The ''Benefits'' of Chavez Socialism !

In 2010, I posted an article on this blog site entitled ''Oliver Stoned On Hugo !''

While Venezuelan media outlets that criticize Hugo Chavez's regime were getting the duct tape treatment, Oliver Stone was out seeking to promote a movie that lionizes the autocrat. The increasingly leftist filmmaker just can't seem to shake his "Thug-Love" having already wasted money on the Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat flicks. Now he's got a documentary called, "South of the Border" that heralds Hugo as well as productions of 6 other South American socialist leaders.

 

"None of them are Dictators" says Oliver, looking unashamedly more like a South-of-the-Border dictator himself. His co-lover of Banana Republics, Sean Penn, is obviously delighted with Hugo being the main feature of the film. This leftist Penn has repeatedly praised Hugo for his anti-American stance and tight-fisted control of any complaints from his citizens. Sick little bastard.

Stone had been on tour of Latin America, on a marketing campaign for his film. Surprise, surprise--the beleaguered citizens of Venezuela decided not to show up to watch the whitewash of their so-called president. Many of the theaters were reportedly EMPTY! During the first 12 days of the movie's release, it brought in only $18,601 on 20 screens. That's what Venezuelans refer to as "la Bomba".
 

Venezuelans have been force-fed a steady diet of Chavez's mug on TV, which makes Hugo (the despot) more overexposed than Pamela Anderson doing the rumba on "Dancing with the Stars". Stone and the Hollywood leftist sympathizers of these dictatorial Pond Scum should reacquaint themselves with the Declaration of Independence which categorically states: Authority is derived from the governed, not through control.

Seven  years ago a collective of our most ardent  socialists - including the ABC’s prime dickhead Phillip Adams, propagandist John Pilger, the Greens’ scumbag Kerry Nettle and Kevin Rudd’s nephew Van Thanh Rudd - begged Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez to come teach Australians a lesson:

''Every country has its own traditions and culture and has to find its own solutions, but what Venezuela has been able to achieve in so little time will be a source of inspiration and ideas for many in Australia.''

Now:

The daughter of Hugo Chavez, the former president who once declared ‘being rich is bad,’ may be the wealthiest woman in Venezuela, according to evidence reportedly in the hands of Venezuelan media outlets.

Maria Gabriela Chavez, 35, the late president’s second-oldest daughter, holds assets in American and Andorran banks totaling almost $4.2billion, Diario las Americas reports.

Venezuela itself isn't so blessed by the Chavez legacy:

As dawn breaks over the scorching Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, smugglers, young mothers, and a handful of kids stir outside a supermarket where they spent the night, hoping to be first in line for scarce rice, milk, or whatever may be available.
Some of the people in line are half-asleep on flattened cardboard boxes; others are drinking coffee. Almost all are bemoaning their situation. With shortages of basic goods and looting on the rise, more Venezuelans say they are resorting to night-time waits in front of closed stores.

 The Way I see It....Hugo Chavez deserves to be remembered as a missed opportunity; a man ignorant of the consequences of socialism and all it bestows on any country that pursues its phony promises. Through it all Chavez was uncharacteristically silent and passive, not listening to the free-press before it was extinguished. His complacency as he watched his nation fall into a vortex of murder and criminality will be one of the most ugly and unforgivable aspects of his years in power.

The Venezuelan people gave Chavez a political blank cheque and thanks to the prolonged boom in oil prices he also had a financial blank cheque. Few other heads of state had the combination of vast popular support and immense financial resources enjoyed by him for 14 years. His total control of all the levers of power ensured that he could do whatever he wanted. And he did! From changing the name of the country to changing its flag to imposing a new and unique time zone on his nation. And much more.

What he did not do was leave the country better off than when he became president. I can only hope when all those stupid individuals who followed him into the votex realize what is left of their country....they line up to piss on his grave.

Southern Ocean ‘SINK’ Turns the Tide on Climate Change Alarm !

Graham Lloyd wrote in The AUSTRALIAN, SEPTEMBER 11, 2015

Dr Nicolas Gruber

The Southern Ocean has recovered its ability to suck vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, overturning fears the natural “sink” had stalled with dire consequences for future climate change.

Acting like a giant lung, the Southern Ocean carbon sink accounts for about 40 per cent of the ocean uptake of anthro­pogenic carbon dioxide, without a trace of that demon: acidification.

Climate scientists had feared the uptake of carbon dioxide by the Southern Ocean had slowed in what was feared to be a “feedback” response to human ­activity.

New research published today in the journal Science reveals that rather than stalling, the amount of CO2 being ­absorbed by the Southern Ocean was on the rise again. It is thought that changes in weather — particularly wind patterns and temperature in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans — were responsible.The findings have invigorated debate about how well scientists understand the natural variations in the earth’s climate.

