Month: May 2022

According to a study published in the Swedish journal Psykologtidningen, a sharp increase in the diagnosis of mild intellectual disability is seen in Sweden. The worst affected is Örebro, where the increase is over 600 percent. At the same time, researchers warn that the IQ is falling in Sweden year by year.

Are the Swedes getting stupider?

The number of adults diagnosed with mild intellectual disability is increasing sharply in Sweden according to the National Board of Health and Welfare. The number of adult patients has increased by 143 percent between 2008 and 2020 and the increase is also found in children. For example, the proportion of children in special schools has increased in Stockholm by 30 percent since 2016. The largest change between 2008 and 2020 is seen in Örebro County, where the increase is as much as 617 percent.

The reason behind the increase may be that individuals with an intelligence quota below 70 are no longer automatically classified as intellectually disabled. But among the residents in Örebro County, are immigrants from around 165 different countries.

Another equally logical and controversial explanation can be found in the warnings that researchers have come up with for years; it is not the Swedes who become stupider – instead, it is mass immigration from certain countries that lowers the average intelligence and increases the proportion of intellectually disabled people in society.

However, it looks very different in the country’s different counties when it comes to how big the increase has been. The Örebro County region, for example, stands out with an increase of as much as 617 percent since 2008. The increase can have several explanations, says Peter Salmi, investigator in psychiatry at the National Board of Health and Welfare.

“We have not analyzed the figures in more detail, but now that I look, the large local differences raise questions,” ​​Salmi told Psykologtidningen.

“In some regions, the increase occurs in connection with the update of the diagnostic manual. Before the update in 2013, an intelligence quota below 70 meant that you were automatically classified as having a mild intellectual disability. With the update, they released some focus on this figure and instead put more focus on how to function in everyday life.”

According to him, this means that one can now have an intelligence quota over 70 and still be diagnosed with a mild intellectual disability.

More children in special schools

In Stockholm County, the proportion of students admitted to special schools has increased by just over thirty percent since 2016 from 0,9 to 1,2 percent. Monica Kierkegaard supervises Stockholm City’s school psychologists and told Psykologtidningen that she believes that the parameters have been expanded too much and that more individuals who are borderline, between an intelligence quota of 70 and 80 can be diagnosed as such.

“Based on what I see and hear and what the psychologists say, we seem to have started to push the boundaries too much. This especially applies to external investigation units. We do not have good instruments for the adaptive so the assessment becomes absolutely more subjective.”

A psychologist who thinks that the increase is within expectations is Harald Schulz, who works in the reception team in the city of Stockholm.

“We must have at least one percent of the students in the special school, so 1.2 percent for 2020 is a good figure. Going to special school is a right,” he told Psykologtidningen.

“Previously, psychologists assumed that a 70 IQ was an absolute limit. Nowadays, the diagnosis could be made at 74, 75 and probably 76 also if everything in the clinical assessment indicates disabilities.

Scandinavia is seeing an overall decline

The fact that more individuals are being diagnosed with mild intellectual disability in Sweden comes in the wake of research that shows that IQ is falling markedly in the Scandinavian countries.

Norway, Finland and Denmark have lost an average of 0,23 IQ points per year since the 1990s. It has a strong effect in the long run, said the well-reputed, but politically correct, highly controversial, researcher James Flynn from New Zealand. Sweden lacks data from recent years and is therefore not included in the survey, but according to Flynn, the results should be similar to those of the other Scandinavian countries.

“It is clear that all Scandinavian countries have a declining trend since 1995. It seems that the factors that have increased IQ have lost their power,” he said to the journal Forskning och Framsteg.

In other European countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands, there are also signs of stagnation when it comes to IQ among the populations. It is a development that he is not alone in noticing and worrying about.

Kyösti Tarvainen, PhD, associate professor emeritus in systems analysis at Aalto University, Helsinki, warned last year, for example, that Sweden’s average IQ will fall below 90 in the next century as demographics change and ethnic Swedes will inevitably turn into a minority. in their own country. His previous research showed that this will happen by 2065.

A larger study from 2017 that was published in the journal Intelligence used data from Norway, Finland and Denmark, as well as from other developed countries. This study also forecasts that the average IQ in the Nordic countries, at today’s rate, will have fallen as much as almost seven units by 2025.

An obvious partial explanation for why IQ has fallen in Scandinavia recently after a long period of increase is immigration that has taken place in recent decades. This is because, contrary to the politically correct view spread by the media and politicians, there is a clear link between ethnicity and intelligence at the population level.

