Displaying posts published in

May 2016

Iran Arrests Eight Instagram Models for Not Wearing the Hijab by John Hayward

Iran has arrested eight people in a crackdown against women who “promote immoral and un-Islamic culture and promiscuity,” by appearing on Instagram without wearing the mandatory hijab head covering.

The Associated Press reports the arrests came after a two-year sting operation, which identified 170 participants in this conspiracy to defy Islamic law, including 58 models and 59 photographers. In addition to the eight arrests, 21 criminal cases have been opened. Iranian media said “those targeted saw their businesses shut down, as well as their pages on Instagram and Facebook removed.”

According to Channel NewsAsia, the eight people arrested were all models, and the arrests actually occurred in March, but the Iranian government is just now publicizing the crackdown. Some of them have been released on bail, while others face “heavy charges” such as “spreading prostitution.” Based on this account, some of the models are avoiding punishment by essentially claiming they were tricked into participation.

One of the prominent women caught in this dragnet was model Elham Arab, who was shown talking to a prosecutor on Iranian television, with “her blonde hair hidden under a black chador.” Her Instagram account has evidently been shut down, she could not be reached for comment, and the AP wasn’t certain what charges she faced, or if she had been given access to a lawyer.

Channel NewsAsia quotes Javad Babaei, head of Iran’s cybercrimes court, claiming that about 20 percent of Iran’s Instagram traffic is “run by the modeling circle.”
Babaei accused this organization of “making and spreading immoral and un-Islamic culture and promiscuity,” and vowed the judiciary would “confront those who committed these crimes in an organized manner.”

Thomas D. Williams : Professor Robert George of Princeton University states That Transgenderism is not Scientific- a “Superstitious Belief”

A noted Princeton University professor has attacked the very notion of transgenderism, saying that the belief “that a woman can be trapped inside a man’s body” is ludicrous and superstitious, with no basis in medical fact.

Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, sent out a tweet late Sunday evening questioning the science behind the transgender movement, in reaction to the Obama administration’s threatening letter to educators mandating accommodation of gender-confused teenagers.George, who is also the Chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, sent our another tweet warning of the effects of the Obama letter on parents’ rights to educate their children in a safe environment.

George’s concerns over the transgender movement echo the recent statement by the American College of Pediatricians, which argued forcefully against encouraging young people to question their own biological sexuality.

“A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking,” the doctors stated. “When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such.”

The pediatricians noted that children who think they are a different gender than they are suffer from a recognized mental disorder called “gender dysphoria.”

Obama’s Animus toward Israel May Lead to War By Victor Sharpe and Robert Vincent

Will the looming conclusion of the Obama presidency lead him to engineer an all-out war by Iran’s terror surrogates, Hamas and Hezb’allah, against the embattled Jewish state? Will that war conveniently occur in December 2016, as Obama serves out the final days of his presidency?

Is it conceivable that the pro-Muslim president of the United States will use such a conflict to predictably and mendaciously blame Israel as a means to permanently fracture the U.S.-Israeli alliance in a manner that would be difficult for any successor to repair? As extreme as this may sound, it is entirely possible in view of Obama’s past acts of blatant hatred toward America’s one and only true democracy and ally in the Middle East.

As should be obvious by now, Obama believes that Islam has suffered from British and European Christian colonization and oppression. After being thoroughly prepared to be receptive to this message by his stridently anti-Western mother and maternal grandparents, such was the indoctrination Obama received from Khaled al-Mansour – a Muslim high-level adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and anti-Jewish hate-monger – during his formative years.

It was al-Mansour who helped Obama gain admittance to the Harvard Law School. Edward Said, an outspoken anti-Israel professor of Obama’s at Columbia University, and Rashid Khalidi, a former press agent for Yasser Arafat’s PLO, served as Obama’s mentor in the former case and friend in the latter.

These figures, whose entire professional adult lives had been essentially dedicated to eliminating Israel, focused on influencing Obama to support the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians – along with their thugocracy known as the Palestinian Authority. These overwhelmingly Muslim terrorists amount to little more than cannon fodder in the ongoing Islamist quest to effectively perpetrate yet another Holocaust.

Washington, DC, Panel Still Fails to Sell the Iran Deal Andrew Harrod

The Iran nuclear agreement “was a great example of diplomacy,” stated former American ambassador to Iraq and Turkey, James F. Jeffrey, at an April 12 Middle East Policy (MPEC) Council Capitol Hill panel. While this presentation concerning “The Saudi-Iranian Rivalry and the Obama Doctrine” continued MPEC’s Iran deal promotion, the panelists’ arguments remained as depressingly unconvincing as before.

