Month: April 2021

It’s official; Britain is no longer a free country. In no free country is a Christian pastor hauled off to spend a night in jail for preaching from the Bible.

Via Daily Mail:

John Sherwood, 71, was led away in handcuffs, questioned in a police station and held overnight after being accused of making homophobic comments outside Uxbridge Station in west London.

The same British who heroically held off the Nazi war machine have succumbed to this level of tyranny without firing a shot. That is how much damage moonbattery can inflict on a nation’s character in only two generations.

After someone ratted him out, the police arrested Pastor Sherwood under the Public Order Act, then released him the next day without charge.

No need to sentence pastors to prison if throwing a scare into them might work. If they continue preaching from the Bible rather than from the Guardian, escalation will be required.

Mr Sherwood said officers grilled him over his attitude to gay people. He was even asked what he would do if his children were gay. The married father-of-two said: ‘The question was irrelevant to the allegation against me. I said I would seek to bring them to Christ, but of course I would love them no matter what, because they’re my children.’

Not good enough. We are now required to approve of homosexuality. Mentioning what the Bible has to say about it is off limits. This is why it is only a matter of time until the Bible is banned.

Pastor Sherwood preaches at an evangelical church in north London, but was street preaching in Uxbridge when the authorities shut him down, injuring his wrist and elbow as they yanked him off his perch on a mini-stepladder.

As for his specific thought crime,

A statement posted to a Christian Facebook his supporters read: ‘Whilst he was preaching, he expounded the final verses of Genesis 1, declaring that God’s purpose in creating mankind was to set human beings in families, headed by a father and a mother, not by two fathers, or by two mothers.

‘The distinction within mankind of just two genders, male and female, made in the image of God, constitutes the essence of God’s created order.’

That’s what progressives mean by “hate speech.”

As noted by Pastor Peter Simpson, who was preaching with Pastor Sherwood before the arrest,

‘If there was a [gay] Pride parade in Uxbridge, the police would support it even if Christians were offended.’

That’s because gays are oppressed and Christians are oppressors, according to the liberal narrative.

Continued Pastor Simpson,

‘You don’t have to be an evangelical Christian to be shocked by this. Anyone who cares about liberty should be concerned about what happened in Uxbridge.’

That rules out anyone still willing to identify with the increasingly totalitarian left.

https://moonbattery.com/pastor-imprisoned-for-preaching-from-bible/

Six years after the height of the migration crisis, 27 percent of the female refugees who came to Germany have a job, and a similar number of them have a basic command of the German language.

The integration of refugees into German society and the economy was a key task six years ago when Chancellor Angela Merkel delivered the legendary remark of “Wir schaffen das,“ meaning “We can do it.“

In 2015 and 2016, 1.2 million immigrants came to the country, mainly from the Middle East but also from Africa. A total of over 2 million people have arrived in the EU’s largest country since the middle of the last decade, 120,000 last year alone.

A study by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) examines whether newcomers are being integrated into the economy. The difference between integration for men and women is particularly noticeable. After five years in Germany, according to the IAB, only 27 percent of the women work, while 61 percent of the men have a job. This includes those who are studying, working part-time, or working as interns. The results are based on surveys conducted among refugees between 2016 and 2019, the daily Die Welt reported.

At the height of the migration crisis five years ago, the head of the German Labor Office, Detlef Scheele, promised that half of all refugees would be working within five years. This has been achieved for male asylum seekers, but significantly less so for female ones. 

The reason for this is partly because many of the women are having children and not working, which in turn may be due to cultural differences, as in Muslim families, women remain at home and do not have a career. 

This issue pops up again when it comes to IAB’s data regarding those looking for a job. After five years in Germany, 56 percent of female refugees are not looking for work, while for men, this proportion is 22 percent. This is mainly attributed to three-quarters of refugee women having minor children. IAB experts also point out that the German labor market does not offer enough opportunities for women with a refugee background.

An additional problem is insufficient knowledge of German. Those refugees who take a so-called integration course, which also includes German language lessons, have a better chance of finding a paid job; however, 17 percent of those who sign up for the course are illiterate. After a year in Germany, only 9 percent of men and 2 percent of women are working.

Although women would in many cases want to work, employment rates in their countries of origin are also extremely low: 16.5 percent in Syria, 13.5 percent in Iraq and 21 percent in Afghanistan. Immigrant women also have more children than the average German woman — 2 versus 1.5 — and the lower their education, the more children they have.

