Month: January 2023
‘Girls as young as 13 are being kidnapped, forcefully converted to Islam and married to older men’: UN experts on Pakistan
On Monday (January 16), experts at the United Nations expressed grave concern about the alarming rise in kidnappings, coerced marriages, and forced conversions of minor girls belonging to religious minority communities in Pakistan.
The experts included Tomoya Obokata, Mama Fatima Singhateh, Reem Alsalem, Nazila Ghanea, Fernand de Varennes, Siobhán Mullally, Dorothy Estrada-Tanck, Ivana Radačić, Elizabeth Broderick, Meskerem Geset Techane and Melissa Upreti.
They called for immediate action to ensure justice for the underage victims. The UN experts emphasised, “We urge the Government to take immediate steps to prevent and thoroughly investigate these acts objectively and in line with domestic legislation and international human rights commitments.”
They added, “Perpetrators must be held fully accountable…We are deeply troubled to hear that girls as young as 13 are being kidnapped from their families, trafficked to locations far from their homes, made to marry men sometimes twice their age, and coerced to convert to Islam, all in violation of international human rights law.”
“We are very concerned that such marriages and conversions take place under threat of violence to these girls and women or their families,” the UN experts pointed out. They also expressed concern about the “lack of access to justice for victims and their families.”
They also questioned the complicity of the Pakistani justice system and security forces in facilitating the abductions and forced conversions of minor girls. “Family members say that victims’ complaints are rarely taken seriously by the police, either refusing to register these reports or arguing that no crime has been committed by labelling these abductions as love marriages,” the experts stated.
They further added, “Abductors force their victims to sign documents which falsely attest to their being of legal age for marriage as well as marrying and converting of free will. These documents are cited by the police as evidence that no crime has occurred.”
“Pakistani authorities must adopt and enforce legislation prohibiting forced conversions, forced and child marriages, kidnapping, and trafficking, and abide by their international human rights commitments to combat slavery and human trafficking and uphold the rights of women and children,” the UN experts concluded.
Pakistan: Minor Hindu girl abducted, forcibly converted to Islam and married off to Shaukat
In October last year, a 14-year-old Hindu girl was forcefully married to a Muslim man after converting to Islam as per a report by FirstPost.
The incident took place in the Islamkot tehsil in the Tharparkar district in Sindh, Pakistan. According to the report, the teenage girl was abducted from the village.
A cleric named Samaru Pir Jan Sirhandi thereafter facilitated the forced conversion, after which she was forcefully married to her abductor Shaukat, son of Murad Hanhrjo, her family members alleged. Hindus in Pakistan live in perpetual fear of persecution at the hands of the Muslim majority.
The cases of abduction, forced conversion to Islam and marriage with the abductor who is an older Muslim man, is a crimes prevalent in the Sindh province of Pakistan where underage Hindu girls from poor families are the victims. Mian Mithoo, an influential and powerful cleric of the Barachundi mosque in Sindh’s Bahawalpur is said to be the person who organises and facilitates the forced conversions. The courts then hold the forced Islamic marriage valid and make the minor girls live with the abductor, citing strict Sharia laws.
Greta Thunberg slams German Greens and labels Germany one of world’s biggest polluters over coal mine battle in Lützerath
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has slammed Germany’s left-wing government, accusing the Green party of “really embarrassing itself” by sanctioning a new coal-lignite mine in the latest sign of progressives attacking one another in pursuit of a wildly unrealistic environmental policy.
“Disappointed is one way of putting it. I think it’s very weird to see the German government, including the Green Party, make deals and compromise with companies like RWE, with fossil fuel companies, when they should rather be held accountable for all the damage and destruction they have caused,” she said in response to the left-wing’s government with German energy multinational RWE to excavate the area near the village of Lützerath.
The ongoing drama in the village, which has been cleared of thousands of protesters to make way for a lignite mine, has seen climate change activists turn on each other. Protesters — who had been illegally occupying the disused village and were forcibly removed by police last week — blamed the German Greens for making a backroom deal with RWE despite promises to fight climate change.
