Sunday, March 31, 2019



Asian-Americans do better at university, but lag in top-level managerial positions
  
This is no surprise and may be temporary.  Top level positions usually go to "good old boys" -- but as individual Asians get better known, they may  get included in that.  Jews are a good example there.  They were once excluded but now are often themselves the "good old boys"

Asian Americans graduate from university at far higher rates than white Americans, but despite this are no more likely to hold professional or managerial jobs, according to a new study.

The findings suggest that Asian Americans face additional barriers and discrimination when trying to climb the career ladder at work, a phenomenon known as the 'bamboo ceiling', an invisible barrier akin to the 'glass ceiling' faced by women.

It has long been known that the US-born children of Asian immigrants--a population known as the "Asian second generation" are not only more likely to be college-educated than the US general population, but are also more likely to graduate from the nation's elite universities. While Asian Americans make up only 6.3% of the US population, they account for about a quarter of all students in the Ivy League institutions in the US. However, until now, it has not been known if these advantages crossover into the workplace.

In the Ethnic and Racial Studies article, three researchers--Van Tran, Jennifer Lee and Tiffany Huang--from Columbia University, New York City pooled over a decade of data from the Current Population Survey (2008-2016), a monthly survey of about 60,000 US households conducted by the United States Census Bureau. They then used this dataset to analyse graduation rates among the five largest Asian groups in the US - Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese and Koreans. Together these groups account for 83% of the country's Asian population. They found that all five groups are more likely to have graduated from college with a bachelor's degree than white Americans.

The highest attaining group are Indians, who are eight times more likely to graduate with a degree than white students. Chinese are six times more likely, Koreans and Vietnamese almost three times more likely, and Filipinos almost twice as likely to graduate.

However, despite this educational advantage, Asian Americans are less likely to secure positions in top-tier professional jobs than white Americans with the same qualifications as them. The only exception was second-generation Chinese graduates, who are one and a half times more likely than whites to be in a professional or managerial position, after controlling for age, gender, education and region of the country.

"Despite their exceptional educational credentials, we found clear evidence that Asians professionals are overcredentialed in education to achieve parity with whites in the labor market," says Van Tran, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University who led the study.

"To be clear, Asians are not under-represented in the managerial and professional occupations--three quarters of second-generation Chinese and Indians report being in a managerial and professional occupation. However, second-generation Asians are significantly under-represented in senior-level leadership positions, considering how well-credentialed they are, even after accounting for many demographic factors."

According to the authors, there are a few factors that could explain Asian Americans' lack of career progression.

"The same stereotypes that help Asians succeed in the educational domain (i.e. being smart, competent and hardworking) may actually hurt them in the labor market, where Asian Americans are sometimes perceived to be less vocal, less assertive, lacking in social skills and leadership potential," says Professor Jennifer Lee.

"Asian American professionals are also often excluded from the informal power networks in the workplace, which sometimes matter more than competency when it comes to being promoted into the leadership ranks."

Another potential reason is that second-generation Asian professionals often lack Asian role models and effective mentors in the workplace.

Whatever the reasons, the findings are especially timely, as Harvard University has been accused in a high-profile legal case of discriminating against Asian American applicants. A conservative advocacy group, Students for Fair Admissions say that Harvard artificially suppress the number of Asian American students by holding them to higher academic standards than whites, and rating them poorly on personal characteristics.

"We hope that our findings will spark a broader conversation about the disadvantages faced by Asian American professionals across the country, and more importantly, about what policies might be put in place to help promote more equal treatment and opportunities to all groups, including not just Asians, but also whites, blacks and Latinos in the US," says Professor Van Tran.

SOURCE  






Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Jussie Smollett Case: ‘This Is a Whitewash of Justice’

It must be gross for Rahm Emanuel to take exception to it

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson expressed outrage Tuesday at the news that the case against “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett was dropped.

“I’m sure we all know what occurred this morning. My personal opinion is that you all know where I stand on this. Do I think justice was served? No. What do I think justice is? I think this city is still owed an apology,” Johnson said.

He said if someone accused him of doing something that would call into question his honor, reputation, or integrity, he would want his day in court to clear his name.

“I’ve heard that they wanted their day in court with TV cameras so America could know the truth, but no, they chose to hide behind secrecy and broker a deal to circumvent the judicial system. My job as a police officer is to investigate an incident, gather evidence, gather the facts, and present them to the state’s attorney. That’s what we did. I stand behind the detectives’ investigation,” Johnson said.

Emanuel called the prosecution’s decision to drop all charges against Smollett “a whitewash of justice.

“This is a whitewash of justice. A grand jury could not have been clearer,” Emanuel said. He said the $10,000 bond that Smollett forfeited doesn’t cover the cost of the investigation.

“Where is the accountability in the system? You cannot have because of a person’s position one set of rules apply to them and another set of rules apply to everybody else,” the mayor said.

Emanuel complained of “the ethical cost” to Smollett allegedly faking a hate crime.

“Second, is what I would call the ethical cost, and the ethical cost is as a person who was in the House of Representatives when we tried to pass the Shepard legislation dealing with hate crimes, putting them on the books that President Obama then signed into law,” the mayor said.

“To then use those very laws and the principles and values behind the Matthew Shepard hate crimes legislation to self-promote your career is a cost that comes to all the individuals – gay men and women who will come forward and one day say they were a victim of a hate crime who now will be doubted, people of faith – Muslim or any other religious faith who will be a victim of hate crimes, people that have also—of all walks of life and backgrounds – race, ethnicity, sexual orientation,” he said.

“Now this casts a shadow of whether they’re telling the truth, and he did this all in the name of self-promotion, and he used the laws of the hate crime legislation that all of us collectively over years have put on the books to stand up to be the values that embody what we believe in,” Emanuel said.

The mayor also compared the outcome of the Smollett case to the recent cases of celebrities using their money and influence to get their kids into college.

“In another way, you’re seeing this play out in the universities, where people pay extra to get their kids a special position in universities. Now you have a person because of their position and background who’s getting treated in a way that nobody else … that would ever get close to this type of treatment,” he said.

Emanuel said the city’s reputation was “dragged through the mud,” and he added that the grand jury made the decision to charge Smollett based on “a sliver of the evidence” from the police investigation.

SOURCE  






Denmark will strip jihadists' CHILDREN born abroad of their Danish citizenship under new laws

Danish politicians plan to strip the children of jihadis who were born overseas of their citizenship.

The minority government announced the policy after reaching a deal with the populist Danish People's Party and it will put it to a vote, which it is expected to pass.

It is not yet clear how the law will be worded, but activists say it will raise 'complex' legal issues around statelessness and children's rights.

The news comes after Britain stripped Shamima Begum, who ran away from her London home in 2015 to marry an ISIS fighter and live in Syria, of her citizenship.

Home Secretary Sajid Javid said the move was legal because Begum holds dual Bangladeshi citizenship, despite having never been to the country.

Begum also had a son who would have been a British citizen by law, but it is thought the baby has since died.

Under international law, countries are not permitted to strip citizens of their citizenship if it would leave them without a home country, or 'stateless'.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Denmark and Britain are signatories, also states that 'the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration' in any legal decision involving children.

UNICEF Denmark said the new law could amount to 'punishing children for their parents' sins' and would therefore be illegal.

Since 2016, it has been a criminal offence under Danish law to have fought in conflict zones for a terrorist group.

The courts have already convicted 13 people for having joined or tried to join a terrorist organisation.

Nine of those were stripped of their Danish nationality and deported, but the other four remained in the country because they did not hold dual nationality.

The new rules would make the process of removing nationality simpler, using an administrative order.

'Contrary to current rules, children who will be born in regions prohibited to Danes... will not automatically receive Danish nationality,' the immigration ministry said in a statement.

'As their parents have turned their back on Denmark, there is no reason for the children to become Danish citizens,' Immigration Minister Inger Stojberg was quoted as saying in the statement.

The fate of foreign fighters with the Islamic State group and their families has become a major international headache since the fall of the last vestige of its so-called caliphate in Syria.

Most are being held in refugee camps in northern Syria by US-backed Kurdish forces, but risk being turned loose when US troops withdraw.

Donald Trump has called on European countries to bring their citizens home and put them on trial.

There are around 40 jihadists with links to Denmark in what used to be territory held by the Islamic State group in Syria, 10 of whom have been captured, according to the government.

The exact number of Danish children born there remains unknown.

SOURCE  






Australia: Left’s racism claims ‘silence border debate’

Former deputy PM John Anderson.

Senior Coalition figures are warning that legitimate debates over population levels, refugees and border protection are being hijacked­ by claims of racism and argue that left-wing policies — includin­g ending offshore processing — are more likely to stoke racist sentiment than any of the immigration policies implemented by Scott Morrison.

In the wake of the Christchurch massacre in which an Australian shot dead 50 Muslim worshippers, former deputy prime minister John Anderson told The Weekend Australian it was essential for honest debates to be held about complex issues such as the social integration of migrants and refugees. The Nationals leader from 1999 to 2005 expressed concern that, among the intelligentsia, there was a “loathing of Western culture and an idea that it is to blame for everything”.

“The Australian people are not mugs. I don’t believe they are particularly racist,” he said. “I don’t think Australians think all belief systems are the same or that we should not be discerning about what those belief systems might allow.”

Mr Anderson warned that open-border policies were far more likely to result in social issues arising from the settling of a “large number of new people from a number of cultural backgrounds” — a problem he suggested German Chancellor Angela Merkel was still grappling with but which he said the Coalition had avoided by properly managing the migrant and refugee intake.

Labor immigration spokesman Shayne Neumann warned yesterday that the Morrison government had engaged in dog whist­ling by saying rapists, murderers and paedophiles were being held in offshore detention and suggesting that refugees would take jobs and hospital beds from Australians. “Leaders have a responsibility to be truthful, not misrepresent the facts or stoke fears for political gain,” said Mr Neumann. “Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton often fall short of this standard.”

