Wednesday, August 23, 2017





Is it worth keeping this thing in jail for 24 years?



Bring back the death penalty

A heartbroken father has released the harrowing footage of his son's murder in a bid to get knives off Britain's streets.

Lauric Lebato, 22, was stabbed in the back by Sulaiman Sillah when a fight broke out at a party on February 11.

The attack inflicted horrific injuries on Lauric and caused him to bleed to death at the property in Leicester.

His father Tagbeu Lebato has now made an emotional film with Leicestershire Police to highlight the damage knives can have on families and communities.

He also shared pictures of his son and said he was devastated by the loss and said 'his life finished' when Lauric was stabbed

Sillah, 20, of Leicester, was jailed for life with a minimum sentence of 24 years at Birmingham Crown Court after being found guilty of murder.

Speaking on the video, he said: 'You have just watched my son Lauric being stabbed to death.

'I told you it would be shocking. But how do you feel? How do you feel about that knife that took our lives?

'I do not ask you to pity my life. I have no need of your pity. Instead, I ask you to think about that knife that took the life of my beautiful little boy.

'Now, think about another knife that may one day take your life or the life of someone close to you.

Sillah, who claimed he acted in self-defence, was also found guilty of wounding with intent on another occasion.

Jurors also convicted Sillah's friend, Sheriff Oluwa, 20, of violent disorder.

A court heard Oluwa had been threatening people with a large combat knife on the night but had pleaded not guilty to the charge.

On February 11, Sillah and Oluwa, both originally from London, attended a fellow De Montfort University student's birthday party in a basement flat.

Around 15 members of the Manor House Gang from London also attended the party, including Mr Lebato.

A row broke out between the Leicester student group and the Manor House Gang and the fight spilled out into the street, where Oluwa threatened other people with a long combat knife before being sprayed with a foam fire extinguisher by Mr Lebato.

Sillah then ran at Mr Lebato from behind with a knife but Mr Lebato managed to dodge out of his way at the last minute and flee across the road before he was stabbed.

In the film, Mr Lebato said his life has been destroyed by the death of his son after moving from their former home in Ivory Coast to give Lauric a better future'.

'I was born into a very poor family in the Ivory Coast. We had very few things and very little money, but I had a dream that one day I would have a child.

'When that moment came I would take my child far, far away to a different culture, a different place, where I would bring my child up to be a happy, successful and safe person.

'Lauric was born in the Ivory Coast. He was and always will be in my mind a beautiful, happy little boy.

'Five years later, having saved and saved, I fulfilled my dream. We broke that link with my home country, with poverty, and with my family, and Lauric and I set up home together in London.'

SOURCE





Georgia judge forced to RESIGN for saying “nut cases tearing down monuments equivalent to ISIS destroying history”

What Judge Hinkle wrote was true. But the idea that he had to resign because he was biased is ridiculous. There is no indication that any of his judicial opinions were biased. But there are innumerable leftist judges all over the country who legislate leftist politics from the bench. No one ever rebukes them for it or calls them biased, and the damage they do is immense. If all biased judges were forced to resign, hundreds of hard-left judges would be stepping down.


“Gwinnett Judge Resigns After ‘Snowflakes’ and ‘Nut Cases’ Posts,” by Doug Gross, Loganville Patch, August 17, 2017:

LAWRENCEVILLE, GA — A Gwinnett County magistrate judge and longtime local politician has resigned from his court position after being suspended over controversial posts he made on Facebook.

Jim Hinkle, a part-time judge who has served on the court for 14 years, resigned Wednesday, Chief Magistrate Judge Kristina Hammer Blum said in a written statement. Blum had suspended Hinkle indefinitely after his Facebook posts came to light on Saturday.

“For 14 years, Judge Hinkle has dutifully served this court,” Blum said in her statement. “He is a lifelong public servant and former Marine. However, he has acknowledged that his statements on social media have disrupted the mission of this Court, which is to provide justice for all.”…

In other posts, Hinkle has condemned Islam as a violent religion.

