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Pakistan: “Blasphemy” for Ethnic Cleansing by Lubna Thomas Benjamin

Posted By on May 22nd, 2016

After the attack, some villagers gathered and started threatening other Christians, demanding they either convert to Islam or move out of the area. Then an Islamic religious decree was issued, to hand over Masih to the local Islamic clerics so that he could be burned alive for blasphemy.

Why was only Masih (a Christian) accused of blasphemy, when Bilal (a Muslim) had obviously watched the video in question?

The Christians who are left are searching to find an alternate place to live, and are now facing hatred in the guise of a boycott. No one is selling them food or any daily essentials.

In Punjab, harassing Christians has become a norm; a way of getting rid of them. Every time Christians are threatened and forced to leave the area, the charge is always blasphemy.

It started as a normal day in the remote Pakistani village of Chak-44 for Imran Masih, a Christian man, and Bilal, his Muslim friend, in mid-April. Masih had revealed to Bilal that the woman he had fallen in love with was a Muslim.

According to media reports, Masih was called away urgently and left his phone with Bilal, who apparently came across a video that appeared in Masih’s Facebook feed, which allegedly contained content against the Muslim Prophet Mohammad. Bilal’s accusation that Masih had viewed that video became the reason to charge Masih with blasphemy.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Noted scholar George Clooney spouts off on Americans ‘scared of Muslims’ By David Lawrence

Posted By on May 22nd, 2016

Well, cowardly, mousey, he-of-small-intellect George Clooney is at it again. At the tough man contest, the caviar-and-champagne Cannes film festival, gladiator Clooney has slurped and pontificated, “There’s not going to be a President Donald Trump. Fear is not going to be something that drives our country. We’re not going to be scared of Muslims or immigrants or women.”

Now, I am a peaceful fellow, but when I was young, I had a dozen bloody street fights, and I’ve had seventy organized boxing bouts (including six pro fights). And I’ll tell chicken Clooney that I am truly “scared of Muslims or immigrants or women” who strap dynamite to themselves or stab me in the back with knives.

Maybe I don’t have bodyguards like expressionless Clooney. Maybe I don’t have the luxury of not being afraid because I don’t have his armed staff. Not to be afraid of radical jihadists is to be a moron or oblivious or a language-denier like Obama.

Then again, Obama is the faux intellect who believes that sexual organs are secondary to gender identification. Let the boys use girls’ rooms; let the girls use boys’ rooms. Thinking makes it so.

Clooney says fear is not an issue. Maybe they didn’t teach him fear in college because he didn’t pass into his sophomore year, into the age of simulated reason.

Dull-eyes Clooney says, “Trump is the result of the news programs not asking follow-up questions.” He may have forgotten that even Fox grilled him and that Hillary, the woman he has had a $33,400-a-plate dinner for, hardly allows follow-up questions.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Who Am I? Gender and Locker Rooms By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on May 22nd, 2016

The existential “Who Am I?” question is taking on a radical new meaning in light of the gender bathroom subject. Yet this issue is a lineal descendant of certain quarters of radical feminism which has always wanted to eliminate male/female characteristics. As quoted in Richard Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue, Alison Jaggar, a leading feminist philosopher of the 1990s, asserted that “the family structure [is] a cornerstone of women’s oppression: it enforces women’s dependence on men, it enforces heterosexuality and it imposes the prevailing masculine and feminine character structures on the next generation.” Thus, “the sexual division of labor must be eliminated in every area of life… so men must participate fully in childrearing and, so far as possible, in childbearing” [emphasis mine].

On the other hand, according to Nandhini Narayanan, radical feminists also believe that “transgender women were perceived to be men encroaching upon women’s safe spaces and claiming to understand the feminine experience. It began to be perceived as a form of male entitlement.”

In 2014 “Wellesley was one of the only colleges in the country that would allow transmen to continue their education despite being an all-girls’ school. Consequently, “terms like ‘sisterhood’ need to be readjusted to ‘sibling-hood.’ Administrators need to account for growing resentment among the student body when leadership roles meant for women are held by men. Infrastructure needs to accommodate gender neutral restrooms. There is also a need to reevaluate the school’s identity — is it a women’s school but with gender non-conforming students?” Critics argue that the transgender movement reinforces conventional and traditional gender roles; if trans women were initially ‘men’ who ‘felt female’ irrespective of social conditioning and growth environment, then it implies that the differences between the male and the female are biological alone. They argued that transgenderism perpetuates the notion that ‘female brains need to stay female, and will not be happy in conventionally male pursuits.’”

