Christians in Syria: Separating Grim Reality from Islamist Propaganda

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri

A recently released video of an interview with a Syrian rebel — and would-be-martyr – gives extraordinary insight into the mentality of the Syrian opposition. Believing that he’s speaking to European jihadist volunteers, the rebel says that Christians must be killed to impose a Sharia state in Syria, after which they will be given the classic choice: pay the jizya, convert or die. He also says that the rebels intend to move on from Syria to attack Europe and America.

Similarly, another rebel clearly explains that Islam must be the sole source of authority of the future Syrian state.  In the meantime, Syrian militants just massacred a Christian village’s population. Many Syrian Christians have been kidnapped and killed or never seen again.

Targeting Syrian Christians for kidnapping and attacks on churches is condemned by Human Rights Watch.  An U.N. Independent Inquiry on Syria concludes: “Entire communities are at risk of being forced out of the country or of being killed inside the country”—two cautiously worded reminders of the reality of Christian suffering in Syria at the hands of Islamist militants.  During a recent Congressional hearing on Syria’s minorities, witnesses rightly testified that Christians are more fearful for their lives than other group, because they are targeted for religious cleansing.

Despite the overwhelming amount of evidence concerning the plight of Syria’s Christians, there are those who are not convinced that Syrian Christians are being deliberately targeted in a religious purification campaign.

One of them is Muslim college student, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, who lives in the UK and authored the report Christians in Syria: Separating Fact from Fiction, published by The Henry Jackson Society, a UK neoconservative think tank.

Through psychological tactics, like his title Fact and Fiction, and the questioning of absolute figures, percentages and details, Al-Tamimi tries to use the conflicting reports regarding some specific events in order to generate doubts about the veracity of Syrian Christians’ persecution.

Among other things, by claiming that the narrative of those concerned about the Christians’ fate is not the only possible one, he subtly and surreptitiously creates suspicions that those people lie or distort the evidence.

The main problem with his report isn’t so much that it disputes specific details of events. Initially the Western media was rehashing the stories created by the insurgents’ anti-Assad propaganda. Later it became clear that these reports were one-sided and adjustments were made:

For nearly two years, SOHR [Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an organization of Syrian rebels in exile] has reported only acts of violence by the regime against the rebels. Mainstream international media like the BBC, al-Jazeera and al-Arabya, have relied on it as their sole source of news.

In recent months, several experts and Syrians interviewed by AsiaNews accused Western and Gulf State media of selective reporting. More recently, coverage has become more impartial, but SOHR continues to defend Islamic extremists to avoid losing support among rebel forces.

The jihadists are particularly ruthless in their hide-and-seek mind games, reminiscent of Hamas in its conflict with Israel.

In these conflicts many media reporters on the ground aren’t dispassionate observers but have a stake in the matter. As in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which several freelancers supplying news materials are under Hamas’ control, Western media’s flirtation with the Syrian rebels is well-documented.

For example, from Biased War Photography in Western Media:

[T]he portrayal of the “Syrian revolution” is decidedly one-sided… the images taken to supply Western Media all portrayed the Syrian rebels in a way to render sympathy and support.

Here are some other examples.

The Vatican’s news-gathering facilities are a welcome counterbalance to mainstream Western media’s bias.  Of course, there can be a margin of error or doubt concerning the details of some events. Yet what is problematic with the Henry Jackson Report is the arbitrariness with which its author, Al-Tamimi, cherry-picks his favorite sources and rejects those he doesn’t like, without giving reasons or criteria.

This is his account about Qusayr:

Modeled on the story of the ethnic cleansing of 90 per cent of Homs’ Christian population, stories began to circulate that 9,000 out-of-a-supposed population of 10,000 Christians had left the city of Qusayr on the basis of an ultimatum issued by a rebel battalion. However, the rebels in Qusayr denied this story. The truth about what happened, most likely, lies in the account given by a couple of reports in the Wall Street Journal.

So, reports from Jihad Watch and from the Vatican news agency Fides, Vatican Insider, and Barnabas Fund, aren’t to be trusted, but the rebels, who are, for all intents and purposes, the suspects of heinous crimes and so naturally deny it, are more trustworthy?

Or the truth, he moderately suggests, is “in the middle”—that is, in places like The Wall Street Journal, that supports Obama’s decision to arm the Syrian rebels and he only regrets Obama didn’t make this decision sooner, and in The Independent, whose senior Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk had the honor of a personal recommendation from Osama Bin Laden and demonizes Christians for supporting Assad.

Al-Tamimi offers no reason for adopting those two pro-Arab-Spring newspapers’ version of the events.

“The rebels deny it,” Al-Tamimi pronounces. Here’s what the rebels also say:

Syrian opposition spokesmen have repeatedly said that Syrian rebels do not target Christians or other minorities and believe in creating a democratic society once Assad is ousted.

To which we can add: and pigs might fly. To believe that al-Qaeda-linked Islamists want a democratic society—in the Western sense of giving everyone equal rights, and not in the Muslim Brotherhood’s interpretation of it as a means to impose an Islamic state—is, at best, naïve. That part of the Syrian opposition’s statement should throw doubt on the other part, that rebels don’t target Christians.

But Al-Tamimi, who must surely know about taqiyya—lying to non-believers to advance the cause of Islam—behaves as if he didn’t.

The conclusion of Al-Tamimi’s report looks like a highly precarious assembling of statements counterbalancing, if not contradicting, each other to produce a very confused and confusing result.
He writes:

The evidence surveyed here does not, as of yet, suggest the existence of an organized campaign of militant Islamic persecution of Christians throughout Syria… Have there been incidents of anti-Christian violence in Syria? Undoubtedly, but one should always be alert to those pro-Assad propaganda outlets which are willing to exploit, for their own ends, what they see as Western concerns about the status of Christians in the country. In addition, analysts should be more nuanced… At the same time, one must avoid complacency: the ever-growing infiltration of Syria by foreign jihadists (e.g. from Jordan to the south) poses an increasing threat to the survival of the various Christian communities of Syria.

First, that the evidence doesn’t suggest “an organized campaign” is puzzling. What evidence of an “organized” campaign would Al-Tamimi accept?

The Syrian opposition has no effective centralized political or military leadership, so how could there be an organized campaign of any sort?

Muslim persecution of Christians doesn’t require central, bureaucratic coordination. Its organization derives from Islamic law and the hostility it breeds for Christians.

Al-Tamimi warns that we should be alert to pro-Assad propaganda exploiting Western concerns about Christians—without bothering to mention that the propaganda war is fought on both fronts. So why should we be more alert to one side of it than the other?

Apparently simply because one source confirms what Al-Tamimi wants to believe and validates his agenda.

In the end, however, after another series of self-limiting statements, his final conclusion is that there’s an increasing threat to the survival of the various Christian communities of Syria.

Isn’t that enough reason for concern? Why nitpick—why write this convoluted report trying to minimize the persecution of Syrian Christians in the first place—if in the end you must, perhaps begrudgingly, admit that there is “an increasing threat to the survival of the various Christian communities of Syria.”

This research doesn’t lead to a new interpretation of the events. Its conclusion is remarkably similar to that of most counterjihad analysts.

What’s its point then? It’s not immediately clear until one remembers that it was published by the neoconservative think tank The Henry Jackson Society, calling for Western intervention to assist Syrian rebels. Hence the “nuances” that Al-Tamimi mentions, which would help erase any black and white contrast and paint the rebels a uniform, unintelligible gray.

Hate, Racism, Family: the Left's Power Is in Its Changes to the Meaning of Words

About the recent Birmingham mosque stabbings of 4, including a policeman, the TV said that it is not considered as a hate crime.

This simply means that the suspect, a man of Somali appearance, was not a non-Muslim, making him a Muslim (sounds a bit circumvoluted but this is what circumvoluted ways of thinking result in).

But why? If you look at the way Muslims kill and massacre each other all over the world, especially those of rival sects, it looks like fellow Muslims are very much capable of hating a Muslim.

On the other hand, a non-Muslim could very well kill a Muslim without hating him, for whatever practical reason.

It derives from all this that the word "hate" has now acquired a new meaning, it no longer means a sustained emotion of profound aversion and distaste for someone, a sin in Christian theology. Instead it denotes a political sin that, unlike the Christian one, cannot be forgiven, the crime of thinking differently from what the ideological orthodoxy prescribes, the secular heresy par excellence, in short the guilt, more serious than murder, of having politically incorrect thoughts.

Atheists are not doing away with religion. Even they, despite all the hatred that they (at least in the case of militant, fundamentalist atheists) have for religion, cannot help confirming for the umpteenth time that humanity cannot avoid thinking in a religious way.

Atheists are simply replacing a religion, Christianity, where at least the principles, precepts, rules and values are clear and have required several centuries of rational thought to arrive at, with another, which we may call 'cultural Marxism' or 'political correctness', in which the principles are half-baked, the precepts are fluid, the rules are self-contradictory and the values have no solid foundation but change with the ideological fashion.

Religion is a way of thinking embedded in the human mind. That is why all societies of all places and times have always had a religion.

