RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nothing illegal transpired when the grand jury voted not to indict the policeman who put Eric Garner in a chokehold. People may not have liked that decision but no one has accused the prosecutor of not following the proper guidelines of the law or the jury of having been corrupted. There are remedies for dissatisfaction with this conclusion and they have already started to go into effect. The federal govt has begun preliminary investigations into the possibility of a Civil Rights lawsuit and the family of Mr. Garner will undoubtedly initiate a civil suit against the city for wrongful death. A prestigious law school should have used this event as an important lesson in how our legal system works and how individual rights are balanced against other forces and considerations. Instead, Columbia Law School has deemed this event a trauma for its students and has decided to postpone final exams for those students too impaired to take them. By this reasoning, every time a lawyer loses a case, he should be excused from his immediate work load. The only people who can properly be considered traumatized by Garner’s death are members of his immediate family; students of all colors who are displeased should still be held to their academic responsibilities or the definition of trauma gets diluted down to sheer meaningless-ness.

Similarly, the accusation of gang rape at the University of Virginia that precipitated the article by Rolling Stone and its subsequent retraction by the magazine has led to notes written by 300 students who have posed on Facebook bearing a sign saying “I Stand With Survivors.” Time was when a survivor was a word reserved for people who had remained alive after being prisoners of war or inmates in concentration camps during World War II. These people went through years of starvation, torture and indescribable debasement and looked liked skeletons when they were liberated. Now the word is used by students to describe someone who had a sexual assault – an umbrella term on campus not restricted to rape, but including any unwanted sexual activity including kissing, groping, exhibitionism or voyeurism. Does the term survivor as understood in its original context really apply to this? If you got drunk of your own volition and slept with someone who took advantage of your inebriation, you were irresponsible, not a survivor. If you were physically attacked by someone who raped you, you were a victim of a crime that should be reported to the police. Most people don’t want to brand themselves as victims in perpetuity but neither should they be considered survivors for having had one terrible experience.

Racism is the belief that innate differences among different races determine individual outcomes. As a belief, it has been discredited. As practice it violates an individual’s civil rights. Like prejudice, its persistence reflects society’s moral turpitude.

Prejudice can be defined as preconceived opinions that are not based on reason or experience. It cannot be corrected through legislative actions. Prejudice is cultural and usually ingrained. It comes in many flavors. There are xenophobes, misogynists, anti-Semites and racists, among others. Such feelings are primarily a function of ignorance, but they also reflect a culture that lacks empathy and mutual respect. As a society, we need greater emphasis on family values. We need parents, teachers and others in authority to set exemplary examples. The banning of discrimination and the prosecuting of racists will not, unfortunately, eliminate prejudice.

For political purposes and personal gain, public figures and the media have inflamed the anger following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the alleged choke-hold death of Eric Garner on Staten Island. The two cases were similar in that both involved black men killed by white cops. Both accused men resisted arrest, a violation of the rule of law. They were alike in that Grand Jury’s found no evidence to indict either policeman. But the differences are marked. A video shows what appears to be an unnecessary rough (and deadly) take-down of Mr. Garner. Mr. Brown apparently attacked the arresting officer, while Mr. Garner resisted attempts to be handcuffed, even though he had been arrested for the same misdemeanor before. (The police cannot determine which laws to enforce, no matter how minor the infractions may seem.)

While laws banning discrimination have been enacted, there is no question that prejudice and racism persist; though less overtly than fifty years ago. Tolerance should be encouraged, but it cannot be mandated. It must be learned, as must honor and fairness. Respect must be earned. All should be aspects of our cultural makeup. These are values we inherit from our parents, and should be integral parts of our school’s curriculum.

The New York Times, the paper that earned the dubious distinction of being the recipient of the “Most Dishonest Reporting” award for 2013 is at it again. This time, The Gray Lady featured an op-ed piece by the notorious anti-Semite Max Blumenthal, providing this provocateur with a mainstream platform to express his odious views.

True to form, Blumenthal, the darling of radical extremists, conflates, distorts and simply makes things up. But I’m not here to analyze Blumenthal’s arrant nonsense. Others have already done a good job of that. What I wish to highlight is the depths to which the New York Times has sunk.

To be sure, the New York Times has in the past given a broad range of anti-Israel types a platform to express their opinions in the op-ed section, far more than those expressing positive views of Israel. But Blumenthal’s pernicious views veer uncomfortably close to old fashion anti-Semitism and this time, the New York Times exceeded the bounds of decency and fair play and has partnered with those who openly express Jew-hatred.

