RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12270/uk-blasphemy-laws

It is reasonable to assume that the planned report and the ensuing work on finding a definition of “Islamophobia” is meant effectively to destroy the little that remains of free speech in the UK.

The Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group has as its top priority “tackling the far right and counter jihadists”. It seems a peculiar government priority to “tackle” people who are opposed to jihad; one would assume that the British government is also against jihad.

According to British government logic, then, after Muslims stabbed and beheaded British Army soldier Lee Rigby in broad daylight in London, Muslim institutions needed protection — not British ones.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims[1] has formally begun work on the establishment of a “working definition of Islamophobia that can be widely accepted by Muslims, political parties and the government”.

The AAPG on British Muslims, according to its website, was established in July 2017. It is chaired by MPs Anna Soubry and Wes Streeting and is meant to build on the work of a former AAPG: the AAPG on Islamophobia. The latter came into existence as the result of a meeting at the House of Commons in March 2010, hosted by, among others, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) — the largest Muslim organization in the UK, which claims to be representative of British Muslims — which is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood[2]. The purpose of the meeting was “to discuss the growing spate of attacks in all its forms against British Muslims”. The meeting, which was attended, among others, by parliamentarians, police and public servants called for the establishment of an APPG on Islamophobia. By November 2010, the AAPG on Islamophobia had been formed, and was described by its chairman, the Conservative Kris Hopkins, as a “momentous occasion” the purpose of which was to “propose considered, evidence based policies to tackle Islamophobia wherever it exists”. However, the newly established AAPG quickly ran into trouble. It turned out that the Muslim organization appointed as its secretariat was the Muslim extremist organization iENGAGE, which has since changed its name to MEND.[3]

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12427/populist-government-takes-power-in-italy

The new government has pledged to pursue a host of populist policies, including reclaiming national sovereignty from the European Union over issues ranging from border protection and immigration to economics and finance. For now, however, it has abandoned previous plans to hold a referendum on whether Italy should abandon the euro.

“The EU Budget Commissioner the German Oettinger says the markets will show Italians the right way to vote. If that isn’t a threat…” — Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega party

The continued patronizing by EU officials has contributed to the rise of populism in Italy and feeds popular support for the euroscepticism embraced by M5S and Lega.

Italy’s rival anti-establishment parties — the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) and the nationalist League (Lega) — have formed a “eurosceptic” coalition government.

The new government has pledged to pursue a host of populist policies, including reclaiming national sovereignty from the European Union over issues ranging from border protection and immigration to economics and finance. For now, however, it has abandoned previous plans to hold a referendum on whether Italy should abandon the euro.

The viability of a M5S/Lega government initially was thrown into doubt after Italian President Sergio Mattarella vetoed their eurosceptic choice for finance minister: Paolo Savona, an 81-year-old former industry minister who has called Italy’s entry into the euro a “historic mistake.”

M5S/Lega reached a compromised by nominating Giovanni Tria, an economics professor who holds politically correct views on the euro, to head the finance ministry. Fittingly, Savona will become Italy’s new Minister for European Affairs.

The new government, which was sworn in by Mattarella on June 1, will be headed by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, a little-known law professor with no experience in politics, and two deputy prime ministers: M5S leader Luigi Di Maio, who also becomes minister for economic development and labor; and Lega leader Matteo Salvini, who also becomes minister of the interior. The cabinet will have 19 ministers in all.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12428/british-justice-poppycock

Instead of arresting rapists, the police, in at least a couple of cases, actually arrested people who had done nothing other than to try to rescue their children from the clutches of rapists.

So much concern – legitimately so – about the sacred right of the rapists to a fair trial, including the presumption of innocence and an opportunity to retain the lawyers of their choice – but so much readiness to excuse the denial of the same right to Robinson.

These decades of cover-ups by British officials are themselves unspeakable crimes. How many of those who knew, but who did nothing, have faced anything remotely resembling justice? Apparently none.

