RUTHFULLY YOURS

Do you think imposing so-called transgenderism on children as a sexual norm might be harmful to their moral development? Do you question the legitimacy of using made up so-called gender-neutral pronouns as replacements for the standard English words “he” and “she”?

If you answered yes, or even maybe, to either of those questions, then, as of today, you are in violation of Canada’s Human Rights Code, and subject to fines, re-education, or – should you refuse comply and repent – prison time.

Canada’s Senate has passed a “controversial” (read: fascistic) new law, Bill C-16, which adds “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the nation’s hate crime laws – Canada being a world leader in legislating who should be hated and who shouldn’t – thus effectively making it a crime for a business owner to “discriminate” on the basis of not wanting his male employee to wear a dress, or for a teacher not to use a nonexistent, politically correct pronoun whenever a student tells her to. More generally, it makes a hate criminal of anyone who openly expresses a view not perfectly compliant with the zeitgeist on gender identity, transgenderism, or what have you. The debate is now, officially and legally, over.

Campaign Life Coalition, the political arm of Canada’s pro-life movement, condemned the passage of Bill C-16.

“This tyrannical bill is nothing but social engineering to the nth degree, all in the name of political correctness,” Campaign Life’s Toronto vice president Jeff Gunnarson told LifeSiteNews.

Jack Fonseca, Campaign Life’s senior political strategist, said the bill will be used to attack Christian belief.

“Mark my words, this law will not be used as some sort of ‘shield’ to defend vulnerable transsexuals, but rather as a weapon with which to bludgeon people of faith and free-thinking Canadians who refuse to deny truth,” he told LifeSiteNews.

In other words, a postmodern, nihilistic, neo-Marxist pseudo-theory of sexual identity and systemic oppression, dreamt up by some pretentious careerist professor of “queer studies” climbing out of the academic slime somewhere five years ago, has officially been declared the unassailable Absolute Truth by Justin Trudeau’s government. Unassailable as in “alternative views will not be given a hearing.” Unassailable as in “heretics will be burned.”

One of those heretics, a sort of hero of the martyrs brigade, is University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who has stood up publicly, including in front of the Senate committee debating C-16, against the imposition of what he correctly calls “compelled speech” and specifically speech that implies acceptance of a particular, specious (to put it politely) theory of human nature.

LONDON—At least 58 people are presumed dead from the huge blaze that ripped through a west London residential tower earlier in the week, police said Saturday, warning that the number might change as the search operation continues.

The number included the previously confirmed death toll of 30, London police commander Stuart Cundy said.

After facing mounting criticism for being slow to meet survivors and the families of victims, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May said the government’s immediate response had been inadequate.

“The support on the ground for families who needed help or basic information in the initial hours after this appalling disaster was not good enough,” she said in a statement.

Police said they resumed the search operation in the tower on Saturday after it was suspended Friday over safety concerns, and formally identified the first victim of the fire as Mohammad Alhajali, 23 years old. Some victims of the fire have been identified publicly by family members.

The developments come amid heightened tensions over Wednesday’s fire at Grenfell Tower—a low-income high-rise in North Kensington, near Notting Hill and a few miles from the center of the U.K. capital, that was home to hundreds of people.

Critics have questioned whether officials were too slow to address concerns about fire-safety measures in low-income, public housing. One area of focus has been whether the aluminum cladding on the 24-floor building’s exterior contributed to the fire’s quick spread. The cladding wouldn’t have met widely adopted U.S. standards, according to building groups. CONTINUE AT SITE

The “religious-freedom” plea unwittingly exposes the false claims made by prominent Muslims — such as Iranian-American religion scholar/TV host Reza Aslan and Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, who have insisted that female genital mutilation (FGM) is “not an Islamic practice.”

According to National Health Service statistics, at least one girl each hour is subjected to this excruciating procedure in the United Kingdom alone — and this is nearly 30 years after it was outlawed there.