East Asians (Japanese, Koreans and Chinese), have an average IQ of about 105. For individuals from the Middle East, it is in the range of 80- 90. White Europeans have an average intelligence around 100. For Sweden, these figures were previously in the range 103–105 according to various studies, but in IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002) the result had already dropped to 101.

Not a single serious researcher in the world has claimed that IQ differences between different peoples do not exist even if they differ on how big these differences are. What is discussed in the academic world is instead to what extent these differences are genetically determined and to what extent they are due to mental stimulation during childhood, nutritional intake and other environmental factors.

Studies published in peer-reviewed journals (Snyderman and Rothman, American Psychologist, 1987, 1988; Rindermann, Becker and Coyle, Frontiers in Psychology, 2016), show that intelligence researchers consider genetic differences to be the main cause of differences between different nations’ average IQs, followed by education and health.

Only 15 and 7 percent, respectively, of the researchers in the two studies believed that genetic differences had no effect at all on differences between different peoples’ average IQ.

The vast majority of experts therefore believe that the differences are partly due to genes and partly to the environment, based on the fact that lower IQ people who grew up with higher IQ adoptive parents have a significantly higher IQ than their ethnic group.

A controversial subject

It is a controversial subject, so much so that even intellectual giants such as the world-famous geneticist and Nobel laureate James D. Watson have had to endure being cancelled for not backing down from his decades-long research. Watson was stripped of all his honorary titles in 2019, as Chancellor Emeritus, Oliver R. Grace Professor Emeritus and Honorary Trustee, at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Institute in New York, where he held a leading role for decades.

The reason is that Watson in an interview broadcast on January 2, 2019 on a direct question refused to distance himself from his previous statements that intelligence is largely genetically determined and thus something that is affected by ethnicity:

In an interview with The Times of London in October 2007, he said: “There is no reasonable reason to assume that the intellectual ability of people who have been evolutionarily separated geographically would have developed identically. Our desire to regard everyone’s equal thinking ability as some kind of universal human heritage is not enough for it to really be so.”

Many of the countries from which Sweden and other Scandinavian countries have received immigrants have populations where people have a significantly lower average level of intelligence.

This does not mean that all individuals from these countries have a lower intelligence, but it shows that a considerably larger proportion struggle to manage systems to which they are not adapted.

According to researchers at Karolinska Institute, those with an intellectual disability are considerably more likely to commit sexual offenses than the average – as much as 6,5 times more according to the study.

Another example of this problem comes from Swedish Radio. In a report, SFI teacher Johanna Karlman in Borlänge told Swedish Radio’s reporter how adult immigrants were unable to interpret signs and image symbols, something that can often be linked to intelligence.

“The students do not even have the tradition of reading signs. Do not look at symbols, image interpretation is very difficult, numbers and learning the clock is very complicated,” she said.

It is a gloomy development, not only because societies with lower average intelligence worldwide function less well, but these societies are also affected by more violence and sexual crimes.

https://freewestmedia.com/2022/05/11/sweden-large-increase-in-individuals-with-intellectual-disabilities/

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s call to change the EU treaties, a move that would centralize power in Brussels, has been rejected by Polish conservatives and a total of 13 member states.

She made the proposal during a summit of EU leaders in Strasbourg, where one of the key reforms she put forward is the removal of the need for unanimity in decision-making on foreign affairs — in other words, the removal of veto power from individual member states.

“If the EU is to work effectively the principle of unanimity makes no sense in key EU policy areas,” argued von der Leyen. 

If such a proposal were to come to pass, then countries like Hungary, Czechia, and Austria would be potentially unable to veto the EU’s highly controversial proposal to place an embargo on Russian oil, a sanction that many experts have warned could crash the European economy.

The commission president’s proposal is being backed by the two most powerful nations of France and Germany, currently run by left-wing governments. Von der Leyen also hails from Germany, and like many left-liberal politicians, has long sought to limit the power of countries like Poland and Hungary which have blocked an agenda of mass immigration, progressive LGBT ideologies, and undemocratic reforms proposed by the EU which would limit national sovereignty.

“For us as a federal government, it is important that we reduce the power of veto making, which would allow the union to do much more,” said German Minister for Europe and Climate Anna Luhrmann.

French President Emmanuel Macron has also thrown his support behind transforming the EU treaties away from their founding principles.

“We need to reform our texts, it’s obvious,” Macron told a meeting at the European Parliament on May 9.

