Wednesday, July 27, 2016



Another dubious prosecution by British police

They are under feminist pressure to "crack down" on rapists.  Too bad if you are innocent

A highly respected geography teacher wept today after a jury took just 26 minutes to clear him of repeatedly raping a pupil at an £18,000 a year public school.

Kato Harris, 37, was accused of attacking the teenager three times after inviting her to stay in the classroom during the lunch break for chats.

Harris was working as the head of geography and assistant head at the private girls’ school in north London at the time of the allegations, Isleworth Crown Court heard.

He insisted it was ‘completely impossible’ to have carried out the attacks as staff and students could see into the room and the door would have been open during the lunch break.

Harris, who is currently suspended from his job at a school in Berkshire, said strict guidelines prevented staff and pupils from even being alone together.

Asked if there was any possible motive for the girl making up the allegations he said it may have been revenge after he mocked her ‘silly face’ in a school photo.

A jury of seven men and five women at Isleworth Crown Court took just 26 minutes to clear Harris of three counts of rape in the autumn term of 2013.

Harris wept and sank to his knees as the verdicts were read out, while his supporters in the public gallery also sobbed and applauded.

Judge Martin Edmunds QC thanked jurors for their service.

The allegations emerged after the girl moved to a new school and staff became concerned about her unhappiness, panic attacks and eating habits.

She told the court she had struggled with bullying at the school, which made her want to leave.

She said: ‘I started getting bullied in year seven, that got dealt with, then I got bullied again.’

Asked why she left the school, she replied: “I was having panic attacks multiple times a day and didn’t feel safe.’

Her family’s lawyers brought in ex-Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers - who spent 36 years with the Metropolitan Police - as a private investigator who sought to guide officers on how to conduct the case, the court heard.

When in April 2014 the house mistress told the girl she suspected sexual abuse, the teenager replied: ‘Maybe’.

The girl finally came forward after visiting the head’s office on 3 December 2014.

Sally Hales, QC, prosecuting, said: ‘She wanted to tell her about it, but couldn’t speak. ‘The teacher told her she would leave the room, and that she should write it down.  ‘When she came back in, the teacher was handed a piece of paper with three words on it “I was raped”.’

The girl struggled to tell her story during a police video interview but wrote the allegations down. She said in her statement: ‘I was raped three times. It was in a geography classroom but I cannot remember which one exactly. ‘We were talking about geography or school and then it just happened before I could do anything. ‘He forced me on the floor and he started having sex with me. He pulled off my tights and underwear.’

She added: ‘I was scared and shocked, I didn’t know what was happening. ‘Nothing was said all three times.’

She initially refused to tell officers the name of her attacker but described him as ‘tall, with dark curly hair, a geography teacher, and his 40s’.  She then confirmed the teacher’s name when asked.

Speaking via videolink, the alleged victim earlier told jurors she attended treatment because of the attacks in New York every day for a year.  She said: ‘I didn’t name Mr Harris in his first interview as I couldn’t say his name. ‘Only after therapy in America that I could say it. ‘I fly to New York every week to see a psychiatrist.’

Harris had told jurors it was school policy to avoid being left alone with pupils in classrooms, and the building would be too busy for an attack. He said: ‘It’s school policy to keep our doors open, all teachers were provided with door wedges. ‘She doesn’t have a form room in the corridor, I don’t think she had lessons in the corridor either.  ‘400 girls would have been in the building. ‘I didn’t rape her, anywhere, ever.’

William Clegg, QC, defending, asked Harris: ‘How possible would it be for someone to rape a pupil without being observed?’

Harris replied: ‘Completely impossible.’

Mr Clegg then asked about the possibility of it occurring three times.  Harris answered: ‘Even more completely impossible.’

He broke down in tears in the dock as colleagues praised him as an ‘outstanding teacher’ and a ‘passionate guy’.

Giving evidence as a defence witness for Harris, the former headteacher said the accusations were ‘unbelievable, adding: ‘He did his job extremely well. He was a passionate geographer. Every day he had a packed classroom.

‘As a teacher, he was outstanding, bordering on brilliant. Pupils adored his lessons.

‘He was a problem-solving member of staff. If I were still a headteacher, I would employ him in a heartbeat

SOURCE






Top Dem Makes Incredibly Anti-Semitic Statement

A Democratic member of the House Armed Services Committee compared Jewish Israeli settlers to termites on Monday while speaking at an event sponsored by an anti-Israel organization that supports boycotts of the Jewish state.

