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Gay Rape, Masked Men and Sheep in Restaurants One Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in Sweden: January 2016 by Ingrid Carlqvist

Posted By on February 27th, 2016

So far, nine out of ten people seeking asylum in Sweden have not had identification. You can then adapt your background story to increase your chances of being granted asylum.

Stockholm’s Chief Press Officer had written that the police might be perceived as racist, and therefore should not report physical descriptions to the public. Ironically, it is the journalists who have more or less forced the police to stop using descriptions such as skin color – by labeling the police “racist” every time a person of color appears on a wanted list.

“There are those who wish to make this an issue of ethnicity. It is not. It is an issue that concerns culture and values. Our free and open society is founded on personal freedom, Western humanitarianism and Christian ethics. These values must not only be upheld, they must be defended.” — Ebba Busch Thor, leader of the Christian Democrats party, in Svenska Dagbladet

January 4: After an autumn of chaos, when huge numbers of asylum seekers flooded into Sweden, the government was finally forced to implement border controls on its border with Denmark. Now, only those with valid identification documents are allowed to board trains and ferries to Sweden — effectively keeping people who have destroyed their IDs out of the country. How long it will take before most asylum seekers bring identification papers — genuine or fake — remains to be seen. So far, nine out of ten people seeking asylum in Sweden have not had identification. They can then adapt their background stories to increase their chances of being granted asylum.

January 5: The alternative news site Nyheter Idag reported that two 15-year-old boys living at an asylum house for “unaccompanied refugee children,” in the small town of Alvesta, were detained on suspicion of raping a younger boy. When the victim reported the incident, the police were alerted and the 15-year-olds were brought in for questioning. One of them has confessed to some of the accusations.

January 6: In another case of homosexual child-rape, two men who claiming to be 16-years-old were arrested on suspicion of raping a boy at an asylum house for “unaccompanied refugee children” in Uppsala. The rape was discovered when the younger boy visited a hospital, along with his legal guardian. One of the suspected rapists was released after being questioned by police, but is still under suspicion. The other was remanded into custody.

The most publicized rape of a boy so far is now awaiting a verdict from the Court of Appeals. In December 2015, two 16-year-olds were sentenced by the District Court to juvenile detention for eight and ten months, respectively. The sentences stand out as extremely lenient, considering what was done to the 15-year-old victim. All involved parties came from Afghanistan and lived in the same asylum house for “unaccompanied refugee children.” One day, the older boys asked the 15-year-old if he wanted to come to the store with them. On their way back, the older boys pushed the 15-year-old onto a muddy field, hit and kicked him, shoved mud into his mouth, and then raped him — twice. They warned him that if he told anyone, he would lose his “honor.” That night, however, the boy broke down and told the staff at the asylum house what had happened.

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Israel’s Options in a Chaotic Middle East Faced with a new Palestinian uprising, Israelis have shelved the idea of a two-state solution—and have found surprising new allies in a disintegrating Middle East By Yossi Klein Halevi

Posted By on February 27th, 2016

One recent morning, a Palestinian teenager stabbed a security guard at the light rail station minutes from my home in Jerusalem. About an hour later, I drove past the station and was astonished to see—nothing. No increased police presence, not even police barricades. The guard had managed to shoot his attacker, and ambulances had taken both away. Commuters were waiting for the next train. As if nothing unusual had happened.

The ability to instantly resume the pretense of normalcy is one of the ways that Israelis are coping with the latest wave of Palestinian terrorism. For the last six months, Palestinians—some as young as 13—have attacked Jews with knives and hatchets and even scissors, or else driven their cars into Israeli crowds, killing over two dozen people. (About 90 Palestinians have been killed carrying out the attacks.) The violence was provoked by the unsubstantiated Palestinian claim—strongly denied by the government—that Israel intended to permit Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a place sacred to both Muslims and Jews.
The almost daily attacks tend to blur together, though several have become emblematic—like the stabbing murder of a mother of six in her home while her teenage daughter ran to protect her siblings. Still, by Israeli standards, the violence so far has been manageable. Israelis recall that in the early 2000s, when suicide bombers were targeting buses and cafes, almost as many victims would die in a single attack as have been murdered in the current wave of terror.

Israelis have been here before. In 1992, a monthslong stabbing spree by Palestinian terrorists in Israel’s streets helped to catalyze one of the great upsets in Israeli politics, the election of Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister, ending over a decade of rule by the right-wing Likud Party. The stabbings were the culmination of a four-year Palestinian revolt against Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. This first intifada (“uprising” in Arabic), as it came to be known, forced the Israeli public to come to terms with Palestinian nationalism. It also convinced many Israelis that the Likud’s policy of incremental annexation of the West Bank and Gaza was simply not worth the price.