13 member states oppose treaty changes

However, such a move is being met with strong resistance from a variety of countries, and not just conservative-led ones.

“We do not support unconsidered and premature attempts to launch a process towards treaty change,” read a text signed by Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Denmark, Latvia, Finland, Lithuania, Malta, Slovenia, and Sweden. In total, 13 countries have now come out against the proposed treaty change.

Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro wrote on social media that “Berlin wants to rule Europe” and wishes to subjugate other EU member states. He was adamant that his political grouping Solidarity Poland, which is part of Poland’s ruling United Right coalition, would never accept a proposal that would give the European Commission so much power, according to Polish news outlet Dorzeczy.pl.

“It’s so simple and predictable. First we get the conditionality mechanism to break unruly countries. And now you remove their voting rights. Berlin wants to rule Europe and the rest of us are to listen and fall into line. We will never accept this,” Minister Ziobro posted on Twitter.

Ziobro’s reference to the conditionality mechanism refers to what Hungary and Poland both see as a radical power grab by Brussels, which has recently allowed the EU to freeze funding to Hungary and Poland over vaguely defined “rule-of-law” issues. Hungary, for example, has restricted the teaching of LGBT topics to children in school, arguing that sexuality beyond the basics of sexual education needs to stay out of the classroom, especially for younger children. The liberal establishment in Brussels is completely at odds with this position and is using the EU’s purse strings to pressure Hungary into changing the policy of its democratically elected government.

Ziobro has in the last few days been emphasizing that he and his grouping were right to oppose agreeing to the conditionality mechanism by which EU funds can be stopped for non-compliance with European Commission strictures on the rule of law. He has always argued that this mechanism would be used to blackmail Poland.

Ziobro, as well as the larger Law and Justice (PiS), are both opposed to the federalization of Europe and the abolishment of national sovreignty.

https://rmx.news/poland/berlin-wants-to-rule-europe-push-to-change-eu-treaties-slammed-by-polish-conservatives/

Australian consumers were flabbergasted to learn that thousands of avocados were being dumped amid the highest food price inflation in years. A Queensland resident described the discarded mountains of fruit as “tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of avocados going to waste”.

But farmers have defended the waste, saying it was the only way to secure a profit. Jan De Lai, a resident of Atherton in far north Queensland, said the fruit were perfectly fine but left to rot on a waste dump.

“Two trucks came in and just dumped big mounds of avocados. And I’d noticed that there’d also been a lot dumped there previously,” she told Australian outlet 7NEWS.

Australia is suffering its highest year-on-year increase in food price inflation since 2011, according to Michael Harvey, an agriculture industry analyst from Rabobank.

A board member of Avocados Australia, admitted that a large number of avocados were destroyed in this manner. Covid-19 lockdowns with restaurants and eateries closed down, as well as the Queensland and New South Wales floods this year has “disrupted” the market, he explained.

When asked why farmers were not lowering the price to drive up demand, he said it would not be worth it for farmers. “The cost of putting that stuff in a package, including the labour and the cost of packaging and the cost of transport is just not worthwhile.”

He added: “It doesn’t pay to put the money into packing the fruit or to pay someone the freight costs to send it down to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.”

During the pandemic, grocery channels performed better that the food service, causing a decrease in the consumption of avocados, he told 7NEWS.

In the longer term, the oversupply situation should correct itself “and there’s still growing demand”.

https://freewestmedia.com/2022/05/11/truckloads-of-avocados-dumped-despite-massive-food-price-hikes-in-oz/

Last month, a Dutch Member of Parliament, Geert Wilders — the leader of the Party for Freedom, which is the largest opposition party in the Netherlands’ Parliament — received two fatwas. Fatwas, officially, are Islamic religious opinions; they sometimes contain calls, however, to kill whomever might be considered insufficiently supportive of Islam or its prophet, Mohammad.

Wilders has dedicated his life to supporting freedom of speech and religious tolerance, and pointing out problems in radical, violent Islamist extremism. Because of this, he has been the target of frequent death threats by Islamist leaders. There are many who appear to prefer religious conformity, restricted speech and often the death penalty for what they might consider blasphemy.

As for this author, born in the Netherlands, it was always a particular pleasure for many years, while serving as a member of the US Congress, to meet with political visitors from the Netherlands to the US. A special one, with whom I often met, is Wilders.