The protesters’ cult hero, Greta Thunberg, arrived in Lützerath for the second time over the weekend to offer solidarity with the illegal squatters, who have continued to ignore a court-mandated eviction order. They are crying foul play against police, while authorities argue they have little choice but to clear the protesters.
Thunberg, herself, was eventually carried off the site by two police officers on Sunday, according to German tabloid, Bild.
The Swedish activist, however, appears to have used the vast majority of her visit to Germany to criticize the country’s government — which includes the German Greens in its coalition — for failing to act at her behest.
During an interview on the Anne Will program on Sunday, the Swedish climate campaigner called Germany “historically one of the biggest polluters in the world,” and accused the current federal government of doing little to address this unwanted title.
Green voters in Germany are finding it difficult to stomach that it was primarily Green politicians who reached the agreement with RWE to raze the village of Lützerath to aid the energy company’s expansion of the Garzweiler coal mine. Mona Neubaur, Green vice premier of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), and Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy and climate minister, were perhaps the two most influential Green politicians behind the deal.
When asked about the deal, Thunberg told the program: “It’s not my role as an activist to watch compromises between governments and very destructive corporations,” before proceeding to make it her role by accusing the deal of “endangering the lives of countless people.”
She continued to call the discussions between prominent Green politicians and RWE “very hypocritical,” and dismissed Habeck’s claim that Lützerath would be the “last village” to give way for lignite in Germany, asking: “How can (Lützerath) be a symbol of the end if they plan to move on, to move on with this?”
Environmental activists have campaigned across Germany for years in favor of cleaner energy production; however, leaders are currently finding a need to revert back to coal given the energy fall-out from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and Green party politicians have also accepted the reality of the current energy situation.
Since campaigning to phase out nuclear energy in Germany, climate activists will be horrified to see the rise in coal mining, a far more harmful form of production for the environment than the former. And with coal constituting a staggering 31 percent of German electricity production, compared to 8 percent recorded in 2015, eco-warriors only have themselves to blame, writes Wolfgang Munchau of Eurointelligence.
Thunberg’s criticism of Green politicians in Germany’s federal government is reflective of the way many Greens voters are feeling about their elected representatives.
“I voted the Greens and I will never, ever do [so again],” said David Dresen, from the neighboring village of Kuckum as cited by news outlet Politico.
“It’s a gut punch that Green ministers now try to sell this backroom coal deal as a success. We won’t accept that,” added Olaf Bandt, the chair of the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation.
Dutch teachers unaware that students use AI text generator for homework
The advanced AI text generator ChatGPT is being used for homework assignments by many Dutch students without teachers being aware that the work had been generated by an artificial intelligence bot.
Dutch news outlet NOS interviewed students with more than 250 saying that they used the bot for school assignments, and in almost all cases, they got away with it.
ChatGPT has come in handy to answer parts of questions, write paragraphs, correct spelling errors, come up with ideas and even write entire essays. Dutch language assignments for example, have been made a lot easier, they say.
One student told NOS that he used the tool all the time. “I use it to quickly do my homework,” he said. “It often says in an assignment: put it in your own words. A teacher really can’t check what my own words were.”
The AI bot has made copying work much easier too, since ChatGPT generates a new version of the same content but in different words.
Another student admitted that most of his poetry analysis had been generated by ChatGPT. “According to the assignment, I had to give my own opinion. Chat GPT is not very good at that yet – I had to rewrite that. But the theoretical part was fine. I could copy it just like that.”
Existing plagiarism detection against ChatGPT, which checks for identical texts in papers by other students or online, is of no use since the AI bot generates text itself.
According to Robert Charmulaun, a Dutch teacher and chairman of the Dutch department of trade association Levende Talen, some schools are already considering measures. “Students then have to write texts at school, for example.” Or they are required to use recent sources from 2022, because the AI bot has not yet been updated.
https://freewestmedia.com/2023/01/17/dutch-teachers-unaware-that-students-use-ai-for-homework/
Persecuted Brazilian Journalist Recounts his Torture – “God, Homeland, Family and Freedom – They Took it All”
FRANCIS SHOCKS SEMINARIANS WITH OBSCENITIES
Seminarians from Barcelona say they were scandalized when Pope Francis reportedly used the f-word and other expletives at a papal audience in Rome.
