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October 2018

The Annihilation of Iraq’s Christian Minority by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13193/iraq-christians-annihilation

“I’m proud to be an Iraqi, I love my country. But my country is not proud that I’m part of it. What is happening to my people [Christians] is nothing other than genocide… Wake up!” — Father Douglas al-Bazi, Iraqi Catholic parish priest, Erbil.

“Contacting the authorities forces us to identify ourselves [as Christians], and we aren’t certain that some of the people threatening us aren’t the people in the government offices that are supposed to be protecting us.” — Iraqi Christian man, explaining why Christians in Iraq do not turn to government authorities for protection.

Government-sponsored school curricula present indigenous Christians as unwanted “foreigners,” although Iraq was Christian for centuries before it was conquered by Muslims in the seventh century.

“Another wave of persecution will be the end of Christianity after 2,000 years” in Iraq, an Iraqi Christian leader recently said. In an interview earlier this month, Chaldean Archbishop Habib Nafali of Basra discussed how more than a decade of violent persecution has virtually annihilated Iraq’s Christian minority. Since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, the Christian population has dropped from 1.5 million to about 250,000 — a reduction of 85%. During those 15 years, Christians have been abducted, enslaved, raped and slaughtered, sometimes by crucifixion; a church or monastery has been destroyed about every 40 days on average, said the archbishop.

Alleged Fake Bomber is Fillipino Ex-Con Who Claimed To Be Seminole Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271760/alleged-fake-bomber-fillipino-ex-con-who-claimed-daniel-greenfield

I don’t think there’s a profile that fits this guy. There’s no point in even bothering to try.

He identified on Twitter with the “WeUnconquered SeminoleTribe”. His LinkedIn page connects him to the Philippines. He was allegedly a former male stripper.

Career decision of becoming a Horse Doctor was always a love for animals, which were here first and never do anything to anyone. And respect all living things. My family very sound Sayoc name in Medical field Grandfather Col. Baltazar Zook Sayoc that perfect the conversion oriental eye to Americanize. The first plastic surgeon to be observed by 8 million people in NY city Hospital. He over through Communist Philippines liberated island. He built all hospitals in Philippines islands and sets standards highest level. Most surgeon use his instruments which are patented. And a lot surgeon use today. Also Sayoc intl. schools marshals arts Kali that used to over throw communist party . Also one 5 Hero’s disciplinary my mother Madeline Sayoc Giardiello First president Pharmacy Cosmetic Association, Who Who Business Women of Year, Soul buyer consultant for Home Shopping Network, head number 1 marketing consul in World Aventura Marketing consul, up for city counsel women Aventura,

This doesn’t sound like English as a first language. Or it could just be mental illness.

At least one of his businesses seem to have involved male burlesque dancers. And he has an extensive criminal record for pretty much everything. The media is going to cynically try to connect him to Trump and Republicans, but he seems to have been a mentally unstable man with a lot of anger and obvious personal issues.

Opening up the Package Plot But mysteries linger about Florida suspect Cesar Sayoc. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271762/opening-package-plot-lloyd-billingsley

This week suspicious, potentially explosive packages were sent to former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, former vice president Joe Biden, former CIA boss John Brennan (via CNN), former DNC boss Debbie Wasserman Schultz, former Attorney General Eric Holder, Rep. Maxine Waters, billionaire George Soros, and actor Robert De Niro. Warnings that more packages had been sent turned out to be true.

On Friday, authorities intercepted suspicious packages sent to senators Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, former national intelligence director James Clapper, and billionaire Tom Steyer. Like the first group, all are prominent Democrats and critics of President Trump.

FBI director Christopher Wray described the packages as improvised explosive devices and not “hoax devices,” though according to a U.S. News report it was unclear whether they could be detonated. To date, none of the devices exploded and no one has been harmed, but Wray believes “we’ve caught the right guy.” That turned out to be Cesar Sayoc, 56, and the establishment media cranked out stories on what was known about him.

CNN reported that his van featured images of President Trump as well as a sticker reading “CNN Sucks.” A Facebook video “showed the bomb suspect in a MAGA hat at Trump rally in 2016” and Sayoc was a “registered Republican.” Sayoc also had a criminal record, with arrests for bomb threats, grand theft, battery, fraud, drug possession and probation violations. His lawyer Ronald S. Lowy told CNN Sayoc “didn’t fit it” and he questioned Sayoc’s ability to execute a scheme of explosive devices.

The New York Times learned that Cesar Altieri Sayoc’s father was from the Philippines and his mother from Brooklyn. He “frequently posted in right-wing circles and shared conservative news stories and condemnations of liberal politicians.” Relatives told the Times Sayoc was a body builder who had worked as a male stripper. He had money, lost it, and “wasn’t the most stable guy in the world.” A hairdresser described him as “very antisocial” and “a loner” who lived in his van. Sayoc was not quoted in the article.