The Federal Institute for Population Research (BIB) said that most women who come to Germany are from Muslim countries where large families with many children are more common. In the first generation, half of the Muslim women in Germany have three or more children. The higher the number of children women have, the more difficult it is for them to enter the labor market, as they usually lack the necessary qualifications. This, of course, means an increased burden on the German social system, especially in cases where a man loses his job.

https://rmx.news/article/article/one-in-four-female-refugees-is-employed-in-germany

The refugee aid ship Ocean Viking took in 236 migrants off the coast of Libya on Tuesday. According to the operating organization SOS Méditerranée, they were on two overcrowded boats around 50 kilometers off the west coast of the North African country.

According to the information, the migrants come from 15 different countries and 114 of them are unaccompanied minors. Some were weak and dehydrated. Several women suffered minor burns from fuel. It was initially left open where the crew wanted to take the illegals.

A spokeswoman for SOS Méditerranée told Berlin weekly Junge Freiheithowever that even if Libyan authorities agreed in accordance with international law to take back the people on the ship, the organization would refuse.

The spokeswoman emphasized: “Libya is not a safe country, so we then send inquiries to the Maltese and Italian authorities.” Experience has shown that Italy has recently given in and accepted the migrants, while Malta has remained resolute in refusing illegal migrants.

The number of migrants arriving in Italy across the Mediterranean has skyrocketed in the first four and a half months of this year. As of April 20, the Ministry of the Interior in Rome registered nearly 8 600 arrivals. In the previous year there were fewer than 3 300 in this period, and two years ago it was around 650.

The professor of international relations at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Vittorio Emanuele Parsi, warned that the wave of migrants would continue beyond the summer months. Experience shows that the number of boat crossings increases significantly during this time of year.

The recent deaths of 130 migrants off the Libyan coast is directly connected with the presence of the Ocean Viking which for days has been going back and forth in the waters off Libya.

In short, in June 2018 the Libyan SAR area was recognized by the IMO (International Maritime Organization), which officially included it in the international database. Since that period, the rescue operations in the area of ​​competence have been coordinated by the Libyan Coast Guard.

Libya’s coast guard meanwhile intercepts many migrant boats and returns them back to its own shores. International law stipulates that one cannot enter someone else’s SAR area and interfere. Therefore, the Italian Coordination and Rescue Center (IMRCC) receives an alert first, and cannot send a rescue party without first having notified the Libyan Coast Guard.

The Ocean Viking had been in Libyan SAR waters since April 19 and was going back and forth awaiting the departure of some boats. At 10 pm on April 20, with a stormy sea, three boats inexplicably set out in the direction of the Ocean Viking, which until a few hours earlier was 30 nautical miles from al-Khoms. The migrants, however, after taking off, began to have problems and called the Alarm Phone. But Ocean Viking at that point was no longer in that area, but much farther away, because at 6 pm on April 20 she left for Tunisia, where a boat in difficulty was reported.

A Libyan patrol boat immediately set off in search of the three boats, but asked for the cooperation of others, given the sea conditions. Thus IMRCC Rome identified three merchant ships in the area that could search for the boats in difficulty. A first boat carrying 104 people was recovered by the Libyans. On the same a woman and a child had dead. The corpses of the people who were aboard the second dinghy were sighted on 21 April by one of the three merchant ships. The third boat with about forty migrants on board sunk, and the wreck of the dinghy was spotted and photographed from a Frontex plane.

This version is also confirmed by Commodore Massoud Abdelsamad, spokesman for the Libyan Navy. Despite this, the Italian Democratic Party secretary Enrico Letta continued to ignore the NGO’s responsibility, saying that “there are still 42 people missing on a third boat – Europe kills, lets them drown”.

The deaths are directly due to the irresponsibility of those who continue to favour illegal immigration not understanding that irregular departures, unfortunately, also lead to the death of many people.

https://freewestmedia.com/2021/04/30/ocean-viking-picks-up-236-migrants-and-heads-for-europe/

The controversial Salzburg political scientist Farid Hafez was the subject of discussion in the European Parliament this week. A motion for a resolution by German Member of the European Parliament Markus Pieper ( Christian Democratic Union, CDU) laments that “Hafez has repeatedly received funding from the EU budget despite being closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Turkish government, which seek to silence independent journalists and media freedom under the pretext of Islamophobia”.