An analysis of Blumenthal’s history reveals the following disturbing facts;

•Blumenthal was disinvited from a scheduled speaking engagement by the German “Die Linke” (The Left) party due to his anti-Semitic (not to mention anti-Israel) views.

•Blumenthal’s antics earned him a lifetime ban from the German parliament.

•The Simon Wiesenthal Center has labeled Blumenthal an anti-Semite and his comments earned him a spot in the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s “Top 10” list of anti-Semitic slurs.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/allah-the-greatest-deceiver-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Scholar of Islam Louis Lionheart and joined by Scholar of Comparative Religion Anthony Rogers.

Mr. Rogers joined the show to discuss Allah: The Greatest Deceiver?, analyzing the significance of Islam’s teaching to smile in unbelievers’ faces — but to curse them in one’s heart. The discussion occurred within a focus on Islamic Literary Sources: Their Application, in which Mr. Rogers dissected a religion’s teachings and their earthly incarnations.

Fredrik Reinfeldt was Prime Minister of Sweden from 2006 to 2014. His center-right coalition government suffered a defeat in the general elections of September 2014. Allegedly conservative Prime Minister Reinfeldt stated that the native Swedish culture was merely barbarism; everything good was imported from abroad. He said this in 2006 following a visit to the town of Södertälje, near Stockholm.

In September 2005 a police station in Södertälje was hit by shots from an automatic weapon, following a confrontation between aggressive immigrant youths and the local police. The trouble started after a Swedish girl was called a “whore” and reacted negatively to the epithet.

If a leading politician had said that African, Asian or Islamic culture was “merely barbarism,” there would have been a huge public outcry and calls for his immediate resignation due to “racism.” His career might have been over. Yet disrespecting and mocking the traditions of Europeans is apparently no problem.

Suburbs in Stockholm and other Swedish cities were rocked by major immigrant riots in the spring of 2013. There are fears that similar riots could return at any moment. The underlying problems have not gone away. Despite this, the ruling elites stubbornly reject any suggestion that mass immigration should be curtailed.

Eleven young men and boys were detained in December 2014 after rioting in a Stockholm suburb. The police were attacked with stones and Molotov cocktails, a park was vandalized and several cars were torched. The eleven are suspected of arson, vandalism, violent rioting and attempted severe assault. “They are still being questioned,” police spokeswoman Kia Samrell told news agency TT. Police spokeswoman Elisabeth Wernsten told Swedish Radio News: “A witness saw a large gathering of younger individuals who marched towards the center of Rågsved, where the school is. The witness suspected that the youths were going to smash the school up.” When the police gathered to confront them, they started throwing stones and firebombs. Another police spokeswoman, Eva Nilsson, said that the incident appears to have been premeditated. Police still had no explanation as to why they had been attacked. “This gang simply decided to get together to commit crime. There is no good reason for wanting to attack the police in this way. Nothing provoked the incident,” said Wernsten.

Did you bury a teenage girl alive after shooting her? Are you on death row after a string of crimes too gruesome to describe? Or are you just a member of Al Qaeda dedicated to destroying America?

If so progressives will fight for you. Just dial 1-800-IAM-VICTIM and the leftist waiting to take your call will insist on your presumption of innocence. Its activists, reporters and lawyers will exploit every pretext to get you off the hook and they will call that justice.

The judicial process, they will say, matters more than public safety, public outrage or the victims.

When the crime wave set loose by their own activism flooded the country they clung to Blackstone’s formulation of “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” As murders, rapes and robberies rose, the value of that formulation went up from ten to ten thousand.

But it had to be the right ten thousand.

Leftist lynch mobs rioting in Ferguson, marching through Manhattan and screaming in Oakland assert that the presumption of innocence doesn’t apply to police officers or white Hispanics. Their poses of victimization with their cries of “Black lives matter” and “I can’t breathe” disguise what they really are.

They were protesting before the case moved forward. They have continued protesting after the verdict was in. That’s not a call for justice. It’s a lynch mob that knows what the verdict should be and seeks to intimidate the authorities into giving it to them by taking the law into their own hands.

Members of Turkey’s National Education Council last week did not discuss Turkey’s extremely poor PISA rankings, or improving the curriculum in mathematics and science. Instead, a pro-government teachers’ union proposed making religion a required course in pre-school.

Turkey’s response to the European Court of Human Rights, which vehemently told Ankara to scrap all compulsory religious education, was to introduce Islamic teaching to six-year-olds.

Another casualty was the “human rights and democracy” classes that Turkish fourth-grade students must take.

Systematic Islamist indoctrination in Turkey is becoming less stealthy.

Education is the new battlefield. Turkey’s government is pushing to advance its declared policy goal of “raising devout (Muslim) generations.”