FGM is no less appalling a crime than rape or slavery, yet self-described feminists in the West — including Muslims such as Linda Sarsour and non-Muslim activists on a crusade against “Islamophobia” — are either silent when it comes to barbaric practices or deny their connection to Islam. Does she also support slavery, another practice supported by Islam?

Attorneys for the defense of two Michigan doctors from India, and one of their wives, who were indicted by a grand jury on April 22 and charged with mutilating the genitals of two seven-year-old girls, intend to put forth a religious-freedom argument on behalf of their Muslim clients.

The defendants are members of Dawoodi Bohra, an Islamic sect based in their home country. In the federal case, the first of its kind since female genital mutilation (FGM) was banned in 1996, the defense team is claiming that the practice is a religious ritual and therefore should be protected by U.S. law.

Their plea unwittingly exposes the false claims made by prominent Muslims — such as Iranian-American religion scholar/TV host Reza Aslan and Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, who have insisted that FGM is “not an Islamic practice.”

Female genital mutilation, also known as female circumcision, is the cutting or removal of the clitoris and/or the labia, as a way of eliminating a girl’s sexual desire and pleasure, to guarantee that she be a virgin before marriage and remain faithful to her husband afterwards. According to the World Health Organization:

FGM has no health benefits, and it harms girls and women in many ways. It involves removing and damaging healthy and normal female genital tissue, and interferes with the natural functions of girls’ and women’s bodies. Generally speaking, risks increase with increasing severity of the procedure.

The family of a brave teen who tackled a suicide bomber who was trying to enter his school is imploring the Pakistani government for protection as terrorists have warned them they are targets.

The kin of Pakistani teenager Aitzaz Hassan called the 15-year-old “pehlwan” — or wrestler — because of his heavy-set frame. On Jan. 6, 2014, Aitzaz, who had talked about becoming a soldier one day, used his might to keep a suicide bomber from blowing up his classmates.

Aitzaz was standing outside his government school in the northwestern district of Hangu when the terrorist, claimed by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a group with ties to al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), tried to enter the gates and reach the morning assembly.

The teen quickly tackled the bomber, preventing him from entering the school and reaching some 1,000 students inside. Aitzaz died later at a hospital from injuries suffered in the bomb blast.

Aitzaz’s father, Mujahid Ali Bangash, was working in the United Arab Emirates at the time. He told Agence France-Presse he was “happy that my son has become a martyr by sacrificing his life for a noble cause.”

“Aitzaz has made us proud by valiantly intercepting the bomber and saving the lives of hundreds of his fellow students,” he said.

The teen was posthumously awarded the country’s Sitara-e-Shujaat, or Star of Bravery. The family has been lobbying to make Jan. 6 Aitzaz Day in Pakistan, so all will remember his ultimate sacrifice to stop terrorism.

This April, the family received a threat from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan: “Aitzaz Hasan is not a hero nor a martyr,” the letter said. “If Aitzaz’s brother Mujtaba does not stop meeting media and officials of government institutions, he will be responsible for any loss.”

The TTP shot Malala Yousafzai, a teen advocate for girls’ education, in the head in an Oct. 9, 2012, assassination attempt. She survived and went on to become the youngest Nobel Peace Prize recipient in history.

Aitzaz’s brother Mujtaba went to local authorities shortly after receiving the threat to ask for government protection for the Hasan family. According to Pakistan’s The Nation, authorities are still mulling over the request.

“Despite my plea to the relevant security institutions informing them of the threat, I have not yet received a reply from any of them,” Mujtaba said. “Right now my family only has one guard for protection, provided by the district administration. It is a request to the authorities to give us the required security. My family is going through trauma and need their support.”

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2017/06/16/jihadist-arrests-in-eu-doubled-last-year-rising-for-third-year-in-a-row/

A new Europol report today on terrorism in eight European Union member states finds that jihadist arrests doubled in 2016, rising for the third year in a row: SEE AT SITE

Among the many leaders who shaped modern Europe, few have been as consequential as Helmut Kohl, who died Friday at age 87. He saw his country through the death of the Cold War and the birth of a reunited Germany at the center of a more deeply integrated European Union.