Until the first intifada, Israelis had tended to regard control of the territories won by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War as benign, bringing prosperity to the occupied as well as to the occupiers. As the intifada took hold, Israeli anger turned not only against the Palestinians but against the ruling Likud. There were antigovernment riots, and Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was widely ridiculed for his passivity and lack of vision. READ MORE AT SITE

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Show Me Free Speech Missouri fires the professor who tried to muzzle students.

Posted By on February 27th, 2016

Even months after the meltdown at the University of Missouri, who can forget Melissa Click, the professor caught on video calling for “muscle” to eject a student journalist photographing a sit-in on the quad? The university fired Ms. Click this week, and suddenly due process and free speech are back in vogue on campus.

On Thursday the University of Missouri system’s Board of Curators announced a 4-2 decision to terminate Ms. Click, a communications professor. Board chairman Pamela Henrickson told the press that Ms. Click’s conduct “was not compatible with university policies,” including interfering “with the rights of others.”

The Columbia campus faculty council chairman Ben Trachtenberg denounced the dismissal in a statement as “terrible,” saying Ms. Click was entitled to “a fair process.” Faculty council member Angela Speck told the Missourian newspaper that it was “ridiculous” that Ms. Click could be fired “without due process.” Both said at a Thursday meeting that the decision violated Ms. Click’s First Amendment rights, according to the Missourian. READ MORE AT SITE

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Trump Agonistes His competitors try to expose his weaknesses for the first time.

Posted By on February 27th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-agonistes-1456531598

The Republican presidential race entered its blitzkrieg phase Thursday as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz finally turned their fire on Donald Trump instead of playing for second place. The brawling was entertaining if often ugly, but the debate was important in surfacing the vulnerabilities that Democrats are sure to exploit if Mr. Trump is the GOP nominee.

The debate marked the first competitive vetting of the businessman, who had remained untouched as the other candidates vied to become the last non-Trump standing. Or as Mr. Trump would put it, “losers.” Messrs. Rubio and Cruz had to take on Mr. Trump, and now we’ll find out if the New Yorker can take the same mockery he dishes out.
***Start with his policy knowledge, which is thinner than topsoil and not as rich. Mr. Rubio challenged Mr. Trump to go beyond his stock line that he’d replace ObamaCare by allowing competition across state lines, which is a good idea but hardly sufficient as a reform. Yet Mr. Trump couldn’t come up with another specific idea to expand private health coverage.

This is typical of Mr. Trump, who told us in November that the voters don’t care about policy details. But Americans want a President to know something about the biggest problems, and Hillary Clinton wouldn’t let him get away with a simple soundbite. The exchange revealed that Mr. Trump doesn’t like to work all that hard to learn anything new. He gets by on instinct and insult.

Speaking of which, in Texas Friday Mr. Trump took his attacks on the press corps to a new level by promising to change the libel laws. “We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected,” he said, sounding like Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. READ MORE AT SITE

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A FASCIST COUP IN POLAND? AGNIESZKA KOLAKOWSKA

Posted By on February 27th, 2016

Give Us Poles A Break

By all accounts, things are rotten in the state of Poland. A fascist dictatorship has been installed — a bit like the one in Hungary, apparently, but worse. Ostensibly, democratic elections were held. But that is just a smokescreen. There has been a coup. By or against whom is unclear, but democracy, freedom of the press and civil liberties are definitely threatened. Poland is on the road to ruin, and liable to take the whole of the EU down with it. The European Commission is worried.

One might be forgiven for thinking that this alarming news appeared in headlines eight years ago, when the bunch that has just been ousted — Civic Platform (PO) — came to power and purged the media, sacking anyone not to their liking and replacing them with their own cronies. Or when those cronies proceeded to use the public media as a vehicle for virulent and relentless propaganda against the current bunch, Law and Justice (PiS). Or at just about any time during those eight years, which saw a long string of scandals including — besides fraud, embezzlement and misuse of funds on a massive scale — the illegal wiretapping of journalists and police raids on editorial offices. Or when it emerged that newspapers loyal to PO were subsidised under the table through government advertising. Or just before the elections, when PO, in a manoeuvre of dubious legality, forced through five of its people onto the Constitutional Tribunal.

Not a peep out of the European Commission then. But then that was a (supposedly) left-wing government, so that was all right. And this is (allegedly) a right-wing government. Hence the current hysteria.

