RUTHFULLY YOURS

The library in Arvika surprised patrons by offering Arabic language courses. Many Swedes wondered if offering courses in Swedish to the Arabic-speaking immigrants would not be more productive. The library, however, does not offer any such service.

The Immigration Service released a new report on April 8, entitled “Are You Married?”, which showed how its own case officers allow child marriages.

Swedish authorities have approved hundreds of polygamous marriages among immigrants, law professor Göran Lind revealed on April 4.

According to the police, the man became angry with his wife, because she was trying to learn Swedish.

April was the month when the Islamist scandals in the Green Party (Miljöpartiet) came one after the other. The Green Party sits in Sweden’s government, along with its coalition partner, the Social Democrats (Socialdemokraterna). They have made themselves known as a party favoring open borders, and with a passionate love for multiculturalism. These infatuations are precisely why the party has been a perfect candidate for Islamist infiltration. Within theGreen Party, even to ask the question whether Muslims view Islam as a political force has been considered rude and “Islamophobic.”

On April 17: Housing Minister Mehmet Kaplan was forced to resign after it was reported that he not only socialized with Islamists and fascists, but also compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.

April 20: A would-be member of the Green Party executive, Yasri Khan, refused to shake hands with a female TV reporter, Ann Tiberg, causing much hoopla and eventually forcing Khan to resign.

April 22: The scholar Lars Nicander of the Swedish Defense University warned that the Green Party may have been infiltrated by Islamists: “It is obvious they are trying to get in and ascend to positions of trust,” Nicander told the daily Aftonbladet.

Green Party party secretary Anders Wallner commented on Nicander’s remarks:

“What is being put forth by Lars Nicander is something we take very seriously. Extremism has no place in our party, something our spokespersons have been very clear about.”

April 23: Semanur Taskin, spokesperson for the Green Youth in Stockholm, decided to drop out of politics. As a Swedish Muslim, she said, she felt “misunderstood and no longer secure in politics.” Taskin is also a member of an organization founded by Mehmet Kaplan — Swedish Muslims for Peace and Justice (Svenska muslimer för fred och rättvisa). The organization is best known for working for Muslim rights in Sweden; participating in “Ships to Gaza,” and criticizing all things they perceive as “Islamophobic” or the government’s work against Islamism.

Thanks to the lifting of sanctions, the prize for best Holocaust cartoon was lifted as well. Iran is now offering $50,000 for the best Holocaust cartoon, more than quadruple last year’s prize, which was $12,000.

The competition is expected to draw participants from more than 50 countries. It is sponsored by two organizations which are directly or indirectly linked to the Iranian regime: the Owj Media and Cultural Institute, funded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Sarsheshmeh Cultural Center, which is supported by the Islamic Development Organization (IDO). The Iranian parliament provides the IDO’s budget.

These kinds of Holocaust events and conferences in Iran are based on the notion that Holocaust did not occur.

This week, Iran is hosting its second annual Holocaust Cartoon Competition, even as some politicians and world leaders continue to argue that Iran is becoming a stabilizing force because it is re-joining the international community, by implementing the nuclear agreement and integrating into the global financial system.

The exhibition of Holocaust cartoons will open on May 14. Iran’s Holocaust Cartoon Competition reflects the Iranian regimes’ attempts to expand its efforts to promote anti-Semitism beyond the borders of its nation.

As Iran’s revenues are rising, thanks to the lifting of sanctions, the prize for the best Holocaust cartoon was lifted, as well. Iran is now offering $50,000 for the best Holocaust cartoon, more than quadruple last year’s prize, which was $12,000. According to Iran’s semi-official IRNA news agency, the conference is expected to draw participants from more than 50 countries.

The Iranian regime seems to be using global legitimacy, granted to its leaders by many Western politicians through the nuclear agreement and business deals, to promote the core pillars of its Islamic revolution, opposing the US and rejecting Israel’s right to exist, as well as its fundamental ideals.

In addition, it is worth noting that these kinds of global conferences, which work to deny the historical fact of the Holocaust, are aimed at undermining Israel’s legitimacy, as well as its right to exist. One of Iran’s major foreign policy and ideological objectives, which rests on the religious teachings of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, is the struggle against Israel.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is now hoping that the tragedy of the Abu Hindi family will push Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to revolt against Hamas.

Hamas is hoping that the tragedy will further undermine the credibility of the Palestinian Authority among Palestinians, shown as being complicit in the blockade on the Gaza Strip to prevent it from receiving weapons.