Born in 1930, Kohl came of age amid the furies of a nihilistic German nationalism and then amid the wreckage of its defeat. He was compelled to join the Hitler Youth, as were all boys in that era, but was part of the first generation of Germany’s postwar leaders too young to have fought in the conflict. His parents instilled in him a devout Catholicism that shaped his later political outlook.

He entered politics in the Christian Democratic Union, which with its Bavarian sister party the CSU became Germany’s main center-right party. He rose to the Chancellorship of West Germany in 1982, a position he would hold for a postwar record of 16 years.

He took power after years of Social-Democratic Ostpolitik, or engagement with East Germany, and when the anticommunism of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II still faced considerable skepticism among putative foreign-policy experts. One of Kohl’s early contributions was to defend plans to deploy Pershing II missiles in West Germany against fierce protests across Europe.

Kohl also built on the work of his predecessors in reconciling Germany with the rest of Europe. His friendship with French President François Mitterrand was legendary, and that proved crucial in persuading other European leaders to accept a reunified Germany after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

That reunification—and the creation of the euro, which Kohl accepted as its price—remains controversial. Economists are right that the euro and many economic-policy decisions governing reunification created challenges that still dog the EU. Kohl was right that peaceful German integration was worth the price.

Europe’s first tasks after 1989 were political, not economic: to welcome the formerly subjugated people of Eastern Europe back into Western civilization, and to find a way for Germany to be a nation again without being a threat. Kohl, driven by his commitment to European unity, aided both projects with his policy of rapid reunification and the euro. The result was a Continent that weathered the collapse of a malign neighboring superpower while remaining at peace with itself.

Historians will remember that achievement more than the commonplace political scandals that engulfed Kohl later in his long career. Rarely does a leader change his nation as dramatically for the better as Helmut Kohl did.

At the moment, the bar for taking extremists out of circulation is set ridiculously high. People known for their own extremism that reaches pre-terrorist levels should not be walking the streets when they have expressed support for Islamic State (ISIS) or tried to head to Syria or called for the destruction of Britain and other democracies or allied themselves to people already in prison. Their demand for free speech or freedom of belief must never be elevated above the rights of citizens to live safely in their own towns and cities. It is essential for parliament to lower the bar.

Is this to be the political landscape for the future, where groups of people demanding death and destruction are given the freedom of the streets whilst those wishing to hold a peaceful celebration are prevented from doing so?

To see extremist Islam as a “perversion” of Islam misses an important point. The politically correct insistence that radical versions of Islam somehow pervert an essentially peaceful and tolerant faith forces policy-makers and legislators, church leaders, rabbis, interfaith workers and the public at large to leave to one side an important reality. Flatly, Islam in its original and classic forms has everything to do with today’s radicals and the violence they commit. The Qur’an is explicit in its hatred for pagans, Jews and Christians. It calls for the fighting of holy war (jihad) to conquer the non-Muslim world, subdue it, and gradually bring it into the fold of Islam. Islam has been at war with Europe since the seventh century.

On the Sunday morning after the terrorist attacks in London the night of June 3, British Prime Minister Theresa May addressed the nation in a powerful speech. It deserves to be read in full, but several points stand out and call for a response.

We cannot and must not pretend that things can continue as they are. Things need to change and they need to change in four important ways.

First, while the recent attacks are not connected by common networks, they are connected in one important sense. They are bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism.

It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam.

Lower down, she enhances that by saying:

Second, we cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed. Yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide.

No one who has watched the endless stream of radical Muslim preachers who appear on YouTube or who post extremist, anti-Western, anti-democratic, or anti-Semitic opinions on Facebook would object to May’s stricture. But given earlier attempts to rein in the providers of so many internet spaces in a demand for better scrutiny and the removal of radicalizing material from their sites, we must remain pessimistic about how far May or any other Western leader can bring effective pressure to bear. Without strong financial disincentives, these rulers of the internet will pay little heed to the concerns of the wider public and our security services.