Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/9/2015

Police in the Macedonian town of Kumanovo engaged in protracted gun battle today with ethnic Albanian terrorists. Five policemen were killed and dozens more wounded. An undetermined number of terrorists were also killed.

In other news, a 17-year-old “Australian” “youth” was arrested in Melbourne for plotting to detonate three bombs. Police say they found explosive devices in the young man’s home. The incident had nothing to do with Islam.

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

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Diana West, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, Papa Whiskey, 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.

Financial Crisis
» Presidential Questions
» The $364 Billion Real Estate Threat Inside China’s Biggest Banks
 
USA
» 7th Circuit Decision Says We Can Order You to Buy a Gun?
» American Doctor Declared Free of Ebola Finds the Virus in His Eye Months Later
» Baltimore Officials Work Towards Disarming the United States
» Black Spring: The ACLU Joins the Lynch Mob
» California Approves New Uniform Rules for Seawater Desalination
» Cultural Relativism Uber Islam
» Exposing Senator Alexander’s Expansion of Medicaid Through the ESEA Reauthorization
» Give Your Vote to Hitlary
» He Pushed Forward: Brave Garland Police Officer Advanced as he Brought Down Garland Terrorists
» How America Waits for the Next Terrorist Attack
» Inside the Mind of a Black Baltimore Cop
» Jade Helm Double Take
» John Bolton: Hillary Should be “Disqualified” From Presidential Run
» KC Police Learning to ‘Tactically Disengage’ To Avoid Violent Confrontations
» Mark Twain Would be Ashamed to be an American Today
» Master the Human Domain: The Domestic Plan Behind Jade Helm
» Media Hypocrisy Over the “Draw Mohammed” Contest
» Our Cartoon Contest Provoked Jihadis? Here’s News: They Were Already Provoked
» Overland Park Man is Shocked at News of Son’s Involvement in Garland, Texas, Assault
» Phoenix Mosque Attended by Garland Jihadists Previously Spawned Two Other Terrorists
» Six Reasons Pamela Geller’s Muhammad Cartoon Contest is No Different Than Selma
» Texas Shooting Suspect Elton Simpson’s Private Messages: ‘The Noose is Tightening’
» The Chains of Government Strengthen as Our Morality Weakens
» Unbelievable Surveys Given to Children in Massachusetts — And Schools Across America
» Why Aren’t the Republicans Fighting Harder?
 
Canada
» SFC Christopher Speer is Dead. Omar Khadr is Free
 
Europe and the EU
» Berlin, Then and Now
» From the Arc De Triomphe to Gdansk, Europe Celebrates
» Germany: Thwarted Attack in Hessen, Bomb Filled With Nails
» Italy: Priest Wanted for Questioning in Piscaglia Probe Located
» Italy: Five French Citizens Nabbed for Vandalism to Stay in Jail
» Leading Geneticist: ‘Health Damaging Effects’ of GMOs Unpredictable
» Norway Ends Blasphemy Law Because of Charlie Hebdo Jihad Massacre
» Number of UK Muslim MPs Doubles
» Sardinia Village Priest Nabbed for Teen Sexual Abuse
» Scotland: Election 2015: Nicola Sturgeon Meets New Team of SNP MPs
» UK: Extremists Order Muslims to Boycott General Election in Intimidating Leaflets Warning Voting is a Sin
» UK: Here’s How the Election Results Would Look Under a Proportional Voting System
» UK: Hackney Driver Swerves Onto Pavement Before Ploughing Into Female Police Officer
» When Will Labour Learn That British People Don’t Like Left-Wing Politicians
 
Balkans
» Five Macedonia Police Killed in Gunfight Near Kosovo Border
» Macedonia: 3 Police Officers Dead, 20 Injured in Clashes With Armed Group in City of Kumanovo
» Macedonia: Police Clash With ‘Armed Terrorist Group’
 
North Africa
» Egyptian Court Sentences Mubarak and Sons to Three Years in Jail for Corruption
» Egyptian Youths Face Trial for ‘Insulting Islam’ By Making Fun of ISIS
» Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak Jailed in Corruption Retrial
 
Middle East
» Aviation: Struggling Royal Jordanian Raises Capital
» Dozens Killed as 40 Inmates Escape in Iraq Prison Break
» Dozens of Saudi-Led Coalition Airstrikes Hit Rebel Stronghold in Northern Yemen
» Islam’s ‘Reformation’ Is Already Here — And it’s Called ‘ISIS’
» Sex Slave Forced to Marry Twenty ISIS Fighters and Has Virgin Surgery Each Time
» The Middle East Runs Out of Water
» UN Official: ISIS Forces Girls to Undergo Virginity Surgeries, Marry Them Off 20 Times
 
Russia
» Russia Stages Massive WW2 Parade Despite Western Boycott
 
Far East
» Pentagon Raises the Alarm Over Beijing’s Territorial Expansion in South China Sea
» US Diplomatic Overture to N. Korea Met With Missile-Firing
 
Australia — Pacific
» Australian Police Say They Disrupted Melbourne Bomb Plot
» Climate Change is UN-Led Hoax to Create ‘New World Order’ — Australian PM’s Adviser
 
Sub-Saharan Africa
» Blaming the Victims of Rape in Somalia
» Liberia Cautiously Marks End of Ebola After 4,700 Deaths
» UN: 100,000 Flee Week of South Sudan Fighting
 
Immigration
» Italy: Immigrant ‘Hero’ Defends Bus Passengers From Local Gang
» Italy: 80,000 Foreigners in 15 Years: Varese, Model of Integration
» People Smugglers Using Facebook to Lure Migrants Into ‘Italy Trips’
» Report: Major Problems With U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program
 
General
» “Stay Quiet and You’ll be Okay”
» Communist Treason Murders Millions
 

Presidential Questions

Act of 23 December 1913, § 16, [3] and [4], 38 Stat. at 266. At that time, the statutorily fixed rate of exchange was 20.67 “dollars” per ounce of gold, or 23.22 grains of gold per “dollar”. An Act To define and fix the standard of value, to maintain the parity of all forms of money issued or coined by the United States, to refund the public debt, and for other purposes, Act of 14 March 1900, CHAP. 41, § 1, 31 Stat. 45, 45.

Even with these apparent safeguards in place, however, Congress carefully provided in the Federal Reserve Act that “[t]he right to amend, alter, or repeal this Act is hereby expressly reserved”, so that the lessons later experience taught could easily be applied. Act of 23 December 1914, § 30, 38 Stat. at 275. Unfortunately, in a misguided response to the banking crisis of the early 1930s, Congress relied on this reserved right to remove the requirement for redemption of Federal Reserve Notes in gold. AN ACT To protect the currency system of the United States, to provide for the better use of the monetary gold stock of the United States, and for other purposes, Act of 30 January 1934, CHAPTER 6, § 2(b)(1), 48 Stat. 337, 337, now codified at 12 U.S.C. § 411. Yet, during the same crisis, Congress, in what ultimately became 12 U.S.C. § 95(a), authorized the President and the Secretary of the Treasury to prescribe by regulations whatever changes in the Federal Reserve Act the future might prove to be necessary in order to deal with such matters. See AN ACT To provide relief in the existing national emergency in banking, and for other purposes, Act of 9 March 1933, CHAPTER 1, § 4, 48 Stat. 1, 2.

Subsequent experience has now taught this country that the only way to obtain “the full benefits of the currency provided for by the Congress through the national banking system and the Federal reserve system” with respect to the original statutory goal of maintaining a permanent relationship between that “currency” and gold is to impose directly upon the banks themselves, both in the first place and in the final analysis, a requirement that they make Federal Reserve Notes freely exchangeable for gold at all times.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

The $364 Billion Real Estate Threat Inside China’s Biggest Banks

Fitch Ratings has called real estate the “biggest threat” to Chinese banks as surging loans tied to properties coincide with defaults and falling sales.

Corporate loans backed by buildings have grown almost fivefold since 2008 and residential mortgages have more than tripled in the period among lenders rated by Fitch, the company said Friday. That’s seen property loans held by China’s four biggest lenders soar to a total 2.26 trillion yuan ($364 billion), according to their annual reports.

“Collateral is supposed to reduce bank risk — but the rise of property collateral in corporate loans may actually increase the chance of bank failure,” Fitch analysts Jack Yuan and Grace Wu said in the report. “This is because the widespread use of such collateral has lowered the perceived risks of lending, fueling China’s credit build-up and spreading real-estate risk to other sectors of the economy.”

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

7th Circuit Decision Says We Can Order You to Buy a Gun?

Can public opinion require you to buy a gun? We can make that claim sound nicer and call it community standards instead of public opinion.

Two federal judges said we can deny or demand firearm ownership. The judges allowed a city ordinance in Illinois to ban the ownership of modern rifles. It also bans ammunition magazines that hold than 10 cartridges.

According to the judges, the city of Highland Park, Illinois passed an ordinance that is simply a regulation of the right to keep and bear arms in the home rather than an infringement on the right.

In practical terms, two judges allowed politicians to pander to their gun-ban donors as they legislated for headlines. Legal scholars will take apart the Friedman decision and show where it is wrong. In the mean time, let’s see what happens if the judges decision stands. The judges said a city may limit firearms ownership based on feelings. The same ruling could also allow a city to require firearms ownership.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

American Doctor Declared Free of Ebola Finds the Virus in His Eye Months Later

American doctor Ian Crozier was treated for Ebola in Atlanta last year and declared free of the virus in his blood. But he had no way of knowing it still lurked in his eye.

About two months after being released from the hospital, he experienced a piercing pain in his left eye, he told The New York Times. The pressure in his eye elevated while his vision decreased.

After repeated tests, doctors discovered the virus was still living in his eye.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Baltimore Officials Work Towards Disarming the United States

The city council is completely democratic, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake had a top leadership position in the Democratic National Committee and provides key input into Obama’s task force on 21st policing, an initiative to federalize local and state police.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Black Spring: The ACLU Joins the Lynch Mob

The Marxist-founded pressure group gears up to bring the Arab Spring to Baltimore — and the rest of America

Cooling down the churning cauldron of mob violence that Baltimore has become is not on the agenda of the ACLU which is now preparing to turn up the heat in cities across America.

Following the suspicious death in police custody of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man with a long rap sheet, angry mobs and radical agitators have turned Maryland’s largest city into a Hobbesian jungle. They were already angry at the endlessly sensationalized deaths in recent years of black males such as Trayvon Martin (Sanford, Fla.), Michael Brown (Ferguson, Mo.), Eric Garner (Staten Island, N.Y.), and Tamir Rice (Cleveland, Ohio) at the hands of non-blacks, but the seemingly senseless death of Gray last month pushed them over the edge.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

California Approves New Uniform Rules for Seawater Desalination

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) — California water regulators on Wednesday adopted a new uniform permitting process for seawater desalination projects expected to expand in number as the drought-stricken state increasingly turns to the ocean to supplement its drinking supplies.

