolness among the world’s coolest people is not easy. Such coolness does not just land haphazardly in the lap of any random society. It must be worked on. So let us briefly peruse the societal and political characteristics that the cool and beautiful people (all liberals, needless to add) make a big media show of denouncing.

With this list in hand, we shall scan the world looking for the places where the political authorities most scrupulously eschew such wickedness and thus escape the vilification from cool people that befell such places as Apartheid South Africa; Pinochet’s Chile; Baltimore, Maryland; Ferguson, Missouri or —please give me a second to reach for the smelling salts here–the state of North Carolina.

Firstly, do not mistreat blacks. For heaven’s sake! Do not even jail blacks if they are convicted (by an independent jury during an internationally monitored trail) of being communist terrorists. South Africa learned this bitter lesson with Nelson Mandela.

In fact, the strictures of cool people stipulate that governmental authorities must not kill blacks even in self defense. Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland recently had this valuable lesson driven home by many cool people.

Given the above guidelines, you would certainly not want the distinction of having jailed and tortured– without even rudimentary due process– the most and longest suffering black political prisoners in the modern history of the Western hemisphere; many more political prisoners than were jailed by Apartheid South Africa, in fact.

Yazidi girls were “sold” in exchange for a few packs of cigarettes.

“They would come and take any girl against her will; if she refused, they would kill her on the spot.” — all quotes below from “Birvan,” on “Shabaab [Youth] Talk,” hosted by Ja’far Abdul, March 22, 2016.

“Anyone who walked by our room and liked us would just say ‘Let’s go.'”

“There were 48 ISIS members in that house, and we were two girls — two Yazidi girls.”

“What hospital?! They beat me even more!”

“I didn’t care if I got caught. Escape or death were both better than remaining there.”

A new televised interview, conducted in Arabic with a Yazidi girl who endured sexual captivity at the hands of the Islamic State, was published on March 22, 2016. It appeared on “Shabaab [Youth] Talk,” hosted by Ja’far Abdul.

The teenage girl, who went by the pseudonym of Birvan, was enslaved when she was 15 and endured months of captivity before she managed to escape. She is now 17. Based on the 40-minute interview, her story is as follows:

Yazidis were escaping from their war-torn village near Tel Affar, Iraq, when they were intercepted on the road by four ISIS operatives. The men swore that if the Yazidis would cooperate and answer some questions, no harm would befall them and they would be allowed to return home in peace. Asked how many Yazidis there were, Birvan says she recalls only 95 men and their families — “many, many women and children.”

WASHINGTON — A former congressman who was one of the foremost champions of human rights during his years on Capitol Hill returned today with one of the escaped Chibok schoolgirls to warn about the escalated threat posed by terror groups in West Africa.

Frank Wolf, who represented the 10th district of Virginia in the House from 1981 to 2015, is now a distinguished senior fellow at the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative and the Wilson Chair in Religious Freedom at Baylor University.

He told the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa and Global Affairs that he traveled to Nigeria in late February, where he listened to “hundreds of individuals in small villages, and remote areas miles off the main roads” in addition to “tribal leaders, pastors, mothers and fathers as well as government officials and our own Embassy personnel.”

Wolf stressed that the death toll wreaked by Boko Haram “makes them the single most deadly terror organization in the world” — with more victims than ISIS.

Boko Haram pledged allegiance to ISIS last year — a vow that makes the U.S. government their sworn enemy in addition to their old foe the Nigerian government, the former congressman stressed.

“Boko Haram attacks villages, conducts drive-by shootings, and uses young girls as suicide bombers. They target politicians and clerics for assassination, focusing on the symbols of Western advancement such as schools, hospitals, and churches, but also mosques. While no one has an exact number, thousands of young girls have been abducted by Boko Haram,” Wolf said.

“Just last month, we commemorated the two-year anniversary of the kidnapping of the Chibok Girls, and despite the loud protests in the West and the #BringBackOurGirls campaign championed by First Lady Michelle Obama, it is extremely doubtful that any of the girls have been released. One counselor with whom we spoke on the ground told us that the girls who have been captured may never return without a major concerted effort by the Nigerian government and the West, and if they do they will have been the victims of sexual violence, and are often times pregnant and will have been forced to convert to Islam.”

A young Nigerian woman who wore dark glasses during the hearing and went by the pseudonym Sa’a for protection described the April 14, 2014, attack on the Government Secondary School in Chibok.

It was the second Boko Haram school attack she survived.

“They marched us out of the school for miles to where their trucks were. Then they asked us to enter the trucks and said that if we did not, they were going to shoot all of us. We were all scared, so we entered the trucks,” Sa’a said. She and a friend decided to jump from their truck while it was careening down a forest road in the dark.

When Sa’a was first offered an opportunity to continue her education in the United States, she “felt like if we go to school again they are going to kidnap us wherever we are.” Her brothers were among those who convinced her to keep studying. CONTINUE AT SITE

Section 116 guarantees the right to worship in whatever manner your favoured creed prescribes — but only so long as beliefs and practices conform with the definition of religion laid down by the High Court. In this regard, Koranic edicts are somewhat problematic
Thumbing through the Constitution the other day I came across Section 116 covering freedom of religion:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

Trusty Wikipedia then sent me to what is regarded as a leading authority on the question of religion, the 1983 judgment of the High Court in Church of the New Faith v Commissioner for Pay-Roll Tax (Vic). In this case the court found that Scientology is a religion, despite some justices commenting that its practices were “impenetrably obscure”. In reaching this finding, the court argued that the definition of religion needed to be flexible while also recognising the need to be sceptical of disingenuous claims of religious practice. Justices Mason and Brennan held:

“… the criteria of religion [are] twofold: first, belief in a supernatural, Being, Thing or Principle; and second, the acceptance of canons of conduct in order to give effect to that belief.”

Justices Wilson and Deane were less prescriptive, setting out five “indicia” of a religion:

1/ a belief in the supernatural
2/ a belief in ideas relating to “man’s nature and place in the universe
3/ the adherence to particular standards, codes of conduct or practices by those who hold the ideas
4/ the existence of an identifiable group of believers, even if not a formal organisation
5/ the opinion of the believers that what they believe in constitutes a religion.

A definition by the fifth judge, Justice Murphy, included the supernatural, but was less prescriptive on other matters.

It led me to ponder how effectively Islam meets these requirements: belief in the supernatural (Being, Thing or Principal) and adherence to codes of conduct. In the Koran these are most commonly presented as the Five Pillars: the Affirmation, Prayer, Charity, Fasting, and the pilgrimage to Mecca. These are what might be called housekeeping precepts and form the populist face of Islam. The more significant codes are those which are driving resurgent Islamism.

Firstly, the Koran encourages an ethos of ‘us’ and ‘them’, where the ‘us’ are Muslims and the ‘them’ are Jews, disbelievers and Christians: that is, Muslims and the rest. For example:

You who believe, do not take the disbelievers as allies and protectors instead of the believers: do you want to offer God clear proof against you? (Women 4:144)