Gates of Vienna News Feed 1/31/2014

A man who says he had been at sea for 16 months in a tiny boat was washed ashore in the Marshall Islands. The man, who speaks only Spanish, says he was on his way from Mexico to El Salvador when his boat was cast adrift in the Pacific. He subsisted on sea turtles, fish, and seagulls during his ordeal. He had reportedly been traveling with a companion, who died several months ago.

In other news, an undetermined number of officials in Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry were taken hostage yesterday in Baghdad when gunmen stormed their building.

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

Thanks to Caroline Glick, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, JP, KGS, MC, Nilk, Takuan Seiyo, 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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Stuck With the Bill

Like other U.S. states, Tennessee is experiencing a budget crunch, and Governor Bill Haslam expects the citizens of Tennessee to tighten their belts.

But not the federally-sponsored refugees in Tennessee. Those refugees were brought to the state with a promise that the federal government would help with their welfare costs. However, now that the feds have withdrawn their cash, Tennessee still has the refugees, and tax-paying citizens have to pick up the slack for Medicaid and similar expenses.

The latest newsletter from the Tennessee Council for Political Justice has this report:

It’s no news to anyone listening in Tennessee that Governor Haslam is warning that projected revenue shortfalls will mean budget cuts.

Speaker Harwell acknowledged that with “revenues down a little this year, [balancing the state’s budget] will be tough. But we will stick to the principles of fiscal responsibility and balance it responsibly.”

On January 2, 2014, The Tennessean reported: “The governor has argued that the annual growth in Medicaid spending has put the squeeze on other programs the state would like to spend money on. ‘Medicaid takes up all of our new dollars, and that’s just the hard fact,’ the governor told reporters after a Rotary Club speech last month.”

The week of January 20, 2014, the newspaper ran a series titled “Broken Trust” about the 7,100 most vulnerable Tennesseans with developmental disabilities who are forced to go without needed services because of the state’s failure to allocate the funds.

The funds needed to provide these services are Medicaid funds. These are dollars that the State spends and the federal government matches.

Rep. Bill Sanderson believes that these state Medicaid dollars should NOT go to Tennesseans with developmental disabilities, but instead, to refugees who don’t even live in Tennessee yet. He’s referring to the refugees that are eventually brought to Tennessee by Catholic Charities, a federal contractor that gets paid a lot of taxpayer money to bring refugees to Tennessee.

When refugees are brought to Tennessee by the federal contractors, they are immediately enrolled into any and all public assistance programs, including, state-funded TennCare, SSI, and cash welfare. The federal government used to reimburse the state for 3 years worth of what it cost the state to provide these benefits. But typical of the federal government, they broke their promise to the states and stopped reimbursing the states for what the federal program cost.

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The Muslim Agenda

The video below is a two-hour compilation of material juxtaposing Islamic teachings the behavior of Muslims with what Western political leaders say about the “Religion of Peace”. It demonstrate that Islam is much more a cult-like political ideology than a religion.

NOTE: Some of the photos and clips in this video are graphic, and may be disturbing to sensitive viewers. On occasion foul language is heard in the sound track or displayed in the subtitles:

Hat tip: Steen.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 1/30/2014

Scores of demonstrators staged a sit-in yesterday near the U.S. embassy in Amman, Jordan. They carried banners and chanted slogans to protest Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace plan and support the Palestinian cause, declaring their opposition to any compromise with Israel.

In other news, Austria is planning to send 130 more peace-keeping troops to reinforce the EU mission in Bosnia.

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

Thanks to Andy Bostom, Derek Bauer, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, Jerry Gordon, JP, 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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A Secular Space

In a continuing series of videos about the proposed Charter of Secular Values in Quebec, a transsexual citizen named Michelle Blanc testifies before a national assembly commission in Quebec City.

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

See the links at the bottom of this post for more videos of citizens’ testimony on the Charter.