Action on the desalination rule, which puts key decisions for such plants in the hands of statewide regulators rather than regional boards, came a day after the same state body enacted sweeping cutbacks in water use by California’s cities and towns.

The latest measure amends California’s Ocean Plan to make clear that regulators must evaluate the best available sites, designs, technologies and mitigation measures for minimizing harm to the environment from desalination plants.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Cultural Relativism Uber Islam

by Diana West

Listening to Laura Ingraham’s interview with Pamela Geller, I made some notes on their lines of argument. Geller, obviously, is for the cartoon contest as an exercise of the American right to speech free from Islamic dictates; Ingraham supports Geller’s right to free speech but opposes the contest, nonetheless, as not “helpful.”

Geller opens by taking exception to Ingraham’s earlier comment calling the cartoon contest needlessly provocative. Geller argues that, on the contrary, it is murdering cartoonists that is needlessly provocative, and then says something about the importance of not surrendering to violent sharia enforcement. Once established, she says, we will enforce it again and again and again.

Ingraham replies with a list of her own bona fides regarding freedom of religion, persecuted Christians, the war in Iraq, also professing her own Roman Catholic faith. She then says she doesn’t think the US effort to combat the Islamization of the globe is “necessarily helped” by putting on Mohammed art contests, although she supports PG’s right to do so. She then intimates that PG was merely grandstanding, which PG takes exception to. (PG: Where did I say I was “brave,” LI: I didn’t say you said that — although LI did imply exactly that.)

When they come back to topic, LI says: I’m a Roman Catholic. I don’t like it when the Virgin Mary is smeared in dung. I don’t like it when the crucifix is dipped in urine. She says that while this was protected speech, she doesn’t like it, doesn’t think it is good for anyone.

Here we see unfolding the “religious equivalence” argument, an argument born of cultural relativism that must avoid comparisons between the teachings of Christianity and Islam, Jesus and Mohammed, to sustain itself…

           — Hat tip: Diana West [Return to headlines]
 

Exposing Senator Alexander’s Expansion of Medicaid Through the ESEA Reauthorization

The US Department of Labor (Secretary’s Commission for Achieving Necessary Skills — SCANS) identified the proficiency levels and ratings for personal qualities and interpersonal soft skills. The US Department of Labor and US Department of Education contracted with American College Testing (ACT) to benchmark Common Core and these behavioral standards. NAEP, ETS, AND ACT have introduced these testing measures — called “soft skills,” “workforce readiness skills,” and “21st Century Skills” — in the affective domain. (Contract with CRESST funded by the USDOE Office of Educational Research and Improvement for SCANS Workforce Readiness.

In a current government publication called, “What Works in Job Training: A Synthesis of the Evidence” (July 22, 2014, US Departments of Labor, Education, Health and Human Services, and Commerce) we find the following statements:…

The ACT Aspire test measures “readiness” in the affective domain called “academic behaviors.” They have cleverly used the word “academic” to circumvent any questions that the public might raise about the psychological testing of personality traits. However, these so-called “academic” behaviors include:…

Re-thinking the non-cognitive has been the dominant focus of the Bloom ‘Whole Child Theory’ — cognitive + affective = psychomotor — defined as beliefs, feelings, behavior; think, feel, act; or know, do and ‘be like’ [“orientations”—Spady]. Benjamin Bloom’s famous quote is, “Good teaching is challenging the child’s fixed beliefs.” To change behavior [psychomotor or action], you must create a conflict in the affective domain. A short list of affective domain research includes:…

The Pennsylvania Technical Training and Assistance Network (PATTAN) team effort is training teachers in Pennsylvania to screen all students, and apply the multi-tiered system of support to all students (Response to Intervention-RTI), identifying behavioral/mental health disabilities and interventions on normal children before referring any child to Special Education. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) codes must be used for billing and there is no code for normal. Every child will now be coded as mentally disabled.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Give Your Vote to Hitlary

I know, I know, that Hitlary would rapidly prove to be the worst president America has ever had (or the best, if you are a CFR traitor) — which, having in mind the excellent jobs of the Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama trying to destroy America, would be a true accomplishment. Nevertheless, I think that electing Hitlary to the presidency of the United States is the best thing true patriots can do to save America.

Yes, yes, I also know that we don’t elect presidents, but that they are selected at the conciliabula of the Council on Foreign Relations and later confirmed at the Bilderberger’s secret meetings. I am not that stupid to think otherwise. But, giving our votes to Hitlary we’ll guarantee that, even if the CFR conspirators try to change their mare in midstream as they did before, because Hillary scares them, We The People can put her in the White House with a true mandate.

Now, why do I think that in the short run this counterintuitive thing would be beneficial for the American people? Because everything indicates that Americans need a strong whack on the head to wake up from their media/gadgets-induced dream, and Hitlary can be our big stick.

Fifty years ago, an Obama would have lived at the White House for less than six months before angry Americans would have forcibly kicked him out. Currently, however, not even Obama has been able to provoke the sheeple to put aside their iPhones and iPads and start the clean up of the Augean stables that we need so badly. Conclusion: to wake them up, we need somebody even worse than Obama. We need Hitlary.

[…]

In 1987, CFR mouthpiece Arthur S. Miller, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, wrote The Secret Constitution and the Need for Constitutional Change, in which he described in more detail the new Constitution the conspirators have in mind. This new Constitution, which is nothing but a blueprint for a corporate takeover of America under a communo-fascist totalitarian dictatorship, seems too close for comfort to the new Amerika we have seen vertiginously developing under CFR puppets George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

But, contrary to the overt, violent revolution advised by Marx and Lenin, the new American Revolution has been a disguised, covert one. The new American Revolution has not used (at least, not yet) guns and bullets to enforce its rule, but stealth, cunning, deception, lies and psychological warfare. Though the ideology of the new anti-American revolutionaries who conspire behind our backs to impose it upon the rest of us is a mixture of fascism and communism, which they euphemistically call the New World Order, the techniques they are using to implement it are not the ones preferred by Fascists or Communists, but have been copied from the British Fabians and Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci.

The British Fabians advocated of communism as conceived by Karl Marx, but, contrary to Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and other Communist ideologues, they believed that the right way to do it was not by violent means but gradually, by infiltration, capturing the existing institutions from inside and putting them to work for their goals. No wonder the symbol of the Fabians is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

He Pushed Forward: Brave Garland Police Officer Advanced as he Brought Down Garland Terrorists

By Bob Owens

More details are beginning to emerge about the incompetent Islamic terrorist attack on a free speech event held by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) in Garland, Texas Sunday. Bearing Arms readers have asked for more details about how the actual shooting went down, and about the Garland police officer who used his duty sidearm to defeat two attackers armed with rifles within 15 seconds.

Please keep in mind that we don’t have all the details about the attack, the individual officer’s response, or the exact steps law enforcement took once the attack began, and that even if we had that information, we would withhold such details which may be useful for any other would-be terrorists attempting future attacks.

That said, we will provide analysis of some key pieces of publicly available information.

At the point of the attack, the two suspects apparently drove up and opened fire upon an unarmed security guard who was accompanied by a 60-year-old Garland police officer. The unarmed guard was struck the volley of gunfire. The veteran Garland officer then drew his duty-issue Glock pistol and opened fire on the suspects.

The officer killed one terrorist and wounded the other in his initial volley of return fire. Witnesses claim there was a brief pause, and then the officer fire two more shots to kill the still-moving terrorist as he appears to be reaching for a backpack. The entire event lasted 15 seconds, with heavily-armed Garland SWAT converging on the scene immediately afterward.

We’re not going to mention any more about the officer who took out these terrorists, only that to give an idea of his approximate position in relation to the terrorists as he engaged them.

The evidence markers at the bottom of the photo above show us a remarkable story, as they denote the final locations of the shell casings ejected from the officer’s Glock duty pistol. While every pistol is different from another in its ejection pattern, and the movement of the officer and the cant of his gun precludes us from knowing exactly where he was, there, is a distinct trial of shells showing that the officer was moving forward from the bottom left of the photo above towards the terrorists at the rear of the vehicle. He appears to have opened fire from 20 yards away, and fired at least a dozen shots by the time he reached an area near the traffic cones, roughly 7-10 yards from where the terrorists died.

Second photo taken from the opposite angle (below) seems to confirm this determined officer’s advance on the terrorists while firing.

[Two young terrs with high-capacity long guns, stopped dead in their tracks at 20 yards in 15 seconds by a sexagenarian with a pistol, shooting on the move. Outstanding! You’re never too old to be a warrior! — PW]

           — Hat tip: Papa Whiskey [Return to headlines]
 

How America Waits for the Next Terrorist Attack

No matter how they write up the scary script threatening unleashed lions on courageous Pamela Geller notwithstanding, the days of Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi being able to plot terrorist attacks on innocent civilians are gone forever.

Of all the grisly beheading videos sent over the Internet, the most indelible one trumps the latest terrorist script intending ‘to show how easy we give our lives for the Sake of Allah’ with one that irrefutably proves the lives of terrorists can be snuffed out before they get to carry out their missions.

Even with the ACLU, CAIR and other American organizations running interference for them — even with the apparent support of America’s most anti-American president in its back pocket, Radical Islam’s intention to force Sharia law on the 300-plus million American population is an unattainable pipe dream.

Obama may be soft on terrorism, but Americans, like the people of many other countries, are not.

Everything about Obama is politically correct politics. Everything about the American people is liberty and freedom.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Inside the Mind of a Black Baltimore Cop

By John Blake

He stepped onto the streets this week in his blue Baltimore police uniform and noticed something was different.

African-American pedestrians shook their heads at him and frowned. Drivers slowed their cars when they spotted him and scowled. And when he joined a phalanx of white officers assembled for crowd control, he heard people yell:

Police ain’t s***.

There’s more of us than you.

This is our city. This is our corner.

He is a black police officer who liked wearing his uniform in public because it inspired nods of respect. But this past week, something changed.

“I felt funny in my uniform for the first time,” he said. “People looked at me like I was crazy. I just kept it moving. But I was like, wow, this uniform had that much effect?”

When riots erupted in Baltimore after a young African-American man named Freddie Gray died in police custody, pundits and protesters flocked to the airwaves to offer their perspective. The voice of one group, though, has not been heard: What do Baltimore’s black police officers who were raised in the city have to say about what’s happened to their community?

Two black officers from the city’s Police Department decided to answer that question. Both men asked not to be identified for fear of retribution.

