You’re Nothing But a Pack of Cards!

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Off with her head!’ the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

‘Who cares for you?’ said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) ‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards!’

— Lewis Carroll, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

In case you’ve been traversing the Antarctic, and have been without an Internet connection for the last few days, Donald Trump has caused a new uproar in the media and among the chatterati. His latest offense was to tell the “Squad” (four communist congressbabes: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley) that if they hate America so much, they should just get on back to where they came from.

Progressive apoplexy ensued. Even though it was obvious that Mr. Trump had directed his remarks specifically towards the non-native Ilhan Omar, the media went into high dudgeon on behalf of all four “women of color” — as if Occasional Cortex were any more colored than I am.

Further details would be tedious and are not worth listing here. If you’re interested, and can stomach these Progressive outlets, here’s the media’s take on Donald Trump’s latest demonstration of “racism”:

Among the non-Woke, opinion is divided on the effectiveness of the president’s latest sally against the socialist Multicults.

In favor of Mr. Trump: He is forcing Nancy Pelosi to give full support to the four congressgendernonbinaries she had just tried to distance herself from. Last week they were anathema to the Speaker of the House; this week they are victims of racist abuse. The president has driven Ms. Pelosi into a corner where she has no choice but to embrace the four people she knows are destroying the Democrats’ chances of holding onto the House next year.

Against Mr. Trump: The president has played into the hands of those who label him a “racist”. He will alienate those undecided voters who might otherwise be leaning towards the Republicans.

Regardless of whether he is pursuing a winning or losing strategy — only time will tell — Mr. Trump is obviously following my advice and refusing to play the game. The huge furor over his first tweets about the Squad did not deter him in the slightest — the day after his initial tweets he doubled down on his theme, elaborating on the Squad’s hatred of America. He’s not at all concerned about being called a “racist”.

In other words, he declined to play the game — the currently accepted, universal Progressive game of forcing non-Progressives to backpedal and try to prove to the world that they do not deserve to be called “racists”.

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 7/15/2019

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German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, who is also the nominee for president of the European Commission, said that she supports an extension for Britain to negotiate Brexit with the EU. Ms. Von der Leyen is thought to be currying favor with various factions in her bid to be voted in as EC president.

In other news, British Prime Minister Theresa May criticized Donald Trump’s negative remarks about Democrat Congresschick Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to AF, JD, Reader from Chicago, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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“If We Don’t Speak Now”

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“If we don’t speak now”

by Tabitha Korol

“Speak now or forever hold your peace” is based upon the marriage liturgy of the Christians’ Book of Common Prayer. Today it may refer to our self-monitoring for the irrational fear of not being politically correct.

After reading my essay, “An Assumption of Dignity” on the Internet, a reader commented, “I circulated it to our editorial board who found it very moving. However, based entirely on the reality of it not being ‘politically correct,’ I am recommending that it will not be posted on our educational site. That said, given its compelling nature, I will circulate it privately and selectively.”

This poignant communication appears to be from an academic, in a corporate or military milieu, who wants to share it but is constrained by a fear of being classified “intolerant”. In years past, he’d have thought nothing about forwarding and posting the article with his observations on said educational site. Today, in this post-Obama era, he is threatened by the vitriol that would explode were he to dispatch ideas antithetical to those of people who set the political agenda, intimidated by the possibilities that harm would come to his family, and concerned that he could be summarily dismissed from his position if the first two and harassed if the third.

Although our First Amendment remains unchanged, with its protections extended to all individuals in the United States, the writer nevertheless reasoned that sharing information contradictory to the views of the ruling class could offend and must be done surreptitiously and with extreme caution. He is judicious and self-monitoring, but feeling defenseless in his isolated position; he is slowly conforming to “the plan.” Guarded, he is gradually growing fearful of and more submissive to those in power.

The purveyors of hate-speech accusations work to divide us into groups based on their immutable features — race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, family breakdown, and views on innumerable subjects. They have always existed in history but are far more forcefully promoted by those who now hold sway over our schools, government, and the workplace. When these were still insufficient to more completely affect our massive population, the ruling class devised issues for additional divisiveness — climate, abortion and post-partum infanticide, American monuments and symbols, slavery and LGBTQ reparations, a unique foreign invasion, and so many more. And when our young adults leave the schools to join the mainstream of American life, they will take with them not only their learned prejudices, but also their ways of stifling the free speech of others who would dare to disagree.

