SOEREN KERN: AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL AND MUSLIM DISCRIMINATION IN EUROPE

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3056/amnesty-international-muslim-discrimination-europe

“Amnesty International omits, however, all instances of discrimination initiated by Muslims against Christians and others in Europe who have taken them in, and who may well feel dismayed by what might be seen as an escalating procession of Muslim demands, threats and attacks. Nowhere does it call on Muslims to accept responsibility – not only for problems brought about by the refusal of many of them to accept the values of the majority, but also for their efforts to displace these values with their own.”

A new report from Amnesty International lashes out at “widespread discrimination” against Muslims in Europe. The report directs particular ire at laws banning Muslim veils in public spaces, and excoriates European politicians for helping to “foster a climate of hostility and suspicion against people perceived as Muslim.”

Amnesty International omits, however, all instances of discrimination initiated by Muslims against Christians and others in Europe who have taken them in, and who may well feel dismayed by what might be seen as an escalating procession of Muslim demands, threats and attacks.

The report also fails to explain why growing numbers of Europeans are increasingly skeptical about Muslim immigration; it also fails to mention that in country after country, Europeans have been going out of their way to afford Muslims special benefits, rights, privileges and provisions that do not apply to native-born Europeans, and that are establishing the Muslim population as an entitled class in European society.

The 123-page study, “Choice and Prejudice: Discrimination Against Muslims in Europe,” says that “Muslims in Europe face discrimination in several areas of life because of their religion,” and this “blights their individual prospects, opportunities and self-esteem and can result in isolation, exclusion and stigmatization.”

It continues, “[D]iscrimination against Muslims in Europe is fuelled by stereotypes and negative views;” and calls on European politicians to “adopt a more rational approach” and stop portraying Islam “as a system of values which denies gender equality or a violent ideology.”

Amnesty International, perhaps welded to notions political correctness, also further fails to mention actions by Muslims themselves that might well have been responsible for fuelling the “stereotypes and negative views” that it accuses Europeans of having.

Consider Belgium, where radical Muslims have launched a propaganda and intimidation campaign aimed at turning the country into an Islamic state. Muslim neighborhoods in Brussels — the so-called capital of Europe — have already become “no-go” zones for Belgian police officers, who are often pelted with rocks by Muslim youths.

In Britain, hundreds of Muslim children every year are subjected to forced marriages. In England and Wales, more than 65,000 Muslim women and girls have been the victims of female genital mutilation, and another 24,000 girls under the age of 15 are believed to be at a high risk.

Also in Britain, tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants are practicing bigamy or polygamy, possibly at times to collect larger social welfare payments from the British state. At the same time, radical Muslims have launched a campaign to turn twelve British cities, including London, into independent Islamic “emirates” to be ruled by Islamic Sharia law.

In Denmark, Muslim criminal street gangs have taken over large parts of Danish towns and cities; in Copenhagen, some suburbs have also been transformed into “no-go” zones, off limits to non-Muslims. Meanwhile, over the past decade, the number of Muslim immigrants living on social welfare benefits in Denmark has increased almost ten-fold.

In France, where there are now more practicing Muslims than practicing Roman Catholics, there are 751 Sensitive Urban Zones , also off-limits to non-Muslims apparently because they are too dangerous; in these French “no-go” zones over which the French state has lost control, an estimated five million Muslims currently reside.

In Germany, thousands of Muslim women and children are the victims of forced marriage every year. At the same time, Islamic Sharia courts are operating in all major German cities, and German authorities say they are “powerless” to do anything about them.

In the Netherlands, nearly half of Moroccan immigrants in the country between the ages of 12 and 24 have been arrested, fined, charged or otherwise accused of committing a crime during the past five years. Further, as Islamic legal tradition holds that dogs are “unclean” animals,

a Dutch Muslim politician in The Hague, the third-largest city in Holland, has recently called for a ban on dogs in the city.

In Italy, Muslims have been commandeering the Piazza Venezia in Rome for public prayers; and in Bologna, Muslims have repeatedly threatened to bomb the San Petronio cathedral because it contains a 600-year-old fresco inspired by Dante’s Inferno that depicts Mohammed being tormented in Hell.

In Spain, a high school teacher in the city of La Línea de la Concepción was sued by the parents of a Muslim student who said the teacher “defamed Islam” by talking about Spanish ham in a geography class. And a discotheque in southern Spanish resort town of Águilas (Murcia) was forced to change its name and architectural design under duress after Islamists threatened to initiate “a great war between Spain and the people of Islam” if it did not.