And religion does not even need to be theistic, namely include a belief in God, but it can also be atheistic.

And we cannot do away with faith. Everything requires faith, from the hope that the train will eventually arrive to the trust in your spouse when s/he declares to you absolute faithfulness, from the belief that political change for the better is possible to the credence that everything, the whole universe, was born out of chance or, alternatively, design.

Going back, the Left has highjacked the use of certain words or completely changed their meaning.

It has revolutionised the English vocabulary and, as in all revolutions, it has dispossessed someone, all of us, of it. It has self-appropriated, stolen the English dictionary, become its self-appointed master.

We cannot use the word "gay" any more, except in the particular sense that the Left has dictated. And incidentally it has appropriated for itself the rainbow as a symbol.

It has made the use of certain words (nigger, faggot, poofter, Paki etc) impossible, while at the same time made perfectly acceptable the use of others, swear words and expletives especially of a sexual or bodily nature, which were not allowed before.

It has utterly transformed the meanings of "hate", "racism" and "family".

This is where the power of the Left lies, these are its culture war victories.

The power of the Left is in its theft of the language for its own purposes: by controlling what words people utter and with what meaning, it controls what people think.

In the USA Blacks Can Get Away with Murder

In the trial of George Zimmerman the prosecution has finished and the defence has begun its case.

George Zimmerman was a white-Hispanic (with an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather) neighbourhood watch volunteer patrolling a white gated community where there had been a spat of recent break-ins and burglaries committed by blacks.

He shot dead, claiming in self-defence, Trayvon Martin, a black 17-year-old who had entered the area and was acting in a way that arose Zimmerman's suspicions. There was an altercation seen by a witness, who said he saw Martin on top of Zimmerman bashing his head, confirming the latter's testimony, also confirmed by his injuries.

In addition, Martin had injuries to his knuckles, in conformity with the idea that he had hit someone's head hard.

There seems to be at the very least reasonable doubt for acquittal. But the black community is asking for blood, and there are fears that, in case of discharge, black riots may erupt.

In the meantime, African Americans have already taken their "revenge" on European Americans but very few people take any notice. From FrontPage Magazine:

The trial of George Zimmerman is winding down with a meltdown of the prosecution’s case and lurid predictions of riots if a “politically correct” decision is not reached. Why is it in America today that racial issues like this one so resemble the Wonderland world where, as the Red Queen famously says, “first the sentence, then the evidence”? Why is it that Americans consider blacks to be much more racist on the whole than whites, yet the latter is exclusively singled out for scorn? David Horowitz and John Perazzo provide answers in their pamphlet Black Skin Privilege, written not long after Zimmerman was arrested in connection with the Trayvon Martin death. Here’s what Horowitz and Perazzo say:

In America today, blacks generally can conduct racist assaults on whites and count on “civil rights” activists and the media not to notice. In the two months following Trayvon Martin’s death, black assailants carried out at least 14 fourteen known attacks against white victims with the idea of “avenging” the fallen youth. In East Toledo, six juveniles beat a 78-year-old white man, shouting: “This is for Trayvon … Trayvon lives, white [man]. Kill that white [man]!” In Gainesville, five blacks shouting “Trayvon!” beat a 27-year-old white man, leaving his face permanently disfigured. In another Gainesville incident, a black crowd shouting “Trayvon!” assaulted and stomped on a white man who was trying to recover his female companion’s purse from the hands of a black thief. In Chicago, two black teenagers beat and robbed a 19-year-old white man because, as one of the attackers explained, they were angry about Trayvon Martin. In Baltimore, a group of blacks beat and robbed a white man, stripping him naked, then posted a video of the assault online with the caption: “me an my boys helped get justice fore trayvon.” In Mobile, a white man named Matthew Owens was brutalized by twenty African Americans armed with brass knuckles, bricks, chairs, bats and steel pipes after he asked them to stop playing basketball in the street directly in front of his home. As the assailants left the scene, one of them looked back at the victim, who was bleeding profusely, and shouted,: “Now that’s justice for Trayvon!” It is unlikely that many Americans have heard of these racial attacks, because the perpetrators are protected by a media that does not want to notice that the racists are black, and their victims are white.

The same as in Britain, actually.

Within weeks of the Trayvon Martin shooting, a parallel killing occurred with the skin colors reversed at a Taco Bell restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona. A 22-year-old black motorist got into an altercation with Daniel Adkins, a 29-year-old, mentally disabled “white Hispanic” who was walking by. When the argument grew heated, the motorist drew a gun and killed Adkins. When police arrived at the scene, the black shooter claimed that Adkins had swung a bat or metal pipe at him, although no such items were found at the scene. Arizona, like Florida, has a “Stand Your Ground” law that allows a person to use deadly force to protect himself when faced with a life-or-death confrontation. A protective media withheld the shooter’s name, and there was no racial mob calling for his head. Unlike George Zimmerman, the gunman was not arrested nor charged with a crime. Call that black skin privilege.

If you’re black and possibly guilty but a white person is involved, the media will actively volunteer to be your advocate…. In the Trayvon Martin case, the media withheld details of the crime that were damaging to Trayvon in order to protect him and indict Zimmerman — that the mainly white community he had entered at night had been the target of a rash of recent break-ins and burglaries by young African -American men; that the hoodie Trayvon was [sic] wore was a uniform for burglars; and that Trayvon had been suspended from school after burglary tools were discovered on his person along with unaccounted-for jewelry.

There were several other media "mistakes" and convenient omissions. One was this: the TV channel ABC News obtained a surveillance video of Zimmerman and said that no abrasions or blood could be seen in the video. The conservative media outlet The Daily Caller disputed this claim, and posted a still from the same ABC video showing the injury on the back of Zimmerman's head.

At the same time, the press flooded the airwaves and front pages with sentimental photos of Trayvon as an innocent adolescent, while withholding others of the six-foot-two, 17-year-old who beat the smaller Zimmerman to the ground, smashing his head on the concrete and causing him to scream repeatedly for his life before he fired his gun in self-defense.

Looking at the Martin case, black skin privilege means you can form a lynch mob if the target is a “white” man and the press will overlook it; you can demand a judgment in advance of the facts, and can conclude his guilt in advance of a trial. You can even take “justice” into your own hands by threatening his life as the Black Panthers did to George Zimmerman or twittering his home address like vigilante filmmaker Spike Lee and comedienne Roseanne Barr did in the hope that someone might go after him. If this isn’t a rebirth of the cracker mentality of the segregated South, it is hard to know what would be…

The pamphlet Black Skin Privilege by David Horowitz and John Perazzo derives its name from the expression "white skin privilege", first made popular during the 1960s by the Weatherman terrorists as they launched their bombing run against America. The rest of the Weatherman's ideas were rejected by the dominant culture, but their views on race were not.
From the introduction to the pamphlet:

Black skin privilege means the press will fail to report an epidemic of race riots targeting whites for beatings, shooting and other violence in major American cities over the last several years. Black sin privilege has created an optical illusion in the liberal culture that white on black attack are commonplace events when in fact there are five times as many black attacks on whites as the reverse. As Horowitz and Perazzo note, in 2010, blacks committed more than 25 times the number of acts of interracvial [sic] violence than whites did.

UK TV Broadcasting Muslim Call to Prayer Each Morning during Ramadan

Here in Albion, we are getting every day closer to becoming a fully-implemented Sharia state.

Ralph Lee, boss of the British TV Channel 4, must find the destruction of the West and Christianity, starting with the UK, amusing.

He said it will screen a Muslim call to prayer every day during Ramadan — because it is more relevant than the Diamond Jubilee.

Boss Ralph Lee claimed the fact that 2.8 million UK Muslims will celebrate the holy month from next week put last year’s Royal celebrations in the shade.

He added: “Nearly five per cent of the country will actively engage in Ramadan".

And there lies a huge problem, Ralph. You should mourn it, although you probably "celebrate diversity".

We now have home-grown cells of al-Qaeda in Britain, as well as terrorist "lone wolves". What more diversity than that do you want?

Ralph went on to say: “I want to set out to provoke people to think about Islam in ways that aren’t associated with terrorism”.

So, he now wants people to associate Islam with cacophony, horrendous sounds. Better than murder and mayhem, I suppose, but do we need it?

Channel 4 will screen a full three-minute chant by Hassen Rasool, a muezzin or prayer call leader, from the start of Ramadan next Tuesday. It will then break into its regular schedule to mark the first prayer of each day at 3am.

On the first day Channel 4 will also air 20-second bursts of the chant at four other prayer times — 1.11pm, 5.26pm, 9.20pm and 10.49pm..”

This will do wonders for Channel 4's ratings, I'm sure.

Radical preacher Anjem Choudary, accused of encouraging terrorism, said he welcomed any move to promote Islam.

He added: “Islam is the fastest growing ideology in this country — by some accounts Britain could be a Muslim country by 2015.”

Marvellous.

Abu Zakariyya, of the radical Islamic Emergency Defence group, added: “We want to see Sharia law in the UK and only God knows if this could be a step towards it.”

