Friday, May 29, 2015



Another false claim of sexual assault in Britain

Such claims pop up all the time in Britain

A former aide to the Duke of Edinburgh has been cleared of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl.

A jury took just 40 minutes to clear Benjamin Herman, 80, who was accused of grooming the schoolgirl while he worked at Buckingham Palace in the 1970s.

Mr Herman was a major in the Royal Marines at the time but was on secondment as an equerry, or personal assistant, to Prince Philip.

The prosecution told Blackfriars Crown Court he had ‘taken advantage’ of the girl, who was lonely and craving adult attention.

The woman, now 54, said he once drove her to Buckingham Palace.

Edmund Gritt, prosecuting, said that the grandfather had ‘taken advantage’ of the young girl, who was lonely and bullied and craving adult attention.

He kissed her ‘passionately’, groped her and made her attempted to make her carry out sexual acts on him when she was between the ages of 11 and 14, he told the court.

‘Between 1971 and 1974, he held the post of equerry to the Queen’s husband Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh,’ Mr Gritt told the court during the trial.

‘He managed the Duke of Edinburgh’s official diary and accompanying him on official business. His office was in Buckingham Palace.

The woman, now 54, came forward in the wake of a 2012 Savile documentary exposing the former presenter as one of Britain’s most prolific paedophiles.

The prosecution denied that she had ‘latched on’ to the Savile story and said she could describe his house and family had told friends and colleagues about the abuse before the broadcast.

Asked why the Savile revelations had prompted her to go to police, she said: ‘I was very upset. I felt I couldn’t suppress it any longer.’

The prosecution told Blackfriars Crown Court (pictured) he had ‘taken advantage’ of the girl, who was lonely    +3
The prosecution told Blackfriars Crown Court (pictured) he had ‘taken advantage’ of the girl, who was lonely

Asked why she hadn’t gone to the police earlier, she said: ‘I made up my mind that I would never speak about it. I felt ashamed, I felt guilty, I felt dirty. I’ll take my dirty little secret to my grave, I thought.’

The woman said he told her about his job and said that he often looked after Prince Edward and Prince Andrew and played football with them.

Herman ‘emphatically denied’ the allegations.  He claims that his work as equerry kept him out of the house all day, that it was not possible to drive to Buckingham Palace forecourt and that he had never even met the alleged victim.

His barrister, Nerida Harford-Bell, confirmed that he had been found not guilty after just 40 minutes of jury deliberation.

Yesterday he was cleared of three counts of indecent assault on a girl under 13 and one count of indecency towards a child between 1972 and 1974.

SOURCE







The Borg of the Middle East: ISIS wants to transform everything in its path to a single structure, with itself at the center

ISIS has conquered Syria’s spectacular Roman Empire city of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site long known affectionately as the “bride of the desert,” and in all likelihood is gearing up to demolish it. We know this because they’ve done it before. ISIS used hammers, bulldozers, and explosives to destroy the ancient Iraqi cities of Hatra and Nimrud near Mosul, and they did it on video.

“These ruins that are behind me,” said an ISIS vandal on YouTube, “they are idols and statues that people in the past used to worship instead of Allah. The Prophet Muhammad took down idols with his bare hands when he went into Mecca. We were ordered by our prophet to take down idols and destroy them, and the companions of the prophet did this after this time, when they conquered countries.”

Muslims have ruled this part of the world for more than 1,000 years. All this time, they’ve been unbothered by the fact that Palmyra, Hatra, and Nimrud include pagan monuments, temples, statues, and inscriptions that predate Islam. Only now are these places doomed to annihilation. ISIS is more belligerently Philistine than any group that has inhabited the region for a millennium. The only modern analogue is the Taliban’s destruction of the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan with anti-aircraft guns, artillery shells and dynamite in March 2001, mere months before their al-Qaida pals attacked New York City and Washington.

This attitude toward history harks back less to the seventh century than to the twentieth, when Pol Pot reset the calendar to Year Zero after the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia, and when Mao Zedong’s Chinese Cultural Revolution murdered millions in the war against everything “old.”