[And the hero-cop of Garland can’t be identified either, for the same reason: whole populations with a terrorist attitude carefully cultivated by the institutionalized American left. — PW]

           — Hat tip: Papa Whiskey [Return to headlines]
 

Jade Helm Double Take

Here are ten supposed “conspiracy theories” blasted by the media that turned out to be TRUE

(NaturalNews) All the talk about the Jade Helm military exercises targeting Texas as “hostile territory” has turned the mainstream media into its usual self: finger-wagging denialists who pretend nothing is ever a threat unless they say so first. Jade Helm is no threat to your safety, they insist, but a tiny measles outbreak in Disneyland that killed no one should have you screaming in total panic. (Did you properly put on your measles paranoia tin foil hat before getting injected at Walgreens?)

According to the status quo media, nothing nefarious is ever planned by governments. Never mind the fact that nearly every act of genocide and war in the last two centuries was planned and carried out by governments. The phenomenon is called “democide,” and in just the last century or so, over 260 million people have been mass murdered by governments.

Click here to watch my video mini-documentary on democide.

The clueless mainstream media also has a very short memory. It can’t remember world history, American history or even what it reported five years ago. As I show here, the very same things the media is now reporting as facts were derided as “conspiracy theories” just a few short years ago.

Here are ten relevant examples:…

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

John Bolton: Hillary Should be “Disqualified” From Presidential Run

By Robert Wilde

At the South Carolina Freedom Summit on Saturday, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said that Hillary Clinton was not fit to be president of the United States because she did not take necessary steps to protect Americans in Libya.

On the day that Ambassador Christopher Stevens, along with three other brave Americans, was killed in Benghazi, Bolton said that “not only was nothing done, the response of the administration was to go home. The president left the Oval office in the situation room to go to the residence. Hillary Clinton left the State Department to go home.”

Not once did Clinton call the secretary of defense to see what the status of the embassy was at that time. “She didn’t stay in a way the six secretaries of state that I worked for would have stayed. They would have stayed there all night to protect our people in danger overseas. Hillary Clinton went home. That act alone disqualifies her from being president of the United States,” Bolton exhorted.

Bolton expressed his anger that, after the entire sordid Benghazi affair, the U.S. government arrested just one of the people responsible and brought them back for a full due process criminal trial.

The ambassador asked, “What lesson does that send to the terrorists all around the world? What lessons does it send to the state sponsors of terrorism all around the world who arm and equip them and finance them? I’ll tell you what it says. It says an American ambassador, who is the personal representative of the president of the United States overseas, can be murdered by a group of terrorists with complete impunity.”

[in contrast with the old Scottish slogan, Nemo me impune lasessit. (No one crosses me with impunity.) Bolton for President! — PW]

           — Hat tip: Papa Whiskey [Return to headlines]
 

KC Police Learning to ‘Tactically Disengage’ To Avoid Violent Confrontations

By Glenn E. Rice

When two patrol officers arrived at a south Kansas City house last month, a 24-year-old woman armed with a knife already had begun slicing her wrists.

She threatened the officers with the knife and a hammer as they approached in the basement of the Wornall Road home.

Instead of weapons, the officers used words to defuse the situation and convince her to surrender.

That is the type of scene — officers showing restraint in a volatile situation — that Police Chief Darryl Forté wants to see play out more often.

“We want to make sure that officers understand it is OK to tactically disengage,” Forté said. “We take an oath to protect life and property but we don’t want to hurt anybody unnecessarily,”

Police are trained to protect themselves against armed or dangerous individuals, especially in tight quarters, like a basement. They learn at the police academy that they only have a few seconds to react when a threatening person charges them. They train on when to shoot to make sure they go home safe.

But in the aftermath of the police shooting last summer of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., many law enforcement agencies nationwide now are teaching officers how to delay or even prevent shootings by backing away or finding cover until other officers arrive.

That used to be considered cowardice, Forté said.

But the public wants officers to save lives, not take them, recent events have shown.

[…]

All Kansas City officers are required to attend the new training, which includes a segment focused on what Forté calls “tactical disengagement and redeployment.”

In other words, how to back off — the opposite of what officers previously have been trained to do.

[…]

“It is not the Old West and we are on a street in Dodge City where you draw when somebody flinches to see who is quicker,” said Kansas City Sgt. Ward Smith, a firearms instructor.

[…]

But officers can’t always back off, one participant pointed out.

“There are times when you have to use tactical retreat because it will buy you a little time to get extra officers there who can assist,” said Sgt. Terry Freed. “There are also a lot of times as an officer you don’t have the luxury of a tactical retreat; you have got to immediately take control of the situation.”

[As in Garland, Texas, on May 3, 2015. That also applies to civilians who are under attack, hence the irrationality of “duty to retreat” laws. — PW]

           — Hat tip: Papa Whiskey [Return to headlines]
 

Mark Twain Would be Ashamed to be an American Today

It was the great American Humorist Mark Twain who said Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Master the Human Domain: The Domestic Plan Behind Jade Helm

A closer look at the upcoming Jade Helm military exercise, specifically its “master the human domain” motto, reveals a larger agenda in regards to domestic policy.

In current military terminology, the “human domain” or “human domain analytics” refers to the “global understanding of anything associated with people.”

Breaking down into four specific categories, mastery of the human domain results from obtaining total information awareness on a mass scale.

Who You Are — Collected information includes names, addresses, biometrics, social media accounts .

What You Do — Travel history, communications, financial transactions and movement of physical assets.

Who You Know — Relational information including family, friends, associates and organizations.

Context — Contextual data such as demographics, politics, cultural norms and religion.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Media Hypocrisy Over the “Draw Mohammed” Contest

Many media outlets have spent more time condemning Pamela Geller’s “draw Mohammed” contest as unnecessarily provocative and “hate speech” and little time condemning the jihadists who planned to massacre the attendees at the Texas event.

Americans can disagree over whether Geller’s event was unnecessarily provocative. I did not agree with it and would not participate in such an event intended to offend Muslims just as I oppose events and artwork intended to offend Christians. However, I don’t support violence against anti-Christian art and events since modern society’s response to offensive speech is peaceful protests, not violence.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Our Cartoon Contest Provoked Jihadis? Here’s News: They Were Already Provoked

By Robert Spencer

Islamic jihadists tried to commit mass murder at the American Freedom Defense Initiative/Jihad Watch Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest that Pamela Geller and I hosted in Garland, Texas, last Sunday. Media pundits across the political spectrum have decided: it’s our fault. We provoked them, you see.

“Of course we have a right to draw what we want, but we also have an obligation not to be irresponsibly provocative,” said the ex-Catholic author of Why Catholics Are Right, Michael Coren.

“It’s needlessly provocative,” said New York Representative Peter King, whose hearings on Muslim radicalization back in 2011 were widely termed “provocative.” He said he thought our event was “insulting someone’s religion.”

Coren and King were expressing the dominant view, which is essentially that if Pamela Geller and I had just left well enough alone, all would be well. The police officer who was shot in the ankle by one of the jihadis would still be walking without difficulty, and the two jihadis, Ibrahim (formerly Elton) Simpson and Nadir Soofi, would still be breathing air.

The unspoken assumption here is that if only we hadn’t cooked up this cartoon exhibit, Simpson and Soofi would no doubt be on their way to becoming loyal, patriotic, law-abiding American Muslims, living demonstrations of the compatibility of Islam and democracy and of the ability of America to embrace people of diverse perspectives. All we have to do to achieve this utopia is just give a little. And what non-Muslims have to give is the right to draw and publish cartoons of Muhammad. After all, why would anyone want to be “provocative”?

The first problem with this rosy little scenario is that these jihadis in particular, and Islamic jihadists in general, are already “provoked.”

Ibrahim Simpson wasn’t “radicalized” by our cartoon contest.

Long before it took place, he was in touch with jihad terrorists who encouraged him to carry out a jihad attack. If he hadn’t opted to attack our heavily guarded event, he might have chosen a softer target, as did his fellow jihadists Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered four Jews in a kosher supermarket in January, and Man Haron Monis, who took hostages (of who two were subsequently killed) in the Lindt Chocolat Café in Sydney, Australia last December.

What’s more, the Islamic State, to whom Simpson pledged allegiance before his attack, is already “provoked.”

[…]

King is right that drawing Muhammad is “insulting someone’s religion.” But it is the murderous jihadis who made this question the flash point of the defense of the freedom of speech, not Pamela Geller and I. It is they who, by their determination to murder those non-Muslims who violate their religious law on this point, have made it imperative that free people signal that they will not submit to them. If we give in to the demand that we conform to this Sharia principle, there will be further demands that we adhere to additional Sharia principles. It is ultimately a question of whether we will submit to Sharia, or stand up for freedom.

At Garland we were standing. In the aftermath, it is clear that a huge segment of the Western political and media elites are ready, if not eager, to kneel, not daring to “provoke” their new masters.

[What they really want to do is not so much to kneel before them but to gain their support in an effort to overwhelm Americans demographically — the “hodgepodge of folks” of which the Community Organizer in Charge recently spoke. — PW]

           — Hat tip: Papa Whiskey [Return to headlines]
 

Overland Park Man is Shocked at News of Son’s Involvement in Garland, Texas, Assault

By Eric Adler

On Tuesday, Azam Soofi of Overland Park struggled to make sense of it all.

“We are grieving,” he said, standing at the threshold of his home on 158th Place.

His son, Nadir Soofi, was dead. Police had identified him, along with Elton Simpson, both of Phoenix, as the two gunmen who on Sunday, firing assault rifles, tried to enter an event in Texas where cartoonists were taking part in a contest that featured drawings of the Prophet Muhammad. Both Soofi, 34, and Simpson, 30, were stopped, killed by police.

Azam Soofi, an engineer, declined to talk about the assault. He was at a loss to reconcile the boy he knew with the actions on Sunday.

“My son was a great son,” Soofi said, “a caring soul, a beautiful person. He lived a real privileged life all his life.”

Soofi said it was through news accounts that he first became aware of his son’s involvement. He was shocked.

“He was a very humble, soft-spoken person,” Soofi said of his son, who did not grow up in the Kansas City area. Azam Soofi moved here about 5 years ago.

Soofi’s wife, Nadia Azam, who later came to the door, spoke at a frustrated pitch, not at all excusing her stepson’s actions on Sunday, she said, but raising questions about the purpose of the cartoon contest.

“My question is,” she said, “what did they (the event organizers) get out of this? How was this event a productive thing for either now or in the future? How was this productive for the average U.S. citizen? Can you answer that one question? How does it make America a better place? This is what I want to know.”