What seems to have earned him these death threats is his unrelenting passion for freedom. To others, it seems, this commitment, is not a plus. Radical cleric Muhammad Abdullah Ahsan, for instance, recently proclaimed: “The rascals like Geert Wilders can’t be stopped by mere condemnation. He must be handed over to Muslims for public execution to ensure world peace.”

Another radical Islamist leader, Saad Hussain Rizvi Sahib, according to an online post, “issued a fatwa against the Arrogant [sic] Greet [sic] Wilders, to Kill [sic] him and he ordered Ummat-a-Muslima to spread this message to Muslims of Haaland and kill him as soon as possible.”

In response to these latest threats, Wilders tweeted: “It is no use threatening me, Muslims in Pakistan, Netherlands or anywhere else. Fatwas won’t stop me….. Freedom is my ideology. And no one will stop me.”

After years of countless threats, Wilders, since 2004, has been forced to live with around-the-clock security, generously provided by the Dutch government. “It is a situation,” he has said, “that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy”. “I am in prison,” he has said privately; “they are walking around free.”

“An Imam,” Wilders has noted, “who wants a politician dead is—however reprehensible—allowed to say so.”

Wilders’ first alleged “offense,” in 2004, was to have been part of a team that created a ten-minute film, Submission, produced and directed by Theo van Gogh, to dramatize the abuse of Muslim women that sometimes takes place based on three Quranic suras: 4:34, 2:222 and 24:2.

Film critic Phill Hall wrote:

“‘Submission’ was bold in openly questioning misogyny and a culture of violence against women because of Koranic interpretations. The questions raised in the film deserve to be asked: is it divine will to assault or kill women? Is there holiness in holding women at substandard levels, denying them the right to free will and independent thought? And ultimately, how can such a mindframe exist in the 21st century?”

After Submission (the English for the word “Islam”) was released, a 26 year old Dutch-Moroccan Muslim, Mohammad Bouyeri, murdered van Gogh by shooting him and slitting his throat. Bouyeri later told a Dutch court, “If I ever get free, I would do it again.” Papers on a knife stuck in van Gogh’s body warned that Wilders, among others, would be next. Since then, for 18 years, Wilders has had constantly to move from one safe house to another, unable to live in his own home or with the freedom to go out alone in public. His life, every minute, is in extreme danger.

Wilders, nonetheless, sees the personal sacrifice as the price to be paid to advocate for a free society and free speech, saying:

“[T]he point is, if you really speak out in favour of freedom, let alone if you use the freedom of speech. … [a]nd why Islam (I’m not talking about the people, but the ideology of Islam) why they are not free. … [y]ou either get fatwas as I got; you are taken to court by people who hate your guts. You are silenced in parliament….”

Free speech, he comments, is “absolute for the people who talk according to the wishes of the elite that are in charge. But if you diverge from that, it’s very relative, it’s non-existent.”

Wilders is indeed extremely outspoken. To the Dutch Parliament, he said, “Islam, is the Trojan Horse in Europe, and, “there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam’. As Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan said the other day, and I quote, ‘There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.'”

In New York, after the 9/11 attacks, he said, “We must never give a free hand to those who want to subjugate us.”

In London, he said, “I feel that the more Islam that we get in our societies the less freedom we get [and quoting George Orwell]: ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear'”.

Yet, despite years of death threats and a lifestyle no one would want, he remains a passionate advocate for free speech. This conviction — aligned with America’s First Amendment and dating back to our founding fathers, flies in the face of today’s trends in the West where “cancel culture” runs rampant and people try to silence those with whom they disagree.

Here in the US, you were not allowed to talk freely about the very real possibility that the Covid virus, which has killed more than six million people worldwide, may have escaped from a Chinese laboratory; and you were blocked from making any statements about treatments for Covid that were not approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. You also could not, in the middle of a national campaign for the presidency, talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop computer, filled with potentially damaging evidence that voters might find useful as they assessed which candidate to vote for.

The most recent assault on freedom of speech in the US now comes from the Department of Homeland Security, which is armed: the Disinformation Governance Board. According to its website, it supposedly “protects free speech.” The great American public, evidently sensing something awry, immediately renamed it “The Ministry of Truth” after the government’s propaganda center in George Orwell’s novel, 1984.

The American version is to be headed by a supposed “expert” on disinformation, Nina Jankowicz, who already has a record of unexpertly dismissing Hunter Biden’s easily verifiable laptop as a “Trump Campaign product;” supporting the notoriously false “Steele Dossier;” saying on National Public Radio: “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms,” and, while discussing “online abuse” against women, she actually recommended deploying the police:

“We need to at least upskill police officers and local law enforcement to deal with these things and perhaps start some collaboration… Online, that just doesn’t exist yet. So I’m hopeful for that architecture to come into play.”

