BOOKS, MOVIES AND TELEVISION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Kermit Gosnell, America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer A riveting new book tells his disturbing story. Mark Tapson

Posted By on January 31st, 2017

Masked by innocuous language like “pro-choice” and “reproductive care,” and protected by a media conspiracy of silence, the grim reality of abortion rarely surfaces in our cultural awareness, as it did with the recent undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s moral vacuum. But a new book about the chilling crimes of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, America’s most prolific serial killer, highlights that ugly reality in an even more horrifying but compelling fashion.

Part true-crime investigation, part social commentary, part courtroom drama, and part journey into the banality of evil, Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer was written by investigative journalists and filmmakers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, well-known for their controversial documentaries FrackNation and Not Evil Just Wrong, as well as a play called Ferguson drawn entirely from testimony about the shooting of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson. The husband-and-wife team have also miraculously crowdfunded a feature film based on the Gosnell story (it raised more money than any film project in Indiegogo history), directed by conservative actor and Twitter gadfly Nick Searcy (Justified), with the screenplay written by novelist and political commentator Andrew Klavan.

McElhinney begins the book with a confession that she had “never trusted or liked pro-life activists”; she resented the “emotional manipulation” of their demonstrations – until she began researching the Gosnell story, a process so “brutal” that at times she wept and prayed at her computer, not only over Gosnell’s evil but over “the reality of abortion” even when it’s performed properly and legally. Writing the book changed her dramatically, and it’s not an overstatement to say that reading this book will have the same effect on many readers as well.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell might still be butchering babies today if it weren’t for the dedication of a Philadelphia narcotics investigator named Jim Wood who followed up a lead about Gosnell’s lucrative illegal prescription scheme. The lead led to a raid on Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society abortion clinic in February, 2010, where investigators discovered shockingly unsanitary conditions and incompetent, untrained assistants, as well as improperly medicated post-abortion patients sleeping or sitting together under bloodstained blankets, a few in need of hospitalization. The procedure room was even filthier. Fetal remains were found throughout, in empty water and milk jugs, cat food containers, and orange juice bottles with the necks cut off. One cupboard held five jars containing baby feet, which Gosnell apparently severed and kept for his own amusement.

Unfazed by the presence of the FBI, Dr. Gosnell proceeded to perform an abortion in the middle of the raid. When he was done, Gosnell sat down with the investigators and ate dinner while still wearing torn, bloody surgical gloves (his staff later reported that Gosnell normally ate during his abortions). He pointed out one of the cats that roamed the clinic, which reeked of cat urine, and casually said it had killed 200 mice there. The only time his cool, casual demeanor slipped was when he realized that the staff were telling detectives about his habit of manipulating ultrasound readings to falsify fetal ages, in order to perform late-term abortions well after the state’s legal limit. Detectives also would later learn that Gosnell’s practices included killing babies that were born alive by plunging scissors into the backs of their necks and snipping the spinal cords.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Challenges the Internationalist Order What the hysterical response of the opposition tells us. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on January 31st, 2017

A job begun is half done, as the Romans used to say. Restoring our nation’s pride in its exceptionalism, and keeping our government’s obligation to put our country’s interests and security first, is job number one for the new president. After just one week in office, President Trump has made a good start at dismantling the internationalist order that for nearly a century has tried to weaken and subordinate national sovereignty and identity to globalist institutions. The hysterical response of the global elites and this country’s fellow-travelers tells us Trump is drawing blood.

Trump’s executive orders and comments on securing our southern border, renegotiating NAFTA, and banning refugees from jihadist-infested countries––from a list drawn up during the Obama administration by the way–– drew the usual blustering dudgeon. Mexico’s complaints about Trump’s comments were laughably hypocritical. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said, “Mexico does not believe in walls.” Of course they don’t believe in their northern border because Mexico uses illegal immigration into the U.S. to get rid of people for whom they have no jobs or opportunities, and from whom they secure $25 billion a year in remittances, more than the revenues from the sale of oil.

But the last border you want to try to cross illegally is Mexico’s southern border, notorious not for any wall, but for the brutality, including torture and rape, inflicted on those caught. Even Mexican-Indian citizens are apprehended and abused as suspected illegal aliens from Central America. This animus against immigrants is no surprise, given the harsh protections of citizenship enshrined in Mexico’s constitution, which makes illegal entry a felony. And there are numerous draconian restrictions on legal immigrants, such as prohibitions on owning property and serving in government or the military. Or consider Article 33, which states, “The Federal Executive shall have the exclusive power to compel any foreigner whose remaining he may deem inexpedient to abandon the national territory immediately and without the necessity of previous legal action.” Compare that with the extensive legal protections for even criminal illegal aliens in the U.S. The Mexican president is merely mouthing globalist pieties in order to serve his own country’s national interests.

