Wednesday, December 12, 2018


DNC Chair Tom Perez Suggests Christians Are Stupid

DNC Chairman Tom Perez has a problem with Christians. He thinks they are stupid.

Speaking on December 6 at a liberal gathering in Washington, D.C., Perez appeared unhinged as he delivered a whining speech over the inability of Democrats to get their message across. He identified three obstacles: “Fox News, their NRA newsletter, and the pulpit on Sunday.”

Perez then unloaded on the clergy and the faithful, making a veiled stab at President Trump. “That person on the pulpit is saying, ‘Ignore everything else that this person has done and is doing. We have to focus on one issue of Roe v. Wade.’ And people buy it because that's their only source.”

This man is from some other universe. When I go to church on Sundays, I rarely hear a priest mention abortion, except in passing. More important, we Christians are not stupid people who take our political cues from any one source. We actually read and think for ourselves. That we regard the fate of unborn children to be a paramount issue is true. We only wonder why others don't agree. What is more important than the right to live?

This is not the first time that Perez's passion for abortion has sent him off the rails. Last year he said, “Every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman's right to make her own choices about her body and her health. That is not negotiable and should not change city by city or state by state.”

Perez's statement was too much for Democratic commentator Mark Shields. After quoting the remark I just cited, Shields said, "The Democratic Party, which is a pro-choice party, would now become the ‘no choice’ party."

In 2002, Shields blasted the DNC for providing a link on its website to Catholics for a Free Choice, an anti-Catholic front group. I followed through by taking out a New York Times op-ed page ad on September 16, 2003, titled, “Why Are The Democrats Insulting Catholics?”

The DNC is in trouble, and so is the Democratic Party. This demeaning comment by Perez suggesting that Christians are stupid is not going to sit well with millions of Americans. One thing is for sure—we will repeat what he said over and over and over again.

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One Syrian rapist, 29 crimes

29.

That’s how many crimes one single Syrian migrant had allegedly committed since entering Germany four years ago. He had already been wanted for drug trafficking and had been investigated for a rape last year. And then he struck again, this time in a case that has once again torn apart a sleepy college town.

Freiburg is a German city of 226,000 people. Foreigners make up 36,800 or 16% of the population. Of the foreigners in Freiburg, whose name means fortified city of free people, 18,750 or 8.5% are men.

Even though foreigners are only a small percentage of the population, they commit 42% of the crimes.

These days, Freiburg is mainly known as a college town. One site describes it as the “sunniest and warmest city in Germany” with a "progressive mindset" and "a remarkable commitment to the environment". The University of Freiburg’s 30,000 college students make the area a magnet for parties, clubs and eateries catering to the booming student population. And for those who prey on the students.

The medieval cobblestone streets of Freiburg bulging with bars aimed at college students had come to host a very different population as a mass of Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis and others claiming to be refugees poured into Germany. Facilities catering to refugees quickly popped up all over the sleepy college town.

Unaccompanied minors, migrants, many of them claiming to be underage when their actual ages ranged into the twenties and even the thirties poured into Freiburg. By November 2016, 577 of these ‘minors’ had showed up in Freiburg. And crime, drugs, theft and sexual assaults came traveling along with them.

Trouble had already been reported at the White Rabbit, a trendy club where sexual assaults by refugees have become routine. Reports even described men forcing their way into women’s bathroom stalls. A refugee reportedly attempted to assault a woman in the bathroom and the dance club soon announced that it would not allow asylum seekers inside. “This is not an easy thing to do but we see no other way as currently we are experiencing problems with refugees,” it said in a statement.

On New Year’s Eve of that year, the wave of refugee sexual assaults taking place across Germany, most notably in Cologne, reached Freiburg with two women being assaulted by seventeen men.

But none of that had any impact on the eagerness of the Freiburg establishment to continue welcoming in migrants. Even as the violence grew worse, Freiburg followed Merkel’s slogan, “Wir schaffen das” or “We’ll make it work.” Refugee violence was only a minor obstacle on the road to integration.

The University of Freiburg has a special refugee initiative, as do other educational institutions in the area. The City of Freiburg commissioned rapid prefabricated housing that could hold hundreds of refugees. It hasn’t asked any of the difficult questions about what those refugees will do in Freiburg.

The “progressive mindset” made Freiburg a very welcoming destination for Muslim migrants; and for the crime and violence that has come with the great migratory wave from the terrorlands.

In 2017, Syrians had committed 282 of crimes in Freiburg. The Turks were responsible for another 246, the Iraqis for 158, the Algerians for 141, the Afghans for 121, the Tunisians for 77, the Moroccans for 76, the Somalis for 69, and the Albanians tying the Pakistanis for 59 for a grand total of 1,288 crimes committed by immigrants from Muslim majority countries.

