The attack on police

Police officers around the nation are dealing with hate and disrespect like never before.

I’m going to take a break from the ongoing impeachment sitcom to focus on a real-life problem that is, for the most part, being ignored by the mainstream media. I’m referring to the assault on our law-enforcement officers across the country.

Last week alone, four police officers were killed in the line of duty. Two weeks before Christmas, these men were taken away from their families and the media seems to be indifferent. If you did not know this, I’m not surprised.

Under the past administration, law-enforcement officers trying to carry out their duties were portrayed as racists who are prone to violence. Police were not given the benefit of the doubt in questionable situations. They were usually deemed the problem and that attitude began to spread, resulting in growing disrespect for police.

So far this year, 49 officers have been killed in the line of duty by gunfire alone. If this continues, it will be much harder to recruit men and women who are willing to place themselves in harm’s way to protect those who have no respect for them.

Currently, there are between 750,000-850,000 law enforcement officers across the nation serving over 300 million citizens. Yet each year the disrespect for these men and women grows. Starbucks seems to be a frequent offender. On Thanksgiving Day, an officer bought coffee for the 911 operators on duty. The coffee cups had “PIG’ written on them. Starbucks said this did NOT reflect the company’s values. However, two days ago two officers at a Starbucks in California were refused service.

Remember this past summer when police officers in New York City were assaulted with buckets of water when they were simply trying to do their job. Remember the support they received from the mayor? Neither do I because there was none!

I know there will be those who say, "But there are bad police officers!” Really? Out of nearly 850,000 officers, you will find some bad actors! Deal with those officers as they are identified; but don’t paint all with such a broad brush.

Who wants a job where you never know if you are going to make it home at the end of your shift? You don’t know if you pull someone over for a broken taillight or an expired tag if they might pull out a gun and shoot you?

There are so many reasons for what we are seeing, but not enough time to cover them all. Regardless of the reasons, those of us who do care about law and order and respect for authority can make our voices heard.

When my wife and I see law-enforcement officers or first responders, we tell them we are grateful for their service and they are in our prayers. To law enforcement we say, “Be safe out there!” I have never had a negative response, only that of gratitude. It takes so little to communicate so much! Act as if it was someone close to you and you might see them differently.

From my family to yours, we want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

SOURCE 






'A Piece of Meat': How Some Muslim Men See White Women

A British girl was “passed around like a piece of meat” between Muslim men who abused and raped her between the ages of 12 and 14, a court heard earlier this month. Her problems began after she befriended a young Muslim man who, before long, was “forcing her to perform sex acts on other [and older] men,” and receiving money for it. When she resisted, he threatened her and her family with death and destruction. Speaking now as an adult, the woman explained how she eventually “lost count of how many men I was forced to have sex with” during two years of “hell” when she often considered suicide. Among other anecdotes, the court heard how the young “girl was raped on a dirty mattress above a takeaway and forced to perform [oral] sex acts in a churchyard,” and how one of her abusers “urinated on her in an act of humiliation” afterward.

Although her experiences are akin to those of many British girls, that she was “passed around like a piece of meat” is a reminder of the experiences of another British woman known by the pseudonym of Kate Elysia. The Muslim men she encountered “made me believe I was nothing more than a sl*t, a white wh*re,” she said. “They treated me like a leper, apart from when they wanted sex. I was less than human to them, I was rubbish.”

What explains this ongoing exploitation of European women by Muslim men—which exists well beyond the UK and has become epidemic in Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere? The answer begins by understanding that, although these sordid accounts are routinely dismissed as the activities of “criminals,” they are in fact reflective of nearly fourteen centuries of Muslim views on and treatment of European women.

For starters, Muslim men have long had an obsessive attraction to fair women of the European variety. This, as all things Islamic, traces back to their prophet, Muhammad. In order to entice his men to war on the Byzantines—who, as the Arabs’ nearest European neighbors represented “white” people—the prophet told them that they would be able to sexually enslave the “yellow” women (an apparent reference to their fair hair).

For over a millennium after Muhammad, jihadi leaders—Arabs, Berbers, Turks, Tatars et al.—also coaxed their men to jihad on Europe by citing (and later sexually enslaving) its women. As one example, prior to their invasion into Spain, Tariq bin Ziyad, a jihadi hero, enticed the Muslims by saying, “You must have heard numerous accounts of this island, you must know how the Grecian maidens, as beautiful as houris … are awaiting your arrival, reclining on soft couches in the sumptuous palaces of crowned lords and princes.”

Women's Rights Activist: Linda Sarsour Is 'Empowering' Radical Islamic 'Torture, Terror, Rape'
That the sexual enslavement of fair women was an aspect that always fueled the jihad is evident in other ways. Thus, for M.A. Khan, an author and former Muslim, it is “impossible to disconnect Islam from the Viking slave-trade, because the supply was absolutely meant for meeting [the] Islamic world’s unceasing demand for the prized white slaves” and for “white sex-slaves.”