Lead author Dr Nicolas Gruber, from ETH Zurich, said the research did not address directly whether fluctuations in the sink strength were because of natural or human-induced variability.
“The starting hypothesis is that they are a result of natural variations,” Dr Gruber told The Australian.

Dr Benny Peiser (left) from the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation said it was “not the first time that lengthier observations have led to the demise of a short-term climate scare.” He continued, “The fact that researchers now acknowledge they cannot predict future trends indicates that they don’t fully understand the underlying physics and mechanisms.”

Contributing author Dorothea Bakker, from the University of East Anglia, said the variation in the Southern Ocean carbon sink was larger than expected on the basis of the growth of atmospheric CO2 alone.

“The Southern Ocean behaves like a giant lung — breathing in and absorbing vast amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, and releasing it later in the year,” Dr Bakker said. “The seas around Antarctica absorb significantly more CO2 than they release. They basically help to slow down the growth of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and lessen the rate of climate change.”

CSIRO Southern Ocean expert Steve Rintoul, who was not part of the research team, said the new analysis showed the strength of the Southern Ocean carbon sink varied with time more strongly than expected. “The weakening and strengthening of the Southern Ocean carbon sink reflects changes in ocean temperature and carbon dioxide driven by variations in the winds blowing on the ocean surface,” Dr Rintoul (right) said.  He said the wind changes were caused by human activities such as
greenhouse gases emissions and by natural variability.The results show that overall, the Southern Ocean sink is keeping pace with the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

GWPF science spokesman David Whitehouse said the recovery of the Southern Ocean carbon sink “could be yet another explanation for the surface temperature hiatus”. He said the research was “another alarmist claim removed by science, showing that the ‘settled science’ isn’t settled at all.

“The fact is that the current models do not fit the observations, so there we have a vital part of future climate prediction shown to be not predictable,” Dr Whitehouse said.  He added, “No one

knows why the Southern Oceans are doing this, and no one can say what will happen next. It seems the Southern Ocean, along with a little bit of help from the sun, means that future climate projections, especially decadal ones, have become far more uncertain. The closer you look at widely held certainties, the more complex and less understood they become — that’s the science of a complicated earth.”

In a press release, University of East Anglia said while the research results may look to be good news for climate change, the effect could be temporary, and trends can’t be predicted reliably for the
Southern Ocean carbon dioxide absorption.


The Way I See It......The results show that overall, the Southern Ocean sink is keeping pace with the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This is in contrast to some earlier studies based on model experiments and atmospheric data that concluded the Southern Ocean carbon sink was weakening. Bravo for Mother Earth sticking it to the hyped-up delusional Warmists.

CNN Tries to Destroy TRUMP Over VACCINES and AUTISM !

(NaturalNews) During the widely televised Republican debates hosted by CNN, debate moderators tried to destroy Donald Trump with a "gotcha" question about vaccines and autism.

As Natural News readers know, a top CDC scientist has publicly confessed to taking part in the CDC'S fraudulent cover-up of data linking vaccines to autism in African-Americans. Both the CDC and the mainstream media -- including CNN -- have gone to tremendous lengths to censor this news, bury the truth and pretend that vaccines have no links to autism.

Of all the candidates running for President, Donald Trump is the only one who has publicly expressed intelligent scepticism over the insane vaccine schedule now being pushed on the children of America by a federal government that's run by Big Pharma profit interests.

CNN plays "gotcha" with Trump, but it backfires

CNN clearly plotted to attempt to discredit Donald Trump on this issue, posing a question to him that was laced with all the usual pro-vaccine propaganda which falsely claims that vaccines have no risks and couldn't possibly be linked to autism. The question to Trump was essentially accusing him of being medically incompetent or scientifically insane. But when CNN posed the question to Trump, he answered brilliantly.

Stating that he's in favor of the principle of vaccines, Trump explained, "But I want smaller doses over a longer period of time."

Trump, like many informed pediatricians and parents, is extremely skeptical of the false promises claimed by the CDC and the vaccine industry it promotes. Trump even went on to tell this story about vaccines and autism:

''Autism has become an epidemic... Because you take a baby in, and I've seen it, and I've seen it, and I had my children taken care of, over a long period of time, over a two or three year period of time, same exact amount, but you take this little beautiful baby, and you pump -- I mean, it looks just like it's meant for a horse, not for a child, and we've had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, two-years-old, two-and-a-half-years-old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic. ...I'm in favor of vaccines [but] do them over a longer period of time, same amount, but just in little sections. I think you're going to have -- I think you're going to see a big impact on autism.''