Howard government immig­ration ministers Philip Ruddock and Amanda Vanstone, while not commenting on the rhetoric used by the Prime Minister or Home Affairs Minister, strongly rejected suggestions that tough border protection­ policies were racist.

Mr Ruddock told The Weekend Australian: “Border integrity is not about discrimination. It’s about ensuring you have the capacity to help those who need it the most.” The NSW Liberal Party president also took aim at critics suggesting Australia should “only help those who are free enough to travel, with money to pay people-smugglers”.

“I think in relation to these matters there are some people who believe the only people we should help are asylum-seekers who say, ‘Look at me, look at me. I’m the most important person you should be helping’,’’ Mr Ruddock said.

“And having come to that view they go out of their way to essential­ly demonise those who are wanting to manage the process and manage it sensibly and approp­riately.’’

Ms Vanstone said former Labor immigration minister Mick Young had argued that, as a major ­migrant nation, it was important to keep the intake at a level with which Australians were happy.

“If you overstep that you will put one of the key elements of our national character at risk. And I think, to me, that is such an obvious point to make … That’s not a racist remark,” she said.

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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Friday, March 29, 2019



Bible verse scrawled on a tribute wall to victims of the Christchurch mosque terrorist attack sparks outrage - as mourners call for it to be removed immediately

Since nobody else seems to be offering an exegesis of Luke 19:27, perhaps I should.

For a start, it is part of a parable in which Jesus is emphasizing that deeds have consequences and that good deeds are expected. And as a parable it is not meant to be taken literally.  So saying that it commands that non-Christians should be slain is wrong.

The first part of the parable tells us that we should use our abilities for good.  So those who contributed something got a reward.  And doing nothing was insufficient.  The man who had simply locked away the money he had was penalized.

And then we come to actual opponents of the good.  They were to be slain -- as the wicked would be at the last day



A Bible verse scrawled on a tribute wall for the Christchurch mosque massacre victims will be removed after it sparked outrage among members of the public.

The message, which simply read 'Luke 19:27', was spotted by Duncan Lucas as he made his way past the wall on a development site in Auckland on Tuesday.

Mr Lucas decided to look up the gospel verse, and was shocked to find it was a reference to enemies being killed in front of a king.

'Not being somebody well versed in biblical studies, it struck me curious someone would write it up with no reference,' Mr Lucas told Stuff.co.nz.

'Without any surrounding context, it [the verse] shows a particular standpoint and indicates that anyone of one particular faith is not deserving of equal treatment,' he added.

In the King James version of the Bible, the verse reads: 'But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.'

While Mr Lucas didn't think the reference needed to be removed he did say it was a 'bit sick' that someone had appeared to deliberately leave out any context.

'I just think whoever put it up there knew they avoided context and knew it would speak to people who looked it up. I think that's a bit sick,' he said.

The marketing manager for Precinct Properties, which erected the tribute wall, confirmed the company were 'making steps' to remove the reference.

She said the company were happy to hear from any members of the public who might deem a message on the wall as inappropriate. 

But she added that in the main the wall had been filled with 'overwhelmingly positive' content.

Since the message board was created many well-wishers have taken the time to write touching tributes and inspirational words.  

SOURCE  






Muslim campaigners condemn New Zealand women for donning headscarves in solidarity with mosque shooting victims, saying: 'The hijab is NOT empowering for us'

New Zealand women who wear a headscarf in solidarity with Muslim women have faced a backlash from campaigners who say it is not 'empowering'. 

Some women including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern have covered up in the wake of the Christchurch mosque shootings which killed 50 people on March 15.

Ardern won widespread praise for putting on a headscarf when she met members of the Muslim community after the terror attack.

But women's rights advocates said it was a sensitive issue for many women who campaign against the obligatory wearing of headscarves. 

Critics pointed out that women in conservative Muslim countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia were forced to cover up for the sake of modesty or risk public rebuke, fines or arrest. 

'When we see non-Muslim women wear the hijab in solidarity of Muslim women it is very ironic and contradictory because our experience with the hijab is not empowering or uplifting in the political sense,' said Maryam Lee, a Muslim women's rights advocate and author in Malaysia who chooses to not wear a hijab.

'I wish [Ardern] hadn't but I understand where she is coming from because she is not a Muslim and not from a Muslim majority country.'

Women across New Zealand donned headscarves last Friday as part of a Head Scarf for Harmony campaign.

It was started by a doctor who heard about a woman too scared to go out as she felt her headscarf would make her a target for terrorism. 

Lee, who has written a book called 'Unveiling Choice' about the hijab, said women in Malaysia opting not to wear headscarves would now receive more harassment and pressure to wear the hijab by Muslims citing Ardern's actions.

Women in Muslim-majority Malaysia, which has a large population of ethnic and religious minorities, have been barred from government offices in the past for attire that officials deemed as indecent, such as skirts or shorts.

Masih Alinejad, an Iranian activist and journalist who hosts the website My Stealthy Freedom where women in Iran post photos without headscarves, had mixed feelings about the campaign.

Alinejad has lived in self-imposed exile since 2009 and received death threats for her campaigning against the obligatory wearing of headscarves.

'I felt admiration that a prominent leader and women in New Zealand showed compassion to the Muslim community, but I also felt that you are using one of the most visible symbols of oppression for Muslim women in many countries for solidarity, and it also broke my heart,' said Alinejad.

'That is why I call on them to show their sisterhood and solidarity with us, who are being beaten up, imprisoned and punished for fighting against compulsory hijab as well.'

But Mutiara Ika Pratiwi, national secretary of Indonesian women's rights group Perempuan Mahardhika backed Ardern.

'Giving sympathy to a victim's family is part of a feminist position, and the veil is a symbol for a community that is currently a victim,' said Jakarta-based Pratiwi.

'Although there are those who criticize her, the majority respect the move. What is important is that Jacinda is able to build a movement of New Zealanders who sympathize with the victims.'

SOURCE  






China’s ‘deadbeats’ barred from planes, high-speed trains because of bad credit

This seems an excellent idea to me.  There is no morality in failing to pay back what you have borrowed.  It is a form of theft

For this class of people in China, dubbed “discredited individuals” or “deadbeats”, daily life is a series of inflicted indignities.

Being designated a ’discredited individua’ — referred to as laolai in Chinese — often stems from acquiring bad credit and too much debt.Source:Supplied

Daily life has become pretty slow and sticky for the 13 million Chinese citizens deemed “deadbeats” by their Communist ruling party.

But despite little being known about the mysterious national database, curated by China’s Supreme Court, information has been trickling out as to the punishments inflicted on the black-listed.

According to the South China Morning Post, those 13 million are prohibited from taking aeroplanes or high-speed trains, meaning they are sometimes forced to take cross-country expeditions in cramped and crowded slow trains that can take days.

Some individuals have also reportedly had a special ringtone applied to their phones so as to shame them in front of their family and friends, according to the report.

The “discredited individuals” list was concocted in 2013 as a means to motivate Chinese people into good monetary behaviour.

According to data from the National Public Information Centre, by the end of 2018 more than 17.5 million people had been stopped from taking flights and more than 5.5 million were prohibited from high-speed train travel.

Being designated a “discredited individual” — referred to as laolai in Chinese — often stems from acquiring bad credit and too much debt and comes with a slew of other grievances beyond the scope of “luxury” travel.

Unlike time spent behind bars for a crime, this list has no term limit. Until you can pay your debts, life will be far from lush. But some argue they can’t pay their debts because their ability to run successful businesses or hold down good jobs is impeded by the restrictions and stigmas that come with being classed a “deadbeat”.

Speaking to SCMP, 47-year-old David Kong is banned from spending on “luxuries”, which include air travel and fast trains.

“It’s even worse than doing time because at least there’s a limit to a prison sentence,” Mr Kong said in a phone interview. “Being on the list means that as long as you can’t clear your debts in full, your name will always be there.”

SOURCE






Fake charges of racism deepen our divisions

The intake of Lebanese Muslims into Australia in the '70s WAS poorly conceived and executed

Our history — in its good and bad aspects — is deeply compromised by the culture wars as exemplified by the media campaign unleashed against the “racist” Liberal Party for its many sins, one of the most conspicuous being the issue of Lebanese Muslims allowed here by the Fraser government.

In his celebrated interview with Scott Morrison, host Waleed Aly presented this as a primary item in his accusation: “Does your party and your Coalition have a problem of Islamophobia?” The essence of Aly’s critique was Peter Dutton’s suggestion “that Lebanese immigration in the 70s was a mistake or that mistakes were made around it”.

This was condemned as unacceptable and dangerous. A number of journalists took up the same theme. They pointed to Dutton’s 2016 remarks that Fraser had made a mistake in the entry of Lebanese Muslims fleeing the civil war and nominated this as evidence of Liberal racism or Islamophobia, or both. Aly, highlighting the Coalition’s anti-Islamic problem, asked Morrison: “Why single out the Lebanese community in that context?”

The first point to be made is that politicians from all sides should do better in canvassing ­racial and religious issues. The second point is that this arena is loaded with hypocrisy, with most politicians and media adopting one side or the other in the culture war and running polemics to suit their cause.

Asked for his view on this issue, former immigration minister Philip Ruddock, known for his ties with the Lebanese community, said: “The Lebanese Concession was recognised to have been a policy mistake and it was closed down in a relatively short time. The only test required was to have relatives in Australia, but even that could not be adequately enforced and there is no doubt it was abused.

“Malcolm Fraser properly insisted that the entry be based on non-discriminatory grounds but the entry criteria were such that the policy did not meet the normal Australian standards of integrity that should characterise our immigration program.”

Fraser initiated the policy through his immigration minister, Michael MacKellar, given the plight facing many Lebanese who fled their country. Prominent Christian Lebanese business leaders had approached Fraser and urged him to take action — in short, to bring Christian Lebanese to this country.

