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A Day in the Life of a Christian – Under Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws When, exactly, will the protests in the West begin? by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-christian-under-pakistans-blasphemy-laws/

In Pakistan, blasphemy laws carry a death sentence. These notorious statutes are often used abusively for settling personal scores, making personal gains or for satisfying grudges that one neighbor may have against another.

The country’s blasphemy laws are also used to target minority groups, and Christians are disproportionately affected. Indeed, roughly a quarter of all blasphemy accusations target Christians. Business rivals accuse Christian men of blasphemy as a means of destroying their business and reputation.

In 2020, a Christian man was sentenced to death for having allegedly sent “blasphemous” text messages to his former supervisor. He has been held in custody since 2013.

While the death sentence is seldom carried out, people accused of blasphemy are vulnerable to attack or murder by rampaging Muslim mobs. In June 2024, for instance, an elderly man was killed by mob violence after being accused of desecrating the Quran.

In its 2024 report, the human rights organization Open Doors found that anti-Christian violence in Pakistan has been at the maximum possible level for many years. Violence against Christians does not only include widely publicized attacks against the Christian community, such as in the city of Jaranwala in August 2023, but also small scale, localized, and increasingly persistent killings and attacks on Christians and churches, often spurred on by the country’s notorious blasphemy laws, which have been expanded in scope and punishment.

Christians in Pakistan are more frequently arrested and charged than acquitted, and although not all situations are linked with blasphemy accusations, those are the most prominent examples.

In 2023, Pakistan’s National Assembly passed legislation that increased punishment for some forms of blasphemy by raising the penalties from three years to no fewer than 10 years for insulting the companions, wives, and family members of Islam’s founder, Muhammad. The widening of the scope of blasphemy laws and the increase in penalties on conviction demonstrate the level of importance politics and society attach to this topic.

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Iranian People Are Ready To Bring About Regime Change. Does The West See It Coming? Shahin Gobadi

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/30/iranian-people-are-ready-to-bring-about-regime-change-does-the-west-see-it-coming/

It was like yesterday. Nearly 50 years to the day, on Dec. 31, 1977, the Shah held a state dinner for U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Watching on television from my family’s middle-class home in western Tehran, I was eager to hear Carter’s speech. Having visited the U.S. as a curious tourist the previous summer, I had learned a few things about the American political system.

In the middle of the speech, Carter toasted the Shah, saying Iran was “under your majesty, an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” At that, I turned to my uncle beside me, who was back in Iran after years of living in California, and asked, “Where is he talking about? Americans, with their embassy and all its personnel, really don’t know what is going on in Iran?”

Though my uncle abhorred the Shah as much as anyone, he was also keenly aware of the brutality that the Shah’s notorious secret police, SAVAK, used in crushing anyone who expressed such sentiment. That evening, he tried to assure me that the president of the strongest country in the world definitely knew things that an Iranian teenager did not, and that the Shah was irremovable. Our heated argument ended without resolution after my father intervened.

That autumn, I had witnessed anti-government demonstrations by university and high-school students. As an ordinary young Iranian nothing could stop my yearning for freedom. I will never forget the first time I heard the chant “down with the Shah in the streets of central Tehran. Though the Pahlavi dynasty appeared invincible after 57 years of iron-fisted rule, it was doomed less than 14 months after Carter made his remarks.

As an anti-mullah activist, I closely follow developments in Iran, and international policies towards it. It’s clear that Western leaders remain prone to the same faulty assumptions today as they were in 1977.

Despite the visible mistakes made in dealing with the Shah before the 1979 revolution, these errors have been repeated in handling the mullahs’ regime over the past 45 years. Just as Carter labeled the monarchy an “island of stability,” many experts in the U.S. and Europe continued to relay the view that the theocratic dictatorship is here to stay, and that regime change is not feasible.

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Abigail Shrier: How the Gender Fever Finally Broke

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-how-the-gender-fever-broke-trump-executive-order?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Loving, naive parents believed medical science was above politics and beyond question. Now, with the stroke of a pen, a destructive ideology has been eliminated.

When the history of 21st-century gender mania is written, it should include this signal entry: In 2020, a website called GoFundMe, usually a place to find disaster-relief appeals and charities for starving children, contained more than 30,000 urgent appeals from young women seeking to remove their perfectly healthy breasts.

