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Ruth King

UK Parliament: Little Interest in Grooming Gangs by Andrew Jones

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12662/britain-parliament-grooming-gangs

The approach the British authorities have taken in response to this national disaster appears largely based on countering secondary issues — most notably, individuals that protest the grooming, including at one point the arrest of parents attempting to rescue their daughter from her abusers.

There also seems to be a tacit alliance with much of the media to silence public discourse and, when all else fails, outright suppression.

In response to Britain’s ongoing sexual grooming scandal, a group of 20 MPs signed an open letter to recently appointed Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, urging coordinated action.

As the UK Parliament has 650 MPs, the 20 signatories constitute a mere 3% willing to support the protection of children subjected to gang-rape, trafficking and torture, and at times murder. Such a paltry number of politicians willing to speak out against child sexual slavery seems yet more evidence of the moral bankruptcy of Britain’s political elite and how low the country appears to have sunk.

Britain’s media elite have ignored the letter. Reporting has been limited to the local press in Oxford and Rochdale — areas afflicted by grooming — as well as a few alternative media outlets such as Breitbart London, and indirect reference on Sky News.

A key signatory of the letter, Rotherham MP Sarah Champion, whose constituency was made infamous by grooming, was forced from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party front bench in 2017 for speaking openly about the prevalence of “British Pakistani men” in this type of child sexual exploitation. Given that Sajid Javid, then Communities Secretary, spoke in support of Champion, it is perhaps intentional that this letter was addressed to him in his new role as Britain’s first Muslim Home Secretary.

The United Nations’ Patently Ridiculous Report on American Poverty By Nikki Haley

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/united-nations-report-on-american-poverty-distorts-and-misrepresents/

It is unnecessary, politically biased, factually wrong, and a waste of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Last month, the United Nations released a report about poverty in America. A single researcher spent two weeks in our country, visiting four states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. His report was harshly critical, condemning America for “punish[ing] those who are not in employment,” among other farcical notions.

Everyone knows there is poverty in America. Thousands of public officials at the federal, state, and local levels of government attempt to address poverty, as they should. Thousands more nonprofit, charitable, and religious organizations honorably dedicate themselves to fighting poverty in our country.

As governor of South Carolina, I saw firsthand the struggles of poor communities that often lack the economic and educational opportunities enjoyed elsewhere in America. And we did something about it. During my administration, we brought record-breaking numbers of new jobs to South Carolina, spanning each one of our state’s 46 counties; moved thousands of citizens from welfare to work; and made unprecedented investments into the education of students in economically challenged parts of our state. The fight against poverty is a complicated, multi-dimensional battle, but it is one that has the attention of Americans at all levels.

It certainly has the attention of the Trump administration. Its economic policies have helped bring unemployment down to the lowest level in decades. Its tax-reform law included a landmark measure to direct billions in new capital into distressed communities in every state.

In Germany, the ‘Immigration’ Worm Has Turned By Michael Walsh

https://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/in-germany-the-immigration-worm-has-turned/

I’m in Berlin at the moment, staying not far from Checkpoint Charlie, through which I passed many times during the Cold War, and not far from the spot where, sledgehammer in hand, I did my small bit to dismantle the Berlin Wall in November of 1989. So much has changed in the nearly 30 years since that memorable moment: McDonald’s and KFC have franchises on either side of the intersection of the Friedrichstrasse and the Zimmerstrasse, where the Wall briefly opened to allow a narrow passage from the American sector’s principal checkpoint across a short block flanked on both sides by the Todesstreifen of barbed-wire and machine-gun free-fire fields. On the western side — actually the southern side, by the compass — the fearsome Wall was gaily painted with graffiti; on the other, it was a blank slate of gray concrete, fully reflective of the Stalinist Leftist orthodoxy of the only captive nation that even remotely tried to make a go of the Marxist economic, social, and moral lie.

