Month: July 2023

The BBC has issued an apology in response to a reporter’s “inappropriate” question to Morocco’s football captain before the team’s World Cup match against Germany on Monday (24 July).

Morocco is the first Arab and North African team to qualify for the Women’s World Cup, but Ghizlane Chebbak, the team captain, was asked an “unethical” and “dangerous” question about LGBTQ+ rights.

In Morocco, laws that discriminate against women and LGBTQ+ people are still in effect. Human Rights Watch states that “sexual deviancy” – acts between people of the same sex – can result in prison sentences of up to three years.

At the post-match press conference in Melbourne, the BBC reporter asked: “In Morocco it’s illegal to have a gay relationship. Do you have any gay players in your squad, and what’s life like for them in Morocco?”

Chebbak winced, took off her earpiece, glanced at coach Reynald Pedros, and then laughed in response to the query. “Sorry, this is a very political question,” a Fifa representative said, requesting the reporter stick to questions about football.

“No, it’s not political, it’s about people,” the reporter replied. “Please let her answer the question.” A BBC spokesperson said on Tuesday (25 July): “We recognise that the question was inappropriate. We had no intention to cause any harm or distress.”

The interaction clearly shocked the members of the media present, and some of them took to social media to criticise the line of questioning. CBC Sports reporter Shireen Ahmed said the question was strange and inappropriate, adding that it should not have been asked in the first place.

“This isn’t an issue of journalistic freedom,” Ahmed said on Twitter. “You can inquire about social laws in different places without endangering people. Journalists have an obligation to be fair, accurate and practise with care. If reporting harms someone, it is not only unethical but dangerous.”

In addition to being the first Arab country to compete in the Women’s World Cup, Nouhaila Benzina will also make history as the first player to wear the hijab if she gets game-time during the tournament.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/womens-world-cup-bbc-apologises-190624251.html

by Giulio Meotti

340 years ago, on July 15, 1683, an Ottoman officer approached the walls of Vienna with a proposal to surrender. The message was delivered to a Croatian soldier: “Accept Islam and live in peace under the Sultan! But if you resist, then death, desolation and bondage will be the fate of you all!”

In Vienna, two months later, Europe defeated the Ottomans and only the battle of Marathon in 490 BC. C. – where the Athenians defeated a Persian expeditionary force – had the same significance for Western culture.

But what if today the walls of Vienna did not need to be conquered and another form of (sweet) conquest was already at work? German-Turkish entrepreneur Vural Öger said during a meeting with Turkish entrepreneurs in Germany: “What Süleyman started with the siege of Vienna we will achieve with our women”. And with faith.

In Vienna, Muslims are already more numerous than Catholics, even in middle and high schools. In the city, Catholics have halved since 1971. Every year the Church loses 1.5 percent of the faithful.

Muslims have just become the majority in schools in Linz, the country’s third largest city and capital of Upper Austria. For the first time this year, more Muslims than Catholics were counted in schools. 35.75 percent belong to the Islamic faith, against 33.13 of Catholics. And in Graz, the second largest city in the country? 34 percent of the students are of Islamic faith.

And what is true for old Vienna, in the midst of a demographic crisis, reduced to a museum inhabited by elderly people strolling in the Prater, will be true for every other European metropolis prey to complete secularization. Demographic crisis, but also spiritual. In an interview with Der Standard, cardinal of Vienna Christoph Schonborn said: “Take a look at Viennese schools and you will observe how the demographic developments of Christian children and Muslim children are divergent. This is a serious topic. There is no shortage of Islamic voices who affirm that Europe is a ripe fruit for Islam”.

I don’t know if Karl Kraus was right, the caustic and brilliant Austrian intellectual who gave a definition of Vienna that was both a warning and a prophecy: “Experimental laboratory of the end of the world”. Maybe more of a laboratory of the end of Europe?

Frits Bolkestein, the EU commissioner for the internal market, said that if Turkey were admitted to the EU, “the defeat of the Turks in Vienna more than 300 years ago would prove in vain”.

Recep Erdogan now heralds the “Turkish century” and blackmails the EU into joining the European Union. And he claims that Turkey’s borders extend “from Vienna to the shores of the Adriatic Sea”.

