Month: May 2024

by Giulio Meotti

“Strange Bedfellows” is not just a 1964 film starring Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida. In politics and war they are called “bedfellows”, but the radical left’s love affair with Islamic fanatics is the strangest couple that ever existed. Even Hitler and Stalin had much more in common.

How to explain the infatuation and alliance of progressivism with Islamic fundamentalists who kill Jews and Christians, want to replace secularism with sharia, subjugate women and cut off the heads of those who draw a harmless cartoon?

“Jihad Woke”. This is what Abe Greenwald in the monthly Commentary calls the new “bedfellows” and the cultural cancer that is devastating Western universities in its third stage. It is the alliance of all extremisms (sexual, racial, ecological, cultural) and Islamists.

This is why Gilles Kepel – France’s leading Islamic scholar – has just said that October 7th will have a deeper strategic impact than September 11th because, unlike the attack on the Twin Towers, the Hamas pogrom broke the West in two.

Just look at the 4,000 demonstrators who marched in front of the Munich synagogue two days ago demanding the destruction of Israel. An eyewitness told Nius that “the noise could be heard in the prayer room” of the synagogue. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told i24NEWS: “It is scandalous that the government allowed a pro-Hamas crowd to march on the Munich synagogue on the holy day of Shabbat. Four thousand anti-Semites were given permission to curse Israel in front of a Jewish house of prayer!”.

Meanwhile, they attacked the Holocaust memorial in Moabit (Berlin). There was a synagogue where today the memorial commemorates the Nazi murders. It survived the pogrom of 1938. From 1941, the Nazis used the synagogue as a collection center for Jews. Tens of thousands of people spent their last nights in Berlin here before being deported to concentration and extermination camps loaded onto freight wagons like cattle for slaughter. On one wall are listed the dates of a total of 63 deportation transports to the gas chambers of Eastern Europe.

They opened the gates of hell and justified everything.

Kamel Daoud, the Algerian writer, explains in Le Point what is happening: “Who are the winners of Gaza? The Islamist international. A global KO. Well managed between jihadism and the useful idiots of the West, this galaxy has managed to achieve an unthinkable victory. This includes collective prayers in American universities, the tutelage of the European radical left, and the infiltration of the media.”

“The Islamist international has managed to universalize its equations: the world is a Jewish conspiracy and Palestine is the state of Allah. But democracy is also hypocrisy. Therefore? ‘Islam is the solution’ was the slogan of Islamists in Egypt. The world lies, except for ‘us’. These ‘liberators’ from servitude, who managed to create an identity starting from the veil, make the keffiyeh a flag of their cause. Palestine is not their goal.”

Just look at the minute of silence observed at the UN for the Iranian Raisi. Do they do this for all deceased heads of state? No. Maybe they would do it again for Goebbels.

The destruction of the West: that is the goal.

Universities are the stronghold of the woke religion, but now there are those who say no.

Three students with keffiyeh and a video with an ISIS-style scenography. We are at the University of Turin, Italy.

In Belgium, the universities have started to ban Israeli universities.

“The inhabitants of Gaza do not need these spoiled children who want to earn a little glory, running around the corridors of universities in beautiful brand new keffiyehs” writes Algerian Boualem Sansal.

Now we see ecologists openly siding with Islamic extremists. “They have abandoned classic environmental defense to move towards what the ultra-left calls intersectionality,” Olivier Vial, director of Ceru, a university think tank, explains to Le Figaro. Vial says that Israel is seen in the decolonial movement “as the very figure of the colonizer” and the Jew “as a sort of ‘super white’ who should be deconstructed.” Exactly the opposite of the truth.

There are 109 verses in the Quran that command violence, often explicit violence, by Muslims against non-Muslims. But no matter what depths of depravity radical Islam reaches, it remains fenced in by the impregnable force field of “Islamophobia,” a major sin of the woke catechism and zealously applied by the left.

We are sliding towards the most abject and nihilistic radicalism with virtually no reaction. Now there are beginning to be signs that changes are afoot in many US universities disgusted by the wokery. But they are not taking place at the same pace or everywhere. There are rivers of money upstream to be drained, so many cultural institutions could sink even deeper into an oppressive and pro-Islamic monoculture.

Those who today consider themselves so free that they can afford to ignore this rampant madness will be the slaves of tomorrow. Or worse, their neck will be under the butcher’s knife.

