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2 killed, 6 injured in shooting attack in Jerusalem

At least two people have been killed and six injured in a drive-by shooting in Jerusalem, Israeli police said. The shooting is preliminarily being considered a terrorist attack, according to a police spokesman.

The incident took place near Israeli police’s National Headquarters located near the Ammunition Hill memorial site, according to Israeli police. A perpetrator was shooting from a car.

BREAKING At least 5 Israelis wounded in drive-by shooting attack in Jerusalem
1 critical terrorist shot & wounded. pic.twitter.com/vJqGYlHHSA

The attacker escaped and headed to the tomb of the Hebrew prophet Samuel, 1.3 kilometers north of Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood.Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said that the attacker has been identified as a 39-year-old man from the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.

The injured victims were taken to Hadassah Hospital Mt. Scopus, the hospital said, as cited by the Times of Israel.

The attacker was due to start a four-month jail sentence next week for assaulting a police officer, a spokeswoman for Israel’s Prisons Service said, as cited by Reuters.

Hamas has claimed responsibility for the attack. According to the organization’s spokesman, the attack was “a natural reaction” to the occupation “against our people.”

At least 218 Palestinians have died in attacks in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip since 2015. Israeli authorities claim 147 of those were assailants, while the others were killed during protests or clashes.

Palestinians have killed least 33 Israelis and two visiting Americans, estimates from Reuters show.

However, Palestinians have accused Israel of constantly using excessive force, claiming that some of those killed had no intention of attacking and posed no threat. In some cases, Israel has opened investigations into whether excessive force was used.

Guess Who Is Helping Islamists to Oppress Women? by Thomas Quiggin

Why Canada’s Minister of Immigration should be accepting an award from an individual whose own organization (ICNA) openly advocates violence against women is not clear. Minister Hajdu, despite her role as Minister for the Status of Women in Canada, has remained silent on this issue despite being made aware of it directly.

Not only did the child services department do nothing to help the 1400 girls being raped and forced into prostitution, in fact she (and others) went out of their way to silence anyone who tried to speak out. Rather than face the fact that a problem of mass rape existed, Joyce Thacker played a role in the cover-up.

Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau has declared himself to be a “feminist” and says he is committed to increasing the role of women in society. However, he recently visited a gender-segregated mosque in Ottawa, the imam of which is part of the International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS), placed on a list of designated terrorist organizations by the United Arab Emirates in 2014.

Ironically, the City of Ottawa has other mosques which are modern and humanist, but the Prime Minister has never chosen to visit one of them.

Advocating violence against women and other misogynist practices are increasingly being accepted by individuals who identify themselves as “feminists” and “female leaders.”

The process of normalizing Islamist misogyny is well underway while so-called feminists remain silent on issues such as wife beating, child marriages, female genital mutilation and “forced suicides.”

For current feminists, it appears as though political correctness and fantasizing that they are “social justice warriors” outweighs the rights of women, especially brown women.

When it comes to the issue of opposing violence against women, feminists are as silent as beaten wives. Nothing – including the advocacy of wife beating, pedophiliac sex acts with nine-year-old girls and the generalized oppression of women – can draw feminists into the debate on the role of women under the Islamist ideology that is prevalent in Canada and the USA.

Premier Katherine Wynne of Ontario (population 13.6 million) recently visited the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), along with Education Minister Mitzie Hunter. They met on August 26, 2016 with female members of the Islamic Circle North America Sisters (ICNA Canada) in Scarborough. The ICNA directly advocates misogynist positions such as wife beating, the taking of slave girls and the position that women are, overall, inferior to men. ICNA also notes that Islamic women have been “emancipated” from the obligation of earning their own livelihood. Therefore, women can be kept at home and cannot leave the house without the permission of the husband.

The Right to Mock by Douglas Murray

Mohammed Shafiq was quoted in the Sun saying of Smith: “I think he should apologise immediately. Our faith is not to be mocked, our faith is to be celebrated and I think people will be offended.”

Shafiq does not explain why his faith should not be mocked. Nor does he seem to know anything about the right of free people in free countries to do or say whatever we like about Islam or any other faith whenever we feel like it.

There is nothing special about Islam that means it cannot be mocked. In fact, it would be a very good thing (both for Muslims and everyone else) if it were mocked rather more.

But there in that sentence is the implicit threat again. All insist that their faith “should not be mocked.” And for those who say they are moderates, and are presented as such by the press, it seems to be exceptionally useful that they do not have to be much more explicit than this.

But in this not-so-subtle intimidation do we not see precisely that thing which most worries the public? That despite what our politicians say, the allegedly vast chasm that separates the extremists from the “moderates” seems at times to be almost paper-thin.