We don’t know what will happen in the next two generations, but surely the century is easier for it to be Turkish and Islamic than Christian and Viennese.

Since the beginning of the millennium, the percent number of Muslims in the Austrian population has doubled: it was 4 percent in 2001 and 8 percent in 2016. On the one hand thanks to immigration (the waves of Chechens, Afghans, Turks, Bosniaks and Syrians), on the other to Muslim mothers who have double the children of all other religions. The proportion of Muslim newborns in the total population is growing faster than expected. A study by the Kronen Zeitung comes to this conclusion. “The number of Catholic children, who will soon be overtaken in the Austrian capital, is decreasing”.

Or as demographer Wolfgang Lutz puts it, “we have a population swap going on. The old ones are dying and the young ones are coming”. There are already schools with no more Austrians, only foreigners.

“Islam has long since become the number one faith in secondary schools,” explains Krone. The incredible growth of the Islamic community in Austria is documented by statistics: in 1971 there were 22,300 Muslims, in 1981 76,900, in 1991 158,800, in 2001 339,000 and in 2021 745,600.

Only 1 percent of young people in Vienna are Catholic.

The Krone Zeitung has published impressive figures in the case of constant immigration: “In 2046, one in three Viennese will be Muslim”.

We read in the great Viennese Jewish writer Hermann Broch: “The crowd around him, the hustle and bustle, as the baroness said, all that busy coming and going, that crowding of faces and backs, seemed to him a soft mass, which fades and it slips away without offering any hold.”

Europe spent the last forty years becoming that “soft mass,” the empty wasteland that we are today. No faith. No fight. No future. Only that “ripe fruit” for conquest.

The 1683 defeat of the Turks at Vienna was in vain | ערוץ 7 (israelnationalnews.com)

By Will Stoutamire

The term “technocracy” is nothing new to our political lexicon. It’s been around for decades and is commonly associated with totalitarian leftist regimes who appoint technical elitist “experts” to manage specialized sectors of their regime’s military, economy, and other civil sectors. A technocracy’s effect is to nullify the will of the people.

The first of such modern regimes was arguably the National Socialist German Workers Party (aka the Nazi Party). Minister of Armaments Albert Speer was among Hitler’s finest and most prized technocrats. In recent years, Speer’s role has been overshadowed by diabolical agents with more obvious blood on their hands, such as Adolf Eichman, Rudolph Hess, Hermann Goering, and others.

However, Speer was central to Hitler’s vision for Germany. He laid out grandiose architectural plans for the Third Reich’s capital and kept the bulk of the German armaments machine running, even as the lights dimmed around Hitler’s failed vision of a thousand-year reign of unopposed power. He was no less diabolical than his peers.

Since WWII, people have pondered and debated how it was possible for Germans, considered among the world’s most cultured and educated people, to fall in line with the Nazi agenda. After the war, Speer offered insights that are also warnings to Democrats’ technocratic aspirations.

When Germany surrendered, Speer was brought to the ancient German city of Nuremberg, where he was put on trial for crimes against humanity along with twenty-four others. After much deliberation between the tribunal, he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment at Spandau prison in Berlin. It was a slap on the wrist sentence compared to other regime members who stood trial and received death sentences.

When Speer’s trial neared its conclusion, his final testimony included information explaining how the Nazi regime effectively won the hearts and minds of the bulk of the German population after the nation’s economic and cultural decline following WWI. He also issued a stern warning to the victorious democratic nations that were already building large bureaucratic departments that were overseen by the proto-technocrats of their day.

(Keep in mind that America had a head start on this project: During the 1930s, Roosevelt’s New Deal transformed the American federal government by adding nearly seventy megalithic bureaucracies to the Federal government, permanently transforming America’s governing system. This transformation began the process of convincing many well-meaning Americans that “the bigger the government, the better,” and conditioned Americans to embrace large bureaucratic agencies run by technocrats.)

Speer spoke the following:

Hitler’s dictatorship was the first dictatorship of an industrial state in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people…

By means of such instruments of technology as the radio and public-address systems, eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual. Telephone, teletype, and radio made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs where because of their high authority they were executed uncritically.