Rep. Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) launched into a tirade against Israel and its policies toward the Palestinians, comparing Jewish people who live in disputed territories to “termites” that destroy homes. Johnson also compared Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, a remark that drew vocal agreement from those in the room.

“There has been a steady [stream], almost like termites can get into a residence and eat before you know that you’ve been eaten up and you fall in on yourself, there has been settlement activity that has marched forward with impunity and at an ever increasing rate to the point where it has become alarming,” Johnson said during an event sponsored by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, an anti-Israel organization that galvanizes supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS.

“It has come to the point that occupation, with highways that cut through Palestinian land, with walls that go up, with the inability or the restriction, with the illegality of Palestinians being able to travel on those roads and those roads cutting off Palestinian neighborhoods from each other,” Johnson continued. “And then with the building of walls and the building of check points that restrict movement of Palestinians. We’ve gotten to the point where the thought of a Palestinian homeland gets further and further removed from reality.”

SOURCE





The Torrent of Progressive-Enabled Terror Continues

France, Germany, America — the common theme is turning a blind eye

The ongoing leftist effort to deny reality brings us once again to France. Local authorities in Nice are resisting orders from France’s SDAT anti-terrorism agency to destroy CCTV footage of the Bastille Day terrorist attack. “This is the first time we are asked to destroy evidence,” said a source quoted by French newspaper Le Figaro. “The CCTV department and the city of Nice could be prosecuted for this, and also the officers in charge do not have jurisdiction to engage in such operations.”

Interestingly, while many media sources framed the demand as a “request,” a Google translation of the original article in Le Figaro used the phrase “urgent legal requisition.” The paper further noted that SDAT cited “Articles 53 and L706-24 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and Article R642-1 of the Penal Code” in their effort to “erase 24 hours of images from six cameras named, numbered,” as well as “all the scenes from the beginning of the attack that took place on the Promenade des Anglais, on the night of 14 July.”

The French Ministry of Justice insisted the effort was aimed at avoiding the “uncontrolled dissemination” of images that could be used as jihadist propaganda. The government further claims the destruction of the video intended to protect the families of the victims.

Nice city officials aren’t buying it. They have filed a legal complaint, logically arguing the video constitutes evidence in the case. Municipal attorney Philippe Blanchetier, also stated she will ask the prosecutor to keep the images “in order not to jeopardize with any other procedures that may emerge beyond the investigation.”

It appears the French public isn’t buying the government’s assertions either. “The comments section of the Le Figaro article is replete with outrage and disgust by the fact that the French government, instead of preserving evidence for the purposes of a thorough, independent investigation, is in fact behaving rather more like the chief suspect in the attack — ordering the destruction of vital evidence,” writes geopolitical analyst Gearóid Ó Colmáin.

The French government should be viewed with suspicion. Despite a series of Islamist terror attacks prior to the Nice atrocity, interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve was forced to admit that only lightly armed, local police were on guard at the entrance to the Nice beachfront pedestrian zone when terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel sped his 27-ton truck past a barricade and killed 84 people. Cazeneuve had previously asserted national police were guarding it. Nice deputy mayor Christian Estrosi, who had called for increased security for the Bastille Day event, disputed Cazeneuve’s original assertion and insisted the government had lied about policing of the event.

A police source who had seen the video told the BBC “a single municipal police car was blocking the junction” where Bouhlel initiated his murderous rampage.

In other words, the video epitomizes the utter bankruptcy of a progressive mindset that has yet to reach its saturation point with regard to the ongoing slaughter of innocent victims by Muslim terrorists. Better to destroy evidence than destroy an increasingly lethal terrorist infrastructure that remains not only a viable entity in the Middle East, but one welcomed into the European Union by a progressive globalist elite who remain completely immune to the destructive consequences of their behavior. As if on cue, French President Francois Hollande announced Friday his nation would send artillery to Iraq — but will not commit group troops.

Note the despicable status quo that amounts to nothing more than Hollande and other equally feckless leaders on both sides of the Atlantic outsourcing a war against those seeking to destroy civilization. Thus it is completely unsurprising that five additional people, four men and one woman between the ages of 22 and 40, were charged with aiding and abetting the Nice attacker. Or that their Paris prosecutor — citing text messages, more than 1,000 phone calls, and video taken of the attack scene discovered on the phone of one of the suspects — revealed the attack was apparently planned months in advance.