Elsewhere in Spain, Muslim immigrants were accused of poisoning dozens of dogs in the city of Lérida, where 29,000 Muslims now make up around 20% of the city’s total population; again, according to local residents, as dogs are considered “unclean.” In the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia, Muslims have deployed “morals police” to ensure that practicing and non-practicing Muslims comply with Islamic Sharia law.

In Switzerland, an immigrant group based in Bern said it wants the emblematic white cross to be removed from the Swiss national flag because as a Christian symbol it “no longer corresponds to today’s multicultural Switzerland.” Further, leading Islamic groups in the country announced that they want to establish a “parallel parliament” so that all of the country’s Muslims can “speak with one voice.” Based in Basel, the new parliament would straightforwardly operate according to Islamic Sharia law.

These developments in Europe have been occurring during just the last eight years in addition to, of course, the bombing by Muslims of commuter trains in Spain in March 2004; the bombing of public transportation in London in July 2005; the attempted bombing of the Glasgow airport in June 2007; the attempted bombing of the Barcelona metro in January 2008; the attempted bombing of several US-bound airplanes, including that of the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in December 2009; mass riots caused by the reprinting of the “Mohammed Cartoons” in Denmark in 2005 and 2006; Muslim riots in Malmö, Sweden in December 2008 and in Strasbourg, France in June 2010; and Muslim threats to mobilize 10,000 demonstrators onto the streets of London to prevent a democratically elected member of a European government, MP Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, from entering Britain in February 2009; and Muslim attacks on German police in May 2012.

Muslims in Europe also murdered the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in January 2004; tortured and murdered the French Jew, Ilam Halimi in January 2006; attacked the Swedish artist Lars Vilkes in July 2007; tried to murder the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard in January 2010; killed French servicemen and Jews in March 2012; and attacked Spanish politician Josep Anglada in April 2012.

DAVID GOLDMAN: BERNARD LEWIS’ STUBBORN HOPE….SEE NOTE PLEASE

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/99112/bernard-lewis-stubborn-hope

PROFESSOR LEWIS’ STUBBORN HOPE LED HIM TO DELIGHT IN THE “CAMP DAVID” DELUSION OF PEACE, IN THE OSLO CALAMITY, AND IN THE GAZA WITHDRAWAL….AH YES HIS ENGLISH IS SUPERB, HIS KNOWLEDGE AMAZING, BUT HIS POLITICAL SENSES AND HIS ABILITY TO HAVE LEARNED FROM HIS VAST KNOWLEDGE OF THE HISTORY OF ISLAM ARE TRULY PATHETIC….RSK

In Notes on a Century, the historian is still optimistic about a ‘great civilization’ in the Muslim world

Bernard Lewis beckons to us as if from the mists of legend. A poet-scholar, linguist, observer and sometime participant in the great events of the Middle East for seven decades, the London-born scholar belongs more to the world of T.E. Lawrence than to ours. At 95, his prose is translucent and his recollection luminous.

But Notes on a Century—his personal and professional memoir—makes for sad reading, for two reasons. The first is that we will not find another like Bernard Lewis; it is a valedictory essay not just for a remarkable man but for an epoch. No university today could train a poet capable of extracting the red thread of history from the obscure orthography of official archives, or a historian-diplomat who knows the songs of a dozen peoples in their own dialects. Part of the reason is ideological. The post-colonial-studies movement typified by the late Edward Said has ruined a field that once was called “Orientalism”—meaning simply a specialty in Near Eastern philology rather than Greek and Roman. Saudi and other Gulf State funding of Middle East studies programs, meanwhile, has made a critical stance toward Muslim culture an academic career-killer. Even without the ideological divide, though, our culture has grown too brittle to nurture another mind of Lewis’ depth.

The second, even sadder reason is the disappointment of Lewis’ hope for what he calls the “heirs of an old and great civilization.” For decades, Lewis balanced a clear-sighted critique of the failings of Muslim society with an underlying optimism about the future of the Arabs, Turks, and Persians. The backwardness of Muslim societies, he insisted, was a self-inflicted condition rather than the crime of Western colonialists. But he never lost faith that the West that defeated Hitler and overcame communism also could find a way to nurture modern institutions of civil society in Muslim countries. Lewis not only reported their history but also translated their poetry, befriended their men, and loved their women.

This optimism made Lewis an icon for American conservatives, and an enormous, if reluctant influence on American policy: Although he advised against the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Lewis is indelibly (if unfairly) linked with inflated neo-conservative expectations for Muslim democracy. But Lewis explicitly warned against a simple-minded rush to parliamentary forms in the Muslim world, hoping instead for a gradual expansion of existing consultative mechanisms into something that would approach democracy at some undermined date. But Lewis and the neo-conservatives shared an inherent optimism about the changing Muslim culture that informed the national mood after Sept. 11.