The entry criteria were exceptional. People did not have to qualify as refugees and were given no assessment to this effect. Nor did they have to meet normal immigration entry standards in relation to skills, qualifications, language or resources. The only alleged test applied was having relatives in Australia — and there was plenty of scope for this to be manipulated and abused.

On January 1, 2007 the cabinet documents for this period were released. Advice from the Immigration Department had been that too many Lebanese Muslims were being accepted without “the required qualities” for successful integration, a lethal conclusion violating the principles governing the success of Australia’s immigration program.

The Fraser cabinet was told many of the entrants were unskilled, illiterate and had questionable character and health standards. This was a collapse in normal entry standards. The cabinet documents explicitly confirm the humanitarian decision to accept entry was made on conditions that fell far short of Australia’s normal entry criteria. MacKellar said most applicants were sponsored by relatives living in Sydney’s southwest and many settled around Lakemba. Officials reported that many were misrepresenting their background during interviews in “deliberate attempts to conceal vital information”.

In a November 2016 column the Sydney Institute’s Gerard Henderson said: “Immigration Department staff sent to the region to administer the program had no way of checking whether the applicants had a relative in Australia.” Officials have privately confirmed this to the writer. One said: “We lost control over what was happening.”

Interviewed at the time by The Australian’s Matthew Franklin, Fraser confirmed the government’s relaxed entry criteria on humanitarian grounds. The submission said that as many as 90 per cent of the entrants were Muslims, suggesting many Christians, ironically, were not interested. In his memoirs, co-authored with Margaret Simons, Fraser wrote that of those who came “nine out of 10 were Muslim” and conceded this represented a significant change in the nature of immigration from Lebanon because previously “migrants from Lebanon had been mainly Christian”.

In his book Fraser said there had been a mistake but claimed it was in resettlement and planning. This is undoubtedly true. But his understandable effort to deny any mistake on entry policy cannot be sustained given the facts, cabinet documents, chaos surrounding the process and admissions by the minister and department about the flawed entry criteria.

Indeed, this is worse than a mere mistake. The evidence suggests it is one of the most significant failures in the immigration intake over the past several decades. While cause and effect are hard to directly prove, the southwest of Sydney was subsequently the location of Islamic gangs, crime, violence and racial and religious baiting. Do people believe that when you abandon the integrity of the intake — even for a short time — there are no consequences?

It is morally and intellectually dishonest to raise this 70s episode as evidence of Liberal Party Islamophobia, as Aly did, along with criticising any minister who calls it a mistake while ignoring, concealing or seeking to deny what really happened.

The next question is: Should Dutton have made these comments in 2016? His remarks were provocative because he drew the link between the 70s entry and the high number of second and third-generation Lebanese Muslims charged with terrorist-related ­offences, saying they constituted 22 out of 33 people.

Dutton made clear he did not seek to discredit an entire community. He called it “a particular issue” and told parliament he would not allow the community “to be defined by those people doing the wrong thing”. This, however, was the exact charge against him — by Bill Shorten, the Greens and much of the media.

Dutton was branded a racist and a bigot and much of the media agreed — as they agreed with Aly last week. At the time Shorten accused Dutton of engaging in “lazy disrespect, wholesale labelling of entire communities for the actions of a tiny minority”.

In his defence Dutton said Australia had a highly successful humanitarian program of 18,750 people and an immigration intake of 200,000, but when things were not working “we should own up to our mistakes”.

That justification is far too convenient. Greens senator Nick McKim clarified the paradox, saying: “Just because something is fact doesn’t mean it is reasonable or productive to talk about it.” That can be right — but, on the other hand, outright suppression of core realities cannot help anybody. Dutton, however, was unwise in his language given the intelligence agencies’ rely on the co-operation of the Muslim community. He should not have linked the 70s intake with the problem of foreign fighters in 2016, despite being factually correct in that Lebanese Muslims were manifestly over-represented among terrorism offenders.

This leads, however, to the final question: how much damage is being done by the progressive forces as they parade their manic virtue branding and hang the accusation of racism and Islamophobia on every hook they see? This is not helping the country; it is exacerbating, not repairing, our divisions. At the time Malcolm Turnbull as PM held Dutton’s critics to account for the consequences of what they were doing — saying they sought to “inflame unrest, animosity and racial hatred”.

Turnbull was right. We need to understand that branding our political leaders as racists and agents of Islamophobia constitutes its own form of counterproductive extremism; witness the unjustified comments that Morrison had contributed to the atmosphere leading to the New Zealand massacre. Consider the historical method at work. The progressive quest is to lay on the table every sin of the White Australia policy, every racial, colonial and sexual injustice since European settlement — and that constitutes a multitude — yet when there are historical issues that do not suit the progressive agenda, they must be hidden, disguised or suppressed. Spare us the hypocrisy.

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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Thursday, March 28, 2019



Trump Signs Proclamation: ‘Golan Heights Are Part of the State of Israel’

President Trump on Monday signed a proclamation recognizing “that the Golan Heights are part of the State of Israel,” challenging decades of largely unquestioned convention that the strategic ridge is occupied Syrian territory, to be returned as part of a future peace deal between the warring neighbors.

With Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Vice President Mike Pence, and senior administration officials looking on, Trump signed an order at the White House citing “unique circumstances” making it appropriate to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan.

They included Israel’s capture of the ridge in 1967 “to safeguard its security from external threats,” aggressive actions by Iran and Hezbollah in Syria that “continue to make the Golan Heights a potential launching ground for attacks on Israel,” and the fact that “[a]ny possible future peace agreement in the region must account for Israel’s need to protect itself from Syria and other regional threats.”

Netanyahu called the decision “historic.”

“Your recognition is a two-fold act of historic justice,” he told Trump. “Israel won the Golan Heights in a just war of self-defense, and the Jewish people’s roots in the Golan go back thousands of years.”


(Jewish links to the Golan go back to the conquest of Canaan as recounted in the Old Testament (Joshua 20:8 and 21:27). The remains of one of the world’s oldest synagogues were excavated in the 1970s at Gamla, scene of a costly battle during the Jewish revolt against the Romans in the 1st century AD.)


In the years leading up the Six Day War the Syrians frequently launched artillery attacks from the Golan on Israeli communities in the Galilee valley to the west.

One week after Israel captured the territory in June 1967 it offered to return it in exchange for a peace treaty with Syria. The Arab states rejected the offer that September, declaring there would be no peace, no recognition, and no negotiations with Israel.

Israel formally annexed the Golan in 1981, although from the early 1990s, several Israeli governments mulled relinquishing it in return for a full peace agreement with Damascus.

A deal never materialized, and the Golan’s future has not featured meaningfully in peacemaking efforts since 2008, when Turkey tried to mediate between its then ally, Bashar Assad, and Israel.

Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the notion of Israel surrendering the Golan has looked increasingly remote.

“Your proclamation comes at a time when the Golan is more important than ever for our security, when Iran is trying to establish bases in Syria to strike at Israel,” Netanyahu told Trump. “From across the border in Syria, Iran has launched drones into our airspace, missiles into our territory.”

Trump’s decision brought praise from supporters of Israel inside and outside Congress.

“This show of support is a blow to Iran & its terrorist puppets who want to wipe Israel off the map,” tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) voiced hope the Senate would take up his recently-introduced legislation to enshrine the move in U.S. law.

“Words have power and meaning when those words are linked to action,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said earlier.

“In the recent past, the words of America’s leaders have meant little to the international community because their words often stood alone without a commitment to action. Under President Trump, the world sees and understands that the United States is a true friend and ally of Israel as his words of support are followed by meaningful and historic action.”

‘Departure from the international consensus’

Condemnation was fast in coming, too. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a phone call that the move “leads to a flagrant violation of international law, impedes the settlement of the Syrian crisis, aggravates the situation throughout the Middle East.”

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation called the move “a serious departure from the international consensus and a violation of the international legitimacy that recognizes the Golan as an occupied Syrian territory since 1967.”

Protests also came from the European Union, Iran, Turkey, and others.
SOURCE






The latest scapegoat:  British newspapers

This afternoon, Corbynistas and other activists will protest outside News UK in London. Their beef? They think the newspapers produced in that building, primarily the Sun and The Times, are ‘Islamophobic’ and therefore bear some responsibility for the barbaric racist slaughter in Christchurch last week. This is a new low for the censorious PC left. It is not five years since nine journalists and cartoonists (and three non-journalists) were massacred in France for the crime of being ‘Islamophobic’, shot to death at their desks simply because they mocked Muhammad and were stinging critics of radical Islam. To gather outside the offices of journalists and brand them ‘Islam-haters’ so soon after journalists were murdered for being ‘Islam-haters’ strikes me as quite repulsive. This is the definition of a dodgy protest.

The finger-pointing at the media in the aftermath of Friday’s slaughter has been chilling. No sooner had the killer carried out his heinous deed than the Twitterati and sections of the commentariat were blaming certain columnists for contributing to this horror. Everyone from loudmouth alt-right agitators to established newspaper writers who have questioned the validity of the term ‘Islamophobia’ were named and shamed as facilitators of the mosque massacres.

The chairman of Finsbury Park Mosque said the media have to be more ‘responsible’ when writing about Islam. Press TV, the Iranian state channel Jeremy Corbyn once worked for, says the ‘Islamophobic media’ are ‘responsible for the deadly shootings at two mosques in New Zealand’. Online, leftists have been sharing actual lists of journalists who apparently have blood on their hands. These are like McCarthyite lists, lists of the undesirable, lists of people whose words apparently cause murder. Again, to draw up such lists in an era when journalists have been murdered for criticising Islam strikes me as incredibly callous.

There are so many problems with this rush to blame the media for the barbarism in New Zealand. The first is that it lessens the moral responsibility of the killer himself. It dilutes his evil through implying, or outright arguing, that certain journalists who have never said anything racist, far less called for violence, must burden some of the responsibility for what he did. Guardianistas have expressed more anger with Melanie Phillips than with the NZ killer himself in the days since the massacre – it is perverse.

