Month: November 2022
Sunak and Hunt are ushering in a new socialist era for the UK – as well as readying to sell us back into EU servitude!
India: Sex with minors an offence even after a valid marriage, Kerala High Court refuses to exclude Muslim personal law from POCSO Act
On November 19, Kerala High Court ruled that a marriage between Muslims under personal law cannot be excluded from the Protection Of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. Justice Bechu Kurain Thomas said if one of the partners in the marriage is a minor, offences under POCSO Act will apply. The validity of the marriage would not be considered in such cases.
Notably, Punjab and Haryana High Courts, Delhi High Court and Gujarat High Court had ruled differently from what Kerala High Court ruled. The three state High Courts had favoured personal law above POCSO. However, on October 30, Karnataka High Court ruled POCSO would override personal law.
Justice Thomas said, “With respect to the learned Judges, I am unable to agree to the proposition laid down in those decisions that an offence under the POCSO Act will not get attracted against a Muslim marrying a minor.”
The court was hearing a bail plea moved by a 31-year-old Muslim man accused of kidnapping and raping a minor. He claimed to have gotten married to the minor as per Muslim personal law in March 2021. Thiruvalla Police Station booked the accused under sections 366, 376(2) (m) and 376(3) of the Indian Penal Code and under sections 5(j)((ii), 5(i) and section 6 of the POCSO Act.
The FIR in the matter was registered based on intimation received by a doctor of a health care centre where the victim had gone for a checkup for her pregnancy. The accused allegedly abducted the minor from West Bengal and “committed repeated penetrative sexual assaults during the period before 31.08.2022, due to which the victim became pregnant and thereby, the accused committed the alleged offences.”
The accused’s counsel argued that as Muslim personal law allows the marriage of girls below the age of 18, he cannot be prosecuted for rape of provisions under the POCSO Act. On the contrary, the state argued POCSO Act would override personal law.
Justice Thomas said, though, as per The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937, all questions related to marriage would be divided as per the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) after the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 came to force, “It is questionable whether the said personal law will prevail over the special statute relating to marriages. Under section 3 of the said Act, a child marriage shall be voidable at the option of the contracting party, who is a child. But section 12 makes a child marriage void in certain circumstances.”
The court noted that the investigation officer alleged the accused enticed the victim without the knowledge of her parents. At that time, the victim was only just over 14 years. The validity of the marriage was also put under scanner by the court.
The court ruled, “However, the petitioner is arrested for the offences under the POCSO Act as well as the IPC. The POCSO Act is a special statute enacted specifically for the protection of children from sexual offences. Sexual exploitation of every nature against a child is treated as an offence. Marriage is not excluded from the sweep of the statute.”
The court further added that Section 42A of the POCSO act categorically says that if there are inconsistencies with provisions of any other law, the POCSO Act will override other laws.
Multiple courts stated that Muslim girls could marry at the age of 15
The Kerala High Court’s judgement saying POCSO oversides Personal Law is significant because, in the past, several High Courts have ruled that marriage of Muslim girls above 15 years of age or those who have attained puberty is legal as per Muslim Personal Law, which is based on Sharia Law.
In a recent judgement, the Punjab and Haryana High Court said that a Muslim female aged 15 years and above can legally marry a person of her choice with her own consent and willingness. On October 28, Punjab and Haryana Court reaffirmed that a Muslim girl who reaches the age of 15 can marry whoever she wants, and such a marriage would not violate the Prohibition of Child Marriage (PCM) Act. Notably, according to the personal laws in Islam (Sharia), the age of attaining puberty is 15.
The High Court also reassured that Muslim girls will continue to be governed by Islamic personal laws. The Court had added that such a marriage would not contradict the terms of Section 12 of the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006.
However, the Supreme Court will be examining the matter on the petition filed by the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), challenging the said judgement.
In June 2012, Delhi High Court had said in a judgment that a Muslim girl could marry a person of her choice at the age of 15 if she had attained puberty.
In December 2014, Gujarat High Court said that the marriageable age of Muslim girls was 15 years and above.