By Wednesday morning, Hinkle appeared to have either deleted his Facebook account or set it to a private setting. But the Atlanta Journal Constitution captured images of his posts before he did so.

“In Charlottesville, everyone is upset over Robert E. Lee statue. It looks like all of the snowflakes have no concept of history,” Hinkle wrote Saturday. “It is what it is. Get over it and move on. Leave history alone – those who ignore history are deemed (sic) to repeat the mistake of the past. In Richmond, VA, all of the Confederate monuments on Monument Ave. have people on horses whose asses face North. PERFECT!”

Later, he wrote “The nut cases tearing down monuments are equivalent to ISIS destroying history.”…

In her statement, Blum made clear the suspension came because the posts jeopardized Hinkle’s position as an unbiased arbiter of the law….

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National Parks Issue Statement on Confederate Monuments

As the American left pushes to purge the nation of Confederate statues and memorials, the National Parks Service is making clear the statues at Gettysburg battlefield are not going anywhere.

Katie Lawhon is the senior advisor for the park service when it comes to Gettysburg, and she says the statues “are important” and allow the park service to “historically and objectively tell the stories the monuments commemorate.”

Lawhon reassured the Reading Eagle that the statues would not be moved.

Barb Adams, who volunteers at Gettysburg, said watching the statues being vandalized and/or removed around the country breaks her heart. She said, “It’s just so upsetting to me—these men, these soldiers fought for what they believed in.”

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UK: 'Left-leaning' National Trust head cautiously admits: 'We have alienated traditional members'

The outgoing head of the National Trust has admitted that the organisation has alienated "traditional visitors" in the wake of rows over Easter egg hunts, gay pride badges and flapjacks.

Dame Helen Ghosh, who takes over as Master of Balliol College, Oxford University, next April, said that while Trust membership was healthy "sometimes some of our perhaps more traditional visitors have felt that they are not being catered for as they once felt that they were.”

She told Radio 4's The World This Weekend: “Sometimes I see signs that our places, or things going on, that perhaps tread too far in one direction than another. “It is sometimes the case that we appeal too much to one audience, and not enough to another."

Dame Helen, who succeeded previous director general Dame Fiona Reynolds in 2012, continued: “I haven’t got a specific example in mind. I think what I’m describing is that in order to be open-armed to welcome the widest possible group of visitors to our places, sometimes some of our perhaps more traditional visitors have felt that they are not being catered for as they once felt that they were.”

The Trust has endured a torrid summer, during which it has faced criticism for requiring volunteers to wear gay pride badges, the public ‘outing’ of Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, former owner of Felbrigg Hall near Cromer, and a change in the recipe for it’s celebrated flapjacks.

Earlier in the year, the Trust was accused of "airbrushing faith", after the word "Easter" was dropped from the annual egg hunt it runs with Cadbury.

Speaking on Radio 4, Sir Roy Strong, a former director of both London’s Victoria & Albert museum and the National Portrait Gallery, was damning in his assessment of the Trust.

He blamed successive “left-leaning” director generals, and suggested it may be time for the organisation - which attracts more than £500 million in annual funding - to be “broken up”.

Sir Roy, 82, said: “If you go to a National Trust house or property, you’re being almost told what to think, and how we ought to react.

“They’re obsessed with children, play areas, fun things at Easter and Christmas, and so on. “The signs are that the National Trust is being turned into a branch of the leisure industry.

“Within the last 20 years it’s really begun to alienate its own public. They’ve had two director generals, both competent in their own ways, and a balance has gone. Both were left-leaning”.

“My own view [is that] it’s too large, and therefore it’s kind of alienating a lot of its members. I think there is a big discrepancy between the historic houses and gardens which certainly the present DG is possibly embarrassed about, and landscape and coastline, and it may well benefit from splitting.