The second problem is the plain censoriousness of it. Many of the journalists being named and shamed and listed and protested against have not expressed anti-Muslim bigotry – they are simply concerned about radical Islam and some of them are also concerned about Muslim immigration. Whether you agree or disagree with these concerns is immaterial – they are legitimate talking points. To argue that certain views and opinions directly give rise to murderous violence is a form of censorious blackmail. It says: ‘Silence yourself or else people will die.’

And thirdly there’s the double standard. Today’s protesters should answer this: if journalists who criticise Islam bear responsibility for the New Zealand massacre, do journalists who love and defend Jeremy Corbyn bear responsibility for the anti-Semitic slaughter at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October, when 11 Jews were killed? After all, the Corbyn movement has a pretty bad problem with anti-Semitism. It has supporters and members who have promoted actual racist views of the Jews. Corbynista journalists have continually tried to downplay the seriousness of anti-Semitism. They can’t get a handle on this crisis of prejudice. Did their words create the conditions for the Tree of Life barbarism? If not, why did other journalists’ mere criticisms of Islam cause the New Zealand horror? It doesn’t add up. Unless, of course, this media-bashing is just ghoulish opportunism rather than a properly thought-through analysis of the bigotry that fuelled the mosque massacres.

That is what we have here: ghoulish opportunism. It is really unfair to target journalists at News UK over what happened in New Zealand. These are decent reporters and columnists who cover world events as they understand them and who happen to have different political and moral opinions to the PC left. That is really why they are being protested against: because they deviate from ‘correct thinking’ as defined by the self-righteous left. These protesters are essentially exploiting the horrors that occurred in New Zealand to put pressure on certain journalists and editors to silence themselves and their ‘problematic’ opinions. These journalists have done nothing to facilitate terrorism; the protesters, on the other hand, come across like the unwitting heirs to the Charlie Hebdo barbarism with their targeting and demonisation of journalists who have committed the ‘crime’ of criticising Islam.

SOURCE







Justice in Chicago is political

On Tuesday, the Cook County State's Attorney's office announced it had dropped the 16 counts against Empire star Jussie Smollett. State's Attorney Kim Foxx recused herself from the case, but the prosecutor who dropped the case reports to her. A Chicago police union rep told PJ Media that Foxx was behind the decision to drop the charges, and this represents merely one more example of her throwing the Chicago police "under the bus," following the lead of former president Barack Obama.

"Once again, she's throwing the Chicago Police Department completely under the bus, which she's been doing for the last two years in office," Martin Preib, second vice president at the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), told PJ Media on Tuesday. He argued that Foxx had never truly recused herself from the case, since her "underlings" remained involved.

"What's the difference between her recusing herself and her underlings having the case? What really has been recused here? Nothing," Prieb declared.

Smollett told police that on January 29, masked white attackers wearing MAGA hats had screamed, "This is MAGA country!" before seizing him, putting a noose around his neck, and pouring an unknown bleach-scented liquid on him. His story fell apart as no video evidence of the alleged attack was captured, and two black men came forward, telling police Smollett paid them to orchestrate the hoax.

Smollett was eventually charged with 16 felony counts after reporting a hate crime hoax.

After the charges were dropped, he claimed, "I have been truthful and consistent on every single level since day one. I would not be my mother's son if I was capable of one drop of what I've been accused of."

Last week, Prieb told PJ Media many police doubted Smollett's story from the get-go. Even so, he said he was not surprised when prosecutors dropped the charges on Tuesday, even though the evidence against the Empire star seems crystal clear.

"The weaponization of the criminal justice system that we saw under the Obama administration through to this Mueller investigation, this attack on Trump, Foxx falls right in line with that — undermining the criminal justice system and turning it into a political advocacy outpost for the left," Prieb said.

The FOP has called for investigations of Foxx many times in the past. Just last week, it renewed those calls, highlighting Foxx's early interference in the Smollett case.

Just days after Smollett gave his story to police, Michelle Obama's former chief of staff, Tina Tchen, asked Foxx to contact the FBI and get the feds involved in the hate crime investigation. Foxx told Tchen she had reached out to Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, telling him to get the FBI involved.

"It seems a totally inappropriate thing to do, to ask a prosecutor to get involved in a case that early on," Prieb told PJ Media last week.

Yet Foxx has a notorious history of letting criminals off the hook.

One particularly egregious example involved the vacating of two felony convictions for high-ranking Spanish Cobra gang member Ricardo Rodriguez in February. Eliminating the 20-year-old convictions paves the way for Rodriguez to avoid deportation and remain in the country, FOP representatives argued.

Prieb also mentioned two cases early in Foxx's administration. Arturo DeLeon-Reyes and Gabriel Solache confessed to stabbing Mariano and Jacina Soto, murdering them and kidnapping their children. Yet Solache and DeLeon-Reyes claimed, like so many convicts, that they were victims of police misconduct, even though they pleaded guilty and confessed to the murders. The two were later released after Foxx's office granted immunity to a police officer who testified against the department.

According to FOP's reporting in 2017, Foxx received hefty political contributions from Arthur Loevy, one of the most powerful wrongful conviction law firms in Illinois.

Prieb also noted that one of the attorneys for Smollett, Patricia Brown-Holmes, also prosecuted three Chicago police officers for an alleged conspiracy against 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Foxx relentlessly attacked her predecessor, Anita Alvarez, for failing to charge the police involved, even though the officers were later acquitted.

Prieb argued that Foxx's crusade against police to free criminals echoed the efforts of the Department of Justice under Barack Obama. Obama himself intervened in many high-profile cases of alleged police abuse against black men.

SOURCE






Top cop wants to edit Britain's national news

Neil Basu’s lecturing of the press is a worrying sign of the times.

We are told that assistant commissioner Neil Basu, Britain’s top counterterrorism cop, has ‘the toughest job in UK policing’. Yet somehow AC Basu has found time to take on an extra job – as the self-appointed editor of our national news.

Basu has published what the sympathetic Guardian calls ‘an open letter to the media on how to report terrorism’, which sounds like a top cop issuing orders to newspapers and TV broadcasters on what they can and can’t publish. Anybody might think we lived in a PC police state.

AC Basu blames the mainstream news media for ‘radicalising’ far-right terrorists such as the New Zealand mosque murder suspect. He attacks the tabloid press for publishing clips of the carnage in Christchurch and for making ‘the rambling “manifestoes” of crazed killers available for download’.

The accumulated wisdom of Britain’s head of counterterrorism, backed by the sophisticated hi-tech methods of modern policing, basically boils down to: ‘I blame the meejah.’

Basu even claims that the racist who rammed a van into worshippers outside London’s Finsbury Park mosque was ‘driven to an act of terrorism by far-right messages he found mostly on mainstream media’. Some of us might naively have assumed the murderer was responsible for driving his vehicle at the crowd. But no, he was ‘driven’ to it by the media, apparently with no more personal responsibility for his actions than an unthinking van with somebody’s foot on its accelerator.

Amid the confused discussion that follows any act of terrorism these days, one official message always rings out loud and clear: that the problem is we have ‘too much’ freedom of speech and of the press. Thus AC Basu declares that ‘society needs to look carefully at itself’: ‘We cannot simply hide behind the mantra of freedom of speech. [I]t is not the freedom to cause harm – that is why our hate-speech legislation exists.’

If there is a ‘mantra’ being repeatedly chanted in Britain today, it is certainly not in defence of free speech. It is the mantra that free speech means ‘hate speech’, that freedom does ‘harm’, that words are as dangerous as weapons, and that society needs even more restrictions on what we should all be allowed to say, hear or read.

Remarkably, in the new free-speech wars, a top cop like AC Basu is on the same side of the barricades as the radical press-haters who picketed the offices of News UK – publisher of the Sun and The Times – after Christchurch. Both the police establishment and the Corbynite left loathe freedom of speech and of the press, largely because of their shared contempt for the ‘ordinary people’ who they fear are ignorant and gullible enough to be turned into racists and terrorists by a ‘hateful’ word or image.

Free speech and a free press are not excuses we ‘hide behind’. We should shout upfront that they are the most precious liberties of all in a civilised society. Free speech is never the problem, but the potential solution to political crises. Some of us do not believe the scaremongering about a far-right ‘upsurge’ across the West. But if you want to plant the seeds for one, keep lecturing people on what they are permitted to think or say about Islam or anything else.

The hard truth is that free speech has to be for the self-styled ‘eco-fascist’ suspect in the Christchurch massacre as much as for the imam of Finsbury Park mosque or assistant commissioner Neil Basu.

Of course, that freedom does not give any Islamist or far-right terrorist the ‘right’ to have their manifesto published or linked to via the mainstream media. Those decisions are judgement calls, matters of editorial discrimination which the rest of us are free to endorse or criticise. But the last thing we need is those judgement calls on what should be published being made by police chiefs or judges.

If it can now be deemed in the public interest for a top cop to try to edit the news, then, to quote AC Basu, our supposedly free society surely does ‘need to look carefully at itself’.

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

***************************


Wednesday, March 27, 2019


Mayor of London to face questions over arrest of street preacher

Questions over how police treated a [black] street preacher arrested in Southgate last month will be put to the Mayor of London on Thursday.

Sadiq Khan will be asked why officers detained 64-year-old Oluwole Ilesanmi and why they changed their version of events.

The questions have been tabled by London Assembly member David Kurten. A Christian, Mr Kurten said he was "concerned" by footage appearing to show the evangelist being handcuffed and led away.

The UKIP politician said: "I've received a lot of comments about this video and they're all supportive. "Even people who aren't Christians say 'this is terrible, that someone seems to be having their freedom of speech impinged'".

Premier has learned Mr Ilesanmi plans to attend tomorrow's 'Mayor's Question Time', alongside representatives of the Christian Legal Centre which has been supporting him.