The same hypocrisy is evident in the mainly European complaints about Trump’s moratorium on immigration from certain countries. Last week foreign immigrants from such places who had been detained at airports were blessed with restraining orders by two federal judges in Virginia and New York. The ACLU applauded this slap-down of Trump’s “unconstitutional Muslim ban,” a willful distortion of the plain text of the executive order. And as a globalist outfit congenitally hostile to its own country, the ACLU seems to think there is a Constitutional “civil liberty” for anybody from anywhere to enter the U.S.

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You’re Fired! Trump fires insubordinate acting AG Sally Yates and restores law and order at the Justice Department. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on January 31st, 2017

President Trump last night fired the insubordinate acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she ordered federal prosecutors to ignore Trump’s lawful emergency executive order restricting travel and immigration from Islamic terrorist-infested nations.

The Yates termination may foreshadow a major house-cleaning at the U.S. Department of Justice. That agency is overrun by left-wing careerists who have no respect for the rule of law and who operate under the legally and morally grotesque assumption that aliens, including suspected terrorists, ought to enjoy all the same rights as U.S. citizens.

Yates “has betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States,” Trump said in a press release. “This order was approved as to form and legality by the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel.”

He called Yates “an Obama Administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.”

“It is time to get serious about protecting our country,” Trump continued. “Calling for tougher vetting for individuals travelling from seven dangerous places is not extreme. It is reasonable and necessary to protect our country.”

Last night President Trump also relieved acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Daniel Ragsdale of his duties. No reason for the decision had been reported at press time. The new acting ICE director is Thomas D. Homan who has been executive associate director of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) since 2013.

When the U.S. Senate was considering Yates’s nomination for deputy attorney general in 2015, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), whose nomination as attorney general is pending in the Senate, made his opposition known. According to Politico, Sessions “urged his colleagues to defeat Yates” objecting “to what he said was her involvement in defending the federal government against a lawsuit 26 states have filed challenging unilateral actions Obama took in November to grant millions of illegal immigrants quasi-legal status and work permits.” Sessions described the Obama actions as “presidential overreach.”

Hours before Trump ended Yates’s employment, Yates took the extraordinary step of directing Justice Department attorneys to refuse to defend Trump’s executive order in court.

“I am responsible for ensuring that the positions we take in court remain consistent with this institution’s solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right,” she wrote in a letter to lawyers at the Department of Justice. “At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful.”

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A Palestine-born Scholar of Islam’s Advice for President Trump (video)

Posted By on January 31st, 2017

Dear Mr President,

Please let me address to you this message as a Christian with a Palestinian origin living in Switzerland. I am an expert on Arab and Islamic law, a field that I taught at various universities in Italy, France and Switzerland, and on which I published more than forty books, including an Arabic edition, an English translation and a French translation of the Koran in chronological order.

It is the duty of each of us to support the efforts of our leaders towards a better society and to wish them success in fulfilling their obligations.

The society, as a statue, has two legs: the public authority, and the scholars who have the knowledge. The public authority executes, and the scholars enlighten the public authority.

When an epidemic occurs, it is necessary that scholars are able to identify it … But still they must have been trained and are free to express themselves. Then the scholars must inform the public authority in order to take the necessary measures to counter this epidemic.

Your country, like Europe, the region where I come from, and the world are facing the rise of violence in particular by various Islamic terrorist groups. This violence is one of the causes of immigrant waves breaking on the shores of Europe, the US and other countries. In your statements, you highlighted these two issues.

You described “radical Islamic terrorism” as an “evil” unseen before, adding that it should be just “eradicated off the face of the earth”: “we gonna end it. It’s time. It’s time right now to end it”. But you have not said how you will achieve this goal. You also called Angela Merkel’s open door policy to refugees a “catastrophic mistake”, saying that Berlin, instead of hosting refugees, would have done better to advocate more for the creation of no-fly zones in Syria in order to protect the local population from the bombing. “The gulf states should have had to pay for them. After all, they have money like hardly anyone else has”.