#ThemToo Earlier women’s crusades tell us much about the one currently shaking up American life. Kay S. Hymowitz

https://www.city-journal.org/metoo-movement

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” We don’t know for sure whether it was Mark Twain who came up with that bon mot, but it has proved useful enough to deserve a creator of that stature. It comes in particularly handy in times like these, when many seemingly unprecedented events turn out to have familiar echoes from the past.

Such is the case with the #MeToo movement. Extraordinary as this post–Harvey Weinstein moment may seem, it’s not the first time that American women have risen up to protest male misbehavior. During the nineteenth century, women were in the vanguard of reform movements dedicated to fighting licentiousness, most of it male, and much of it sexual. If you squint hard enough to blot out the Victorian archaisms, these #MeToo prototypes can yield considerable insight into today’s reckoning.

Sociopolitical movements like #MeToo have taken root in many parts of the world, but no soil has been quite as fertile for them as that of the United States. Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by this peculiarity of American life during his canonical visit in 1831. “Not only do [Americans] have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part,” he wrote, “but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small.” The Frenchman had a theory about the origin of this early form of community organizing: in a democracy, he suggested, where, unlike aristocracies, power was diffuse, individuals had to join together in groups to wield any influence over their social arrangements. Associations—particularly in the Northeast and the Midwest—were a civic by-product of America’s brand of equality, freed from feudal, hierarchical memory.

If the 26-year-old wunderkind noticed the role that women were playing in these democratic associations, he didn’t mention it. Yet women were the majority, as well as the most energized, of converts during the Second Great Awakening, and they brought their enthusiasm to great moral causes of the era, beginning with a battle against prostitution, a fact of collective life in those days. Ladies of the night were ubiquitous in ports where sailors and other male transients congregated; according to historian Stephen Mintz, as many as 10 percent of women in antebellum cities at least occasionally walked the streets. In an economy that had yet to create jobs for textile “mill girls” and telephone operators, the world’s oldest profession was one of the few available to single women without means. It was a more lucrative choice than the even more prevalent domestic service, though it was not unknown for servants themselves to freelance during free hours. During the Great Awakening, evangelical ministers denounced the practice, but it was their female congregants who turned the cause into a Tocquevillian movement: in 1834, they founded the Female Moral Reform Society in New York. Within a few years, the society had 400 chapters, mostly in northeastern and midwestern states.

Georgetown Prep after the Smear By Patrick Coyle

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/georgetown-prep-kavanaugh-confirmation-media-circus-damage/

The media circus is gone, but mess they left behind remains.

On the afternoon of Thursday, September 13, as parents arrived at our school to pick up students, a journalist from a major network camouflaged herself among them, avoiding identification at our front gate. She was subsequently found snooping around the halls of our main building and was escorted off campus. She later apologized.

But others soon followed. One reporter from a national newspaper deceived his way into our library so that he could rummage through old yearbooks. Some of our alumni had news crews staked out in front of their houses. Reporters were even harassing their elderly parents, tracking down home addresses and banging on doors, demanding interviews.

Journalists phoned us by the dozens, mostly demanding to know how long we had presided over a circus of drug and alcohol abuse, misogyny, and criminality. At least these reporters gave us the courtesy of a call. Many other national media outlets simply ran archly critical stories without bothering to contact us at all.

This was all necessary for American democracy, some of them explained, since one of our graduates had become a Supreme Court nominee. In a sense, that’s understandable. But as I learned firsthand, the lens trained on Georgetown Prep was warped, obscuring details that ran counter to preferred narratives, and the resulting portrait of our community was grossly distorted.

We were garishly described as an institution that “celebrated heavy drinking,” “a troubled, morally questionable symbol of a snobby elite [where] alcohol was an integral part of the school’s identity,” and a place where “disregard or mistreatment of women [was] widely accepted.” A “debauched . . . scene of cloistered young men.” And those are just a few such insults from the more than 60 articles that appeared about Prep in the Washington Post alone.

Update: 11 Dead in Synagogue Shooting; Suspect Had ‘Assault Rifle’ and ‘At Least Three Handguns’ By Paula Bolyard

https://pjmedia.com/trending/law-enforcement-update-on-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting/

Law enforcement officials gave additional insight into Saturday’s shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue in an afternoon press conference.

Pittsburgh public safety director Wendell Hissrich told reporters, “There were 11 fatalities as a result of the shooting incident” perpetrated by Robert Bowers, 46, of Pittsburgh. Hissrich added, “There were no children” among the victims.