Mr Kurten continued: "I want to raise attention to Sadiq Khan about Olu's case. "I want to highlight what's happened and I want to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen again to street preachers who are within their rights of freedom of speech.

The Metropolitan Police said Mr Ilesanmi was arrested outside Southgate Underground station in North London on Saturday 23rd February after concerns were raised about a man's behaviour.

He was later de-arrested and told he faced no further action. The preacher said he was taken to a "very remote place", with no way of finding his way back.

The force later acknowledged its claim he was taken to another location only 200 metres away was false. The Met said he was taken 3.5 miles away to Hadley Wood.

The Christian Legal Centre says he was taken even further away than that - 5.2 miles away to Wrotham Park.

Mr Kurten continued to say: "I'm obviously concerned, like a lot of people, that freedom of speech is being gradually eroded. Olu's a Christian street preacher but [this is happening] for many other groups of people as well."

Earlier this month, the Met said its local professional standards unit was investigating what happened.

In the video, which has been seen more than 2.4 million times, Mr Ilesanmi is accused of "being racist" but it's unclear what he said while preaching which caused the police to intervene.

SOURCE






Trump put more women in top roles than Obama, Bush, Clinton

It’s no secret that President Trump can be brash about women. He described porn star Stormy Daniels as a “Horseface,” and mocked Rosie O’Donnell as a fat pig and “total loser.”

Trump also fessed up to “locker room talk” about how he likes to “grab them by the pussy.”

But the president’s actions speak much louder than his words.

Despite a few crude comments, Trump put more women in top advisory roles in his administration than any of the last three presidents, a powerful statement some believe is overshadowed by the media’s relentless focus on vilifying the president’s every move.

“I don’t think it’s gotten as much attention as the fact that he’s said things that are sexist,” Augusta University professor Mary-Kate Lizotte, an expert on women in politics, told The Washington Examiner. “It might not have as much of an effect because of negative coverage.”

The Examiner reports:

At the beginning of the third year of his first term as president, Trump has seven female top advisers, as compared to five for Obama, three for Bush, and five for Clinton at that point. He had eight as of December 2018, when United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley departed the administration.

The top advisers are White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway; CIA Director Gina Haspel, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, senior adviser Ivanka Trump, Director of Legislative Affairs Shahira Knight, and Director of Strategic Communications Mercedes Schlapp.

Those in Trump’s inner circle are only some of the women that have served in the administration, with others including Haley and former communications director Hope Hicks playing key roles early on.

Last May, the president appointed Gina Haspel as the head of the CIA, the first woman to ever hold that post, Fox News reports.

There’s also women serving in important cabinet positions, such as Secretary of Transportation Elaine L. Chao and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, as well as women moving up through the ranks.

“Trump reportedly will also nominate more women to powerful positions soon, such as U.S. Ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft for U.N. ambassador and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jessie Liu for associate attorney general, a key post currently held by Rod Rosenstein,” according to the Examiner.

Schlapp said it’s obvious Trump “surrounds himself with very strong women with strong voices” and he respects their opinions on all types of issues.

An unnamed former senior White House official contends the president cares more about results than gender. “He treats people equally,” the official said. “He values merit and quality of work, regardless of any other attributes including gender.”

Schlapp dismissed the relentless allegations Trump is a misogynist as “outrageous.” “I have always felt respected by the president,” she said. “He is someone who values my opinion and insight. Those of us who work with him get to see his compassion.”

Despite the progress for women, some of the president’s critics remain devoted to spinning the issue into a negative and allege Trump’s female advisors are nothing more than “tools for his benefit.”

Boston University professor Tammy Vigil, a self-professed expert on gender in politics, told the Examiner it belittles women to work for the president because they’re allegedly forced to “work around the truth.”

“It compromises their integrity,” she said. “They have to sort of give up their own honesty and integrity in order to serve the male president, which is not a good look for women, even if they are in positions of power.”

“Why is he hiring these women?” she questioned. “He’s getting something out of it.”

SOURCE







San Antonio Airport Bans Chick-fil-A Over Anti-Gay Accusations
    
Chick-fil-A will not be allowed to open a planned restaurant inside the San Antonio International Airport because the city council is packed with anti-Christian bigots.

The city council voted to ban the nation’s most popular fast-food chain over accusations the family-owned company donates to anti-LGBT organizations.

According to Think Progress, the “anti-gay” organizations Chick-fil-A supports include the Salvation Army, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Paul Anderson Youth Home:

“The Fellowship of Christian Athletes is a religious organization that seeks to spread an anti-LGBTQ message to college athletes and requires a strict ‘sexual purity’ policy for its employees that bars any ‘homosexual acts.’ Paul Anderson Youth Home, a ‘Christian residential home for trouble youth,’ teaches boys that homosexuality is wrong and that same-sex marriage is ‘rage against Jesus Christ and His values.’”

Think Progress basically has a problem with Christian organizations requiring members and employees to follow Christian teachings on sexuality. It seems to believe any Christian who supports traditional marriage is a homophobic bigot.

City Councilman Roberto C. Treviño led the charge to block Chick-fil-A from opening a franchise in the airport. He accused the company of having a legacy of anti-LGBTQ behavior.

“With this decision, the City Council reaffirmed the work our city has done to become a champion of equality and inclusion,” Treviño said in a statement. “San Antonio is a city full of compassion, and we don’t have room in our public facilities for a business with a legacy of anti-LGBTQ behavior.”

Councilman Trevino either knowingly lied about Chick-fil-A or he is woefully ignorant. Chick-fil-A has never discriminated against gay employees or gay customers. Period.

“This is the first we’ve heard of this. It’s disappointing,” Chick-fil-A said in a statement. “We would have liked to have had a dialogue with the city council before this decision was made. We agree with Councilmember Treviño that everyone is and should feel welcome at Chick-fil-A. We plan to reach out to the city council to gain a better understanding of this decision.”

First Liberty Institute, one of the nation’s top religious-liberty firms, condemned the city council’s decision.

“This decision is exactly the kind of government hostility to religious liberty that the First Amendment abhors,” said attorney Keisha Russell. “Chick-fil-A has a long history of being a great place to work, customer service beyond reproach, and is an exceptional member of the community. All Americans should agree that tolerance and inclusion are necessary in our diverse and pluralistic society. Fortunately, one bigoted city council member does not represent the Great State of Texas or its values. Texans and San Antonians should not stand for such intolerance and bigotry by their elected officials.”

Let’s be clear — the only reason Chick-fil-A has been banned from the San Antonio airport is because the city council is packed with a bunch of anti-Christian bigots.

SOURCE






Do we really want to glorify political violence?

Or is the NZ shooter not a problem?

Australia: The Project co-host Lisa Wilkinson has defended an interview with 'Egg Boy' Will Connolly after fans criticised his appearance on the show.

Connolly, 17, egged right-wing Senator Fraser Anning in Melbourne in response to the politician's comments on Muslim immigration in the wake of the Christchurch mosque shootings.

In his first public appearance on The Project on Monday night, Connolly said although his actions were 'not the right thing to do' he had 'united people' and raised money for those affected by the massacre.

Unhappy viewers took to social media to voice their disapproval of Connolly:

'[Lisa Wilkinson] so you think it's okay to smash eggs on someone in public view? If he did it to you because [he] disagreed with your views would you still make him a hero for his behaviour?' one person commented underneath a post by The Project on Instagram.

'What does this teach our young about respectful behaviour? I don't care what was said by Anning we should not be promoting this kind of behaviour.'

Wilkinson took to the comments section herself to defend the programme, saying they had not made 'Egg Boy' a 'hero'.

'We are news program. He has been a huge news story. He has been hounded for interviews by just about every TV, online and radio show in the world,' Wilkinson said.

'As well as every major publication you could imagine. He approached us because he felt we would be fair and balanced in presenting his story. And I believe we were. That's it. Cheers, Lisa.'

Another unhappy watcher said 'Egg Boy' did not deserve attention.

'Fraser Anning is an idiot no doubt about that - but it is not OK to hit someone you disagree with with an egg or anything else - imagine the furore if this was done to a female politician or the Prime Minister or anyone that you disagreed with!' they said.

The 17-year-old shot to internet fame after he was captured on video smashing an egg on Queensland Senator Fraser Anning's head in Melbourne on March 16

The controversial incident was captured on video at the Conservative National Party meeting in Moorabbin, Melbourne on March 16 and later went viral.

After the egging, Connolly was smacked in the face twice by Senator Anning and was tackled to the ground and put in a choke-hold by four of the senator's supporters.

Senator Fraser Anning later defended physically lashing out at the teenage boy who publicly egged him saying it's what 'most sensible people would do'  

SOURCE  

*************************

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

***************************


Tuesday, March 26, 2019




Proof that girls and boys are born to be different: Study finds that brain differences between the sexes begin in the womb

Feminists undergo all sorts of gyrations to dispute findings such as this but the fact remains that differences between the neural networks in  male and female brains are detectable BEFORE BIRTH (using MRI). 

I interpret the finding "the association between GA and increased intracerebellar FC was stronger in males" as a preparation for  males to be more active and athletic, which is unsurprising

Journal abstract appended.  Note that Moriah Thomason is a female


In a scientific first, researchers claim to have found that differences between men’s and women’s brains start in the womb.

The conclusion is likely to be controversial, with some experts claiming social influences are more important.

But scientists who did brain scans of 118 foetuses in the second half of pregnancy to analyse the links between gender and the connectivity of a developing brain believe the differences are biological.

Professor Moriah Thomason, from New York University Langone, said one of the main differences was in connectivity across distant areas of the brain.

According to the US study, published in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, female brains growing in the uterus produced ‘long-range’ networks.

Professor Thomason said this was less true of boys, who were ‘more susceptible to environmental influences’.

SOURCE

Sex differences in functional connectivity during fetal brain development

M.D.Wheelock et al.