Leftists and Jihadists: strange bedfellows | Israel National News – Arutz Sheva

On the morning of 25th May, a vengeful crowd in the Mujahid Colony area of Sargodha in Pakistan attacked and vandalized a man’s house in retaliation for an alleged blasphemy incident. Angry individuals broke into the man’s home, trashed his possessions and set fire to the shoe factory that was located there. Furthermore, they destroyed nearby electrical installations and set fire to tyres. However, the situation began to calm down after the Regional Police Officer (RPO), Sargodha District Police Officer (DPO) and a significant police contingent arrived at the scene. Two families from the Christian community were also rescued from the rabid throng by the authorities.

Another Jaranwala style attack on Christians in Sargodha with mob attacking local community, burning and ransacking property. The failure of the State to take any serious and sincere action against perpetrators of the Jaranwala incident has only emboldened those who exploit… pic.twitter.com/ks7uTziYaX

— M. Jibran Nasir 🇵🇸 (@MJibranNasir) May 25, 2024

The police transported the injured victim and other wounded persons to a hospital in an ambulance before apprehending multiple culprits. The extremists also used stones to attack the police party, according to RPO Shariq Kamal, but they were eventually driven out. He declared that those who disrupted law and order would face harsh consequences and that the incident was under investigation. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) voiced concerns about the situation in Sargodha and urged the district government and Punjab Police to quickly restore order and prosecute those responsible.

HRCP is seriously concerned by the unfolding situation in #Sargodha, where the Christian community in Gillwala village is reportedly at grave risk to their lives at the hands of charged mobs. There are unconfirmed reports of a man having been allegedly lynched.

The Punjab…

— Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (@HRCP87) May 25, 2024

Officials said that the vandalism was carried out by unidentified individuals after the discovery of burnt pages of the Quran which triggered the violent reaction. Asad Ejaz Malhi, the Sargodha DPO also confirmed that the disturbance was caused by suspected desecration of the Quran, but he insisted that a sizable police presence was present and no casualties were reported. “When police arrived, the mob had gathered outside the houses. Officers cordoned off the area and safely evacuated all residents. The police peacefully dispersed the crowd,” he stated and added, “Additional police units were stationed throughout the city to ensure the safety of the Christian community.”

Unconfirmed social media footage showed many people including youngsters destroying furniture while a crowd surrounded a man who was covered in blood. A large fire outside a house was captured on another video. However, Malhi alleged that no one was hurt and dismissed them as “fake videos” and he argued, “The police are maintaining law and order.” His claim was refuted by a family member of a wounded person who revealed that his uncle was in severe condition at a local hospital.

Malhi stated that the suspect was in jail and an investigation was ongoing, but he was unable to verify whether the claimed desecration had actually taken place. A resident of Sargodha named Mohsin Malhi reported that the suspect set fire to two of his homes and a factory. A district peace committee made up of representatives from the Muslim and minority communities as well as religious scholars would assess the situation and make a statement, according to Malhi. A declaration from the Christian community is also anticipated.

The instance brought up memories of a similar attack that happened in Jaranwala in August of last year when Islamists torched numerous homes and churches as they rampaged through a neighbourhood that was predominately Christian over blasphemy charges.

Pakistan: Islamist mob attack Christians over blasphemy charges (opindia.com)

Reduxx can reveal that the man who led a decades-long campaign pressuring the World Health Organization (WHO) to destigmatize fetishism, sadomasochism, and fetishistic transvestism, which is now included under the transgender umbrella, was a celebrated gay rights activist who ran a BDSM dungeon in Oslo. Svein Skeid, who passed away in December 2020, led the fetish rights campaign group Revise F65, which lobbied the WHO for decades and achieved their goal in 2018.

Skeid, renowned in Norway as a leading gay rights advocate, founded the Revise F65 committee in 1996 as a subsidiary of the National Association for Lesbian and Gay Liberation, or LLH, which has since become a trans activist group known as The Norwegian Organization for Sexual and Gender Diversity (Foreningen for kjønns- og seksualitetsmangfold – FRI).

“The purpose of Revise F65 is to remove Fetishism, Transvestism and Sadomasochism as psychiatric diagnoses from the ICD, the International Classification of Diseases, published by the World Health Organization (WHO) and translated into national versions world wide (mandate from the 1996 biennial national convention of LLH/FRI),” wrote Skeid in 2018.

“The mandate was based on a national survey conducted among the nearly two thousand lesbian and gay members of LLH, ‘rejecting discrimination of leather, SM and transgender people, and judging this diversity as a valuable resource.’”

