Fascism is back in Austria

It's as authoritarian and as anti-democratic as it was when it was the "Ostmark des deutschen Reichs".  That Islamofascism is the form of Fascism that they now support is just a matter of detail

1. November 17, 2017 was literally a Black Friday.

Reinhard Fellner, a card-carrying Social Democrat as well as chief of “Initiative Social Austria,” was sentenced in provincial court to three months (three years on probation) for denigration of Islam (§ 283 StGb). Any ever-so-small criticism of Islam in the next three years will lead to the completion of the sentence. This is so much more shocking, since he made a very mild criticism, which is far below the level of criticism which would be possible and necessary in a free and open society, to call attention to the dangers endemic to Islam. He simply began to investigate to what extent (terrorist) acts of violence as well as sexual abuse of women, children and animals are connected to Islam. Fellner’s conviction is so much worse because he undertook this attempt in the course of participating in the assessment of a bill published on the Parliament’s homepage. So he was legally convicted for performing the honorable task of an active citizen, participating in the process of parliamentary lawmaking.

The proceeding against Fellner can certainly be called a scandalous trial. The court did not examine several expert assessments by experts on Islam offered by the accused as proof of the truth of his statements. Likewise, witnesses named by the defense were not allowed to testify. Although the document gives no indication of a complainant, the state prosecutor suddenly claimed that the charge had been brought by the IGGiÖ (Islamic Faith Community in Austria) which “had felt insulted” by Fellner. The defendant was also confronted with a newspaper article which had not been in the document before the trial began. To Fellner’s indication that Ayatollah Khomeini, the most significant Shi’ite of the 20th century, had given approval to sexual intercourse with animals, the judge responded that this was not significant and had nothing to do with Islam, since Khomeini was already dead. Altogether, there was no serious effort by the judge or the state prosecutor[2] to formally align the evidence of Fellner’s criminal activity with the charge. Instead, the judge and the state prosecutor voiced the opinion that hate speech would apply even if the defendant’s claims were true.

The verdict does not concern just a number of oddballs who have chosen Islam-criticism as their strange hobby. It is an expression of the continued pushing of a blatantly political and subjective system of justice being established to enable the unresisted installation of a multicultural dictatorship, population replacement and Islamization. And it is a landmark in the transformation process which is morphing our disappearing democracy into an autocratic rule by mob.

This arbitrary judicial act is the inglorious apex of the years-long persecution of political undesirables using religiously- and subjectively-based punishment. The trail of devastation of the right to free expression extends over several prominent victims of political justice: from Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and Pro Vita head Dr. Alfons Adam to the former Muslim convert Laila Mirzo, whose trial for “denigration of religious teachings” (§ 188 StGb) was adjourned, to be sure, but who was afterwards — because of her Islam-critical stance — denied her right be designated a journalist and Islam expert (February 5 of this year) by Kurier editor Karl Oberacher. An ultimate in judicial partisanship and scurrility is the recent verdict of an Innsbruck court of a €480 fine against a former district head of the “Ring of Free Youth” (RFJ, the Freedom Party’s youth movement), whose Facebook entry celebrated a “piglet barbecue” for Ramadan. (Der Standard of November 15, 2017)

For years, justice has applied subjective and religious law selectively and one-sidedly. While the Christian faith, its God, its commandments and its symbols may be besmirched and denigrated at will without a single prosecution in three decades, let alone a conviction, critics of Islam are habitually legally persecuted, even if their conclusions can be meticulously documented with reference to high religious sources.

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ACLU targets ‘restrictive’ Maine abortion law

Julie Jenkins was on the job as a nurse practitioner recently in northern Maine when she got a call from the Maine Family Planning clinic’s headquarters in the south part of the state, asking if she could help oversee an abortion that day.

Jenkins, a 44-year-old clinician with specialized training in women’s health care, said she was ready to go. To get the abortion, the patient would drive to the nearby clinic in Presque Isle in far northern Maine, where Jenkins would check her ultrasound to confirm she was 10 weeks pregnant or less and eligible for a medication abortion in the form of five pills — one taken in the office and four at home.

