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Europe: Muslim Atrocities against Women? So What! by Uzay Bulut

These examples are merely a sampling of what is becoming commonplace across Europe. In the name of human rights, inclusion, diversity and equality, “enlightened” activists and judicial authorities are apologizing for and excusing Muslim criminals for behavior that would not be tolerated from anyone else — and should not be tolerated.

Do these judges work for Islamic sharia courts or for secular European courts?

These court rulings are an open call to Muslim men in Europe to rape women, children, anyone they like. Those cultures in which women and children as are viewed as property deserve no respect, and certainly not preferential treatment.

It happened again last week. Two Turkish nationals in Schwerin, Germany were arrested for raping a 13-year-old girl after forcing themselves into her home.

Schwerin, Germany (Image source: Getty Images)

Recently, a judge in Germany acquitted a Turkish drug dealer of raping one of his customers last August. He had forced himself on her for four hours and left her incapacitated for weeks. He told the judge that in the culture from where he came, what she “had experienced as rape” might be considered merely “wild sex”.

What “culture” is this?

According to the Turkish women’s rights organization “We Will Stop the Murders of Women,” which publishes monthly reports, in March of this year alone, 35 women were killed; 14 others were exposed to sexual violence, and 63 children were molested. Many children, the report said, had been sexually abused for years, and often attempted suicide.

The report also stated that the murder of women in Turkey — 63% percent of which is committed by husbands, boyfriends, fathers, brothers or sons — is spurred more than half the time by women; it is supposedly their fault: they actually wanted to make decisions about their lives, such as getting a divorce, before they were murdered.

Worse, nearly a third of those are classified by authorities as “suspicious murders,” perpetrated by “unknown assailants.”

Torturing women to death is also increasingly widespread, as well as killing young children along with their mothers. One case involved a man who slit the throats of his ex-wife and their five-year-old daughter.

Tis The Season Of Anti-Semitism by Abraham H. Miller

Abraham H. Miller Emeritus Professor, University of Cincinnati

It’s been a good season for anti-Semites. Jewish students graduating CUNY will have as their last memory of the school some inspiring words from professional anti-Semite Linda Sarsour, who believes a Jewish homeland has no place in the community of nations, Sharia should be law, and Zionist women cannot be feminists.

Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who has been involved in a long string of anti-Semitic controversies, finally did something even the British Labour Party could not ignore. He called Hitler a Zionist.

But Livingstone was merely suspended from party membership, not expelled. And why should he have been? After all, he was merely echoing sentiments that many in his party seem to hold.

In the Middle East, as the Palestine Authority seeks to loosen Hamas’ grip on Gaza by refusing to pay its electricity bills, the UN has stepped in to tell Israel that it is its obligation, as the occupying party, to intervene and supply its sworn existential enemy with power for free. Israel, of course, has not occupied Gaza since 2005.

In the Alice in Wonderland world of the UN, Israel is still occupying Gaza, but its presence in a united Jerusalem does not legally exist. Israel’s excavations in Jerusalem that underscore the Jewish presence there for millennia and contradict Islamic make-believe history are ordered to cease. Israel will not comply.

Whatever the anti-Semitic UN does in its pandering to Islamic nonsense, generated by the 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people and has been so for over three thousand years. As one Israeli official put it, our history is embedded in every stone.

And if this were not enough to lacerate Jewish sensitivities in a single week, the more than 2,000,000 New York Jews were being treated to a political campaign that simultaneously weaponized and politicized anti-Semitism.

Thomas Lopez-Pierre, a candidate for New York City Council, was running a campaign steeped in anti-Semitic tropes of the exploitive, greedy Jew. Lopez-Pierre lashed out at his rival Mark Levine for being white and Jewish, undoubtedly a double-edged sin in the leftist world where all ethnicities are to be celebrated unless you are white and Jewish.

Lopez-Pierre, without so much as a scintilla of evidence, argued that greedy Jewish developers with Israeli money were responsible for 80% of the gentrification of Harlem that was displacing blacks and Latinos. And following the pattern of all racists, all members of a group are responsible for the bad deeds (real or imaginary) of any other members of the group. This, of course, was the deranged mentality of the Southern lynch mob!

Among anti-Semitic stereotypes, the Shylock trope resonates well, but apparently cooler heads convinced Lopez-Pierre, who never had a chance of winning, to fold his smutty tent and leave the electoral field to real candidates.

Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy We urgently need to stop the ecological posturing and invest in gas and nuclear Matt Ridley

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/wind-turbines-are-neither-clean-nor-green-and-they-provide-zero-global-energy/

The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.