You're in good company, Ralph. Anjem Choudary and Abu Zakariyya approve of your decision and see it as a means to achieving their ends. If you wanted to win friends among the "radical Muslim community", you got it right. But if you wanted to create nice associations with Islam in people's minds, away from terrorism, hand-amputation and lack of aesthetic sense in music, you're not on the right track. Mind you, I've no idea of what you could have chosen instead, though.

Pope's First Official Visit Is to Lampedusa, Tiny Sicilian Island Flooded by African Migrants

This is the second part of Lampedusa, Italy.

The island of Lampedusa, the southernmost appendix of Italy in the Mediterranean, has the bad luck of being geographically too close for comfort to the Muslim world. Its history is testament to this.

In 813 AD, despite a 10-year truce signed in 805 by the Emir Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab with Byzantine Sicily's governor Constantine, the Arabs, who had not kept another previous truce established in 728 and many others since, proceeded to break this one too and, after attacking Sardinia and Corsica, sacked and devastated minor Italian islands including Lampedusa. The rest of Sicily was conquered by Muslim armies later.

After all, as the Encyclopaedia of Islam, considered as the reference work on Islam in the Muslim and non-Muslim academic worlds alike, says:

The duty of the jihad exists as long as the universal domination of Islam has not been attained. Peace with non-Muslim nations is, therefore, a provisional state of affairs only; the chance of circumstances alone can justify it temporarily. Furthermore there can be no question of genuine peace treaties with these nations; only truces, whose duration ought not, in principle, to exceed ten years, are authorized. But even such truces are precarious, inasmuch as they can, before they expire, be repudiated unilaterally should it appear more profitable for Islam to resume the conflict.

Things have changed since the 9th century, Muslims are not so strong militarily, and invasion and destruction take subtler forms.

Now they come to our shores carrying a white flag and a refugee label, demanding to be housed, fed and that all their needs be met.

This, which started after the beginning of the "Arab Spring", was a pseudo humanitarian crisis, the illegals overwhelmingly were not refugees, they were economic migrants in search of what they probably thought were easy jobs or welfare benefits in Europe. Tunisians should have remained in their country, to help rebuild the economy there.

Italy has been justly criticized for mishandling the situation and allowing the illegals to remain and to enter the rest of the EU through temporary visas. To really help the Tunisians, it would have been more useful to ship the illegals back to where they came from, after - if at all possible - establishing who was among them a real asylum seeker in danger of persecution.

Allowing our cities and towns to be flooded with Third World immigrants is as misguided as helping benefit scroungers or giving international aid that is only going to make the receiving countries' local tyrants richer to better oppress and use violence against their people; it is as unwise as giving money to alcoholics and drug addicts to buy their drug of choice.

Charity does not have to be a jerk reaction dictated by misplaced feelings of guilt, it has to be accompanied by a rational evaluation. Not all charity helps its recipients.

Paolo Lo Iudice, the blogger of Vivere in Tunisia about Italians living in Tunisia, says regarding the illegal migrants: "These people are Tunisian but do not love Tunisia. We have stayed here to defend our homes, jobs, projects and people in whom we believe, we love this land although we are not Tunisian. They should be ashamed of themselves, instead of rolling up their sleeves and building a new Tunisia they went to Italy spending 2,000 dinars just to get more money, most of them have all they need here in Tunisia, there is only one thing they lack ...the desire to work".

A year after, the so-called emergency was still not over in Lampedusa, with illegals having continued to arrive during the spring and summer from Sub-Saharan African countries like Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia as well.

The difference was that the island's reception centre, destroyed by a fire started by the illegals the previous year, did not exist anymore, so the migrants had to be accommodated in hotels and tourist villages which are virtually the place's only economic resources.

In the meantime, the so-called "humanitarian" one-year temporary visas issued in 2011 to tens of thousands North-Africans had expired, but the latter had not been repatriated. Most were still thought to be in Italy.

Even now, two years after, "refugees" are still landing on Lampedusa's shores. Only two days ago, over 200 of them arrived on a boat after being rescued and transported to the island by the Navy on the Coast Guard patrol boats, ahead of Pope Francis' visit to Lampedusa on Monday July 8, his first official trip. Other 80 immigrants were rescued shortly after.

No other pope before Francis visited Lampedusa. The Holy Father has chosen it for being "the frontier of the desperate".

The Italian party Lega Nord (Northern League) Senator Angela Maraventano, not re-elected in the last February election, commented:

Of course, we are proud to receive the Pope but I hope that his words are not an additional encouragement for crossings of the Strait of Sicily [separating Sicily from Tunisia]. Africa's problems must be solved in Africa and those who think otherwise objectively become accomplices of the owners of the boats, the killers who pocket cash without risking anything. I'm saying this with a clear conscience, I will be judged by God, not men.

The "killers" reference is to the fact that people may die during these crossings.

____________________________________________________________________________


After two years of this experience rather exceptional even by dhimmi Eurabian standards, there are two interesting aspects of the Lampedusa situation for Europe generally.

The first is that the island's small population size, that renders it easily overwhelmed by groups of immigrants, and its proximity to North Africa make it a good test (in which Lampedusans are the unfortunate guinea pigs) of things to come.

Lampedusa represents a miniature image of what can happen to the rest of Western Europe if both current Muslim immigration and European demographic trends continue, when the proportion of natives and migrants will be the same in Europe as it has recently been in Lampedusa.

The second aspect showing what can lie ahead for the rest of Europe is the reaction of the inhabitants.

Their predicament was illustrated by one of them in this video showing the fire that destroyed the reception centre: "We are really worried about our safety. Even our children were used to walk freely in the streets, and now at 7pm all of us are barricaded in our homes with the doors locked lest something happens to us, because we are seriously afraid."

In a post titled "Defecating on Walls in the Name of Freedom", the Italian political blog Digicontact wrote: "After this first wave of new barbarians the island of Lampedusa counts its damages. Over 60 houses devastated by 'refugees'. They have just arrived and already behave like criminals. What should be the attitude of us Italians facing such behaviour? We got a bit tired of being non-racist at all costs. Faced with such behaviour everybody should be able to understand that this is just the beginning of an invasion and not a simple immigration wave, least of all of refugees, because in Tunisia there is no war. ...Put yourselves in the shoes of those who find their house in Lampedusa destroyed by a group of poor immigrants who escape from hunger by defecating on floors and walls and destroying furniture and whatever they can find".

Confronted with an unprecedented crisis and left to their own devices to deal with it, the people of Lampedusa have used "direct action" methods.

They stopped and delayed by a few hours the Italian Coast Guard patrol boat, loaded with still more "rescued" North Africans, docking at the harbour. Enraged, women later occupied the harbour and docks for several hours and chained themselves, overturning wheelie bins and blocking the road. They then incited fishermen, who with ropes pulled twelve of the many boats on which the migrants had travelled, moored at the docks and obstructing fishing boats (another of the many unresolved problems), to the entrance to the harbour. "Nobody enters here any more", the women shouted from the quay where the flags of Trinacria (ancient name of Sicily) and of the Pelagie Archipelago were flying. To chants of "freedom!" they raised a banner: "We are full".

The island descended into chaos. An urban guerilla, something described by Lampedusa's mayor Dino De Rubeis with the words "We are at war, people have now decided to get justice with their own hands", occurred with violent clashes when hundreds of Tunisians demonstrated in the streets, the police charged them and some of the island's inhabitants protested against the migrants. Dozens of both police and migrants were injured. Three Lampedusans tried to assault the mayor, who was then escorted by the police and barricaded in his office while outside dozens were protesting against him and the Tunisians who wandered around the streets after having burnt down the reception centre where they were staying. In a drawer he kept a baseball bat for self-defence.

The locals vented their fury against journalists and TV crews, attacking them verbally and sometimes physically.

Dozens of Tunisians and Lampedusans threw rocks at each others at a petrol pump, after a group of illegals threatened to explode gas cylinders near the petrol pump in the old harbour, provoking the islanders' reaction.

"Lampedusa Guerilla. Refugees? No, Criminals" is the title of an article that announces: "Italy, invaded, rebels. It is time to say it's enough, everybody go home, whoever comes back must be jailed until he is shipped back. Or else the social revolt about which Antonio Di Pietro talks unthinkingly will be rightfully staged by the inhabitants of Lampedusa and of the other areas of Italy tormented and persecuted by reception centres which are in fact criminal dens".

Record Disapproval of Supreme Court among Americans

This is the result of a Rasmussen survey that should make those people who keep saying that public opinion is in favour of same-sex marriage meditate. Public Approval of Supreme Court Falls to All-Time Low (emphases added):

The U.S. Supreme Court finished its term with big decisions on voting rights, affirmative action and same-sex marriage. Following those rulings, public approval of the court has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in more than nine years of polling.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 28% believe the Supreme Court is doing a good or an excellent job. At the same time, 30% rate its performance as poor. That’s the highest-ever poor rating. It’s also the first time ever that the poor ratings have topped the positive assessments. Thirty-nine percent (39%) give the court middling reviews and rate its performance as fair. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

These numbers are even weaker than the numbers recorded following the Supreme Court ruling upholding the president’s health care law last year. Just before the court heard arguments on the health care law, 28% gave the justices good or excellent marks. However, disapproval was far lower than it is today. Then, following those arguments, many thought the court was likely to overturn the law. At that point, positive ratings for the court shot up to 41%, the highest level in years. However, when the court eventually upheld the health care law, the numbers fell again. Just 29% offered a positive review early that September.