Another entry, from June 2020: The New England Journal of Medicine, America’s platinum medical publication, published a piece explaining that biological sex is actually “assigned at birth” by a doctor—and not a verifiable fact, based on our gametes, stamped into every one of our cells. In fact, biological sex ought to be deleted from our birth certificates—the authors claimed—because a person’s biological sex serves “no clinical utility.” Breaking news to gynecologists.

Public schools began asking elementary kids whether they might like to identify as “genderqueer” or “nonbinary.” Any dissent from this gender movement was met with suppression. The American Civil Liberties Union’s most prominent lawyer, Chase Strangio, announced his intention to suppress Irreversible Damage, my book-length investigation into the sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls. “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he tweeted. Weeks later, Amazon deleted Ryan Anderson’s book criticizing the transgender medical industry.

I could go on. But as of January 28, 2025, I don’t have to.

On that day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing that the federal government would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” and that it would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

To the practitioners and promoters and numberless devotees of pediatric “gender affirming care”—a euphemism for the vast apparatus pushing junk science on vulnerable children and confused families—it came as a much-needed slap in the face.

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Test Scores Take Another Dive As Schools Pocket $Billions

Posted By on January 31st, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/31/test-scores-take-another-dive-will-anyone-be-held-accountable/

Another year, another disastrous National School Report card, the annual checkup on American students’ test scores. Yes, it’s bad. After predictably plunging during the COVID school-shutdown years, scores show no signs of snapping back. This is child abuse on a national level.

Our good friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity succinctly summed up the past five years: “The massive, unprecedented infusion of federal funds into schools under the guise of COVID recovery has abjectly failed to improve outcomes – but it has enriched the teacher unions.”

Yep. And the test scores remain abysmal, with no improvement. Average reading scores for 8th graders (America’s future workforce, mind you) have fallen from 263 in 2019 to 258 in 2024, erasing 33 years of slow improvement in reading.

Math is just as bad, if not worse. True, the 274 level is the same as in 2022, but it’s way below the level five years ago.

Worst of all, those at the bottom of the education performance race are getting worse, while a small cohort at the top are improving. This continues a trend, which began during the Obama administration.

“In 2011 and 2012, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to release states from the most onerous requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act,” explained Chad Aldeman, an education writer at The 74 website. “Congress made those policies permanent in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act.”

“No Child Left Behind”? Try “Most Children Left Behind.” Lower standards equals lower test scores. It’s that simple. You can expect the future gap between rich and poor to widen.

“If students can’t catch up, the learning loss may impact their future earnings and even become a drag on the U.S. economy,” noted a CNN piece in 2023.

This is a deadly serious problem. One calculation, made early in the COVID era, forecast a $2 trillion cumulative loss of income for America’s 50 million schoolkids; another more recent report estimated that “(s)tudents on average face 2 to 9 percent lower lifetime income depending on the state in which they attended school.”

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

What Happened When DEI Came to the Military?By Madeleine Rowley

Posted By on January 30th, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/dei-military-pete-hegseth-trump

A Free Press investigation reveals the extraordinary extent to which our armed forces put diversity over readiness. Pete Hegseth tells us that’s about to change.

Retired Air Force Brigadier General Christopher Walker, 59, spent almost two years as a senior adviser to the Air Force’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the Pentagon, attending dozens of meetings about implementing DEI initiatives. This was an unusual role given Walker’s career path: He had over 400 hours of combat flights and, most recently, had overseen West Virginia’s Air National Guard.

But in 2021, when the Air Force established its Office of Diversity and Inclusion, staffers assumed that Walker would be on board with their belief that DEI was a “warfighting imperative.” Why? Because Walker is black. But that assumption was wrong.

Walker was a mole.

Alarmed by DEI programs that were little more, in his view, than “Soviet indoctrination,” he leaked information to an organization called Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services (STARRS). This group consists of retired military veterans and civilians who oppose woke ideology in the military. They, in turn, alerted lawmakers like Sen. Tom Cotton and Rep. Mike Waltz about what they were hearing from Walker and other active duty service members who opposed the military’s diversity policies.

“No one delved into how I thought,” Walker told The Free Press. “They took one look at me and assumed I believed these things. I learned to listen and had to bite my tongue a lot.”

Walker, who prefers to go by his pilot call sign, Mookie, took notes and mostly kept his head down, so he could keep reporting what was going on. “I thought, If this is allowed to stand, all of the senior people within the [Department of Defense] are going to bring along this propaganda and get rid of anybody who doesn’t go along with it.”