As any viewer of British TV news knows, a “trained professional journalist” in Britain observes all kinds of rules of professional conduct: he calls Muslims “Asians,” he describes any critic of Islam, or anyone who attends a rally protesting the unjust incarceration of a critic of Islam, as a member of the “far right,” and he identifies far-left smear machines as “anti-racist groups.”

The coverage here during the last few days of the Tommy Robinson affair in Britain appears to be having at least a small impact in certain circles in Merrie Olde England. Dispatches have come in from some of the tonier addresses in the UK explaining, in that marvelous tone of condescension, which no one from beyond the shores of England can ever quite pull off, that those of us who sympathize with Robinson have got it all wrong; that we simply do not grasp the exquisite nuances of British jurisprudence, specifically the kingdom’s laws about the coverage of trials – for if we did understand, we would recognize that Robinson’s summary arrest and imprisonment did not represent an outrageous denial of his freedom of speech, his right to due process, and his right to an attorney of his own choosing, but were, in fact, thoroughly appropriate actions intended to ensure the integrity of the trial he was covering. Those of us outside the UK who think that British freedom has been compromised and that the British system of law has been cynically exploited for ignoble purposes are, apparently, entirely mistaken; on the contrary, we are instructed, Britain’s police are continuing to conduct themselves in a responsible matter, Britain’s courts are still models of probity, and Britain’s real journalists (not clumsy, activist amateurs like Robinson) persist in carrying out their role with extraordinary professionalism and propriety, obeying to the letter the eminently sensible rules that govern reportage about court cases in the land of Magna Carta.

“It is true,” acknowledged one correspondent, “that in previous years the UK police wrongly hesitated to prosecute Muslim grooming gangs. And it was a shocking scandal, which the Daily Mail did much to expose and excoriate. But that has changed.”

Hesitated? Changed? Talk about English understatement. For decades – not years – police, social workers, local politicians, and journalists all over Britain knew that thousands of non-Muslim girls throughout the country were being repeatedly raped by Muslim gangs. The perpetrators were not arrested – partly because police and others in authority were apparently terrified of being called racists.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/putin-the-manager

On May 30, Russia Today (not to be confused with the RT television network) published an article by Srdja Trifkovic in Russian, “Putin is a manager rather than a far-seeing statesman who follows a long-term plan.” We bring you this piece in Dr. Trifkovic’s translation, a sequel to his article Putin’s Collapsing Credibility posted here a month ago.

It has been perfectly clear to me, since early spring of 2014 and Putin’s hesitating response to the crisis in Ukraine, that Russia does not have a serious strategy. An adequate response would have entailed prompt despatch of Russian forces to protect the Russian-speaking population, from Kharkov in the northeast to Nikolaev in the center and Odessa in the southwest, in accordance with the R2P doctrine. Instead, there was a consolation prize [Crimea], rather meager for the loss of 500 miles of strategic depth inhabited by a pro-Russian majority.

Russia experienced something similar with the regime-change operation in Tbilisi in 2003, when Shevardnadze was replaced by the unstable Mikhel Saakashvili. The Russians “protected” South Ossetia and Abkhasia, one-fifth of the country, but Georgia was lost to the pro-NATO regime. In Central Asia the Russians are losing ground to the Chinese. Their north-south geopolitical vector in the direction of Iran has been cut by the Chinese one, which extends from Xinjiang to the Caspian Sea. The Chinese are gaining ground with greater investment and soft power, which is also projected by Turkey throughout the region. This is aptly illustrated by the fact that Kazakhstan is replacing Cyrillic with Latin as its national language script.

In Belarus the situation is fluid. The relations between Moscow and Minsk are worse than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Poor personal rapport between [Belorussian president Alexander] Lukashenko and Putin has morphed into a very visible weakness of that alliance. In Armenia, the Russians were faced with a routine regime-change operation directly copied from Gene Sharp’s textbook. Unlike Georgia and Ukraine, let it be noted, Armenia is both a member of the Eurasian Economic Union and of the Collective Security Treaty Organization [ODKB, founded in Moscow in 1992].