In 2012, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] released the findings of its prestigious education report, the “Program for International Student Assessment” [PISA], which experts view as the world’s most comprehensive education survey. PISA assesses the extent to which 15-year-old pupils from 65 OECD member nations have acquired key knowledge and skills in mathematics, reading, science and problem-solving (the PISA survey covers 510,000 students worldwide.)

In their overall performance, Turkish pupils ranked poorly: 44th out of 65 countries. Ironically, Turkey and six other predominantly Muslim member nations of the OECD all ranked in the bottom slice of the ranking: the United Arab Emirates, 48th; Malaysia, 52nd; Tunisia, 60th; Jordan 61st; Qatar, 63rd; and Indonesia, 64th.

Turkish universities did not perform any better. The acclaimed Quacquarelli Symonds [QS], a higher education surveyor, ranked only three Turkish universities in the world’s top 500 universities list. According to the findings of QS, only nine Turkish universities (out of 175 Turkish universities) were listed among the world’s 800 best universities — and the best ones appear in the modest 430-460 bracket.

As many Swedes have grown sick and tired of a political elite giving in to Islamic demands, it is generally expected that the anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats, will do well in the next elections.

It takes some time before voters realize what is going on, but in the end, they invariably do.

Last week, after having been in office for exactly two months and one day, Sweden’s government collapsed. Apart from the Palestinians, hardly anyone will regret the fall of Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s government. The only thing Löfven’s cabinet will be remembered for is its slamming of Israel by recognizing the Palestinian state.

Following last September’s general elections, Mr. Löfven, a Social-Democrat, formed a minority government of the Social-Democrats and the Greens. Immediately after its formation, the Red-Green minority coalition recognized “Palestine.”

During the past decades, the arrival of thousands of radical Islamic immigrants has led to a rise of anti-Semitism in Sweden. The immigrants, having acquired Swedish citizenship, are catered to by Sweden’s leftist parties. Prominent Social-Democrats denounce Zionism as racism and declare that ISIS is being trained by the Mossad. Mr. Löfven’s Green Minister for Urban Development has even advocated the “liberation of Jerusalem” from Israel.

Once it had recognized “Palestine” as a state, the Löfven government turned to the urgent matter of Sweden’s 2015 budget. Unable to reach an agreement on the budget, the government collapsed and announced new general elections for next March. As many Swedes have grown sick and tired of a political elite giving in to Islamic demands, it is generally expected that the country’s anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats [SD], will do very well in the next elections.

The idea that we are all complicit in the Eric Garner grand-jury decision is false.

How did we get to the point in the United States where street protesters are treated as sainted figures, no matter what they do? How did it happen that important public leaders—the American president, the mayor of New York, college presidents—feel obliged to legitimize these protests, no matter what they do to a city, its citizens or owners of private property? Why is it that the leaders of America’s most important institutions are no longer capable of recognizing a mob when they see one?

On Wednesday last week, the day of the grand jury decision in the Eric Garner case on Staten Island, hundreds of people marched through New York City’s main streets and highways, blocked bridges, invaded the crowds of parents and kids gathered for the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, and spread themselves on the floor as “die-ins” amid commuters in Grand Central Terminal.

Despite the massive inconvenience, many New Yorkers, who like to think they live in a tolerant city, more or less accepted this venting. Message sent and absorbed. Whatever political course the controversial Garner case would take next, it was time for everyone to resume their lives on Thursday.

Petraeus’s last assignments in the Army were as commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) from July 4, 2010, to July 18, 2011. And then this intel challenged general ran the CIA….rsk

KABUL—A Taliban suicide bomber Thursday targeted a bus carrying Afghan soldiers in Kabul, killing at least five troops in the latest of a string of deadly attacks that have shaken the capital.

The attacker approached on foot an Afghan National Army bus that had stopped on the side of the road to pick up troops early in the morning, said Hashmat Stanikzai, a spokesman for Kabul police. Ten soldiers and three civilians were injured in the attack.

More than 100 troops were on the bus at the time of the explosion, which partly charred the vehicle and blew out its windows.

Shortly after the blast, Afghan security forces cordoned off the area and the wounded were taken to a hospital.

The Taliban in a statement claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was aimed at military officers of the “puppet administration” in Kabul. The insurgent movement said it had been tracking the movements of the bus for a long time.

Targeting military vehicles is a tactic the Taliban have used many times before, especially in Kabul. A similar attack in October against a Ministry of Defense bus, for instance, killed eight people and injured more than 20 in the city.

Last month, a car bomb struck a British Embassy convoy, killing one British citizen and five Afghans.