But those statistics also conceal the human cost of migration to Europe from Muslim countries.

In March, Hussein Khavari, an Afghan refugee, was sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of Maria Ladenburger, a 19-year-old med student volunteering for a refugee charity, in Freiburg. Khavari had already been sentenced to 10 years in prison in Greece after pushing a woman off a cliff. Then, even though evidence shows that he was in his thirties, the Greeks released him as a juvenile offender.

The monster continued on to Germany where he pulled the same scam and attacked another woman. His previous victim had been twenty, his new victim was nineteen. His previous victim had survived, but the Muslim refugee made sure that Maria wouldn’t, by strangling her and then drowning her.

In October, 7 Syrian men were arrested in Freiburg for the gang rape of an 18-year-old woman. The assault, like many others, took place at a club. And, like a number of other assaults, rape drugs were involved.  The female student had gone out to celebrate with a friend. Someone had slipped her a drink.

The first Syrian rapist assaulted the woman in the bushes. After he was done, he went into the club and called on his friends to join in.

The suspects include a Majid, an Ahmed, a Muhammad, a Munahad, an Alaa and a Jekar. Some of the Syrian men also allegedly had links to terrorist groups.  A number had posted pictures of themselves brandishing guns on social media. The full number of attackers may be in the double digits.

The alleged rapists lived in refugee housing around Freiburg. They had previously come to the attention of the authorities for drugs, assaults and robberies. And still they weren’t deported.

One of the suspects is a refugee who had come to Germany in 2015 during the great migration.

Majid and another of the suspects had already been suspected of the rape of another 20-year-old woman in her home. And Majid had also been suspected of committing yet another sexual assault. He was also due to be arrested shortly for drug trafficking, but before the police could take him in, he struck again and destroyed a young woman’s life.

"In Freiburg, there is no room for criminals and such terrible crimes," Mayor Martin Horn insisted.

But the evidence tells another story.

Sexual assaults have been rising in Freiburg with over 50% of the suspects listed as foreigners. The parties are slowing down. There are more bouncers than ever around the club. And fear is in the air.

Muslim migrants have turned a sleepy German college town, a place once known for having the most sunshine in Germany, for its Black Forest hikes and its nearness to France and Switzerland, into a place where college students are stalked by predatory refugees. The “sunniest place” in Germany has become a place of shadows, and its progressive mindset has turned a city of free people into hunted prey.

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Why the New Testament shouldn’t come with trigger warnings

Demands for the New Testament and Koran to contain alerts in the margins of those passages that have been used to justify and promote anti-Semitism should come as no surprise in our increasingly trigger-obsessed times.

The European Jewish Congress (EJC), an umbrella organisation for Jewish groups in Europe, recently produced a catalogue of policies to combat anti-Semitic hatred. EJC president Moshe Kantor called for scriptures to include “marginal glosses and introductions that emphasises continuity with Jewish heritage [and] warn readers about anti-Semitic passages in them.”

You might think this is just the latest instance of our contemporary obsession with tearing down the past and correcting anything sculpted, painted, or written more than five minutes ago. What next? Trigger warnings beside the Rosetta Stone, or alerts for vegans queueing to admire the hunting artwork of the Lascaux Caves? But wait… It is worth examining why such a move on the part of the EJC is understandable.

Anxiety about anti-Semitism is well founded. It is now rising to new levels in Europe – just 70 years after the Holocaust. This has prompted many Jews living on the continent to ever higher levels of vigilance as they pay close attention to the language and actions of their political leaders.

Young Austrian Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, is emphatic that a Europe without Jews is no Europe at all. But, British Labour’s ageing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, offers little assurance to Jews, and spices his equivocation about the anti-Semitism endemic in the UK Labour Party by roundly and regularly denouncing Israel whilst honouring his ‘friends’ in Hamas.

And don’t forget that across the Atlantic, in a most violent and shocking act of hatred, Jewish worshippers were recently gunned down at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Little wonder that Jewish organisations are looking for new ways to anticipate and counter acts of Jew-hatred. The devil of anti-Semitism continues to stalk the earth.

Anti-Semitism is humanity’s greatest and most persistent hatred; and disturbingly, it has fed for centuries on the teachings of other religions. Islam holds all Jews (and Christians) to be subservient – a status to be acknowledged in their legal designation as dhimmis. Dhimmitude continues to heap humiliation on the heads of Jews.

But the devil of anti-Semitism has also supped on Christian teachings about Judaism — Martin Luther, for instance, was a notorious anti-Semite — as well as on passages in the New Testament that blame the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus. Hence, the greatest source of Christian anti-Semitism is the claim that every Jew in every age is a ‘Christ-killer’.