Additional material provided by the translator:

Fatima Houda-Pépin: She just quit the Québec Liberal Party (anti-Charter) after serving 20 years as an elected member of her riding. She is a Muslim, the only Muslim elected to-date in Québec, and is in favor of the Charter (most of it). She is highly respected in Québec for her integrity and she is very knowledgeable re Islamic fundamentalism. She also got the anti-Sharia motion adopted by the National Assembly back in 2005 or so.

Excerpts From Michelle Blanc’s Testimony at the Commission Hearing:

I am here to address you as a woman, a grandmother and a lesbian. I will not speak to you as a transgender, since I have no legal existence in Canada.

Every day I am a victim of sexism, contempt and rejection.

I studied in psychology, cultural anthropology and religious studies… I understand the religious-cultural phenomenon.

I also understand that communication includes verbal and non-verbal, and the evocative power of non-verbal symbols is very strong.

We all remember that small piece of red fabric that held so much power, that half of Québec was in turmoil over because of this tiny symbol.

Therefore, whenever we see big crosses, when we see veils, when we see all types of religious symbols, of course, the connotations are very powerful.

It’s forbidden to advertise to children, because they are easily influenced…

Yet, there are some who are willing to allow our young children to be in the presence of veiled women all day long.

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Death on the Escalator

A Montreal woman was killed this morning when her hijab became entangled in the mechanism of an escalator at a subway station.

Many thanks to Susan Victoria for translating this news report, and to Vlad Tepes for subtitling it:

There’s no word yet on whether the manufacturer of the escalator will be held liable for its failure to make its equipment accessible and safe for people of all races and religious faiths.

Below is a brief BBC article about the incident:

Woman Dies as Escalator Catches Her Scarf on Montreal Metro

A commuter has died after her scarf got snagged in an escalator at a Montreal Metro station and strangled her.

The unidentified 48-year-old woman was found dead at the bottom of the moving staircase at Fabre station in the north of the Canadian city.

Her hair was also apparently caught in the escalator in Thursday morning’s incident.

Montreal police said they would work with the coroner’s office to determine the circumstances of the fatality.

Police spokesman Jean-Pierre Brabant told reporters: “What we know now is that the woman’s scarf was caught in the escalator.

“When she bent over to try to get the scarf out, her hair was also caught.”

Video transcript:

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 1/29/2014

Thirty-eight people were killed in the latest fighting between Philippine government troops and a breakaway faction of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Thirty-seven of the dead were mujahideen, and one Filipino soldier was killed. The rebel group is unhappy with a recent peace accord between MILF and the government.

In other news, New Zealand is considering removing the Union Jack from its national flag. Prime Minister John Key says that he would like it to be replaced with the silver fern, as a representative of New Zealand’s flora.

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

Thanks to Andy Bostom, C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, Jerry Gordon, JP, Steen, Vlad Tepes, 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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A Minor Skirmish

As mentioned here previously, Gates of Vienna experienced technical difficulties a few days ago. Readers may have received errors when loading pages, and especially when attempting to comment.

The cause of the problem was eventually determined to be a low-level DoS (Denial of Service) attack, which went on for a couple of days. It was relatively ineffective, and our site remained up the entire time, with only some minor inconveniences (although would-be commenters may have felt otherwise). It absorbed quite a bit of my administrative time, which led to lighter posting, but other than that it had no great impact on Gates of Vienna.

According to the old adage, “when you’re taking fire, you must be over the target”. So we must be doing something right.

The proximate cause of the attack was probably our posting of the full text of the “ideological” portion of Anders Behring Breivik’s letter, which was otherwise unavailable. Numerous mass media outlets had received it, and some had published quotes from the non-ideological part, but none had released the entire text. It may be that someone, somewhere was so unhappy enough about what happened that they funded a cyber-attack against Gates of Vienna.

In any case, the incident has forced us to ponder our long-term prospects. If the attacks get more intense and more frequent, we may have to move up to a more expensive hosting option.

If that happens, you’ll hear about it: we’ll be pounding on you that much harder when the next fundraiser rolls around.

Show me the Poo!