You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

Matt Ridley and climate change campaigner Leo Murray debate the future of wind power:

Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.

Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.

Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.

If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.

The British broadcaster brave enough to discuss Islamic violence Douglas Murray

Last night Channel 4 broadcast a deep and seriously important programme. ‘Isis: The Origins of Violence’ was written and presented by the historian Tom Holland and can be viewed (by British viewers) here.

Five years ago, to coincide with his book ‘In The Shadow of the Sword’ about the early years of Islam, Holland presented a documentary for Channel 4 titled ‘Islam: The Untold Story’. That was something of a landmark in UK television. For while there had previously been some heated and angry studio discussions about Islam and plenty of fawningly hagiographic programmes about the religion’s founder presented by his apologists, here was a grown-up and scholarly treatment which looked at the issue as though there weren’t blasphemy police around every corner.

Sadly, part of the reception of that programme, and numerous events in the years since have kept such displays of scholarly truthfulness nearly as much of a rarity since as they were before. Which is one reason why Tom Holland deserves even more praise for returning to the subject of his earlier documentary.
And not just returning to it, but – in ‘Isis: The Origins of Violence’ – returning to the hardest part of that subject. In a nutshell he posed the question ‘Why do Isis, and groups like Isis, do what they do?’ And he answers this with the only honest answer anybody interested in truth could possibly come back with – which is that although they may be inspired by many things, their most important inspiration is a version of Islam whose roots can be traced to the origins of the religion, its foundational texts and the behaviour of Mohammed.

Holland did not spare the viewer. Travelling from the scene of the devastating Isis attacks in Paris, to Iraqi towns decimated by the group, via Istanbul and an interview with a Salafi leader in Jordan, Holland showed the depth as well as complexity of the question and answer. The most moving sequence of all came in the Iraqi town of Sinjar which was levelled by Isis and whose mainly Yezidi population either fled, were sold as sex slaves or (as in the case of the town’s old women who could not be sold) massacred. In a profoundly moving sequence, picking his way up a demolished street, on the lookout for explosives amid the rubble, Holland speaks to camera. What he said needs thinking about:

‘There are things in the past that are like unexploded bombs that just lie in wait in the rubble, and then something happens to trigger them. And there are clearly verses in the Koran and stories that are told about Mohammed that are very like mines waiting to go off – Improvised Explosive Devices. And they can lie there maybe for centuries and then something happens to trigger them and you get this.’

The documentary will doubtless have many detractors from the many people – non-Muslim as well as Muslim – who want to cover over those IEDs. Holland’s documentary profoundly and carefully reveals why this is such a terrible mistake, and why from London and Paris to Istanbul and Mosul, the effects of failing to be honest in our assessment of the past has such serious repercussions for our present and future.

Tesco and the great green scam Rupert Darwall

Only two months ago, Tesco agreed to pay a £129 million fine for false accounting, when it overstated profits in its August 2014 trading statement. ‘What happened is a huge source of regret to us all at Tesco,’ chief executive Dave Lewis said, ‘but we are a different business now.’ Not so fast. On Monday, the supermarket giant announced that its UK stores and distribution centres would be switching to 100 per cent renewable electricity this year.

Tesco backs up its claim by saying that its UK electricity consumption will be supported by renewable energy certificates. As part of the EU’s promotion of renewable electricity, all member states are required to run schemes to guarantee the origin of electricity produced from renewable energy sources. In Britain, energy regulator Ofgem runs the Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin (REGO) scheme that Tesco will use to support its 100 per cent renewable claim.

Last year, renewable sources supplied 24.4 per cent of electricity generated in Britain. Intermittent, weather-dependent renewable in the form of wind and solar accounted for 58 per cent of renewable electricity. The next largest comes from the environmentally destructive Drax power station. It used to be Europe’s largest coal-fired power station but now burns wood pellets sourced from North American forests. Under EU rules, wood imported from outside the EU is accounted for as a renewable, zero-carbon fuel source. Yes, the EU really thinks that burning American forests is renewable.

Renewable electricity generation by typeIn 2016Onshore wind 25.5%Onshore wind 25.5%Offshore wind 19.8%Offshore wind 19.8%Solar photovoltaics 12.4%Solar photovoltaics 12.4%Plant biomass 22.7%Plant biomass 22.7%Hydro 6.5%Hydro 6.5%Other 13.0%Other 13.0%Source: BEIS Energy Trends 6.1 / Author’s calculations

Given the high proportion of renewable electricity from weather-dependent capacity, what happens when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing? Would you buy chicken from a store that let its chill cabinets warm up? Is Tesco going to let its store go dark when there isn’t enough wind and solar electricity being generated? Of course, it’s not going to put itself out of business by shutting its stores when the wind speed drops.