Let me give you my humble opinion on these two issues.

Regarding radical Islamic terrorism, it is certainly necessary to fight it with weapons, but weapons alone will not suffice. It is also particularly important to eliminate the ideology on which radical Islamic terrorism is based, namely the Islamic ideology. To take adequate action we must call things by their name.

The radical Islamic terrorism is based on the Koran, the Sunnah of Muhammad and the teachings of Islam. Radical Islamic terrorist groups are only putting into practice what universities, Islamic centers, schools and mosques have been teaching for fourteen centuries in all Muslim countries, and even in Western countries, including yours. Egyptian journalists and intellectuals continue to denounce this teaching, which is the source of terrorism that destabilizes Egypt. This teaching is conveyed by mosques, schools and universities of Al-Azhar, the most important religious institution in the Sunni world. Without a radical change of this teaching, it is impossible to end the radical Islamic terrorism. But how to proceed?

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The Latest Applicant to be “The Muslim Voice” by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on January 31st, 2017

Secularism may be accepted in a Christian society but it can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society.” — Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The acceptance of a legislation formulated by humans means a preference of the humans’ limited knowledge and experiences to the divine guidance: “Say! Do you know better than Allah?” (2:140)…. For this reason, the call for secularism among Muslims is atheism and a rejection of Islam. Its acceptance as a basis for rule in place of Shari’ah is downright riddah [apostasy]….” — Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

We Muslims believe that Allah is the sole Creator and Sustainer of the Worlds…. If they do not [observe His injunctions and to judge according to them], then they commit kufr [unbelief], aggression, and transgression.” — Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

There have never been any effective democracies in the Islamic world.

The idea that human beings can replace God as legislators is obnoxious to classical Islamic thought and to modern Islamist convictions. Men and women do not choose how to live: God has been there first.

Several of the ECFR’s own pronouncements indicate an unwillingness to compromise with European norms.

“The Shari’ah is for all times to come, equally valid under all circumstances. The Muslim insistence on the immutability of the Shari’ah is highly puzzling to many people, but any other view would be inconsistent with its basic concept.” — Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) plays an important role in the Fiqh al-‘Aqalliyyat (“Jurisprudence for Minorities”) world. It is now based in Dublin, having been founded in London in 1999 by the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe. Apart from issuing fatwas (principally those of leading Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi), it aims to supervise the education in Europe of local imams, to bring together Muslim scholars living in Europe, to resolve issues that arise on the continent (and UK) while operating with strict respect for shari’a law (which implies there should be no compromise), and to establish itself as an approved authority wherever Muslims live as minorities. This latter aim would suggest that the ECFR might one day possess an authority that would override that of local and national shari’a councils, and its members would expect to be the first and perhaps only voice to which parliaments and parliamentary bodies would lend an ear in their deliberations on how to treat their Muslim minority communities.

Despite the claim of the ECFR and other bodies involved in guidance for Muslims living outside Islamic jurisdiction to work towards a modus vivendi with Western governments, laws and cultural norms, the members of the ECFR nevertheless tend to approach this challenge in a way that can make the rapprochement problematic. Two matters engage much of their attention, namely secularism and democracy. Al-Qaradawi has spoken and written clearly on these. In one of his books, he separates Christian and Muslim beliefs:

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinians’ Fort of Torture by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on January 31st, 2017

Because it is not Israelis who are perpetrating the abuse, the reports are ho-hum to these journalists.

Hamas is an extremist Islamist movement that does not consider itself obliged to abide by international laws and treaties concerning basic human rights. Indeed, the concept of human rights simply does not exist under Hamas in the Gaza Strip, where public freedoms, including freedom of speech and of the press, are non-existent.

In 2013, two Palestinian detainees reportedly died of torture in the Jericho Central Prison.

A London-based human rights organization reported 3,175 cases of human rights violations, including arbitrary detentions, by the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces in the West Bank during 2016. Hundreds of those detained include university students and lecturers, as well as schoolteachers. During the same year, the PA security forces also detained 27 Palestinian journalists.

Unfortunately for them, they are not going on hunger strikes in an Israeli prison, where such actions garner the immediate interest of the mainstream media.

Many are willing to tell their stories. But who is willing to listen? Not Western governments, human rights organizations and journalists. Most of them seek evil in Israel, and Israel alone.

As Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies occupied themselves in the past two weeks issuing warnings to President Trump against moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, reports resurfaced concerning the brutal conditions and human rights violations in a Palestinian prison in the West Bank.