These charges and counter-charges constitute yet more proof that the PA and Hamas are determined to pursue their fight to the last Palestinian child.

What happened in the Abu Hindi home is an unspeakable family tragedy. What is happening to the Palestinian people, who have forever been led by leaders who care nothing for their well-being, is a tragedy of national proportions.

The tragic death of three Palestinian siblings, killed in a fire that destroyed their house in the Gaza Strip on May 6, demonstrates yet again the depth to which Palestinian leaders will go to exploit their children for political purposes and narrow interests.

The three children from the Abu Hindi family — Mohamed, 3 years old, his brother Nasser, 2 years old and their two-month infant sister Rahaf, died in a fire caused by candles that were being used due to the recurring power outages in the Gaza Strip.

On the one hand, the overwhelming cause of our current security problems is Islamist terror. It is the number one cause of concern to our police, intelligence services and everybody else with the nation’s security at heart. The public expects to be protected from such terror and expects that protection to come from that security establishment.

Yet all the time, a vocal lobby of Muslim and non-Muslim figures tries to pretend that the threat is not what it is, or that an attempt to depict any and all efforts to protect the country — even one phrase said by one actor in one simulated attack scenario — is some terrible crime of bigotry.

An actor saying “Allahu Akbar” in a simulated terror attack may be offensive to somebody’s religion. But if so, what is more offensive to their religion: one actor saying “Allahu Akbar” as part of a simulation, or countless Muslims around the world shouting the same phrase before real attacks in real time?

Sometimes you can see a whole society’s self-delusion in under a minute. Consider a single minute that occurred in Britain this week.

On Monday night, Greater Manchester Police staged a pre-prepared mock terrorist attack in a Manchester shopping centre in order to test emergency responses capabilities, readiness and response times. At one stage, an actor playing a suicide bomber burst through a doorway in a crowded part of the shopping centre and detonated a fake device.

It turned out that the actor pretending to be a suicide bomber had shouted the words “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is Greatest”) before the simulated attack. This may have helped make the simulation more realistic, but it had an immediate backlash. Nobody complained about the simulated attacks. What disturbed some people was the simulation of the signature Islamist sign-off.

Last night, I went to an event at the student central in Malet Street organised by supporters of the Labour Party. Part of the Birkbeck campus. The event was titled ‘Antisemitism, Zionism and the left’. The purpose was to address the ‘witch hunt’ taking place against anyone who criticises Israel. Something that is seen by some as part of a co-ordinated attack to unsettle Corbyn and remove him from power.

Given what was said, it is clear that Corbyn’s issue with antisemitism runs far deeper than a few councillors or MP’s. There were about 150 people there. Had there been a vote, every single card carrying Labour member present would probably have agreed, reposted or repeated, every single comment made by those suspended. Antisemitism is not a comment made in careless anger by these people, it is embedded in their world vision.

The panel was made up of 6 speakers.

Tariq Ali, writer, journalist and filmmaker
John Rose, author of the Myths of Zionism
Arthur Goodman:, Jews for Justice for Palestinians
Weyman Bennett, Unite Against Fascism
Lindsey German, Stop the War Coalition
Walter Wolfgang, veteran Labour Party activist
Labour and antisemitism denial

Thanks largely to Obama’s recent “engagement,” Stalinist Cuba has quickly become the absolute coolest place on earth.

Close on the heels of Katy Perry, The Rolling Stones and the Obama family itself, this week Karl Lagerfeld showcased his Chanel “cruise line” with a fashion-show extravaganza where Havana’s Prado Street served as the catwalk/runway for the world’s coolest models. Gisele Bundchen, Tilda Swinton and Vin Diesel monkey-shined for the paparazzi on the sidelines.

Not to be outdone, the Kardashians just arrived in Havana to shoot their next show.

Attaining such status for coolness among the world’s coolest people is not easy. Such coolness does not just land haphazardly in the lap of any random society. It must be worked on. So let us briefly peruse the societal and political characteristics that the cool and beautiful people (all liberals, needless to add) make a big media show of denouncing.

With this list in hand, we shall scan the world looking for the places where the political authorities most scrupulously eschew such wickedness and thus escape the vilification from cool people that befell such places as Apartheid South Africa; Pinochet’s Chile; Baltimore, Maryland; Ferguson, Missouri or —please give me a second to reach for the smelling salts here–the state of North Carolina.