Just prior to last week, 30% gave the court good or excellent marks. While the overall number fell only slightly following the final flurry of rulings, there were significant changes beneath the surface. Positive ratings increased among liberal voters by 13 points. However, they fell by eight points among conservatives and by seven among moderates.

Following the Supreme Court session four years ago, 48% thought the justices were doing a good or an excellent job. The numbers have been all downhill since then. During 2010 and 2011, the ratings were in the mid-30s.

Looking back over the past four years, the changes have been remarkable. Following the 2009 court session, 48% of conservatives gave the court good marks. So did 51% of moderates and 46% of liberals. Since then, approval among conservatives has fallen by 32 points to 16%. Positive reviews among moderates has fallen 21 points to 30%. However, the numbers among liberals are unchanged.

Overall, 39% of voters now believe the court is too liberal, while 24% believe it is too conservative.

More Americans View Blacks As Racist Than Whites and Hispanics

This is a really interesting result from a Rasmussen opinion poll (links in the original).

It is intriguing because it goes against the politically-correct received wisdom but not surprising, if you consider that blacks are not punished for so called "hate crimes" for which whites would be punished, and can get away with anything (literally murder if they are famous football players):

Americans consider blacks more likely to be racist than whites and Hispanics in this country.

Thirty-seven percent (37%) of American Adults think most black Americans are racist, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 15% consider most white Americans racist, while 18% say the same of most Hispanic Americans. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

There is a huge ideological difference on this topic. Among conservative Americans, 49% consider most blacks racist, and only 12% see most whites that way. Among liberal voters, 27% see most white Americans as racist, and 21% say the same about black Americans.

From a partisan perspective, 49% of Republicans see most black Americans as racist, along with 36% of unaffiliated adults and 29% of Democrats.

Among black Americans, 31% think most blacks are racist, while 24% consider most whites racist and 15% view most Hispanics that way.

Among white adults, 10% think most white Americans are racist; 38% believe most blacks are racist, and 17% say most Hispanics are racist.

Overall, just 30% of all Americans now rate race relations in the United States as good or excellent. Fourteen percent (14%) describe them as poor. Twenty-nine percent (29%) think race relations are getting better, while 32% believe they are getting worse. Thirty-five percent (35%) feel they are staying about the same.

These figures reflect more pessimism than was found in April when 42% gave race relations positive marks and 39% said race relations were improving. However, the April number reflected all-time highs while the current numbers are more consistent with the general attitudes of recent years.

(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.

The survey of 1,000 Adults was conducted on July 1-2, 2013 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently killed a key portion of the Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional and sent a lawsuit challenging the University of Texas’ use of race as a factor in admissions back to the appellate court level for further review. Most Americans believe affirmative action admissions policies discriminate against whites, as the lawsuit argues, and think it’s better for colleges and universities to accept the most qualified students.

This is consistent with public resistance to all special preferences. Only 30% think it’s fair for colleges and universities to give preferences to children of large donors. Just 38% think it is fair for the children of previous students to have a special advantage in the admissions process.

Following those decisions and a big ruling on same-sex marriage, public approval of the U.S. Supreme Court has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in more than nine years of polling.

Blacks are slightly more optimistic about the current state of race relations in American than whites and Hispanics are. But 37% of blacks and 38% of Hispanics believe those relations are getting worse, compared to 29% of whites.

Liberals are more confident than conservatives that race relations are getting better.

Forty-five percent (45%) of voters believe the U.S. justice system is fair to most Americans, but just 34% think it is fair to poor Americans. Forty-five percent (45%) consider the justice system fair to black and Hispanic Americans.

Most voters continue to believe the U.S. economy is fair to women, blacks and Hispanics but are now evenly divided when asked if it’s fair to lower-income Americans. However, they still think all four groups are treated better than the middle class.

Lampedusa, Italy. Part I: What Happened in 2011

During the "Arab Spring", the tiny island of Lampedusa, off the coast of Sicily, due to its unfortunate vicinity to North Africa saw the arrival of around 50,000 migrants mostly from Tunisia and Libya in 2011.

We know that the use of words like "invasion" or "flooding" is considered racist by the liberal media, but how else is it possible to describe this situation?

Lampedusa has a total population of just over 6,000 people only when you also include the inhabitants of the nearby island of Linosa, with which it forms Italy's southernmost local council.

Invasion does not need to be military. Any violation of a sovereign country's borders is a crime and an aggression.

There was even an allegation that some women had been thrown overboard by the migrants during the sea crossing from Africa to prevent the overloaded boats from capsizing, according to an eye witness aboard the boats.

The many thousands of immigrants and refugees fleeing the chaos of the "revolution", among whom were suspected escaped prisoners, were then gradually transferred to mainland Italy and other EU countries, but there were repeated times when the number of newcomers was higher than that of locals.

On those occasions when natives were outnumbered, there were tales of local women having to be accompanied everywhere to protect them from immigrants' unwanted attentions, sacked shops, flats' doors forced open, people returning home to find Tunisians sitting at the dining table eating and, after their departures, some householders even discovering faeces inside saucepans.

The island just became what one newspaper called "a huge immigrant camp".

Maybe expecting to find a hotel reception and with scarcely a thought about the crisis they were creating in the small island, the illegal immigrants were complaining, as in the above video, describing what they found in Lampedusa as "shameful" and pontificating "the reception is zero" as if they had been giving a hotel review on TripAdvisor.

The attitude of the Tunisian refugee in the video is particularly enlightening, showing an entitlement mentality according to which Europe, the land of democracy, justice and human rights, was expected, as was its duty, to give all these things to him and his companions, and Italians should have "taken the time" to provide them with all they needed.

This video confirms what Lampedusa mayor Bernardino De Rubeis said: "We have here young Tunisians who arrogantly want everything immediately, just like criminals, ready to endanger our lives and theirs". He later added: "We're in a war, and the people will react. There are people here who want to go out into the streets armed with clubs".

The one expressed in the film is the typical mindset of many Muslim immigrants to Europe. These are the people usually portrayed as "victims" for whom everything else has to be sacrificed.

And when they don't get what they want, there is trouble. In April 2011 the illegals, unhappy about their accommodation conditions, set fire to a guest house where they were staying at the expense of a charity organization, and threw rocks at the police.

On 20 September 2011, similar story: the immigrants torched the reception centre where they were accommodated, destroying three buildings in the holding facility, and clashed with the police, while the media were blaming for the arson everyone, the Italian government, the provisional Tunisian government, the European Union, except the actual perpetrators. This was the second time that the reception centre had been burnt down by refugees, the first during an inmate riot destroying a large part of the complex on 19 February 2009.

The desperate Lampedusa natives, seeing their predicament not understood or helped by Italian or European authorities, in March 2011 even resorted to stopping for an hour the Italian Coast Guard patrol boat, loaded with still more North Africans, from docking at the harbour, and repeated this sort of "direct action" several times.

Lampedusa lives mainly on tourism, and the thousands of migrants, often behaving not exactly as gentlemen, were making the place inhospitable to visitors. In this financial crisis every job is precious. In 2011, the tourist season started in August, two months later than usual.

In addition, the island did not have the agricultural and water resources to deal with the refugee emergency.

And anyway, the crux of the matter is that people should not be forced into that situation through the moral blackmail accusation of not acting charitably.

Unfortunately these are, as Oriana Fallaci said, the enemies we welcome as friends, and their sob stories seem to have the desired effect on many people, in Italy as all over Europe.

Professional "Anti-Racists" Don't Care about Black and Hispanic Lives

Below is a piece with very enlightening statistics about what groups commits most crimes in New York City, and an even more eye-opening observation about how the stop-and-frisk policies, far from targeting minorities, actually target whites, who commit a percentage of crimes disproportionately lower than other ethnic groups when compared to the rates at which they are subjected to stop-and-frisk.

The author of the FrontPageMag article, John Perazzo, also notes that stop-and-frisk policies “targeting” blacks and Hispanics in minority neighbourhoods favour these groups in virtue of the vast share of police and city resources devoted to protecting their communities. A simple calculation of how these and other policies introduced by former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as part of his zero-tolerance crackdown on the city's crime reduced violent crimes reveals that stop-and-frisk saved the lives of over 10,000 black and Hispanic males.

This prompts the question: are the professional "anti-racists", the usual media and lobby-group suspects, really concerned about the welfare of minority groups as they profess, or are they much more concerned about the perpetuation of the "race relations" industry - with all its peddling of ethnic victimization - which also means their own self-perpetuation?