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/06/second-coming-karl-marx/

One thing young people are very unlikely to learn—not from our education system anyway—is that no simple concept can ever hope to explain all of human history, or even most of it. Denied this insight, the notion that history has been determined by class struggles is an easy sell.

Most readers of Quadrant would have expected the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx on May 5, 1818, to go largely unnoticed. Today, most would think Marxism a philosophy that died at the end of the Cold War and is now well and truly relegated to the dustbin of history. However, our mainstream press still found adherents who not only marked the anniversary but took an upbeat position. Professor John Buchanan of the School of Business at the University of Sydney declared: “Marx was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. His work Das Kapital is still referred to and used in discussions of the modern economy.” In his interview, the Sunday Telegraph observed:

As Western democracies confront such global capital Goliaths as Facebook and Google, the Australian banking royal commission and business pressure to reduce wages by cutting penalty rates and employing casual labour, Buchanan says Marx’s complaints of social inequality under capitalism are increasingly relevant. Marx’s key arguments were that society was the history of class struggles, between property or capital owners, and those without capital.

In London and New York the anniversary was even more newsworthy. Some major newspapers responded as though Marxism was enjoying an intellectual revival, on the verge of the secular equivalent of a Second Coming.

The New York Times headlined: “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right”, and endorsed Marx’s alleged “originality and profound importance as a philosopher”, claiming:

Today the legacy would appear to be alive and well. Since the turn of the millennium countless books have appeared, from scholarly works to popular biographies, broadly endorsing Marx’s reading of capitalism and its enduring relevance to our neoliberal age … Educated liberal opinion is today more or less unanimous in its agreement that Marx’s basic thesis—that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class majority as profit—is correct.

In London, the Independent also declared Marxism was on the brink of something big: “The world is finally ready for Marxism as capitalism reaches the tipping point.” It said Marx had predicted that the centralisation inherent in globalised, capitalist economies would give birth to a post-capitalist society. Socialist ideas, the Independent asserted, remain celebrated throughout the world, especially among younger generations:

Socialism does not carry historical baggage for a younger generation left behind by the iniquities of capitalism. A Harvard study found that a majority of millennials reject capitalism and a third are in favour of socialism. This is what might be called the revenge of Marx; the rehabilitation of one of the world’s historical philosophers.

The notion of a Marxist revival explains the otherwise difficult to comprehend electoral appeal to young people of those two aged white male socialists, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.

https://pjmedia.com/parenting/australia-audits-childrens-books-to-make-sure-gender-isnt-labelled/

Australian officials are combing through children’s books — and toys — in kindergartens, schools, and libraries, aiming not just to promote “gender neutral” options but to avoid “gender stereotyping” of any kind.

At least two city councils in the Australian state of Victoria — Manningham and Melbourne, specifically — have started “auditing” children’s books, ultimately considering a kind of ban on the terms “boy” and “girl.”

The effort follows research from the Australian National University showing that children were influenced by “gender stereotyping.” The research suggested that educators should “minimise the extent to which gender is labelled” and avoiding telling children what girls and boys should do, News.com.au reported.

In seeking to undermine “gender stereotypes,” activists seem willing to promote confusion among children, undermining the important discoveries kids make about gender early in life.

Parents were none to pleased to hear the news.

“For goodness sake, this is social engineering gone crazy,” Marie Hardwick wrote on Facebook. “Leave kids alone to be kids. Stop trying to destroy kids’ childhoods.”

Sarah Lovejoy, mother of a 2-year-old daughter, responded to a video on the Australian TV show Sunrise’s Facebook page.

“This needs to stop. I’ve got a two-year-old daughter (yes I picked her gender based on what genitals she was born with) and she plays with cars, trains, tractors, Barbies, dolls and uses her imagination and pretends she’s cooking food or being a doctor,” Lovejoy argued. “Let’s just let kids be kids.”