CNN then tries to cajole Ben Carson into attacking Trump, but that backfires, too

Next, CNN turned to Ben Carson and prompted him to attack Donald Trump for his answer. While  

professing his belief in vaccines, Carson added this one stunning statement that backfired in the face of CNN:

Ben Carson: "We are probably giving way too many in too short a period of time..."

With now TWO candidates in the debate stating they believe there are too many vaccines given too early, CNN then turned to Rand Paul, hoping Paul would attack Trump.

Instead, Rand Paul confirmed what both Donald Trump and Ben Carson both said: that there are too many vaccines given too close together:

Rand Paul: "I'm all for vaccines, but I'm also for freedom. I'm concerned about how they're bunched up... I ought to have the right to spread out the vaccines a little bit..."

Finally, Mike Huckabee chimed in on the whole scam of Big Pharma, asking, "Why doesn't this country focus on cures rather than treatment? Why don't we focus on the cure for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's?"

CNN then abruptly cut him off and changed the subject as quickly as possible.

The Way I See It.......what wasn't brought out was the fact that it was Dr Andrew Wakefield, a renowned gastro-intestinal surgeon, working at the Royal Free Hospital in the England that became aware, in the late 1990's, of a relationship between children suffering from both inflammatory bowel

disease and autism. A case study reporting on 12 of these children was published in the U.K. medical journal Lancet in 1998 with Dr Wakefield simply suggesting that further study of a possible link between MMR vaccination and autism would be desirable.

Due to the medical politics surrounding the MMR-autism issue this article was later retracted by the ''Whores of Big Pharma'' who publish the journal saying he fabricated the study. This effectively  helped to hide vaccine injury science from public awareness. Dr Wakefield has been pilloried for daring to include the parents' personal recollections and observations of their children after receiving the MMR vaccinations in his report.

UPDATE:  The main ''whore'', the un-Godly Dr Fiona Godlee, who is the editor-in-chief for the British Journal of Medicine, and a key player in having Dr Wakefield barred from practice, admits that fraud claim against him for unscientific research had no basis in fact. Her private admission of wrong doing is obviously insufficient for the public damage done to Dr Wakefield's integrity.

The NEW DARK AGES, where the perfectly normal are branded bigots

BRENDAN O’NEILL wrote this in THE AUSTRALIAN, AUGUST 19, 2015
Brendan O'Neill is the editor of Spiked Online and a columnist for The Australian and The Big Issue

Something terrifying has happened during the past five years: a belief that was held by virtually all human beings for centuries has been rebranded as bigotry, something that may no longer be expressed in polite society.

That belief is that marriage is something that occurs between a man and a woman, or between a man and many women: the idea that marriage is a union of opposite sexes.

This was once seen as a perfectly normal point of view. Now, in the historical blink of an eye, it has been denormalised, and with such ferocity and speed that anyone still brave enough to express it runs the risk of being ejected from public life.

Consider the ABC’s Q&A this week, and the furious response to it. The show was unusual from the get-go because it featured not one but two gay-marriage sceptics: Katy Faust, an American Christian, and me, a godless Brit.

I made the argument that gay marriage now seemed to play the same role God played 200 years ago: anyone who didn’t believe in it hadn’t a hope in hell of getting ahead in public life.


There was a chokingly conformist climate, I observed, with sincere critics of gay marriage facing demonisation, harassment and, in some cases, expulsion from decent society.   Consider  Brendan Eich (right) being sacked as chief executive of Mozilla for his belief in traditional marriage. Or all those Christian cake shops beleaguered by gay-rights activist scum demanding that they make gay cakes. Twenty-first century religious persecution. Unbelievable !

The response to my comments, on Twitter and in parts of the media, proved my point. It can be summed up as: “How dare you say that the gay-marriage campaign is intolerant, you bigoted arsehole?! Get out of Oz!”  Irony doesn’t even begin to cover this.

Labor Senator Sam Dastyari, (rhymes with bastard-yari) also on the Q&A panel, accused Faust of being “hateful” and talking “Christian evangelical claptrap”. Yet all she said was that marriage should be between a man and a woman and children had a right to know both their father and their

mother. (Ed. Labor shit-head !)

The demonisation of Faust shows how thoroughly the Christian viewpoint has been turned into a kind of hate speech. Something that was a standard outlook a few years ago is now treated as a pathology. And as a liberal — small L — I find it deeply troubling that a moral outlook can be so swiftly put beyond the pale, branded “INAPPROPRIATE”.

Then there was Twitter, which went into meltdown over Faust’s and my comments. We’re bigots, haters, scumbags, “vomiting our bile”; we should be sent packing.

You know what? Scrap my comparison of gay marriage to God: 200 years ago, in developed Western countries, even the godless had a better chance of getting ahead than gay-marriage sceptics do today.
Are Faust’s views really so controversial? Most people would back the idea that kids should ideal­ly know their biological mum and dad.