The historian Robert Spencer commented:

“‘[D]isinformation’ and ‘hate’ re entirely subjective categories, based on the point of view of the person who is doing the evaluating…. [and] who gets to decide what ‘hate speech’ is? Nina Jankowicz, apparently.”

As the freed slave Frederick Douglass said in 1860:

“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power…. Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.”

Who really believes that the rhetoric of Wilders — or just about all of us, for that matter — would ever pass the scrutiny of the new Orwellian-sounding federal Disinformation Governance Board? Certainly not those who embrace free speech. In my years in Congress there were frequent votes about flag desecration, well-intended attempts by colleagues to ban defiling the American flag. I love our flag as much as anyone can, but voted every time against making flag desecration a crime. Freedom of speech in free nations should supersede imposing even more limitations on freedom.

As Wilders receives still new fatwas, we would do well recognize the price that he and others have paid for expressing their points of view. As the powers that be continue clamping down on the free speech we all should cherish, we must recognize the value and strength that people like Wilders, and even those who burn flags, bring to the public square. We may or may not agree with their views, but should recognize that through their freedom of expression they enrich the debate and discourse. They make us stronger, not weaker.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18516/wilders-islamic-death-threats

Turkey has long been heralded by the international media as a “secular” and “modern” country. But in reality, it is the absolute opposite. Non-Muslim communities – Christians, Jews, Alevis, Yazidis, agnostics, deists, atheists, and all others – are systematically victimized by discriminatory acts, including violations of their human rights, their convictions, their faith, and their freedom of speech.

A 2022 report by the Norwegian Helsinki Committee’s Freedom of Belief Initiative, entitled “An Appeal to Move Forward from Aspirations to Actions: Monitoring Report on the Right to Freedom of Religion or Belief in Turkey,” reveals Turkey’s decades-long abuses against non-Muslim communities across the country.

The Committee lists some of the violations of the rights of non-Muslims:

• Atheists, deists, and agnostics encounter daily infringement on their right to freedom of thought and belief in the workplace, family, and the education system. Atheist, deist and agnostic parents and students do not have the right to exemption from the compulsory religious instruction in the Religious Culture and Ethics lessons.
• Those who express criticism of religion or belief in general, or of specific interpretations, especially those of Islam, face complaints and risk being prosecuted under the Turkish Penal Code.
• No religious or belief community in Turkey has a legal personality as such. Religious or belief groups and their representative institutions, such as Patriarchates or the Chief Rabbinate, lack legal entity status and as such, cannot access the court system, open bank accounts, buy property or officially employ their own religious officials and provide social security for them. Individuals belonging to religious, or belief groups organize themselves as associations or establish foundations with religious intent, though these are also subject to limitations.
• Important restrictions continue to hamper the associative capacity of the non-Muslim community foundations. The foundations’ board elections have been obstructed since 2013. As a result, the functioning of the community foundations and the beneficiary communities continue to be paralyzed and weak.
• Acquiring place of worship status remains an ongoing challenge for several religious communities. This is particularly true for the Alevi, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Protestant communities. The kingdom halls of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the churches of the Protestant community and the cemevis of the Alevi community are in particularly precarious positions due to this lack of the official place of worship status. The public authorities have systematically denied place of worship status to these sites, in disregard of relevant ECtHR [European Court of Human Rights] judgments.
• Many religious buildings are on the verge of ruin and at risk of being lost even though they are officially registered as cultural heritage sites by the Cultural Heritage Preservation Regional Boards under the umbrella of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
• Furthermore, the impact of past loss of properties and associated foundations belonging to a wide range of religious or belief groups continues to be a scar in need of attention. For non-Muslim communities, the process of returning community foundation property that was unjustly taken has not been completed; the damage has yet to be fully remedied.

The report gives as examples the Hagia Sophia former Church and the Chora former Church in Constantinople that were converted into mosques in 2020.

“Both Hagia Sophia and Chora were originally built as churches, converted into mosques during the Ottoman period, and then converted into museums during the Republican Period,” the report adds.

In 2005, the Association of Permanent Foundations and Service to Historical Artifacts and Environment filed a lawsuit to challenge the status of the Chora Church as a museum. In November 2019, the Council of State, Turkey’s highest administrative court, ordered that it was to be reconverted to a mosque. A Presidential Decree opening the Chora (Kariye) Mosque to worship was published in the Official Gazette on 21 August 2020. In October 2020 the images of Jesus Christ, frescoes and icons in the museum were covered by white curtains.