Neither is Tesco putting its money where its mouth is. According to calculations by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, a lithium-ion battery with enough electricity to run everything in a house for a week would weigh more than a ton and triple your electricity bill. Tesco isn’t going down the route of bankrupting itself by buying up a huge proportion of the world’s output of lithium-ion batteries.

In reality, Tesco’s claim is based on a Big Lie, that electricity can be stored just like groceries, homewares and clothing. As every school child doing GCSE physics knows, electricity is extremely hard to store. Uniquely, electricity is a product line that has to be generated the moment it’s consumed. There is no stock of electricity waiting to be sold. One GCSE text book illustrates the puny scale of renewable electricity. A hydropower project in Chile’s Atacama Desert will have a capacity of 55 million cubic metres to give a potential generating capacity of 91.7 gigawatt-hours. The amount of solar power is only sufficient pump 45 cubic metres of water a day. Question: How long will it take to fill the reservoir? Answer: 3,346 years.

Report: China Executed at Least a Dozen Intel Sources, Imprisoned Several Others By Rick Moran

The CIA had spent years carefully building a solid network of spies and sources in China, only to have the whole thing unravel between 2010 and 2012 when the Chinese government systematically dismantled it. The New York Times is reporting that current and former intelligence officials say that at least a dozen operatives were executed with several others imprisoned.

The agency now believes a mole was responsible. And they will be years repairing the damage to our ability to gain adequate intelligence in China.

Daily Caller:

Beijing killed at least a dozen CIA sources and imprisoned several others, former and current U.S. officials told The New York Times. One asset was reportedly shot in front of his coworkers. The systematic campaign largely did away with a CIA espionage network that took the U.S. years to build.

Intelligence coming out of China was at its best early in 2010, but by the end of the year, the flow had decreased. By 2011, the CIA realized that their sources were disappearing.

“The CIA considers spying in China one of its top priorities, but the country’s extensive security apparatus makes it exceptionally hard for Western spy services to develop sources there,” reports The New York Times, highlighting the significant damage caused by the eradication of intelligence assets.

Some officials think a mole tipped the Chinese off, revealing the identities of CIA sources. The FBI and CIA launched an investigation, code-named Honey Badger, into the situation. Investigators suspected a former agency operative who oversaw operations in China and decided to remain in Asia after he left the CIA. The man, a Chinese-American intelligence officer, left the CIA before the leaks began. He had access to the identities of key informants.

Other officials who talked to The New York Times suspect that China hacked the covert communications channel. Still others believe that American officers and their sources simply got careless at a time when Chinese spycraft was improving rapidly.

By 2013, the CIA had managed to blunt China’s elimination of intelligence assets, although it is unclear how the agency achieved this outcome.

China is particularly sensitive to the dangers of foreign espionage, but at the same time, it is highly aggressive in its own spy operations against other countries, especially the U.S.

No matter how it happened – and it could have been a combination of factors – our intelligence on China is at a low point at exactly the wrong time. It’s easy to forget that tensions in the South China Sea are still at a high level and it wouldn’t take much for the current stand off to erupt into a hot war. If that happened, we’d be at a huge disadvantage given our intelligence capabilities having been crippled.

China has been active in stealing secrets from the US: CONTINUE AT SITE

The Gender Obsessed West Sets Itself Up for the Rise of Islam by Giulio Meotti

French authorities imposed on students ridiculous books such as Daddy Wears a Dress. It would have been comical if the following years would not have been so tragic. What, in fact, wrecked these French illusions was Islamic terrorism.

The only enemy these French élites knew were patriarchal privileges, since for them “domination” comes only from the white male Europeans.

Obsession with gender is a convenient distraction to avoid facing matters that are more difficult and less pleasant. If the West will not commit itself to preserving Western societies and values, it will fall. And its extraordinary progress will be blanketed over by darkness, along with all those gender rights.

Welcome to the progressive “next frontier of ‘liberation'”, where the most urgent question in Western democracies is “genderism”.

North Carolina was subjected to a year of being boycotted, until it withdrew its transgender bathroom law. Last month, the National Union of Teachers in Great Britain asked the government to teach children as young as two new transgender theories. New York recently presented the first “trans-doll”. American universities are wracked with hysteria over the correct use of neutral pronouns. Even National Geographic, instead of writing about lions and elephants, started covering the “Gender Revolution”. One of the first announcements of Emmanuel Macron, as the French President-elect, was that he would appoint officials from a “gender equal” list.