N.Y.C. Admin. Code 8-102(23) maintains that “gender is defined as one’s ‘actual or perceived sex and shall also include a person’s gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression, whether or not that gender identity, self-image, appearance, behavior or expression is different from that traditionally associated with the legal sex assigned to that person at birth.'”

Thus, the Administrative Code explains that “Cisgender is an adjective denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity conforms with the gender that corresponds to their biological sex.” On the other hand, “Gender Identity”… may be male, female, neither or both while “Gender Expression” is “expressed through one’s name, choice of pronouns, clothing, haircut, behavior, voice or body characteristics.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Crackpot Campus That Has Banned Sugar, Hats and Rugby Greg Hurst,

Posted By on May 22nd, 2016

The leftist madness is not limited to US universities:

First they came for the bags of sugar, removing them from the campus shop. Then they blocked Six Nations
rugby matches from being screened in the student union bar.

After that coffee was targeted: Starbucks and Nestlé were subject to campus boycotts. Sombreros were next;
handing out the hats at a freshers’ fair was deemed cultural appropriation.

They even tried to ban Ukip after students said that inviting its candidate on to the campus would make them
feel less safe and secure.

So when the University of East Anglia stopped graduating students from tossing mortarboards in the air during
their official photograph, it came as little surprise. The university in Norwich, which last year became the
first in Britain to introduce day-time sleeping berths for hung-over students, is developing a reputation as
one of our most crackpot campuses.

It was the university authorities that generated headlines this week by declaring that tossing mortarboards
skywards posed an unacceptable risk because it could lead to injury.

An offer to have flying mortarboards added digitally to graduation photographs for an extra £8 did not
mollify students. Its justification was given short shrift by the Health and Safety Executive, which said
that the chance of being hurt by a flying mortarboard was incredibly small.

Yet it is UEA’s student union, housed in a brutalist concrete and glass building on the campus, that has
been most active with bans and boycotts. Tate & Lyle sugar and Starbucks coffee were barred from the campus
shop over their company’s tax affairs; Six Nations rugby because its sponsor, RBS, funded fossil fuel
extraction; Nestlé over claims that its baby milk powder discouraged women in poor countries from breast
feeding.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Minimum Wage’ Of $100,000+ For 50,000 Highly-Compensated Illinois Public Employees Costs Taxpayers $8 Billion by Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on May 22nd, 2016

In Illinois, and many states, public service has little to do with serving the public and everything to do with using the public’s money to serve politicians. Whenever we open the books, Illinois is consistently among the worst offenders. Recently we found Cook County animal control officers making $105,000; suburban school administrators at $503,000; university doctors earning $1.3 million; and 72 small-town ‘managers’ out-earning every governor of the 50 states.

This week, Governor Bruce Rauner (R) told the state public employee union AFSME, “Illinois is broke.” Our data and analysis at OpenTheBooks.com shows he’s right. There are 50,000 public employees earning six-figure salaries who cost Illinois taxpayers $8 billion a year.

Using our interactive mapping tool, you can quickly review the public employees across Illinois who earn more than $100,000.

OTB_WheresTheSalaryHeat_graphic

In 2,500 units of local and state government at least one public employee makes $100,000+ in Illinois

Here are a few examples of what you’ll uncover by zip code:

18,900 teachers and school administrators – including $503,200 for Mohsin Dada, an administrator at North Shore School District 112 who earned $248,510 salary, plus a teacher’s retirement pension of $254,700 (ZIP – 60035).
9,000 college and university employees – including Dr. Fady Toufic Charbel at the University of Illinois at Chicago who earned $1.38 million (ZIP – 60601).
8,838 State of Illinois employees – including Steven Valasek, a $218,519 ‘contractual worker’ employed by Illinois Comptroller Leslie Munger (R) (ZIP – 62704).
5,122 small-town city and village employees – including 72 municipal managers who out-earn every governor of the 50 states at $180,000 per year.
5,007 City of Chicago rank-and-file managers and workers – including $216,000 for embattled Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D).