Thus, many offices and squads received their evil commands in this direct manner. The instruments of technology made it possible to maintain a close watch over all citizens and to keep criminal operations shrouded in a high degree of secrecy.

To the outsider this state apparatus may look like the seemingly wild tangle of cables in a telephone exchange; but like such an exchange it could be directed by a single will. Dictatorships of the past needed assistants of high quality in the lower ranks of the leadership also-men who could think and act independently.

The authoritarian system in the age of technology can do without such men. The means of communication alone enable it to mechanize the work of the lower leadership. Thus, the type of uncritical receiver of orders is created.

Speer explained that, while Hitler was the first to employ the tools of authoritarian control to carry out his regime’s crimes, as technology developed after the war, other technocratic dictatorships would pose an even greater threat to humanity:

The more technological the world becomes, the greater is the danger…As the former minister in charge of a highly developed armaments economy it is my last duty to state: Every country in the world may be dominated by technology; but in a modern dictatorship this seems to me to be unavoidable. Therefore, the more technological the world becomes, the more essential will be the demand for individual freedom and the self-awareness of the individual human being as a counterpoise to technology.

In 2023, America is witnessing an ever-encroaching government composed of unelected and unrestricted technocrats who are increasingly running, or perhaps, ruining, ordinary Americans’ lives. Therefore, it pays to take a lesson from one of history’s most evil technocratic regimes and its chief architect.

Speers’ words from his final testimony should chill any reader who favors a free society. We already see how the dozens of huge bureaucracies routinely roll over Americans’ constitutional rights, imposing their collective wills upon the people without regard to our ostensibly representational government.

Moreover, this rogue bureaucracy is allied with Big Tech’s spiderweb. Both big tech and the Deep State are composed of radical leftist ideological factions who believe in their absolute right to censor any view or opinion that runs contrary to a far-left narrative. No wonder, then, that we are witnessing a government, press corps, and common culture run amok with the Marxist-Woke mind virus.

The big question is whether there are enough freedom-loving Americans left to defeat this anti-freedom system of governing. After all, the bureaucratic state about which the evil Speer warned has already successfully entrenched itself into the fabric of the American way of life.

It’s urgent that Americans understand that their liberties are being held hostage by technocratic elites. They must immediately begin the process of reclaiming their ancient rights before it’s too late. That means using all legal means possible to oppose the government and technological alliance that works to subvert the will of We, the People, America’s true rulers.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/albert_speers_warning_to_the_west_about_the_rise_of_technocracy.html

Barbie dolls are meant for little girls from 3 to 12, while the Barbie movie is rated PG-13. The material in the movie isn’t appropriate for children, but neither is it appropriate for adults.

Parents are expected to take young girls to the movie which is one part pink glitz, as it is being marketed through every corporate media outlet, and one part extended feminist rant denouncing men and our society. Tacky and vulgar, Barbie the movie is the work of children in adult bodies who have been given adult powers, but confuse leftist virtue signaling with adult responsibilities.

Barbie is the latest invasion of childhood spaces by adults who have never grown up. Peter Pan long ago stopped being a fantasy and became an extended societal nightmare. The majority of attendees at Disney theme parks are no longer families, but childless millennials, and the same is true of subscribers to the Disney+ streaming service. Barbie follows up on Disney’s legacy of replacing family and children’s programming with deconstructionist millennial nostalgia binges.

The theme of so many classic children’s fantasies from Peter Pan to Narnia was there was a dividing line between childhood and adulthood. A time had to come when the toys were put away and the business suits were put on. But a generation came of age that put on the business suits and kept the toys out, that held off buying a car and a home, getting married and having children, to go on playing games. This is the generation that Barbie was made for.

Past writers nurtured childhood fantasies, yet knowing that they could never truly be a part of them, while their contemporary counterparts angrily stomp all over those fantasies with a mixture of adult themes and childish bitterness. Unable to truly immerse themselves into the escapist play of their childhood, they poison the well so that children won’t be able to do it either.

If they can’t play with their old toys, no one, especially children should be allowed to play.