Indeed, adopted children often seek out their biological parents, believing it will help them make sense of who they are. Maybe they’re bigots, too?

The response to Q&A shows that gay marriage is not a liberal issue. Rather, what we have here is the further colonisation of public life by an elite strata of society — the chattering class — and the vigorous expulsion of all those who do not genuflect to their orthodoxies. Whether you’re a climate-change denier, a multiculturalism sceptic or, the lowest of the low, someone who believes in trad­itional marriage, you’re clearly mad and must be cast out.

 The Way I See It.....the social impact of this illiberal liberalism will be dire, be warned.

A whole swath of society — the old, the religious, the traditionalist — will feel like moral lepers in their own country, silencing themselves lest they, too, be branded scum.

Listen, we need more time to have a respectful discussion about this complex issue, which is what our Prime Minister is trying to do. And when we do, then the government should let the people decide by referendum or plebiscite......not the politicians

Saudi Arabia Bans National Geographic with Pope on the Cover !

It would appear that the headline that speaks of Pope Francis’ ‘silent revolution’ has deeply angered the Saudi regime, ever fearful of riots and protests. For the religious authorities, the concept of a religion that is ‘fluid’ and open to ‘change’ and modernity (which is what the Argentine Pope is doing for the Catholic Church according to the magazine) is exactly what they are opposed to, maintaining a ‘pure’ and unchangeable version of filth they call Islam. Those who are placing their hopes and betting the future of the West on Islamic reform should consider that carefully.



“Riyadh censors National Geographic issue featuring Pope Francis,” Asia News, September 10, 2015:

Riyadh (AsiaNews / Agencies) – Riyadh authorities have censored the Arabic version of the August issue of National Geographic, which featured a cover photo of Pope Francis. Although officially there has been no explanation of the ban, the leaders of the Islamic country are reportedly “offended” by the of the head of the Catholic Church presence in the prestigious journal. 

In a brief Twitter message, the leaders of the Arabic version of National Geographic spoke of a “banned” edition for “cultural” reasons without providing further details.
According to reports from the site foreignpolicy.com, director Alsaad Omar al-Menhaly apologized to readers for the non-distribution of the August edition, due to the fact that the magazine “did not receive entry permission [into the country] for cultural reasons “. 

Saudi Arabia is based on Sharia, or Islamic law, which imposes the “death penalty” in cases of “gayness, murder, rape, drug trafficking and sorcery.”  In the outrageous ultra-conservative Sunni Wahhabi kingdom, women are forbidden to drive and must always be accompanied by a man with whom they have close ties of kinship. 

The Way I See It..... these days, the Pope foolishly continues to promote a policy of welcome and support for refugees fleeing from the wars in the Middle East, particularly the Syrians (mostly Muslims), opening the doors of the Vatican and inviting priests to do the same in parishes; compared to a Saudi Arabia that has never accepted any refugees in four years of conflict, and who have effectively sealed their borders.

UPDATE: Saudi Arabia still won't take any Syrian refugees, but offers to build 200 mosques for them in GERMANY. 

Don't Be the First to Stop Applauding !

To hear the professional left’s “culture commandos” tell it, revered conservative author, commentator, and documentary filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza is a criminal — and stark, raving mad. A search for D’Souza online, and will quickly show that he’s a “convicted felon.” His Wikipedia page, for instance, references him as an “Indian American political commentator, convicted felon and author” — making sure his brush with the law is listed ahead of his status as a best-selling writer,

and well ahead of his status as the most successful conservative documentary filmmaker of all time.

If one searches for recent news about D’Souza, one will find that a federal judge recently ordered him to undergo ongoing psychiatric treatment as a condition of his probation. The government stooge stated, “Mr. D’Souza has weaknesses in controlling his own impulses and … is prone to anger in reaction to criticism.” 

Really? Or was he too successful in criticizing the black Messiah Barack Obama?  Navigating the fine print, one eventually learns that D’Souza’s “crime” involved relatively minor campaign finance infractions committed on behalf of his friend Wendy Long during her 2012 U.S. Senate race. Dig deeper, and it becomes readily apparent that D’Souza isn’t mentally ill — far from it!

Rather, he’s the latest victim of America’s “culture war” — an attempt to radically remake this nation in the image of Soviet Russia.

The tarring and feathering of D’Souza is but one high-profile example of a pervasive, anti-American assault on core conservative, constitutional values — and those who dare to advance them. It is no longer merely “government overreach,” “liberal bias in the media,” or “political correctness run amok.” It is something more sinister: an increasingly brazen totalitarian effort to remake American democracy in the image of statist, conformist, command-economy orthodoxy.