Abstract

Sex-related differences in brain and behavior are apparent across the life course, but the exact set of processes that guide their emergence in utero remains a topic of vigorous scientific inquiry. Here, we evaluate sex and gestational age (GA)-related change in functional connectivity (FC) within and between brain wide networks. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging we examined FC in 118 human fetuses between 25.9 and 39.6 weeks GA (70 male; 48 female). Infomap was applied to the functional connectome to identify discrete prenatal brain networks in utero. A consensus procedure produced an optimal model comprised of 16 distinct fetal neural networks distributed throughout the cortex and subcortical regions. We used enrichment analysis to assess network-level clustering of strong FC-GA correlations separately in each sex group, and to identify network pairs exhibiting distinct patterns of GA-related change in FC between males and females. We discovered both within and between network FC-GA associations that varied with sex. Specifically, associations between GA and posterior cingulate-temporal pole and fronto-cerebellar FC were observed in females only, whereas the association between GA and increased intracerebellar FC was stronger in males. These observations confirm that sexual dimorphism in functional brain systems emerges during human gestation.

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 36, April 2019, 100632






UK: Seven police officers sent to remove four women from 'inclusive' talk on transgender issues featuring CEO of Mermaids

More non-inclusive "inclusivity

An academic was forcibly removed by police from a 'transgender visibility' event after organisers complained she made members of a panel discussion ‘feel uncomfortable'.

Dr Julia Long was carried out of the Accenture International Transgender Day of Visibility Panel Event on Thursday night after seven officers from City of London police responded to a complaint from organisers about the presence of a group of four women.

The women were asked to leave after being told they were not welcome at the ‘inclusive’ event at consultancy firm Accenture’s head office in London.

SOURCE






Middle East Forum Defends the Right to Discuss Islam in Europe

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff's appeal to the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) was just rejected. Pursuing the principle that publicly discussing Islam and related matters should not lead to arrest and jail, the Middle East Forum had helped fund her important case with its implications for all of Europe.

Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff has been criminally convicted under Austria's "defamation of religion" law for "publicly denigrating" the Islamic prophet Muhammad "in a way likely to arouse justified indignation." Her crime? Asking in a private seminar: "A 56-year-old and a six-year-old? What do we call it, if it is not pedophilia?" She was referring to Islamic texts stating that Muhammad married Aisha when she was six years old and consummated their marriage when she was nine.

"Since the Rushdie affair thirty years ago, criticism of Islam has become hazardous throughout the West," said Marc Fink, director of the Forum's Legal Project, which protects the public discussion of Islam in the West. "It has become fashionable to ban and even criminalize 'hate speech' and 'defamation of religion,' but these terms are poorly defined and the attendant laws are inconsistently applied.

"The survival of liberal democracy depends on the freedom to discuss controversial subjects, including Islam and Islamism. Censorship of these topics leaves the public ignorant of the threats it faces. The ECHR ruling is a preview of things to come in the U.S. should the First Amendment be weakened."

The Forum has recently been criticized for this principled stand – for example, from The Guardian (UK), The Times of Israel and Vice News. But MEF has offered a vital lifeline to many authors, researchers and commentators victimized by Islamist lawfare.

"The Legal Project has stood by my side since the day I was reported to the Austrian police," said Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff. "I could not have come so far without its assistance. It is my hope that one day there is no need for the Legal Project, for it would mean the rule of law has returned."

In another Legal Project case, a Quebec Superior Court found feminist author Djemila Benhabib not guilty of defamation for criticizing a Montreal Islamist school. "From now on freedom of expression will be better off in our democratic society," said Ms. Benhabib. "In helping me, the Middle East Forum's Legal Project has played such an important part in that matter."

The Forum has also helped UK counter-Islamism activist/journalist Tommy Robinson. Author Bruce Bawer provides perspective on the Robinson case: "I've benefited from the Forum's principled largesse myself, when my outspokenness about Islam has landed me in legal or financial quandaries. As an American, I'm extremely proud that the Forum has stepped in to cover Tommy's expenses."

SOURCE






The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center

By Bob Moser

In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls down like dollars.”

The Law Center had a way of turning idealists into cynics; like most liberals, our view of the S.P.L.C. before we arrived had been shaped by its oft-cited listings of U.S. hate groups, its reputation for winning cases against the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, and its stream of direct-mail pleas for money to keep the good work going. The mailers, in particular, painted a vivid picture of a scrappy band of intrepid attorneys and hate-group monitors, working under constant threat of death to fight hatred and injustice in the deepest heart of Dixie.

When the S.P.L.C. hired me as a writer, in 2001, I figured I knew what to expect: long hours working with humble resources and a highly diverse bunch of super-dedicated colleagues. I felt self-righteous about the work before I’d even begun it.

The first surprise was the office itself. On a hill in downtown Montgomery, down the street from both Jefferson Davis’s Confederate White House and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where M.L.K. preached and organized, the center had recently built a massive modernist glass-and-steel structure that the social critic James Howard Kunstler would later liken to a “Darth Vader building” that made social justice “look despotic.” It was a cold place inside, too. The entrance was through an underground bunker, past multiple layers of human and electronic security. Cameras were everywhere in the open-plan office, which made me feel like a Pentagon staffer, both secure and insecure at once.

But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost all of them were administrative and support staff—“the help,” one of my black colleagues said pointedly. The “professional staff”—the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations officers, and fund-raisers—were almost exclusively white. Just two staffers, including me, were openly gay.

During my first few weeks, a friendly new co-worker couldn’t help laughing at my bewilderment. “Well, honey, welcome to the Poverty Palace,” she said. “I can guaran-damn-tee that you will never step foot in a more contradictory place as long as you live.”

“Everything feels so out of whack,” I said. “Where are the lawyers? Where’s the diversity? What in God’s name is going on here?”

“And you call yourself a journalist!” she said, laughing again. “Clearly you didn’t do your research.”

In the decade or so before I’d arrived, the center’s reputation as a beacon of justice had taken some hits from reporters who’d peered behind the façade. In 1995, the Montgomery Advertiser had been a Pulitzer finalist for a series that documented, among other things, staffers’ allegations of racial discrimination within the organization.

In Harper’s, Ken Silverstein had revealed that the center had accumulated an endowment topping a hundred and twenty million dollars while paying lavish salaries to its highest-ranking staffers and spending far less than most nonprofit groups on the work that it claimed to do.

The great Southern journalist John Egerton, writing for The Progressive, had painted a damning portrait of Dees, the center’s longtime mastermind, as a “super-salesman and master fundraiser” who viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals. “We just run our business like a business,” Dees told Egerton. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same.”

Co-workers stealthily passed along these articles to me—it was a rite of passage for new staffers, a cautionary heads-up about what we’d stepped into with our noble intentions. Incoming female staffers were additionally warned by their new colleagues about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women.

And the unchecked power of the lavishly compensated white men at the top of the organization—Dees and the center’s president, Richard Cohen—made staffers pessimistic that any of these issues would ever be addressed. “I expected there’d be a lot of creative bickering, a sort of democratic free-for-all,” my friend Brian, a journalist who came aboard a year after me, said one day. “But everybody is so deferential to Morris and Richard. It’s like a fucking monarchy around here.”

The work could be meaningful and gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.

For the many former staffers who have come and gone through the center’s doors—I left in 2004—the queasy feelings came rushing back last week, when the news broke that Dees, now eighty-two, had been fired. The official statement sent by Cohen, who took control of the S.P.L.C. in 2003, didn’t specify why Dees had been dismissed, but it contained some broad hints. “We’re committed to ensuring that our workplace embodies the values we espouse—truth, justice, equity, and inclusion,” Cohen wrote. “When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.”

Dees’s profile was immediately erased from the S.P.L.C.’s Web site—amazing, considering that he had remained, to the end, the main face and voice of the center, his signature on most of the direct-mail appeals that didn’t come from celebrity supporters, such as the author Toni Morrison.

While right-wingers tweeted gleefully about the demise of a figure they’d long vilified—“Hate group founder has been fired by his hate group,” the alt-right provocateur Mike Cernovich chirped—S.P.L.C. alums immediately reconnected with one another, buzzing about what might have happened and puzzling over the timing, sixteen years after Dees handed the reins to Cohen and went into semi-retirement. “I guess there’s nothing like a funeral to bring families back together,” another former writer at the center said, speculating about what might have prompted the move. “It could be racial, sexual, financial—that place was a virtual buffet of injustices,” she said. Why would they fire him now?

One day later, the Los Angeles Times and the Alabama Political Reporter reported that Dees’s ouster had come amid a staff revolt over the mistreatment of nonwhite and female staffers, which was sparked by the resignation of the senior attorney Meredith Horton, the highest-ranking African-American woman at the center.

A number of staffers subsequently signed onto two letters of protest to the center’s leadership, alleging that multiple reports of sexual harassment by Dees through the years had been ignored or covered up, and sometimes resulted in retaliation against the women making the claims. (Dees denied the allegations, telling a reporter, “I don’t know who you’re talking to or talking about, but that is not right.”)

The staffers wrote that Dees’s firing was welcome but insufficient: their larger concern, they emphasized, was a widespread pattern of racial and gender discrimination by the center’s current leadership, stretching back many years. (The S.P.L.C. has since appointed Tina Tchen, a former chief of staff for Michelle Obama, to conduct a review of its workplace environment.)

If Cohen and other senior leaders thought that they could shunt the blame, the riled-up staffers seem determined to prove them wrong. One of my former female colleagues told me that she didn’t want to go into details of her harassment for this story, because she believes the focus should be on the S.P.L.C.’s current leadership. “I just gotta hope your piece helps keep the momentum for change going,” she said.

Stephen Bright, a Yale professor and longtime S.P.L.C. critic, told me, “These chickens took a very long flight before they came home to roost.” The question, for current and former staffers alike, is how many chickens will come to justice before this long-overdue reckoning is complete.