But because of a decades-old state law, the clinic also needed to locate a licensed physician who could watch via video conference while the patient initiated the abortion in the clinic. No doctor was available, Jenkins said, so the patient was rejected for treatment that day.

“I was there. I had the ultrasound. I would’ve been able to provide the service,” she said. “We couldn’t find a doc to essentially watch her swallow the pill.”

Jenkins is now a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit filed in September targeting the state law that allows only physicians to induce abortions, a requirement shared by 40 other states.

Because of Maine’s vast rural expanse and often difficult travel conditions, the American Civil Liberties Union has settled on the state as promising terrain to challenge the law, which carries criminal charges for people who perform an abortion without a physician’s license.

In carving out this next frontier in the battle for abortion rights, advocates are hoping to build on a Supreme Court ruling in 2016 that struck down a Texas law requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital near where the abortion is performed and mandating clinics to meet the standards of surgical centers.

If successful in Maine, the plaintiffs in the case, filed in US District Court for the District of Maine, expect similar legal challenges across the country.

Advocates of preserving the status quo argue that requiring physician involvement in abortions is important for patient safety. But the lawsuit argues that the law places an “undue burden” on women in Maine seeking to terminate their pregnancies. Allowing certified nurse midwives and advanced practice nurse practitioners like Jenkins to perform the procedure, they argue, would give women the access they are entitled to under the Constitution.

US Representative Chellie Pingree, who lives on the island of North Haven in Penobscot Bay, where obtaining an abortion can require multiple days of travel to and from the mainland, said she sees no reason to keep the law.

“The bottom line is, what’s the point?” said Pingree, a Democrat. “This is an allowable service, and to say it can only be performed by a doctor is clearly just a way to make it more restrictive.”

The law wasn’t always seen as an ideological tool. It passed the Maine state Legislature in 1979, six years after the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion across the country. According to local press accounts from the time, while other laws restricting abortions sparked emotional debates among politicians in Maine’s capital, the physician-only statute passed with little controversy.

The law was originally drawn up to protect women from back-alley providers, so there was little to argue over then, said Kathy Simmonds, an assistant professor of nursing at Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions, who lives and practices in Maine.

Antiabortion advocates in the state still argue that expanding the universe of people allowed to perform abortions would present a health risk for women. Teresa McCann-Tumidajski, executive director of the nonprofit Maine Right to Life Committee, called the legal challenge a profit-driven move by the “abortion industry.”

“We don’t like Maine women used as test markets or guinea pigs for the rest of the country,” she said.

Abortion rights advocates say that fear of medical risk is unfounded, pointing to evidence that advanced practice nurse practitioners have similar results to physicians when performing the procedures in other states. The Maine Medical Association has no safety concerns about advanced practice nurse practitioners performing abortions, said Gordon Smith, the organization’s executive vice president.

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Controversial Proud Boys embrace ‘Western values,’ reject feminism and political correctness

In May, eight men met at Mackesey’s Irish Pub in downtown Madison to drink beer and talk politics. The men, all of them white and most in their 20s, had met online and were getting together for the first time.

The meeting would establish the Wisconsin chapter of an emerging national group called the Proud Boys. For Thaddeus Pall, it was a rare opportunity to openly express his support for President Donald Trump in liberal Madison.

As the men were leaving the bar for a member’s apartment, Pall, then 26, separated from the group to buy cigarettes. According to Madison police, as Pall was returning to his new friends, he was approached on the street by men in hoodies with what Pall described as baseball bats or wooden sticks. He told police the men had targeted him as a Trump supporter because of his T-shirt, which read: “Basket of Deplorables 2016.”

Pall said one yelled, “He is wearing a Trump shirt! He’s a Nazi!” and three surrounded him, pummeling his head, hands and arms and shattering his cell phone. Pall told the officer he did not know who the attackers were but thought he knew what they were: anti-fascist activists known as “antifa.” An “antifa” website later published a blog post detailing the attack and claiming responsibility.

After the beating, Pall tweeted a photo of his face and hands covered in blood. As a member of the Proud Boys, a libertarian men’s club that conveys special status on members who are attacked by anti-fascists, Pall had just achieved the highest degree of membership.

