Antisemitism, Antizionism, Jihadism and the Reunited Germany. News by Fred Alan Medforth
The saying Go Woke, Go Broke found a real-life example in the form of SVB’s collapse. The conservative Claremont Institute which tracks the funding that goes into the BLM (Black Lives Matter) Movement and maintains a database of the same reveals that collapsed Silicon Valley Bank donated more than 73 million dollars to the BLM Movement and other allied causes in recent years.
In 2020, the bank had pledged to increase its commitment to “diversity, equipment, and inclusion (DEI)” in the workplace, following the outrage over the death of George Floyd.
Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research, while talking to The Federalist, a right-wing media, said that SVB’s failure on the heels of its left-wing activism “is yet another indication that SVB was focused on woke virtue signalling instead of protecting their customers’ deposits.”
“Time after time we see the same pattern: companies that are the most concerned with ESG scores and woke politics do the worst jobs serving their customers,” Hild explained. “The rest of corporate America should learn from SVB’s failure now before they are the next company to make headlines for comically poor management.”
In August of 2020, SVB published a report that said “Innovation is global and is touching every aspect of our lives, which is creating even more need for inclusiveness of ideas and approaches, we are on a journey committed to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in our workplace, with our partners and across the innovation economy.”
The report further goes on to say “In recent months, we’ve expanded our philanthropic giving through corporate donations and employee matching programs. These programs focus on pandemic response, social justice, sustainability and supporting women, Black and Latinx emerging talent and other underrepresented groups.”
Moreover, it also has been reported that the head of financial risk management at Silicon Valley Bank in UK was busy with LGBTQ campaigns in recent times. Jay Ersapah, the head of financial risk management, had organised a month-long pride campaign when the bank was collapsing. Jay Ersapah identifies as a queer working-class person, and co-chaired the European LGBTQ Employee Resource Group. She was included on SVB’s “Outstanding LGBT+ Role Models List 2022.”
Responding to the collapse of the bank, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus has suggested that “woke” policies like the ones launched by Ersapah could have led to SVB’s dramatic failure. “I feel bad for all of these people that lost all their money in this woke bank. You know, it was more distressing to hear that the bank officials sold off their stock before this happened. It’s depressing to me. Who knows whether the Justice Department would go after them? They’re a woke company, so I guess not. And they’ll probably get away with it,” he said on Fox News while appearing on “Cavuto Live” hosted by Neil Cavuto.
Notably, the BLM has received huge donations from hundreds of companies such as Apple, Amazon, American Express, Blackrock, Boeing etc. The total funds that the BLM movement has received till now stand at a whopping $82,889,408,433.
Opindia published a report on how BLM leaders bought a house worth $6 Million. The house secretly purchased by three leaders associated with BLM was more than 6,500 square feet and had half a dozen bedrooms and bathrooms, several fireplaces, a soundstage, a pool, and a bungalow. The real estate listings also mentioned that the property has parking for more than 20 cars.
Silicon Valley Bank’s obsession was not limited to BLM, they also donated heavily to other ‘woke’ causes. Last year, the SVB Financial Group pledged $5 billion in loans to support anti-emissions efforts by 2027. The project aimed “to support companies that were working to decarbonize the energy and infrastructure industries and hasten the transition to a sustainable, net zero emissions economy”
It is believed that the Silicon Valley Bank has collapsed due to its lending practices being based on activist causes rather than financial metrics. The bank’s leadership failed to recognize the potential risks associated with lending based on non-financial metrics. The bank had disregarded traditional banking principles such as creditworthiness and profitability in favour of social impact and environmental sustainability.
The failure of the bank has raised questions about the role of activism in banking and whether banks should prioritize social causes over financial metrics. Experts have pointed out that while there is a growing demand for ethical banking, banks must not forget their primary goal of ensuring profitability and risk management.
This bank’s failure serves as a cautionary tale for other banks that may be considering a similar approach to lending. While it is essential to support social and environmental causes, banks must do so within the framework of sound banking practices and risk management principles.
The Irish Defence Forces’ decision to not consider a prominent atheist campaigner for the position of army chaplain was discrimination, a legal body in the country has ruled.
Ireland’s Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) has ruled that a decision by Ireland’s Defence Forces not to consider a prominent atheist campaigner for the position of army chaplain was discriminatory.