In July 2020, the Turkish Council of State Tenth Chamber annulled the 1934 Cabinet Decree making it a museum. The Council of State ruled unanimously to nullify the 1934 Cabinet Decree as contrary to the law. Almost immediately after the ruling, President [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan signed a presidential decree on 10 July 2020 turning the site back into a mosque. The decree transferred the administration of the Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya-i Kebir) Mosque to the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, DİB or Diyanet), a public body under the Presidency responsible for the administration of all mosques in Turkey.”

• No measures have been taken to eliminate interference [of the government] in the internal affairs of the Armenian Orthodox, Jewish, and Greek Orthodox communities in the appointment of religious leaders. This is despite the finding of the Turkish Constitutional Court that the interference in the latest election of the Armenian Patriarch was not prescribed by law.
• Glaring inequalities in the legal restrictions facing training religious personnel other than Sunni Muslim religious personnel and in public resources allocated to the training of Sunni Muslim religious personnel versus the denial of resources to the training of other religious personnel, have not been remedied.
• Religious communities, such as the Alevi community, Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, Armenian Patriarchate and Protestant community, have been unable to train religious staff within Turkey.
• Turkish authorities have continued to issue travel restrictions targeting Christian foreigners. These restrictions interfere with several human rights including freedom of religion or belief, the right to fair trial, freedom of movement, and protection of aliens against unlawful expulsion. This practice also impacts the Protestant community since, not being permitted to train their own teachers, they rely on foreign religious workers.
• Public funding of religious services is provided solely for the Sunni Islamic community. This is in contradiction with the prohibition of discrimination and with the state’s obligation to observe the principle of equality.
• As a result of the denial of public religious services, requested by the Alevi applicants, and the non-recognition of the Alevi faith by the state, Alevis are unable to fully exercise their right to freedom of religion or belief.
• The child’s right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, their right to participation, as well as parents’ rights to raise their children in line with their own philosophical or religious views, are subject to systematic interference in Turkey’s public education system. The mandatory Religious Culture and Ethics (RCE) lessons, including the exemption mechanism, the optional religion courses, Islamic religious practices in schools and high school placement exam constitute substantial interference in the protection of, among others, the child’s right to freedom of religion or belief.
• Women across different religious or belief communities face significant obstructions to free will in the exercise of their human rights, including freedom of religion or belief. Some of the central findings of this report demonstrate that women continue to be especially vulnerable in their homes, women are prone to pressures from secular and religious segments of society and women often feel compelled to live double lives. Furthermore, men continue to exercise a monopoly over the interpretation of religious dogma and religious offices. Decision-making processes in religious or belief communities also remain dominated by men.

All these rights violations are rooted in or inspired by Islamic teachings.

Islam does not allow freedom of religion and threatens the death penalty for apostasy. As the website “The Religion of Peace” (ROP) puts it, “The only freedom of belief in Islam is the freedom to become Muslim.” The ROP website also notes:

Muslims are told to fight unbelievers until they are either dead, converted to Islam, or in a permanent state of subjugation under Muslim domination. Allowing people of other faiths to live and worship independently of Islamic rule is not an option.

And in the Islamic teachings and traditions, there is no room for a secular political system in which all people are treated as equals.

While the believers of all other religions and non-religious citizens are oppressed and deprived of their human rights, one of the most important institutions of the country is the Presidency of Religious Affairs, a Sunni Islamic institution, referred to in Turkish simply as the Diyanet. It was established in 1924. The President of Turkey appoints the President of the Diyanet. Provincial muftis, and imams working in Sunni mosques are appointed by the Diyanet. With an enormous budget, a plentiful staff, broad activities and a great sphere of influence, the Diyanet is a bigger institution than many ministries of Turkey.

The institutions and associations belonging to non-Muslims, however, are subject to organized discrimination. The demographic collapse of Christians and Jews has made the problem even worse. Today only 0.1% of Turkey’s whole population is Christian or Jewish, because of decades of persecution culminating in the genocide at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Massacres swept across the Christian population of Anatolia from 1894 to 1924. During the three decades, around 2.5 million Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks were murdered by Turks. The historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi detail the crimes committed during this period in their book The Thirty-Year Genocide.