In December 2021, Punjab and Haryana Court had asked the authorities to provide protection to a 17-year-old girl who had gotten married to a 33-year-old Muslim man suggesting that as per Islamic law, a girl above the age of 15 can marry a person of her choice.
https://www.opindia.com/2022/11/kerala-high-court-refuse-exclude-muslim-personal-law-pocso-act/
Protest held over housing of asylum seekers in Dublin
Hundreds of protesters gathered in East Wall, Dublin to protest at the housing of a number of asylum seekers in the old ESB building in the area.
A group of between 200 and 300 people, many local residents, stopped traffic on the road during the protest.
They said they were angry at the accommodation of male-only asylum seekers there and that they had not been consulted.
The protest began to break up at around 3.30pm with a small group remaining near the entrance to the building, which has been cordoned off with barriers.
Gardaí were in attendance.
As the protest was taking place, four men carrying plastic bags and luggage arrived at the building and went inside, with a small number of the protesters shouting at them.
The Department of Children, Equality, Disability and Youth has been contacted for comment.
Independent Councillor for Dublin North Inner City Nial Ring, who attended the protest, said the lack of consultation with the local community had caused a lot of anger.
He said he believed the asylum seekers being moved to the accommodation were not recent arrivals to Ireland and that they had been moved to Dublin from other parts of the country.
He said he believed a lot of people living in the area would open their hearts to those fleeing war and he hoped that someone in the Government would have the courtesy to inform residents about who is moving to their area.
He said Government policy in this area was causing a lot of disquiet.
Dublin City Councillor for the Green Party Janet Horner said the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth had briefed local representatives on what was happening at the former ESB site.
The Department is expected to circulate an information leaflet to all residents in the area over the next week.
In its briefing, the Department said the former ESB office building on East Wall Road has been converted into an accommodation centre in response to the extraordinary pressure being put on Ireland’s international protection system and a lack of available accommodation for international protection applicants.
The Department says that current projections indicate a shortfall of 15,000 beds for asylum seekers by December and it expects that the number of Ukrainians and International Protection applicants arriving is expected to remain at elevated levels.
Cllr Horner, who also represents the North-Inner city, said, whilst some men have been among the the first to arrive at the Two Gateway Building in the area, that families will follow in due course.
She said some of the families who would move to the site were not new to the area and had already been accommodated in nearby hotels.
The building has the capacity to house 380 people who are International Protection applicants and 80 “singles” have been among the first to arrive.
Accommodation is spread over five floors, with families set to be accommodated on different floors from single men and women. Access to the floors will be controlled.
Residents staying in the accommodation are to be provided with three meals per day, with each person receiving towels, toiletries and linen that will be changed twice a week.
According to the briefing, Gateway Integration Ltd will operate the site under a contract for the next 12 months.
There will be round-the-clock security, with a duty manager and a senior manager on call.
The Department says emergency centres have been opened across Ireland, with in excess of 40 accommodation locations used since January, across 13 counties.
It says that in Dublin, similar sites have been, or are currently in operation in Dublin 6, Dublin 11, Dublin 14, Dublin 22, and South County Dublin.
https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2022/1119/1337137-east-wall-protest/
Will Elon Musk be the game changer in Ukraine?
Tesla founder Elon Musk is once again becoming an important military factor in the Ukrainian theater of war. Musk has decided to take around 1 300 of his Starlink satellites, which previously covered the territory of Ukraine, off the grid due to financing problems.
This is a heavy blow for the Ukrainian military as well as for the Kiev government. Early in the war, Musk had provided Ukraine with thousands of Starlink mobile terminals, which the government used to keep its communications open.
More importantly, the Starlink network was often the only means of communication for the Ukrainian military, and thanks to additionally developed software, the Ukrainian units were able to record great success in engaging Russian targets using Starlink.
“Starlink helped us a lot when it came to the blockades in our cities and occupied territories. Sometimes we completely lost touch with those regions,” Ukrainian President Zelensky told Business Insider.