These reports, however, were buried, along with the abuse, in favor of attention to rhetoric directed against the Trump Administration. Anything uttered by Abbas and senior PA officials regarding the possible transfer of the US embassy to Jerusalem made it to the headlines of major newspapers and TV networks around the world.

At one point, it actually appeared as if the mainstream media in the West was interested in highlighting and inflating these statements in a bid to pressure Trump into abandoning the idea of moving the embassy to Jerusalem. Western journalists ran to provide platforms for any Palestinian official interested in threatening the Trump Administration.

The threats included warnings that the transfer of the embassy to Jerusalem would “destroy the peace process,” “jeopardize regional and international security” and “plunge the entire region into anarchy and violence.” Some Palestinian officials went so far as to state that such a move would be considered an “assault on all Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims.” They also threatened to “revoke” Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

Regrettably, as Palestinian officials from across the political spectrum joined forces to broadcast sensational headlines in the mainstream media around the world, the reports about torture of Palestinian detainees in a PA prison failed to attract the interest of the many journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The torture that takes place in PA-controlled prisons and detention centers is not new.

Over the past few years, Palestinians have become accustomed to hearing horror stories about what is happening within the walls of these structures. Yet, because it is not Israelis who are perpetrating the abuse, the reports are ho-hum to these journalists.

A Palestinian who points a finger at Israel is guaranteed a sympathetic ear among journalists. When a Palestinian complains of torture at the hands of Palestinian interrogators or security officers, it is seen as just more of the same. Worse: It is seen as “Oh those Arabs, what can anyone expect from them?”

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Remember the crowds protesting when Obama banned immigrants? By Ethel C. Fenig

Posted By on January 31st, 2017

Crowds, crowds, crowds! Or, in some cases, are they a mob of useful idiots? As Ed Lasky noted, the hysterical reaction of the anti-Trump crowd, erroneously called civil and human rights defenders, to President Trump (R)’s executive order temporarily banning visitors and immigrants from a few Muslim-majority terrorist countries (not a ban on Muslims) is hypocritical. (The Women’s March and the airport mobbers all look alike – all sound and fury, signifying nothing but moral narcissism.)

Below is a photo from the massive crowds in Chicago protesting former (thank goodness!) President Barack Hussein Obama (D)’s 2011 order banning Iraqi refugees for six months.

Or maybe this is the large, angry crowd reacting to Obama’s decision in the final weeks of his administration banning desperate Cubans fleeing failing Communist Cuba from entering the U.S. without a visa.

President Barack Obama is ending the longstanding “wet foot, dry foot” policy that allows Cubans who arrive in the United States without a visa to become permanent residents, the administration announced Thursday.

The move, which wasn’t previously outlined and is likely one of the final foreign policy decisions of Obama’s term, terminates a decades-long policy that many argued amounted to preferential treatment for a single group of migrants.

Perhaps if a large crowd greeted Syed Rizwan Farook as he brought his mail-order bride, Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani national raised in Saudi Arabia, into America breezing through Chicago’s O’Hare airport over two years ago, they could have convinced them to love the USA instead of plotting to slaughter innocent Americans.

This twisted, evil Muslim (yes, a coincidence I know) couple bonded over their hatred of America, its people and their freedoms, and their religions, going on to gun down many in San Bernardino, California in December 2015.

If Malik had already radicalized years ago, how did she get the go-ahead to immigrate to the United States in 2014?

A senior State Department official told CNN on Wednesday that Malik was not asked about jihadist leanings when a U.S. consular official interviewed her in Pakistan for her fiancée visa application last year. That’s because no red flags were found in the Department of Homeland Security application that was submitted and checked before the interview, the official said.

The consular officer who did the interview reported that Malik was able to answer enough questions about Farook to prove that she knew him well and that they had a personal relationship, a main focus of the consular interview process, according to two senior State Department officials.

After the interview, Malik passed two other security database checks before her visa was adjudicated. Records show that the visa was decided on the day after the interview: May 23, 2014. Malik came to the United States on July 27 of that year. According to California marriage records, she married Farook just one month later.

As we were taught in kindergarten, safety first! Oh, how their victims, not to mention those of September 11, the Boston Marathon, the Orlando nightclub, and other innocents slaughtered in this country by those who entered into America’s welcoming doors, wish America had followed this basic rule.

And most Americans agree with President Trump’s order.