According to testimonies from the seminarians, Francis ranted against “f***ing careerists who f*** up the lives of others.” The pope criticized “those who climb to show their a**,” the Italian media outlet Daily Compass reported on Monday.
The trainee priests were shocked when Francis also reportedly insisted that priests should never deny absolution to penitents in the confessional under any circumstances.
Eyewitnesses describe how the pontiff, at the audience on Dec. 10, tossed his prepared speech aside, saying that “it would have been boring.” Instead, Francis told the seminarians to ask him questions.
“After handing out the address prepared for the occasion, the pope engaged in dialogue with those present at the meeting,” the Holy See Press Office clarified.
The pope’s speech, which was sent to the Vatican press corps, is very different in content from the Holy Father’s alleged off-the-cuff remarks. The former reminds the seminarians that their “first obligation will be a life of prayer born of gratitude” when they become priests.
The prepared address urges the seminarians to “never extinguish that fire which will make you fearless preachers of the Gospel, dispensers of divine treasures” and to “take up your rosary” and ask Mary “to help you to unveil the mysteries of the priesthood.”
“It is not the first time that the Pope has stated that the speech he had prepared (or that had been prepared for him) is very boring and foisted a different message on the audience,” Spanish website Germinans Germinabit reported.
“What is serious about this weekend’s visit is that the media have picked up some words that Francis did not utter and the Holy See provided the media with some words that Francis had not uttered,” the blog noted.
Describing the pope’s words as spoken with “total crudeness,” the website reported how it had compiled from witnesses “a fairly extensive account in which the crude language used by the Pope has been collected in its entirety.”
In Francis’ answer to a question from one seminarian, the pope is reported to have invited them “not to be clerical, to forgive everything” and “if we see that there is no intention to repent, we must forgive all.”
Pope Francis turns into a different figure.GabTweet
“We can never deny absolution, because we become a vehicle for an evil, unjust, and moralistic judgment,” Francis reportedly told the seminarians, who were accompanied by the auxiliary bishop of the diocese, Javier Vilanova Pellisa.
Priests who deny penitents absolution are “delinquents,” the pontiff allegedly stressed.
Addressing rectors and formators of seminaries in Latin America earlier in November, Francis similarly put aside his 12-page written speech, remarking, “It is a heavy thing, let us read it calmly” and proceeded to deliver an extempore message, the Italian section of Vatican Newsreported.
Francis told the Latin American rectors and formators that priests “have to ask the permission of the bishop” to withhold absolution in the case of mortal sin.
“This happens, please! Our people cannot be in the hands of criminals! And a priest who behaves like this is a criminal, in every word. Like it or not,” the pope emphasized.
At the same November meeting, Francis also insisted that priests and seminarians must practice “closeness.” The pontiff elaborated, “This must be contagious, that is, the priest, the seminarian, the priest must be ‘close.’ Close to whom? To the girls of the parish? And some of them are, they’re close, then they get married, that’s fine.”
“With the Barcelona seminarians, however, it seems that the joke with an inappropriate double meaning was turned into language that would embarrass even a sailor,” Daily Compass commented.
Sources who live in Casa Santa Marta in proximity to Francis told Church Militant that they had witnessed outbursts of foul language from the Holy Father when he loses his temper.
In his bestseller The Dictator Pope: The Inside Story of the Francis Papacy, author Henry Sire (whose pen name is Marcantonio Colonna) records several instances of the pontiff exploding with expletives.
According to Sire, Fr. Peter Hans Kolvenbach, former superior general of the Jesuits, wrote a damning report on Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1991, accusing Bergoglio, who required a dispensation to be appointed auxiliary bishop, of “a series of defects, ranging from habitual use of vulgar language to deviousness.”
“When the publicity cameras are off him, Pope Francis turns into a different figure: arrogant, dismissive of people, prodigal with bad language, and notorious for furious outbursts of temper which are known to everyone from the cardinals to the chauffeurs,” Sire wrote.