In total, there’s roughly $9.3 billion in total compensation flowing to highly-compensated government workers when counting 7,637 federal employees based in Illinois with six-figure salaries.

So, who are the biggest culprits in conferring six-figure salaries? We ranked the fourteen largest public pay and pension systems in Illinois:

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Fear of Speech in Germany Merkel indulges Erdogan and it backfires on European rights.

Posted By on May 22nd, 2016

Germans have an undeserved reputation for humorlessness, but at least one court in Hamburg is guilty of not getting the joke. A panel of judges found this week that satirist Jan Böhmermann libeled Recep Tayyip Erdogan by reading a poem mocking the Turkish President’s anatomy and his alleged relations with farm animals. Mr. Böhmermann is now forbidden from repeating all but a few lines of the poem out of deference to Mr. Erdogan’s rights.

That’s a hoot. Mr. Erdogan’s government has made itself notorious in recent years by shutting down opposition newspapers, imprisoning journalists on flimsy pretexts and filing thousands of criminal charges against Turks he deems guilty of insulting him. He has also opined that Israel is “more barbaric than Hitler.” Earlier this year, his bodyguards assaulted people peacefully protesting his speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Now he’s trying to extend his misuse of the legal system to Europe. Erdogan filed his complaint against Mr. Böhmermann using an archaic German law forbidding insults against foreign leaders. German Chancellor Angela Merkel had the legal authority to stop the suit but allowed it to go forward, largely out of fear that Mr. Erdogan might renege on his deal to curb the flow of refugees into Europe. CONTINUE AT SITE

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

J-Street was paid by Obama administration to promote Iran dealBy Ari Soffer

Posted By on May 22nd, 2016

Liberal Jewish group received $576,000 to advocate for Iran nuclear deal, belying its ‘pro-Israel’ pretensions.J-Street received more than half a million dollars to advocate for the Obama administration’s controversial nuclear deal with Iran, it has been revealed.

The liberal Jewish group, which bills itself as “pro-Israel and pro-peace” but which critics say takes solely anti-Israel stances, was paid the money by the White House’s main surrogate organization for selling the deal.

The Ploughshares Fund was named in an explosive New York Times profile of Obama aid Ben Rhodes, in which the President’s chief spin doctor listed the central groups responsible for creating an “echo chamber” in order to promote the deal, even when the White House’s official line didn’t jibe with the facts.

According to Associated Press, the group’s 2015 annual report details several organizations which received substantial funds to peddle the official White House line on the nuclear deal. Among them was National Public Radio (NPR), which received a $100,000 grant to promote “national security reporting that emphasizes the themes of U.S. nuclear weapons policy and budgets, Iran’s nuclear program, international nuclear security topics and U.S. policy toward nuclear security.”

Other grantees included: The Arms Control Association ($282,500); the Brookings Institution ($225,000); and the Atlantic Council ($182,500), who “received money for Iran-related analysis, briefings and media outreach, and non-Iran nuclear work,” according to AP.

The National Iranian American Council received more than $281,000, while Princeton University received a $70,000 grant to support former Iranian ambassador and nuclear spokesman Seyed Hossein Mousavian’s “analysis, publications and policymaker engagement on the range of elements involved with the negotiated settlement of Iran’s nuclear program.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

BUSY,BUSY WEEK FOR JIHAD

Posted By on May 21st, 2016

2016.05.20 (Tanzania)
Islamic extremists hack three people at a rival mosque to death with machetes. 2016.05.19 (Afghanistan)
Five children and two women are among a family of eleven exterminated by Taliban bombers. 2016.05.17 (Iraq)
Thirty people at a market are exterminated by a Fedayeen suicide bomber. 2016.05.17 (Iraq)
A female suicide bomber murders over forty people who gathered to help victims of an earlier blast. 2016.05.15 (Syria)
Two locals are brutally murdered by teenage French ISIS. 2016.05.15 (Iraq)
A suicide bomb attack on a cooking gas factory leaves fourteen others dead.

2016.05.20 (Tanzania)
Islamic extremists hack three people at a rival mosque to death with machetes.

2016.05.19 (Afghanistan)
Five children and two women are among a family of eleven exterminated by Taliban bombers.

2016.05.17 (Iraq)
Thirty people at a market are exterminated by a Fedayeen suicide bomber.