Months during which the war’s outsourcing has guaranteed the Islamic State’s viability and attractiveness to potential recruits. Recruits dismissed as “lone wolves.” Lone wolves progressives somehow find more comforting when their ISIL-inspired atrocities cannot be “directly linked” to the terror group.

Such obdurate denialism is not only about terrorist attacks, and not only about France. In both Germany and Sweden, government officials worked overtime to cover up the rape-fest in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, and two years' worth of sexual harassment at Sweden’s “We Are Sthlm” music festival, where “so-called refugee youths primarily from Afghanistan,” as internal police reports characterized it, harassed girls as young as 12. And right here in America, who can possibly forget the Obama administration’s initial effort to purge the transcript of Omar Mateen’s murderous rampage in Orlando, lest it conflict with their fraudulent see-no-Islamist-evil narrative.

As this column was being written, that narrative was once again in play. Despite an eyewitness account provided by a Muslim woman who said 18-year-old German-Iranian Ali David Sonboly shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he gunned down defenseless children in Munich, German officials are not only refusing to link the attack to Islamist terror, but stating there is an “obvious link” between Friday’s shooting at a Munich mall and far-right Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik.

Moreover, American media didn’t even wait for any facts to emerge before the talking heads at MSNBC on Friday spoke about the rise of “intolerant” ideologies and parties directed against Muslims and Middle East refugees, and actually linked the violence to the GOP convention and the Brexit vote. And the BBC chose to scrub “Ali” when naming the Munich terrorist in their coverage.

Such efforts reek of desperation, driven by an unseemly hope that if just one terror attack can be tied to anything other than the nexus between Islamist terrorists and their progressive enablers, then all will be well.

But all is not well. A trickle of terror attacks has become a torrent. So much so, it is almost impossible to chronicle one heinous event before it is superseded by another: late Saturday at least 80 were killed and more than 230 injured in yet another ISIL-perpetrated terror attack in Kabul, Afghanistan.

It is reality that the destruction of video evidence in Nice, or the media- and police-coordinated rush to judgment in Munich cannot hide.

And with each additional atrocity it becomes increasingly apparent that only one of two scenarios will disabuse progressive elites of their multi-culti, open border, one world delusions: a nuclear detonation in a Western city — or a sufficient number of elitist casualties. Until then, carnage inflicted on the “little people” with continue. Little people whose choice becomes increasingly clear: vote progressives out of power, while there’s still time.

One’s life — literally — could depend on it.

SOURCE





Don’t let the new politically correct language of slaughter fool you. Terrorism by any other name is still as terrifying

Have you heard it? The whisperings of a new language for terror, shared across our news networks?  The liberals and progressives, creating a whole new dialect, a softened tongue?

Taking the edges off the sharp stuff, dulling down the painful truth, neutering the raw? Making the truth more palatable, more malleable around the narrative they want to tell?

I’ve heard it for a while now amongst the chattering establishment. Watched it evolve into a mother tongue.  Learned to predict what they will say next in response to the next terror attack on our people and our freedom.

It started before Nice, about the time we began developing our own coping mechanisms: hashtags, tea-lights, vigils in a public square. We lit up public buildings in the colours of the flag, even though patriotism was casually mocked any other day of the week for being racist or xenophobic.

Our communications networks saw it as their role not to inflame tensions but instead to downplay terror. To be the cool press applied directly onto the wound.

In its early days, this language for terror became Chinese whispers. It has ended up as blatant lies.

After the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne, police reported a peaceful evening that passed off without incident. That night 1,200 women suffered rape, sexual assault or abuse at the hands of 2,000 men.

But the language of terror has evolved. In the latest attack on Germany last night, a failed asylum seeker detonated an explosive device, injuring 12 and killing himself. The BBC reported: ‘Syrian Migrant Dies in German Blast. Motive not immediately clear.’

Twenty minutes after the story broke I still had to work reasonably hard to discover that three of those injured were in a serious condition.

And whilst ‘no motive was clear’ in this German blast, police on scene were able to tell us it was probable bits of metal had been added to the bomb in his backpack. So the motive was to harm as many innocent people as possible, whichever way you try and bubble-wrap it.

We know the attacker was a failed asylum seeker. We know he was from Syria. Yet the BBC was keen to point out this attack had not been linked to a militant group. If you were a family member of an innocent festival-goer, caught up in this horror, do you think you would care?

Someone tried to kill your child. For no reason. How is that for truth?

Earlier in the day, a Syrian asylum seeker with a machete cleaved down a pregnant Polish woman in Reutlingen. Two others were injured in the attack.