Lewis’ autobiography went to press just as the wave of optimism that attended the Arab Spring had begun to fade, and his lifelong optimism appears to be curling a bit around the edges, as a different and much darker picture than the one he imagined is emerging from Morocco to Afghanistan. His criticism of Muslim society was always tempered by respect and even affection. Part of his great popularity as a writer may be explained by the fact that his hopes resonated with characteristic American generosity and optimism. And so his disappointment also is ours.

***

“MODERATE” MUSLIMS IN MACEDONIA

http://www.daylife.com/photo/07m0aYE6cPcyU?__site=daylife

People with an Islamic flag, chanting “Allah u Akbar” (God is the greatest), march through a street in Skopje, Macedonia, during a protest on Friday, May 4, 2012. A large crowd protested Friday against the arrest three men identified as radical Islamists suspected with the murder of five Macedonian fishermen in mid April. Two other suspects remain at large. The fatal shooting of the fishermen near Skopje has fueled tension in the Balkan country between ethnic Macedonians and the ethnic Albanian minority.

JOHN BERNARD: THIS YEAR WE CHOSE THE BEST OF THE LEAST

http://www.letthemfight.blogspot.com/ People who ‘rise to the occasion’ are generally no different than the people from whom they emerge. If the people are focused on good character, sound leadership, selfless service, a sense of personal responsibility for the good of the nation, an understanding of good and responsible nationalistic spirit, then those who are chosen to […]

OMRI CEREN: J STREET MORE BRAZEN EVERY DAY: CO-FOUNDER DANIEL LEVY THINKS ISRAEL’S CREATION WAS “AN ACT THAT WAS WRONG”

http://www.mererhetoric.com/2010/10/05/j-street-co-founder-daniel-levy-israel%E2%80%99s-creation-an-act-that-was-wrong/

Quite the few days that J Street had last week, what with all the admitting they’re foot soldiers in Soros’s anti-Israel army after lying about it for years and then trying to get ahead of the story by lying about it some more. Most of the criticism has focused on co-founder Jeremy Ben-Ami, who did not exactly fall on his sword and instead tried to hamfistedly change the subject. But it’s probably unfair to blame him for all of J Street’s failings, from rigging polls to being more anti-Israel than the Saudis to expressing fake confusion about Hamas’s intentions.

Per Eli Lake’s first story, Ben-Ami seems to have been the one who did most of the “misleading” about J Street’s fundraising, from furtively squirreling away Soros’s cash to opaquely raising 50% of the group’s 2008 money from a single foreign source.

But per Lake’s second article, when it came time to shuttle Goldstone around DC and peddle his endlessly inaccurate and venomously biased libels around the Hill, J Street delegated the task to one of the adults in the organization. It was J Street co-founder, advisory board member, and international socialite Daniel Levy “who accompanied the judge to several of the [10-12] parleys” with Congress. It was also Levy’s New America Foundation that hosted a high-caliber lunch for Goldstone with “a group of analysts and Middle East wonks.”

The Goldstone tour wasn’t the first time that Levy willingly served as a channel for de facto Hamas propaganda. He’s been a tireless advocate of pro-Hamas diplomacy, and sees the Iranian proxy as an integral part of Palestinian civil society. A few years ago Noah Pollak took him out to the woodshed for historical revisionism that seemed jarringly anti-Israel and borderline anti-Zionist.

If sometimes it seems like Levy doesn’t really think that the modern Jewish State deserves defending, it’s because he kind of doesn’t really think that the modern Jewish State deserves defending. You can be confident on that point because he said so himself – quite definitively – at last May’s Fifth Al Jazeera Forum. Levy was on a panel with Al-Quds Al-Arabi editor-in-chief Abdel Bari Atwan, NAF Strategic Program Director Steve Clemons, surreal Hamas apologist and one-stater Allister Sparks, and accused terrorist Basheer Nafi.