Whereas Jesus of Nazareth, a pious Jew, was sure he knew what God wanted from the people of Israel, the Jewish leaders of the day were equally sure that they knew, too. And the consequences of that early religious split continue to roll through the ages of history. This was something acknowledged in 2016 by Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, who declared that the church had been complicit in spreading the virus of anti-Semitism.

Given that grim history, a decision to publish trigger warnings about passages in scriptures that have been used to encourage anti-Semitism might seem like a sensible idea. After all, trigger warnings are intended to signal that potentially distressing materials are about to be encountered. However, the trouble is that as you leaf through the Bible, material with the potential to disturb leaps out at you from almost every page, threatening to trigger feelings or memories.

It might be a vision of slaying the children of one’s enemies (Psalm 137); or calling down divine fire to incinerate the disobedient (2 Kings 1); or an adulterous king who has his lover’s husband conveniently slain in battle (2 Samuel 11); or a brutal execution (Acts 7). In the Bible, you’ll also find a hair-raising account of preparations for an act of child sacrifice forestalled by the last-minute intervention of the angel of the Lord (Genesis 22); and the bloody beheading of a man at the behest of a vindictive woman (Matthew 14).

No doubt about it: the Hebrew and Christian scriptures — or Old Testament and New, as they are known to many — embrace the broadest range of human life and experience and contain abundant moments of bloody vengeance, vindictive vituperation, and downright nastiness that can to alarm the sensitive or tantalise the hate-filled. (It is, for example, often overlooked that Anders Behring Breivik claimed it was Christianity that motivated his killings in Norway in 2011.)

And some of the content in the New Testament — especially in St John’s Gospel -—– is overtly very derogatory about the Jews, and especially about the Jewish leaders with whom Jesus was in constant conflict; resulting in his death. This prejudice finds its way into the great music of J.S. Bach, whose St John’s Passion remains, to this day, deeply distasteful to many.

So, there’s much to be disturbed by in the Bible, and plenty there that can cause offence and distress. But this kind of New Testament material demands to be confronted and engaged with; it needs to be interpreted, criticised, and explained for what it is: ancient writings whose Christian authors were motivated by the belief that the arrival of the new, in the figure of Jesus Christ, called for the dismantling of the old, in the form of the Jewish legal and religious establishment.

But to insert trigger warnings in the margins of these texts is to side-step these thorny questions of interpretation rather than to confront them head-on. For the problem with trigger warnings of any kind — and the reason they threaten such mischief — is that instead of maintaining the focus of study on the text itself and upon the intent of the writer, they shift it towards a self-absorbed and self-indulgent focus on the impact of the text on the reader.

Indeed, this shift away from intent to impact lies at the heart of the bitter culture wars currently being waged on some of our university campuses. Far from minimising discomfort, trigger warnings inserted beside testing passages of scripture could actually inflame sensitivities and cause people to withdraw from confronting anti-Semitism at just the time when they need to do battle.

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If Tommy Robinson is a monster, the left is his Dr Frankenstein

Time and again, the left’s failings have fuelled the Tommy Robinson phenomenon. If Tommy Robinson really is the monster that much of the media claim he is, then the left is his Dr Frankenstein.

Almost every aspect of the Tommy Robinson phenomenon – from his positioning of himself as the teller of difficult truths to the idea that he poses a one-man threat to the social order – has been gifted to Robinson by the left.

Through demonising open discussion about radical Islam and the tensions in multicultural Britain, leftists and liberals paved the way for Robinson to pose as the lone brave voice raising awkward questions about Islamist terror or Muslim grooming gangs.

And in then raging against Robinson as if he were Oswald Mosley Version 2, a bona fide fascist who threatens to unravel social peace in the UK, these same people imbued Robinson with an awesome power and sense of global menace he could never have earned for himself.

They facilitated both his USP – his willingness to break censorious codes and say the unsayable about cultural divisions – and they boosted his public profile in a way no PR man ever could have. I don’t know if Robinson has an agent, but if he does he should sack him, because he has an army of agents on the left who are cultivating and inflaming the Tommy Robinson phenomenon literally for free.

This weekend, Robinson will be one of the key figures at the Brexit Betrayal march in London. On Sunday, in a protest backed by UKIP leader Gerard Batten and Robinson, who was recently made one of Batten’s advisers, protesters will gather to kick up a stink about the political class’s selling-out of the vote for Brexit and its determination to keep us entangled in EU institutions.

This UKIP-Robinson hook-up has understandably caused a stir. Some UKIP members are unhappy that their party is rubbing shoulders with the former leader of the English Defence League. Nigel Farage resigned in protest.