Just as Muslim rapists see British and other European women as “pieces of meat,” “nothing more than sl*ts,” and “white wh*res,” so did Muslim luminaries always describe the nearest European women of Byzantium. Thus, for Abu Uthman al-Jahiz (b. 776), a prolific court scholar, the females of Constantinople were the “most shameless women in the whole world … [T]hey find sex more enjoyable” and “are prone to adultery.” Abd al-Jabbar (b. 935), another prominent scholar, claimed that “adultery is commonplace in the cities and markets of Byzantium”—so much so that even “the nuns from the convents went out to the fortresses to offer themselves to monks.”

But as the author of Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, explains:

Our [Arab/Muslim] sources show not Byzantine women but writers’ images of these women, who served as symbols of the eternal female—constantly a potential threat, particularly due to blatant  exaggerations of their sexual promiscuity. In our texts [Arab/Muslim], Byzantine women are strongly associated with sexual immorality. ... While the one quality that our sources never deny is the beauty of Byzantine women, the image that they create in describing these women is anything but beautiful. Their depictions are, occasionally, excessive, virtually caricatures, overwhelmingly negative. … The behavior of most women in Byzantium was a far cry from the depictions that appear in Arabic sources.

The continuity in Muslim “dealings” with European women is evident even in the otherwise arcane details. For example, the aforementioned Kate “was trafficked to the North African country of Morocco where she was prostituted and repeatedly raped.” She was kept in an apartment in Marrakesh, where another girl no older than 15 was also kept for sexual purposes. “I can’t remember how many times I’m raped that [first] night, or by who,” Kate recounts.

This mirrors history. By 1541, the Muslim Barbary State of “Algiers teemed with Christian captives,” from Europe so that “it became a common saying that a Christian slave was scarce a fair barter for an onion.”

According to the conservative estimate of American professor Robert Davis, “between 1530 and 1780 [alone] there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast,” of which Morocco—where Kate was abducted to in the modern era—was one. Women slaves—and not a few men and boys—were always sexually abused. With countless European women selling for the price of an onion, little wonder by the late 1700s, European observers noted how “the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather white complexion.”

It was the same elsewhere. (The number of Europeans enslaved by Muslims throughout history is closer to 15 million.) The slave markets of the Ottoman sultanate were for centuries so inundated with European flesh that children sold for pennies, “a very beautiful slave woman was exchanged for a pair of boots, and four Serbian slaves were traded for a horse.” In Crimea—where some three million Slavs were enslaved by the Muslim Tatars—an eyewitness described how Christian men were castrated and savagely tortured (including by gouging their eyes out), whereas “The youngest women are kept for wanton pleasures.”

Such a long and unwavering history of sexually enslaving European women on the claim that, they are all “pieces of meat,” “nothing more than sl*ts,” and “white wh*res,” should place the ongoing sexual abuse of Western women in context—and offer a dim prognosis for the future.

SOURCE 







Australian mothers choosing kids over paid employment

MANY women with children choose to work part-time so they can be home with their kids, a new study has found. Researchers studied under-employment in a sample of nearly 5000 Australian women and found those with children under 15 are not likely to want to work more hours. Therefore they have lower underemployment levels than women with no children.

The study, published by the Life Course Centre from the University of Queensland, goes against an assumption that mothers would work more hours if they could balance it with caring for children.

Lead author Parvinder Kier found younger women, women without tertiary qualifications and those with no kids at home are 50 per cent more likely to want more hours of work. "Females prioritise their off-spring upbringing and hence choose to seek employment opportunities with limited hours so they can be more readily available during their children's vital formative years," Dr Kier, from Griffith University, said.

Women now make up 47 per cent of the overall work-force but 68 per cent of the part-time workforce. Mothers work on average 20 hours a week in paid employment

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail of 21 Dec. 2019





When Massachusetts was the battlefield in the war on Christmas

Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch had nothing on the 17th-century Puritans, who actually banned the public celebration of Christmas in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for an entire generation.



The pious Puritans who sailed from England in 1630 to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony brought with them something that might seem surprising for a group of devout Christians—contempt for Christmas. In a reversal of modern practices, the Puritans kept their shops and schools open and churches closed on Christmas, a holiday that some disparaged as “Foolstide.”


A Puritan governor disrupting Christmas celebrations.

After the Puritans in England overthrew King Charles I in 1647, among their first items of business after chopping off the monarch’s head was to ban Christmas. Parliament decreed that December 25 should instead be a day of “fasting and humiliation” for Englishmen to account for their sins. The Puritans of New England eventually followed the lead of those in old England, and in 1659 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony made it a criminal offense to publicly celebrate the holiday and declared that “whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way” was subject to a 5-shilling fine.

Why did the Puritans loathe Christmas? Stephen Nissenbaum, author of “The Battle for Christmas,” says it was partly because of theology and partly because of the rowdy celebrations that marked the holiday in the 1600s.