This is the psychodrama that drives so much of the obsessive deconstructionism of classic characters and stories. Bitter aging millennials ‘update’ children’s stories so that they are no longer for children and fill them leftist virtue signaling and political rants. The classic “if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention” bumper stickers come to Barbie and everything else.

Writer-director Greta Gerwig brings an even dumber version of the same feminism that she used to dumb down her distorted adaptation of Little Women over to Barbie. The pink glitz and plastic sets of Barbie replace the lush period costumes of Little Women, but underneath are the same complaints about how unfair life is to women in a “patriarchal society”. Gerwig’s problem isn’t actually the ‘patriarchy’: it’s that she’s about to turn 40 and is still an unserious child.

The ‘patriarchy’ didn’t make Gerwig decide to date her much older current husband and Barbie co-writer Noah Baumbach after he broke up with his older wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh (and then skewered her in a movie, ‘Marriage Story’, in which she’s replaced by Scarlett Johansson.) Like previous cinematic feminist heroine Lena Dunham, Gerwig confuses her bad judgment with the patriarchy and uses a movie about a toy to blame society because she can’t make adult decisions.

Barbie captures the perpetual immaturity of media feminism better than ever Disney could. It’s a $300 million production that amounts to a session of aging women acting out a childish feminist narrative with Barbie and Ken dolls come to life. Underneath the pop tunes and fashions, its message is that being a woman and a doll are unhappy things. Call it a ‘late stage’ feminism in which there is little for women to aspire to beyond the spite that the movie spits at men.

What does feminism even mean in a world in which women dominate college admissions, but they also officially no longer exist? As marriages and families stretch further into the distance, what’s left except, as Gerwig’s counterpart in the movie played by America Ferrera does, than to find some toys to play with while mourning the rites of passage of adulthood and aging…

The realities of human existence were once confronted through faith and meaning, but Gerwig was raised a Unitarian Universalist, who went to Catholic School and loves the “ritual of religion”, having gone to “mosque and to synagogues”, while Noah Baumbach, despite making movies depicting Jewish characters, is the son of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother.

Faith and meaning are not on the table when all you have is pop culture and your old toys.

Toys writ large dominate Hollywood. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has swallowed up most of the industry and serious actors line up for their opportunity to appear in it. Mattel’s new CEO decided to take the Disney approach and view the toy company as a bunch of IPs that could be turned around into deconstructionist movies for depressed adults who hate being grown up.

Next up is a ‘surrealistic’ Barnie movie that will dig into ‘millennial angst’ and “focus on some of the trials and tribulations of being thirtysomething, growing up with Barney—just the level of disenchantment within the generation.” And the possibilities are endless.

With properties like American Girl, Hot Wheels, and Masters of the Universe, Mattel could have its own miserable cinematic universe for dysfunctional overgrown children who cry and denounce society while playing with their old toys. Just imagine how a Hot Wheels movie can lecture us about the environment or what He-Man could tell us about toxic masculinity.

It’s funny, but it’s also tragic. A generation of adult children have ruined childhood, not just by wrecking the privileged fantasy worlds that children naturally create, but by trying to make children into miniature adults. The sexualization of children in schools and pop culture is the natural outgrowth of adults who, like child molesters, think of themselves as still being children.

Adults protect and nurture children. A society in which bitter adults exploit children, deny them the safe harbor of their dreams and force them to act out personal and political psychodramas for their benefit is a deeply sick society. Like the Islamic terrorists who train children to kill, the child soldiers of the pop culture revolution are told from an early age that the world is on the brink of destruction and that their family members and friends are evil people. And that their mission is to dedicate their lives and personal happiness to changing the world.

Children who are denied safety and security, politicized at an early age, sexually groomed, become broken adults who are never able to move past their childhood traumas. And that is the ideal audience for feminist Barbie, depressed Barney and a whole world of broken toys.

Hollywood, like the rest of the leftist cultural empire, has collapsed the distinctions between adults and children. Appropriating and colonizing the culture of childhood is a generational imperialism that reflects the immaturity of adults and the abuse of children. Adults who refuse to let go of their toys, are also refusing to let children be children.