2016.05.17 (Iraq)
A female suicide bomber murders over forty people who gathered to help victims of an earlier blast.

2016.05.15 (Syria)
Two locals are brutally murdered by teenage French ISIS.

2016.05.15 (Iraq)
A suicide bomb attack on a cooking gas factory leaves fourteen others dead.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

French fests scrap Bataclan band over Muslim remarks

Posted By on May 21st, 2016

Two French festivals on Friday cancelled shows by Eagles of Death Metal, the band whose November 13th show in Paris turned into a bloodbath, after the frontman made remarks critical of Muslims.

The Rock en Seine and Cabaret Vert festivals took issue with an interview by singer and guitarist Jesse Hughes, who renewed allegations that Muslim staff at the Bataclan club was involved in the attack.

“Being in total disagreement with Jesse Hughes’ recent allegations given in an interview with an American media (outlet), both Cabaret Vert and Rock en Seine festivals have decided to cancel the band’s performance,” said a statement by the two festivals, which take place in late August.

Eagles of Death Metal had briefly become heroes in France after Islamic extremists assaulted their concert, killing 90 people in the deadliest of a series of coordinated attacks that claimed 130 lives across the metropolis. But Hughes has since proved controversial in his remarks. Unlike many rockers, he is known for his right-wing politics and champions gun ownership as well as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.#In an interview published last week, Hughes called for greater scrutiny of Muslims in the West and alleged that conservative Christians were unfairly being blamed for global problems.

“I saw Muslims celebrating in the street during the attack. I saw it with my own eyes. In real time! How did they know what was going on? There must have been coordination,” he told Taki’s Magazine, a publication of Greek-born conservative commentator Taki Theodoracopulos that has faced criticism for its writings on race.

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Boris Johnson, Free Speech Champion of Erdogan Offensive-Poetry Contest Turkey’s Islamist president earned well-deserved poetic mockery. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on May 21st, 2016

This is my favorite story in some time. And it’s not even a “narrative” — it really happened.

First, though, the disgraceful background: Just when you thought German chancellor Angela Merkel had run out of nails to hammer into the coffin of Western liberalism, she permitted a criminal prosecution to proceed against Jan Böhmermann, a young German comedian, for the “crime” of insulting Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, our Islamic-supremacist, jihad-supporting NATO “ally,” who — if we may borrow a phrase from a good friend of his — has “fundamentally transformed” Turkey from a Western-leaning democracy to a suffocating sharia state.

Herr Böhmermann performed an edgy stand-up routine that featured a poem in which he described Erdogan as a “goat f***er,” among other not-niceties. A few months earlier, the comic had similarly poked fun at the Turkish president as a way of illuminating the obscenities of Erdogan’s dictatorial rule. This prompted the thin-skinned despot’s government to lodge a formal complaint with Berlin. Böhmermann’s latest skit was intended to draw attention to the fact that, with all the talk of bringing Turkey into the EU, Erdogan — far from embracing Western liberalism — was seeking to impose his blasphemy fatwa on Germany.

In Imam Erdogan’s emirate, which was the main focus of my book Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, such insolence lands a person in jail — as, by the way, does political dissent and what used to be known as news reporting.

As previously noted here, Erdogan is one of the pioneers of the Muslim Brotherhood–crafted “integrate but don’t assimilate” strategy for overrunning Europe and, in time, the United States. The plan urges Muslims to relocate to the West but maintain Islamic mores while pressuring the home governments to accommodate sharia (Islamic law).

A few years back, Erdogan gave a speech to a throng of Muslim migrants in Cologne, decrying Western pressure on Muslims to assimilate in their new European homelands as “a crime against humanity.” His goal is to transport repressive Islamic standards to the West, where they will snuff out free speech and other liberties inconvenient to tyrants. The game-plan is working to a fare-thee-well, feeding the explosion of Islamic enclaves that gradually assert their autonomy from Western governance while serving as incubators of jihadist radicalization.

Merkel is supposed to be part of the West’s defense against such aggression. But she is not the West. She is modern, feckless Europe. So when Erdogan complained about a harmless comic bit, she snapped to. Under an antiquated German law, Böhmermann could be sentenced to five years in prison for a “deliberate insult” of a foreign head of state.