The left has worked doggedly to insert their values into our lives, and because they use compassion as their tactic, traditional Americans failed to see that the compassion was highly selective. Compassion for the mother is denied the unborn child; compassion for the gender-confused is denied the healthy heterosexual; compassion for the Muslim newcomer is denied the indigenous Christian and Jew. We have even witnessed the compassion shown more for the criminal than for his victim in a court of law.

This selective compassion is denied our President, a man who serves his country selflessly, even donating his paychecks to worthy causes. Why does the Left rant about President Trump, insult his every sentence, mannerism, activity? For one thing, it serves to comfort the Left, to keep them engaged with trivia to dodge the discomfort of acknowledging his triumphs. For another, and perhaps the crux of the issue, is that when they cannot suppress his speech, they can still suppress what they hear. They impose their will on others by censoring what’s available to the public, such as on Google, Facebook and Twitter, and discredit the rest. The Shangri La for the left is when society is so controlled that it becomes self-censoring. We are almost there.

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ISIS Brides Want to Return Home to the Netherlands

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The following news report describes the plight of two Dutch women who left the Netherlands and went to Syria as “ISIS brides”. Their husbands went to wage jihad for the Islamic State, and the wives accompanied them to keep house and whelp out their wee bairns.

Now the women want to return to the Netherlands, but the Dutch government is none too anxious to have them back. The puir wee bairns will undoubtedly be the deciding factor — who, after all, could resist them?

It’s not clear whether these women have “an immigration background” or are converts to Islam. Dutch viewers can probably tell from their accents. One of them seems to have blue or green eyes, so my guess is that they’re converts.

Many thanks to C for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:


Video link

Video transcript:

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Toy Boy Gets Booed on the Champs Elysées

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French President Emmanuel “Toy Boy” Macron stood up in his vehicle and waved at the crowd during yesterday’s parade down the Champs Elysées on Quatorze Juillet. The crowd responded by booing him. Well, strictly speaking, they whistled, which is the equivalent of booing in Continental Europe.

The security services were dispersed among the crowd, but couldn’t stop the whistling, presumably because the disrespectful whistlers never showed any sign of becoming violent. Or maybe there were just too many of them.

Many thanks to Ava Lon for translating this TV news report, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:


Video link

The future Baron and I attended the Quatorze Juillet festivities in France back in the early 2000s. We had a very enjoyable experience, even under the massive post-9/11 security regime. Things seem to have changed a lot since then.

Video transcript:

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Blogging Will Be Light-Headed

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The following essay from June 2005 is the latest in the series “Dymphna’s Greatest Hits”.

Rereading it made me nostalgic. Readers who are familiar with Dymphna’s later travails will understand how amazing it seems (a) that she was willing and able to walk out to the car in the dark, (b) that she could drive it, (c) that she could sustain such a nasty fall and get up from it all by herself, and (c) that she could come back into the house on her own.

The situation was very different ten years later, as most of you already know.

Oh, by the way — I’ll bet I got in a LOT of trouble for leaving that wheelbarrow there, but I can’t really remember it…

Blogging Will Be Light-Headed

by Dymphna
Originally published June 3, 2005

It’s a loathsome phrase: “blogging will be light.” Go on. Just tell us you didn’t pay the electric bill and promise to return after you’ve hit up your brother-in-law for another utility deposit.

We’ll wait.

Around here, at least in certain quarters, blogging will be sparse and painful. On account of tripping over a wheelbarrow in the dark. One moment you’re vertical, walking toward the car, and then WHAM! you’re horizontal, lying in a large cold puddle next to the fig tree. Some unspecified period of disorientation passes. You feel the pulse of the rain and think vaguely of the Biblical observation that it falls on the just and the unjust at moment your awareness begins to take in the scent of roses nearby.

OK. Tactile sense of rain. Olfactory nerves intact: rose fragrance. Time for a body check: chins? Check. There, but bonging. Pain? Maybe a 3. Safe enough. Shoulder? Check. OK, just taking a cold soak in a puddle. Pain? No. Hip? Check. Padded and impervious. No pain there. Head? Resounding from the effect of cranium hitting ground. Pain? A 3, with some resonance.

That leaves only one problem: A wheelbarrow handle jammed firmly up and under the ribcage on the right side. Not such a great check here. Pain? Maybe a 5. The task, as it appears from ground level, is to maneuver the overturned and now wedged wheelbarrow in such a way that it won’t inflict further damage.

Fling it off? What if it doesn’t fling far enough? This is a wheelbarrow, not a frisbee.