Except that PiS is actually about as right-wing as Bernie Sanders. Well, perhaps I exaggerate slightly. But it’s certainly not right-wing fiscally or economically. This is not small-government and low-taxes conservatism; rolling back the State is not on the agenda. The conservatism is social, cultural and moral, and comes with a strong emphasis on national sovereignty. In the Polish context this means upholding tradition and family values, a tiny smidgeon of Euroscepticism, the refusal to submit to bullying by the EU and Germany in particular, an acknowledgement of our Judaeo-Christian heritage and the conviction that Christianity must be restored to its proper place in the public sphere, where the Church must play a role. You might call them culturally conservative old-style socialists. But whatever label you stick on them, none of this warrants investigation by the European Commission, let alone cries to topple the governent.

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It’s Sharia, Not Alcohol, That Threatens Women Julie Bindel

Posted By on February 27th, 2016

There is nothing wrong with moderate drinking, and I do not consider the amount I put away anyone else’s business than my own. Despite the government’s rather dramatic health warnings, I believe that the odd glass of wine or beer does more good than harm for most people. But soon, thanks to a growing dual legal system in Britain, we may have an alcohol-free parliament. It would seem that sharia courts and councils, on which I have reported previously in this magazine, are not the only example of how the UK law is being bent to accommodate Islamic custom.

Later this year, Members of Parliament move out of the Palace of Westminster while it undergoes renovations over the next decade. But the temporary building into which they will move is governed by sharia law. The building, located in Whitehall, was discreetly transferred to an Islamic bond scheme in 2014. Under terms of the lease, alcohol is banned on the premises. It is shocking but not surprising that any government buildings in the UK could be governed by Islamic law.

Last month, the women’s rights organisation Muslim Women’s Network UK (MWNUK) demanded the resignation of the leaders of Birmingham Central Mosque after they dismissed the group’s concerns about domestic violence and forced marriages. According to MWNUK, the mosque’s chairman, Labour councillor and mayoral candidate for the city Muhammad Afzal, said that forced marriages were no longer a problem; that domestic violence only affected Christian communities because they get drunk; and that more men than women were the victims of domestic violence. Afzal has since withdrawn from the mayoral contest.

Alcohol is forbidden under Islam, although most Muslims in the UK drink it. When Islamists blame the West for the moral decay among young Muslims living in Western societies, alcohol is often cited. Alcohol was also blamed by some devout Muslims for the grotesque sexual assaults on more than 100 women and girls in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Pressure group MuslimStern, which has 20,000 followers on Facebook, said its mission was to “highlight the way the media was using the incidents to promote racism against minorities”. The group complained that the female victims had brought the unwanted attention to themselves by dressing in a manner that North African men were not accustomed to.

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John Fonte Ideologies :Have Consequences

Posted By on February 27th, 2016

What might be called “transnational progressivism” is the ideology for an age once thought not to need one. President Obama, for example, was hailed as ‘not a doctinaire liberal’ and ‘centrist and pragmatic’. The truth, as eight sorry years have shown, is very different
For more than half a century leading global thinkers have heralded the death of ideology. Beginning with Daniel Bell’s famous 1962 book The End of Ideology, prominent scholars have repeatedly maintained that the role of ideology was diminishing and the exercise of pragmatism ascending throughout the Western world. In The End of Ideology (listed by the Times Literary Supplement as among the “100 most influential non-fiction books since World War II”), Bell declared that the “ideological age has ended” in the West (although it would intensify in the developing world).

Bell argued that the rise of affluence and the advance of social modernisation had led to a broad consensus on political values and an exhaustion with grand ideological debates in the developed world. Bell’s thesis was amplified by leading American social scientists including Edward Shils and Seymour Martin Lipset.

Decades later Francis Fukuyama declared that with the collapse of communism we had reached “the end of history”, meaning the great ideological issues of politics (who should govern and why) had been solved. Although (small h) history in the sense of wars and political upheavals might continue for hundreds of years, (capital H) History in the Hegelian sense was over, because liberal democracy had triumphed in the realm of ideas. Fukuyama maintained liberal democracy was the ideological endpoint of humankind’s age-old quest for the best regime. In the future, even autocratic rulers would claim to be democratic or cite democracy as their end goal.

In January 2009 as Barack Obama was being inaugurated as President of the United States, David Brooks wrote in the New York Times that “Obama aims to realize the end of ideology politics that Daniel Bell and others glimpsed in the early 1960s. He sees himself as a pragmatist, an empiricist.” Indeed, from the beginning of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign to the present, scores of books, essays and blogs have been marshalled to argue that Obama eschews ideology and embraces pragmatism. Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein (who served in the White House from 2009 to 2012) wrote that Obama was “not a doctrinaire liberal”, that “his skepticism about conventional ideological categories is principled”, and that, above all, he is an empirical pragmatist who understands that “real change requires consensus, learning, and accommodation”. The journalist Fareed Zakaria declared that “Obama is a centrist and a pragmatist”. Academics and public intellectuals compared Obama’s thought to the tradition of the pragmatist school of American philosophy embodied by Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey.