“At 9:55 this morning,” Hissrich said, “calls were received at the Allegheny County Emergency Operations Center that an active shooter was inside the building.”

“Apparently, an initial contact between the subject and the officers occurred, injuring two of the officers. Two additional officers were injured during the altercation — those were SWAT officers,” he continued. “Multiple agencies responded to this incident this morning and without their courage, this tragedy would have been far worse.”

In addition to the 11 fatalities, there were six people injured, including four police officers, he said. That number does not include the suspect.

Pittsburgh police chief Scott Schubert said that he arrived at the scene shortly after the shooting. “Watching those officers run into the danger to remove people to get them to safety was unbelievable,” he said, noting that the injured officers and SWAT team members are in stable condition at area hospitals.

FBI Special Agent Bob Jones described the attack as the “most horrific crime scene I’ve seen in 22 years with the FBI.” Members of the Tree of Life synagogue “conducting a peaceful service in their place of worship were brutally murdered by a gunman targeting them simply because of their faith,” he said. CONTINUE AT SITE

In Europe, Free Speech Bows to Sharia By Andrew C. McCarthy

Europeans are free to say only what the courts let them.

When he was 50, the prophet of Islam took as his wife Aisha, who was then six or seven. The marriage was consummated when Aisha was nine.

This is not a smear. It is an accurate account of authoritative Islamic scripture. (See, e.g., Sahih-Bukhari, Vol. 5, Book 58, Nos. 234–236.) Yet it can no longer safely be discussed in Europe, thanks to the extortionate threat of violence and intimidation — specifically, of jihadist terrorism and the Islamist grievance industry that slipstreams behind it. Under a ruling by the so-called European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), free speech has been supplanted by sharia blasphemy standards.

The case involves an Austrian woman (identified as “Mrs. S.” in court filings and believed to be Elisabeth Sabaditsch Wolff) who, in 2009, conducted two seminars entitled “Basic Information on Islam.” She included the account of Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha. Though this account is scripturally accurate, Mrs. S. was prosecuted on the rationale that her statements implied pedophilic tendencies on the part of the prophet. A fine (about $547) was imposed for disparaging religion.

Mrs. S. appealed, relying on Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. That provision purports to safeguard “freedom of expression,” though it works about the same way the warranty on your used car does — it sounds like you’re covered, but the fine print eviscerates your protection.

Article 10 starts out benignly enough: Europeans are free “to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” But then comes the legalese: One’s exercise of the right to impart information, you see, “carries with it duties and responsibilities.” Consequently, what is called “freedom” is actually “subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties” that the authorities decide “are necessary in a democratic society,” including for “public safety” and for “the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others.”

Jonathan Foreman: A Febrile Summer in a Divided Capital

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/10/febrile-summer-divided-capital/

Even if you ignore the rancorous Brexit debate and Remainers’ predictions that put the seven plagues of Egypt to shame, there have been plenty of entirely unrelated developments to make a Briton think seriously of buying a one-way ticket to the Antipodes or Americas.

The crowds sunbathing in the parks and strolling the shopping streets in their shorts and T-shirts seem so happy and carefree that if you didn’t read or watch the news you might have little sense that Britain may be finally, genuinely going down the tubes. Indeed, their calm and good cheer make you almost wonder if the panic, anger and bitterness so prevalent among the political and media classes might be misguided or at least excessive.

It was different last summer. In June, during the humid, febrile days after the terrible Grenfell fire, which came on the heels of Theresa May’s election debacle and assembly of a shaky coalition government, the capital felt as if it was on the verge of revolution. But then things calmed down and there was nothing like the run of headlines that over the past few months have prompted pundits to wonder if the UK as we know it is falling apart.
This dispatch appears in October’s Quadrant.
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Some of the more frightening ones may well be (consciously or unconsciously) part of the continuing campaign to stop or reverse the dismayingly chaotic Brexit process. These include the reports from both inside and outside the government that warn of catastrophic shortages of food, antibiotics and other vital goods come March 2019.

The UK may well face some difficult times after next spring, but it does seem a little unlikely that the country will be devastated by the equivalent of Napoleon’s naval blockade. It is not obvious that the hostility of M Barnier’s European Commission is shared by all the EU member governments, and surely one thing that has been made clear by various efforts to enforce sanctions on rogue regimes during the last decades is that there is no pariah state so despised and hateful that France, Germany and others won’t fight to trade with it. (As for the dark talk of civil unrest when or if Britain ceases to be a member of the EU, such an outcome seems more probable if the predominantly “Remainer” political class tries to overturn or reverse the referendum.)