Maamoun Adbulkarim, Syria’s antiquities chief, told Reuters that the army carted hundreds of ancient statues away to safety, but of course the giant Roman columns and the museum itself aren’t going anywhere except, perhaps, underneath the jaws of ISIS bulldozers. “This is the entire world’s battle,” he said.

That’s how bad things are in Syria now. The mass-murderers, war criminals, sectarian gangsters, and state sponsors of international terrorism in Bashar al-Assad’s Arab Socialist Baath Party regime can plausibly tout themselves as the defenders of civilization. In this particular case and in this particular place, they’re right.

Palmyra is more than 2,000 years old. It began as a humble caravan stop in the second century B.C., but Rome eventually annexed it and turned it into a dazzling and prosperous metropolis. Lying in an oasis in modern-day Homs Governate, during Rome’s time it served as a crucial hub linking Europe to Persia, India, and China.

The ruins sprawl over a vast area, preserved in the desert, away from the dense and overbuilt coastal areas of modern Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Unlike most Roman ruin sites, this one includes nearly intact buildings, some of them enormous. The architectural style is a delightful blend of Roman, Greek, and Persian. Some of the standing columns bear inscriptions in Greek and Aramaic. It’s a magnificent place, the Levantine melting pot at its finest, a startlingly beautiful crossroads where the East meets the West, where everything and everybody is blended.

But now it has been overtaken by a totalitarian death cult that uses mass murder and heavy weapons and machinery to transform everything and everyone into a single block-like structure, with itself at the center. ISIS is the Borg of the Middle East.

UNESCO is asking for an international effort to safeguard its World Heritage site, but who is going to step up do it?

The Syrians can’t. They just ran away. The Iraqis can’t defend their own cities, let alone somebody else’s. The Jordanians might be willing if they could project enough power abroad, but they can’t. The Israelis are theoretically capable, but the costs of yet another military intervention in an Arab morass would be catastrophic. The Turks could pull it off, but they’re more worried about Syria’s Kurdish population than ISIS and would rather see ISIS victorious if they had to pick one or the other. The Russians? Vladimir Putin will never ride to the rescue of any “civilization” that isn’t his own.

That leaves the United States. We’re the only real hope. Except that we aren’t.

We could send in ground troops to protect Palmyra. The city is part of our heritage (sort of), since the city once belonged to the Roman Empire, and we’ve done this sort of thing in the past. George Clooney’s film The Monuments Men, released in early 2014, dramatized efforts by a small American army unit during World War II to protect buildings, bridges, and fine art before the Nazis could destroy them. “You can wipe out an entire generation,” says Frank Stokes, played by Clooney, “you can burn their homes to the ground, but somehow they’ll find a way back. But if you destroy their history and destroy their achievements, it’s as if they never existed. That’s what Hitler wants, and that’s exactly what we’re fighting for.”

That was then. The United States Army occupied much of Europe. If Americans already occupied Syria, of course we’d protect Palmyra. But we will likely never occupy Syria. The 82nd Airborne could parachute in and hold the city for a while, but they’d be surrounded by ISIS on one side and the Assads and Hezbollah on the other. They’d also be cut off logistically. And how long would they stay there—until the war is over? Until ISIS is a spent force? That could take more than a decade.

So yes, the United States could go in and rescue Palmyra, but the odds that that will happen are negligible. President Barack Obama campaigned on ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not getting sucked into these sorts of quagmires. On this issue, at least, he’s backed by the majority of Americans in both political parties.

Inaction has costs, however. Aside from the hundreds of thousands of people who have already been killed, a psychopathic terrorist state that will likely be with us indefinitely is rising in the desert and gearing up to broadcast its destruction of the most beautiful real estate for hundreds of miles in any direction.

“The world does not care about us,” a resident told CNN. “All they are interested in is the stones of ancient Palmyra.” That isn’t actually true. The rest of the world has grown numb to the staggering body counts over there, but Palmyra was supposed to outlive us all. And now it probably won’t.

There’s something else, too. Armies willing to commit cultural genocide are always willing to commit genocide against humans. ISIS thinks that it’s following the Prophet’s example. It’s also following that of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao.

