RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16126/austria-free-speech

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) ignores that there may be a context and a reason for “portraying newcomers as a threat to security”. It does not consider the proliferation of Islamic terrorism in Europe or research showing that terrorists have migrated into Europe disguised as asylum seekers, who have gone on to perpetrate deadly terrorist attacks.

“According to the study, six of the 16 mosque associations examined (37.5%) pursue ‘a policy that actively impedes integration into society and to some extent exhibits fundamentalist tendencies.’ Half of the 16 mosques examined ‘preach a dichotomous worldview, the pivotal tenet of which is the division of the world into Muslims on one side, and everyone else on the other.’ Six of the mosques were found to practice ‘explicit denigration of Western society’.”

None of this context exists for ECRI, which appears to operate in a vacuum, unencumbered by real world facts.

Instead, ECRI commends Austria for having “several measures in place… which aim to combat hate speech by developing a counter-narrative.”

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) recently published its sixth monitoring report on Austria.

ECRI, which describes itself as “independent”, is the human rights monitoring body of the Council of Europe — not to be confused with the European Union. The Council of Europe is composed of 47 member states, including all of the 27 European Union member states.

ECRI is an unelected body with members designated by their governments (one for each member state) who are supposed to have “in-depth knowledge in the field of combating intolerance…. and recognised expertise in dealing with racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance”. It was founded in 1994 by the heads of state of the Council of Europe with the mandate, among other things, to “review member States’ legislation, policies and other measures to combat racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance, and their effectiveness”.

Thanks in large part to the efforts of ECRI and the Council of Europe, Europe now has a huge web of hate speech laws and policies. Gatestone has previously reported on ECRI’s monitoring of Germany and of Switzerland.

In its sixth monitoring report on Austria, ECRI wrote that “progress has been made and good practices have been developed in a number of fields”.

“Austria has taken several initiatives to thwart hate speech by developing a counter-narrative. The authorities have worked with civil society to improve the detection and recording of online hate and to provide support to victims of such incidents… in… 2018, the authorities concluded an agreement with social network providers to remove hate speech within 24 hours”.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/china_floods_threaten_collapse_of_worlds_largest_dam.html

The China Meteorological Administration issued “No. 1 Flood” warning as a second month of rain and earthquakes risk collapse of Three Gorges Dam and the safety of 400 million.  

Southern China in June suffered its worst flooding since 1940 with the overflowing of 250 rivers impacting 15 million residents and causing at least 121 people dead or missing. The world’s largest hydroelectric dam, the 1.4 miles wide and 630 feet high Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtse River with a 5 trillion gallon capacity, fully opened its seven massive outlets to begin discharging a record 28-acre feet per second.

But after thirty-one days of rain, a record 16.8 inches falling between Sunday and Monday morning, and inflows running at 40-acre feet per second after, CMA on July 4 issued an 80 percent risk of thundershowers for each of the next 11 days.

China’s Paramount Leader Xi Jinping in his first public statement on the crisis, called on the country to “put people first and value people’s lives most in the fight against the floods”, according to Xinhua official state news agency.

Human rights advocates complained as a record 1.2 million people from 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1,350 villages were displaced as Three Gorges Dam’s reservoir filled. But some Chinese geologists also warned that impoundment water weight could create severe earthquakes risk due to amplification of the region’s historically low seismicity.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sun-ever-sets-on-the-british-empire-11594076187?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Sometimes life throws you a metaphor. As my neighbors and I stood, masked and socially distanced, to watch Washington’s fireworks Saturday, a thick plume of smoke spread from the staging area to obscure part of the display. Similarly, the doom and gloom hanging over American life this year clouded but didn’t quite kill the joy of the most glorious day in our civic calendar. Even in a bad year, independence is good.

Nothing is more American than Independence Day, yet from a broader perspective, the Fourth of July is merely our local version of the world’s most widespread political festival. Think of it as British Leaving Day, a holiday celebrated from Ireland to Brunei. In some places it celebrates the happy day when the Brits, civil and well-intentioned though they may be, finally packed it in and went home. In Trinidad, Tonga and Tanzania it’s one of the highlights of the year.

In other places, as in the U.S., it isn’t the day they hauled down the Union Jack and sailed away. For us, and for the Irish (who celebrate the 1916 Easter Rising), it’s the day when the colonial rulers got served an eviction notice that, after some unpleasantness and delay, they eventually obeyed.

Our forebears were so glad to see the backs of the British that some localities had British Leaving Days of their own. Boston and New York held Evacuation Day celebrations into the 20th century on the dates the British fleet left their harbors, March 17 and Nov. 25, respectively. Before the Civil War, New Orleans celebrated the anniversary of Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the British invaders on Jan. 8, 1815.