“So much of what they do sounds like the Blair government in exile. It’s ticking the boxes against the disabled, the aged, LGBT, the ethnic communities and the rest of it, and something gets lost along the way.”

The National Trust attracts 20 million visitors per year to its 775 miles of coastline, 248,000 hectares of land and more than 500 historic houses, castle, monuments, gardens and nature reserves

SOURCE






Blaming the victims in Europe

There is a variety of diseases beleaguering poor Eurocrats such as commoners’ realism, rationality and that nasty airborne virus of enlightenment transmitted by freedom of speech. But the disease most vexing is xenophobia.

As the then UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres suggested, xenophobia was an emerging European condition. In 2015, he wrote: “Europe needs to remain a continent of asylum … There are some distressing indications of rising xenophobia in some places in Europe … a lack of recognition of the fact that all societies are becoming multicultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious.” In his first London speech as UN Secretary-General, Guterres criticised “national sovereignty agendas” and urged people to “fight xenophobia” and “hatred of Muslim communities”.

In UN and EU documents, the defence of Western sovereign borders is curiously portrayed as hatred of Muslims. One might consider strong borders indispensable to the protection of all peaceful citizens residing in Western countries, Muslims included. But in anticipation of member states adopting a global compact on migration next year, the UN has proposed a global campaign to “counter xenophobia”. Despite struggling with a concise, standard definition of the term, it appears that members regard xenophobia as the chief obstacle to Western populations accepting a policy of porous borders.

The EU and UN worked in unison to defend open borders across Europe against clear evidence that the policy facilitated jihad. Thousands of migrants claiming Syrian refugee status were neither Syrian nor refugees. Once again, the EU has joined the UN to campaign against xenophobia.

In January, European Council president Donald Tusk described three chief threats to the EU. The second threat in Tusk’s analysis is “anti-EU, nationalist, increasingly xenophobic sentiment in the EU itself”. Note the word association. Tusk might have praised the remarkably peaceful response of Europeans to mass migration from the Islamic world. He could have thanked European people for their immense generosity and tolerance, despite the multiple jihadist attacks and assaults committed against them. He could have acknowledged the socioeconomic burden imposed on European citizens by the EC. He might have conceded humbly that EU chiefs were too hasty in prosecuting an open-border policy in an age of transnational jihad. He might have shown empathy for the victims of Europe’s open-border policy and sympathised with the understandable counter-reaction. Instead, Europe’s political leaders treat the natives as collateral damage in their pursuit of an open-border utopia.

Spain is the latest casualty of the EU’s open-border policy. In the hours before the latest jihadist strike, the Spanish maritime service intercepted more than 600 people trying to cross the Mediterranean from Morocco.

And there is the related problem of official denial.

When Spain tried to push illegal immigrants back from the Spanish-Moroccan border in 2015, the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, Nils Muiz­nieks, suggested the push-backs could be a human rights violation. He claimed there was no direct link between migration and terrorism.

Oxytocin might offer relief from denial about open-border policy and the development of Islamism as a Western condition, but the truth does too. In 2004, a terror cell orchestrated the slaughter of 191 innocents in Madrid. Of the three men convicted of murder and attempted murder in the Madrid bombings, one was a Spaniard and two were Moroccan. In the years that followed, Spanish authorities uncovered several terrorist plots by Moroccan immigrants. On Saturday, The Sun newspaper reported that last week’s attacks were orchestrated by a terror cell that includes about a dozen Moroccans recently returned from Syria.

Should Eurocrats find the link between mismanaged migration and terrorism unclear still, consider Brussels, Paris, Nice, London Bridge and Borough Market. Or go transatlantic for a tour of the Boston bombings before heading Down Under where four recent fatal terrorist attacks were perpetrated by refugees.

Most migrants and refugees make fine citizens. The story of modern Australia is a migrant story, no matter how many Greens councils try to deny it by banning Australia Day. But the balance between mass migration and social harmony is a delicate one. It is put at risk by ideologues who pursue an open-border policy without assessing the consequences.