Instead, they force children to grow up while they never do.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/barbie-and-the-lefts-war-on-childhood/

Germany experienced a dramatic rise in asylum applications in the first six months of the year, with a significant increase over the figure recorded for the same period last year.

According to the biannual report from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), a total of 162,271 migrants applied for asylum in Germany from January to June, up 77.5 percent from the 84,583 applications made in the first six months of 2022.

Germany recorded 244,132 asylum applications in all of 2022, and 190,816 in 2021, suggesting this year’s figure will far exceed the figures the country has experienced in the post-pandemic years.

The figures related solely to asylum applications and do not factor in legal or illegal immigrants who have failed to declare themselves to authorities.

The report stated that the vast majority of asylum seekers originate from Islamic nations, with 71.1 percent arriving in Germany from Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Somalia or Eritrea.

Similarly, three-quarters of all asylum seekers are both male and under the age of 30.

Asylum applications from Turkey have tripled within a year, with 19,208 individuals making a claim so far in 2023, up 209 percent. Claims from Afghanistan and Syria have also skyrocketed, up 80 percent and 77 percent, respectively.

At its current trajectory, asylum applications will be in the region of 325,000 for the year, a figure only surpassed three times in Germany’s history — during the migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016, and back in 1992.

The federal government, which has overseen the high rate of immigration into Germany, has been the subject of criticism from the chairman of the German Federal Police Union, Heiko Teggatz, as a result of the figures released this week.

“With an increase in the number of asylum seekers of 77.5 percent, it is beyond a doubt that the measures agreed at the refugee summits have failed miserably,” he told the Bild newspaper.

He called on Interior Minister Nancy Faeser to “finally wake up from her slumber and assume her responsibility for the people in this country.”

“That’s almost two big cities that immigrated in a few months,” said CDU MP Alexander Throm about the figures.

“I don’t see that the traffic light government understands the seriousness of the situation. For illegal migration, all lights are still green at this traffic light. Nancy Faeser should have made protecting the German borders a priority long ago, which she is reluctant to do,” he added.

Even FDP politicians, a party within the federal traffic light coalition, are sensing the turning tide in public opinion on the issue of immigration. Stephan Thomae, the party’s parliamentary director, said in response to the figures that if the number of refugees arriving in Germany through “countries like Poland or the Czech Republic continues to rise sharply, we will have to think about temporarily tighter internal border controls.”

ttps://rmx.news/germany/young-muslim-men-see-asylum-applications-soar-in-germany-surpassing-last-year-by-78/

Detransitioner Files Blockbuster Lawsuit Against Doctors Who Aided Her Sex Change When She Was Only 15 and Left Her Disfigured https://t.co/FZ6SOmiRIX

— The Gateway Pundit (@gatewaypundit) July 25, 2023

A study from the Marriage Foundation suggested that nearly half of children in Britain are no longer living with both of their biological parents by the time they reach 14 years of age.

Drawing on a dataset of 4,476 first-born children in the UK conducted by the Millennium Cohort Study and weighing the sample to represent the national population, the Marriage Foundation revealed on Monday that 46 per cent of children in the country are not living with both their natural parents by the age of 14.

The Marriage Foundation found that the majority of such cases (70 per cent) were a result of breakups from non-married couples, while 30 per cent were from families of married couples. For children whose biological parents were still together by the age of 14, 84 per cent had married parents, compared to just 16 per cent who were unmarried.

The data also showed that 60 per cent of parents who had never married were separated at the time of their child’s 14th birthday, compared to 21 per cent who married before the child was born and 32 per cent who married following the birth.

Harry Benson, Research Director of the Marriage Foundation, said that even when “considering a wide range of socio-demographic controls – such as ethnicity, age, time lived together, education and relationship happiness”, the numbers still indicated a greater probability of never-married parents to split up at 46 per cent, compared to 26 per cent for those who married before the birth and 27 per cent after.

The results back up similar findings from the Children’s Commissioner last year which found the 44 per cent of those born in 2000 spent some time living outside of a traditional nuclear family by the time they reached 17.

Mr Benson said per The Times: “Marriage provides relationship clarity, and encourages good things like sacrifice and forgiveness.