The motion, adopted by a two-thirds majority, calls on the EU Commission to “amend the eligibility criteria for the ‘Rights, Equality and Citizenship’ programme under the EU budget to prevent individuals and organisations with such alarming views from receiving EU funding”.

Hafez’s EU-sponsored engagement against “Islamophobia” and “anti-Muslim racism” has long divided the political and academic scene, as well as Muslims.

In November, the resident of Upper Austria himself was the target of house searches among suspected Muslim Brothers. After he compared this “Operation Luxor” to the Nazi pogroms in 1938 in an article published in the USA, even the Salzburg university distanced itself from him.

He had “absolutely no understanding for comparing the procedure in a democratic constitutional state like Austria with events in the Nazi era”, said Reinhard Heinisch, Head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Salzburg. At the same time, however, Heinisch joined a supporters’ committee that condemns the raid on Hafez as an “intimidation attempt against a recognised academic”.

Hafez denies any connection to the Muslim Brotherhood. “No, I am not a Muslim Brotherhood member and I am not an Islamist,” he said in a press interview. Hafez also denies any proximity to the Turkish government.

The fact is, however, that he has been publishing the annual “Islamophobia Report” on behalf of the Turkish Seta Foundation since 2016. It not only denounces incidents that are actually hostile to Muslims, but also labels liberal Muslims and critics of political Islam as Islamophobes.

In the most recent report, even the Nobel Prize winner for literature Peter Handke, who is not known as a critic of Islam, made it onto the front cover. The judgement is based on Handke’s “glorification of the Serbs during the genocide in Bosnia” in the 1990s.

The Seta Foundation is a “non-partisan think tank” for Hafez, in fact it propagates the policies of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In 2019, it caused outrage with a list of journalists critical of the government.

The EU funding for the “Islamophobia Report” commissioned by Seta had already prompted Austrian People’s Party MEP Lukas Mandl to sharply criticise the EU Commission’s funding practice two years ago. He feels vindicated by the latest parliamentary decision.

“I hope that the Commission will follow Parliament’s clear mandate to act,” Mandl told the VOLKSBLATT newspaper. The Social Democrats (SPÖ) and the Greens rejected the motion for a resolution.

https://volksblatt.at/eu-parlament-kein-geld-mehr-fuer-umstrittenen-islamophobie-forscher/

By Andrea Widburg

Tom Wolfe famously quipped, “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” Certainly, that was the case during the Trump presidency, when leftists insisted he was Hitler, yet were unable to point to a single instance in which he’d engaged in conduct actually associated with fascists. However, in the topsy-turvy world that is 2021, Wolfe’s saying has been turned on its head. With the advent of the Biden administration, America is heading into a purely fascist future. Meanwhile, Europeans are insistently demanding freedom, whether it’s generals and other civil servants pushing back against Critical Race Theory and Islam, or ordinary people singing and dancing in the streets.

In America, people who committed a misdemeanor by entering the Capitol without permission are still rotting in jail in solitary confinement without ever having had a hearing. The situation is so dire and un-American that Senators Elizabeth Warren and Dick Durbin, both proponents of total government, protested:

Most of the 300-plus people charged with participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have been released while they await trial, but dozens of those deemed to be dangerous, flight risks or at high risk of obstructing justice were ordered held without bond. D.C. jail officials later determined that all Capitol detainees would be placed in so-called restrictive housing — a move billed as necessary to keep the defendants safe, as well as guards and other inmates. But that means 23-hour-a-day isolation for the accused, even before their trials begin.

And such treatment doesn’t sit well with Warren or Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), two of the chamber’s fiercest critics of solitary confinement.

“Solitary confinement is a form of punishment that is cruel and psychologically damaging,” Warren said in an interview. “And we’re talking about people who haven’t been convicted of anything yet.”

(So far as I know, no Republicans have done the same, and shame on them if I’m correct.)

On Wednesday, Federal agents flashing open-ended warrants conducted a 6 a.m. raid on former New York mayor current Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to seize his electronics. The ostensible reason was that Giuliani violated a law requiring Americans who represent foreign nationals to register as foreign agents. This is a law that is enforced only against Republicans close to Trump – and Giuliani is adamant that he’s never represented foreign nationals.