Now, three decades after the Wall came down, I’m back in East Berlin talking to old and new German friends — most of them Ossis, or East Germans — about the current state of Germany’s overriding social and political issue: the influx of more than one million cultural aliens, mostly from the Muslim ummah and thus by faith and profession profoundly opposed to Western Judeo-Christian civilization. And their answer is… not good for the Merkel administration. CONTINUE AT SITE

Dick Durbin is making an ass of himself By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/dick_durbin_is_making_an_ass_of_himself.html

Can Dick Durbin stifle himself for a bit? The vaunted senator from Illinois is saying one absurd thing after another, putting the jackass back big into the Democratic Party label.

Seriously, get a load of this first one from the senior senator from Illinois:

A top Democrat in the Senate said his vulnerable colleagues from red states “understand” that fighting to stop President Trump’s Supreme Court pick is more important than getting re-elected in 2018.

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., was pressed on this “dilemma” that Democrats face as the 2018 midterms approach during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“Staying united to stop the Supreme Court pick could cost you red state senators. Not fighting it as hard might allow the red state senators to get re-elected and get Democrats in control of the Senate. That’s your dilemma,” host Chuck Todd posited on Sunday.

President Trump hasn’t even named his pick for the newly vacant Supreme Court seat, and already Durbin is telling his fellow Democrats (not himself, of course) to fall on their swords by obstructing the nomination, no matter who it might be, and forget about their own careers. Do it for the cause. Take one for the team. Because many Democratic senators have found themselves in a quandary over this upcoming nomination – they are running for re-election in red states and know that obstructing the nomination as Democrats won’t go over well with voters. Many are thinking of jumping ship to stay in office. So in Durbin’s view, it’s better “a lost seat for thee, but not for me.”

UN’s Human Rights Council reeks of hypocrisy; US was right to leave: by Lawrence Haas

https://www.sacbee.com/news/news-services/article214350249.html
The Human Rights Council’s recent vote to investigate Israel for its response to “protests” on its Gaza border highlights everything that’s wrong with this hypocritical body, and why the United States was right to leave it.

First, the vote reflects the council’s longstanding obsession with Israel, which has far more to do with its status as the world’s only Jewish state than with any serious council concerns about the world’s biggest human rights problems.

The United Nations created the council in 2006 to replace its Human Rights Commission, which by then had become an object of derision due to its anti-Israel bias.

In 2002, professor and dogged U.N. watcher Anne Bayefsky reported that over the previous 30 years, the commission spent 15 percent of its time on Israel and made it the subject of a third of its country-specific resolutions.

The commission’s successor, however, has only proved worse. The council has made Israel its only permanent agenda item, which means that it discusses the Jewish state at each of its three meetings a year but it doesn’t necessarily discuss such true humanitarian horrors as North Korea, Syria and Venezuela, nor such regular human rights abusers as China, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Cuba.

Solzhenitsyn 40 Years Later By Herbert London

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/solzhenitsyn_40_years_later.html

In June 1978 Solzhenitsyn delivered the commencement address at Harvard entitled “A World Split Apart.” It was a speech devoted to the emergence of “different worlds,” including our own Western society. On one side of the divide is a freedom diverted to unbridled passion with the accumulation of material riches to be valued above all else. Man is the center in this equation as there isn’t any power above him resulting in a moral poverty searching for meaning.

In days after this speech, the Fourth Estate accused Solzhenitsyn of “losing his balance,” of representing a “mind split apart.” He thought one can say what one thinks in the USA, but democracy expects to be admired. The press argued “the giant does not love us.”

Was Solzhenitsyn right? He did use positive signs in the heartland. “Gradually another America began unfolding before my eyes, one that was small town, and robust, the heartland, the America I had envisioned as I was writing this speech.”

Mad-Eleine Albright’s New Book….see note please

Nothing here but a halfbright screed against Trump with vile comparisons to Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin and praise for herself and Hillary Clinton….rsk

“She frequently nudges the reader to make connections between the president of the United States and past dictatorships. She reminds us who first coined the Trumpian phrase “drain the swamp”. It was drenare la palude in the original, Mussolini Italian. She quotes Hitler talking about the secret of his success: “I will tell you what has carried me to the position I have reached. Our political problems appeared complicated. The German people could make nothing of them… I…reduced them to the simplest terms. The masses realised this and followed me.” Sound familiar?”