But that seems over now. Due to funding problems, Musk’s space company SpaceX took 1 300 satellites offline. Musk is demanding $2 500 per terminal from the Ukrainian military to keep them running. The total cost increased to 20 million US dollars. The result: the Ukrainian military can no longer – or does not want to – bear these costs.
SpaceX said it has already spent $100 million funding Starlink in Ukraine and will not do so again. The Pentagon should therefore take over a larger part of the financing. But the Pentagon also recently refused to pay for the costs. Negotiations on the matter are still ongoing.
Musk had recently made himself unpopular with the Ukrainian government with his peace plan. This provided for the cession of territory and the repetition of referendums in the areas attached to Russia under UN supervision. Kiev responded with outrage and personal threats.
Before the Midterm elections in the US, Musk had urged “independent-minded” Americans to vote for the Republican Party.
Musk’s Republican leaning or fading energy?
The Ukrainian government has meanwhile warned its Western allies that Kiev would not be able to secure heat and power due to intensified Russian attacks on its energy grid, according to sources. Without energy, Starlink becomes more or less useless.
Ukraine, which is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to European anti-corruption officials, thus remains a bottomless pit. Not only are weapons from the West and even aid supplies being diverted to the black market on a large scale – even gigantic money transfers from the West are simply disappearing.
In March, the Kiev government launched a fundraising campaign for all supporters of Ukraine with the bankrupt crypto provider FTX. The funds were then supposed go to the Ukrainian National Bank and be invested there on the one hand for humanitarian aid and on the other hand in military armaments.
A rumor is circulating in US financial circles that enormous sums of additional unofficial US military aid for the Ukrainian government were laundered at FTX. Kiev is said not only to have repeatedly speculated with the aid money “in the short term”, but also to have invested billions in FTX in the long term.
Shortly after the start of the campaign, the news platform CoinDesk reported in March that 48 million euros were donated within just a few hours after the start of “Aid for Ukraine”. Since then, industry experts speculate, much larger sums may have flowed into the coffers of the corrupt FTX outfit.
However, neither the Kiev government nor President Zelensky need fear the consequences of this particular debacle. Supporting Ukraine has been far too important an agenda for the Biden administration for triple-digit speculative losses on Western aid money to be a valid counterargument. US Secretary of State Blinken has assured Kiev that his administration would continue to support Ukraine “as long as necessary“.
https://freewestmedia.com/2022/11/20/will-elon-musk-be-the-game-changer-in-ukraine-2/
Qatar, invites radical preacher Zakir Naik ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, and he will give religious lectures throughout the tournament in the country
As the 2022 FIFA World Cup begins in Qatar, notorious radical Islamic preacher Zakir Naik, who is accused of money laundering and delivering hate speech in India, has been invited to the country to preach Islam. According to reports, Zakir Naik has already reached Doha in Qatar ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, and he will give religious lectures throughout the tournament in the country.
On Social Media, this information was shared by a number of persons and media organisations. It was shared on Twitter by Faisal Alhajri, a presenter at the Qatari state-owned sports channel Alkass. He took to Twitter and wrote, “Preacher Sheikh Zakir Naik is in Qatar during the World Cup and will give many religious lectures throughout the World Cup”
The news was also confirmed by the famous entertainment magazine ScreenMix. They wrote, “Qatar calls for the largest Islamic preacher d. Zakir Naik to deliver religious lectures during the 2022 World Cup”
Videos show Zakir Naik arriving at a FIFA World Cup venue in Qatar.
It is notable that Zakir Naik, who is in Qatar to deliver religious sermons, holds similar views on the Islamic prophet as remarked by suspender BJP leader Nupur Sharma. Qatar had vehemently protested when Nupur Sharma had talked about Prophet Mohammad’s marriage, and it was one of the first countries to summon the Indian government over the controversy that erupted following the remarks by ex-Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson Nupur Sharma.
In June of this year, Qatar summoned India’s ambassador to the country and delivered protest memos expressing the Gulf nations’ strong “rejection and condemnation” of the BJP leader’s comments about the Islamic prophet. Zakir Naik had said that Prophet Mohammad had met his wife Aisha when she was six, and the marriage was consummated when her age was 9 years, quoting Islamic texts. He had even denied claims that Aisha was actually 19, not 9, saving this was a distortion by modern scholars of what was mentioned in Hadiths.