Mookie recalled a private meeting in 2022 attended by generals and other key Pentagon staffers. At the meeting, Alex Wagner, the Air Force assistant secretary, asked the group to brainstorm ways to get the general public to accept drag shows on Air Force bases.

Close to retirement and with nothing to lose, Mookie finally spoke up. “I reminded the group that since the 1980s, the Air Force has not allowed lingerie shows,” he said. “They don’t allow burlesque shows. So why would we allow drag shows?”

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No J6er Got Justice in Biden’s D.C. By Jack Cashill

Posted By on January 30th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/01/no_j6er_got_justice_in_biden_s_d_c.html

“I fear that you will get more violence,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham on “Meet the Press” this Sunday. “Pardoning the people who went into the Capitol and beat up a police officer violently I think it was a mistake.”

In so saying, Graham, like so many pundits on the Right, showed how little he knows about what transpired on January 6, 2021, and during the four years afterward. In truth, the one thing all J6ers have in common, including the allegedly violent ones, is that they had no more chance at securing justice in Joe Biden’s D.C. than the Scottsboro Boys had in Jim Crow Alabama.

In 2020, 95 percent of the D.C. citizens voted against Donald Trump. If this jury pool were not poisoned enough, the media lied relentlessly to potential jurors about the “insurrection,” about “white supremacist” mobs, about cops being “murdered” — pick a number of dead cops, 1 to 5.

A change of venue would seem to have been in order, but none was allowed, and the juries lived down to expectations. They acquitted not a single J6er. Knowing the odds against them, hundreds of defendants pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit — including felony assault.

The Scottsboro Boys at least had the major media and the ACLU on their side, The J6ers had neither. On the first anniversary of January 6, for instance, all 51 ACLU chapters signed on to a letter drafted by the D.C. ACLU about “the white supremacists” that invaded the U.S. Capitol. The date was the only thing the ACLU got right:

“On January 6 of last year, the residents of D.C. were traumatized as an insurrectionist mob roamed our streets, harassed our neighbors, and violently broke into the Capitol Building, killing at least five people — all in an attempt to overthrow the counting of American citizens’ votes.”

What makes this letter doubly perverse is that the ACLU signees had a fresh memory of what an insurrectionist mob actually looked like. They saw elements of this mob in action over a three-week period that began on May 29, 2020.

On the night of May 29, rioters threw rocks, alcohol, and urine at the Secret Service agents guarding the White House, injuring more than 60 of them. On May 30, rioters defaced the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial. The next night they looted dozens of businesses and set St. John’s Episcopal Church on fire.

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U.S. What we know about the midair collision between a passenger jet and Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River By Faris Tanyos, Jordan Freiman

Posted By on January 30th, 2025

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/crash-reagan-national-airport-washington-dc/

A passenger jet and a Black Hawk helicopter collided in midair Wednesday and crashed into the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport near Washington, D.C., officials said. 

The plane, American Eagle Flight No. 5342, a regional jetliner, was carrying 60 passengers and four crew members, CBS News learned. There were three soldiers aboard the Sikorsky H-60, a Defense Department official told CBS News.

At least 19 bodies had been recovered by 2:50 a.m. ET, a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation told CBS News.

Here’s what we know so far about the crash:
What we know about the victims and the search for survivors

As of 2:50 a.m. Thursday, an official said at least 19 bodies had been recovered from the river, which contained three debris fields. The official said no survivors had been found.

In a news briefing early Thursday, officials said that police boats and divers were conducting search and rescue in the Potomac River.

“It’s a highly complex operation, the conditions out there are extremely rough for the responders. It’s cold. They’re dealing with relatively windy conditions,” District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Services Chief John Donnelly told reporters.    

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Mexico—Friend, Enemy, Neutral, or Something Else? After years of U.S. appeasement, Mexico exploits open borders, drug trade, and remittances—it’s time for America to enforce real consequences and reclaim control. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 30th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/30/mexico-friend-enemy-neutral-or-something-else/

Mexican nationals, likely cartel members, recently crossed the border and shot and wounded an American hiker. Did they assume that Joe Biden was still president, and so it was still a veritable open season on Americans without consequences?

Mexico also recently balked at allowing a U.S. transport plane to land, returning its own nationals apprehended as illegal aliens.

Was its attitude that Alejandro Mayorkas was still Homeland Security Secretary and thus working with Mexico to ensure that millions of illegal aliens could stay in the U.S. indefinitely?