The controversy erupted at a moment when the S.P.L.C. had never been more prominent, or more profitable. Donald Trump’s Presidency opened up a gusher of donations; after raising fifty million dollars in 2016, the center took in a hundred and thirty-two million dollars in 2017, much of it coming after the violent spectacle that unfolded at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that August. George and Amal Clooney’s justice foundation donated a million, as did Apple, which also added a donation button for the S.P.L.C. to its iTunes store. JPMorgan chipped in five hundred thousand dollars.

The new money pushed the center’s endowment past four hundred and fifty million dollars, which is more than the total assets of the American Civil Liberties Union, and it now employs an all-time high of around three hundred and fifty staffers.

But none of that has slackened its constant drive for more money. “If you’re outraged about the path President Trump is taking, I urge you to join us in the fight against the mainstreaming of hate,” a direct-mail appeal signed by Dees last year read. “Please join our fight today with a gift of $25, $35, or $100 to help us. Working together, we can push back against these bigots.” ....

In recent years, the center has broadened its legal work, returning to some poverty law; around eighty attorneys now work in five Southern states, challenging, among other things, penal juvenile-justice systems and draconian anti-immigration laws. But the center continues to take in far more than it spends. And it still tends to emphasize splashy cases that are sure to draw national attention.

The most notable, when I was there, was a lawsuit to remove a Ten Commandments monument that was brazenly placed in the main lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court building, just across the street from S.P.L.C. headquarters, by Roy Moore, who was then the state’s chief justice.

Like the S.P.L.C.’s well-publicized 2017 lawsuit against Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi publisher of the Daily Stormer, it was a vintage example of the center’s central strategy: taking on cases guaranteed to make headlines and inflame the far right while demonstrating to potential donors that the center has not only all the right enemies but also the grit and know-how to take them down.

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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Monday, March 25, 2019



Jim Jefferies EXPOSED by Avi Yemini using hidden camera

Jim Jefferies is an Australian comedian who is very popular in the US and is a rabid Lefty and anti-gunner. He has his own talk show and goes out of his way to pander to the left.

So he set his sights on Avi Yemeni, an Australian of Israeli origin who frequently publicizes Muslim abuses.  Jefferies aimed to discredit Yemeni.  The interview took place before the Christchurch massacre but Jefferies broadcast it after the Massacre in an effort to blame Yemeni for the massacre.

Yemeni is an old hand at handling Leftist dishonesty, however, so he made his own hidden recording of the interview. The recording reveals Jefferies making grossly "Islamophobic" statement in an effort at getting Yemeni to agree with them.  The recording also shows how Jefferies edited his broadcast by attaching Yemeni's answers to different questions, thus making Yemeni look bad

The broadcast was a total fraud.  Leftists NEED lies.  Reality suits them so badly.







The War on Red Hats Roars On

The beatings will continue until MAGA hats are removed.
Three recent prosecutions suggest that President Trump’s supporters who have endured abuse and violence for wearing “Make America Great Again” hats will receive justice.

Police arrested Ryan M. Salvagno, 19, of Somerset, N.J., on February 27. Two days earlier, authorities say, he hounded an unidentified 81-year-old man who wore a MAGA hat. Salvagno allegedly confronted the senior outside a Shop Rite in Franklin Township. Prosecutors say that Salvagno argued with the man about the hat, grabbed it, shoved the octogenarianto the ground (causing minor injuries), and toppled his grocery cart. Salvagno faces assault and harassment charges.

On February 25, Kenneth Dewayne Jones, 18, knocked a MAGA hat off of a 17-year-old classmate at Santa Fe High School in Edmond, Okla. “Are you proud of what you are wearing?” Jones asked his male victim. Jones forcibly removed the teen’s hat and yanked away his pro-Trump banner. Jones was cited for municipal assault and battery, requiring a $560 fine.

Zachary Greenberg, 28, was arrested for sucker-punching Hayden Williams, 26, at U.C. Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, birthplace of the 1960s Free Speech Movement. Williams, a Leadership Institute employee, volunteered to help Turning Point USA register conservative students. On February 19, Williams manned a recruitment table bearing two signs: “Hate Crime Hoaxes Hurt Real Victims” and “This is MAGA Country.”

Cellphone videos show Greenberg, a software engineer, knocking over the table and signs. Greenberg hits Williams once, screams obscenities at him, and then cold-cocks him in the face. His swollen, black eye darkened subsequent TV interviews. Six days after Williams’s beating, he told Fox Business Network anchor Stuart Varney, “I still have ringing in my ears and other symptoms of a concussion.”

University cops arrested Greenberg on March 1. He is accused of felonious assault, bodily injury, and criminal threats, plus misdemeanor vandalism.

“This is the very epitome of fascism,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, Williams’s attorney. “The use of violence to silence your opponents and making people afraid of expressing their views.”

Alas, these are not isolated incidents. Despite the Left’s relentless moans that Trump supporters are hateful bullies, this type of mayhem flows from Left to Right, as Trump haters force Trump fans to pay for their beliefs with physical injuries. And — think of the children! — they typically involve older people brutalizing younger Americans in MAGA hats.

February 16: Terry Pierce and his wife were shopping at a Sam’s Club in Bowling Green, Ky., when they encountered James Phillips, 57, of Cottontown, Tenn. He greeted their MAGA hats with his middle finger. Pierce, 52, told WBKO-TV that, after he returned the salutation, Phillips “pulled a .40 caliber out and stuck it in my face, backed up, and said, ‘It’s a good day for you to die.’” Police say Phillips’ Glock had one chambered bullet, and he had two ammunition clips in his pocket. He was jailed and faces wanton endangerment charges.

“I have as much right to wear that hat and support my country and my president as he has not to,” Pierce said. He told Newsweek that this episode inspired some of his Democratic friends to re-register as Republicans because they did not want to “identify with a party that has so much hate.”

February 15: Rosiane Santos, 41, a Brazilian illegal alien, approached Bryton Turner, 23, as he sampled Casa Vallarta’s Mexican cuisine in Falmouth, Mass. Turner says Santos tried to shove his head into his food. Cellphones captured Santos knocking off Turner’s MAGA hat. According to Police Officer Newton Cardoso, Santos then “began to verbally assault him.” She called him a “motherf***er” for backing President Trump and said he should be barred from a Mexican eatery while wearing a MAGA hat. As Cardoso and three officers arrested Santos, Cardoso says she “hit him [Turner] over the head again in front of us.”

“It’s just a hat,” Turner told WBZ-TV. “I don’t really understand why people can’t just express themselves anymore. Everybody has to get mad.”

Falmouth police charged Santos with assault and disorderly conduct. ICE spokesman John Mohan later said, “Deportation officers with ICE’s Fugitive Operations Team arrested Rosiane Santos, an unlawfully present citizen of Brazil.” She was caught and released. Deportation proceedings await.

February 11: Gunnar Johnson, 14, and other pupils who supported the March of Dimes earned permission to wear hats at Hidden Oaks Middle School in Palm City, Fla. So Johnson donned his MAGA cap, “to show my pride in Trump America.”

“Boy, if you don’t take that hat off,” school-bus aide Delores Matheny, 64, yelled at Johnson en route to campus. “Take it off.” Matheny “yanked my hat off,” Johnson said. “It was crazy.”

Prosecutors decided Thursday not to press charges against Matheny. According to assistant state attorney Nita Denton, “while the bus aide’s behavior is inappropriate and unprofessional, it doesn’t rise to the criminal level.”

November 3, 2018: Jonathan Sparks, 34, walked through Tucson, Ariz., on Saturday before the midterm election. He wore his MAGA hat and carried a sign: “Vote Jobs Not Mobs — Vote Republican.” Someone suddenly grabbed Sparks’s hat and the back of his head.
“The assailant had jumped onto my ankle from behind and so I, not knowing my ankle was broken into four pieces, I turned around to grab and take the hat back,” Sparks told KVOA. “Then, I heard the words ‘Hitler,’ ‘Nazi,’ and ‘Trump.’ He was shouting things like that,” Sparks added. “He came over the top of me and over and over again, he hit me.” Sparks required surgery.

“I’m struggling with range of motion in my ankle,” Sparks told iHeartRadio’s Garrett Lewis. Sparks has undergone physical therapy. “I’m off my cane,” he said. “I’m really happy about that.”

Police charged Daniel Zaroes Brito, 42, with aggravated assault and robbery, for stealing Sparks’s MAGA hat. Brito is a former legislative aide to U.S. Representative Raul Grijalva (D., Ariz.). April 9 is Brito’s next court date.

August 27, 2018: Jo-Ann Butler, 17, was arrested after she snatched a MAGA hat off the head of an unidentified fellow student at Union Mine High School in El Dorado, Calif. “That’s a racist and hateful symbol,” Butler said.

She received a week’s suspension and faces two counts of battery: One involving her classmate and the other against her teacher who, police say, she slapped as she was arrested.

July 4, 2018: Hunter Richard, 16, and a few friends were minding their own business at a San Antonio Whataburger on America’s 242nd birthday. Richard says that Kino Jimenez, 30, then pulled the teen’s MAGA hat so hard that some of his hair got yanked out. Jimenez then yelled profanities at Richard and said the hat would “go great” in his fireplace. He threw a soft drink in Richard’s face and swiped his hat.

Police arrested Jimenez and charged him with theft.

Hunter Richard told NBC News that he supports President Trump. “And if you don’t, let’s have a conversation about it instead of ripping my hat off.”

May 14, 2018: Last Mother’s Day, Eugenior Joseph, 22, and his girlfriend’s family visited a Miami Cheesecake Factory. Upon seeing his MAGA hat, the staff abandoned any sense of customer service. The Daily Wire cited patrons who saw some dozen workers abuse Joseph, who is black.

“Her finger was literally on top of his head,” one diner said about a female employee who taunted Joseph and pointed at his headwear. One witness heard an employee say, “I’m going to knock his head in so hard his hat’s going to come off.” One customer claimed that several employees called Joseph a “n*****.”