Naik is wanted by Indian police on suspicion of money laundering and hate speech in India. India barred Naik’s Islamic Research Foundation from operating, accusing him of inciting and assisting its followers in promoting or attempting to foster sentiments of animosity, hatred, or ill-will amongst religious communities and groups. After departing India in 2016, Zakir Naik fled to Malaysia.
On March 30, 2022, the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) issued a notice declaring the Islamic Research Foundation an illegal association and banning it for the next five years. This organization was established by fundamentalist preacher Zakir Naik, who is accused of radicalising Muslim teenagers through his ‘religious talks.’
Zakir Naik’s Islamist preachings and its violent consequences
The radical Islamist activities of Zakir Naik have been well documented. In 2016, terrorists involved in the Dhaka blast case admitted that they were influenced by the preacher’s speeches.
In 2019, Zakir was banned from giving speeches in Malaysia after he made racist comments against Hindus and Chinese Malaysians. He was interrogated for hours in connection to the same. Zakir Naik is wanted in India in cases involving money laundering. The government of India had taken his channel, Peace TV, off the air for peddling hate propaganda.
https://www.opindia.com/2022/11/zakir-naik-invited-to-qatar-to-preach-islam-during-fifa-word-cup/
A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked British Education (Peter Hitchens)
World Cup chief makes crass remark about the West to please his Qatari hosts
By Monica Showalter
For those who dislike the World Cup, here’s a new reason to dislike the organization behind it even more:
FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s near hour-long speech on the eve of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar has been described as “crass” and an “insult” to migrant workers by human rights groups.
In an explosive monologue at the start of a news conference in Doha, Infantino – the boss of world soccer’s governing body – accused Western critics of Qatar’s human rights record of hypocrisy.
“What we Europeans have been doing for the last 3,000 years, we should be apologizing for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons,” he said. “Reform and change takes time. It took hundreds of years in our countries in Europe. It takes time everywhere, the only way to get results is by engaging … not by shouting.”
The tournament, which starts on Sunday, is the first World Cup to be held in the Middle East, but it has been mired in controversy, with much of the build-up focusing on human rights, from the death of migrant workers and the conditions many have endured in Qatar, to LGBTQ and women’s rights.
That’s from CNN, which has billed the remarks as ‘insensitive’ to human rights organizations, which document the slave-labor conditions of much of Qatar’s expatriate work force, the people who sweep floors and clean toilets, from countries such as India, Pakistan and the Philippines.
No argument with that.
But what’s missed here in these “crass” remarks, (a good word for them), is the FIFA chief’s incredible willingness to dismiss 3,000 years of Western civilization as something to be apologized for, all to please his big-dollar Qatari hosts.
The whole Qatar situation is a very strange one, reeking of corruption, with some corruption accusations leveled against Qatar in the mere selection of the country for the once-every-four-years soccer championship, even though the country has no significant soccer presence globally, the inhospitality of the country in terms of its harsh desert climate, which isn’t the best for soccer-playing, and the cultural issues, such as the Muslim intolerance of alcohol — which has been forbidden in their soccer stadium, which rather goes against global soccer tradition.
Somehow, they have a lot of money, and somehow, they got the contract for the games. Now they’ve got the FIFA chief denigrating and downgrading the West in a bid to create equivalencies which just aren’t there.
What a game. Gonna be hard to follow that one, given the wokesterim that has infiltrated even that international league.
Is Multiculturalism Destroying Western National Identities?
Twenty years ago, the United Nations published a document titled “Replacement Migration: Is it A Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?“. It was not a right-wing conspiracy theory, but a sophisticated working plan for Western democracies dealing with demographic aging. It has since gone mainstream. Just read what Richard Thaler, a Nobel laureate in economics, said this week: “We need more immigrants to pay pensions”.