Our British correspondent JP sent a tip this morning about what I’ve been referring to since as the “dog jihad” video. The woman featured in the video — which was taken by her friend on a smart phone — was confronted by a culturally enriched Tower Hamlets Enforcement Officer (THEO), who accused her of violating the borough’s dog-fouling law while walking her dog in the park. She denied the charge — she had cleaned up after her dog — and demanded that he “show me the poo”, which he refused to do.

THEOs are not civilians, but they are not full police officers, either. This one had to call for police backup to handle these two dangerous women and their dogs. The real police decided that the woman had committed no offense, and did not charge her.

(For the full story of the dog poo incident, see The Evening Standard or Metro.)

The “dog jihad”, like the parking jihad, the alcohol jihad, and all the other tactics employed by zealous Muslims in the neighborhoods where they dominate, is yet another aspect of block-busting. It serves to annoy and inconvenience the kuffar. It makes them uncomfortable and anxious in the streets and parks near their own homes. They learn to conform outwardly to sharia norms, or they move away to escape the harassment. Either outcome is satisfactory from the point of view of the sharia-compliance enforcers.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for leveling the sound and uploading this video:

Watch the original video here.

JP includes more information below, and speculates about other possible motives for the THEO’s behavior besides sharia-enforcement.

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More on THEOs
by JP

Too easy to jump to conclusions after watching the dog-fouling YouTube video and rush to see it as a case of Islamic harassment of Judeo-Christian dog-walkers, which perhaps it is. But worth bearing in mind that the zealous enforcement officer might possibly be motivated to an equal or greater extent by performance-pay-driven targets — the more citizens he apprehends and fines, the greater his take-home pay. Perhaps. Still, it leaves an uncomfortable impression of the potential for abuse inherent in this political police force, a point hinted at in the Daily Express article from 2009 linked to below, and from which I have extracted the key points.

But then we have the Tower Hamlets Poop Scoop Law — is this not excessively zealous and might it not be evidence of an Islamic prejudice against dogs and dog-owners? Note the tone and language used at the council’s Poop Scoop Law webpage (key words emphasised by this writer):
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“No One Will Silence Us”

We posted last week about the testimony being given by ordinary citizens of Quebec at hearings about the proposed “Charter of Quebec Values”, which would ban the wearing of religious symbols and clothing by public employees. Some of the women from the Islamic community who testified in favor of the Charter have been abused, harassed, and threatened by their co-religionists.

A group of women in Quebec made the following video to protest the treatment of these women, and to proclaim their determination not to be intimidated into silence.

Many thanks to Oz-Rita for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:

Transcript:

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 1/28/2014

In order to stabilize the value of the lira, which has dropped recently relative to the euro and the dollar, the Turkish central bank raised short-term interest rates. The overnight lending rate rose from 7.75% to 12%, and the overnight borrowing rate more than doubled to 8%.

In other news, the highly acclaimed Communist folk singer Pete Seeger has died at the age of 94.

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

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, JP, MC, Seneca III, 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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Imperial Kabuki Theatre Tonight

I was able to get into my Gmail account yesterday. I don’t know why it gets blocked sometimes, but it does. And since Google is rather like the Internal Revenue Service or Kafka’s Castle, one doesn’t protest – it is simply how thing are. Google giveth and Google taketh away, blessed be Google…

While the page was still open I spied a newsletter from Red State, a website that most conservative Americans know. The editor is Erick Erickson and his essay yesterday almost exactly described my own anticipatory sentiments about the State of the Union address our current president will be reading from his two teleprompters tonight:

Aside from some syntactical differences and his references to people I don’t know his essay is an almost exact summation of my reasons for joining him in avoiding the kabuki theatre tonight in this latest edition of the President’s State of the Union speech.

As Mr. Erickson says:

…I am not sure if I will watch the State of the Union address.

Why bother?

A thin-skinned amateur who has been in office six years and still can’t grasp how to do his job will stand before an even more thin skinned Parliament of Whores and tell them he does not need them, while knowing he really does need them, while none of them truly want to be with each other, and all have lawyers ready to go bow before the black-robed masters who’ll sit stone faced at the front of room knowing they really rule the joint.