This “vast left-wing conspiracy” leverages regulatory edicts, PC “teachable moments,” and crony capitalist financial pressures to suppress the ideals and ideologies that once made our nation the envy of the civilized world. Its objectives? Compulsory tolerance, selective justice, the perpetual subsidization of American dependency culture, open borders, a disarmed populace, vaporized property rights, warrantless mass surveillance, the ceding of popular authority to the state (and American sovereignty to the world), the deification of progressive leaders, mass youth indoctrination via government-subsidized revisionist history, the debasing of religious freedom, the erosion of the U.S. Constitution, and the relegation of our nation’s two founding pillars — freedom and free markets — to the dustbin of history.

Think that’s hyperbolic? Consider retired liberal general Wesley Clark (photo left) — the former supreme NATO commander in Europe — who last month said American citizens who disagreed with their government should be sent to internment camps. Then consider U.S. senator and 2016 presidential candidate Lindsey Graham — who said he’d consider using military force on the U.S. Congress if it didn’t fund the Department of Defense to his liking.

Where are the charges against these traitors? And which federal judge is ordering them to be subjected to mental evaluations?

Let’s compare D’Souza’s “crime” to the conduct of former U.S. senator and Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards, who was indicted for allegedly funneling $1 million in campaign contributions to his mistress, Rielle Hunter. Edwards’s campaign finance scandal took place as he was running for president — and as he was conspiring to place the blame for his and Hunter’s love child on one of his staffers. Finally, the scandal took place as his wife was dying of cancer. This prick-bastard Edwards got off scot-free. Not one of the charges against him stuck. And no one accused him of being crazy.

D’Souza? He was sentenced to eight months in a halfway house and five years’ probation and ordered to pay $30,000 in fines. He was also required to undergo eight months of court-mandated “therapeutic counseling” by scumbag U.S. district court judge Richard Berman -- best known for his 2008 ruling forcing U.S. taxpayers to subsidize “halal” meals for deadshit Islamic criminals.

Yet to hear the vast left-wing conspirators tell it, D’Souza is the crazy one. Speaking of crazy, consider how the vast left-wing conspiracy treated the “gender evolution” of the athlete formerly known as Bruce Jenner. Obviously American citizens — as their means permit — are free to pursue their idealized selves. That’s what individual liberty and market freedom are all about. Jenner is free to call himself Caitlyn — and pay for multiple procedures to surgically transform himself from a man into a woman.

No one’s stopping him — or her — from doing that. In fact, no one did. Nor did any credible voice at any stage of the process argue that Jenner didn’t have the right to undergo such a transformation.
But acceptance wasn’t the left’s objective — force-fed tolerance was. It wasn’t enough for those of us who disagreed with (or were repulsed by) Jenner’s transformation to hold our tongues. According to the vast left-wing conspirators, we had to affirmatively applaud it.

For future Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre, even that wasn’t enough. Last month, The New York Post rebuked Favre for failing to clap with sufficient enthusiasm as Jenner took the stage at the 2015 ESPY Awards. “As the audience erupts with applause, the camera pans over to Favre as he claps slowly before rubbing his hands together,” the Post reported, arguing that Favre’s failure to sufficiently gush over Jenner made the ceremony “uncomfortable for everyone.”  Outrageous !

This is eerily reminiscent of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, in which the director

of a Moscow paper factory received a ten-year sentence for sitting down at the eleven-minute mark of a standing ovation to Joseph Stalin. For his crime of insufficient enthusiasm, he was arrested later that night on a trumped up charge and bluntly told by his interrogator, “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”

''That was how they discovered who the independent people were,” Solzhenitsyn wrote. “And that was how they went about eliminating them.” Make no mistake: this is where America is headed. The Political Correctness of ''Ninety-Eighty Four'' is here.

Consider what’s happening in Chappaqua, New York — hometown of not so popular 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. As part of its Orwellian ''neighbourhood engineering'' efforts, the administration of Barack Obama wants to force this Empire State hamlet to nullify its zoning ordinances to erect a low-income housing development.

Replete with racist assumptions of inferiority and intolerance, Obama’s compulsory integration permits government meddling in one of our most basic freedoms — where we choose to live.
Everywhere we turn, American freedoms and free markets are under attack — from Obamacare’s insidious individual mandate to the IRS persecution of conservative groups to the NSA’s warrantless mass surveillance of all Americans.

 The Way I See It......the national debt is soaring, citizen's entitlements are on the verge of being exhausted, labor participation is at four-decade lows, wages are stagnant, the Census Dept. says a quarter of Americans are now in poverty, and America’s status as the world’s only superpower is crumbling every bit as fast as the rule of law is eroding here at home. The American Dream is dead.