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 7/14/2019

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The man who threw firebombs at an ICE detention facility in Tacoma, Washington has been identified as 69-year-old Willem Van Spronsen. The late Mr. Spronsen left a manifesto in which he said he was a member of Antifa. Washington Governor Jay Inslee said that President Trump is to blame for the attack.

In other news, the death toll in last week’s migrant tragedy off the coast of Tunisia has risen to 82. The ship originated in Libya, and was carrying 86 passengers when it sank on its way to Europe. Four survivors were rescued.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, JD, Reader from Chicago, RR, SS, Upananda Brahmachari, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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What is Citizenship?

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The following essay by JLH was occasioned by his translation of the previous post.

What is Citizenship?

by JLH

According to the Federal Statistical Office a person has immigration background if that person or at least one parent was not born a German citizen. The definition comprises the following individuals: 1) foreigners, whether immigrants or not; 2) naturalized citizens, whether immigrants or not; 3) (recent) ethnic re-settlers; and 4) progeny of the first three groups born with German citizenship.

I have been reading the phrase “German with immigration background” defined above, and not really understanding it. It is a way of looking at your citizens that is — pun intended — quite foreign to me. I did realize that “pure French” or “pure German” etc. meant something different to the citizens of an ethnically homogeneous country. But I did not understand how closely it was possible to examine that ethnicity. Some thoughtful Germans have been advocating a revision of the categories described above.

Germans have for some time been reacting to Muslim and other immigrants to their country, who have coined phrases for the resident population such “Scheissdeutsche” (S*** Germans). Unlike the French, Dutch, Swedes, et alii, they are also asked by their neighbors and their own self-appointed consciences to remember that they deserve this, because of what their parents and grandparents did or did not do.

I do not and never have denied the Holocaust. How could I? I was one of the children who got money for a ticket to the Saturday morning cartoon show at the local theater. In those days, you never got to see anything — cartoons, feature film, etc., without first seeing the News of the Day. And the news never ran in those days without a new clip on the liberated death camps.

And since I first heard of it through things like Franz Werfel’s gripping novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, I have never doubted or denied the Armenian Genocide. There are many terrible massacres in history, but these two are alive for me, because I have had friends and acquaintances who are the children of those who survived.

Knowing these things does not oblige me to hate Germans or Turks. My Jewish friends have taught me that much. I also do not hate the English because of my wife’s Scots and Irish Gaelic ancestry. I do reserve the right to be indignant at and even contemptuous of the modern-day deniers of Ataturk’s reforms or Churchill’s egalitarianism.

Being an American “of a certain age,” I grew up with the conviction that the Founding Fathers were heroes, the Constitution was a new way to look at the rule of law, and our prosperity came largely from our desire to work — and think — for ourselves.

Those who truly despise freedom of thought and speech have been hard at work to undo those “illusions” of mine. And seeing the tortuous attempts of German statisticians to come to grips with what it means and implies to be “German,” I ask myself, What is it that makes an American? Ethnicity? Don’t make me laugh!

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The Majority Population in German Cities is Facing Its End

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A number of German cities are no longer populated mainly by Germans — a trend that will increase in coming years.

Many thanks to JLH for translating this article from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung:

The Majority Population in German Cities is Facing Its End

by Michael Rasch
July 9, 2019

Frankfurt am Main, Offenbach, Heilbronn, Sindelfingen — in these and other cities, Germans with no immigration background are still the largest group, but are no longer an absolute majority. That affects West Germany more than the East, and cities more than non-urban areas.

As early as the 1980s, the Greens were propagating Multiculti — a multicultural society. Although it had already begun some time before, the very thought of it was hair-raising for some voters. This reality has been accentuated in recent decades. Although the phrase is somewhat out of style. Nowadays, we talk of diversity and mixed society. Meanwhile, the majority society is approaching its end in German cities. That means that Germans who have no immigration background (as defined by the Federal Office of Statistics) are no longer the statistical majority (>50%), but are just the largest of three groups, with foreigners and Germans with an immigration background.

Frankfurt is the Vanguard

The majority society has already ceased to exist in Frankfurt am Main. This is also true for some smaller cities like Offenbach (only 37% still native German), Heilbronn, Sindelfingen and Pforzheim, explains the immigration expert Jens Schneider, who does research at the University of Osnabrück. The same thing will happen soon in several other German cities. In early 2018, according to the city’s statistical yearbook, 46.9% were native Germans. Germans with immigration background were 23.6% and foreigners — 53.1% together. The proportion of native Germans has declined in recent decades. The 50% threshold was first crossed in 2015 with 48.8%. Schneider rejects putting Germans with immigration background and foreigners in the same pot, and, like many of his colleagues, advocates revising the categories. The concept of immigration background gives a false impression. In fact, ca. two thirds of all children of Germans with immigration background (including children of foreigners) are born in Germany. They are therefore German and would often have the prospect of a much better professional career than their parents.