John Hamill, who reportedly describes himself as “a member of the Congregationalist Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster”, took the case against the Irish military force after it reportedly failed to consider him for the job of military chaplain in South Lebanon.
According to a report by the Irish Times, witnesses for the defence forces warned the WRC that Hamill’s appointment to the position would cause substantial difficulties, with the body reportedly only able to deploy one chaplain at a time to the region in order to cater for its overwhelmingly Catholic troops.
What’s more, the army chaplain plays a significant role in liaising with Islamic clerics in the region, with officials expressing fear that the presence of an atheist could disturb fragile relationships built over many years.
Frank Kennedy, a legal representative speaking on behalf of the defence force, said that it was a “genuine and occupational requirement” for the army chaplain to have “first a monotheistic belief in God, and second the capacity to minister in that faith”.
Others who previously served in Lebanon expressed that an atheist chaplain could possibly endanger relations with the local populations, with the force’s Catholic chaplain being said to have gotten around tense situations by virtue of his faith.
However, the WRC has seemingly rejected all those arguments, ruling on Wednesday that it was unlawful for the military to have failed to consider Hamill for the role of chaplain.
It further ruled that while no monetary compensation was required, it ordered the defence forces to come up with a new recruitment process for army chaplains that “reflect and foster the diversity of members of the Defence Forces”.
Despite pushing for the army chaplain to reflect the “diversity” of the defence forces, it remains unclear what the WRC actually means by this, with the Irish Independent reporting the military organisation as being overwhelmingly Catholic.
By contrast, only 0.48 of service members working with Ireland’s air corp, defence forces and naval combined describe themselves as being atheists.
Nevertheless, prioritising diversity over operational effectiveness appears to be becoming a tradition for militaries across Europe, with other forces on the continent having been ordered to push progressivism rather than national security.
The German army has only recently been reprimanded for not being tolerant enough, with the German parliament’s armed forces commissioner, Eva Högl, complaining that not enough was being done to push gender-neutral language within the country’s military.
Britain meanwhile has taken its progressive politics a step further, with senior members of the Royal Air Force reportedly ordering their subordinates to stop hiring white men in order to help push diversity quotas.
It is worth noting that neither the German military nor the UK’s RAF is in functioning condition right now, with the latter reportedly running out of both ammo and weaponry as a result of politicians donating their supplies to Ukraine, while recent reports have found that the UK would not be able to field supersonic jets should the country end up in a war with either Russia or China.
Just 1 percent of Dutch respondents to a recent survey believe the country is clearly heading in the right direction.
The Rabobank survey, conducted last year and published in accordance with a study on Tuesday, showed the vast majority of Dutch citizens are unhappy about the country’s trajectory.
Of the 10,000 Dutch respondents to the survey, a total of 39 percent believe the country is clearly heading in the wrong direction and 47 percent believe it to be heading more in the wrong direction than the right, making an overwhelming majority of 86 percent currently disillusioned with the country’s current path.
Some 12 percent believe the country to be heading more in the right direction than the wrong, while just 1 percent think the Netherlands is clearly heading in the right direction
The attitudes of the respondents regarding the country’s future relate somewhat to regional divides. Respondents in northeastern Drenthe, the country’s westernmost province of Zeeland, and in large parts of Friesland, Flevoland, and Limburg are more negative about the country’s prospects. Meanwhile, respondents in Amsterdam to the country’s north, and Tilburg to its south, are less negative.
City residents were generally found to be less negative about the country’s trajectory than those residing in rural areas, with residents in the country’s northeast and the west reporting the highest negative sentiment at over 91 percent.
A respondent’s socioeconomic background, however, is a more important indicator of sentiment than where they live, and a higher rate of negative sentiment can be seen, predictably, among respondents who are less prosperous.
Respondents were asked various questions relating to their physical health, income, home status, social lives, education, environment, how safe they feel, and their existing support networks to ascertain their prosperity score. Those reporting lower scores are more likely to be disillusioned with the country’s direction.
Regional factors, therefore, do not explain widespread negative sentiment alone, and the correlation between high prosperity within urban areas and a more favorable attitude toward the country’s future isn’t so simple, as prosperity scores are typically lower in cities than in urban areas. Cities where people revealed a lower sense of prosperity include Rotterdam, Arnhem and Eindhoven.