However, there have been plenty of developments completely unrelated to Brexit or the EU that might make a Briton think a bit more seriously about buying a one-way ticket to the Antipodes or Americas.

This week, for instance, there was the report that a Birmingham prison whose management had been outsourced to a well-connected private company was actually being run by prison gangs, and was therefore even more chaotic and drug-ridden than the state-run penitentiaries. This was soon followed by an announcement by the Justice Secretary (a slow-witted fellow even by the undemanding standard that the Prime Minister prefers for her cabinet colleagues) that instead of enforcing the prison ban on mobile phones he would hand one to every prisoner. As is widely known (at least outside the Ministry of Justice), convicts use mobile phones not just to run their criminal enterprises from inside but to arrange the intimidation of witnesses and to put pressure on prison guards by targeting their families.

The Breakneck Islamization of Turkey’s Education System by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13158/turkey-education-islamization

After the minimum age for Quran studies in Turkey was abolished in 2011, a project named “Pre-school religious education through Koran classes” was piloted in ten cities across the country in 2013. The project teaches “basic Islamic information” to children between the ages of four and six. Since then, the number of “pre-school Koran classes” has continued to rise.

The number of religious “imam hatip schools” has climbed from 450 in 2002 to 4,112 in 2017. Meanwhile, there are only 302 specialized science high schools in the country.

“There are religious organizations… [that] pump their own ideologies on children through classes in ‘values education’ … We know that they use one-sided language that demonizes those who are different. We observe that the students who are exposed to such curricula consider those who think differently to be their ‘enemies.’… When one looks at countries such as Afghanistan, where similar steps were taken, one can see where this process leads to.” — İlknur Bahadır Kaya, chairman of the Parents’ Association.

Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) is set to receive an additional two billion liras (around $350 million), boosting its budget from last year’s 8.3 billion liras ($1.5 billion) to 10.4 billion ($1.8 billion) liras for 2019, according to the newspaper Cumhuriyet. This increase in budget surpasses that of 29 other major state institutions, including the ministries of the interior and foreign affairs.

The Diyanet, the state body regulating the role of Islam in Turkey, apparently has, as one of its main missions, transforming the country’s education system. It is now fully engaged in shaping school curricula.

After the minimum age for Quran studies in Turkey was abolished in 2011, a project named “Pre-school religious education through Quran classes,” implemented by the Diyanet, was piloted in ten cities across the country in 2013. The project teaches the Quran and “basic Islamic information” to children between the ages of four and six. In 2015, the Diyanet decided to expand to program to “all places where physical conditions are suitable.” Since then, the number of “pre-school Koran classes” has continued to rise. It has increased to 150,000 students in five years.

The Real News the Media Ignored This Week By Chris Buskirk

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/26/the-real-news

Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? That should be the Democrats’ midterm motto.

Brett Kavanaugh appeared to be a modest, self-effacing family man with a lovely wife and two daughters. He’d devoted his career to the law and taught at Yale where he had earned the respect of colleagues. But really, he’s an especially promiscuous satyr who had somehow managed to avoid detection for decades. So committed was he to his disguise that he managed to live his entire adult life as a model of personal piety and family devotion.

Then there is Trump’s war on the media that makes it unsafe to be a journalist in America. How do we know this? Because these intrepid journalists brave their way to the studios of CNN and MSNBC to tell us about how repressed they are. They tell us about the unprecedented violence brought on by President Trump’s incendiary language. For most of this week, the media couldn’t find time to talk about how the Senate Judiciary Committee referred creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti and his client Julie Swetnick to the Justice Department for criminal investigation for lying to Congress about Kavanaugh.

They couldn’t be bothered to cover the House interview with George Papadopoulos which Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) said showed “the blatant double standard for the politically connected” like Andrew McCabe, who lied to the FBI and not only walked free but got a full pension. Nor was there any interest in new polls showing Republicans gaining ground in congressional races across the country.

A few weeks before an election that should be big news. But it wasn’t. Instead there was wall to wall coverage of a dozen packages sent to prominent Democrats containing devices that look like a particularly inept third grader’s approximation of a bomb. Not even the recipients thought they were in danger as evidenced by the fact that the folks at CNN took the time to unwrap theirs and lay it out on the counter in the office kitchen, photograph it, and send some indignant tweets about it, before going outside and telling each other how brave they were.

In the meantime though there has been a rash of political violence. Against Republicans. Kellen Michael Sorber has been charged with setting fire to the Albany County Republican headquarters in September. On October 11, the windows of the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City were smashed and a message was left stating, “Our attack is merely a beginning.” The Nebraska Republican Party’s headquarters had their windows smashed and “Abolish ICE” was spray painted on the wall [say when]. The windows at House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield office were also broken.