SOURCE






Nasty Lesbian falsely accuses Christian preacher

And the British police believe her

A Christian street preacher revealed today how he was arrested and held in a cell for 11 hours after a lesbian falsely accused him of homophobia.

Rob Hughes, 38, was speaking in Basildon, Essex, when the woman said she was ‘gay and proud’ and he should ‘get down off your pedestal, you judgmental **** - homophobia is not in this town’.

However Mr Hughes - who had a voice recording of all he had said while preaching for 20 minutes that day - had not referenced homosexuality.

But Mr Hughes, of of Tooting, south-west London, was arrested after police said they had received a complaint from a member of the public that he had used homophobic and offensive language.

Mr Hughes said: 'I was taken to the police station, processed, mugshot, fingerprints, DNA, the whole works. I was in a cell for about 11 hours, and then my solicitor finally arrived.

'I was interviewed by the police, they asked me a number of questions - "why were you out", "what were you saying", "did you say what the people said" - I said "no", of course. I was polite and courteous.

'I did say that “you have my dictaphone in your possession, you can listen to the recording, the audio, if you like”. They dismissed that. Not sure why, but I just continued with the interview, finished the questions.’

He was then told shortly after the end of the interview in September 2013 that he would be released and no further action would be taken against him due to insufficient evidence.

Mr Hughes has now received £2,500 and a contribution towards his legal fees for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment and breach of his human rights in an out-of-court settlement, according to his representatives.

He added: 'The whole experience left me feeling that street preachers - it's now a case of being presumed guilty until found innocent, which is really the wrong way round.

'Christians should be gracious in the midst of persecution, but at the same time we have a right to submit a legal defence.’

His case was supported by the Christian Legal Centre, whose founder Andrea Minichiello Williams said: ‘These cases are further examples of situations where the freedom of Christian preachers is restricted, when what they are saying is entirely lawful.  ‘In Mr Hughes's case, he was not even talking about sexuality and yet was targeted by a member of the public who tried to shut him down.

‘The police officer involved with Mr Geuter's case wanted him not to preach the words of Jesus after one complaint was made about him expressing his opinion about the destruction of marriage by the government.’

An Essex Police spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment from MailOnline today.

Cardiff-born Mr Hughes moved to South Africa aged seven and became a Christian three years later. He returned to Britain in 1997 and now works with street evangelism group Operation 513.

SOURCE






Black Leftist hatred of a conservative black

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Cynthia Tucker criticized Dr. Ben Carson for his conservative political and religious views, referring to the retired pediatric neurosurgeon and 2016 presidential candidate as “the GOP’s latest black mascot, a court jester, a minstrel show.”

Carson, who was raised in a poor, single-parent household in inner-city Detroit, became the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland at age 33. He made medical history when he became the first surgeon to successfully separate conjoined twins attached at the head.

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by former President George W. Bush in 2008, founded the Carson Scholars Fund, which awards scholarships to academically gifted students who contribute to their communities, and is a New York Times-bestselling author.

Claiming to speak for the black community, Tucker said that Carson’s non-politically correct views on homosexuality, evolution and religion threaten to eclipse his many accomplishments, and that because of his conservative views he “stands to lose his place as one of the nation’s most admired men.”

Tucker condemned Carson’s “right-wing intolerance and know-nothingism” earlier this month in her column for Uexpress, describing him as “a political novice who is happily ignorant of policy, both foreign and domestic, and contemptuous of religious pluralism and personal liberties.”

Carson “stood as stark repudiation of invidious stereotypes about black intellectual capacity,” Tucker wrote in her column. “But the good doctor’s forays into Republican presidential politics threatens to become his epitaph to overshadow - perhaps even to overwhelm - his academic and surgical accomplishments.”

Black talk show host and author Tavis Smiley also blasted Carson in an appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor” last week. “He’s a black bull in a Republican china shop,” Smiley said. “And if he’s not careful, he is going to do himself irreparable damage.”

However, host Bill O’Reilly commented that Tucker’s criticism is primarily a result of Carson’s condemnation of Obamacare, which Carson has compared to slavery, noting that “it is making all of us subservient to the government.”

Booker T. Washington and other pioneering black leaders “would never have countenanced such nonsense,” Tucker wrote.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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