The survey warned policymakers against making assumptions that wealth differences between regions are the sole cause of negative sentiment, saying the situation is far more nuanced than traditional regional divisions. Only by addressing specific groups who are over-represented in terms of negative sentiment, such as those with fewer qualifications, home renters instead of owners, and those experiencing health difficulties, can policymakers begin to at least partly alleviate the seemingly entrenched pessimism regarding the country’s path.
Dutch conservative Geert Wilders leapt on the data on Tuesday ahead of the Dutch regional elections on Wednesday, tweeting: “Only 1 percent of the Dutch think that the Netherlands is doing well. How much clearer can it be? Rutte and Kaag have to go!”
A transgender adult performer and prostitute allegedly filmed themselves performing sexual services in the toilets of Paris City Hall after being invited there as part of an event by leftist Mayor Anne Hidalgo.
Transgender performer and prostitute “Icy Diamond” was invited to Paris City Hall by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, and made a post on Instagram saying, “How I managed to transform Paris City Hall into a giant strip club & brothel… Freedom guiding the people in the midst of the gold of the Republic. Thanks who? Thank you @annehidalgo for the invitation,” they added.
The performer later allegedly posted a video of themselves offering sexual favours in the toilets of the Paris City Hall on Twitter prior to their account being banned for violations of Twitter’s terms of service. Diamond’s performances in the City Hall were apparently part of La Nuit des Fiertés — ‘Pride Night’ — an annual “flagship event for the LGBT+ community”.
The event’s organisers boast that the event “…allows queer youth to take over the City Hall with programming that resembles us and highlights the queer and LGBT+ community” and thank their sponsors, including the City of Paris and the Walt Disney Company. Among the features of the event are a gala dinner, a DJ party until four o’clock in the morning, and drag shows.
STRASS, a union for prostitutes and sex workers, criticised the mayor for hypocrisy, saying the event showed her up for prosecuting prostitutes with police in the streets while at the same time making a show of supporting sex workers and sexual minorities at city hall. The group said Hidalgo should “stop the arrests” and return money seized from sex workers to them.
The group wrote, “Another successful action to transform the town hall into a brothel. Mrs @Anne_Hidalgo you must be accountable as a pimp since not only do you profit from prostitution with your arrests but you harbour it on your premises… not only will you never be able to abolish us, but we are turning your town hall into a brothel.”
The sex worker’s union said that while the footage “Icy Diamond” had posted of performing acts of prostitution in the toilets at city hall had resulted in a Twitter ban, they were to be shortly re-posted on a paid-porn platform.
The incident is just the latest controversy for Mayor Hidalgo, who has come under fire in the past over cleanliness issues across the French capital, as social media users posted pictures of garbage and dirt on the streets of Paris in 2021.
Hidalgo, meanwhile, accused those posting the pictures of being linked to far-right elements, and claimed the campaign to point out how dirty Paris was getting was “orchestrated.”
Paris media who spoke to locals about the issue found they were also critical of the city government, with one stating, “Since September 2019, we have had [rubbish dumped] in front of our business. Our boss reported it to the appropriate services on several occasions, but nothing was done. It’s not pleasant for us or for the customers.”
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan on Tuesday called on his supporters to “come out” as party workers and police officials clashed outside his Zaman Park residence in Lahore, a Pakistani daily reported.
In a video message on Twitter, Imran said police had arrived to arrest him. “They think that after I am arrested, the nation will fall asleep. You have to prove them wrong.”
“If something happens to me and I am sent to jail or if I am killed, you have to prove that you will struggle without Imran Khan and not accept the slavery of these thieves and of the one person who has been making decisions for the country,” he was quoted by Dawn as saying.
PTI’s Fawad Chaudhry also asked PTI supporters to gather in the streets in a peaceful protest in a show of solidarity with Imran.
Armoured police vehicles had arrived outside Zaman Park with the intention of arresting Imran but a senior Islamabad police official, Deputy Inspector General (DIG) (Operations) Shahzad Bukhari, had refrained from commenting on the case in which officials were acting against the PTI chairman.
However, almost an hour later, police used a water cannon and tear gas against PTI supporters that had gathered outside Zaman Park in droves.
Footage broadcast on television showed police slowly inching toward the residence behind an armoured vehicle that was dispersing PTI supporters with a water cannon. Supporters could also be seen pelting stones at the policemen, Dawn reported.