The former US secretary of state decries the global rise of authoritarianism in her new book, Fascism: A Warning, and talks about Trump, Putin and the ‘tragedy’ of Brexit

Madeleine Albright has both made and lived a lot of history. When she talks about a resurgence of fascism, she says it as someone who was born into the age of dictators. She was a small girl when her family fled Czechoslovakia after the Nazis consumed the country in 1939. After 10 days in hiding, her parents escaped Prague for Britain and found refuge in Notting Hill Gate, “before it was fancy”, in an apartment which backed on to Portobello Road. Her first memories of life in London are of disorientation. “I didn’t have a clue. My parents were very continental European and I didn’t have siblings early on. I felt isolated.” As Hitler unleashed the blitz, “every night we went down to the cellar where everybody was sleeping.”

She has since been back to the redbrick block in Notting Hill. “I rang the doorbell of the person who lived in the apartment – it was a lot smaller than I remember it. I asked a stupid question: whether the cellar still existed. They said: ‘Of course the cellar exists.’ So they took me down and I had this moment – the green paint was exactly the same. I remember the green paint.”

It was decades later that she discovered that, though she was raised a Catholic, her parentage was Jewish and many of her family had been murdered in the Holocaust, including three grandparents.

From Notting Hill, the family moved out of central London to Walton-on-Thames, where they shared a house “with some other Czechs”. The bombs fell there too, but she enjoyed “every minute” of this part of her childhood. “I went to school and we spent a lot of time in air raid shelters singing A Hundred Green Bottles Hanging on the Wall.” It was less terrifying than it might have been because “my parents had a capacity of making the abnormal seem normal”.

Is Islam “Exceptional”? by A. Z. Mohamed

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12635/exceptional-islam

“Western observers… will need to accept Islam’s vital and varied role in politics and formulate policies with that in mind, rather than hoping for secularizing outcomes that are unlikely anytime soon, if ever.” — Shadi Hamid, author of Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World.

“‘Islamic exceptionalism’ is neither good nor bad. It just is.” — Shadi Hamid.

“As the transition from pre-modernity to modernity proceeds with its twists and turns, the Muslim world, over time will progress and develop to the point that eventually there will arise a theology, as occurred in Christendom, consistent with the needs of Muslims and reconciled with modernity.” — Salim Mansur, author of The Qur’an Problem and Islamism: Reflections of a Dissident Muslim.

In early May, the Brookings Institution held a lecture and panel discussion in India on the question of whether Islam is “exceptional” and what it means for the future of Western democracy. A main speaker at the event was Shadi Hamid, author of a 2016 book, Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World.

Hamid, an American Muslim, repeated the thesis of his book, summarized in an op-ed in Time magazine.

“Because of its outsize role in law and governance, Islam has been — and will continue to be — resistant to secularization,” he wrote. He explained:

“Unlike Jesus Christ, the Prophet Muhammad was a theologian, a preacher, a warrior and a politician, all at once. He was also the leader and builder of a new state, capturing, holding and governing new territory. Religious and political functions, at least for the believer, were no accident. They were meant to be intertwined in the leadership of one man.

“Second, more than merely the word of God, for Muslims, the Quran is God’s direct and literal speech. It is difficult to overstate the centrality of divine authorship. This does not mean Muslims are literalists; most are not. But it does mean the text cannot easily be dismissed as irrelevant.”

This means, he added, that “Western observers… will need to accept Islam’s vital and varied role in politics and formulate policies with that in mind, rather than hoping for secularizing outcomes that are unlikely anytime soon, if ever.”