Most voters approve of President Trump’s temporary halt to refugees and visitors from several Middle Eastern and African countries until the government can do a better job of keeping out individuals who are terrorist threats.

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What Ben Carson Should Do at HUD By Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on January 31st, 2017

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., writes frequently about real estate development, public/private partnerships, constitutional law, social policy, higher education, and the Middle East and is past President fo Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME)

Now that Dr. Ben Carson has moved closer to being confirmed as President-Elect Trump’s candidate for secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the new administration can begin planning to fulfill promises outlined in a 10-point “plan for urban renewal,” which promised “tax holidays for inner-city investment and new tax incentives to get foreign companies to relocate in blighted American neighborhoods.” It also pledges to “empower cities and states to seek a federal disaster designation for blighted communities in order to initiate the rebuilding of vital infrastructure, the demolition of abandoned properties, and the increased presence of law enforcement.”

This language sounds like a resurrection of Jack Kemp’s “enterprise zone” model, an idea that reappeared in the Clinton years as “empowerment zones” and with George W. Bush as “Go-Zones,” and can now provide a model for President Trump’s campaign promise to jump-start the rebuilding of inner cities and enlist the private sector in helping to complete this task.

The key to the empowerment zone concept is that it attempts to solve the problems of inner-city unemployment and poverty without direct, substantial government expenditure. It also uses a number of incentives – investment and employment tax credits, regulatory relief, capital gains exclusions, employee training, business incubators, low-interest loans, and other tools – to draw investment into areas that, absent the incentives, would be unlikely to have materialized.

Dr. Carson himself articulated an interesting twist on finding tax revenue to fund the administration’s ambitious plans. He has said that Trump will “be working on empowering people in empowerment zones throughout cities, using a lot of the money from overseas that is stuck over there because of our tax situation,” meaning they hope to convince U.S. companies, many of whose profits are currently offshore, to bring the corporate taxes due on those monies back to America, necessarily with the incentive of a reduced tax rate.

The beauty of deriving a new stream of revenue from repatriated corporate profits, of course, is that it does not cannibalize existing tax revenues and instead provides a new source of taxes which, absent the incentives, would otherwise not be realized. Given that an estimated $2.4 trillion of profits from Fortune 500 companies has been “permanently reinvested” offshore to avoid onerous U.S. federal income taxes, even a reduced, irresistible corporate tax rate of, say, 10% (less than one third current rates) could theoretically yield $200 billion, some or all of which could be earmarked for investing in the rehabilitation and improvement of distressed urban centers. In fact, corporations could be further incentivized by slashing the tax rates even more if companies agree to either relocate some of the business units into the new zones or, if they cannot relocate, pay into a managed fund that would be used specifically in the zones.

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ON TERROR IN MELBOURNE AND THE MEDIA : ROGER FRANKLIN

Posted By on January 31st, 2017

Ten days ago, a lunatic drove a stolen car through Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall, killing five people and grievously injuring many more. You might have read about the incident or perhaps saw footage on the telly, and no doubt found the carnage quite distressing. Well, rest easy, fret no more. The experts say such concern is misplaced, that you are prey to an irrational emotionalism and, really, all things considered, you would do well to set aside any interest in seeing reform of the court system, which days earlier granted the alleged killer’s bail request and turned him loose to do his worst.

They aren’t actually saying that, of course, not in as many words and not about that particular episode. The blood in Melbourne’s CBD is still too fresh, bystanders’ phone-camera pictures of shattered prams and a dying infant too vivid in memory for the rationalisations to begin in earnest. But that’s their logic all the same, applied in the interim to terrorism of the more conventional kind. Terrorists, as the New York Times informs us in regard to Donald Trump’s latest executive order (emphasis added), needs to be regarded with a nuanced eye

… 123 people have been killed in the United States by Muslim terrorists since the 2001 attacks — out of a total of more than 230,000 killings, by gang members, drug dealers, angry spouses, white supremacists, psychopaths, drunks and people of every description. So the order addresses, at most, 1/1,870th of the problem of lethal violence in the United States. If the toll of 9/11 is included, jihadis still account for just more than 1 percent of killings.

See, nothing to worry about whatsoever, not from the more ardent sons of Allah nor, by extension of the above logic, from ice-addled madmen racing down footpaths at 100kph. Some 300-odd Victorians died on the state’s roads in 2016, so those recent five deaths must be viewed, as the NYT might put it, as an insignificant dollop — “just more than 0ne percent” — of snuffed-out lives.