There Is No More Majority Society

By present reckoning, Frankfurt a.M. is probably the only major city where the majority society has flipped, with Germans with an immigration background and foreigners at 53.1%. According to the “Intercultural Integration Report of 2017” of the city of Munich, Nuremberg (44.6%), Stuttgart (44.1%), Munich (43.2%) and Düsseldorf (40.2%) also show high percentages of foreigners and Germans with immigration background.

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 7/13/2019

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A gunman started throwing Molotov cocktails outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Tacoma, Washington early this morning. The perpetrator appeared to be targeting a propane tank with his firebombs, hoping to cause a mass explosion, but he also set a vehicle on fire. When police arrived they shot him dead. He has not yet been publicly identified.

In other news, a transformer fire caused a massive electricity outage in New York City this evening, blacking out parts of Midtown Manhattan and the Upper West Side.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to Insubria, JD, JLH, Reader from Chicago, Upananda Brahmachari, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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The Men Lost Reason And Faith

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It’s Poetry Day, and today’s featured poem is “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” by Rudyard Kipling. I’ve posted this poem at least twice before, most recently just two years ago. However, it’s worth revisiting for two reasons: (1) This is its centennial — it was written in 1919 — and (2) the dénouement outlined in the final two stanzas is that much closer to becoming a grim reality.

It’s a remarkable work. It was written at the dawn of the Socialist Age, after the Bolshevik Revolution but before the height of the Red Terror. The welfare states of the West were in their earliest phase, as were the Culture Wars, as exemplified by the emancipation of women. The poet refers to the confluence of these trends as the “brave new world” — more than a decade before Aldous Huxley borrowed the phrase from Shakespeare (The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1) as the title of his novel.

As we look back on “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” a century later, Mr. Kipling seems to have had an uncanny sense of the shape of things to come (to borrow a title from H.G. Wells, one of the renowned Progressives of his time).

Normally I don’t explain poetry, but a hundred years have passed since it was written, so a little context is in order. The underlying social fabric is that of the Edwardian era, which still ruled the British zeitgeist immediately after the Great War, even though George V was by then on the throne. The great changes that lay ahead in the twenties had already been mapped out by the fashionable intellectual preoccupations of the early 20th century.

A “copybook heading” was an inspirational adage or quote from literature that was written at the top of the page of a schoolboy’s notebook. He would be required to copy it repeatedly in order to improve both his penmanship and his character.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings are here contrasted with the Gods of the Market-Place. Rather than the modern economic meaning of the latter term, think of the agora — the central public space in a city-state where commerce, culture, ideas, and personalities meet and mix. The Gods of the Market-Place were thus the gods of fashions and fads, as opposed to the timeless wisdom and common sense of the Gods of the Copybook Headings.

Three specific fashionable trends are laid out in successive stanzas in the middle of the poem. The first is the disarmament movement, which was just getting up a head of steam after the end of the war. Pacifism became a major political force later on in the twenties and thirties, so much so that it inhibited British rearmament, and thus allowed Adolf Hitler to act out his ambitions more forthrightly than he might otherwise have been able to do.

The second trend was “Free Love”, which was intertwined with the early feminist movement. Sexual freedom was considered a major factor in the liberation of women from the shackles of tradition. The Bloomsbury Group and the Fabians were rife with libertinism, H.G. Wells being a notable example. The fashionable sexual ideas that developed among intellectuals in the Edwardian period spread throughout the culture in the ensuing decades.

The third trend was redistributive socialist governance. Modern socialism was in its infancy in 1919, but the Fabians once again had mapped out the process in advance. As the Labour Party took form in the 1920s, the Fabians and other upper-middle-class socialists looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration.

All of this was just getting started when Mr. Kipling wove it into his poem in 1919. And everything has unfolded as he described in the hundred years since. The same foolishness that was fashionable in 1919 is still fashionable in 2019 — only in a much more deranged and nihilistic form. The burned fool’s bandaged finger just keeps wobbling back to that fire, over and over again.