Sire quoted other commentators to confirm how “Pope Francis’ outbursts of temper, his rudeness towards subordinates, and his vulgar language have become notorious throughout the Vatican.”
Church Militant contacted the Holy See Press Office for comment but received no response as of press time.
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/francis-shocks-seminarians-with-expletives
Stupid words the Home Office BANNED 🙄
France: “Sales blancs de m…” (White bastards). Increased security at the architecture school in Nantes after a hateful and threatening email from an African student. ” I declare war on you. All this will be judged before Allah”
It was a threatening message full of anger that was sent to the teachers and students of the architecture school in Nantes on Sunday morning. According to Ensa, the sender is a former student. Security at the school has been tightened.
“I declare war on you, and yes, I will be hostile to you (…) I will be your worst enemy”. So say the first lines of this email sent on Sunday morning to the mailboxes of students, teachers and people involved at Ensa, the national school of architecture in Nantes. To hundreds and hundreds of people. The author is a “former student”, according to an email sent shortly afterwards by the management, which France Bleu Loire Océan was also able to look at.
In his long message, the student, who comes from Africa, says he is addressing French society in particular. He talks about France’s colonial past, “the coloniser, the persecutor, unscrupulous people who murdered and plundered Africa (…) You started humiliating my ancestors and today you humiliate me.” There is also talk of “dirty white assholes”, of demanding repentance and that “all this will be judged before Allah, the Lord of the Universe”.
When asked, the school administration said it “will not comment on this event”. It emailed its students twice on Sunday, stating in one of its emails that it had contacted the “police and judicial authorities to file a complaint on behalf of the school”. On Monday morning, when classes started, police officers were present near the compound, according to several students. Also, from now on, students will have to show their ID cards to gain access to the premises. (…) France Bleu
More proof that ‘gender affirming’ means ‘mutilating’
By Andrea Widburg
The transgender movement assaults America by turning children against their own bodies, alienating them from the American glue: Faith, family, and (because they become dependent on the state for “affirmative” and medical care) freedom. Leftists are raising an army of confused, angry, and sterile monsters willing to do anything to keep the lie alive. Perhaps some biological men in that army would go AWOL if they knew the post-surgical pain and dysfunction awaiting them.
Behind the “top” and “bottom” surgery euphemisms lie terrible realities. For women, “top surgery” means a mastectomy, or complete breast removal, something formerly limited to treating breast cancer.
As for “bottom surgery,” some women start with a hysterectomy:
Others have skin removed from their forearms to fashion a fake “penis”:
“Bottom surgery” for men is no better. Surgeons remove their penis and testicles and then carve a hole in their bodies to mimic a “vagina.” A recent poll of menwho have had this surgery shows the terrible, lifelong trauma inflicted on them. (Note: The Daily Mail buys into the transgender movement’s language. A “trans woman” is a man.)
More than half of trans women who have ‘bottom’ surgery are in so much pain a year later they need medical attention, a study suggests.
Up to a third of patients also struggled to use the toilet or suffered sexual issues 12 months after the operation, which sees patients transitioning from male to female given a surgically constructed vagina.
Researchers from the Women’s College Hospital (WCH) in Ontario, Canada, analyzed the medical records of 80 patients who sought care from the clinic between three months and five years after having the operation.
[snip]
The most common symptoms reported by post-op patients were pain (53.5 percent), bleeding (42.5 percent) and dilation issues (46.3 percent).
Severe side effects were much rarer, but in 12 cases – or 15 percent – patients experienced vaginal stenosis, the narrowing and shortening of the vagina. [Note: There is no vagina. There is simply a hole—an abscess, really—that surgeons carve into a healthy male body.]
In two other cases, patients had severe infections around the surgical site, and another two were hospitalized with mental health problems.
Much more common were minor outcomes like difficulty urinating (22.5 percent), sexual problems (33.8 percent), and poorly healing wounds (21.3 percent).