Also, in 1934, Jews in eastern Thrace were exposed to a pogrom. From 1941 to 1942, Turkey enlisted all Christian and Jewish males in the military, including the elderly and mentally ill. They were forced to work under horrendous conditions in labor battalions. In 1942, a wealth tax was imposed to eliminate Christians and Jews from the economy. In 1955, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews were targeted by a pogrom in Istanbul. And in 1964, the remaining Greeks were forcefully expelled from Turkey. All of the above contributed to the ethnic cleansing of Christians and Jews in Turkey.

Even after those crimes, Turkey arbitrarily continues to violate the rights of the non-Muslims who are still living in the country, as the most recent report by the Norwegian Helsinki Committee’s Freedom of Belief Initiative has once more revealed.

It is the Islamic government of Turkey and much of its Islamic society that are responsible for this continual prejudice and abuse of human rights. Dissidents living under such Islamic dictatorships, however, are not allowed to have public debates about these issues, because of the ideological refusal to recognize their freedom of speech if they are “kafirs” or “infidels” and ever dared to question historic facts, and above all, Islam.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/turkey-freedom-religion-only-islam-uzay-bulut/

From ten to a hundred. On Tuesday May 10, a small communitarian Muslim political party, the Union des Démocrates Musulmans de France (UDMF), announced it would nominate one hundred candidates in the next parliamentary elections, Le Figaro reported. The UDMF was founded in 2012 by Nagib Azergui, a telecommunications engineer, and had fielded a dozen candidates for the 2017 parliamentary elections. Five years later, with these hundred candidacies, mainly concentrated in the strongholds of Muslim community elections (48 candidates in the Île-de-France region, 16 in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes), the aim is to “make the movement permanent”.

On its campaign leaflet, the UDMF announces its position: A woman is depicted wearing a hijab, the Islamic veil. The party sees itself as openly Islamist and wants to make the “fight against Islamophobia and xenophobia” its priority. The movement had also nominated candidates for the 2019 European elections, the 2020 local elections and the 2021 regional elections. The UDMF is regularly denounced as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that is incidentally banned in numerous Muslim countries such as Egypt and Syria. Nagib Azergui had denounced that the Ministry of the Interior dissolved two associations in 2021, the Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France (CCIF) and BarakaCity, both also close to the Brotherhood.

https://www.valeursactuelles.com/regions/auvergne-rhone-alpes/no_departement/no_agglomeration/politique/un-parti-communautariste-musulman-presentera-une-centaine-de-candidats-aux-elections-legislatives

UPDATE (II): Media conceal the word “Allah” and distort it to “God”

UPDATE

A man was stabbed in front of the Sévigné private Catholic high school in Marseille (13th district) at around 6pm on Tuesday when he went to pick up his children. He was taken to hospital in serious condition and his condition is very critical. The victim is said to have suffered several knife wounds and was hit in the neck area, according to our information. He was in cardiac arrest at the time of his treatment by the emergency services.

(…) The 23-year-old man is said to have shouted that he acted “in the name of Allah”, according to a source familiar with the case. He is already known to the police. (…)Actu17

According to information from TF1-LCI, a father of a family was stabbed to death outside a private Catholic school in Marseille ’13th arrondissement’ by a 23-year-old man who claimed to be “acting in the name of Allah”. The perpetrator, who was known for drug trafficking, was arrested and taken into police custody. The victim suffered life-threatening injuries.

According to initial findings, the attacker is said to be suffering from psychological problems. A connection between the victim and the perpetrator has not been established at this time. TF1 Info , actu17

https://www.fdesouche.com/2022/05/10/marseille-un-pere-de-famille-poignarde-devant-un-college-par-un-homme-disant-agir-au-nom-de-dieu/

by Giulio Meotti

When Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1989, Viking Penguin, the British and American publisher of the novel, was subjected to daily threats from Islamists. As Daniel Pipes wrote, the London office resembled “a battlefield”, with police on guard, metal detectors and an escort for visitors. At the New York office, trained dogs sniffed mail packages and the offices were called a “sensitive place.”

Many bookstores were attacked and many others refused to sell the book. Viking spent three million dollars on security measures, but it never faltered. Today, Western publishers all self-censor. And London capitulates to intimidation.

A popular children’s book from the Biff, Chip, and Kipper series has just been retired following complaints that its portrayal of the Muslim people was racist, the Telegraph said. Oxford University Press is the publisher of The Blue Eye, in which young characters are transported to a foreign land with the help of a magic key. Children gather at a busy street market, which appears to be somewhere in the Middle East, where men are wearing white turbans and a woman is dressed in a niqab. The publisher said: “The book has been completely withdrawn from print and we have destroyed our remaining stock of the book, although a small number of copies may still remain in the supply chain. Some older titles may still be available in bookstores or as second-hand copies.”

