BlogWrath has the full press release:
“The Roth Institute report is one more worrying reminder that anti-Semitism, the congenital disease afflicting the Jewish people, has metastasized. This new strain is particularly conducive to the currently dominant multicultural environment, especially in western Europe.”
This is a very serious problem which all free-thinkers must tackle.
The whole press release is well worth a read.
All right, properly should have posted this on the 8th of December, but…
…it’s still in the spirit of the Christmas season!
(Thanks to WordPress’s most awesome ‘improvements’ to their embedding process, it looks that the best I can do for now is to link to the comic instead…..my apologies!)
What is it these days…
Yes – that is the question…exactly who is in power over there: the undisciplined son or someone else?
Whatever else he was, Vaclav Havel was a brave man.
He was brave enough to stand up for what is right – knowing full well the consequences…
Would more of us could say that!
There is a lot of videos ‘out there’ of Vaclav Havel, speaking, from the Velvet Revolution on. However, it is nice for people to also be remembered in their youth. This is why, for his memorial, I have picked a little clip from an acting role he did while he was just 29 years old. (It is in Czech, but there really isn’t anything of consequence said: just enjoy the ‘young’ Havel!)
A few days ago, I have brought you the reports on these hearings from Free Dominion.
Here is Ezra Levant, interviewing Marc Lemire himself about that same hearing:
What a bigger-than-life figure!
Love him or hate him, he certainly had an impact.
I’d say ‘Rest in Peace’ – but that would offend him: he is not ‘resting’, he is dead…and somehow, I suspect he would prefer the direct word over the euphemism.
His thought-provoking, piercing wit will be missed.
He will be remembered…
…for his unflinching honesty:
…and for his investigative work: even Pen and Teller love him!
Sounds so innocuous: Stop Online Piracy Act.
After all, ‘Pirates’ are all ‘bad’, so anything to get them off ‘our internet’ must be ‘good’, right?
We, surely, the Orwellian language is only a part of the trick here.
The SOPA hearings are being held today and it is difficult to believe that anyone who does not directly benefit financially from this legislation would be willing to support it. The effect of this legislation would be to chill free speech in ways to give Richard Warman and his Section 13 co-oppressors wet dreams in perpetuity!
Right now, even with the ‘moderate’, much less draconian legislation in place, the copyright infringement laws are being used to silence critics of big business – or even just independent voices (lest they become critical in the future).
In this example, a DMCA claim was used to censor a daily tech news episode which criticized a big-music corporation: under the law, a mere DMCA claim was enough to force a takedown of the episode for a minimum of 10 days. If you are running a daily news show, 10 days is an eternity… At least, under the DMCA rules, the news show could appeal to a judge…
And, of course, we all know that the US government has been known to censor a blog for over a year, denying them due process of law to get their property restored and name cleared.
Just to add injury to injury: not only are you guilty until proved innocent under SOPA, getting to court to prove your innocence will be much harder. And even if you were victorious and the courts found you innocent of all charges, you would not have a recourse to sue for damages suffered as the result of the false SOPA accusation!
Is this type of legislation even needed?
The Swiss government certainly does not think so: they have gone the opposite route. After studying the data for a long time, these legislators have concluded that downloading music/videos for personal use is not just perfectly legal, they claim it actually channels money away from copyright holders and helps the music/movie industry in the long run.
And what about the people who have been the most vociferous about the need for crippling the internet in the name of copyright protection? Surely, they themselves do not indulge in the very behaviour they wish to stamp out with knee-jerk legislation like ‘three accusations and you are permanently banned from the internet’, right?
“French President Nicholas Sarkozy is a man who has championed some of the most aggressive anti-piracy legislation in Europe. But today it’s revealed that the occupants of his very own office and home are responsible for a nice selection of pirate downloads using BitTorrent. Three strikes? Those with access to the Presidential Palace’s IP addresses have already doubled that quota. “
But, surely, those entertainment legacy industry movers and shakers who have lobbied the legislators for SOPA – the ones who claim that downloading movies and music for free would bankrupt them – surely they are not doing this themselves, are they?
“With increasing lobbying efforts from the entertainment industry against BitTorrent sites and users, we wondered whether these companies hold themselves to the same standards they demand of others. After some initial skimming we’ve discovered BitTorrent pirates at nearly every major entertainment industry company in the US, including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fox Entertainment and NBC Universal. Busted.”
And those ‘evil Pirates’ – they must be up to even more vile things…
Let’s hope the unanimous screams of protest from the citizens of the internet get heard!