(Image source: Sara D. Davis/Getty Images)

What does it mean that this gender mania is permeating every corner of Western societies and culture? According to Camille Paglia, the contrarian feminist, it is a sign of the decline of Western civilization. In her new book, Free Women, Free Men, she writes:

“Civilizations have gone through recurrent cycles. Extravaganzas of gender experimentation sometimes precede cultural collapse, as they certainly did in Weimar Germany. Now as then, there are forces aligning outside the borders, scattered fanatical hordes where the cult of heroic masculinity still has tremendous force”.

She then asks:

“How has it happened that so many of today’s most daring and radical young people now define themselves by sexual identity alone? There has been a collapse of perspective here that will surely have mixed consequences for our art and culture and that may perhaps undermine the ability of Western societies to understand or react to the vehemently contrary beliefs of others who do not wish us well. Transgender phenomena multiply and spread in ‘late’ phases of culture, as religious, political, and family traditions weaken and civilizations begin to decline”.

It is not a coincidence that this obsession with gender grew out of Western culture during the 1990s, the decade of peace and prosperity before 9/11. The decade was free of any existential angst, consumed by the Monica Lewinski scandal and dominated by Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History”. According to Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, gender ideology is a symbol of our epoch of “weakening”, pointing to a globalized future “governed by the hearth gods of health, wealth, and pleasure”. The high priests of this ideology, however, did not take into account the rise of radical Islam.

Before the French cities of Paris, Nice and Rouen came under the assault of jihadist groups, the French Socialist government had just one cultural priority: the “ABC of gender equality”. The name came from a controversial program that France’s women’s rights minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, had launched in 500 schools.

Should America Underwrite Palestinian Terror? By Abe Katsman

It is bad enough that the blood of American and Israeli victims of Palestinian terror is so cheap; it is outrageous that it is subsidized.

But it is unconscionable that the shedding of American and Israeli blood through Palestinian terror is subsidized with U.S. tax dollars. Yet, unbelievably, the Congressional attempt to rectify this situation through the Taylor Force Act has run into opposition.

If that sounds implausible, consider some context. Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel made stunning concessions to the Palestine Liberation Organization, then led by Yasser Arafat. Israel allowed the PLO to establish the Palestinian Authority, governing the vast majority of Palestinians. In exchange, Israel was to receive peace: the Palestinians committed to permanently abandon the goal of destroying Israel, and to fight terrorism.

The world (including the U.S.) has since showered the PA with billions of aid dollars. But rather than pursue actual peace or build a functioning economy, the PA has invested heavily in systemic demonization of Israel and of Jews. For 24 years, the PA has bombarded its population with anti-Semitic, anti-coexistence, pro-“liberation”, and pro-terror propaganda and incitement. It is everywhere, infecting children’s books and TV programming, schoolrooms, textbooks, summer camps, mosques, broadcasts, and newspapers. Terrorists are heroes and role models. Streets, parks, schools and even soccer tournaments are named in honor of the most murderous of them.

It also infects bank accounts. The most explicit form that the PA’s pro-terror policy takes is payment to terrorists and their families. The PA has codified laws granting regular payments to “anyone incarcerated in [Israel’s] prisons for his participation in the struggle against the occupation.” Under PA law, terrorists are “a fighting sector and an integral part of the fabric of Arab Palestinian society.”

In this so-called “pay-to-slay” system, the PA provides convicted terrorists and their families with substantial salary and health benefits, free tuition, and, for those sentenced to five or more years, a guaranteed government job upon release from prison. Murderers “earn” over $40,000 per year. Longer terror sentences and greater crimes qualify for higher salaries and positions. The families of “martyrs” receive additional large payments and benefits.

These payments amount to over $300 million per year — nearly 10% of the entire PA budget. As it happens, U.S. payments to the Palestinians during the Obama era averaged $400 million per year ($363 million last year). Is there a more obscene use of American tax dollars?

The PA may not know how to increase GDP, but it has been wildly successful at cultivating a rabidly anti-Israel/anti-Jewish population. (Not to mention anti-American: Palestinians danced in the streets on 9/11.) The “peace” that Israel actually received from the peace process has included a never-ending stream of thousands of attempted Palestinian terror attacks against Israeli targets. Since Oslo, Palestinian attacks have killed over 1,600 Israelis, and wounded some 9,000. (As a fraction of the population, that would be the equivalent of approximately 64,000 American dead — equal to suffering a 9/11 attack every year — and 360,000 wounded.)