A recent article by Elsa Fornero, former Italian Minister of Labor, also explains the mentality of those who govern Europe and how they prepare the demise of its civilization:
“If the Italian population ‘disappeared’, we need not worry, because there will likely be someone ready to take its place; just look at the other side of the Mediterranean, where countries with highly dynamic populations and an age structure very different from ours, with many infants, children and young people and relatively few elderly people, appear. By accepting demographic decline as a social paradigm, by adapting to a society not only with fewer schools, uninhabited villages, abandoned houses and less mobility but also fewer cinemas, theaters, tourism and sports facilities, we are implicitly telling them that our land it is already theirs”.
Western elites openly treat immigration as a mere economic resource to support welfare systems that would otherwise be bankrupt. They also forbid any discussion of the impact that these immigration numbers are having on the culture, customs and identity of a society. The very concept of “identity” is viewed with suspicion and branded as a “racist” fantasy.
Canada, (pop. 40 million) is now setting record goals in immigration history, with a plan to bring in 1.45 million more legal immigrants by 2025. The New York Times explains that in the two largest cities, Toronto and Vancouver, 60% of the population in just ten years could be composed of ethnic minorities.
Multiculturalism is becoming a key tool in the dissolution of national identities and the label of “populism” serves to exorcise a rational reaction to the great fears that have besieged Western societies for several decades: the fear of people facing massive, unregulated immigration; the fear that Western culture will dissolve into a blob of relativism and parallel societies (even The Economist denounced it); the fear of countries without external borders or internal moral legitimacy. It is the fear of a cultural disintegration that has been insidiously validating the probability the sociological majority disappearing and, ultimately, society itself.
New official British figures reveal that 10 million people (1 in 6) in England and Wales were born abroad; an increase of 2.5 million since 2011 despite government pledges to attempt to limit immigration.
Today, 90% of Britain’s demographic growth comes from immigration.
The same shift is taking place in Sweden. In 2015 alone, Sweden welcomed163,000 immigrants, the equivalent of 1.65% of its total population. Combined with other years, it is a demographic revolution: As of 2015, approximately 17% of the population were foreign-born.
“The Swedish Parliament unanimously decided in 1975 that Sweden is a multicultural country”, wrote Kyösti Tarvainen, a professor at the Aalto University of Helsinki.
“At that time, more than 40 percent of the immigrants were my compatriots, Finns. The situation has changed: in 2019, 88 percent of net immigrants were non-Western and 52 percent were Muslims. Therefore, there has been a huge cultural change in the immigrant population, as its largest group has gone from being Finnish to being Muslim… with immigration unchanged, ethnic Swedes will be a minority in 2065.”
Demographic change in a European country that has allowed itself to be submerged by non-European immigrants is rapid, often extremely rapid. As the French demographer Michèle Tribalat explained:
“Malmö had 328,000 inhabitants on December 31, 2016; Lessebo had nearly 8,800 on the same date. Lessebo is a town 230 kilometers northeast of Malmö. In 2002, 48 percent of children born that year in Malmö were born abroad or in Sweden to at least one parent born abroad, compared with 12 percent in Lessebo. In 2016, the percentage was 58 percent in Malmö and 57 percent in Lessebo”.
The old Lessebo no longer exists.
Tino Sanandaji, a Swedish economist of Kurdish-Iranian origin who wrote Mass Challenge, a bestseller on how Sweden is imploding due to multiculturalism, notedthat “Contrary to what some ideological historians would have us believe, Sweden has never been a country of immigration.”
“Sweden has long been a homogeneous country and it is only in recent decades that it has begun to welcome a large number of non-European refugees. Until 1985, Sweden had very few non-Western migrants, only 2 percent of the population, because the Social Democrats, in power before 1968, were a fairly conservative party on these issues. But Swedish politics became more radical and in the second half of the 1980s the government began welcoming large numbers of migrants. In the period 1985-2015, asylum immigration in Sweden was about four times higher per capita than in other Western European countries, so that the share of the population of non-Western origin increased from 2 percent to 20 percent of the total population. Governments then believed that Sweden’s social protection system would avoid the problems already observed in France and other European countries. The facts proved them wrong, but it took a long time to admit it”.