Jeffrey’s fellow former American ambassador (to Oman) and MPEC’s Chairman of the Board of Directors, Richard Schmierer, proclaimed:

[The] historic nuclear deal…addressed the fundamental and destabilizing challenge of a potential Iranian nuclear weapons capability, but it also opened the possibility of a more deep-seated change in Iran: the possibility that Iran’s leaders would use the economic benefits and the potential renewed economic access to the international community deriving from the nuclear agreement to change the country’s behavior.

For Jeffrey, this diplomatic success resulted from concrete economic and military measures “backed up by really tough sanctions that cut Iran’s oil exports by over 50 percent”; spoken in reference to President Barak Obama’s efforts to end Iranian nuclear weapons proliferation. Additionally, the nuclear agreement was supposedly “backed up with the red line that this one people actually believe, that the United States, including Obama, would act” in case of Iranian proliferation.

Persian Gulf Sheikhs Gave Bill & Hillary $100 Million by Richard Pollock

A Daily Caller News Foundation investigation reveals that Bill and Hillary Clinton received at least $100 million from autocratic Persian Gulf states and their leaders, potentially undermining Democratic presidential candidate Hillary’s claim she can carry out independent Middle East policies.

As a presidential candidate, the amount of foreign cash the Clintons have amassed from the Persian Gulf states is “simply unprecedented,” says national security analyst Patrick Poole.

“These regimes are buying access. You’ve got the Saudis. You’ve got the Kuwaitis, Oman, Qatar and the UAE. There are massive conflicts of interest. It’s beyond comprehension,” Poole told TheDCNF in an interview.
Overall, the Clinton Foundation has received upwards of $85 million in donations from five Persian Gulf states and their monarchs, according to the foundation’s website.

Activist groups have charged the five states — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — committed numerous human rights abuses.

For years, the accusations have centered on the Persian Gulf practice of importing hundreds of thousands of poor foreign laborers who work for low wages, including hundreds of thousands of female “domestic workers” who have no labor rights and often face exploitation and sexual abuse.

The ongoing Clinton financial relationship with despotic Persian Gulf states could hurt Hillary as a supporter of labor rights and tarnish her image as a vigorous supporter of women.

Yet as secretary of state, Clinton consciously and actively sought to legitimize the sheikdoms through many new Department of State programs.

It’s unclear what kind of promises or concessions the Clintons may have given the monarchs in return for their lavish financial support over the years, but last month the candidate reversed her long-standing support for fracking.

Funding Hamastan By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Since 1987, the Gaza-based terror group has kept itself in the international spotlight
through acts of violence against the Jewish State of Israel. It was designated as terrorist by the Unites States in 1997. In 2006, under the guise of the “Change and Reform” party, it won the elections for the Palestinian Authority and 2007, after violent confrontations with Fatah, took over the Gaza Strip. Since then, it has escalated its attacks against Israel.
Who helps finance Hamas ongoing terrorism against the ‘Zionist entity?’

Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Gaza, was established in December 1987, days into the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) first Intifada against Israel. This Sunni terrorist organization, it controls territory and rules its constituents in the Gaza Strip through hardline Sharia law. Unlike the Islamic State (ISIS), which flaunts its radicalism – through their brutal abuse of women and children and indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, mostly other Muslims in Iraq and Syria, mega-attacks in Europe, and a sophisticated social media apparatus, Hamas manages to portray itself as a victim.
Why? Because unlike impatient ISIS, whose agenda is to eliminate all infidels to create the global Islamic Caliphate now, Hamas, which prioritizes the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel, has been the recipient of direct and indirect support of some Muslims states, as well as supposedly Western-oriented organizations such as the EU, the U.N. and even the U.S. These are joined by international Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated and anti-Israeli groups and the international media. Under the guise of humanitarian aid, all have joined to assist the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza politically and financially.

EDWARD CLINE: IT DID NOT START WITH MARX

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2016/05/it-didnt-start-with-marx.html An extraordinary book came my way, one which alters to some degree my own focus on the current conflict between socialism and conservatism, between secular political collectivism and religious political collectivism in America. This is George Watson’s The Lost Literature of Socialism, originally published in 1998 and reissued in 2001. Then, as now, it […]

Sydney M. Williams: Trump Recogito

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/ If you have concluded that Donald Trump’s gibberish about Muslims, trade wars and the building of a wall along the Mexican border and asinine assurances that he will “make America great again,” render him unfit to be President, as I had, you may want to reconsider your position. First, he is the choice of […]

Britain must learn from the new “conservative revolution” By Francesco Sisci

I am not British. But I wish I were because now and in the foreseeable future Britain has a unique role to play in the world. And if I were British, I would think about Britain’s future in the following way. Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, both the United Kingdom and the […]

Dr. Alex Grobman:The media as a weapon in the Israeli/Arab war The West adopted communist semantics in discussing the conflict, as the Soviets hoped and planned they would.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/18883 “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but [in 1936] in Spain for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie…. This kind of thing is […]