ISRAELI FLAG FLEW OVER THE STATE CAPITOL IN HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT IN HONOR OF ISRAEL’S INDEPENDENCE DAY….

www.jewishledger.com

The Israeli flag flew over the State Capitol in Hartford on April 25 and 26 in honor of Israel Independence Day. Rep. David Baram (15th district) and Rep. Brian Becker (19th district) prepared a statement that Baram read into the official record, noting Connecticut’s “historic trade relationships with Israel, not only in defense industries, but in medical, bio-tech, manufacturing and in the arts and sciences.” Photo courtesy of Don Miller.

http://www.jewishledger.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/capitol-flag.jpg

JACOB LAKSIN: WISCONSIN RECALL SPUTTERS

Wisconsin Recall Sputters

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/09/wisconsin-recall-sputters/

That sound you hear may be the sputtering of Wisconsin Democrats and public-sector unions’ campaign to oust Republican Gov. Scott Walker. On Tuesday, Democrats went to the polls to choose a candidate to square off against Walker in next month’s recall election. But the union-led opposition’s hopes that the standard bearer would be a Big Labor darling were dashed with the election of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, rather than the unions’ preferred candidate, Democratic operative Kathleen Falk. Falk’s defeat marks only the latest setback for a recall campaign that is increasingly running out of steam.

The differences between Barrett and Falk are small but politically significant. Though they both pledged to eliminate Walker’s restrictions on collective bargaining for most state workers, they disagreed on the methods. Falk took the more union-friendly approach, assuring her supporters that she would veto any budget that didn’t restore collective bargaining. That promise earned her the endorsements of the state’s leading public-sector unions, including the state chapter of the AFL-CIO and the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s biggest teachers union.

Barrett refused to go as far as Falk. While he is also committed to restoring collective bargaining, he has said that he would do so by introducing the issue in a special legislative session. The latter is particularly unattractive to unions because it would require Republican support for the legislation. Barrett’s victory in the Tuesday primary means the unions’ dreams of restoring collective bargaining through gubernatorial fiat have been shattered.

Yet another setback for the unions is that their efforts to turn the recall into a referendum on collective bargaining appear to have failed. While union activists and organizers still see collective bargaining as the dominant recall issue, Wisconsin’s voters, among them many Democratic primary voters, disagree. Polling of primary voters conducted by Marquette University found that over half of those who voted in Tuesday’s primary favored Barrett’s compromise-seeking approach on collective bargaining over Falk’s and the unions’ demands that it be reinstated without debate. Collective bargaining has also faded as a galvanizing issue. Increasingly, the recall has come to resemble a general election, where the main focus is on standard issues like jobs and unemployment. Doom-saying from Democrats and their union allies notwithstanding, challenging the unions over collective bargaining has not fatally diminished Walker’s political prospects.

ANTI-SEMITISM IS RACISM: DANIEL GREENFIELD

Anti-Semitism Is Racism Posted By Daniel Greenfield

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/09/anti-semitism-is-racism/print/

Islam is not a race. Even though Islamophobia has become the great obsession of the politically correct elites of the Western world– there is nothing innate about Islam. One is not born a Muslim and there is no double helix of DNA that intertwines with the Koran. Muslims are followers of a belief system and no belief system should be above criticism or reproach.

Jews however are a race, a fact that has been known for thousands of years and has been backed up by genetic evidence in modern times. A fact that has been dismissed by liberals who are eager to denounce racism except when it comes to the one particular race that they have given themselves permission to hate.

By embracing the Islamophobia narrative, the left prioritized combating discrimination against a belief system over combating discrimination against a race, reversing its past position that racial prejudice is worse than any other form of prejudice because it persecutes an innate aspect of the individual, rather than an external adopted one. And when the two were in conflict over the racist aspect of the ideology, it chose the ideology and its racism.

Leftist and Islamic persecution of Jews and the common alliance of the two groups have made it necessary for the left to ignore or even legitimize displays of Anti-Semitism. The supremacy of these two ideologies over the rights and humanity of the most persecuted racial minority in the world are the toxic ingredients in the “New Anti-Semitism” which has revived Anti-Semitic racial prejudice as a progressive value.

American and European elites have become obsessed with protecting a single religion from any criticism, even when that religion comes burdened with an ugly legacy of racism that believes the Jewish people are its eternal enemies who must be destroyed in an apocalyptic Islamic genocide that concludes with every rock crying out, “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!”

The rocks have remained silent, but left-wing newspapers have taken up the call in their place. Jewish store windows are smashed, synagogues burned, schools attacked and children murdered, while the media ignores, justifies, whitewashes and even occasionally praises these crimes. Every other news story from the Middle East is either an attack on the Jewish State or a celebration of the Muslim Brotherhood and its plans for a genocidal theocracy stretching across the region and eventually across the world.