If there is one question that most concerns the public around the question of radical Islam it is “What is the connection between the extremists and the moderates?” Leading politicians across the Western world have not been much help in answering this question, insisting as they do, that radical Islam has nothing to do with Islam and that the extremists are as far away from the moderates as it is possible to be. Yet the public senses that this is not the case.

Despite the amazing lack of public debate about the actual contours of the discussion, the public knows that something is not right about the analysis provided by Liberal politicians and others. Indeed, the public notices not only that there is some connection between the two (something Democrats in the U.S., among others, deny) but that the connection may be closer than anyone would like. A fine example of this was thrown up in the UK this week in the space of just 24 hours.

German Police Arrest Suspect in Alleged Terror Bomb Plot Syrian refugee had explosives in apartment and ‘Islamist motivations’By Zeke Turner

CHEMNITZ, Germany—Police said early Monday that they had arrested a 22-year-old Syrian refugee suspected of planning a terror attack in Germany, capping a two-day manhunt.

The suspect Jaber Albakr was found by police in Leipzig in the early morning hours following a call from Syrians living in the city, Saxony’s state police wrote online.

Suspected of planning an attack with explosives and on the run from police, Mr. Albakr “was captured in an apartment in Leipzig” by the other Syrians, the police wrote on Facebook.

“We are tired, but overjoyed,” Saxony’s state police announced on Twitter after the arrest of Jaber Albakr. Mr. Albakr first eluded capture Saturday during a police raid on his apartment here in Chemnitz, a small city closer to the Czech border. Leipzig, a transportation hub offering extensive rail connections and flights into Turkey, is about an hour’s drive away.

The manhunt began Friday evening when German domestic intelligence agency tipped off Saxony authorities about an alleged plot. That led to a raid at his apartment by special police commandos. Police said they found “several hundred grams” of highly explosive materials in the man’s apartment.

“Based on the amount of explosives found in the apartment, it is relatively clear that this is a culprit with Islamist motivations who wanted to carry out an attack,” said a spokesman for Germany’s federal prosecutor-general, which took over the investigation from state authorities Sunday night.

A person familiar with the investigation said Mr. Albakr arrived in Germany as a refugee and had been granted asylum. ARD public television said he had arrived a year ago.

The manhunt took place in multiple locations and led to several related arrests.

On Sunday afternoon, police raided a second apartment in Chemnitz and detained a fourth person who police said had been in contact with Mr. Albakr. CONTINUE AT SITE

Missiles Fired Toward U.S. Warship Near Yemen Missiles, apparently fired from Houthi territory, caused no damage or injuries By Gordon Lubold

WASHINGTON—Two missiles apparently fired from Houthi territory inside Yemen landed near an American warship patrolling off the country’s coast, missing the ship and causing no damage or injuries, according to Pentagon officials.

The destroyer USS Mason, on patrol in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen, detected two inbound missiles within about an hour of each other about 7 p.m. local time Sunday, Peter Cook, the Pentagon press secretary, said.

The origin of the two missiles appeared to be from Houthi-controlled territory in southern Yemen, Mr. Cook said.

The ship deployed defensive measures in response to the first missile, according to another defense official. Citing operational security considerations, the official declined to pinpoint the location of the destroyer, other than to say it was operating in the southern end of the Red Sea, north of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

The ship was in international waters, the official said. The incident is under investigation.

“We take this very seriously,” the official said. “We will protect our people.”

Rewriting the History of Jerusalem For Unesco and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Israel’s capital is anything but Jewish. By Victoria C. Gardner Coates

This week in Paris, the executive board of Unesco, the United Nations entity charged with looking after matters related to education, science and culture, will vote on a resolution called “Occupied Palestine,” which attempts to redefine the capital of Israel as a supranational city to which Muslims, Christians and Jews have equal claim.

Perhaps not coincidentally, an exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City makes the same case. For the sake of Jerusalem, both need to be exposed as the attempts at historical revisionism that they are.

Jerusalem has been a busy patch of earth over the course of its history and a magnet for people of many faiths—first Jews, then Christians, then Muslims—becoming over the millennia a location of cultural fascination. The “Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven” exhibition at the Met is a case in point. The show highlights the spectacular objects produced in and around the medieval city that continue to inform its modern aesthetic. It is in many ways a curatorial tour de force and must have entailed all manner of diplomatic wrangling to garner so many loans of such delicate, irreplaceable objects.

But there is an elephant in this tastefully curated gallery. At its heart, this is a show about the identity of Jerusalem, as contentious a topic a thousand years ago as it is today, as is evidenced by the Unesco resolution. The exhibition’s premise, as is encapsulated in its title, is that during the medieval period, all claims to the city were equal and inhabitants were uniformly defined by their participation in this unique community.