My only hope is that the Republicans grow a pair and start laughing uncontrollably when the President begins touting ObamaCare, which you know he will do and which you know they will not. Paging Steve Stockman — here’s your moment.

The State of the Union has become a pointless bit of laundry list stagecrap where everyone in D.C. gets to pretend they like each other and together will make magic before leaking how they hate each other and won’t get anything done worthwhile.

And you know what? I’m cool with that. I’d rather board up the whole place than have the Parliament of Whores and Captain Bulls— come together with their favorite johns from K Street and Wall Street and enact Operation BOHICA on Main Street and the Middle Class.

And The Rich. Don’t forget them – the Conservative Rich or the Apolitical Rich, not the Mega Rich who give to the Political Class.

As always, progressives are keeping a sharp watch out for any uppity conservatives who might, just might get out of line and poke fun at the Thin-Skinned One. Thus HuffPo’s gimlet eye spotted the poster below, done by Oleg at the People’s Cube:.


This pretty picture was being used by someone else – see Oleg’s explanation here – and for those Puff Hos it’s evidence for their claim to have discovered that the People’s Cube is in cahoots with the uber-rich, uber-conservative Evil Koch Brothers. Hmmm…this won’t be the first time a progressive banged its punkin head against reality and came away dented and confused. And wrong. But simple things like evidence-based falsity never stops those who draw their conclusions from how they’d like reality to be, rather than what it is. When knocked to the ground by the facts, these folks just climb back on their unicorns and continue on down the Road of Good Intentions, because meaning well is equal to or better than doing good in their strange moral calculus.

But I digress. The subject, sadly enough, is still tonight’s State of the Union Address by our very own Nobel Peace Prize President as seen from the perspective of Erick Erickson (and derivately, by me since I wish I’d written this and still suspect he’s been reading my mail):
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Breivik and the Wicked Leftist Media

Our English correspondent Paul Weston returns with a mordant look at the Breivik letter and the pusillanimity of the legacy media, who have refused to report on its contents.


Breivik and the Wicked Leftist Media
by Paul Weston

A world controlled by the wicked and immoral Left is a very unpleasant place in which to live. At the furthest extremity of Left-wingery we have genocide, totalitarianism, gulags and evil. At the softer end of Left-wingery we have propaganda, lies, MSNBC, smears, the BBC, hatred of tradition and decency, and the concomitant incremental demise of the Western democracy historically defended by millions of our young men who now lie in graves both marked and unmarked across the Western world.

Unfortunately for the decent, intelligent and moral people today, the Left have largely carried out their Long March and now control the institutions which form the thoughts and opinions of the vast majority of Western peoples. He who controls the media and the educational establishment controls the past, the present, and the future, just as Hitler, Stalin and their present-day Socialist comrades-in-arms intended.

To really see what this means in 2014, we need look no further than the case of Anders Behring Breivik, the counter-jihad movement, and the truly obscene behaviour of the Leftist media — particularly so in Scandinavian countries.

In 2011 Breivik carried out his murderous spree, to the shock and horror of all decent people everywhere. The Leftist media, however — which had already made up its mind about certain individuals within the counter-jihad movement — sought to use this act of evil purely to mount an assault upon high-profile individuals whose “crime” was to peacefully and accurately draw attention to the dangers involved in allowing a barbaric ideology by the name of Islam to flourish both demographically and “culturally” within the cohesive, peaceful and Christian West.

I am not going to go into forensic detail about the actions of the Leftist media, which have been covered in depth already by Robert Spencer, Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna, and Fjordman, all of whom were viciously attacked by Left-wing journalists who were outraged (rightly so) by the actions of Breivik, but who had all remained smugly mute for years over the numerically far higher number of murders carried out in the name of Islam or Socialism.

Just to give a couple of typical examples, the Guardian newspaper, chock-full of wicked Leftists, remarked that America had been given the bloody nose she so manifestly deserved on 9/11, whilst the BBC bent over backwards to excuse Islam whilst reducing the then U.S. Ambassador to tears in front of a baying mob of specifically imported Muslims and Leftists within a BBC studio.