Footage also showed PTI supporters being teargassed as police arrived close to the main gate of Zaman Park. The workers, who had covered their faces with pieces of cloth and were carrying bottles of water, continued to pelt stones at officials.
https://hindupost.in/world/pakistan/imran-khan-asks-supporters-to-come-out-as-party-workers-police-clash/ – https://www.opindia.com/2023/03/clashes-in-lahore-as-police-try-to-arrest-former-pm-imran-khan/
An Irish lawmaker has said he doesn’t want to limit his newborn baby by labeling them as a boy or a girl, wanting them to have the freedom to decide their own gender.
Paul Murphy, an Irish People Before Profit–Solidarity politician who has represented the Dublin South-West constituency since 2014, sat down with the Irish Times newspaper to discuss his approach to fatherhood.
He explained how he and his partner, Jess, had trouble conceiving but were eventually successful via a third round of IVF and recently gave birth to a baby named Juniper.
“Regardless of whether it was male or female, it was going to be Juniper. I think it’s a gender-neutral name,” Murphy told the newspaper.
Juniper is a male, but Murphy insists the couple is not labeling the baby as a boy.
“We’re not gendering it. So we’re not describing Juniper as a boy, we’re describing Juniper as a baby, but it is male.
“We live in a deeply sexist and gendered society which creates certain expectations for boys and certain expectations for girls. And those things are changing in a positive direction, but there’s a very, very long way to go,” he said.
The Irish MP said he will use the “they” pronoun to describe the new-born, adding that while he and his partner will not “be out there correcting people’s pronouns,” the parents “don’t want to limit the kind of future they will foresee for themselves, the role they will perceive for themselves, the type of play they will perceive for themselves by saying ‘you’re a boy or you’re a girl,” and just want Juniper “to decide for themselves.”
“You want to dress in pink? Fire ahead. You want to dress in blue? Fire ahead. You want to play football? Brilliant. You want to go dancing? Amazing… it’s just not to limit. Obviously, the vast majority of parents do gender their child, and I’ve no criticism of that whatsoever, no judgment. But it is true that if you put the label, boy or girl, on your child, you definitely increase the chances of them going down one road or another.”
Murphy told the newspaper that he and his partner will respect any decision Juniper makes about his gender, revealing that if he decides at the age of 3 that he wants to identify as a girl “then great, you’re a girl.”
“That’s for Juniper to discover their own gender identity as opposed to us to assume based on their sex,” he added.
In a tweet announcing the new-born, Murphy’s partner wrote: “Lots of people have asked, ‘what did you have?’
“We had a healthy baby, and we are trying to create a home environment which doesn’t place limits or expectations on what Juniper is interested in or who they will become. That is all.”
When Angela Davis, a domestic terrorist, wrote, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition”, she began by extensively citing an ex-Marxist French philosopher. “Michel Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish’ is arguably the most influential text in contemporary studies of the prison system,” she argued while crediting herself with an analysis of the “racial implications” of his ideas.
There is a straight line that runs from Foucault and Davis to the “prison abolition” movement that in its mildest form encompasses police defunding and reducing penalties for offenses and diverting criminals away from prison, and to proposals like Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s BREATHE Act that would create a “roadmap for prison abolition,” with the “full decarceration of federal detention facilities within 10 years”.
Terms like “carceral” or “decarceration”, now commonly used by leftists agitating for the elimination of prisons, police and the criminal justice system, owe much to Foucault.
Foucault’s Prison Information Group had originally been set up to aid Communist terrorists behind bars in Europe, but quickly linked together the idea that criminals were revolutionaries and criminal justice needed to be abolished. Angela Davis, who faced her own criminal charges over Marxist terrorism, took Foucault’s ideas and racialized them. And now they’re broken out.
While black nationalists are more likely to cite Davis and other black nationalists, she and leftist intellectuals very clearly credited Foucault and his Marxist analyses of criminal justice. Neither group tends to mention that aside from leftist extremism, Foucault was also a pedophile.
Many political activists have hidden or not so hidden private lives, but Foucault’s pedophilia was a fundamental element of his opposition to prisons and the criminal justice system.
Two years after Foucault wrote ‘Discipline and Punish’, the book described by many defunders as the founding text for the prison abolition movement, he signed a petition calling for legalizing sex with 13-year-olds. This was not a one-time event. Foucault had signed another petition “calling for the freedom of three men accused of sex with boys and girls between age twelve and fifteen” as part of his vocal activism on behalf of legalizing the act of molesting children.