Attacks reminiscent of the work of Goebbels’ pet propagandists regularly make their way into the pages of The Guardian and Time Magazine as part of the Leftist-Islamic alliance against the Jews. Warnings about growing Anti-Semitism are ridiculed or dismissed while Islamophobia is treated as a grave threat, even though crime statistics clearly show a far higher numbers of attacks on Jews contrasted with a fairly insignificant numbers of attacks on Muslims.

The left cannot deny the hate crimes statistics, so instead it chooses to ignore them. The artificial reality bubbles sent up by its media empires clamor about the manufactured crisis of Islamophobia, while claiming Anti-Semitism is largely overblown, a tool that it insists Jews use to silence Muslims and leftists. The same elites who claimed that McCarthyism was worse than the Gulags, now claim that Islamophobia is worse than Anti-Semitism.

Criticize the affiliates of the genocidal Muslim Brotherhood and the cry of “Islamophobia” goes up from the disciples and propagandists of a group that was inspired by Mohammed and Adolf Hitler. And the media immediately takes up their call. No sooner does a Muslim leader, from Ahmadinejad to Raed Salah, make an Anti-Semitic statement than a thousand columnists rush to claim that he was mistranslated, misquoted or misunderstood.

Israel stands at the critical intersection of this debate. The Jewish claim to the land is based on the history of its people while the Muslim claim to the land is entirely ahistorical. Islam is a religion, not a people, and its claim to the territory rests on religious supremacy through a trip taken by Mohammed on a flying horse. The fiction of an ancient “Palestinian people” was a temporary convenience that is being set aside by Hamas leaders looking to join Gaza together with a Muslim Brotherhood run Egypt.

The struggle between Israel and the Muslim world is a struggle between a people and an ideology, just as the struggle between Israel and the left is a struggle between a people and an ideology. Islam and the left both represent transnational ideologies and as an ethno-religious group, the Jews remain an obstacle for the transnationalists of Islam and the left.

24/7 NEWS AND BUZZ

http://times247.com/
North Korea showing signs of new provocation
Washington Free Beacon
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
News
U.S. intelligence agencies are closely monitoring North Korea for signs the Kim Jong-un regime is set to conduct a new military provocation that could trigger another conflict on the Asian peninsula. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uMwOZTQw

Arab world views unity deal as ‘cold-blooded’ politics
The Times of Israel
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
News
Arab world views unity deal as ‘cold-blooded’ politics
The Arab world is intently following the Israeli political developments, with many spokespeople and commentators viewing the unity of Benjamin Netanyahu and Shaul Mofaz as a cynical maneuver by desperate politicians. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uMw0u29z
Obama reaps unauthorized donations
Daily Caller
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
News
President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign has some unwilling, defrauded donors, including David Newman, who found a $15 charge from the “Obama For America” campaign on one of his debit cards. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uMwDyniW

THE DOJ DEFENDS EMPLOYEE COMMENT THAT MISSISSIPPI IS “DISGUSTING AND SHAMEFUL”….J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS

: http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/05/08/doj-defends-employee-comment-that-mississippi-is-disgusting-and-shameful/

DOJ Defends Employee Comment that Mississippi Is ‘Disgusting and Shameful’

The United States Department of Justice has defended comments by an employee who called Mississippi “disgusting and shameful.” This same employee reviews photo voter identification laws throughout the south for approval from her position in the DOJ Voting Section.

PJ Media first reported on comments made by Voting Section employee Stephanie Gyamfi toward the citizens of Mississippi:

On her Facebook page, Voting Section supervisory civil rights analyst Stephanie Celandine Gyamfi says about the people of Mississippi:

“Disgusting and shameful. Hey, that should replace the state motto: ‘Mississippi: Disgusting and Shameful’. . . forget the Magnolia State motto.”

On Tuesday, Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann held a press conference in response to the PJ Media story and demanded that Gyamfi be removed from all reviews of state election laws under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Three Mississippi congressmen (Nunlee, Harper, and Palazzo), sent a letter to the DOJ demanding the same.

Voting Section Chief Christopher Herren on Tuesday said that the comments by Gyamfi were “personal” in nature. Yet then the resources of the Department of Justice were deployed to defend the comments.

“The department maintains Gyamfi is a respected employee.”

Justice Department officials told WLBT-TV in Mississippi that the comments were “taken out of context” and were defensible because they related to an ugly incident at the University of Southern Mississippi. During that incident, some students taunted an opposing Hispanic basketball player.

Of course Gyamfi’s comments were not confined to her opinions about the handful of Southern Mississippi students. No, the bigotry extended to all Mississippians. All of Mississippi was sufficiently “disgusting and shameful” to warrant replacing the state motto with “Mississippi: Disgusting and Shameful.”