Free Dominion has a discussion with several reports about the Tuesday hearing in Federal Court in Richard Warman’s ongoing case against Mark Lemire, which has run into a snag: the question whether Section 13 of the Human Rights Code (the thought-crime section) is Constitutional or not.
Connie Fournier reports that the cast was large: from CCLA and BCLA to Doug Christie on stage, from BigCityLib to free-speech bloggers in the audience. Here is a little quote from her report:
“During this time, the judge listened intently and didn’t interrupt. His face was inscrutable. The funniest moment of the hearing came when the lawyer for B’nai Brith said that Section 13 is “a ringing endorsement of free speech”. Everyone in the audience snorted and snickered uncontrollably. (Probably only one person in the audience was a censor and the rest were free speech supporters or media).”
An excerpt from Narrow Back’s report:
“At 11:00 we returned to hear from the African Legal Clinic. They talked about “irradicating discrimination” for “deeper social concerns” “improvement of the condition of less fortunate people” blah blah, etc. They also talked about S13 as a “conciliatory process”. I just wrote down: “Ha!” “
And here is a part from Mark Fournier’s post:
“A couple of intervenors in favour of state censorship put in their two cents and then Richard Warman got up and complained that just because the CHRC did a terrible job of administering Section 13 his rights shouldn’t be violated. The irony was breathtaking.”
Read the whole reports – along with what people are saying about it – at Free Dominion!
When you live in a land ruled by Sharia!
Zilla of the Resistance has the story.
(Check it out and have a listen to the music: I rather like the tune I suspect is the ‘swing classic’ ‘Clementine’ done in Indonesian punk – a definite improvement over the original!)
Via: BCF
Quite apart from this story, it is important for us, Westerners, to understand that in lands ruled by Sharia, ‘charity’ does not work the same way it does in our part of the World.
This does not mean that Muslims are not charitable people: not at all!
And it does not mean that in countries with Muslim populations, people do not perform charitable acts for the sake of helping their fellow human beings, regardless of race or creed. They do – and we have many stories of Muslim women helping Westerners (men, women and children) who were in Japanese prison camps during WWII!
Rather, as Sharia rules every single aspect of life of those unfortunate to live under its oppression, so it has very specific and rigid rules for ‘charity’.
Let me illustrate this with an example: following the Tsunami a few years ago, people in Bengal (I refuse to use the new colonial name for the country) were upset that many Western charities got volunteers on the ground and started providing aid. The Bengali fear was that these aid groups were there trying to steal their children…
Many in the West were perplexed by this: why would the people there refuse aid, willingly provided without any strings attached?
Because right now, Bengal is under Sharia. And Sharia strictly differentiates between ‘Muslim charities’ and ‘non-Muslim charities’.
It is forbidden, under Sharia, for Muslim charities to help non-Muslims – and for non-Muslim charities to help Muslims (though, to be honest, non-Muslim charities do face a lot of regulatory interference under Sharia and are thus prevented from being as effective in providing aid as Muslim charities are). Therefore, when non-Muslim charities attempted to aid Muslims in Bengal, the response among the population was confusion and fear – and, ultimately, rejection of much help. The problem was finally resolved by the non-Muslim charities simply giving the money and aid materiel to Muslim charities, who then operated on the ground…
Another ‘perplexing’ example came even more recently, during the terrible flooding in Pakistan. Even as money poured into the county through Red Cross, there were appalling stories of whole non-Muslim families starving – even in regions where food aid was plentiful. Again, people in ‘The West’ could not make heads-or-tails of this and many wrote these stories off as propaganda.
Not so.
The primary channel for the aid funds was The International Red Cross.
In Sharia countries, the Red Cross partners with its affiliated Islamic charity, the Red Crescent, and channels all aid through it.
In Pakistan, which is for all practical purposes governed by Sharia, the Red Crescent operates as an Islamic charity under Sharia does. That means that Mosques are used as the centres from which the aid (from food on down) is distributed.
To most of us, this does not seem particularly odd: Mosques serve as community centres, so they are centrally located and accessible. Plus, they have the room to store the supplies to be distributed, so this would be a logical place to distribute aid from, right?
Plus, under Sharia, the Red Crescent is only permitted to distribute aid through a Mosque. So, it is not just the ‘logical’ course of action, it is the only permitted course of action. And the Red Crescent did make various statements to the effect that everyone who came to them for aid, received aid!
So, what was the problem that caused the non-Muslims to starve?
Under Sharia, a non-Muslim may not enter a Mosque!
Not being permitted to enter the place from which the aid from Western countries was being distributed, non-Muslims could either starve or convert to Islam…
I suspect there is a lot more about ‘charity under Sharia’ we just don’t know…
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 