In the left-leaning and liberal media, meanwhile, you could be forgiven for thinking it was 1936 all over again and that literal Blackshirts will descend on the seat of power on Sunday.

‘This is our Cable Street’, Corbynistas cry, in reference to the Battle of Cable Street in east London in 1936 when East End Jews and radical leftists heroically faced down Mosley’s mob. (Not Labour Party leftists, though: the Labour Party counselled its members to stay away from this affray, cowards that Labour has always been.)

Of course Sunday will be nothing like Cable Street. First, because this is not a march of fascists, but simply of right-wing people, and some hard-right people, of course. They might have views that many of us find unpalatable, but that doesn’t make them Nazis.

And secondly because 2018 is not 1936. It is nothing like 1936, in fact, whatever Guardian editorialists, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Prince Charles and Momentum members might say to the contrary. (This is the rather mixed bourgeois bunch who have hysterically compared the rise of Brexit Britain and the spread of populism in Europe to the march of fascism 80 years ago.)

No, Sunday is being compared with Cable Street not because it will be anything like Cable Street, but because the Corbynista movement desperately needs a Cable Street, and so they’re inventing one.

Corbynistas need that kind of moment, something that feels historic, real, meaningful, in order to add a dash of reality to their otherwise unhinged claims that fascism is returning and Corbynism is the brave internationalist movement that will face it down.

Corbynistas are engaging in what we might call historical appropriation: they are appropriating working-class East Enders’ genuinely brave direct action against actual fascists in order to give the appearance of revolution to their drab, decidedly un-radical state-socialist project and their pointless march against a gathering of disgruntled right-wingers on Sunday.

In the process, they massively overstate their own radical credentials and they dilute the heroism of Cable Street. It does a disservice to those working-class heroes of the 1930s to speak of them in the same breath as today’s middle-class academic leftists who will in essence just be shouting at a gruff bloke from Luton for being mean about Muslims. Anti-fascist resistance it is not.

But then, this sums up the Tommy Robinson phenomenon: its fuel is almost always the rashness and exaggerations and fears of the left.

So the left establishment’s chilling of frank, free discussion about Islam, multiculturalism and fragmented Britain has played directly into Robinson’s hands. The censorious branding of any questioning of Islam as ‘Islamophobia’, and any opposition to mass immigration as ‘xenophobia’, sends the signal to people that there are certain things they mustn’t say in polite society.

It is made clear that the mainstream public square will not tolerate their ‘racist’ concern about Muslim grooming gangs, or their ‘hateful’ dislike of the niqab, or their ‘Europhobic’ desire to end the freedom of movement foisted on us by membership of the EU.

And so, with baleful predictability, other forums emerge, outside of the mainstream, in which people gather to say the unsayable. One of the chief architects of these forums has been Tommy Robinson. He has proven himself adept at creating self-styled ‘no censorship’ zones in which people who feel ignored or demonised can express themselves. Witness both the EDL and later the Football Lads’ Alliance (much of which has distanced itself from both Robinson and the old EDL): these are not fascistic people, but mostly individuals who feel that mainstream politics no longer caters to their views and, worse, looks upon them with naked, elitist contempt.

And, strikingly, there’s Brexit. If some people are turning to the likes of Robinson to represent their frustration with the prevention of Brexit, as they will be on Sunday, that is surely because much of the left has spent the past two years demonising Brexit and the people who voted for it. With no serious mainstream voice willing to speak to their concerns about the EU, Brexit and the future of democracy, some people go looking for other voices.

It isn’t ‘too much freedom of speech’, or being ‘given a platform’, to use the modern parlance, that has energised the Tommy Robinson phenomenon, as censorious leftists would have us believe. Rather, it is their censorship that did that. It is the stymying of open debate that nurtures the space for the rise of self-styled and often quite eccentric ‘truth-speakers’.

And then the left throws petrol on this fire by massively exaggerating Robinson’s threat. Not content with creating the conditions in which he can rise up as a self-styled leader of the ignored, they then speak of him in the same breath as Mosley, and even Hitler, despite the fact that he has no real movement, no military forces, no actual power. They flatter, incessantly, the Tommy Robinson phenomenon, and enable Robinson to continue styling himself as one of the most important political figures not only in Britain, but in the Western world.

We end up with a darkly symbiotic relationship: the left needs Tommy Robinson, in order to prove that its ridiculous thesis about the return of fascism is correct, and Tommy Robinson needs the left because it is the left’s fear, loathing and pursuit of him that furnishes him with political importance and substance.

What we will see in London on Sunday is not a protest, far less a new Cable Street-style battle, but rather a mutually reinforcing performance, where the left will get to play at being anti-fascists and Robinson and his supporters will once again have their sense of historic importance stroked and strengthened. It will be a sad spectacle.

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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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