In their strict interpretation of the Bible, the Puritans noted that there was no scriptural basis for commemorating Christmas. “The Puritans tried to run a society in which legislation would not violate anything that the Bible said, and nowhere in the Bible is there a mention of celebrating the Nativity,” Nissenbaum says. The Puritans noted that scriptures did not mention a season, let alone a single day, that marked the birth of Jesus.


Increase Mather

Even worse for the Puritans were the pagan roots of Christmas. Not until the fourth century A.D. did the church in Rome ordain the celebration of the Nativity on December 25, and that was done by co-opting existing pagan celebrations such as Saturnalia, an ancient Roman holiday of lights marked with drinking and feasting that coincided with the winter solstice. The noted Puritan minister Increase Mather wrote that Christmas occurred on December 25 not because “Christ was born in that month, but because the heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those pagan holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones].”

According to Nissenbaum, “Puritans believed Christmas was basically just a pagan custom that the Catholics took over without any biblical basis for it. The holiday had everything to do with the time of year, the solstice and Saturnalia and nothing to do with Christianity.”

The pagan-like way in which Christmas was celebrated troubled the Puritans even more than the underlying theology. “Men dishonor Christ more in the 12 days of Christmas than in all the 12 months besides,” wrote 16th-century clergyman Hugh Latimer. Christmas in the 1600s was hardly a silent night, let alone a holy one. More befitting a rowdy spring break than a sacred occasion, Christmas revelers used the holiday as an excuse to feast, drink, gamble on dice and card games and engage in licentious behavior.

In a Yuletide twist on trick-or-treating, men dressed as women, and vice versa, and went door-to-door demanding food or money in return for carols or Christmas wishes. “Bands of mostly young people and apprentices would go house to house and demand that the doors of prosperous people be open to them,” Nissenbaum says. “They felt they had a right to enter the houses of the wealthy and demand their high-quality food and drink—not meager handouts, but the stuff prosperous people would serve to their own families.” Those who failed to comply could be greeted with vandalism or violence.

Even after public commemoration of Christmas was once again legal in England following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Yuletide ban remained firmly on the books in Massachusetts for an entire generation. Although outlawed in public, the celebration of Christmas endured in private homes, particularly in the fishing towns further afield from the center of Puritan power in Boston that Nissenbaum writes were “notorious for irreligion, heavy drinking and loose sexual activity.”

In his research, Nissenbaum found no records of any prosecutions under the 1659 law. “This was not the secret police going after everybody,” he says. “It’s clear from the wording of the ban that the Puritans weren’t really concerned with celebrating the holiday in a quiet way privately. It was for preventing disorders.”

The prohibition of public Christmas celebrations was unique to Massachusetts, and under the reign of King Charles II political pressure from the motherland steadily increased for the colony’s Puritan leaders to relax their intolerant laws or risk losing their royal charter. In 1681, the Massachusetts Bay Colony reluctantly repealed its most odious laws, including the ban on Christmas.

Hostility toward the public celebration of Christmas, however, remained in Massachusetts for years to come. When newly appointed royal governor Sir Edmund Andros attended Christmas Day religious services at Boston’s Town House in 1686, he prayed and sang hymns while flanked by Redcoats guarding against possible violent protests. Until well into the 1800s, businesses and schools in Massachusetts remained open on December 25 while many churches stayed closed. Not until 1856 did Christmas—along with Washington’s Birthday and the Fourth of July—finally become a public holiday in Massachusetts.

This war on Christmas, to coin a phrase, lasted a remarkably long time in Massachusetts. More than 100 years after the Legislature repealed its ban on the holiday, the Puritan-infused hostility to Yuletide merriment remained palpable.

"When I was a school-boy I always went to school on Christmas Day, and I think all the other boys in town did," recalled Edward Everett Hale, the popular Boston author and preacher, in the December 1889 issue of New England Magazine. On Christmas Eve, Hale and his schoolmates might walk past King's Chapel — the city's first Anglican church, where Christmas services were held — and "see the men carrying hemlock for the decorations. But that was the only public indication that any holiday was approaching." When he lived in Worcester as a young man in the 1840s, Hale wrote, Christmas for many people was still a non-event. "The courts were in session on that day, the markets were open, and I doubt if there had ever been a religious service."

As late as 1856, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow could still describe New England as being "in a transition state about Christmas." There was enough of the old Puritan animus to keep it from being a "cheerful hearty holiday," he said. But "every year makes it more so."

Eventually, of course, popular culture came down unreservedly in favor of Christmas. Santa Claus and light-strewn trees, midnight masses and Handel's "Messiah," holiday eggnog and gift-wrapped presents — today they're as much a part of Christmas in Boston and New England as in any other part of the country. In countless ways, American life is still influenced by those devout English Christians who sailed to New England four centuries ago. But not when it comes to Christmas.

God rest them merry, but that's one war the Puritans lost.

See
https://www.history.com/news/when-massachusetts-banned-christmas

and
http://www.jeffjacoby.com/23614/when-massachusetts-was-the-battlefield-in-the-war

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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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