Dilbert’s Perspective on the Muslim Invasion By Eileen F. Toplansky

In 1963, President Kennedy spoke to members of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Kennedy asserted that “what makes editorial cartooning such a wonder” is the ability to “entertain and instruct us … and … place in one picture a story and a message and do it with impact and conviction and humor and passion – all that … makes [editorial cartoonists] the most exceptional commentators on the American scene.”

According to Randall P. Harrison, “there are a handful of basic techniques which the cartoonist manipulates to create a symbolic world of make-believe.” The first process, known as leveling, is when “the cartoonist radically ‘levels’ what we usually see in our perceptual field thus creating a cartoon which is 2-dimensional rather than 3-dimensional.” Then there is “sharpening,” where “some items drop out so that the remaining items gather in importance.” Thus, “[a]s a cartoon body shrinks, the head expands. As wrinkles and minor features drop out, the expressive features of eyes, mouth and brows (features that move and are therefore the most informative in the human face) become more prominent.” And, finally, “the cartoonist assimilates through exaggeration and interpolation so that the fantasy, while still make-believe, ‘makes sense’ for the reader.”

But the true art of the cartoon figure is centered on the “thought balloon and the speech balloon.”

This is why Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams, is a refreshing rebuke to those who cannot abide common sense and logic. James Delingpole explains how the latest Dilbert strip is “causing liberal heads to explode.” Concerning global warming, Adams “invites a climate scientist to explain the risk of climate change to the company.” The expert (in a white coat, of course) patiently explains how scientists “put that data into dozens of different climate models and ignore the ones that look wrong[.]” And “then [the scientists] take that output and run it through long-term economic models of the sort that have never been right.” Dilbert innocently asks, “What if I don’t trust the economic models” and is instantly reproached with “[w]ho hired the science denier?”

At his own blog, Adams asks, “[I]f scientists can make climate prediction models that are reliable (or so they tell us), why can’t they do the same with Muslim immigration predictions?” Thus:

Predicting the average temperature on Earth ten years from now is hard. There are too many variables. But predicting the outcome of immigration policies probably involves far fewer variables. All we need to do is look at other countries that experienced lots of Muslim immigration and subtract out the countries that reversed the trend with military force[.]

A good immigration prediction model would find the ‘tipping point’ where the percentage of Islamic population nearly guarantees the entire country will become Muslim in the long run. Is that 10% or 65%? I have no idea.

Suppose I said to you that 20% Islamic population will guarantee that eventually – perhaps in a hundred years or more – the country will have a dominant Islamic culture, with all that implies for women and the LGBTQ community.

Germany: Should Migrants Integrate? “We are an open society. We show our face. We do not wear burkas.” by Soeren Kern

The list makes no mention of German culture as being the guiding or core culture (Leitkultur), nor does the task force explicitly demand that migrants assimilate to the German way of life. Rather, the guiding principles appear to be aimed at encouraging Germans to embrace the foreign cultural norms that migrants bring to Germany.

“We cannot ask anyone to respect our customs if we are not ready to articulate them…. Our country is shaped by Christianity…. Germany is part of the West, culturally, spiritually and politically speaking.” — German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière.

Proponents of a Leitkultur argue that it necessary to prevent the establishment of parallel societies, including those governed by Islamic sharia law.

A government task force created to promote the integration of migrants into German society has published a list of the core features of German culture.

The list studiously omits politically incorrect terms such as “patriotism” and “leading culture” (Leitkultur), and effectively reduces German traditions and values to the lowest common denominator. The task force, in fact, implicitly establishes multiculturalism as the most complete expression of German culture.

The so-called Cultural Integration Initiative (Initiative kulturelle Integration) was created by the German government in December 2016 to promote “social cohesion” after Chancellor Angela Merkel opened German borders to more than a million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The task force — led by the German Cultural Council (Deutscher Kulturrat) in close cooperation with the German Interior Ministry and two dozen media, religious and other interest groups — was charged with reaching a consensus on what constitutes German culture. The original aim was to facilitate “cultural integration” by encouraging migrants to assimilate to a shared set of cultural values.

After five months of deliberation, the task force on May 16 presented a list of what it considers to be the top 15 guiding principles of German culture. Encapsulated in the catchphrase “Cohesion in Diversity,” the list consists of mostly generic ideas about German culture — gender equality, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, pluralism and democracy — that are not at all unique to Germany.