RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/12/04/thousands-of-brazilians-take-part-in-israeli-

Thousands of Brazilians gathered on Sunday at Sao Paulo’s Estaiada Bridge to take part in a popular Israeli social musical initiative held for the first time in Latin America.

The Koolulam project centers around mass singing events in which large groups of non-professionals come together “from all walks of life to do one thing: stop everything for a few hours and just sing,” according to its Facebook page.

The group in Brazil, comprised of Jews and non-Jews, sang “Tempos Modernos,” or “Modern Times,” a famous Brazilian song from the 1980s composed and sung by Lulu Santos, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported.

The show includes a rehearsal of one song led by a conductor and performed by the audience members, who are given music sheets with the lyrics and divided into different voices. The final performance is filmed, edited and posted online.

Conductor Ben Yaffet said about the experience, “Participants go through a creative process surrounded by a sense of unity and belonging rarely achieved in our daily lives.”

Producer Jussara Gontow added, “Koolulam’s main goal is to bring together strangers who have no singing experience and provoke an innovative, creative, sensory and unforgettable musical moment. Children, youth, adults and the elderly become artists.”

Koolulam, established in 2017, has been performed in Israel, the United States, Canada and South Africa.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/shouldnt-take-tragedy-get-jihadis-streets/

It was one of those glittering frosty mornings in Cambridge on Monday, the kind of day that makes you glad to be alive. It only added to the terrible poignancy of the gathering in Market Square to mark the deaths of Jack Merritt, 25, and Saskia Jones, 23.

Some of my friends’ kids, who had known Jack socially (“he was popular, really lovely”), were there to lay flowers. The minute’s silence went on and on as if returning to the normal babble of life were intolerable. In a chilling irony, the two young criminologists had been murdered at a conference to mark five years of Learning Together, a programme for students and prisoners, by one of the very men who had benefited from Jack and Saskia’s shared passion for rehabilitation.

Usman Khan was let out of jail last December on licence after serving only eight years, because his sentence had been reduced (by Lord Leveson) on appeal. A crazy change in the law meant that the release was automatic. Khan didn’t need to appear before the parole board, although the judge at his original trial had been clear that this cunning fanatic should not be released if he posed a continuing danger to the public.

Now wearing an electronic tag, Khan was given permission to travel from his home in Staffordshire to the event at Fishmongers’ Hall, even though he was once part of a terrorist group that had planned to blow up the London Stock Exchange, and the beautiful livery hall lay right next to London Bridge, scene of a horrific attack in 2017.

Did alarm bells really not ring? I’m afraid not.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15240/norway-free-speech-koran

Norwegian police chief Marie Benedicte Bjørnland is unable to rid from her mind the certainty that mistreating a copy of the Koran is wrong and that she and her fellow flatfoots should, under some statute or other, have the power to do something about it. In short, for the Norwegian police, the Koran is, in a way, as holy as it is for Muslims.

Once again, one was reminded of the cartoon crisis, when the Norwegian diplomatic corps saw it as urgent to apologize to authoritarian governments for whatever is left in Norway of individual liberty.

A teacher at the school explained that she had “made a conscious decision not to buy napkins with ‘Merry Christmas’ written on them” or to use a red tablecloth or red tree ornaments because “certain religions are very sensitive” and care needs to be taken “not to offend anyone.”

The Norwegian government has recently spent well over $100,000 to convert churches in Stavanger and Skien into mosques and is kicking in a huge sum of taxpayer money for the construction of a mega-mosque in Bergen with, according to journalist and political activist Hege Storhaug, “open ties to extremism.”

Recently I wrote here about how, on November 16, the group Stop Islamization of Norway (Stopp Islamisering av Norge – SIAN) set fire to a copy of the Koran in a public square in Kristiansand, only to have the fire doused pronto by a group of 30 or more police officers. It later emerged that they were under secret orders from the chief of the Norwegian police, Marie Benedicte Bjørnland, not just to put out any such fire but to prevent SIAN members from committing any such act.

Bjørnland defended her orders by citing the so-called “racism clause” of Norway’s criminal law, and the Minister of Justice, Jøran Kallmyr, stood behind her, making the baffling statement that while burning a Koran was not illegal, it could (depending on how you translated his words) “become” or “morph into” a crime.