Sites encouraging “gender-affirming” surgery insist that people who have had the surgery can still experience sexual pleasure. However, a 2014 study, before transgenderism became a healthcare profit center and a political hot potato, conceded that the surgery (which is always packaged with hormones) is terrible for the male libido:
In retrospect, 62.4% of trans women reported a decrease in sexual desire after SRT. Seventy-three percent of trans women never or rarely experienced spontaneous and responsive sexual desire. A third reported associated personal or relational distress resulting in a prevalence of HSDD of 22%.
[snip]
HSDD was more prevalent in trans women compared with trans men. The majority of trans women reported a decrease in sexual desire after SRT…
What makes this story significant is the swiftly rising number of genital mutilating surgeries. A study from November stated that “The demand for GAS [“Gender-affirming surgery”] has increased exponentially since 2014.” The data are shocking. In 2010, seven surgeries were identified in a database tracking these surgeries. By 2018, the number had risen to 1,096, “a 152-fold increase.”
Body mutilation, once embedded in a society, keeps going. In China, women had their feet bound for almost a thousand years. The Burmese Kayan women wear rings around their necks, deforming their clavicles, to make their necks appear elongated. And for centuries, Western women wore tight corsets that squished their internal organs to the point of chronic ill health.
Across the Muslim world (and in some non-Muslim parts of Africa), female genital mutilation (“FGM”) has been practiced for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. There is no small irony to the fact that leftists have opposed religion-based FGM because it is intended to control female sexuality while enthusiastically supporting American women who have FGM because it is an expression of their “gender identity.”
The left is waging an open war against children and the family. Perhaps if some of the cult members were made aware of what awaits them if they follow the road to its logical endpoint of mutilating surgery, they wouldn’t be so enthusiastic.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/more_proof_that_gender_affirming_means_mutilating.html
‘Horrible Propaganda’ – EU Project Rebrands Paedophiles ‘People with a Sexual Interest in Children’
A Member of the European Parliament (MEP) has accused the European Union of pushing “horrible propaganda” after a project described paedophiles as “people with a sexual interest in children”, accusing the bloc of seeking to rebrand them with a term that is both “more appealing and morally neutral”.
Cristian Terhes, a Romanian MEP who sits with the European Conservatives and Reformists group, has slammed the EU for allegedly pushing for the term “paedophile” to be replaced with something “more appealing and morally neutral”.
It comes after controversy surrounding an EU project’s use of the term Minor-Attracted People (MAPs) to describe paedophiles, despite the fact that the term is highly controversial, and seen by some as overly sympathetic towards predators.
However, despite the use of the term prompting huge backlash only last month, Terhes claims that the EU still seems to be trying to soften the language around paedophiles, with another EU project on child protection repeatedly referring to them as “people with a sexual interest in children”.
“I am shocked and appalled, in equal measure, that the European Commission was, until very recently… replacing the term ‘paedophile’ with the more appealing and morally neutral phrase of Minor Attracted Person,” Terhes alleged in comments to Breitbart Europe.
“They even intensified this horrible propaganda and are now talking of ‘people with a sexual interest in children’,” he continued.
“This attitude of the European Commission to soft soap an evil and criminal behaviour, like paedophilia, is dangerous and a threat to all children in Europe,” the public representative went on to say, calling for the project in question to be withdrawn by European Commission, currently led by Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen.
The Romanian MEP also took aim at the EU’s continued funding of drag queen shows for children, with the bloc giving financial support to drag projects in the likes of Germany, Spain, and Slovenia.
One project sponsored by the EU that took place in Berlin — titled ‘Drag It Up!’ — saw “38 young queer people” trained in the art of drag, with those involved being taught to put on makeup and wigs, walk in high heels, and implement “methods of blurring and exaggerating traditional binary gender roles”.
Terhes demanded that the funding for such projects by the European Commission must be explained, saying that they constituted a risk to child safety.
“The European Commission must also explain why it is funding the Drag Queen Shows across Europe through the Erasmus+ scheme,” he said, adding that “children must be protected from overly sexual displays like this”.
“I call on Ursula von der Leyen to immediately withdraw these projects from Erasmus+ and Horizon and publicly apologise, on behalf of the European Commission,” he demanded.
“She must assure the public that no similar projects, or anything soft on child abuse, will ever be supported by the European Commission again.”