In open defiance of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, New York’s City Council last week passed two bills aimed at curbing the NY Police Department’s practice of “stop-and-frisk,” which has been among the most effective crime-fighting tactics ever employed. One of the bills mandates the appointment of an independent inspector general to monitor the department for evidence that its use of stop-and-frisk may be unfairly targeting blacks and Hispanics; the other opens the door to racial profiling lawsuits against the NYPD. Black Councilman Donovan Richards (D-Queens), who prides himself on being a strong voice against profiling, says that he himself was once “dehumanized” by the experience of being stopped and frisked as a teen, and thus wishes to spare other minority youth the same pain.

In a nutshell, the laws governing stop-and-frisk permit police to briefly detain a person upon reasonable suspicion of his or her involvement in, or intent to commit, a crime—even if there is not yet enough evidence to make an arrest. To justify such a stop, an officer must be able to cite “specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that intrusion.” During detention, an officer may question the suspect and, if he deems it advisable, conduct a weapon search by frisking the suspect’s outer garments.

But civil-liberties and civil-rights activists nationwide—and in New York particularly—routinely charge that stop-and-frisk practices are racist because they target nonwhite minorities in disproportionate numbers. Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather MacDonald, who has done immensely important work in researching the facts about stop-and-frisk and placing them in proper perspective, notes that in 2011 in New York City, African Americans, who constituted 23% of the city’s population, were fully 53% of all police-stop subjects. By contrast, whites were 35% of the city’s population but only 9% of stop subjects.

Left-wing outfits like the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights maintain that if the racial makeup of those affected by “stop-and-frisk” does not mirror the racial makeup of the surrounding community as a whole, we can deduce that racism and/or discrimination are at work. But these critics omit the most important facts of all from the equation: In New York City during 2011, black offenders were responsible for 66% of all violent crimes, including approximately 70% of robberies and 80% of shootings. Blacks and Hispanics, combined, accounted for an astonishing 98% of all shootings in the city. Whites, by contrast, were responsible for only 5% of New York’s violent crimes, and scarcely 1% of its civilian shootings.

These plain and inarguable facts explain precisely why the residents of black and Hispanic neighborhoods seem to be “targets” of stop-and-frisk more often than residents of mostly white areas. In some cases, crime rates in minority neighborhoods are literally dozens of times higher than elsewhere.

The statistics above, it should be noted, raise a vital question that merits contemplation: If blacks constitute 66% of all violent offenders but only 53% of stop-and-frisk targets, and if whites are just 5% of violent offenders but fully 9% of stop-and-frisk targets, could it not be argued that it is actually whites, and not blacks, who are disproportionately “targeted” by stop-and-frisk?

And here’s another reasonable question that deserves an answer: While critics claim that stop-and-frisk policies “target” blacks and Hispanics in minority neighborhoods, why do they not also say that such policies, in another sense, selectively favor blacks and Hispanics by devoting a vastly disproportionate share of police manpower and city resources to protecting them and their communities? After all, it isn’t only the perpetrators in those places who are overwhelming black and Hispanic; the victims are mostly members of those demographics as well.

The role of stop-and-frisk in New York increased dramatically after Rudolph Giuliani replaced David Dinkins as mayor in 1994,and was one among a constellation of effective new strategies introduced by Giuliani. Others included so-called “broken windows” policing, which clamped down on petty crimes as a way to also forestall more serious offenses, and the use of COMPSTAT, a computer technology tool that helped pinpoint specific high-crime neighborhoods geographically on a map. The results of Giuliani’s efforts were extraordinary, as evidenced by the fact that during his eight years in office, the incidence of homicide in the city fell from an annual average of 2,085 during the Dinkins administration, to just 649 by the final year of Giuliani’s tenure. From a statistcal standpoint, this was by far the most dramatic crime drop in the recorded history of America, unrivaled by reductions in any other city. The positive trends continued under Giuliani’s successor, Michael Bloomberg, with total homicides in the city ranging between 471 and 597 during each of his first ten years in office.

Those who have benefited most, by far, from the stop-and-frisk policies put in place by Giuliani (and later, Bloomberg) are the black and Hispanic residents of such traditionally high-crime areas as Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct, Bedford-Stuyvesant’s 81st Precinct, and Harlem’s 28th Precinct. Indeed, blacks and Hispanics have accounted for fully 79% of the decline in homicide victims citywide since 1993. If, from 1993 forward, crime rates would have stayed at their Dinkins-era levels—rather than at the much lower levels brought about by the Giuliani/Bloomberg administrations—more than 10,000 additional black and Hispanic males would have met an early death-by-homicide during the past two decades. Also during that period, the number of rapes that occurred annually in New York City declined by 54.8%; robberies fell by 80.3%; felony assaults dropped by 57.8%; and burglaries were reduced by 84.6%. This means that many tens of thousands of black and Hispanic would-be victims were spared the anguish associated with those crimes as well.

Yet none of these facts matter in the least to our perpetually outraged champions of “civil rights” and “civil liberties,” wedded, as they are, to their quasi-religious conviction that white racism lurks menacingly around every corner and lies at the heart of public policies like stop-and-frisk. Thus do we see the spectacle of New York State Senator Eric Adams, a staunch opponent of “racial profiling,” pining for a return to the halcyon days of the Dinkins administration, when, according to Adams, even current police commissioner Raymond Kelly, who also served under Dinkins, was made of kinder, gentler stuff: “Kelly was one of the great humanitarians in policing under David Dinkins,” says Adams. “I don’t know what happened to him that all of a sudden his philosophical understanding of the importance of community and police liking each other has changed.” The “humanitarianism” that Adams wistfully longs to restore came at a dear price, however, and went a long way toward filling the graveyards of New York.

The Arab Spring in Europe

From The Arab Spring in Europe, in the Gatestone Institute:

In a 1996 interview, Hamas founder and leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin stated that "every Arab rule that does not rule by the law of Allah and his religion is to be rejected." That was 17 years ago, long before the so-called Arab Spring, the terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe and the "days of rage" declared by Muslim rioters worldwide; now the breathing spaces between the attacks get shorter, and turn into years of rage.

One would expect that Muslim immigrants, whose children were born in the West, would adapt, become part of the Western society and partake of its freedom -- otherwise, why did they immigrate? What we see, however, is the opposite. The beheading of a British soldier in London, and the murder of a soldier in France, are only the beginning of a wave of violence and a dictatorship of fundamentalists who will call the tune. The wave of riots and vandalism carried out by Muslim immigrants in France in 2005 was just a hint at what is to come. The immigrants are brainwashed in the mosques, the madrasas [Islamic religious schools] and informal discussion groups, all of which represent the West as worse than Sodom and Gomorrah.

Western women in particular are easy prey; it is not difficult to portray them as licentious whores. Since in Muslim culture the honor of a man is dependent on the behavior of his woman (like chattel), especially when it comes to accepting the laws of modesty, chastity and sexual conduct in general, for Muslim men the West has no honor whatsoever. The face of Europe is changing rapidly, as is clear to anyone walking along a street in Paris, London or Berlin. The veiled women are immediately obvious, their hair covered by hijabs or their faces covered with niqabs; their personalities, identities, features and femininity obliterated, their freedom of movement hindered, ground under the heel of religious dictates chained to the past, despite their living in enlightened, progressive Western countries.

Even if immigrants try to adopt the culture of their new countries, the cultural and religious indoctrination breeds only the rejection of all the values of the host country. As Sheikh Yassin put it, "Islam rejects all the cultural and social aspects of the West that contradict Islam and its religious laws [the sharia], for example, we reject women going with the faces uncovered, prostitution and all the immoral aspects of life in the [Western] world."

It was not by chance that the pepper-sprayed "woman in red" became the icon of the struggle against Islamization in Turkey. We saw women at the demonstrations in the main square of Istanbul shouting "Run, Erdogan, run, the women are coming!" The Western world, until now nodding sagely and saying it is a matter of cultural differences, is beginning to realize that it will have to pay a heavy price for its tolerant approach to the murders, "honor killings," rapes, oppression, abuse of and traffic in women and girls -- not only in the Islamic countries but among the Islamic immigrants in the West.

There are, broadly, two different movements, heading in opposite directions: The West looks forward and seeks progress, the welfare of the individual and scientific achievements. The Muslim immigrants, on the other hand, look longingly backward, their faces turned resolutely to the days of Muhammad. For both, the status of women is an indication of the struggle for the face of the West. The gap is widening and the liberal approach is collapsing along with its hypocritical double standards, political correctness and submission to multiculturalism. What we are witnessing is not multiculturalism, it is a violent attempt made by guests in various countries to devour their hosts whole, along with their houses and property, culture and legacy. For anyone who has not been paying attention, the Arab Spring has arrived in Europe, and it would be a good idea to get ready to deal with it.

Hackers' Jihad Attacks from Mauritania

Militant Islam is on the rise. We have to add Mauritania, in Western Africa, to the countries to be worried about. And, despite their Medieval ideas, Islamists are using the new technology.

An Islamist in Mauritania

coordinates a diverse group of hackers targeting websites worldwide in the name of Islam.

Logging on to his computer, he greets his Facebook followers with a "good morning all" in English before posting links to 746 websites they have hacked in the last 48 hours along with his digital calling card: a half-skull, half-cyborg Guy Fawkes mask.