[It flushed out your jihadist whelp and enabled a cool-headed Texas cop to prevent him and his co-religionist from harming those he had come to murder. Any other questions, Muslima? — PW]

           — Hat tip: Papa Whiskey [Return to headlines]
 

Phoenix Mosque Attended by Garland Jihadists Previously Spawned Two Other Terrorists

By Patick J. Poole

Yesterday at PJ Media, I reported on conflicting stories offered by the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix (ICCP) regarding former mosque attendees Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, who were killed this past Sunday in a gunfight outside a Dallas-area center where a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest was being held.

I noted the attempts by the mosque president, Usama Shami, to downplay the ties of the two would-be terrorists. This included Shami’s claim to the press that neither was a regular member. In fact, Elton “Ibrahim” Simpson had been featured in a mosque fundraising video posted on ICCP’s YouTube channel in 2012 identifying him as a member:

In fact, Simpson and Soofi were not the only two terrorists spawned from ICCP. Two other previous ICCP mosque attendees — Hassan Abu-Jihaad and Derrick Shareef — are currently in federal prison on terrorism-related charges.

There are remarkable parallels with Simpson and Soofi, including that Abu-Jihaad and Shareef were also roommates.

Further, Usama Shami attempted to downplay their association with ICCP as well. He told the Arizona Republic he never saw the pair — despite court records in both their cases stating they had attended the mosque.

Abu-Jihaad is currently serving a 10-year federal prison sentence for passing classified information to a UK-based al-Qaeda webmaster. According to the Justice Department:

In 2001, Abu-Jihaad was serving as a U.S. Navy signalman aboard the U.S.S. Benfold and had access to the future movements of his group of ships, led by the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Constellation. Six months after the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, and before leaving home port in San Diego for a deployment in the Persian Gulf, Abu-Jihaad transmitted then-classified information about his battle group’s itinerary, listing dates for anticipated port calls in Hawaii and Australia, and for the battle group’s transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Abu-Jihaad’s disclosure discussed the battle group’s perceived vulnerability to terrorist attack.

The leak did not come to light until well after Abu-Jihaad left the Navy, when an investigation into Azzam Publications led to the search of a London apartment associated with one of the website’s organizers, and authorities found a floppy disk containing the U.S. Navy information. Subsequent investigation uncovered several email exchanges from late 2000 to late 2001 between members of Azzam Publications and Abu-Jihaad, including discussions regarding videos Abu-Jihaad ordered from Azzam Publications that promoted violent jihad and extolled the virtues of martyrdom; a donation of money Abu-Jihaad made to Azzam Publications; and whether it was “safe” to send materials to Abu-Jihaad at his military address onboard the U.S.S. Benfold.

The FBI established a direct tie between Abu-Jihaad and Simpson according to court documents in the latter’s 2010 trial, as Simpson was first questioned by the FBI in 2006 when authorities believed he might be part of a terror cell.

In 2006, agents opened a criminal investigation of him based on his ties with an individual “whom the FBI believed was attempting to set up a terrorist cell in Arizona,” according to court documents.

Agents say Simpson knew Hassan Abu-Jihaad, an enlistee in the U.S. Navy later convicted of leaking classified information about upcoming movements of his battle group to an alleged terror cell in London. Simpson told agents he knew Abu-Jihaad, who was arrested in Phoenix in 2007, but did not tell them anything else about him.

Undoubtedly, what launched that 2006 investigation was the activity of Abu-Jihaad’s former roommate, Derrick Shareef.

Shareef was arrested in 2006 for his role in a plot to set off hand grenades at a Rockford, Illinois shopping mall during the holiday season. He later pled guilty on a charge of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

During his trial, the FBI provided video tapes of Shareef threatening Americans:

“You are the enemies of Islam, for the sake of Allah we are coming for you,” Shareef says in a tape that looks like it could have been shot somewhere in the Middle East. In fact, the camera was 90 miles from Chicago in a Rockford home where the 22-year-old and a friend each made several videos declaring their desire for destruction.

“We will target you in your homes. We will target you in your businesses. We will target you in your synagogues and your churches. We do not fear you Kafirs. I swear by Allah I am ready to give my life right now for the cause,” the tape says.

The mosque also came under scrutiny in March 2008, when a large group of men from ICCP began firing semi-automatic weapons in an open area frequented by runners and bikers near a residential area, as the Arizona Republic reported at the time:

Shortly before noon on a sunny Sunday in March, two Toyota SUVs rolled to a stop along a dirt road in north Phoenix.

About 20 young Muslim males climbed out, armed with assault rifles, a shotgun, a sniper rifle and handguns. The location near Happy Valley Road and 51st Avenue is a desert recreation site for off-road motorists, hikers and bikers, dozens of whom were enjoying the spring-like weather.

For more than an hour, the shooters blasted away at a granite rock and empty cans in front of a hill.

Officials estimate the fusillade totaled 500 to 1,000 rounds. Some shooters left before police arrived and detained 10 adults and five boys, including an 11-year-old.

The young men and boys told officers the weapons belonged to their parents. They said they were not aware it was illegal to use firearms in the residential area.

Six were arrested and charged with felony weapons violations in Maricopa County Superior Court. Among them were the 20- and 21-year-old sons of two imams at Phoenix-area mosques, as well as the 20-year-old son of Abdallah.

Needless to say, the usual suspects claimed the men were being targeted because of their Islamic faith, rather than their firing rifles in a prohibited area that endangered others.

[Be it noted that today is the 70th anniversary of V-E Day. In 1945, the Nazi enemy had been completely overrun — a mere three years and five months after he had declared war on us following his Jap ally’s attack at Pearl Harbor. It has now been thirteen years and eight months since the jihadist enemy attacked us in our homeland from his base in Afghanistan and he is still doing so — now from his base in the homeland itself, a base cultivated and protected by the diversity ideologues of the American left. So far have we fallen, and so dire is our current peril. — PW]

           — Hat tip: Papa Whiskey [Return to headlines]
 

Six Reasons Pamela Geller’s Muhammad Cartoon Contest is No Different Than Selma

By John Nolte

When you are dealing with the mainstream media, it is always difficult to tell if you are dealing with willful ignorance or just plain old ignorance-ignorance. There are plenty of moronic savants in the national media who have cracked the “hot take” code to please their left-wing masters but have no fundamental grasp of history, or much of anything much of else.

The act of willful ignorance in the media manifests itself through bias, and lies of omission conjured up to serve that bias. These dishonest liars know they are dishonest liars, and willfully choose to not tell the world pertinent facts like, say, Baltimore has been run by Democrats for a half-century, Hillary Clinton is in favor of legally aborting infants born alive, Ted Kennedy abandoned a drowning woman, and George Zimmerman is Hispanic.

Anyone who knows anything about history understands that tactically and morally, Geller’s provocative Muhammad Cartoon Contest was no different than Dr. Martin Luther King’s landmark march from Selma to Montgomery.

The first thing the spittle-flecked will scream upon reading the above is that I am comparing Geller to King. I did not know King. I do not know Geller. I am not comparing anyone to anyone. What I’m comparing is one righteous cause to another.

The second thing the spittle-flecked will scream is that King never would have held a Draw Muhammad Cartoon Contest … which brings me to the first reason there is no moral or tactical difference between Garland and Selma:

1. The Oppressor Chooses the Form of Protest, Not the Protester

Whether it is a bully stealing lunch money, an abusive husband “keeping the little woman in line,” a government passing unjust laws, or religious zealots demanding fealty from all, oppressors come in all shapes and sizes.

Oppressors do, however, share three important things in common: 1) The use of the threats of everything from shaming to instituting unjust laws to violence. 2) The goal of stripping others of their rights. 3) The choosing of the design and structure of whatever defiant protest might take place against them.

The protester has absolutely no say in this matter.

The only way to defy and protest against the bully who takes your lunch money, is to not give him your lunch money. Through his own actions the bully has designed the form of protest. The same is true for the abusive husband. If he is using the threat of violence to keep you “in line,” a defiant protest can only come in one form: doing the exact opposite of what he tells you to do or not to do.

If an unjust government passes a law making it illegal to sit in the front of the bus, the only way to protest the unjust government is to sit in the front of the bus.

Martin Luther King did not choose his form of protest in Selma. Racist Southern Democrats did.

Pamela Geller did not choose her form of protest in Garland. The jihadists did.

[And have been doing so since the original “Cartoon Jihad” over the Danish ones in 2006. — PW]

           — Hat tip: Papa Whiskey [Return to headlines]
 

Texas Shooting Suspect Elton Simpson’s Private Messages: ‘The Noose is Tightening’

Private Twitter messages written by one of the suspects in the weeks before the Garland, Texas shooting Sunday reveal a man who had turned against his country.

“Soon you won’t be able to live in America as a Muslim. The noose is tightening,” Elton Simpson wrote in a March 14 message seen by the FBI and obtained by ABC News.

On April 10 he wrote, “Time is short.”

Less than two weeks later he referenced the Mohammad drawing contest — the site of Sunday’s attack — saying, “When will they ever learn?”

The messages show that Simpson had planned to travel to Syria to join ISIS last month and attempted to recruit others to join him.

“Bring your passport. If you have $4,000, that’s enough to travel with,” he wrote on April 10.

But his plans were disrupted when the FBI in San Diego and Minneapolis arrested some people he wanted to go with him, he said.

[Would that the noose would tighten around these creatures. Of course, no such thing is taking place. our federal, state, and local governments bend over backwards to pamper and defer to them, abetted by a plethora of bleeding-heart NGOs and lickspittle academics. This is just more of the nauseating narrative of victimhood that Muslims constantly bleat and repeat. — PW]

           — Hat tip: Papa Whiskey [Return to headlines]
 

The Chains of Government Strengthen as Our Morality Weakens

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”- Benjamin Franklin

What has happened to the United States? Many say that it is a natural progression that is inevitable, but is it actually the breakdown of our morals, our ethics, our family structure and our school systems? Is it the inevitable “chains of government,” that have slowly but surely bound us with the very freedoms we claim to embrace?

In the name of progression, we have thrown out the very things that made this country great. Our leaders have shunned the very thought that the United States is a Christian Nation and our freedoms are slowly being taken from us on a daily basis. Government of the people, by the people, for the people, exists no more! We are now being ruled by the political elite who have adopted “political correctness,” as the new rule of law.

Writer Malcomb Muggeridge (one time editor of Punch magazine) wrote,

“It is difficult to resist the conclusion that 20th century man has decided to abolish himself . Tired of the struggle to be himself he has created boredom out of his own affluence, impotence out of his own erotomania, and vulnerability out of his own strength, He himself blows the trumpet that brings the walls of his own cities crashing down until at last having educated himself into imbecility, having drugged and polluted himself into stupefaction, he keels over, a weary old brontosaurus, and becomes extinct.”