“And it doesn’t matter, as the Times recalls, that” millions of children were trained in England on the books of Biff, Chip and Kipper”. Turbans and niqabs are not appropriate, says the BBC.

Islam is treated in white gloves in so-called multiculturalism.

A translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, translated into Flemish by Lies Lavrijsen, recently removed Muhammad from Hell in order not to be “uselessly offensive”, as editor Blossom Books put it. Antwerp translator Lies Lavrijsen removed the words about Muhammad. “In Dante, Muhammad suffers a raw and humiliating fate, just because he is the precursor of Islam”, says the publisher. “Thieves or murderers in Dante’s hell have made real mistakes, while creating a religion cannot be reprehensible “.

In Germany, Gabriele Brinkmann, a famous novelist, was left without a publishing house. According to the publishing house, Droste, her novel Wem Ehre Gebuhrt could have “angered Muslims” and exposed the publisher to intimidation. So the writer was asked to censor some passages, but she refused and lost the publishing house.

Abdel-Samad’s book, Der Islamische Faschismus: Eine Analyze, was burned at the stake not in Cairo by the Islamists, but in France by some cowardly publishers. The Parisian publishing house Piranha had acquired the rights to translate the work into French and there was also a release date on Amazon. But the publishing house reversed at the last moment.

The head of culture at the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten, Flemming Rose, had to publish his book on the “tyranny of silence” at a tiny publishing house of a think tank, the Cato Institute. Because as Rose explained to the Washington Post, “other publishers have hesitated in fear.”

The contract with the publishing giant Little & Brown of the famous British journalist Julie Burchill was torn apart after the accusation of “Islamophobic comments” (it was then published by a tiny publishing house).

“The Jewel of Medina”, the novel by the American Sherry Jones on the life of Muhammad’s third wife, was bought and then trashed by the mega publishing house Random House, which had already paid the author a large advance and already launched a ambitious promotional campaign.

In Salman Rushdie’s time, many Western publishing houses bowed to intimidation. Christian Bourgois, a French publishing house, refused to publish the book after buying the rights, and so did the German publisher Kiepenheuer. Other publishers chose to tame Rushdie’s killers. Among these, the Oxford University Press which decided to participate in the Tehran Book Fair together with two American publishing houses, McGraw-Hill and John Wiley, despite the request of Viking Penguin, l’Publisher of Rushdie, to boycott.

We recall that those were the years in which Rushdie’s Japanese translator was killed, the Norwegian one took a pistol shot and the Italian one from Mondadori a knife in Milan.

Today the ancient fear of Islam has been welded to the new Woke hegemony. “Wokism has just begun” Pascal Bruckner writes this week in Le Figaro. “It is introduced as a product imported from the United States, especially on campuses (synthesis of asylums and re-education camps) with all the seduction of novelty and chic. It is a passing fad that is turning into a leftist ideology and is destined to consolidate itself for many years in the media, at school and in business. It will disappear only when public opinion gets tired of the nonsense or professed abominations of gender, identity, race. It will take a whole generation ”.

Let’s get ready for a long wave of censorship. The West is now the west. A waning civilization.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/327294

Anti-Semitism is much more prevalent among Muslims in Germany than the average population. This is the result of a representative survey conducted by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research on behalf of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) Berlin. According to the survey, almost 22 percent of the population in Germany share anti-Semitic attitudes. Among Muslim respondents, the figure is almost 46 percent. More than half of Muslims (54 per cent) believe that Jews exploit their status as victims of the genocide in the Second World War for their own benefit. In the population as a whole, 34 percent see it that way.

Every second Muslim (49 per cent) shares the opinion that Jews have too much power in business and finance. On average, 23 per cent of the population say this. One third of Muslims (33 per cent) are convinced that Jews are responsible for many economic crises. The survey also shows that those Muslims who attend mosque frequently agree more often with anti-Semitic prejudices than those who attend services occasionally, rarely or never.

The director of AJC Berlin, Remko Leemhuis, said: “The available figures unfortunately confirm what we had feared for a long time. Anti-Semitic attitudes are particularly widespread among Muslims.

https://www.idea.de/artikel/antisemitismus-unter-muslimen-staerker-verbreitet-als-im-schnitt