The agents ostentatiously refused to seize copies of Hunter Biden’s hard drives, which Giuliani possessed, even though they were obvious electronic devices. Giuliani contends that the hard drives’ contents establish not only that Hunter and Joe Biden acted as unregistered foreign agents, but also that Joe Biden and his family took millions in bribes over the years and that Hunter Biden was engaged in child pornography. Since Giuliani still has the hard drives, perhaps he should make all the information on the drives public.

Giuliani told some of his story to Tucker Carlson:

On the evidence available, what’s happening to Giuliani looks like typical fascism: an incoming regime uses unequally applied law and a complete absence of due process to purge all political opposition.

And in the perfect public-private partnership that makes fascism a different kind of socialism from communism, the tech tyrants continue to act as the federal government’s censorship arm. Just today, YouTube censored an interview that Dan Bongino conducted with former President Trump, calling it “spam” and a “scam.” You can see the interview on Rumble.

Meanwhile, in Europe, over 1,000 French military personnel, including 20 former generals and 100 officers published an amazing open letter:

It accused the French government of kowtowing to destructive ideologies such as anti-racism and Islamism, which it said were being leveraged for the purposes of sowing unrest in French communities and risking a descent into full-blown civil war.

The signatories expressed grave concern with the government’s push to deconstruct and decolonize its own history in an attempt to placate a growing Islamism that has wracked the nation with violence and argued that radical Islam is being used to subject neighborhoods to dogmatic rules that go against the French Constitution, creating an unconstitutional parallel Islamic state.

“Perils are mounting, violence is increasing day by day,” the letter warned. “Who would have predicted ten years ago that a teacher would one day be beheaded when he left school?”

The signatories also attacked Critical Race Theory, which is making headway in France.

Meanwhile, Basel, Switzerland, was the latest European city to have a flash mob demanding freedom from masks and lockdowns. You can read all about this Insurrection of Joy here. Then, spend a few minutes watching this video from a Swiss train station, as people in the station go from bewildered to celebratory:

We need a non-partisan song for Americans to do the same.

At the end of the day, unless we want the dark night of fascism to become a permanent fixture in America, we’d better act to stop the Democrats from using the unequal application of our laws and the manufactured fear of COVID (a virus that more than 99% of us will have survived) to gain total power.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/the_dark_night_of_fascism_has_finally_landed_in_the_united_states.html

The Democrat media keeps touting the very positive numbers for Biden’s rambling address demanding trillions of dollars, unlimited power, and the elimination of those civil rights he doesn’t like.

But those numbers come from a very select group and there wasn’t much of an audience either in Congress or in the country.

In unadjusted fast affiliate data, the President’s speech drew around 11.6 million viewers in the 9 PM ET hour. Add, Univision (1.08 million) and Telemundo (884,000) to that batch of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and the result inches up to 13.5 million for the speech that started around 9:10 PM ET.

ABC was in first place with 3.5 million viewers in that 9 PM ET hour. CBS was close behind with 3.3 million, followed by NBC’s 3.2 million and Fox’s 1.6 million.

Those aren’t the very final numbers, which they’ll still massage as hard as they can, but it is significantly down from President Trump’s first address whose initial numbers were nearly twice as big as Biden’s.

ABC was next with a 1.2/4 rating and an audience of 5.13 million. CBS followed with a 1.0/3 and 6.59 million tuning in, and Fox had a 0.8/3 rating and 2.72 million watching between 9 and 10:30 PM.

Overall, the speech had a combined demo of 5.0 or 19% better than Obama’s last SOTU last year.

NBC saw the biggest jump with Trump’s speech over last year’s SOTU in the 18-49 demo with a 33% surge. ABC was up 20%, Fox rose 14%

The final numbers for President Trump hit 48 million. That was generally the case until 2020. 

Again, the media will massage Biden’s final numbers to deliver a larger rating, but the early numbers show pretty clear that few were interested.

And that’s understandable. 

Biden doesn’t have much to say. He’s unveiling plans, but isn’t an interesting speaker and doesn’t have much to offer. Everyone knows what he’s going to say before he says it. And that’s even without the rambling erratic delivery. Even if you support him, why bother tuning in?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/04/millions-tune-out-bidens-ratings-half-trumps-daniel-greenfield/