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Unbelievable Surveys Given to Children in Massachusetts — And Schools Across America

On sexuality, suicide, drug use, criminal activity, etc.

Wait until you see the questions (below)!

Across Massachusetts — and across America — thousands of schoolchildren are given sexually graphic, psychologically intrusive surveys by the public schools without parents’ knowledge. These surveys also ask youth to reveal their criminal activity, personal family matters, and other intimate issues.

This is done in the public middle schools and high schools during school hours. At best, parents are told about the surveys in vague terms, but are rarely allowed read them beforehand. The surveys are ‘officially’ anonymous and voluntary. But they are administered by the teacher in a classroom and (according to teachers we’ve talked to) there is often pressure for all kids to participate.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Why Aren’t the Republicans Fighting Harder?

The Republican Party is like a battered wife, beaten down so many times that the desire to fight back has been beaten out of them. The continuous onslaught of political correctness, and the idiotic establishment belief that in order to win elections the Republicans have to move leftward, is making “losing” a norm for the GOP.

The people flocked to Ronald Reagan because he articulated conservative principles, and spoke the language of liberty. The Tea Party emerged because of the anger of many Americans. Folks of all political persuasions were sickened by the federal government’s willingness to spend their hard earned taxes into oblivion. Taxed Enough Already (T.E.A.) then evolved, adding the Constitution to their demands, and in response the progressive left statists of the Democrat Party launched a massive attack campaign, destroying the credibility of any political figure that dared to associate with the TEA Party, and then expanded those attacks to encompass all Republicans. To the uninformed voters that believe the propaganda, “TEA Party” and “Republican” are terms synonymous with “racism,” “bigot,” “hater,” and everything wrong about the Democrats that they can project upon their opposition.

The Republican leadership has become fearful, unwilling to stand against such attacks, and often falling for the rhetoric themselves. The Republicans are ignorant of what the people really want, believing that the liberal left somehow has become the majority when in reality the true believers in progressivism are actually only about 14% of the population.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

SFC Christopher Speer is Dead. Omar Khadr is Free

By Michelle Malkin

A Canadian judge ruled this week that Omar Khadr poses no public safety threat. Tell that to the children of Sergeant First Class Christopher J. Speer and the surviving American soldiers who valiantly fought Khadr on the battlefield.

In 2012, Khadr pleaded guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty and guilty to five charges related to the killing of Speer, a 28-year-old medic with the U.S. Special Forces. This young American hero died in Afghanistan in 2002 during an ambush by al-Qaida operatives. Just days before he gave his life, Speer had fearlessly walked onto a minefield to rescue two wounded Afghan children. It was Khadr, born and bred an Islamic jihadist by his terrorist father, who lobbed the fatal grenade in the war zone. Another American soldier, SFC Layne Morris, survived the attack, but was blinded in one eye for life.

In a sealed plea deal at Guantanamo Bay, Khadr admitted to throwing the grenade. He admitted to attempted murder, conspiracy, spying and providing material support to terrorism. He signed a 50-paragraph stipulation that classified him as an “enemy belligerent because he has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States and its coalition partners” and documented his family’s intimate association and friendship with al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Muhammad Atef.

[…]

But don’t look for our government to raise its voice in protest. It is because of jihad-coddler Barack Obama, working quietly to empty Gitmo, that Khadr found his way back to Canada in the first place. The White House surreptitiously released the killer and flew him home as American citizens were distracted by the 2012 midterm elections. Now, despite opposition from Canada’s conservative government, Khadr’s out on bail while appealing his U.S. war-crimes convictions.

The “progressive” Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City has been at the forefront of pressing for Khadr’s release. CCR also crusaded successfully for the release of Gitmo jihadist Abu Sufian bin Qumu — now the lead suspect in the bloody attack on our consulate in Benghazi — whom the Obama administration has yet to bring to justice.

[And won’t, as long as there are more pressing concerns — like investigating American police departments that get crosswise with his thuggish constituents. — PW]

           — Hat tip: Papa Whiskey [Return to headlines]
 

Berlin, Then and Now

Seventy years since the end of World War II, a look at a ruined city rebuilt

It’s been 70 years since the end of World War II in Europe. The German leadership signed the unconditional surrender after a final battle that flattened Berlin. Some 600,000 apartments were destroyed, along with many public buildings. Much of the damage remained visible for decades to come, particularly along the route of the Berlin Wall that divided the city between East and West. But there has been substantial redevelopment since German reunification in 1990, and today many parts of the city are utterly unrecognizable.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

From the Arc De Triomphe to Gdansk, Europe Celebrates

With moments of memory or military pomp, Europe is marking 70 years since defeating the Nazis in a war that changed the continent forever. The observations began overnight in Poland and will continue through the weekend.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Germany: Thwarted Attack in Hessen, Bomb Filled With Nails

Spiegel, couple arrested. They were about to kill many people

(ANSA) — BERLIN — The bomb experts of the German police found in an Islamic couple’s flat — both were arrested in late April in Oberursel, near Frankfurt — was filled with nails. The news is reported by the German weekly “Der Spiegel”, underlining that the bomb would have killed many people, if it had been detonated even at some distance from where it exploded. The arrested couple — a Turkish-German man, 35 yo, and his Turkish wife, 34 yo, parents of two children aged 2 and 4 — allegedly planned to explode the bomb along the bike route of a cycling race for professionals and amateurs scheduled for May 1. For security reasons, despite the arrests, the local authorities had imposed the cancellation of the race: it was still unclear whether some accomplices would be ready to strike again. In the flat seized by police, in addition to the bomb, parts of an assault rifle, ammunition, chemical agents and 24,000 euro were found. The arrested man’s father, interviewed by Der Spiegel, has reacted with ‘incredulity’: according to him, his son had urged him to go more often to the mosque, but he did not have any warning sign. “He has a happy family, happy children, he used to attend the mosque. Why should he put his family’s happiness at risk?”, the man said.

           — Hat tip: Insubria [Return to headlines]
 

Italy: Priest Wanted for Questioning in Piscaglia Probe Located

Father Jean Baptiste tracked down in Haiti

(ANSA) — Arezzo, May 6 — A priest prosecutors want to question in connection with the disappearance last year of 50-year-old Guerrina Piscaglia has been located in Haiti, investigators said Wednesday.

Father Jean Baptiste was transferred away from the parish of Badia Tedalda, near Arezzo, shortly after Pisascaglia vanished. Baptiste shared the rectory with Friar Gratien Alabi, who is in prison after being arrested in April on charges of murder and tampering with a corpse in the probe into Piscaglia’s disappearance.

The housewife and mother of a 22-year-old son went to the rectory of the local church after a family lunch on the afternoon of May 1, 2014, and was never seen again.

Extensive police searches using dogs conducted in the surrounding countryside failed to turn up any trace of Piscaglia, who lived in the hamlet of Ca’ Raffaello in Arezzo province.

Prosecutors later placed Alabi, a Congolese national, under investigation on suspicion of kidnapping and possible murder after he told a TV show about missing persons that Piscaglia had told him she was pregnant and that he was the father.

Alabi denies having had sex with Piscaglia.

A search of the friar’s home, car, and belongings reportedly turned up a series of pornographic photos of nuns in a state of undress on his computer.

Last month, a Romanian prostitute told police Alabi was one of her habitual clients, paying her 500 euros per session.

           — Hat tip: Insubria [Return to headlines]
 

Italy: Five French Citizens Nabbed for Vandalism to Stay in Jail

One admits to damaging cars ‘while drunk’

(ANSA) — Genoa, May 6 — Five French citizens arrested Saturday in Genoa after they were caught destroying the side view mirrors on six cars are to remain in custody, a court ruled Wednesday.

The court agreed with prosecutors that the five — who are also accused of resisting arrest — displayed “anti-social behavior” and are at high risk of offending again.

While all of them denied attacking police officers, one has admitted to damaging the cars.

“I was drunk,” he reportedly said. “I did something stupid”.

As well, Milan prosecutors have obtained DNA samples from the five in order to compare it to traces found on gas masks and black coveralls left behind by violent anti-Expo demonstrators in Milan on May 1.

           — Hat tip: Insubria [Return to headlines]
 

Leading Geneticist: ‘Health Damaging Effects’ of GMOs Unpredictable

Dr. Michael Antoniou of King’s College London School of Medicine in the UK is one author of a recent paper presented by Responsible Technology. Dr. Antoniou uses genetic engineering for medical applications, but he warns against its use in developing crops for human food and animal feed. Why exactly does Antoniou believe GM crops are unsafe?

Biotech shills with lesser integrity than Antoniou tell us that genetic engineering is the same as the natural breeding process in plants. This is precisely untrue. Genetic engineering differs from the natural process of plant breeding in that tissue culture processes are imprecise and highly mutagenic, leading to unpredictable changes in the plants DNA, proteins, and biochemical composition.

This results in many GMO crops that have unexpected toxic or allergenic effects (such as being chelators for major minerals in the soil and plants that our bodies really need). But nutritional disturbances in GM plants are the smallest of the problems they create.

Moreover, as Antoniou explains, any plant developed with transgenic or cisgenic methods are highly dangerous. As is, radiation induced mutation breeding (another method of biotech) which also allows for mutagenic changes that are unexpected, and often unwanted. When a geneticist tries to create a GM food, they start with a tissue culture from a plant that contains hundreds of thousands of plant cells. Some pick up the GM genes and carry them to their progeny, and others do not. The culture is then treated with chemicals to make the plant eliminate all the cells except those with the GM traits.

You might surmise how this could be extremely dangerous as it causes GM plants to be self-destroying. In the final genetic engineering process, the plants final cells are treated with hormones to stimulate the GM plant cells and cause them to proliferate, thus changing the plant from its original form to one that can be patented by biotech companies.

If you continue this process into the food chain — all the way into human anatomy — then you have a real problem. You are what you eat, after all. Is it any wonder we see GM foods and their pesticide-counterparts causing cancer — which is basically a process of the body attacking itself?

[Comment: Part of “slow kill” the “useless eaters” agenda.]

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Norway Ends Blasphemy Law Because of Charlie Hebdo Jihad Massacre

Norway has scrapped its longstanding blasphemy law, meaning it is now legal to mock the beliefs of others, in a direct response to January’s brutal attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The proposal to rush through the change was made in February by Conservative MP Anders B. Werp and Progress Party MP Jan Arild Ellingsen, who argued that the law “underpins a perception that religious expressions and symbols are entitled to a special protection”.

“This is very unfortunate signal to send, and it is time that society clearly stands up for freedom of speech,” the two wrote in their proposal.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Number of UK Muslim MPs Doubles

LONDON — Making a new record in British parliament, a record of 13 Muslim lawmakers have been elected in one of the most unpredictable and extraordinary general elections in Britain, doubling the number from 8 in 2010.