This interpretation is implicitly projected onto the modern Jerusalem as photographs of the contemporary city appear on the gallery walls next to the explanatory texts. The visitor is encouraged to conclude that if only adherents of the three major religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam—would understand themselves as citizens of Jerusalem, a city transcending national boundaries, this utopia could be recaptured. The organizers are careful to mix up the order of the three religions as listed in written materials to avoid the appearance of preferential treatment.

An uneasy subtext to “Every People Under Heaven” is that during the exhibition’s time frame Jerusalem was completely dominated by Christians and Muslims, successively. These four centuries spanned one of the sparsest Jewish presences in Jerusalem’s history, beginning as they did with the wholesale slaughter of Jews at the hands of the Crusaders in 1099, after which their population dwindled to as few as 200. The Mamluk conquest of 1260 marginally improved conditions, but a significant increase in the Jewish population would have to wait for the 18th century.

This reality is apparent in the show’s makeup, with Jewish objects being largely confined to books and jewelry, and Jewish issues to their longing for the “absent” Temple of Solomon, a longing that is treated as a somewhat quaint anachronism not as an expression of the enduring spiritual connection of Jews to Jerusalem. Jews, we are told, prayed outside the old city walls. Occasionally a Jew appears in the labels for the Christian or Islamic objects, as when one “Stella” reportedly declared that the Dome of the Rock and the al Aqsa mosque are “as radiant and pure as the very heavens,” as if to give the Jewish stamp of legitimization to the structures built on the Temple Mount.

Again, visitors may well ask themselves from this evidence, why can’t we all just get along today as well as we seem to have done in 1000-1400?

The Unlearnt Lessons of Iraq, Libya Srdja Trifkovic

Two weeks of atrocity management over Aleppo indicate that the Deep State is still intent on intervening in Syria. Most Americans don’t want another Middle Eastern war, but if Hillary Clinton wins on November 8 it is looks incresingly likely that they will get it.

Writing in Consortiumnews.com on October 5, Robert Parry warned that official Washington’s political/punditry class has developed a new “group think” on Syria that is even more dangerous than the one preceding the Iraq war. Like the “frenzied war fever of 2002-2003,” this new consensus is based on “a mix of selective, dubious and false information,” while excluding from the public forum all discordant voices:

Most notably, there are two key facts about Syria that Americans are not being told: one, U.S. regional “allies” have been funding and arming radical jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda terrorists, there almost since the conflict began in 2011 and, two, the claim about “moderate” Syrian rebels is a fraud; the “moderates” have served essentially as a P.R. cut-out for the U.S. and its “allies” to supply Al Qaeda and its allies with sophisticated weapons while pretending not to… The neocons and their liberal-hawk sidekicks only talk about stopping the “barbarism” of the Syrian government and its Russian allies as they try to finally wipe out Al Qaeda’s jihadists and their “moderate” allies holed up in eastern Aleppo.

Perry notes that these calls for a U.S. military action against the Syrian government – and implicitly the Russians – are coming from some of the most enthusiastic advocates of the war in Iraq, such as Sen. John McCain, Washington Post’s chief editorialist Fred Hiatt, and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman. He did not name some other influential names urging intervention, such as ex-CIA director and former U.S. Cenral Command chief David Petraeus, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and Ashton Carter’s likely successor at the Pentagon if Hillary Clinton wins, Michele Flournoy.

Specific options are actively under consideration. According to a Reuters report of September 29, discussions were being held at “staff level,” and “include allowing Gulf allies to supply rebels with more sophisticated weaponry, something considered more likely despite Washington’s opposition to this until now. Another is a U.S. air strike on an Assad air base, viewed as less likely because of the potential for causing Russian casualties…”

As for the first option, the unresolved problem is that in today’s Syria there are no “vetted moderates” to whom such “more sophysticated weaponry” (presumably including man-portable ground-to-air missiles, MANPADS) can be safely delivered. On the same day the Wall Street Journal warned that some of Syria’s major rebel factions were “doubling down on their alliance with an al Qaeda-linked group, despite a U.S. warning to split from the extremists or risk being targeted in airstrikes.”

German Police on Manhunt For Syrian Refugee Who Planned Airport Bombing Attack By Patrick Poole

UPDATE: Police have made arrests in this case, but the manhunt for the original suspect apparently continues.

German police arrest two people in #Chemnitz after explosives found in apartment raided during search for man suspected of planning bombing

— Sky News Newsdesk (@SkyNewsBreak) October 8, 2016

BREAKING: German police: “Several hundred grams” of explosives found in raided apartment linked to alleged bomb plot.

— The Associated Press (@AP) October 8, 2016

Original Post: A massive manhunt is underway in the German city of Chemnitz and the town is currently on lockdown as they seek a terror suspect who entered the country last year as a Syrian refugee.

According to reports, 22-year old Jaber Albakr was planning a bomb attack on an airport and slipped police surveillance.

Currently running a large-scale operation in #Chemnitz because of the suspicion of a planned bomb attack.