He calls himself Mauritania Attacker, after the remote Islamic republic in west Africa from which he leads a youthful group scattered across the Maghreb, southeast Asia and the West.

As jihadists battle regional governments from the deserts of southern Algeria to the scrubland of north Nigeria, Mauritania Attacker says the hacking collective which he founded, AnonGhost, is fighting for Islam using peaceful means.

"We're not extremists," he said, via a Facebook account which a cyber security expert identified as his. "AnonGhost is a team that hacks for a cause. We defend the dignity of Muslims."...

In April, AnonGhost launched a cyber attack dubbed OpIsrael that disrupted access to several Israeli government websites, attracting the attention of security experts worldwide.

"AnonGhost is considered one of the most active groups of hacktivists of the first quarter of 2013," said Pierluigi Paganini, security analyst and editor of Cyber Defense magazine.

An online archive of hacked Web sites, Hack DB, lists more than 10,400 domains AnonGhost defaced in the past seven months...

"Today Islam is divisive and corrupt," he said in an online exchange. "We have abandoned the Koran."

Mauritanian Attacker aims to promote "correct Islam" by striking at servers hosted by countries they see as hostile to sharia law. "There is no Islam without sharia," he said.

Mauritania is renowned for its strict Islamic law. The sale of alcohol is forbidden and it is one of only a handful of states where homosexuality and atheism are punished by death.

The quality of Mauritania's religious scholars and koranic schools, or madrassas, attract students from around the world. Mauritanians have risen to prominent positions in regional jihadist groups, including al Qaeda's north African branch AQIM.

As hackers from the region organize into groups, the Maghreb is emerging as a haven for hacktivism as it lacks the laws and means to prosecute cyber criminals, Herberger said...

AnonGhost's global reach is its greatest weapon, but it has yet to stage a major attack on a Western economic target.

Most of AnonGhost's campaigns have simply defaced Web sites, ranging from kosher dieting sites to American weapon aficionado blogs, with messages about Islam and anti-Zionism.

It has attacked servers, often hosting small business websites, located in the United States, Brazil, France, Israel and Germany among others.

Mauritania Attacker and the AnonGhost crew say these countries have "betrayed Muslims" by supporting Israel and by participating in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We are the new generation of Muslims and we are not stupid," read a message posted on the Web site of a party supply business in Italy. "We represent Islam. We fight together. We stand together. We die together."

The team has also leaked email credentials, some belonging to government workers from the United States and elsewhere.

As part of a June 20 operation against the oil industry, carried out alongside the international hacking network Anonymous, Mauritania Attacker released what he said were the email addresses and passwords for employees of Total.

Only Blacks Can Be Racist

A busker, a saxophone-playing girl performing the blues song "Minnie the Moocher" outside the Summerfest in Milwaukee, in the US, was physically attacked by three black women saying that a white girl could not play that song.

They punched her in the side of the face and left her bruised.

"Two women, 14- and 24-years-old, were cited for disorderly conduct. A 41-year-old woman was cited for assault and battery and disorderly conduct."

No mention of "hate crime" or racism as an aggravating factor, as would have been the case if the three white women had attacked a black girl.

If People Vote the Wrong Way, Judges Change It: California's Proposition 8

We have just seen the umpteenth example of "“judicial imperialism”, by which unelected judges through their verdicts supersede laws passed by elected representatives of the people".

Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in California, was passed in November 2008 after the California state elections in which 52.24% of the electorate voted in its favour.

So, here we are in the presence of legislation approved not by the elected representatives of the people but, more than that, by the people themselves.

Two homosexual couples, Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, and Jeff Katami and Paul Zarrillo, after being denied a marriage licence in California sued to overturn the ban.

Finally, after a lengthy process, Proposition 8 was repealed on 28 June 2013 by court ruling.

The subversion of the popular will by judicial activism is increasing and increasingly worrying, and the so-called "gay rights", a euphemism for the phenomenon of a vociferous and culturally powerful minority taking a morally confused, scared majority - scared of being called "bigot, homophobic" - hostage and imposing its will on the rest of the population, is one of the stages where judicial overreach is played most often, not just in America.

George W Bush, who in comparison to Obama is a first-class statesman whom now Americans have started missing, said about same-sex marriage:

Activist judges, however, have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives. On an issue of such great consequence, the people's voice must be heard. If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process. Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage.

Professor of Law and blogger Stephen Bainbridge writes:

The founders of our republic set up a carefully nuanced set of checks and balances, but the last couple of generations of Americans have allowed nine unelected old men and women to seize control of a vast array of deeply contentionous social and cultural issues of national import knowing that they are immune from being held accountable for their decisions. Our judges now use the law to impose elite opinion about how society should be ordered regardless of the democratic will. We have become courtroom spectators rather than participants in the democratic process. It is as the famed First Things symposium put it, The End of Democracy.

Telegraph columnist Gerald Warner maintains in his post about California's Proposition 8:

The lobby for same-sex marriage may have made a serious error of judgement in choosing to make this particular law in this particular state a test case. It is a mistake because, in this instance, they are not trying to reverse some local statute of years’ standing, but to negate the majority will of their fellow citizens, recently expressed at the ballot box. It puts the ultra-liberal lobby squarely in confrontation with the defining act of the democratic process: the secret ballot of a universal suffrage electorate.

It also seeks to subvert states’ rights, the issue on which the American Civil War was fought and which is increasingly coming back into focus, as the culture of the liberal east coast relentlessly attempts to override the core values of the more conservative states. Obama’s healthcare legislation is another issue that has lately reinvigorated that antagonism. Modern history and politics are full of startling examples of old fault lines suddenly reopening: who, 50 years ago, would have forecast, for example, that Yugoslavia would fragment so violently? America’s so-called “culture wars” reflect internal tensions and divisions against which the fabric of federal unity may not be indefinitely immune.

Yet the increasing marginalisation of voters’ powers goes far beyond the United States. A referendum result such as Proposition 8, if voted through in Europe, would simply have been negated by the EU, forcing the offending electorate to think again. The major political phenomenon of our times is the increasingly debilitated condition of democracy.

It is interesting to see how the socio-communists, who pretend to be for democracy and freedom, can suddenly reveal their true, historical colours of totalitarianism, whether achieved by revolutionary or, as in this case, judiciary means.

A commenter to the above Gerald Warner post summed it up nicely: "When the lib'rel/progressives don't get what they want, they go to the bench to get things their way".


Photos from PolicyMic

UK: Mainstream Muslims Want Blasphemers of Islam Punished According to Sharia Law

The above video is a Channel 4 (UK TV network) documentary aired some time ago but just posted on YouTube, showing how even those who are considered "moderate" Muslims have for all intents and purposes very non-moderate views, like advocating punishment - in some cases beheading - for those who insult Islam.

Reporter Jon Snow concludes - what a surprise! - that there is no common ground between them and our Western values, like freedom of speech. Therefore, he says, we must self-censor or expect mayhem.

There is a third possibility, Jon: Muslims living in Muslim countries and leaving the Western world alone.

South Africa: Kill the Whites!

We don't know enough of what's going on in South Africa. The media don't inform us because what happens there is exactly the opposite of what they want us to believe and Hollywood films portray: blacks are nice and victims, whites are horrible and perpetrators (even criminal statistics in the West, where black-on-white violence is much more frequent than white-on-black violence, can easily disprove that).

Songs and chants of "Kill the whites" by vast crowds in their native languages need to be translated, as they have been in these videos, before we can grasp the situation.

And here below are the effects.

Nelson Mandela, incredibly lionized when he was in fact responsible for commissioning terrorist acts at the time of the apartheid, is among those chanting these appallingly racist words.

As The Truth about South Africa says:

When did he [Mandela] become the messiah? It really irritates me. How many people are just bowing down to the man because the world's media is making him out to be the Savior of all people?

Truth is, the WHITES in South Africa voted to abolish Apartheid. The old terrorist was IN JAIL. HE didn't end Apartheid. In fact, he did very little to end it. He was chosen as a figurehead by the media, big business and the Nats.

But go on, have your hero. We all need a messiah.

Only a couple of months ago Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said that South African society is now more violent than it was under apartheid.

These people are communist and don't know the meaning of the word "peace", let alone "tolerance".

In addition to the genocidal violence against whites, the latter have to face particularly bad economic hardship due to "reverse discrimination": reverse it as much as you like, it is still discrimination.

White poverty in South Africa has doubled since 1994.

Peter Tatchell and the Age of Sexual Consent

Peter Tatchell, the UK's most prominent homosexual activist, has done more than advocating the abolition of the age of consent, he has broken the age of consent law in Britain:

"As a gay 18-year-old Australian, anti-Vietnam war draft-dodger, he came to the UK in 1971 and set up home with a 16-year-old gay lover in Shepherd’s Bush. The pair despised the law and so defied it."

The homosexual age of consent in England then was 21, not 16. Later he campaigned for lowering it to 16, and now he wants it lowered again to 14. The trend is clear.

When the age of consent for homosexuals was lowered to 16, an Outrage - Tatchell's organization - banner was photographed saying "16 is just a start".