Another Day, Another Blow to Freedom Publishers’ appeasement of Islam proceeds apace. Bruce Bawer

This is a story about the appeasement of Islam. To be specific, it’s about appeasement on the part of book publishers. To be even more specific, it’s about a little mom-and-pop operation known as Random House, and a German author named Thilo Sarrazin.

I’m not unfamiliar with Random House. In 2006, Doubleday, a division of that storied firm, published my book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. Although it sold briskly from the git-go, it was (like many other honest books on the subject) delicately ignored by most of the mainstream media. Nonetheless, it made the New York Times bestseller list and was translated into several languages – and the paperback edition, published by Broadway Books, another Random House subsidiary, continues to sell. In 2009, Doubleday put out my follow-up book, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. Whereas While Europe Slept had warned of the dangers attendant upon Islam’s rise in the West, Surrender addressed the growing Western tendency to assuage alleged Muslim sensitivities, largely through censorship and self-censorship: museums were putting away art works that might offend the Prophet’s followers; universities were installing propaganda factories disguised as centers of Middle Eastern Studies; Hollywood, which during World War II had specialized in patriotic cheerleading, was responding to the “War on Terror” with films in which Americans were bad guys and Muslims were victims; and while cops and prosecutors were doing all they could to avoid bringing Muslim malefactors to justice, they were hauling critics of Islam into court for “hate speech.”

As for book publishers – well, let’s not forget that the first big modern example of cultural jihad in the West was the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses, he thundered, had insulted “Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur’an.” At the time, that debacle seemed a one-off, and publishers, to their credit, continued to put out books that criticized Islam. The record, however, was not spotless. When Yale University Press, in 2009, released an account of the Danish cartoon crisis, it decided not to include the actual cartoons – a ludicrously cowardly move. Yale wasn’t alone. Over time, it became clear that major presses were becoming more timid on this front: while happy to churn out agitprop by the likes of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, they were growing increasingly uneasy with blunt truth-telling. Hence more and more writers in this genre have had to put out their books themselves. (In Norway, where I live, one of the top bestsellers of 2015, Hege Storhaug’s Islam: Den 11. landeplage – which will appear in English later this year as Islam: Europe Invaded, America Warned – was self-published.)

Germany: Muslim Migrant Beheads Baby Merkel’s response? Muzzle the media. Robert Spencer

It happened back in April, although it was reported only in the German media; apparently the English-language media didn’t find it newsworthy that a Muslim migrant beheaded his one-year-old daughter on a Hamburg train platform. But the sheer horror of this incident has been compounded now by Angela Merkel’s government, which has reportedly banned further reporting on the incident. Anything to keep as many Germans as possible ignorant and complacent regarding just how devastating the Muslim migrant influx into Germany really is.

“According to eyewitnesses,” says one news report on this incident, “the 33-year-old suspect, Mourtala Madou, beheaded his one-year-old daughter in front of a horrified crowd of commuters at Jungfernstieg station on Thursday April 12, and then stabbed his German girlfriend, the mother of the child. The suspect allegedly stabbed the infant from behind, while she was sitting in her stroller, and then severed her neck. He then allegedly stabbed his girlfriend in the chest before fleeing the scene, dumping the murder weapon in a train station trash can. He was later arrested…. Eyewitnesses can be heard saying that the suspect cut the babies [sic] head off.”

Police spokesman Timo Zill said the murders were “very targeted”; eyewitnesses described them as an “honor killing.” In beheading the baby, Madou also utilized a form of killing especially favored by Islamic jihadis, heeding the Qur’anic injunction, “When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks” (47:4).

In response, the Merkel government did not open an investigation of honor killing, or of Muslim migrant crime. It did not commission a study of Islamic theology and culture, and the effects of importing a large number of people from a culture of violence into Germany. Instead, “German media has been allowed by the government to report on the murder of the mother, but Angela Merkel’s pro-migrant government banned German media outlets from reporting on the decapitated baby. Germany’s largest newspaper, Bild, report on the death of the mother of four, without mentioning the details regarding the barbaric murder of her child.”