In the documentary that made him a household name, Dinesh D’Souza criticized the Obama administration for eroding America from within — which is exactly what’s happening to our country. As D’Souza pays the price for his prescience, the vast left-wing conspiracy is sending a simple message to anyone who dares to follow in his footsteps: “Fall in line now.” Oh, and as the interrogator in Solzhenitsyn’s book warned, “don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”

Boston Uni Professor Blames U.S. for ISIS Sex Slavery !

“In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq. Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for the situation Rukmimi Callimachi describes.”   See, the Islamic State doesn’t practice sex slavery because it is sanctioned in the Qur’an and Sunnah, but because the U.S. did bad things in Iraq. This is what passes for analysis on most university campuses these days. Much more below.
 

“The Truth About Islam and Sex Slavery History Is More Complicated Than You Think,” by Kecia Ali, (photo right) Huffington Post,  August 19, 2015 



''Others scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn’t mean Muslims must always do so; indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point. It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so. Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed.''

The disingenuous reasoning here is appalling. Can’t anyone in academia deal with a topic honestly anymore? I know Kecia Ali is a university professor, and university professors today are mostly muddle-headed ideologues more interested in pushing their far-Left agenda than having rational discussion or searching for the truth, but this is ridiculous. There are so many things wrong with that paragraph that it is a breathtakingly compact example of how contemporary academics obscure, rather than expose, the truth. Here are a few of the ways Kecia Ali outrages the truth in that paragraph:

“Others scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn’t mean Muslims must always do so.”

Actually, the Qur’an tells Muslims that Muhammad is uswa hasana, an “excellent example” (33:21), which in Islamic theology has amounted to the proposition that if Muhammad did it, it is right and worthy of emulation. The fact that “the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it” actually inhibited the development of abolitionist movements within Islam, because of the absolute prohibition on declaring something to be wrong that Muhammad considered to be right.

“…indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point.”

Actually, it would settle the point if those majority-Muslim societies had outlawed slavery on the basis of Islamic principles, but they didn’t. They abolished slavery under pressure from the West. There was never an indigenous Muslim abolitionist movement, and to this day, slavery is practiced sub rosa in North Africa, Saudi Arabia, etc., and justified precisely on the contention that if the Qur’an assumes it and Muhammad practiced it, it cannot be wrong.

“It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so.”

Here again, this point is only valid if there were some mainstream Qur’anic case against slavery, reinterpreting the pro-slavery passages in a different way. But there isn’t. “Objective scholars” — as if Kecia Ali were one — may not find slavery in the Qur’an or Islamic law, but note that Kecia Ali is writing for an audience of Leftist non-Muslims in the Huffington Post: she is not trying to convince Islamic State slave owners that slavery is wrong on Islamic grounds. It is, in other words, far easier to lull non-Muslims into complacency about a human rights abuse that Muslims justify on Islamic grounds than it is to convince the Muslims who are perpetrating it to stop doing so.

“Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed.”

Kecia Ali here assumes that the Bible and Qur’an are equivalent in their teachings and mainstream interpretation. In reality, the abolitionist movement arose in the UK and US among Christian clergymen who argued against the ongoing applicability of the Biblical passages justifying slavery on the basis of the idea that all human beings are created in the image of God and equal in dignity on that basis. The Qur’an and Islam, by contrast, make a sharp dichotomy between believers (“the best of people,” Qur’an 3:110) and unbelievers (“the most vile of created beings,” Qur’an 98:6), and consequently there was no teaching of the equal dignity of all human beings upon which an abolitionist movement could be based.
 

Kecia Ali probably knows all this, or should if she doesn’t. But she doesn’t tell her hapless HuffPo marks, that is, her dim-witted readers.

Slavery was pervasive in the late antique world in which the Quran arose. Early Muslims were part of societies in which various unfree statuses existed, including capture, purchase, inherited slave status and debt peonage. Thus, it is no surprise that the Quran, the Prophet’s normative practice and Islamic jurisprudence accepted slavery. What is known of Muhammad’s life is disputed, but his biographies uniformly report that slaves and freed slaves were part of his household. One was Mariyya the Copt. A gift from the Byzantine governor of Alexandria, she reportedly bore Muhammad a son; he freed her. Whatever the factual accuracy of this tale, its presence attests to a shared presumption that one leader could send another an enslaved female for sexual use.

What she leaves out (again) of all this is the normative character of the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example for Muslims. That normative character is not some crazy literalist subsect of Islam. It is mainstream Islamic theology among all sects and madhahib.

Like their earlier counterparts in Greece and Rome, jurists formulating Islamic law in the eighth to 10th centuries took slavery as a given. They formalized certain protections for slaves, including eventual freedom for women like Mariyya who bore children to their masters; such children were free and legitimate. Jurists sought to circumscribe slavery, prohibiting the enslavement of foundlings and prescribing automatic manumission for slaves beaten too harshly. But the idea that some people should dominate others was central to their conceptual world; they used slavery-related concepts to structure their increasingly hierarchical norms for marriage.