Rudyard Kipling did not include in his poem what has become the major accelerant of the collapse of Western Civilization: mass immigration from the Third World. But it may be implicit the lines “when we disarmed They sold us / and delivered us bound to our foe”. In this post-modern world we live in a hundred years later, our foe is being delivered to us in our bound and helpless state.

And now for the poem:

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Culture-Enricher in Aargau Breaks Teacher’s Jaw

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The video and article below concern an incident of cultural enrichment in the northern Swiss canton of Aargau that was so egregious the Swiss press had to take note. A Syrian seventh-grader hit his female teacher multiple times, striking her so hard that he broke her jaw. His action was in respobnse to her impertinence in asking him to empty his pockets of knives and other implements of destruction.

To put the attack into an Islamic cultural context: It was unbearable to the boy that a mere female should treat him with such disrespect. If a woman had been so disrespectful to him in his home country, there would have been two possible outcomes, depending on the circumstances:

1.   If the woman had been a member of his extended family, the boy would have disciplined her physically, and been joined in the process by his father, brothers, uncles, etc. No woman in the family may be allowed to disrespect a male in the family; those are the rules.
2.   If the woman were a member of another clan or tribe, the boy would not have touched her. However, the woman’s male relatives — she could not have been interacting with a male outside the family if she were not accompanied by one or more male relatives — would have beaten her themselves. To have a woman of one’s family show disrespect to an unrelated male would violate the honor of the entire family, and she would thus have to be disciplined.
 

Since the teacher was unaccompanied by any male relative, she was without any protection, lacked honor, and could be disciplined with impunity. Such was the deeply-embedded sharia code that the boy was instinctively following.

The incident occurred in the town of Möriken-Wildegg. Ava Lon, who translated the video for subtitles, sends this interesting information about the name:

Please note that the town coat of arms includes a little African, because the name Möriken was thought to be derived from a diminutive of “Moor”, and thus means “Little Moors”.

I dug into the history of the name, and it seems to have originally been a form of the clan name “Mor” — i.e. “The village of Mor”. As the name evolved, the coincidental resemblance to “Little Moor” must have suggested the design for the coat of arms.

As for “Wildegg”, that comes from a phrase meaning “steep mountainside”. Nevertheless, those things in the lower part of the coat of arms look like red eggs to me. Maybe the word “egg” means “egg” in a Swiss German dialect (the German for “egg” is “Ei”, if I’m not mistaken).

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:


Video link

Here’s the accompanying article from the Swiss daily Aargauer Zeitung, also translated by Ava Lon:

Möriken-Wildegg: A 14-year-old Syrian hit his female teacher five to six times — he had received negative attention in the past

by Nadja Rohner

[photo caption: a young Syrian hit his female teacher (symbolic picture)]

The youth from Möriken-Wildegg talked a lot about the Quran, and during recess instructed girls to dress more modestly.

The case caused shock: last week the Argauer Zeitung published the news, that in Möriken-Wildegg a student from the Chestenberg school broke the jaw of a teacher by punching her with his fist.

He did this when she wanted to find out if the Syrian secondary-school student was carrying a knife — as he had already done in the past.

This time the case was taken up by the Weltwoche journalist Alex Baur. According to his research it is about a 14-year-old “M”.

He allegedly comes from a Syrian family with numerous children, who came to Switzerland exactly five years previously and allegedly lives on welfare. His German is good, and he is described as “quite intelligent, self-confident and quick-witted.”

Still, for a while “M.” had often allegedly been talking about the Quran. He also requested — “in Allah’s name” — that the girls from the area dress and behave more modestly. In this context he allegedly played with a knife on the Hellmatt School recess court. This, according to Weltwoche, resulted in his having to empty his pockets every time before being allowed to enter the classroom.

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The Utrecht Tram Mujahid Goes on Trial

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On the March 18 of this year a culture-enricher killed four people in a mass shooting on a tram in the Dutch city of Utrecht. The police said it sort of appeared to be a terrorist attack, but they were never quite sure of the shooter’s motive — despite the fact that he told them he had committed the attack in the name of his religion.

The following video is taken from a TV news report about the trial of the Utrecht tram jihadi. Many thanks to C for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:


Video link

Video transcript:

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 7/12/2019

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The Federal Trade Commission voted to approve a settlement with Facebook that would require the social media giant to pay a $5 billion fine. Facebook has been under investigation for more than a year for its mishandling of users’ personal information.

In other news, the Native American activist and Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren says that she will increase the importation of “refugees” into the USA by 700%.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to JD, Reader from Chicago, SS, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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