Joseph said that one worker began “balling his fists, smacking his fists, trying to scare me.” After he returned from the restroom, Joseph said the staffers were “screaming things at me.”

The ferocious bullying drove a little girl to tears, and an old lady had to calm herself with medication.

The Cheesecake Factory says it apologized to its guests. As their May 16, 2018, statement continued: “Two individuals are no longer employed by the company, and we are continuing to investigate.”

So how do leftists explain their hooliganism? Lacking any self-awareness, they hold themselves blameless for this carnage and, instead, identify the MAGA hat itself as the culprit. Much as Toledo, Ohio, voters last month granted Lake Erie the same rights as a human being, the Left has declared the MAGA cap morally culpable for immeasurable evil.

“The red MAGA hat is the new white hood,” actress Alyssa Milano declared on Twitter. She called the headgear “synonymous with white nationalism and racism.” Milano was part of the notorious Covington Catholic High School pile-on, in which liberals excoriated several MAGA-hat-clad teenage boys for threatening a helpless Native American Indian at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18. Subsequent exculpatory videos proved, in fact, that these lads did nothing wrong.

Twenty-six Republicans in Arizona’s House of Representatives asked state attorney general Mark Brnovich to investigate Perry High in Gilbert. In a March 4 letter to Brnovich, the lawmakers addressed the school’s March 1 “Party in the USA” spirit day. The legislators wrote that “school administrators demanded that several students remove hats, clothing, and signs supportive of President Donald Trump. The students were reportedly asked to leave campus, and one student was suspended for 10 days.” The letter adds that “parents of the students in question say that they were told that the clothing was ‘offensive, and that the kids were being disrespectful by wearing it.’”

Last month, students at central California’s Clovis North High School were forbidden to wear their MAGA hats, because administrators considered them unsafe. “Bottom line for us, our dress code is really about allowing our kids to come to school, to feel safe at school . . . and to be free of distractions,” school-district spokeswoman Kelly Avants told KSEE-24. “Here we are closer to shouting fire in a crowded theater.”
So, severely neurotic Trump foes want to ban MAGA hats as intimidating and violent, even as Trump foes intimidate and violently attack Trump fans in MAGA hats.

The circle of psychological projection is complete.

SOURCE






Never Forget: CAIR's Dirty Deeds

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is having a banner month. The militant Muslim group never lets a crisis go to waste. That means Americans should beware. When unappeasable CAIR is ascendant, our free speech rights, religious liberty and national security are at risk.

Following the horrible massacre at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, CAIR flacks were out in full force decrying "Islamophobia" and calling for crackdowns on "hate speech" (by which they mean any and all negative thoughts or words about CAIR or Islam). CAIR executive director Nihad Awad was first out of the gate to blame President Donald Trump; target Fox News hosts Jeanine Pirro and Tucker Carlson, whom the left wants to silence; and renew opposition to White House efforts to tighten our immigration and entrance policies, including the travel ban affecting terror-sponsoring countries upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

One of the most vocal critics of policies to guard American sovereignty is radical Somali-born Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. CAIR leaders and members poured thousands of dollars into her campaign. This weekend, the America-bashing, Israel-deriding congresswoman will headline a sold-out fund-raising banquet in Southern California. It will be a triumphant celebration, no doubt, of Rep. Omar's escape from Democratic leadership sanctions (with an invaluable assist from the CAIR lobby) for her nasty swipes at Republicans, Jews, and, of course, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.

While they drape themselves in the mantle of "civility," the CAIR brigade speaks viciously and cavalierly about their enemies. Omar says Trump is not "human." On an Arab-American talk show, she mocked a college professor who treated terrorist organizations al-Qaida and Hezbollah with gravity. She cackled at how he named them with a sternness in his voice and questioned why the words "Army" and "America" are not uttered with equal contempt. I can hear the ululations of agreement at the CAIR banquet now.

Let's not kid ourselves about these exploiters and sowers of division. They thrive on violence whether Muslims are the victims or the perpetrators. CAIR operatives are first to claim systematic oppression and fear of a "backlash" if bloodthirsty Islamic jihadists slay innocent Americans. It's always our fault and it's always our responsibility — to curtail our speech, give up our gun rights, undergo sensitivity training, accept inflated statistics about "hate crimes" and apologize for everything. CAIR wants to shut up its critics in the name of "stopping the hate" because it doesn't want us talking about its dirty, dangerous deeds.

Never forget: The federal government designated CAIR an un-indicted terror co-conspirator in 2007 in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation and others for providing support to violent Hamas jihadists. Investigators tied CAIR's founders to the Islamic Association for Palestine, founded by a senior Hamas jihadist to serve as the terrorist group's public relations and recruitment arm in America. The Holy Land Foundation, a terror-financing charity, provided seed money for CAIR's Beltway office.

Never forget: CAIR is a designated terror organization in the United Arab Emirates.

Never forget: Federal law enforcement investigators banned interactions with CAIR to "prevent CAIR from publicly exploiting such contacts with the FBI."

Never forget: Ghassan Elashi, a founding board member of CAIR's Texas chapter, was convicted of laundering money for Hamas terrorism. CAIR's civil rights director Randall Todd Royer trained with the al Qaeda-linked jihad group Lashkar-e-Taiba and was convicted of conspiring to engage in terror activities. Bassem Khafagi, former CAIR community affairs director and a founder of the sharia-promoting Islamic Assembly of North America, was deported back to his home country of Egypt after being convicted for bank and visa fraud.

Never forget: CAIR officials in California rushed in front of cameras after the San Bernardino jihad attack in 2015 to blame American foreign policy instead of the killers. CAIR provided aid, comfort and legal assistance to the mass shooters' families.

Never forget: Last summer, CAIR stoked a fake hate crime perpetrated by an Odessa, Texas, waiter who falsely claimed he received a customer's receipt with the message: "We don't tip terrorist."

Never forget: CAIR disseminated the fake claims of a deranged Muslim New York teenager who lied about having her hijab ripped off by Trump supporters.

Never forget: CAIR helped manufacture the "Clock Boy" fake hate claim in Texas — after which, Clock Boy jetted off to Qatar to cash in on a Muslim Brotherhood-linked educational scholarship.

Never forget: CAIR has flexed its censorship muscle by squelching critics of Somalia-based jihad group al-Shabab in Minnesota and smearing them as "anti-Muslim" — even if they were Muslim.

Never forget: CAIR works every day to silence Muslim reformers, apostates, Christians, Jews, infidel scholars, border security advocates, anti-sharia activists and investigative independent journalists, on college campuses, TV airwaves and the internet, to prevent us from exposing the truth about Islamic supremacism.

To quote the late and dearly missed Italian journalist and fierce lioness Oriana Fallaci, who faced trial and death threats for "insulting Islam:"

Lan astaslem. "I will not surrender."

SOURCE





Shooters party, who want to ease Australia's strict gun regulations,  take two country seats in the lower house with MASSIVE swings in State election - just one week after 50 people were killed in Christchurch mosque massacre

Clearly, country people are worrying about what IS happening rather than what MIGHT happen

A minor party that wants to weaken gun laws has tripled its number of lower house seats in Australia's biggest state - just one week after 50 people were shot dead in the Christchurch massacre.

The Shooters Fishers and Farmers Party retained Orange with a 37 per cent swing towards them and picked up two more seats, Barwon and Murray, with massive double digit swings against the National Party.

They now have the same number of seats in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly as the Greens following Saturday's state election, with more than 100,000 voters backing them.

Third-time Shooters party candidate Helen Dalton resoundingly defeated Nationals candidate Austin Evans in the seat of Murray, which stretches along the Victorian border.

She secured a swing of 27.8 per cent against the Nationals, more than overcoming a 3.3 per cent margin in a seat previously held by former state education minister Adrian Piccoli.

Ms Dalton confirmed her victory on Saturday evening, writing on Facebook that Mr Evans had called to concede defeat.  

'I'd like to congratulate him on a gruelling and hard fought campaign,' she said. 'This has been an amazing performance by all of you. I'd like to offer my sincere thank you to every volunteer and every person who voted for me. 'I'm extremely honoured to be able to end 35 years of National rule and look forward to representing you as YOUR member for Murray.'

The Shooters are also on track to grab the state's largest seat, Barwon, which stretches from Walgett, Narrabri and Coonabarabran in the east to Broken Hill and the South Australian border.

Shooters candidate Roy Butler led the race on Saturday night with a 21.5 per cent swing against the Nationals.

The Shooters party won the seat of Orange in a 2016 by-election. Philip Donato retain that seat on Saturday with a 37.2 per cent swing. His primary vote of 50.6 per cent was double that of his National Party opponent Kate Hazelton.

The Nationals, previously known as the Country Party, had held this seat in the state's Central West from 1947 until the 2016 by-election.

The Shooters want the government to stop recording ammunition sales and are pushing a controversial plan to allow former police and army officers to grant gun licences and exempt them from paying any fees.  

Former Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer, who was also a state Country and National Party MP for 13 years, said the Shooters party was influenced by the American National Rifle Association and presented a real threat to gun laws in NSW.

'It's not helped if the Shooters party were to win an outright balance of power and multiple seats in both houses,' Mr Fischer told Daily Mail Australia on Friday.

'The National Rifle Association in the USA is still a presence on the internet.'

Mr Fischer, who championed national gun laws in 1996, said 'any wholesale chipping away of the gun laws' was a risk to 'children's safety and community safety' in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre.

Outgoing Shooters MP Robert Brown hit back at Mr Fischer's suggestion his party was influenced by the NRA and downplayed the possibility of them securing changes to gun laws.

'Bulls***. You can quote me on that,' he told Daily Mail Australia. 'Tim Fischer is telling lies.'

The massive swings come just one week after 50 Muslim worshippers were gunned down during Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch.

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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