“It is great news that there are more Muslim MPs elected than ever before. However, the House of Commons still does not reflect the diversity of the population,” said Editor of The Muslim News, Ahmed J Versi.

Versi welcomed the appointment of eight Muslim women in the elections, seeing it as a welcome sign that more Muslim women have been elected this year, six Labour, one Conservative and one Scottish National Party (SNP).

The election included the first Muslim SNP MP, Tasmina Ahmed Sheikh, elected in the landslide by the nationalist party in Scotland as well as the first female Muslim Conservative MP Nusrat Ghani.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Sardinia Village Priest Nabbed for Teen Sexual Abuse

‘Dozens of witnesses’ heard in probe

(ANSA) — Cagliari, May 6 — Carabinieri military police on Wednesday arrested the parish priest of the central Sardinia village of Villamar. Father Pascal Manca is accused of sexually abusing minors aged around 15.

He moved to Selargius, near Cagliari, after news broke that he was being investigated. Carabinieri investigators have gathered testimony from dozens of witnesses. The priest was placed in pretrial detention on fears he might flee or offend again, sources said.

           — Hat tip: Insubria [Return to headlines]
 

Scotland: Election 2015: Nicola Sturgeon Meets New Team of SNP MPs

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon said she was “bursting with pride” as she joined her party’s newly-elected MPs to mark its landslide election victory in Scotland.

The 56 new Westminster members posed for photographs with their party’s leader in South Queensferry, overlooked by the Forth bridge.

Ms Sturgeon said ending austerity would be the first priority for SNP MPs.

Meanwhile, former SNP leader Alex Salmond said Scotland was closer to independence after the party’s success.

The SNP celebrated unprecedented gains, virtually sweeping the board by taking all but three of the 59 seats in Scotland.

Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives won only one Scottish seat each.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

UK: Extremists Order Muslims to Boycott General Election in Intimidating Leaflets Warning Voting is a Sin

Flyers calling on people to ‘reject democracy’ and were handed out and affixed to car windscreens and lamp posts in Tower Hamlets and Luton (pictured).

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

UK: Here’s How the Election Results Would Look Under a Proportional Voting System

Ukip won 12.6 per cent of the vote and only managed to get one MP into parliament. By contrast, the SNP only got 4.7 per cent of the vote and returned 56 MPs.

So what would today’s new parliament look like if we had a proportionally representative system?

Based on the 629 seats won by the six biggest parties, the Tories would have lost 90 seats. While they would still be the biggest party in parliament, with only 240 MPs they would probably have been forced into another coalition.

Under a proportional voting system the SNP’s landslide of 56 seats would have been reduced to 31 and the Lib Dems would not have been wiped out, retaining 51 seats instead of eight.

Ukip would become the third biggest party in government with 82 seats and the Greens would have won 24 — a far cry from those parties’ current tally of one seat each.

Electoral reform in favour of the Alternative Voting system was rejected by a national referendum back in 2011.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

UK: Hackney Driver Swerves Onto Pavement Before Ploughing Into Female Police Officer

22-year-old Michael Oluwafemi Adenibi was driving against traffic without a license or insurance when he struck PC Sue Thompson — sending her two metres into the air (pictured).

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

When Will Labour Learn That British People Don’t Like Left-Wing Politicians

For Thursday’s election was not merely a disappointment for Ed Miliband and the Labour Party. It was a disaster, a catastrophe, an utter debacle to rank with the very worst defeats of the Eighties.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Five Macedonia Police Killed in Gunfight Near Kosovo Border

“Five police officers were killed in a shootout with ‘terrorists’“ and some 30 were injured in the northern town of Kumanovo, Interior Minister Gordana Jankuloska told reporters.

“There are victims among the terrorists but for the time being we cannot give the exact number,” she added.

Meanwhile, local papers in the Albanian language reported that five members of an armed group were killed in Kumanovo.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Macedonia: 3 Police Officers Dead, 20 Injured in Clashes With Armed Group in City of Kumanovo

KUMANOVO, Macedonia — Three police officers were killed and at least 20 others were injured in clashes early Saturday between security forces and an armed group in the town Kumanovo in northern Macedonia, local media reported.

The TV station Telma said three officers were killed in an exchange of gunfire. The station said it had confirmed the deaths with family members of the deceased.

Interior Ministry spokesman Ivo Kotevski earlier said police had clashed a “well-trained terrorist group” which had entered Macedonia from an unspecified neighboring country with a plan to “perform attacks on state institutions.”

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Macedonia: Police Clash With ‘Armed Terrorist Group’

Policemen have been injured in clashes with gunmen in a northern region of Macedonia, mainly populated by ethnic Albanians. The Macedonian officials have refused to give more details about the so-called ‘armed group.’

Four policemen clashed with an “armed terrorist group” in the northern town of Kumanova, Macedonian authorities said on Friday. Three of them were taken to a hospital in the capital Skopje, which is about 40 kilometers away from Kumanova.

The region, mainly populated by ethnic Albanians, saw fighting during an ethnic Albanian insurgency in 2001, hospital sources said.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Egyptian Court Sentences Mubarak and Sons to Three Years in Jail for Corruption

An Egyptian court sentenced former president Hosni Mubarak and his two sons to three years in jail without parole on Saturday in the retrial of a corruption case, although the trio is unlikely to go to jail again.

Mubarak, who ruled Egypt with an iron fist for 30 years, and his sons Gamal and Alaa already spent at least three years each in prison for other cases, so will probably not have to serve out the sentence.

The retrial was of a case in which Mubarak was sentenced to three years in prison in May last year on charges of diverting public funds and using the money to upgrade family properties. His two sons were given four-year jail terms in the same case.

But Egypt’s high court later overturned the convictions and ordered a retrial.

“The ruling of the court is three years in prison without parole for Mohamed Hosni Mubarak and Gamal Mohamed Hosni Mubarak and Alaa Mohamed Hosni Mubarak,” Judge Hassan Hassanein announced on Saturday.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Egyptian Youths Face Trial for ‘Insulting Islam’ By Making Fun of ISIS

Four Egyptian kids who dared make fun of ISIS in a harmless video are headed for trial along with their teacher on charges of “insulting Islam,” after their Muslim neighbors got hold of the footage and went to police.

Aged between 15 and 16, the youths could face up to five years in a youth detention center — while the teacher would serve any sentence he receives in prison — if the court finds them guilty of violating Egypt’s blasphemy law, Egypt-focused activists say.

Egyptian Christian and civil rights groups are leading calls for their release, but the five — members of the Coptic community that descends from the non-Arab people whose Pharaohs ruled ancient Egypt — have already spent weeks in police holding cells.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak Jailed in Corruption Retrial

Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has been sentenced to three years in jail on corruption charges after a retrial in the capital, Cairo.

His sons were given four years each in the same case which centres on the embezzlement of $14m (£9.3m) earmarked for renovation of presidential palaces.

The original conviction was overturned on 13 January over legal procedures.

This was the last court case hanging over Mubarak, who was toppled in the 2011 uprising.

Hosni Mubarak and his sons — Alaa and Gamal — were also fined for the amount embezzled and used to renovate their private residences in Cairo and on the Red Sea coast, as well as a family farm.

The former leader, 87, and his sons were present in the courtroom at a police academy on the outskirts of Cairo.

Some of his supporters wore T-shirts with Mubarak’s face and waved and blew kisses as he entered, the Associated Press news agency says.

They shouted in anger as the judge issued the ruling — which can be appealed against.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Aviation: Struggling Royal Jordanian Raises Capital

By $290 million, carrier recorded losses of $50 mln in 2014

(ANSAmed) — AMMAN, MAY 4 — Financially struggling Royal Jordanian’s (RJ) agreed to raise its capital by JD200 million (USD 290 million) in an attempt to save the national carrier from bankruptcy, company officials have announced today.

RJ last year reported losses of nearly USD 55 million and was under risk of being liquidated. “The capital will be increased by 200 million shares/dinars, making the authorised share capital 246.4 million shares/dinars through public offering and/or private offering to the shareholders, as may be decided by the board of directors,” the statement said following a board meeting on Saturday.

The raise will extend until 2019, and to be implemented on three phases. “The first of which will start in 2015 and the increase will be by JD100 million; the capital will be increased by another JD100 million in the coming years throughout the period required to implement the restructuring plan (2015-19),” said a company statement.

As the company struggled, officials have decided to cancel several routs to limit losses including destinations like Accra, Alexandria, Colombo, Milan, Al Ain, Mumbai, Lagos and Delhi.

RJ also suspended during the year flights to Tripoli, Benghazi, Misrata and Mosul, in addition to stopping services to Damascus and Aleppo since July 2012, all due to security concerns.

Flights to Sanaa and Aden have been suspended since mid-February 2015.

           — Hat tip: Insubria [Return to headlines]
 

Dozens Killed as 40 Inmates Escape in Iraq Prison Break

Forty inmates in a prison in northeastern Iraq, including some convicted of terrorism charges, escaped amid a riot that killed at least six police officers and 30 prisoners, authorities said Saturday.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Dozens of Saudi-Led Coalition Airstrikes Hit Rebel Stronghold in Northern Yemen

SANAA, Yemen — Dozens of Saudi-led coalition airstrikes hit the rebel stronghold Saada in northern Yemen, forcing hundreds of families to flee the area, security officials and Shiite Houthi rebels said Saturday.

The raids come after the Saudi-led coalition ordered civilians in rebel strongholds to flee by nightfall Friday and declared the entire region a “military target.” It warned it will strike anything in the region, even as the Saudis pressed for a ceasefire to begin next week.

Saudi Brig. Gen. Ahmed Ali Asiri, the coalition spokesman, said in a televised press conference that the strikes have targeted multiple buildings belonging to Houthi leadership, weapons stores and rebel encampments in the region bordering Saudi Arabia.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Islam’s ‘Reformation’ Is Already Here — And it’s Called ‘ISIS’

By Raymond Ibrahim

The idea that Islam needs to reform is again in the spotlight following the recent publication of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. While Ali makes the argument that Islam can reform—and is in desperate need of taking the extreme measures she suggests to do so—many of her critics offer a plethora of opposing claims, including that Islam need not reform at all.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Sex Slave Forced to Marry Twenty ISIS Fighters and Has Virgin Surgery Each Time

The group reportedly stripped Syrian and Iraqi girls naked and paraded them in ‘slave bazaars’ before they were shipped to other provinces, a United Nations official said.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

The Middle East Runs Out of Water

by Daniel Pipes

A ranking Iranian political figure, Issa Kalantari, recently warned that past mistakes leave Iran with water supplies so insufficient that up to 70 percent, or 55 million out of 78 million Iranians, would be forced to abandon their native country for parts unknown.