But Pall, a former Madison resident who now lives in northern Michigan, said in an interview that he is no longer active in the Proud Boys, although he said the attack did not alter his feelings about the group.

“I think people need to calm down. It’s just politics. People can have different views. We all want the same things — we all want a better planet, a better world, a better future. This disagreement is really about how you get there,” Pall said.

The Proud Boys were founded at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign by Gavin McInnes, a New York-based conservative online talk show host and co-founder of Vice Media who has since cut ties with the company. He estimates the membership at about 5,000 men nationwide.

McInnes and his followers believe there are 10 ways to “save America”: Abolish prisons, give each American a gun, legalize drugs, end welfare, close borders to illegal immigrants, outlaw censorship, venerate the housewife, glorify the entrepreneur, shut down the government and declare “the West is the best.”

Members also traffic in inflammatory language. A female reporter arranging an interview for this story with Wisconsin Proud Boy members in September was asked by the interview subject whether he should bring condoms. In a later interview, McInnes told the reporter she should give up her career, that “you need to find a man,” and that she would run out of eggs if she did not get pregnant soon.

Several Proud Boys members say they joined the group after watching founder Gavin McInnes on his online talk show.
In McInnes’ view, there is a demand for men’s clubs like the Proud Boys because, “There’s a real war on masculinity in this country that starts in kindergarten and goes all the way to adulthood. And it’s not natural.”

The Proud Boys call themselves “proud Western chauvinists” who “refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.” Initiation into the group is a multi-step process. A first-degree member simply declares he is a Proud Boy. Initiation at the second degree involves getting punched by other members while naming five breakfast cereals. Third degree is earned by getting a Proud Boy tattoo. Fourth degree is a “consolation prize” if a member “endures a major conflict related to the cause,” as Pall did.

Members often greet each other with the group’s ironic rallying cry, “Uhuru!” The word is Swahili for freedom and was taken from a video showing an activist calling for whites to make slavery reparations to African-Americans.

The Proud Boys also have a “no wanks” policy urging members to avoid masturbation and pornography to motivate them to get “off the couch” and meet women.

Group members have participated in recent rallies that drew anti-fascists in Portland and Berkeley that turned violent. The attack on Pall in Madison has been investigated by the FBI; federal authorities have called “antifa” members domestic terrorists. No charges have been filed.

McInnes has fiercely distanced the Proud Boys from white nationalists and the recent deadly demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. But experts say some of the group’s beliefs overlap with so-called alt-right ideology.

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Australia's seniors say the political correctness of millennials is ruining society

Older Australians are sick of the younger generation's manners, obsession with technology and political correctness, which they say is ruining society.

That was the verdict on the nation's young which emerged from a study commissioned by the Australian Seniors Insurance Agency (ASIA).

Of 1,000 people aged over 50 surveyed by CoreData for the ASIA, 88 per cent thought people in modern Australia were too politically correct.

As well, 74 per cent of seniors said people who strived to be politically correct annoyed them, and 45 per cent said they tried to avoid being politically correct just for the sake of it.

And 86 per cent of those surveyed said the drive to be politically correct was ruining society.

Study findings:

85 per cent of older Australians found millennial social etiquette confusing

88 per cent thought people in modern Australia were too politically correct

86 per cent said the drive to be politically correct was ruining society

Employment etiquette included putting phones away in meetings, punctuality, personal hygiene

Posting online when tired, intoxicated or emotional in the top 3 no-nos

Nan Bosler, president of the Australian Seniors Computer Clubs Association, said seniors found it difficult these days when it came to simple things, such as certain words they used day to day.

"Names we have known things by all our lives, they weren't there out of disrespect or anything like that, it was just a name we knew things by," she said.

"And if we have to always modify what we're saying, it's a little distracting, it's a little bit frustrating.

"We of course do respect other people, so we understand about political correctness. "But we don't always think it's the way we want to go — we want to be true to ourselves."

Ms Bosley said too much sensitivity about the meaning of words and phrases acted as a barrier between younger Australians and people aged over 50. "I think we can just be too politically correct," she said.

"I suppose it's for the majority that the minority have to sometimes think well 'ok, can't say that anymore, I must remember that'."

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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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