The unelected bureaucrats staffing the EU and UN risk turning the free world into a wasted asset. If the emergence of a European population resistant to open-border zealotry has come as shock, it is because Eurocrats are so far removed from the people they claim to serve. The bulging register of thought crimes that every PC comrade carries around in his head shields him from the intolerable realism of the dissenting masses. But shouting xenophobia at realists won’t stop terrorism. And it won’t protect the free world from those determined to make us unfree.

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Stop Smearing Sebastian Gorka

White House counterterrorism advisor Sebastian Gorka has been the subject of severe criticism in recent months. With the departure of Steve Bannon from the administration, many are calling for Gorka to be fired next. A recent piece in Rolling Stone questioned the validity of his Ph.D. and labeled him something of a neophyte and an extremist. The Forward tied Gorka to a right-wing Hungarian secret society called Vitezi Rend.

These stories make for great political attacks, but are they valid? And, perhaps more importantly, setting aside all of the charges against him, are Gorka's views on terrorism and how our nation should combat it prudent?

First, let's examine the accusations on anti-Semitism and secret societies. Gorka, on the record, has denied being a member of the Vitezi Rend. He was also called an anti-Semite, and a video used to incriminate him was conveniently edited to remove his condemnation of the world's oldest hatred. Still, he's gone on the record and denied this allegation, too.

There's no evidence that Gorka has ever expressed anti-Semitic views.

There isn't any reliable evidence that Gorka has ever expressed the extremist views he's accused of holding or been a member of a secret society.

The questions raised about Gorka's qualifications seem suspect as well. He earned a Ph.D. from Corvinus University. Whatever the quality of that pedigree, it was sufficient to land Gorka a position as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University and positions with a host of other respected institutions like the Marine Corps University Foundation and the Council for Emerging National Security Affairs (CENSA).

Ben Rhodes, a senior national security advisor during the Obama administration, had shockingly thin qualifications for the job.
Even if his credentials have been inflated, it's worth remembering that the previous White House relied on Ben Rhodes for international security counsel, and his background was shockingly thin, focused mostly on creative writing.

Gorka's worldview, similarly questioned, is perhaps the most important piece of this puzzle. He has written forcefully about the threats Islamists pose to the West and devoted his career to understanding the nature of these threats, while working to raise alarm bells about the despicable ideology that has been gaining popularity throughout the Muslim world.

He's been right to do so.

Gorka's influence can be felt at all levels of this administration. In his inaugural address, President Trump promised to "eradicate the Islamic State." He didn't say degrade, manage, or contain. He said eradicate. That's important. So is the Trump administration's willingness to name the threat facing our people – radical Islamism.

This represents a welcome change after eight years of leading from behind and "strategic patience" that got us nowhere. While the Obama administration dithered as the Arab-Islamic world erupted into conflagration, Gorka reminds us that ignoring our enemies as they rise to power is just as dangerous as disengagement from our friends as they fall from it.

I met with Gorka recently at the White House and he mentioned how the struggle against communism, wherein his father was tortured by the authorities, was akin to the battle against modern day Islamism. Inspired by his father, he's fighting this generation's ideological struggle.

Gorka has a solid grasp of the ideology that threatens our safety and security.

A dispassionate review of Gorka's background and work indicates that he is simply a right-wing Hungarian. Hungary has produced its fair share of racists and anti-Semites, but there's absolutely no reason to believe Gorka is one of them. His credentials are no less impressive than others who have served the White House in similar capacities.

Importantly, in order to win the war against radical Islamism, we must develop a thorough understanding of its ideology. Gorka has a solid grasp of that ideology, and all of us in the United States should be thankful that he is lending his expertise to advance our safety and security. Attacks on Gorka's character do nothing to make our nation safer. His work on combatting radical Islamists most likely will.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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