Firstly, do not mistreat blacks. For heaven’s sake! Do not even jail blacks if they are convicted (by an independent jury during an internationally monitored trail) of being communist terrorists. South Africa learned this bitter lesson with Nelson Mandela.

In fact, the strictures of cool people stipulate that governmental authorities must not kill blacks even in self defense. Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland recently had this valuable lesson driven home by many cool people.

Given the above guidelines, you would certainly not want the distinction of having jailed and tortured– without even rudimentary due process– the most and longest suffering black political prisoners in the modern history of the Western hemisphere; many more political prisoners than were jailed by Apartheid South Africa, in fact.

Yazidi girls were “sold” in exchange for a few packs of cigarettes.

“They would come and take any girl against her will; if she refused, they would kill her on the spot.” — all quotes below from “Birvan,” on “Shabaab [Youth] Talk,” hosted by Ja’far Abdul, March 22, 2016.

“Anyone who walked by our room and liked us would just say ‘Let’s go.'”

“There were 48 ISIS members in that house, and we were two girls — two Yazidi girls.”

“What hospital?! They beat me even more!”

“I didn’t care if I got caught. Escape or death were both better than remaining there.”

A new televised interview, conducted in Arabic with a Yazidi girl who endured sexual captivity at the hands of the Islamic State, was published on March 22, 2016. It appeared on “Shabaab [Youth] Talk,” hosted by Ja’far Abdul.

The teenage girl, who went by the pseudonym of Birvan, was enslaved when she was 15 and endured months of captivity before she managed to escape. She is now 17. Based on the 40-minute interview, her story is as follows:

Yazidis were escaping from their war-torn village near Tel Affar, Iraq, when they were intercepted on the road by four ISIS operatives. The men swore that if the Yazidis would cooperate and answer some questions, no harm would befall them and they would be allowed to return home in peace. Asked how many Yazidis there were, Birvan says she recalls only 95 men and their families — “many, many women and children.”

WASHINGTON — A former congressman who was one of the foremost champions of human rights during his years on Capitol Hill returned today with one of the escaped Chibok schoolgirls to warn about the escalated threat posed by terror groups in West Africa.

Frank Wolf, who represented the 10th district of Virginia in the House from 1981 to 2015, is now a distinguished senior fellow at the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative and the Wilson Chair in Religious Freedom at Baylor University.

He told the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa and Global Affairs that he traveled to Nigeria in late February, where he listened to “hundreds of individuals in small villages, and remote areas miles off the main roads” in addition to “tribal leaders, pastors, mothers and fathers as well as government officials and our own Embassy personnel.”

Wolf stressed that the death toll wreaked by Boko Haram “makes them the single most deadly terror organization in the world” — with more victims than ISIS.

Boko Haram pledged allegiance to ISIS last year — a vow that makes the U.S. government their sworn enemy in addition to their old foe the Nigerian government, the former congressman stressed.

“Boko Haram attacks villages, conducts drive-by shootings, and uses young girls as suicide bombers. They target politicians and clerics for assassination, focusing on the symbols of Western advancement such as schools, hospitals, and churches, but also mosques. While no one has an exact number, thousands of young girls have been abducted by Boko Haram,” Wolf said.

“Just last month, we commemorated the two-year anniversary of the kidnapping of the Chibok Girls, and despite the loud protests in the West and the #BringBackOurGirls campaign championed by First Lady Michelle Obama, it is extremely doubtful that any of the girls have been released. One counselor with whom we spoke on the ground told us that the girls who have been captured may never return without a major concerted effort by the Nigerian government and the West, and if they do they will have been the victims of sexual violence, and are often times pregnant and will have been forced to convert to Islam.”

A young Nigerian woman who wore dark glasses during the hearing and went by the pseudonym Sa’a for protection described the April 14, 2014, attack on the Government Secondary School in Chibok.

It was the second Boko Haram school attack she survived.

“They marched us out of the school for miles to where their trucks were. Then they asked us to enter the trucks and said that if we did not, they were going to shoot all of us. We were all scared, so we entered the trucks,” Sa’a said. She and a friend decided to jump from their truck while it was careening down a forest road in the dark.