“This is why couples who have tied the knot tend to be more stable and more likely to weather the challenges that life throws at them… why marriage accounts for lower levels of family breakdown than other less stable forms of relationship.

“No wonder a huge majority of couples who are still together by the time their children become teenagers are married.”

The founder of the think tank, Sir Paul Coleridge said: “Every experienced parent knows that if adolescents are to successfully navigate the scary teenage years they need a secure and a stable family environment.

“If you want to experience the rich rewards of fully enjoying your children… marrying the other parent is a crucial first step.”

The Marriage Foundation report called on the government to do more to support marriage. This may be a big ask, however, given that the supposedly Conservative government has in its decade-plus in power demonstrated open hostility towards the traditional family.

For example, stay-at-home mothers were enraged in 2020 when then-Home Secretary Priti Patel demanded that the government do more to incentivise the 8.5 million “economically inactive” people — nearly two million of whom were women who decided to stay home to raise their children — into employment.

The government’s tax structure already punishes traditional family structures, with the state only taxing individuals rather than recognising family units, meaning that families reliant upon a single income of £50,000 will take home less money than two working parents on salaries of £25,000, thereby incentivising both partners to work rather than stay at home with children.

Despite the cost of living crisis, Prime Minister Sunak’s government doubled down on punishing middle-class families, relying on what is referred to as a “stealth tax” whereby the government freezes the tax band thresholds. The result will likely see thousands of families placed in artificially higher brackets given that their wages increased due to inflation, but in reality, in many cases keep their relative income at the same level as the cost of living also increases.

On top of that, family benefit programmes were also frozen, meaning that the same families will over time be priced out of the government programmes by the same mechanism.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2023/07/25/death-of-family-half-of-children-not-living-with-both-parents-by-14/

He shouted “Better no child than such a shitty child”. Then nurse Erick O. (34) allegedly tried to break the neck of his son (10 months)!

The Kenyan-born nurse has to answer for the attempted murder of his own child at the Aschaffenburg Regional Court. In the process, he once collected donations for orphans in his African homeland and gave lectures to primary school pupils in the Odenwald.

During the trial, the man did not comment on the charges brought by senior public prosecutor Jürgen Bundschuh. Instead, the boy’s mother described in horrifying detail the ordeal of their son on October 25, 2022, in a flat in Aschaffenburg. Her partner allegedly threw the child to the floor and against a cupboard three times – just because the child did not want to fall asleep!

Anna B. (30, name altered): “The little one was crying and did not want to sleep. I wanted to put him to bed, but Mr O. wouldn’t let me. He said he had to listen to him too.”

For minutes Erick O. allegedly pinched the toddler’s cheek and pushed him into the mattress. “He became more and more aggressive, said he was ready to go to jail,” Anna B. recalled. After futile attempts to calm the child, O. then allegedly tried to twist the child’s head: “I know how to do that, I’m doing that today. I don’t want such a shitty child,” he is said to have said.

The mother desperately held her son’s head. Then Erick O. snatched the baby from her. She recalled: “He was like an animal. He picked him up and threw him once across the room.” The baby was thrown against the door, then unconscious. “I wasn’t quick enough, unfortunately. I thought it was already dead,” the witness testified.

Because neighbours heard the mother’s cries for help and rang the bell, the child was saved at the last moment. Anna B.: “He was already standing in front of us with a knife. He said that the little boy was a part of him, I wasn’t allowed to have anything of his.”

Today, the boy is well again and, according to the mother, has suffered no consequential damage.

During the trial, it came out that Erick O. had apparently also abused the first of his three children. According to senior public prosecutor Jürgen Bundschuh, the accused, who has German citizenship, acted out of a “callous attitude that disregarded the suffering of others”. He had wanted to punish Anna B. because he felt her style of upbringing was too soft.

Judge Karsten Krebs will pronounce a verdict on August 2.

Vater wollte Sohn töten: Er rief „Lieber kein Kind als so ein Scheißkind“ | News | BILD.de

Mass brawls have been breaking out in Helsinki, Finland among the youth in migrant communities. pic.twitter.com/uJsfWnW2Ng

— Catch Up (@CatchUpFeed) July 21, 2023