— Polizei Sachsen (@PolizeiSachsen) October 8, 2016

Major police operation in Chemnitz, Germany. Reportedly explosives found. https://t.co/Yq4Sbj19HS

— Björn Stritzel (@bjoernstritzel) October 8, 2016

#Saxony Police release picture of #Chemnitz bomb threat suspect, Jaber Albakr. Saxony Police says #Albakr is from #Syria.#Germany pic.twitter.com/Mdrdh8HIpn

— Ahmed Hassan (@SHAWSHANK5) October 8, 2016

This follows two previous terror attacks in Germany this past July by an Afghan refugee and a Syrian asylum seeker who was scheduled for deportation.

The Daily Mail reports:

A German city is in lockdown as armed police are hunting for a man suspected of planning a bomb attack on an airport.

The suspect has been named as Jaber Albakr – a Syrian who was under surveillance by the Federal Office for Constitutional Protection in Cologne, say reports.

He is a 22-year-old who was born in Damascus.

He is suspected of plotting a bomb attack on a German airport, according to Online Focus.

It is understood the suspect entered Germany last year with refugees from Syria.

Residents have been ordered to remain indoors as large-scale closures and evacuations take place in the town and the suspect remains at large.

Putin’s Puritan Piety: The Ideological War against the West by Giulio Meotti

Russia is one of the few countries in the Western world in which religion is becoming increasingly important and not less.

To establish his authority on the Russian society, President Vladimir Putin has shaped a doctrine mobilizing the entire Russian society against a perceived Western “decadence”. He has declared that Russian traditional family values are a bulwark against the West’s “so-called tolerance — genderless and infertile.”

The first Cold War was a clash between Western democracy and the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat. The new Cold War is a one between Western liberalism and Russian conservatism.

During the Cold War, American conservatives used to label the Soviet Union “the godless nation” on the verge of collapse because it had purged religion from the Russian society. Two decades later, the Kremlin is occupied by a former officer of the KGB, secretly baptized, who launches the same accusation of atheism at the United States and the West.

Welcome to “Putin’s covert war on Western decadence”, as The Spectator defined it:

“Putin’s Russia is fast becoming a very puritan place. Ever since returning to the presidency in 2012, Putin has pursued an increasingly religious-conservative ideology both at home and abroad, defining Russia as a moral fortress against sexual licence and decadence, porn and gay rights”.

Recently, Russian officials censored porn websites. When the largest pornography site on the internet, PornHub, offered the Russia’s official communications and media watchdog a premium account in exchange for lifting the ban, Russian officials replied: “Sorry, we are not in the market and the demography is not a commodity.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ideological war against the West is getting cocky and self-confident. In a televised speech from a Kremlin hall, Putin declared that Russian traditional family values are a bulwark against the West’s “so-called tolerance — genderless and infertile.”

“Many Euro-Atlantic countries have abandoned their roots, including Christian values,” said Putin. The patriarch of the Orthodox Church, Kirill, echoed Putin by charging the West of being engaged in a “spiritual disarmament” of the Russian people, and by criticizing the European laws that prevent wearing religious symbols in public. “We have experienced an era of atheism and we know what it means to live without God”, Kirill said.

Hungary to Amend Constitution to Block EU Migrant Plan “Brussels or Budapest, that was the question, and the people said Budapest.” by Soeren Kern

The Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, all former Communist countries, also oppose the EU plan to relocate 160,000 “asylum seekers,” which they say is an “EU diktat” that infringes on national sovereignty.

“One of the principals underpinning the system is the primacy of EU law.” — Margaritis Schinas, chief spokesperson for European Commission.

“In the early autumn of 2015 we erected a fence on the external green border of the European Union and the Schengen Area. This was to protect the European Union’s greatest achievement: free movement within the common area of the internal market…. We do not want to distribute the migration burdens falling on Europe, but we want to eliminate them: to put an end to them.” — Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, July 11, 2016.

“We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries… That is a historical experience for us.” — Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, September 3, 2015.

“We lose our European values and identity the way frogs are cooked in slowly-heating water. Quite simply, slowly there will be more and more Muslims, and we will no longer recognize Europe.” — Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, September 30, 2016.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has proposed amending the Constitution to prevent the European Union from settling migrants in Hungary without the approval of Parliament.

In a speech on October 4, Orbán said the amendment would be presented to Parliament on October 10, and, if approved, it would come into effect on November 8.

Hungarian voters overwhelmingly rejected the European Union’s mandatory migrant relocation plan in a referendum on October 2, but failed to turn out in sufficient numbers to make the referendum legally binding.

More than 97% of those who voted in the referendum answered ‘no’ to the question: “Do you want the European Union to be entitled to prescribe the mandatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of the National Assembly?”

Voter turnout was only 40%, however, far short of the 50% participation required to make the referendum valid under Hungarian law.