Mr Tatchell (or shall we call him comrade Tatchell given his militant Marxist background) criticises the concept of age of consent, as is obvious from this quotation from his own website:

"Nevertheless, like any minimum age, it is arbitrary and fails to acknowledge that different people mature sexually at different ages. A few are ready for sex at l2; others not until they're 20. Having a single, inflexible age of consent doesn't take into account these differences. It dogmatically imposes a limit, regardless of individual circumstances".

Peter Tatchell wrote the chapter "Questioning Ages of Majority and Ages of Consent" for a book openly advocating paedophilia and finding ways "to make paedophilia acceptable".

This book, published in 1986 and called The Betrayal of Youth (spelling BOY), was edited by Warren Middleton, then vice-chairperson of the now-disbanded Paedophile Information Exchange, Britain’s number one paedophile advocacy group.

Stephen Green writes: "The book was part of a campaign to abolish all ages of consent, destroy the responsibilities of parents for their children, deny any ill-effects on children of interference by paedophiles, and withal to make it easier for paedophiles to gain sexual access to children."

In The Betrayal of Youth Tatchell wrote that that the age of sexual consent is "Re-inforcing a set of increasingly quaint, minority moral values left over from the Victorian era".

He was not on his own in this crusade, far from it. Many of his comrades, socio-communists and homosexual activists thought the same (emphasis mine):

Campaign for Homosexual Equality chairman Michael Jarrett was identifying paedophiles as an oppressed group, and the CHE list of “demands” included the complete abolition of minimum ages for sexual activity. The Labour Gay Rights Manifesto of 1985 said ‘A socialist society would supersede the family household. … Gay people and children should have the right to live together. … It follows from what we have already said that we favour the abolition of the age of consent.’

Feminists like Beatrice Faust contributed to The Betrayal of Youth, as well as other homosexual activists besides Tatchell, including Jeffrey Weeks and Eric Presland, who "related his first paedophile experience with an Asian boy of thirteen, and boasted of interfering with a little boy of six".

The book is considered so toxic that Amazon doesn't sell it and you cannot search its content in Google Books. This is The Betrayal of Youth's list of contents and contributors.

Tatchell is well aware of how much all this is bad publicity for him and keeps rationalising and adjusting his positions, but only the ideologically blind or pathologically naive cannot see through his self-excuses.

He has prepared a standard self-defence which can be found on his own website and has been repeated verbatim on many outlets. It used to also be on the site of his friend militant atheist of the "Kill the Pope" brigade Richard Dawkins but it's not there any more. Maybe even Dawkins draws a line at what is morally allowed, even though his motto is "There's probably no God... now stop worrying and enjoy your life".

In this article that supposedly should serve to exculpate him, Tatchell has nothing better than this: "The critics also cite Warren Middleton’s 1980s book, Betrayal of Youth, to which I contributed a chapter. I had no idea that he was involved in child sex abuse matters when I was asked to write."

Considering that Warren Middleton was co-founder and vice-chairperson of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), a prominent group promoting paedophilia, it was impossible for Tatchell not to have known his propensities. In addition, both Tatchell and Middleton were part of the the Gay Liberation Front/Angry Brigade, a neo-Marxist revolutionary group of radical students at the London School of Economics, thus making Tatchell's protestations of ignorance verge on the ridiculous.

Our "gay" friend's self-defence begins with:

"Unlike many Catholic clergy, I have never abused anyone. Unlike the Pope, I have never failed to report abusers or covered up their crimes."

Bad start, Pete. These are blatant falsities. It wasn't "many" Catholic clergy, it was an extremely small minority. And, as shown in Lies about the Catholic Church Child Sex Abuse Scandal, there is no reason, except bigotry and prejudice, to single out Catholic clergy who in fact have committed fewer of these crimes than any other pedagogic institution, religious or secular.

Saying what he does about the Pope is a criminal act, it is slander. The Pope has never covered up for anyone; people like Tatchell and his pals/comrades in the mainstream media think that if you repeat a lie enough times your audience will start to believe that it's true.

But blaming the Church whenever you're in trouble is a good way to distract the public from your own, shall we say, deviations from the norm. It's worked so far, our friend thinks, so why shouldn't it work now? Maybe because people have started calling your bluff, Pete.

The above should tell you how trustworthy and credible Tatchell is, but there's more.

Look at his defence of another book:

My 1997 Guardian letter about the book, Dares to Speak, gives the wrong impression. It was edited...

Dares to Speak was an academic book published in 1997, authored by professors, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, a Dutch senator and a former editor of a Catholic newspaper. It discussed the age of sexual consent and whether all sex between young people and adults is necessarily unwanted and harmful, based on what it said was objective research with young people.

The book does not endorse or excuse sexual relationships with young people that involve coercion, manipulation or damage. The authors queried, among other things, the balance between giving young people sexual rights and protecting them against abuse. These are entirely legitimate issues to discuss.

Leaving aside the irony, probably lost on humourless Tatchell, about his using a "former editor of a Catholic newspaper" as a guarantor of the morality of a book while he constantly treats the Catholic Church like a den of abusers, the book Dares to Speak, that Tatchell praises so much as an academic achievement, was edited by Joseph Geraci, who was also the editor of Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia. The book is a collection of articles from the journal.

Before it was tactfully removed, this was Wikipedia's entry for the publication (emphasis mine):

Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia (1987–1995) was a journal published by the Stichting Paidika Foundation whose purpose was to promote the normalization of pedophilia. Its editor was Joseph Geraci and the editorial board included articles by writers Frits Bernard, Edward Brongersma, Vern L. Bullough, and D. H. (Donald) Mader, some of whom campaigned as pro-pedophile activists.

After the normalization of homosexuality, we'll have the normalization of paedophilia. Get over it.


Added on 8 December 2013. In fairness to Peter Tatchell, he has politely asked me to add that his real views on age of consent, in particular his four criteria of any change in the age of consent laws, are here:

http://www.petertatchell.net/lgbt_rights/age_of_consent/an-age-of-consent-of-14.htm

This doesn’t alter my opinions on this whole subject. It’s up to you to decide if it alters yours.

For Obama Some Religions Are More Equal than Others

Obama ‘Strongly Objects’ to Religious Liberty Amendment.

The amendment's sponsor, Rep. John Fleming, R-La., says that it would require “the Armed Forces to accommodate ‘actions and speech’ reflecting the conscience, moral, principles or religious beliefs of the member.”

Fleming points to evidence that Christian service members and chaplains are being penalized for expressing their faith. Examples:
•The Air Force censored a video created by a chaplain because it include the word “God.” The Air Force feared the word might offend Muslims and atheists.

•A service member received a “severe and possibly career-ending reprimand” for expressing his faith’s religious position about homosexuality in a personal religious blog.

•A senior military official at Fort Campbell sent out a lengthy email officially instructing officers to recognize “the religious right in America” as a “domestic hate group” akin to the KKK and Neo-Nazis because of its opposition to homosexual behavior.

•A chaplain was relieved of his command over a military chapel because, consistent with DOMA’s definition of marriage, he could not allow same-sex weddings to take place in the chapel.

The Obama administration evidently thinks it important that such actions continue to be taken.

There’s a tension between this policy–arguably suppressing expressions of Christian faith–with the White House’s assurance, according to Investor’s Business Daily, that FBI surveillance not including any investigation of mosques.

So, it appears, Christian religious expression must be suppressed, while Muslim religious expression cannot even be monitored. Yes, government can appropriately limit the conduct of members of the military in ways that would be inappropriate in the case of civilians. So there’s not necessarily a contradiction between these policies. And perhaps there’s a need to restrict servicemembers from offending colleagues in a way that would not be appropriate outside the military (and is not on college campuses, where it often occurs). But it sure looks like a double standard to me: Christianity, bad; Islam, good. I seem to remember, from some ancient reading, the phrase, “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

But we know that Obama is Islamophile. Some of his politics, like helping the Islamist ethnic cleansing of Christians in Syria, would otherwise be difficult to explain.

About Iraq, he inherited it from Bush. About Egypt and Lybia, you can say that he gambled, not exactly knowing what was going on.

But now he knows. And he does the same.

Lesbian Breaks the Rules of Her College but Does not Want to Pay the Consequences

Christian College Expels Lesbian, Bills Her $6,000 to Recoup Loans Because She Didn’t Finish Semester.

What I like most about this article are the comments:

1. I guess she should have followed the rules. Lady Gaga or somebody will pay her debt no doubt. She will get a degree from some other school and be done with it.

2. There is no one so blind as those who will not see.

In a liar’s universe, there is no truth.
Professing to change her behavior to meet the school’s minimum requirements and then taking, and living with a same sex spouse in an out of state union is deceitful.

How can anyone purportedly intelligent enough to earn a scholarship not be intelligent enough to understand a few simple rules?… Oh yeah, that’s right, she has the Nobel Peace Prize winner Barak Hussein Obama Jr., the worst ever president of the United States, for an example of how to live an honest life.

Never trust the MSM.