Foucault’s interest in prison abolition for pedophiles was not strictly objective. A decade earlier, he had been sexually abusing eight-year-olds in Tunisia.
“They were eight, nine, ten years old, he was throwing money at them and would say ‘let’s meet at 10pm at the usual place’” a former comrade related. “He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys. The question of consent wasn’t even raised.”
All sorts of writers and thinkers were privately guilty of assorted offenses, but it’s impossible to distinguish Foucault’s pedophilia, his sympathy for pedophiles and his opposition to locking them up from his more popular views on prisons and the criminal justice system.
In “The History of Sexuality”, he wrote censoriously of a 19th century village for persecuting a farm laborer who had groomed little girls to sexually pleasure him.
“The pettiness of it all,” he bemoaned. “This everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become from a certain time the object not only of collective intolerance, but of a judicial action.” Foucault wrote sympathetically of “these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children.”
An understandable position for a man who had paid starving little boys to do even worse. So was Fouculat’s insistence that believing “a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.”
The Marxist influenced philosopher who later died of AIDS was certainly not the only 70s European intellectual to justify child abuse, but he did so in the same analytical terms that are at the core of police defunding and prison abolition arguments, and although long dead his sticky intellectual fingerprints are all over its modern rebirth in the western world.
A CBC softball interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a black nationalist leftist activist calling for eliminating prisons, has her saying, “We in the contemporary abolition movement are fond of citing Foucault”. Gilmore often mentions the ex-Marxist child rapist as an inspiration.
A New England Journal of Medicine paper promoting “restorative justice” or having criminals apologize to their victims instead of being locked up, quotes Foucault. An Indiana Public Media story promoting prison abolition includes Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish’ as one of the top items on its reading list. Foucault runs through the abolition and defunding movement. And there is no escaping the fact that his seemingly dispassionate analyses of the prison system, grounded in pseudo-Marxism, were really expressions of sympathy for leftist terrorists.
And for pedophiles like him.
Despite widespread knowledge about Foucault’s crimes against children, no one in the movement influenced by his ideas has ever bothered to disavow them or even answer whether they believe that child rapists should be an exception to their proposed “prison abolition”.
‘Abolitionists’ go through every logical fallacy in the book. They redirect, argue that the question is a distraction, that child abusers are a minority of criminals, that most of them never get caught and that the phenomenon will disappear once the root causes are addressed. They claim, as The Intercept does, that imprisoning pedophiles is racist because, “while whites constitute the majority arrested for child pornography possession, black people get longer federal sentences.”
Mostly they act as if their movement hasn’t addressed the question and doesn’t need to.
But Foucault, the godfather of prison abolition, had already addressed the question. The movement, which quotes him so often, refuses to admit to his answers because it would destroy whatever support it has even among those who favor releasing most criminals.
Prison abolition was the brainchild of a child rapist who wanted to legalize pedophilia. He opposed prison because he belonged there and because the inmates would have never let him live if they knew what he was. Had Foucalt ever been imprisoned for his crimes, he would have been beaten to death by even the most hardened criminals: as imprisoned pedophiles often are.
The Left has much to say about America’s original sins and how they define the present, it has far less to say about its own original sins and how they define its movement. Prison abolition, police defunding and similar criticisms of the justice system are built on a child rapist’s conviction that raping children should not be a crime and that no one should be locked up for it.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-pedophile-behind-prison-abolition/
Red alert in the Vienna city area: Because of Islamist threats of attacks against several churches, a large contingent of police and special forces is on the way. For tactical reasons, the police have not yet given any more specific details. eXXpressTV is live on the scene for you.
According to the Vienna police, indications of an Islamist-motivated attack had been reported. Several places of worship in the city were named as targets. The alarm was sounded based on a threat assessment by the DSN and several provincial counter-terrorism offices. All neuralgic points in the city area were manned with reinforced police units. The Cobra and WEGA special units are on site, and officers with assault rifles are standing at intersections. How long the operation will last could not yet be estimated in the morning.
The Viennese immediately felt horribly reminded of the devastating terrorist attack of November 2, 2020, when an assassin shot four passers-by in the city centre before being killed himself by the police. Then too, the City resembled a fortress with heavily armed police forces. The operation itself in the so-called “Bermuda Triangle”, a party mile, had lasted only about 20 minutes.
https://exxpress.at/terror-alarm-in-wien-exxpresstv-berichtet-live-von-den-gefaehrdeten-kirchen/