Many facts buttress Kalantari’s apocalyptic prediction: Once lauded in poetry, Lake Urmia, the Middle East’s largest lake, has lost 95 percent of its water since 1996, going from 31 billion cubic meters to 1.5 billion. What the Seine is to Paris, the Zayanderud was to Isfahan — except the latter went bone-dry in 2010. Over two-thirds of Iran’s cities and towns are “on the verge of a water crisis” that could result in drinking water shortages; already, thousands of villages depend on water tankers. Unprecedented dust storms disrupt economic activity and damage health.

Nor are Iranians alone in peril; many others in the arid Middle East may also be forced into unwanted, penurious, desperate exile. With a unique, magnificent exception, much of the Middle East is running out of water due to such maladies as population growth, short-sighted dictators, distorted economic incentives, and infrastructure-destroying warfare. Some specifics:

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

UN Official: ISIS Forces Girls to Undergo Virginity Surgeries, Marry Them Off 20 Times

By Mary Chastain

Zainab Bangura, the United Nations Special representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, recently interviewed numerous females whom the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) kidnapped and forced to be sex slaves.

She found what others have previously discovered: rape, slavery, slave markets, and women undergoing surgery to restore their virginity.

“Women and girls are at risk and under assault at every point of their lives,” she explained, adding that the threats lurk behind them “every step of the way… in the midst of active conflict, in areas under control of armed actors, at check-points and border crossings, and in detention facilities.”

She also told journalists about the sex markets the militants throw to sell women to different men.

“Girls are literally being stripped naked and examined in slave bazaars,” she claimed and said they were “categorized and shipped naked off to Dohuk or Mosul or other locations to be distributed among ISIL leadership and fighters.”

[…]

One woman phoned a Kurdish Peshmerga fighter to beg them and the West to designate as their next target the brothel where she being held. She said the terrorists “raped her 30 times in just a few hours.” She wants the brothel bombed to kill the jihadists and end the women’s misery as sex slaves.

[An unutterably ghastly situation, inflicted by Muslims adhering to their scripture and traditions. And the left is whining about a cartoon contest that offends these creatures? Unconscionable. — PW]

           — Hat tip: Papa Whiskey [Return to headlines]
 

Russia Stages Massive WW2 Parade Despite Western Boycott

Russia has staged its biggest military parade, marking 70 years since victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two.

Thousands of troops marched across Red Square in Moscow, and new armour was displayed for the first time.

Many foreign dignitaries were present, but most Western leaders stayed away because of Russia’s role in Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin said global co-operation had been put at risk in recent years. His Ukrainian counterpart accused him of justifying aggression.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Pentagon Raises the Alarm Over Beijing’s Territorial Expansion in South China Sea

China’s land reclamation in the South China Sea has ramped up dramatically, US officials say, with Beijing reportedly developing infrastructure in the disputed area. They’ve warned of a threat to stability in the region.

The South China Sea is home to strategically vital shipping lanes and is believed to be rich in oil and gas.

China’s neighbors — the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan — all have overlapping claims to the sea. Vietnam has reclaimed about 60 acres of land since 2009 and Taiwan has reclaimed about 5 acres. Compared to China, their reclamation work has proceeded at a slower pace.

Land reclamation is only one of the areas where China is seeking to expand its global footprint, the Pentagon said.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

US Diplomatic Overture to N. Korea Met With Missile-Firing

Just as the Obama administration was testing the possibility of new talks with North Korea, Pyongyang answered the overture with a fresh show of force — test-firing a new ballistic missile from a submarine.

North Korea claimed Saturday that it successfully test-fired the newly developed ballistic missile. Not long after that announcement, South Korean officials said the North fired three anti-ship cruise missiles into the sea off its east coast.

In response, a State Department official said Saturday that such launches are “a clear violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions,” and urged North Korea to “refrain from actions that further raise tensions in the region.”

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Australian Police Say They Disrupted Melbourne Bomb Plot

Police in Australia arrested a 17-year-old and accused him of plotting to detonate three homemade bombs in the Australian city of Melbourne, officials said Saturday.

The teen was arrested on Friday afternoon in a joint federal-state police counterterrorism operation at his home in Greenvale where the devices were found, Australian Federal Police Deputy Commissioner Mike Phelan said.

Melbourne is Australia’s second largest city and is the capital of Victoria state.

Last month, five Australian teenagers were arrested on suspicion of plotting an ISIS-inspired attack at a Veterans’ Day ceremony also in Melbourne that included targeting police.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Climate Change is UN-Led Hoax to Create ‘New World Order’ — Australian PM’s Adviser

The Australian prime minister’s chief business adviser says that climate change is a ruse led by the United Nations to create a new world order under the agency’s control. The statement coincided with a visit from the UN’s top climate negotiator.

Maurice Newman, chairman of Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s business advisory council, said the UN is using false models which show sustained temperature increases because it wants to end democracy and impose authoritarian rule.

“It’s a well-kept secret, but 95 percent of the climate models we are told prove the link between human CO2 emissions and catastrophic global warming have been found, after nearly two decades of temperature stasis, to be in error,” he wrote in an opinion piece published in The Australian newspaper on Friday, without providing evidence.

The real agenda is concentrated political authority. Global warming is the hook,” he said, adding that the UN is against capitalism and freedom and wants to create a “new world order.”

[Comment: Bingo.]

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Blaming the Victims of Rape in Somalia

After 14-year-old Fatima was raped by a tuk-tuk driver, she was arrested, detained for a month and raped repeatedly by a police officer, according to the child and her aunt.

Sexual violence is widespread in Somalia and rarely prosecuted. If anyone is punished at all it is often the victim, not the perpetrator.

“We are fighting to change that attitude of blaming the victims,” said Fartuun Adan, who runs the Elman Peace and Human Rights Centre in the Somali capital Mogadishu, where survivors of sexual violence can find refuge, medical care and support.

“There must be consequences for men who rape,” she said, but instead those who report rape are frequently arrested themselves.

When it comes to rape cases in the socially conservative Horn of Africa nation, blaming the victim is the norm — and there have been no consequences for Fatima’s uniformed attackers.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Liberia Cautiously Marks End of Ebola After 4,700 Deaths

MONROVIA, Liberia — On the day Mercy Kennedy lost her mother to Ebola, it was hard to imagine a time when Liberia would be free from one of the world’s deadliest viruses. It had swept through the 9-year-old’s neighborhood, killing people house by house.

Neighbors were so fearful that Mercy, too, might be sick that no one would touch her to comfort her as tears streamed down her face. She had only a tree to lean on as she wept.

Now seven months later, Liberia on Saturday officially marked the end of the epidemic that claimed more than 4,700 lives here, and Mercy is thriving in the care of a family friend not far from where she used to live.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

UN: 100,000 Flee Week of South Sudan Fighting

Up to 100,000 people have fled a week of heavy fighting in South Sudan’s northern state of Unity, according to the United Nations. Aid agencies have evacuated their international staff from a town in Unity state.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Italy: Immigrant ‘Hero’ Defends Bus Passengers From Local Gang

One African single-handedly fights off three Neapolitans

(ANSA) — Naples, May 6 — An African immigrant single-handedly fought off a gang of three Neapolitans who were threatening passengers on a public bus until police arrived, sources in Naples said Wednesday.

The immigrant hero was hailed by the rest of the passengers and bystanders at the bus stop, who were attracted by the commotion.

Police took the gang as well as the immigrant in for identification and questioning, sources said.

           — Hat tip: Insubria [Return to headlines]
 

Italy: 80,000 Foreigners in 15 Years: Varese, Model of Integration

The data furnished by the regional observatory for the Integration and the Multiethnicity underline the capabilities of the territory to welcome the foreigners. But the arrivals are in clear decrease

Citizens of East Europe, with a steady employment and a house in lease or in ownership. The identikit of the foreigner who lives in the province of Varese shows a good integration in the society.

Despite being the fourth province in Lombardy for the number of immigrants, Varese counts less than 80,000, a number that has quadrupled since the beginning of the century thanks most of all to the arrivals in the first years, while the trend has been interrupted since 2009 when the crisis started. So the percentage of the irregular has decreased: in 2013 they were 6,000 and they fell to 5,000 last year.

The photo contained in the thirteenth report about foreign immigration compiled by the regional observatory for the integration and the multiethnicity shows a social fabric in continuous evolution: in comparison to 15 years ago the greatest component is represented today by immigrants from East Europe, first of all Albania ( 14,000 presences), Romania (10,000 presences) and Ukraine with 5 thousand citizens. Only the number of foreigners coming from Morocco remains high ( 11,000).

In the last 5 years, however, also because of the economic crisis, we have started to see an inverse phenomenon: foreigners who leave the territory to find opportunities in other countries or in their home country. “ In 1981, professor Gian Charles Blangiardo lecturer at the Bicocca University said, it was recorded the same population that we have today, despite the arrival of 80,000 foreigners. A figure that explains how, only thanks to the foreigners, there is a demographic growth. But the crisis has stopped this wave that, however won’t be eternal, because the same countries from where these citizens depart will soon have to face a demographic emergency. At that point, we can hypothesize that the arrivals from East Europe will be replaced by the immigrants from the Sub Saharan territories where the index of growth should remained elevated also in next decade.”

Studies like the one introduced today at Villa Recalcati, in presence of the President of the Province Gunnar Vincenzi, of the Prefect Giorgio Zanzi and of the executive of the scholastic office Claudio Merletti, serve, in fact, to define policies of migratory and promotion of social integration for the administrations.

Beyond the forecasts, today we can say that Varese has been able to welcome 80,000 more residents without uneasiness or jolts: the regular workers are 42% while the unemployed have returned to 12% in 2013, after years of great opportunities with a percentage of unemployment of 3% in 2006. Four foreigners out of five live in private residences with their family: renting remains diffused but it is recorded in the province the highest rate of real estate owners of Lombardy with 33%.

Today the one that lives in the province of Varese is most of all a first generation immigrant , resident or permanent for at least ten years (50%). And this also reflects on the presences at school where we have been assisting for a few years the passing of the foreigners of second generation on those who arrived directly in Italy.

Many data collected in the investigation done in 17 communes of the territory, involving 350 people more than 15 years old, speak about a province that places over the regional average index of total integration. In the last years it happened only one change of the identikit of the foreigner: women are the majority (52%) who are on average between 32 and 38 years old and her religion is predominantly Christian orthodox.

In his opening discussion, the President Vincenzi wanted to remind us the emergency that today Italy has to face: “Everyone has to do something and we don’t have to use this matter for political issues. Everyone has to do their part”.