After four years of Biden’s appeasement, Mexico seems to assume that it has a sovereign right to encourage the flight of millions of its own impoverished citizens illegally into the U.S. and further assumes that it can fast-track millions of Latin Americans through its territory and across our border.

Mexico either cannot or will not address the billions of dollars of raw fentanyl products shipped in—mostly from China—and then processed for export to the U.S. by its cartels across a nonexistent border.

Mexico seems to have little concern that some 75,000 Americans on average die from mostly Mexican-imported fentanyl each year—more deaths in just the last decade than all the Americans killed in action during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. Who then is our friend, and who is our enemy?

This appalling death toll is in part due to the deliberate efforts of the cartels to mask fentanyl as less deadly narcotics or camouflage the poison by lacing it into counterfeit prescription drugs.

Mexico encourages its expatriate illegal aliens to send back some $63 billion per year in remittances. That huge sum constitutes one of Mexico’s largest sources of foreign exchange, surpassing even its tourist and oil revenues.

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Tal Fortgang Stopping Anti-Semitism Goes Hand-in-Hand with Stopping Crime Soft-on-crime policy is “kindness to the cruel.”

Posted By on January 30th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/jewish-anti-semitism-crime

Amid open support for terrorist groups on campuses and city streets, violence against Jews has risen once again. The latest piece of evidence is the New York Police Department’s 2024 hate crime data, which show a decline in prejudice-driven crimes overall but a seven-percentage-point increase in anti-Jewish crimes compared with 2023. While Anti-Jewish hate crimes had been a plurality in past years, in 2024 they were a majority, accounting for 345 of 641 total hate crimes. It’s no wonder that Jewish life in America is migrating away from the five boroughs and toward the friendlier climes of South Florida.

While it’s a tragedy that Jews are bearing the brunt of hate-motivated violence, anti-Semitism is rarely, if ever, about the relationship between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. Anti-Jewish violence is, fundamentally, an indication of a sick civilization. Activist harassment against Jews is incidental to widespread contempt for the West, the promises of which the Jews—economically mobile, academically high-achieving, and largely law-abiding—show are within reach. Street violence against Jews is an outgrowth of the sickness identified by Jewish sages two millennia ago: “Those who are kind to the cruel are destined to be cruel to the kind.”

The anti-Jewish crimes tend to consist of petty violence, such as assaults, harassment, thefts, and vandalism. They’re often perpetrated by individuals who know that Jews (especially easily identifiable Haredi Jews) are unlikely to defend themselves. Petty thieves make off with money taken from Jews they likely see as enriching themselves by exploiting hardworking people. More often, these acts are driven by inchoate resentment against a people who look funny, behave differently, do not act tough, and yet, on the whole, seem to succeed.

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Bill Gates Angry at Elon Musk Is he joking or simply completely misinformed? by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 30th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bill-gates-angry-at-elon-musk/

Bill Gates is angry that Elon Musk is editorializing on X about the internal politics of Europe, from the United Kingdom to Germany. The outraged Gates claims we don’t allow (hired) foreigners to interfere in our domestic politics and don’t do that to others.

Really?

Is he joking, or simply completely misinformed?

1. Does Gates remember Christopher Steele, the British subject and ex-spy who interfered in the 2016 presidential election by fabricating a venomous dossier to destroy the Trump campaign? Yes, it is illegal to hire foreign nationals to work in American presidential campaigns, but that stopped neither Hillary Clinton who used three paywalls to hide her payments to Steele nor the FBI who hired him as an informant and helped spread his salacious lies throughout the media and government.

2. Does Gates remember the British Labor callout to enlist British activists and financial support for them to swarm American swing states in service to the 2024 Kamala Harris campaign?

3. Closer to home, has Gates ever complained about Swiss national and multibillionaire Johann Georg Wyss, and his multimillionaire donations that have poured into Democratic coffers to sway our elections via his “Hub Project”? That long-standing interference makes Musk’s postings seem amateurish in comparison.

4. For that matter, surely Gates is familiar with the chronic efforts of both the Clinton administration (by its own admission) and Obama administration to interfere in elections in Israel over some 20 years in a serial effort to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu— that included inter alia funding with taxpayer monies anti-Netanyahu political groups.

So please, Mr. Gates, spare us you very selective outage about Mr. Musk, given your prior deafening silence on hired foreign interference here and Democratic efforts to interfere in the elections of others—including fueling the Ukrainian opposition in the 2014 Ukrainian election.