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Trump Wants to ‘Open Up’ Libel Laws to Easily Sue Media Conservative senator: “Front-runners of both political parties attacking the First Amendment” By Bridget Johnson,

Posted By on February 27th, 2016

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who was elected to Congress with the help of conservatives such as Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and talk show host Mark Levin, ripped Trump on Twitter for attacking press freedom. Sasse has not endorsed any candidate, but campaigned against Trump with Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in Iowa.

A freshman senator whose endorsements included Sarah Palin is going after Donald Trump for talking about changing libel laws so he can more easily sue news organizations.

At a rally today in Fort Worth, Texas, Trump railed against major newspapers and said if he wins the presidency he’ll “open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

“We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected,” Trump said.

The WaPo’s editorial board has published editorials on the opinion page advocating that Trump be stopped, including one this week criticizing RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. “If Mr. Trump is to be stopped, now is the time for leaders of conscience to say they will not and cannot support him and to do what they can to stop him,” the editorial board wrote.

“You see, with me, they’re not protected, because I’m not like other people but I’m not taking money. I’m not taking their money,” Trump said. “We’re going to open up libel laws, and we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before.”

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Donald Trump: The gift that keeps on giving…to the left By Patricia McCarthy

Posted By on February 27th, 2016

How anyone who watched last night’s debate could continue to support Donald Trump is a mystery. The man is a bundle of character flaws, large and small. His behavior betrays his megalomania, his narcissism, and his venal, childish hostility to anyone who dares to disagree with him. He lies so often his opponents on the debate stage could not begin to counter them all.

This man should never, never become the president of the United States. He has never matured beyond the lower elementary school age, and given today’s tyranny of political correctness that regulates how even toddlers in pre-school must conduct themselves and restrict their speech, Mr. Trump would very likely be expelled from any pre-school in the country, let alone a high school or university. The man is the worst America has to offer, an example of the gross deterioration of our national culture.

That this man has a following is a permanent black mark on our nation. Support for “The Donald” relegates us to just a few degrees separate from those who celebrated Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Juan Perón, or any other tyrant who came to power via a cult of personality, no matter how warped his character. Has our educational system failed so badly that we have been brought to our knees by an obvious charlatan? Have we become a reality show nation? It seems that we have indeed. We elected Obama twice; Trump would be the natural successor to Obama’s duplicity and disdain for our founding document. It is a safe bet that Trump has never read the Constitution and has not a clue how profound it is.

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How Did We Get Obama and Trump? By Janice Shaw Crouse

Posted By on February 27th, 2016

Many Americans shook their heads in 2008 wondering how in the world President Obama was elected when he had told us plainly that he wanted to “fundamentally transform” our country. Then, the perplexity increased when he was reelected in 2012 long after his radical policies and disdain for the Constitution were abundantly evident. Unbelievably, after suffering through the effrontery of the Obama Administration’s arrogance and his flaunting of executive actions instead of bipartisanship, the nation is now enthralled with Donald Trump’s bombastic, flamboyant, but empty promises – based solely on his ability to capitalize on the public’s anger and to manipulate people’s fears, rather than specific policy proposals or potential for effective constitutional governance — to come in and liberate us from the overweening government bureaucrats with their endless thirst for control and restore America’s greatness. The Washington Post summarized the situation by claiming that Donald Trump is giving the establishment (on both Capitol Hill and K Street) the “middle finger” and “his supporters love it.” One analyst likened Trump to a parasite eating up the host; another called him America’s “Fatal Attraction.”

Clearly, Donald Trump is a brash, arrogant bully with a “yuuge” ego who sees things in black and white, winners and losers. Trump offends sensibilities with unpresidential behavior, crudities and bad manners, along with insults and accusations of lying against other candidates. Still, the more obnoxious he has become, the better his ratings. He has tapped into middle-America’s need for a “straight-up guy” who’ll “tell things like they are” without any consideration for how he offends the PC crowd. The public has had enough of politicians who talk out of “both sides of their mouths” to say one thing to the voters during election campaigns while planning to do another. At this point, the public doesn’t believe any politician; they want an outsider. They’ll take the crudity because it least it’s an authentic expression of their frustration and anger.