The Prefect Zanzi assured the maximum engagement in the territory to manage the reception while the executive scholastic Merletti confirmed the priority role of the school as a place of integration and harmonization of the differences.

di Alessandra Toni Translated by Erika Caccamo (Reviewed by Prof. Robert Clarke)

Pubblicato il 24 aprile 2015

           — Hat tip: C. Cantoni [Return to headlines]
 

People Smugglers Using Facebook to Lure Migrants Into ‘Italy Trips’

It reads like the website of a travel agency. “A trip to Italy next week in a big fast tourist yacht,” says the Facebook post beneath a picture of a luxury ocean liner. “Two floors, air-conditioned, prepared for tourists. Recommended for families.”

But a package holiday this is not. It is the Facebook page of a Turkey-based people smuggler, one of dozens if not hundreds of smugglers using the social network to advertise their services in plain sight. Once contactable only through trusted third parties, now smugglers along the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean are openly publicising their phone numbers, prices and schedules on social media to drum up business.

           — Hat tip: Fjordman [Return to headlines]
 

Report: Major Problems With U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program

The CSP report should serve as a wake-up call for those who have seen something unusual taking place in their town, but perhaps haven’t been able to put the pieces together yet

A report by the Center for Security Policy (CSP) has uncovered major problems within the Refugee Resettlement Program (RRP).

The foreword by Frank Gaffney describes the source of the concerns:

According to the sacred texts and traditions of Islam, Mohammed left his home town of Mecca in the 7th Century and traveled with a small band of followers to the city of Yathrib (now Medina), in what has become known as the hijra (migration). He did so with intent of establishing a new base of operations from which to conquer and rule.

Hijra remains the model to this day for jihadists who seek to populate and dominate new lands. Their migrations are not for the purpose of assimilating peacefully in a new host nation, adopting as their own its traditions and legal systems. Rather, Mohammed’s followers, in keeping with the example established by their prophet, are driven first to colonize and then to transform non-Muslim target societies—whether through violent means or via stealthy, pre-violent ones favored by the Muslim Brotherhood when it is not powerful enough to use violence decisively.

Two major terrorism incidents on American soil are directly connected to the refugee program. The Somali Christmas Tree bomber was a resettled refugee in Portland, Oregon, while the Boston bomber family was granted asylum in the U.S. and received protection and care under the 1980 Refugee Act.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

“Stay Quiet and You’ll be Okay”

By Mark Steyn

[…]

I’ll have more to say about the [UK] elections in the days ahead, but for now let me offer a whole-hearted good riddance to Ed Miliband, the now departed Labour leader who, in a desperate last-minute pander, offered to “outlaw Islamophobia”. That was the British political establishment’s contribution to a rough couple of weeks for free speech, culminating in the attempted mass murder in Garland, Texas.

That’s what it was, by the way — although you might have difficulty telling that from the news coverage. The Washington Post offered the celebrated headline “Event Organizer Offers No Apology After Thwarted Attack In Texas”, while the Associated Press went with “Pamela Geller says she has no regrets about Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest that ended in 2 deaths”. The media “narrative” of the last week is that some Zionist temptress was walking down the street in Garland in a too short skirt and hoisted it to reveal her Mohammed thong — oops, my apologies, her Prophet Mohammed thong (PBUH) — and thereby inflamed two otherwise law-abiding ISIS supporters peacefully minding their own business.

[…]

If the American press were not so lazy and parochial, they would understand that this was the third Islamic attack on free speech this year — first, Charlie Hebdo in Paris; second, the Lars Vilks event in Copenhagen; and now Texas. The difference in the corpse count is easily explained by a look at the video of the Paris gunmen, or the bullet holes they put in the police car. The French and Texan attackers supposedly had the same kind of weapons, although one should always treat American media reports with a high degree of skepticism when it comes to early identification of “assault weapons” and “AK47s”. Nonetheless, from this reconstruction, it seems clear that the key distinction between the two attacks is that in Paris they knew how to use their firepower and in Garland they didn’t. So a very cool 60-year-old local cop with nothing but his service pistol advanced under fire and took down two guys whose heavier firepower managed only to put a bullet in an unarmed security guard’s foot.

The Charlie Hebdo killers had received effective training overseas — as thousands of ISIS recruits with western passports are getting right now. What if the Garland gunmen had been as good as the Paris gunmen? Surely that would be a more interesting question for the somnolent American media than whether some lippy Jewess was asking for it.

[…]

In Copenhagen, in Paris, in Garland, what’s more important than the cartoons and the attacks is the reaction of all the polite, respectable people in society, which for a decade now has told those who do not accept the messy, fractious liberties of free peoples that we don’t really believe in them, either, and we’re happy to give them up — quietly, furtively, incrementally, remorselessly — in hopes of a quiet life. Because a small Danish newspaper found itself abandoned and alone, Charlie Hebdo jumped in to support them. Because the Charlie Hebdo artists and writers died abandoned and alone, Pamela Geller jumped in to support them. By refusing to share the risk, we are increasing the risk. It’s not Pamela Geller who emboldens Islamic fanatics, it’s all the nice types — the ones Salman Rushdie calls the But Brigade. You’ve heard them a zillion times this last week: “Of course, I’m personally, passionately, absolutely committed to free speech. But…”

[…]

There’s no fine line between “free speech” and “hate speech”: Free speech is hate speech; it’s for the speech you hate — and for all your speech that the other guy hates. If you don’t have free speech, then you can’t have an honest discussion.

[…]

“Stay quiet and you’ll be okay:” Those were Mohammed Atta’s words to his passengers on 9/11. And they’re what all the nice respectable types are telling us now.

[A long, hilarious, and absolutely magnificent essay — a must-read. — PW]

           — Hat tip: Papa Whiskey [Return to headlines]
 

Communist Treason Murders Millions

In point of fact, the American Communist Party (CPUSA) — as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Central Committee — stole every political, industrial and military secret America had; before, during and after World War II. We now know for certain that over 200 espionage agents found employment in the Roosevelt Administration, many of them rising to the pinnacles of power.

Not every Communist Party member was a spy, of course, but Lona Cohen was. In her prime, she managed to smuggle dozens of A-bomb documents out of the Los Alamos nuclear facility. Moreover, she was a spy married to a spy. She and her husband Morris topped off a long and productive criminal collaboration when they were freed from prison in exchange for a couple of our spies who were being held by the Russians.

Disillusioned and despondent in exile, the aging pair grew homesick for America. ‘Am I a traitor? Svetlana,’ Lona asked her Russian friend in KCET’s Red Files. ‘But I didn’t kill anybody, and I didn’t destroy any American lives. No American soldier died because of what I have done.’

Wrong !

Lona’s actions killed 33,636 American soldiers, not to mention millions of Koreans and Chinese. Stalin could not order Kim Il Sung to attack South Korea until he had an atomic bomb to stymie America’s exclusivity. Using American plans, stolen for him by the CPUSA, Stalin detonated an exact copy of America’s ‘Fat Man’ bomb in 1949. Then, in 1950, Uncle Joe finally gave Kim Il Sung the order to attack South Korea. (We actually have a copy of that order straight from the KGB’s files.)

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

11 thoughts on “Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/9/2015

  1. In regard to the 17 year old arrested in Melbourne, I heard a radio report that said that he was to appear before a children’s court, a children’s court! The religion of peace at work.

    • Anyone under 18 years of age gets to appear at Children’s Court where those nasty police and prison officers are not allowed to wear their uniforms in case they may frighten those ‘children’ who may have a case to answer.

      And don’t get me started on the various states ‘Young Offenders Acts’!

      • So, if this junior jihadi is convicted, he will probably do 2 weeks detention.

        • I read somewhere today that the would be jihadi may be put before a real court instead. His intent must be considered a felony and a serious one at that.

  2. Ethnic Albanian Muslims, who make up about 30% of Macedonia’s 2 million people, took up arms in 2001 demanding more rights. The conflict ended after six months with a western-brokered peace deal that granted more rights to the minority group.
    Wherever in the world there are Muslims, violence follows.

    Whenever “western brokers crap” stick their nose in any muslim toilet, expect disasters to befall non muslims.

    • This ‘honest’ broker experience for the oppressed Muslim minority now will be very useful later when negotiating terms for ‘enclaves’ in the west. How’s that Kosovo working out. The gateway to Europe and the west.

  3. “Last month, about 40 ethic Albanians from Kosovo briefly took over a Macedonian police station in the village of Gosince near the border, demanding the creation of an Albanian state in Macedonia’

    Hi Muslims/ Albanians/ Ottomans/ Turks run to your father EU/ Brussels, Germany and ask them to broker a deal with Macedonia for your own country inside Macedonia. Britain and EU will help you get what you want just say we can’t live under non muslim rule.

  4. True to form : AS expected NATO crap asked Macedonia for restraint.

    What NATO means let muslims have their own separate country for now. Once they have their own enclave then they will ask for the rest and we NATO will help them achieve that. NATO and EU are the tail of the devil.

  5. I really don’t understand this Macedonia situation. I wish someone that is a regular commenter on this site would give us a brief synopsis of the recent history of the area.
    What I do know is rather foggy and probably tainted by western propaganda…
    What I do know is it was reported in North America that Europe was so ineffectual against an ethnic cleansing within the borders of Europe! that we had to get involved… We then bombed the hell out of “them” and sent in peacekeepers… This was Clinton’s war.
    Why the US had to be involved in what is obviously a European problem just speaks to the inept situation within the European theater of resolving anything militarily without the US. Or, the Europeans “have our number” to such a degree that they felt certain that the US would expend their blood and treasure to promote a satisfactory outcome for Europe.
    Well, it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.
    Again, if anyone wants to give their take on Macedonia I would be more than happy to listen.

    • I am from Albania. Clinton didn’t get involved in Yugoslavia for love or morals, he doesn’t have any. He got involved to break up Serbia in order to obliterate Russia’s position in the Balkans. There was no genocide in Kosovo, just a few choreographic scenes to serve to the west. Those 41 dead bodies resumed from some “common grave” were not children and other civilians, they were KLA soldiers in uniform.
      In Macedonia the same scenario has been playing all over again. No matter how much Macedonia kisses America’s [posterior] screaming in the streets “we are the good christian orthodoxes, we hate Russia, we love USA”, USA loves more Albanians than christian orthodoxes. That’s how it is, nothing you can do about it.
      Macedonia in 2001 was at the same point as Serbia in 1999. The war choreography was there. Albanians were in no position to beat Macedonia. Albanians are only good at writing petitions and open letters. Then all of the sudden, 9-11 happened. Then USA had its hands full, and in about 1 month after 9-11 all of KLA in Macedonia surrendered. What did they say when they surrendered? “Without the support of the West, our struggle is meaningless.” Now apparently everything has changed all over again.

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