One percent? It’s no more than shrinkage, really, just a few random and statistically irrelevant souls denied the opportunity to fulfill actuarial expectations. So why worry about it? Why get upset when the courts indulge perils to public safety and allow them to slide back into the driver’s seat? And by the same token, why bother to note Islam’s affinity for bloody mayhem when it is so much more fun to perform a little mathematical sleight of hand and denounce Donald Trump for restricting the access to his homeland of those hailing from hotbeds of Islamist sentiment? If you start counting the jihadis’ victims only from September 12, 2001, as does the NYT, it gets even better. Why, they haven’t killed hardly anyone at all!

MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tony Thomas: Reporting Islam in the Approved Way

Posted By on January 31st, 2017

When I get ‘mindful’ about Islam, as urged by a think-tank at Griffith University, I recall the fire in a Mecca girls’ school that saw religious police force children back into the flames because they were deemed insufficiently modest to warrant rescue.
With help from lslamic community leaders, the Reporting Islam think-tank at Queensland’s Griffith University re-educates journalists nationally to report Islamic issues “more mindfully” (whatever that means). It’s not as though the ABC, SBS and Fairfax need any encouragement.

The unit, billed as a world-first flagship in terms of educating journos about Islam, got at least $445,000 grants for 2014-16 from the Attorney-General’s department in the Abbott government era. The AG’s top-level contractor for service delivery is the Queensland Police Force. Predictably, the unit won a Multicultural Award from the Queensland Government and SBS last year.

Like most of our universities, Griffith swarms with Islam-friendly academics (except, maybe, in the LBGTI etc safe spaces). Griffith University’s funding has also included $100,000 direct from Saudi Arabia, that bastion of academic freedom and respect for women, gays and Christians. This $100,000 a decade ago went to Griffith’s Islamic Research Unit (GIRU). Graham Perrett, Labor MHR for Moreton and a Griffith U fan, told Parliament, not altogether re-assuringly, that “Griffith University is just one of many institutions throughout the world to receive funding from the Saudi government.”

When I get “mindful” about Islam, as urged by Reporting Islam, I recall the episode in 2002 when a girls’ school in Mecca caught fire. The religious police, instead of helping the young girls to escape, locked them in or forced them back into the blaze. Why? Because the girls weren’t in proper Islamic dress; were not necessarily escorted by male guardians; and might create sexual frissons with the firemen. Fifteen girls burned to death.[1] Saudi’s public beheadings and all that? Watch if you dare. GRAPHIC material

However, nothing the Saudis get up to is as horrific as the deeds of the self-described Islamic State, which are nothing to do with Islam. There was an (STRONG CAUTION: GRAPHIC MATERIAL) ISIS video published a month ago showing a prisoner hog-tied to playground equipment. A boy of about six years is given a large knife and saws the live prisoner’s head half off.[2]

Close to home, nothing-to-do-with-Islam incidents have included

In 2006 Shaykh Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly, Mufti (or Grand Mufti) of Australia, gave a sermon in Arabic to a 500-strong crowd in the Lakemba Mosque describing immodestly-dressed women as ‘cat’s meat’ inciting rapists. [3] Hilaly also quoted approvingly an Islamic scholar who said women who were raped should be arrested and jailed for life for provoking males. Hilaly, who was appointed Mufti by the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils in 1988, had a subsequent history of anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist statements.
Melbourne Muslim cleric and terror cell leader Abdul Benbrika was convicted in 2008 of leading a terrorist network which wanted to blow up the 2005 MCG Grand Final crowd and blow up Crown casino on Grand Prix weekend.
The late Farhad Jabar, 15, in 2015 was allegedly handed the gun which he used to kill Parramatta police worker Curtis Cheng, in the female section of the Parramatta mosque. Jabar shortly before had listened to a sermon in the mosque from extremist Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Four men are under arrest in Melbourne for allegedly planning a Christmas Day attack on St Paul’s Cathedral, Flinders Street Station, and Federation Square.

These sorts of things make it hard for earnest reporters to keep up the positive spin on Islam. But Griffith’s Reporting Islam unit will be their coach, with the backing of the journos’ union, the MEAA. Key people on the team include leader Associate Professor Jacqui Ewart, and Professor Mark Pearson, a one-time reporter for The Australian.[4] They are supported by manager Dr Abdi Hersi, and other Muslim researchers and trainers.