But why such overt double standards over two acts of similar atrocity? Why the total failure to hold up the Koran and the hadith for 9/11? And why the massive, concerted and hysterical smear campaign against Bodissey, Spencer and Fjordman?

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The Slaughtering of Sacred Cows

Nick at the The Frozen North has taken a look at Diana West’s book American Betrayal from a British perspective. Should we call it “British Betrayal”?

Excerpts from his essay are reproduced below:

Brits of my generation were taught that World War II was a moral enterprise and that as a country, we had fought for freedom, self-determination and democracy. Apparently, we declared war on Germany to defend Poland and six years later, after forging a “special relationship” with America, we had defeated Germany and won the war.

We grew up during what became known as the cold war, and we were led to believe that the forces of Communism could lay waste to the entire world. One American President faced them down when they tried to base missiles in Cuba; another called the Soviet Union an “evil empire”. This worldview was reinforced in the public consciousness by fictional works in both TV and print.

And yet, the British and Americans allied themselves with the Soviet Union during World War II. Evidently, it didn’t matter that the Soviets invaded Poland along with the Nazis, or that they refused to return the Polish territory they captured during that military conquest.

How can the British and American wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, and the behaviour of our leaders towards the dictator Stalin, be reconciled with the claims that the war was a moral conflict and that Britain and America “won” it?

The American journalist Diana West has recently written a book which examines the extent of Soviet influence on American policy both during and after the war. She has been attacked by the former radical leftist David Horowitz for doing this, but the question being asked here is perfectly legitimate: To what extend did the British and the Americans do Josef Stalin’s bidding during the war?

When I visited the Imperial War Museum in London a couple of years ago, there was a plaque on the wall that said serving in the Merchant Navy was the most dangerous thing anyone could do during the war. Having visited Malta not long before, I was familiar with the story of Operation Pedestal, so it was not difficult for me to accept that sailing in a supply convoy during the war was incredibly dangerous. And the Arctic convoys to the Soviet port of Murmansk were among the most dangerous of all.

The arctic convoys were an attempt to meet the obligations of an agreement that had been made by Lord Beaverbrook on behalf of the British government during a trip to the Soviet Union in September of 1941. Beaverbrook had promised to send the Soviet Union 200 aircraft and 250 tanks each month, which would mean handing over to the Soviets between a quarter and a third of the output of Britain’s military manufacturing output. In the House of Commons, Churchill had warned that ‘sacrifices of the most serious kind and the most extreme efforts will have to be made by the British people’ in order to supply Russia with armaments.

Military aid was therefore sent to the Soviet Union by sea, with convoys sailing up the coast of Norway and around the Barents Sea to the Soviet ports of Murmansk and Archangel. These journeys were so incredibly dangerous, and losses were so high, that the British Chiefs of Staff even proposed cancelling convoy PQ16, which was due to sail from Iceland on 18th May 1942.

Churchill, knowing that Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov was due to visit London a few days later, insisted that the convoy go ahead “whatever the cost” because Britain’s “comradeship” with the Soviet Union was at stake. As the acclaimed historian Laurence Rees has said, this shows clearly that the decision to sacrifice British lives was politically motivated. In other words, Winston Churchill was willing to let British sailors die in order to keep Stalin onside.

Why we would go out of our way to help the reds in the first place remains a mystery to me. I tend to agree with Lieutenant General Henry Pownall, the deputy of General Sir Alan Brooke, who wrote on 29 June 1941: “I avoid the expression “Allies”, for the Russians are a dirty lot of murdering thieves themselves, and double crossers of the deepest dye. It’s good to see the deepest cut-throats in Europe, Hitler and Stalin, going for each other.” Senator Bennett Clark of Missouri expressed similar sentiments at the time: “It’s a case of dog eat dog. Stalin is as bloody handed as Hitler. I don’t think we should help either one.”

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