News channels were quick to remind us this was not a terrorist attack. Well, that’s alright then. I don’t mind my children watching a man hack a woman to death with a meat cleaver as long as it’s not a terror attack. The language of terror has become, almost Shakespearean. A crime of passion? How charming, how desperately exciting, how romantic!

Until you remember the lady was pregnant and he hacked her to death with a machete. There is nothing passionate about that.

And all this only two days after a shooting rampage in Munich which killed nine young people.

Despite this killer’s Iranian extraction, he quickly became German – very German. So much so that the BBC even changed his name. Ali David Sonboly became David Sonboly. Rechristened by our unbiased broadcasting corporation to sound thoroughly European, even Jewish, one might suggest. Definitely not Muslim, either way. They reverted to his real name when their sleight of hand was exposed.

Have we created a new definition of terror these days? Is an axe attack on public transport not terrifying enough to qualify?
His history of depression was shouted about. And his fascination with mass shootings and Anders Breivik. You see, this language of terror likes to use CAPS LOCK when there is something, anything, to point you away from links with migrants or Muslims.

The killer’s motive was passed around like a hot potato until it landed in the lap of the Right wing. The media was comfortable with that.

The media was keen to highlight most of the victims were migrants — a subtle attempt to influence our opinion of the attacker.

Using the victims as evidence of the motivation of the attacker is a well-rehearsed refrain. ‘Many Muslims died in the attack.’ This is how we judge the success of modern multiculturalism: we all die together, too.

Meanwhile over the weekend more than 80 Muslims died in a Kabul suicide bombing that was indubitably the work of ISIS. Does that make it any less terror?

In Nice the attacker was initially called a ‘lone wolf’, another well-rehearsed phrase in this new language of ours. Then, quietly, as the nation moved to mourn its 84 dead, four others were arrested in the city.

The attacker had planned the attack for a year, and laughed as he drove over children like skittles, screaming Allah Akbar as he mowed them down.

But, the media was quick to reassure us, he wasn’t a real Muslim because he drank alcohol and his ex-wife was ‘shocked and surprised’.

Mohamed was a divorced father-of-three who liked girls and salsa and didn’t pray, according to a French crime correspondent. Another told BFMTV - a French rolling news channel - he was more into women than religion.

You see the new language at work? Distancing Europe from terror? Separating religion from these attacks? Waiting as long as possible before acknowledging the lone-wolf’s radicalisation and the supply of weapons to him by Albanian friends in the foothills of Nice.

Now investigators have admitted to the Associated Press that his louche behaviour may have been straight from the ISIS manual as he sought to conceal his true identity as a radicalised terrorist of at least a year’s standing behind a façade of Western decadence.

Even an axe attack on a train in Bavaria was held at arm’s length from links to Islam or ISIS. He only went to the mosque on ‘social occasions’ and was a ‘calm and quiet’ boy. The fact he shouted Allah Akbar and took an axe to five people, injuring two critically, was considered insufficient evidence to pin this act to terror.

Have we created a new definition of terror these days? Is an axe attack on public transport not terrifying enough to qualify?

Only when a video was released by ISIS purporting to show the killer making threats against infidels did the media finally cave.

The Australian Attorney General speaks for political elites everywhere when he asserts many terror incidents are in fact linked to mental health issues, not religious or ideological ones, and that even those screaming Allah Akbar 'are not necessarily deeply committed to and engaged with the Islamist ideology'.

I accept not all attacks are made by terrorists. I also accept not all attacks are made by migrants or asylum seekers. And I accept victims are often selected entirely at random. But that is not the point.

Germany has seen four attacks in seven days. Whether they are officially linked to ISIS or not, they are the acts of people adopting the technique of terrorists and it IS terrorism, no matter what you want to attribute the acts to.

And trying to gloss over the truth has only made us cynical about this new reporting language. Like a crossword reader, I now have to look for the clues hidden in the text.

A name changed. A religion obscured by references to women and drink. A heritage confuscated by a dual-nationality passport.

This language of terror has to stop. This shape-shifting, neutering, dulling down, dampening.

We do not need tensions inflamed. But inciting the suspicion that facts are being hidden is no way to calm frayed nerves.

Merkel’s obstinate refusal to accept that her open-doors policy to migrants has made things worse has turned Germany into a country on the brink.

She has to offer solutions to clear up the mess she had created. To pull the situation back from spilling over into all-out civil war.

And to help her do this, we have to talk about Merkel’s mess (and the other Western governments’ own terrible mistakes) honestly and openly.

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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