3. Hmm lets see, she applied to a conservative school likely under affirmative action rules due to title IV requirements. She more than likely used her race to advance her qualifications over other more qualified, Asian, Native American, Eskimo, and White Competitors. Then while she was reciving her free education she proceeded to violate the schools code of conduct, and more than likely was promoting homosexuality on campus, through the internet and social circles. Imagine if a White Male was given grants and scholarships to a traditionally black college, and then promoted the KKK in the local community, it would be no less vile and offensive. Liberals only like morals so long as they are working in their benefit.

4. Everyone here gets it. This is a homosexual version of Sandra “Professional Student” Fluke. These people get in there specifically to disrupt and discredit an organization, then get them to bend to some agenda. Ms. Powell and her “spouse” are prime examples. Then, on cue, the trolls (in this case, atheists} come out and start smearing “so called Christians” with stuff like “if God existed, he/she would not be so intolerant”. Really? Read the Bible sometime. God is VERY intolerant of rebellion against His will. He is long suffering, but has limits.

5. gee if the 35,000people had only given/sent her 1.00 dollar each..then the poor disinfranchised woman would have her bill paid..but seeing she is laying the professional victim card…she didn’t stop and consider that..did she ?

6. “I shouldn’t have this debt hanging over my head “…..meet the next Housing Crisis brought to you by the same group that brought the original housing crisis : Democrats playing the Discrimination Card to enable people to avoid their financial responsibilities. The Democrats are now trying to use the student loan obligations to torpedo the economy by encouraging irresponsible behavior on the debtor end. This individual owes the school for services rendered which she voluntarily agreed to. Grow up. Pay up. And shut up, girl.

7. What an evil world we live in. Political correctness (LIES) and lack of personal responsibility rule. I’m sure Grace College is private and this lesbian was not forced to go there and she must have volunteeringly signed an oath to abide by the college’s rules. But that doesn’t matter anymore does it? It’s all about selfishness anymore, right? Barf! America is such a disgusting country. And now watch, Grace College will be vilified and the lesbian will be the victim. Right is called wrong and wrong is called right.

8. America is not a disgusting country.
America is a beautiful country.
But there are certainly some vile disgusting cretins who will not tolerate anyone who disagrees with them. Unfortunately this PC BS has been crammed down our throats for so long now the haters think they have the right to demand that they be not just tolerated but celebrated.

9. What she isn’t telling the media is that a school in Illinois agreed to take her in as a student AND agreed to pay off her debt to Grace University because they support her lifestyle. She also isn’t telling the national media that the University President on a local radio station (with her on the line) agreed openly and publicly to give her any transcript that she needed to move on. She promptly replied that the situation still has “other options” and hung up the phone. Check with KFAB in Omaha for the details. She is another one in a generation of childish adults who think the world should cater to their every desire and lust.

10. There is a limited time period one can drop classes and not have to pay for those classes. She knew the rules, she broke the rules, had to leave the school before the semester was finished, payment is her responsibility.

11. She knew the rules when she applied to the university or shortly after acceptance. Behavior has consequences and she made an informed choice to violate the schools rules of conduct. If she wanted a non-Christian education and lax honor code she should have attended a different school.

12. this was no accident…this has been used on americans and Christians for decades…devide and rule anyway possible..she didn’t just suddenly think she was gay and she knew what kind of school she was at…this was a planned attack. wake up america

13. Here we go again.
Homosexuals only go to this places to destroy Christianity.
If you don’t agree with the rules GO ELSE WHERE!
Let your money and participation show your ideology.
Personally, I am a live and let live Conservative.
I do not judge other’s actions, UNLESS they directly involve me and mine.
If you are a Homosexual, BE ONE, but don’t try to force me to participate in any manner. I WON’T.
They CAN’T do that, they CAN’T leave well enough alone, their mental problems won’t let them. so they have lost my heart, mind, and financial support.
If you want an abortion, HAVE ONE, but don’t make me pay for YOURS, nor your birth control.
The pro Abortionist have lost my heart, mind, and financial support.
Leave RELIGIOUS based schools, businesses, churches, and organizations (BSA) ALONE!
There are plenty that don’t care, so WHY go after the ones that do, a SMALL %.
But, the hate filled knuckle heads JUST CAN’T do it.
This is all becoming an issue for normal people BECAUSE it’s being forced down our throats.
Things are about to change, and not in a good way for these insane dolts.
Watch and see. Pass the popcorn.

14. heathen, that’s a straw man. And you know it.
Too many other options out there than be all whiny because the school, organization, business, or church doesn’t agree with your lifestyle. But no, YOU have to force your crap on everyone else when just using other options would suffice.
This is about to become a big issue in America. CHRISTIANS are waking up., and that’s who you mean, don’t deny it. You darn sure won’t put Islam in that category, and they KILL you for not being Islamic.
God nor Christ never said to not defend you and yours. NEVER.
Watch and see lil’ buddy, watch and see.

15. Here we have another case where another homosexual person lies or deceives their religious employer/school to either stay employed or to continue to receive payments and or academic credentials.

A religious school has first amendment rights to protect their faith from non religious violations.

Just like with the kaitylun hunt cultists, the gay left just wants to glom on to this story and make it about homosexual civil rights (civil privileges actually) when its really about constitutional religious rights.

This Woman should pay back every dime.

Arrested 14-Year-Old Faces Jail for Wearing NRA "Protect Your Right" T-Shirt

Whatever you think of the gun debate in America, this goes too far.

Marcum, a 14-year-old-boy from West Virginia got into an argument with a teacher for wearing his NRA (National Rifle Association) T-shirt with the image of a firearm and the words “Protect Your Right” printed on it at his school.

He was arrested for disturbing the education process and for obstructing an officer — the latter, according to court documents, because Marcum refused to stop talking, thus hindering the arresting officer from doing his job.

Marcum was suspended from school, after which he returned to class wearing the exact same shirt, as did other students in a show of solidarity.

He is now facing a $500 fine and a year in jail.

From The Blaze:

WOWK-TV reported Jared Marcum saying he never thought there would be a problem with his pro-Second Amendment apparel.

“I never thought it would go this far because honestly I don’t see a problem with this. There shouldn’t be a problem with this,” Marcum told WOWK-TV.

Police confirmed that Marcum had been arrested and faced charges of obstruction and disturbing the education process after getting into an argument over the shirt with a teacher at Logan Middle School, which is south of Charleston.

Logan Middle School’s policy regarding dress states:

"A student will not dress or groom in a manner that disrupts the educational process or is detrimental to the health, safety or welfare of others. A student will not dress in a manner that is distractive or indecent, to the extent that it interferes with the teaching and learning process, including wearing any apparel that displays or promotes any drug-, alcohol- or tobacco-related product that is prohibited in school buildings, on school grounds, in school-leased or owned vehicles, and at all school-affiliated functions."

The student’s father, Allen Lardieri, told WOWK that the shirt didn’t violate this policy, nor did his son become aggressive when confronted about it.

“I will go to the ends of the earth, I will call people, I will write letters, I will do everything in the legal realm to make sure this does not happen again,” Lardieri said.

It doesn't sound like Marcum's shirt violated the school's policy. It looks more like the school and police violated Marcum's right to free expression.

HuffPo Shows How for the Left "Hate" Applies only to Preferred Victims

The Huffington Post, that wonderful Leftist outlet, has shown how hate-free it is by posting the video of a spoof made in response to negative comments for the Cheerios advertisement featuring a mixed-race couple and their daughter.

The ad "generated such a strong racist backlash on YouTube that the comments section had to be closed", laments the staunch guardian of morality and enemy of all hatred HuffPo.

Pity that, under the "Most Popular" column (screenshot above), just below the video response to reprehensible haters, there is a photo labelled "This Dog's Butt Looks Like Jesus".

Of course, offending the world's 2.18 billion Christians (a third of the global population - an astonishing figure, considering how much they are persecuted and killed for their religion in Asia and Africa, and discriminated against in the "developed", soon to revert to underdeveloped, world) for no good reason, not, say, involuntarily in the course of a well-argued discussion with the intention of making some valid points but just for the - quite appropriately - hell of it, to make fun at their beliefs without provocation or motive is OK. But maybe there is a motive: could it be, wait for it, hate?

Since the similarity, in this case, is evidently very much in the eye of the beholder, why did The Huffington Post not find or invent another likelihood?

If the photo had been "This Dog's Butt Looks Like Martin Luther King", would HuffPo, which knows everything about questions of ethics, first of all bigotry and racism, have considered it offensive to the black civil rights movement and not published it?

And what about a photo "This Dog's Butt Looks Like Muhammad"?

That is out of the question. In primis, the HuffPo staff value their lives and limbs more than moral and political integrity and avoidance of double standards and, unlike Christians, Muslims don't take insults gracefully and, what's more important for the HuffPo personnel's incolumity, peacefully, as we've had myriad opportunities to see during the last, well, 1,400 years.

In secundis, the political editor of the UK version of The Huffington Post is none other than our old Mulism friend Mehdi Hasan, who on more than one occasion was caught on video calling non-Muslims "people of no intelligence" and comparing them to animals and cattle, showing to be speciesist as well as Muslim supremacist.

He would not have taken this insult lying down, especially coming from infidels, in his esteemed opinion animals and people of no intelligence.