“Banning the availability of anything, or taking choice away, is definitely the wrong way to go about making classrooms gender neutral,” Billie Deborah Chin wrote. “It should be about making everything available to everyone.”

Defenders of the idea cited studies showing that girls and boys develop gender preferences early in life and that toys are becoming more gender stereotyped. “The research is actually very interesting,” commentator Cath Webber said. “What they’re telling people to do is … don’t tell girls they have to play with Barbies and don’t tell boys they have to play with Lego.”

Webber insisted that the female deficit of interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) may trace back to the idea that Legos are for boys. Lego actually makes a broad range of toys — for boys and girls — and it is arguably likely that boys generally gravitate toward objects more and girls generally gravitate toward people.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Taube noted, Australia’s social justice warriors attempted to maintain calm, assuring parents that their kids’ Winnie the Pooh and Thomas the Tank Engine books were safe. Tania King, one of the authors of the recent paper on minimizing gender “labelling,” argued that the entire hubbub emerged from one line misquoted from her 40-page literature review. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270316/tommy-robinson-political-prisoner-matthew-vadum

One of Britain’s most prominent human rights activists is being held as a political prisoner for reporting on a brutal Muslim child-rape gang, one of many such “grooming” gang cases that country’s government has been downplaying or outright covering up in recent years.

Authorities in the United Kingdom are notorious for protecting Muslims who rape Britons and for covering up the crimes of Muslim rape rings. Some government officials and journalists suppress news of the sex crimes out of a perverse sense of political correctness; others because they are afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic.

From the 1980s to the 2010s, as many as 1,400 Britons, mostly white girls, were raped largely by Muslim men in Rotherham, England. In recent years Muslim rape gangs have been uncovered in Rochdale, Telford, Aylesbury, Banbury, and in many other British communities.

Not surprisingly, many Britons no longer trust their government to handle such grooming cases fairly.

Some like scrappy English Defence League co-founder Tommy Robinson, a married father of three who has been sounding the alarm about the Islamization of the United Kingdom for years, try to bring transparency to a distrusted legal process.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is an imperfect vehicle for reform. He has had plenty of legal troubles unrelated to his activism – for example, a conviction for mortgage fraud, and at times he seems a bit too eager to use his fists. But he is doing his countrymen a great service by drawing their attention to tremendous evils in his society that go largely unchallenged.

Whatever misdeeds Robinson may have carried out, they are insignificant compared to the crime waves unleashed on the British public by violent, misogynistic Muslim men who refuse to assimilate and adapt to their new homeland.

Unfortunately, Robinson can’t look for relief to weakling Prime Minister Theresa May, who is an Islamist appeaser. Her Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, is a Muslim.

The deck is stacked against those skeptical of Islam. In the United Kingdom the police now monitor statements on social media and jail those who express frowned-upon sentiments. In the U.K., Big Brother is no longer just something from George Orwell’s prophetic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Not surprisingly, Muslim terrorism apologist and Second Amendment-hater Piers Morgan pulled out the usual canards about Islam while attacking Robinson during a recent TV interview.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12415/british-media-lies

Did the Daily Mail’s lawyers have to check with the British government, which had placed a gag order on reporting about the arrest, to make sure that it was permissible to report on the protest, if not directly on the arrest itself?

It seems fair to say that the incident has shocked, outraged, and scared people around the world who, until now, had thought of the United Kingdom as a free country.

“Britain used to be a bastion of free speech. Today its leaders are behaving like North Korea and Saudi Arabia.” – Geert Wilders, MP; The Netherlands

Meanwhile, Robinson remains in jail for daring to exercise his free speech, and what the mainstream media have won back is the right to resume repeating their lockstep lies about who he is and what he stands for.