When Sa’a was first offered an opportunity to continue her education in the United States, she “felt like if we go to school again they are going to kidnap us wherever we are.” Her brothers were among those who convinced her to keep studying. CONTINUE AT SITE

Section 116 guarantees the right to worship in whatever manner your favoured creed prescribes — but only so long as beliefs and practices conform with the definition of religion laid down by the High Court. In this regard, Koranic edicts are somewhat problematic
Thumbing through the Constitution the other day I came across Section 116 covering freedom of religion:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

Trusty Wikipedia then sent me to what is regarded as a leading authority on the question of religion, the 1983 judgment of the High Court in Church of the New Faith v Commissioner for Pay-Roll Tax (Vic). In this case the court found that Scientology is a religion, despite some justices commenting that its practices were “impenetrably obscure”. In reaching this finding, the court argued that the definition of religion needed to be flexible while also recognising the need to be sceptical of disingenuous claims of religious practice. Justices Mason and Brennan held:

“… the criteria of religion [are] twofold: first, belief in a supernatural, Being, Thing or Principle; and second, the acceptance of canons of conduct in order to give effect to that belief.”

Justices Wilson and Deane were less prescriptive, setting out five “indicia” of a religion:

1/ a belief in the supernatural
2/ a belief in ideas relating to “man’s nature and place in the universe
3/ the adherence to particular standards, codes of conduct or practices by those who hold the ideas
4/ the existence of an identifiable group of believers, even if not a formal organisation
5/ the opinion of the believers that what they believe in constitutes a religion.

A definition by the fifth judge, Justice Murphy, included the supernatural, but was less prescriptive on other matters.

It led me to ponder how effectively Islam meets these requirements: belief in the supernatural (Being, Thing or Principal) and adherence to codes of conduct. In the Koran these are most commonly presented as the Five Pillars: the Affirmation, Prayer, Charity, Fasting, and the pilgrimage to Mecca. These are what might be called housekeeping precepts and form the populist face of Islam. The more significant codes are those which are driving resurgent Islamism.

Firstly, the Koran encourages an ethos of ‘us’ and ‘them’, where the ‘us’ are Muslims and the ‘them’ are Jews, disbelievers and Christians: that is, Muslims and the rest. For example:

You who believe, do not take the disbelievers as allies and protectors instead of the believers: do you want to offer God clear proof against you? (Women 4:144)

James Kirchick, a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative, is a columnist at Tablet. He is a former writer at large for Radio Free Europe based in Prague and a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow based in Berlin. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/202104/anti-semitism-labour-party-corbyn

The most charitable explanation for Jeremy Corbyn’s inept handling of the British Labour party’s latest anti-Semitism row (which have become so numerous that one wag created a clock counting the “number of days since [Labour’s] last anti-semitic incident”) is that it once again demonstrates his indecisive leadership style. After it was revealed that MP Naz Shah had authored social media posts advocating the deportation of Israeli Jews to America, likening the Jewish State to Nazi Germany, and comparing Zionism to al-Qaida, Corbyn initially refused to suspend the lady from Bradford West. Only after members of his own caucus publicly demanded it did Corbyn finally cave and withdraw the whip.

Then came the defense of Shah by Corbyn’s longtime friend and ally, former LondonMayor Ken Livingstone. In a truly weird, touring performance across several BBC programs meant to defend the disgraced Shah, Livingstone performed a sort of poor man’s impersonation of David Irving, claiming that Hitler was himself a Zionist. Digging his heels further, Livingstone claimed that Shah and other Labour figures accused of anti-Semitism have been smeared because “a real anti-Semite doesn’t just hate the Jews in Israel.” It takes one to know one.

Livingstone also said that he had “never heard anyone say anything anti-Semitic” in his near half-century involvement with Labour, which is a bit rich coming from the guy who once claimed that the Conservative Party was “riddled with homosexuals.”

Like his belated punishment of Shah, Corbyn only reluctantly suspended Livingstone from the party. And as if to send a signal to what is clearly a significant, and growing, anti-Semitic constituency within his party, Corbyn simultaneously reprimanded fellow Labourite John Mann MP, the heroic chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism who publicly confronted Livingstone and accused him of being a “Nazi apologist.”

As Labour and the media debate whether or not there is an anti-Semitism “crisis” within the party, nearly everybody seems to agree on at least one thing: Jeremy Corbyn himself is no anti-Semite. This generousness extends even to Corbyn’s harshest critics. “It is not that Labour’s leadership is anti-Semitic,” opines the New York Times’ Kenan Malik in a piece titled, “The British Left’s Jewish Problem.” “There is no reason to believe Corbyn is an anti-Semite,” writes the Financial Times’Robert Shrimsley in a column explaining why he can no longer vote for a Corbyn-led Labour Party.

On the contrary, there is every reason to believe Corbyn is exactly that.