Yet again: Kecia Ali doesn’t tell her unfortunate readers that Islamic law is not considered to be some man-made document like the U.S. Constitution; on the contrary, in Islamic theology Sharia is considered to be the unchangeable and perfect law of Allah himself. As such, its allowance for slavery is considered to be as divinely inspired and unalterable as the rest of it.

“Still, early Muslim slavery (like early Muslim marriage) wasn’t particularly a religious institution” — an unsupported and false claim. 'Jurists’ ideas about the superiority of free over slave (and male over female) were widely shared across
religious boundaries” — everyone did it, you see, so it must be OK. This tu quoque argument might hold water if theologically-justified slavery persisted in religious contexts other than Islam today, but it doesn’t.

To say this is not to present an apologetic defense of Islam;

Don’t kid yourself, professor...

...to the contrary, effective Muslim ethical thinking requires honesty and transparency about the lasting impact on Muslim thought on slavery and non-consensual sex.

Honesty and transparency on this issue would be refreshing, but it isn’t forthcoming in this article.

However, singling out slavery or rules governing marriage or punishments for a handful of crimes as constituting the enactment of “authentic” Islamic law surely reflects a distorted notion of a Muslim polity.

The Islamic State’s attempt to create an imagined pristine community relies on a superficial and selective enactment of certain provisions from scripture and law, an extreme case of a wider phenomenon.

Once again, an assertion without evidence. How is the Islamic State being superficial and selective in its interpretation of the Qur’an and Sharia? Kecia Ali doesn’t tell us. She just wants us to take her word for it.

Religious studies scholars, of course, must analyze their doctrines.

I’m all for that.

What beliefs do they express? How do they formulate them? What one mustn’t do is take them at face value, as the legitimate expression of a timeless Islamic truth.

And why mustn’t one do this? Because above all, Kecia Ali and the Huffington Post don’t want you to have a negative view of Islam. But why should one not think that the Islamic State’s practices are the “legitimate expression of a timeless Islamic truth”? Yet again, we just have to take Kecia Ali’s word for it.

In fact, the stress they put on the errors of their Muslim opponents, who actively dispute

their interpretations of many things including slavery, makes very clear that there is no one self-evident interpretation of Islam on these points.

Note that Kecia Ali doesn’t actually offer an alternative interpretation of the Qur’an passages that the Islamic State adduces in order to justify slavery. She just tells us that some unnamed “Muslim opponents” of the Islamic State have offered this. Who? When? Where? She doesn’t tell us. Why not? Could it be that this Muslim challenge to the Islamic State hasn’t actually happened at all?

…In the thousand-plus years in which Muslims and non-Muslims, including Christians, actively engaged in slaving, they cooperated and competed, enslaving and being enslaved, buying, selling and setting free. This complex history, which has generated scores of publications on Muslims and slavery in European languages alone, cannot be reduced to a simplistic proclamation of religious doctrine. The fact that the Islamic State must preface its collections of rulings for slaveholding by defining terms such as captive and concubine illustrates that it is drawing on archaic terms and rules, ones that no longer reflect anything like the current reality of the world.

I doubt that even the Islamic State jihadis would deny that these are old terms and rules that have fallen into desuetude. But they would argue that they are part of the law of Allah; the fact that they’re old and long unused doesn’t change that, and actually only increases the urgency of reviving them, so as to bring the practice of Muslims back in line with the commands of Allah. Here yet again, Kecia Ali is attempting a sleight-of-hand, pretending that this issue is all about human law, not about the

law that Muslims consider to be that of Allah himself.

By focusing on religious doctrine as an explanation for rape, Americans ignore the presence of sexual abuse and torture in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and in Assad’s Syria by the regime and other factions in its vicious ongoing war. None of this is to deny the horror of the systematic rapes Callimachi reports or the revolting nature of the theology she describes. It is to point out that there are reasons why the story of enslaved Yazidis (photo right) is one that captures the front page of the New York Times: it fits into familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity.

The idea that the New York Times is interesting in retailing “familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity” is beyond ludicrous. For years, the Times has again and again obscured and whitewashed numerous incidents of barbarity committed by Muslims and justified by their perpetrators by reference to Islamic texts and teachings. Rukmini Callimachi’s piece was highly anomalous in acknowledging, even in a slight and incomplete manner, that the Islamic State justifies its practices

by referring to teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah. But to admit that fact would be to expose as false and manipulative the ever-present narrative of Muslim victimhood, and Kecia Ali is not going to do that.

In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq. Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi (left) describes. Moral high ground is in short supply. The core idea animating enslavement is that some lives matter more than others. As any American who has been paying attention knows, this idea has not perished from the earth.