Hundreds of supporters of Tommy Robinson filled the streets of London on Saturday in protest against his arrest in Leeds on Friday, but it was not until shortly after midnight on Monday that the Daily Mail posted a report about the protest on its website. The story, which was unsigned, was updated on early Monday afternoon. How to explain the delay? Did the Daily Mail’s lawyers have to check with the British government, which had placed a gag order on reporting about the arrest, to make sure that it was permissible to report on the protest, if not directly on the arrest itself?

The Mail made sure to describe the hundreds of protesters as “far-right.” How did the Mail ascertain their politics? Does it not occur to the Mail that even if Robinson were far-right, which he is not, a British subject would not have to be far right to want to take in a protest against his shockingly rapid-fire arrest, trial, conviction, and imprisonment for the sole offense of reporting from outside a courthouse?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12420/denmark-approves-burka-ban

Denmark becomes the sixth European country to enact such a ban, after France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Austria.

“The face is your passport. When you refuse me to see you, I am a victim.” — Jacques Myard, a former conservative MP who supported the ban in France.

“[S]ome people do not want to be a part of Danish society and want to create parallel societies with their own norms and rules.” — Danish Justice Minister Søren Pape Poulsen.

The Danish Parliament has passed a ban on Islamic full-face veils in public spaces. The new law, sponsored by Denmark’s center-right government, and backed by the Social Democrats and the Danish People’s Party, was passed on May 31 by 75 votes to 30.

As of August 1, anyone found wearing a burka (which covers the entire face) or a niqab (which covers the entire face except for the eyes) in public in Denmark will be subject to a fine of 1,000 Danish kroner (€135; $157); repeat offenders could be fined 10,000 Danish kroner.

In addition, anyone found to be requiring a person through force or threats to wear garments that cover the face could be fined or face up to two years in prison.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/tommy-robinson-grooming-gangs-britain-persecutes-journalist/The latest controversy is maddening for many reasons.

Tommy Robinson is a British political activist and “citizen journalist” who came to prominence in Britain almost a decade ago when he founded the English Defence League. The EDL was a street-protest movement in Britain whose aims could probably best be summarized as “anti-Islamization.” It emerged in the town of Luton after a group of local Islamists barracked the homecoming parade of a local regiment returning from service in Afghanistan.

From their earliest protests the EDL’s members sought to highlight issues including sharia law, Islam’s attitudes toward minorities, and the phenomenon that would become euphemistically known as “grooming gangs.” In reality these protests often descended into hooliganism and low-level violence (naturally helped along by self-described “anti-fascists”). The authorities did everything they could to stop the EDL, and the media did everything possible to demonize them. In a foretaste of things to come, very few people made any effort to understand them. And nobody paid any price for (indeed many people benefited from) claiming that the EDL was simply a fascist organization and that anybody who even tried to understand them must be a fascist too. The usual prohibition against sweeping generalizations doesn’t seem to apply if the generalization tilts in that direction.

I interviewed Tommy Robinson five years ago, after he had left the EDL (having by his own admission failed to keep extremists including actual neo-Nazis away from the movement). As he said then, one of the problems of everyone insisting that a particular movement is campaigning for the Fourth Reich is that the few people who think that sounds like a great idea will show up. Whatever his other faults, there is no evidence that Robinson thinks that way. Indeed he was once charged with assault for head-butting a Nazi sympathizer who wouldn’t leave an EDL protest. Not many people bothered with those details. The assault got reported, but not the cause. So the fact that Robinson had head-butted a Nazi became yet more evidence that he himself must be some kind of Nazi.

Anyhow — Robinson wised up slightly, and eventually began to plough his energies into a type of citizen journalism/activism. Some of this has been remarkably brave, some of it remarkably wrong (such as a video he made after last year’s Manchester Arena attack, in which he seemed to furiously suggest that everyone living around a particular mosque in the area must be some type of enemy combatant), and some remarkably ill-advised — not least because it has allowed him to be presented in the worst possible light.