That is why Swedish people recently voted in a conservative government. It is their last chance to stop this unprecedented national self-destruction.
In France now, nearly a third — 29.6% — of the population aged 0 to 4 is of non-European origin compared to 17.1% aged 18 to 24, 18.8% aged 40 to 44, 7.6% aged 60-64, and 3.1% over 80. This was recently revealed by Insee, according to the French National Statistics Institute, which examined the last three generations. 16.2% of all children between the ages of 0 and 4 in France are children or grandchildren of Maghrebi origin; 7.3% are from the rest of Africa and 4% are from Asia.
French President Emmanuel Macron just called it “demographic transition“, a euphemism for a cultural replacement. In Callac, a small, quiet town with 2,200 inhabitants in central Brittany, the authorities want to settle immigrants to fight “desertification,” noted Le Figaro. The aim of the municipality and a philanthropic foundation in Callac, to repopulate a small “aging” town with migrants, revitalize the town center and develop economic activities. The Callac model reportedly inspired the asylum bill announced by Macron for 2023: distribution of foreigners in “rural areas”.
Former Belgian Senator Alain Destexhe, in his book, Immigration et Intégration: avant qu’il ne soit trop tard (“Immigration and Integration, Before It Is Not Too Late”), reports that between 2000 to 2010, Belgium welcomed more than 1 million immigrants into a population of 11 million. On September 5, the Belgian academic and economist Philippe Van Parijs, remarked to the newspaper De Standaard that “Brussels is no longer Belgium”. Van Parijs conducted a demographic study, and his discoveries will surprise only those who want to remain blind. In ten years, the percentage of Brussels residents whose parents both have Belgian citizenship, has decreased from just 36% to 26%.
“[N]o fewer than three quarters of the inhabitants of Brussels are of immigrant origin. There are more Brussels residents of Moroccan origin than Flemings or Walloons”.
This historic transformation was foreseen by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former UN secretary general, who in 2007 outlined this vision of the future of Europe:
“The unprecedented collapse of the population of Europe and its accelerated aging contrast with the still very rapid population increase in the southern and eastern Mediterranean. This will result in very acute imbalances! From a strictly quantitative point of view, immigration would be a solution. But we cannot treat the question as a problem of communicating vessels. Immigration without precaution risks imploding Western societies at the cost of very serious problems (culture shock, neo-colonial structures, unemployment, etc.)”.
That is why the new Italian government just returned to blocking ships carrying illegal migrants. A country facing demographic suicide (1,707 kindergartens closed down in the last ten years) cannot afford to be overwhelmed by mass immigration without losing its national identity.
The West is at stake. The choice Europeans urgently need to make is whether they would like to transform their countries into a wholly different culture — as the people who inhabited Turkey did after center of Christendom fell to the Ottoman Empire, or as Egypt did from being the land of the Christian Copts to that of a state where the Copts now face non-stop persecution (here, here and here).
Unfortunately, Europe, whether it likes it or not, has virtually no time left to decide whether or not it wishes to continue embracing open borders, multiculturalism and globalism, and, through passivity, find that its hard-won Judeo-Christian values, freedoms and identity will be quickly made extinct.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19127/multiculturalism-national-identities
Frontex registers new record in illegal crossings
The European border protection agency Frontex has now also confirmed a new record. In the first ten months of this year, 275 000 illegal border crossings were counted – 73 percent more than in the same period last year.
“Due to the high number of arrivals, there may be delays in reporting and the final numbers could be higher,” Frontex officials warned. In October alone, 47 percent more illegal entries into the EU member states were registered than in the same month last year.
The most active route to the EU continues to be the Western Balkans (128 438 border crossings in the first ten months). Second place is taken by the central Mediterranean route, which recorded an increase between January and October in particular (79 140 border crossings up to and including October).
This is based on preliminary estimates by the EU border protection agency.
https://freewestmedia.com/2022/11/20/frontex-registers-new-record-in-illegal-crossings/