The Way I See It....the moral high ground is in short supply. The U.S. Constitution rightly continues to permit a form of enslavement as punishment for crime” (the 13th Amendment says: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”). This academic dumbass says because of the West's tradition of incarceration of criminals we shouldn’t judge the Islamic State’s barbaric practice of sex slavery.
 

Kecia Ali’s moral equivalence here is nothing short of monstrous. But for her efforts, she will no doubt be hailed in Leftist circles and laden with honors, while the Islamic State’s sex slaves, for whose rights and human dignity she could have and should have spoken out instead of engaging in this gruesome apologetic for their enslavement, continue to suffer daily torture.
 

I'm afraid this is American academia today......morally corrupt, paying lip service to constitutional values and is teaching their young impressionable students to loath western accomplishments and capitalism's legacy. May they all go to Hell!

A Drowned Boy Exposes the Lie of War Refugees !

The funeral of the drowned “Syrian” (actually Kurdish) boy Aylan Kurdi in his hometown of Kobane, Syria, less than two days after his death at sea off the Turkish coast, has definitely exposed as a lie the claims that the nonwhite invasion of Europe is the result of “war refugees.”

Kobane is 869 miles (1,400 kilometers) from Bodrum in Turkey, where the Kurdish boy was drowned after his parents irresponsibly loaded him onto an overcrowded dinghy, and is supposedly—if the controlled mass media is to be believed, in the middle of a “war zone.”

 

Yet Aylayn Kurdi’s father Abdullah (photo left) was able to take the bodies of not only Aylan, but also of his brother Ghalib and his wife Rehan, back to Kobane where they were buried, once again before the waiting press cameras.
 

The question which can well be asked is therefore, if the Kurdi family was “fleeing a war zone,” why was it possible for Abdullah Kurdi to travel so easily back to his hometown and arrange full public funerals in Kobane?

 

The very definition of a “war refugee” is, according to the official United Nations definition, as contained in the 1951 Refugee Convention:
 

“a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail him—or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution.”  (see Article 1A(2)).

 

The fact that Abdullah Kurdi could return overnight to Kobane to bury his family shows clearly that he—and all the so-called “refugees” do not qualify as “refugees” in any sense:

 

–They are not being persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion;

–They are able and willing to avail themselves of the protection of Syria (otherwise they would not have been able to go back there so easily); and

–They are easily able to return to their home without fear of persecution.

In other words, even under the UN’s own definition, the Kurdi family were not “refugees” in any sense of the word.

 

Furthermore, as the Leftist controlled media has now been forced to admit, the Kurdi family had been living in Turkey for three years before even trying to invade Europe, so Abdullah could get a good set of dentures--after their legal application to immigrate to Canada had been turned down by the Canadian authorities.

 

Further evidence of the outright lies being used by the nonwhite invaders, and their liberal promoters in the controlled mass media, came with the results of an in situ inspection of a “refugee center” in Mineo, Sicily, by the leader of the Lega Nord party, Matteo Salvini.
 

Writing on his Facebook page, Salvini (photo right) pointed out that of the 3,042 “refugees” in the center, only two had actually come from any of the supposed “war zones.”  He said that all the rest came from other Third World countries, including India and Bangladesh. (“Is there a war there?” he asked.) “Refugees or illegal immigrants? Do you see now?” Salvini concluded, correctly pointing out that the nonwhites had no right to be in Europe at all.

 

Meanwhile, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has joined the growing ranks of Central European nations to warn of the danger posed by the nonwhite invasion. Hitting out at Germany for saying it would accept requests from “Syrians” regardless of where they entered the European Union—a move which also breaks all previously established European Union rules—Orban said that this was only encouraging the invasion.

He also announced that Hungary is building a fence and tightening migration rules that it says will close Hungary off to migrants as of September 15. “The reality is that Europe is threatened by a mass inflow of people, many tens of millions of people could come to Europe,” Orban (photo-left) told public radio in a regular Friday interview. “Now we talk about hundreds of thousands but next year we will talk about millions and there is no end to this,” he said.
 

In May this year, Orban sent personal letters to eight million Hungarian voters in which he pledged to protect their livelihoods from immigrants. In July he said “political correctness in Europe” had enforced a “guilt-ridden silence” on the links between immigration and violent crime.

 

The Way I See It.......Europe for years did not intervene in Syria to stop the jihadist uprising which now resulted in sending hundreds of thousands of Syrians to Europe. Nor will it defend its borders against this army of immigrants, who have been joined by Afghans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Africans and Balkans picked up en route.

 

And here is the troubling truth: the West's self-loathing means it will no longer defend what it no longer prizes, it welcomes those who will destroy what’s not destroyed already.....their cultural heritage and social fabric.