Skeid’s statement was written in response to the June 2018 decision by the WHO to remove the three psychiatric diagnoses Fetishism, Fetishistic Transvestism and Sadomasochism as “disorders of sexual preference” from their latest edition of the International Classifications of Diseases and Related Health Problems, the ICD-11.

In a statement justifying the decision, WHO said, “From WHO’s perspective, there is an important distinction between conditions that are relevant to public health and indicate the need for health services versus those that are simply descriptions of private behavior without appreciable public health impact and for which treatment is neither indicated nor sought.”

Revise F65, while targeting WHO for their campaigning, frequently incorporated a BDSM pride flag in their demonstrations. Skeid also became known for wearing fetish gear in public to promote his political cause.

Previously, the ICD-10 had listed the diagnoses under a section titled F65. The WHO had defined fetishistic transvestism as “the wearing of clothes of the opposite sex principally to obtain sexual excitement and to create the appearance of a person of the opposite sex.”

“Fetishistic transvestism is distinguished from transsexual transvestism by its clear association with sexual arousal and the strong desire to remove the clothing once orgasm occurs and sexual arousal declines. It can occur as an earlier phase in the development of transsexualism,” the ICD-10 reads.

The ICD-10 had further defined sadomasochism as a “preference for sexual activity which involves the infliction of pain or humiliation, or bondage,” noting that “often an individual obtains sexual excitement from both sadistic and masochistic activities.”

The revised ICD-11, under code 6D36, defines “gender incongruence” as including “a history of sexual excitement in association with cross-dressing,” which the WHO manual states, “can sometimes be a feature of Gender Incongruence that develops in adolescence or adulthood, but such a history is not a sufficient basis for diagnosing Paraphilic Disorder Involving Solitary Behaviour or Consenting Individuals.”

Leading up to the decision by WHO officials, the Norwegian Directorate of Health had, in 2010, already depathologized the paraphilias within the national diagnosis registry at the behest of Skeid and Revise F65. Skeid explicitly outlined his goal to influence diagnostic policies relating to transvestic fetishism and sadomasochism worldwide.

“In addition to national work, Revise F65 also have an international mandate to motivate other countries to remove their national versions of the SM/fetish ICD diagnoses,” Skeid stated. “The more countries that remove their diagnoses, the greater is the possibility that the World Health Organization will follow suit. This is what happened in many countries in the years before the World Health Organization removed homosexuality as a diagnosis from the ICD classification in 1990.”

While promoting sadomasochism through his activism with Revise F65 through LLH / FRI, Skeid was a prominent member of Scandinavian Leather Men (SLM), a homosexual BDSM organization, and ran a “private dungeon” in downtown Oslo.

“I didn’t want to admit the BDSM sides of me in the first years, and a lot of porn, rubber clothes and sex toys disappeared into the rubbish chute … before I entered the SLM environment in 1980,” Skeid said in a 2019 interview.

WHO’s decision to follow the Norwegian Directorate of Health in depathologizing transvestic fetishism and sadomasochism was determined with the input of Columbia University professor Dr. Richard B. Krueger, a sex researcher and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry.

While acknowledging Skeid’s campaigning, Krueger co-authored a 2017 report supportive of his aims which singled out the paraphilias listed in the ICD-10’s category F65, noting that, according to Skeid, “the three diagnostic categories in ICD-10: Fetishism (F65.0), Fetishistic Transvestism (F65.1), and Sadomasochism (F65.5), should not be considered illnesses and should be removed from the ICD.”

Play on the bondage wheel in my private dungeon downtown Oslo, Norway. pic.twitter.com/XMl4uM31Y1

— Svein Skeid (@ReviseF65) August 9, 2019

Krueger, who has served as Medical Director of the Sexual Behavior Clinic at New York State Psychiatric Institute, was a member of the American Psychiatric Association’s Paraphilias Subworkgroup, and responsible for the APA’s fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) entry for pedophilia.

During the DSM revision process, Krueger consulted with pro-pedophile activist group B4U-Act, which campaigns to have pedophilia recognized as a sexual orientation and was co-founded by convicted child rapist Michael Melsheimer. Melsheimer had explicitly stated that the purpose of the organization was to normalize pedophilia where the National Association of Man-Boy Love (NAMBLA) had failed to do so. The B4U-Act co-founder also coined the term ‘MAP,’ an acronym for Minor-Attracted Persons, a term which is gaining traction in academic publications.

Diagnostic criteria for individuals classified as demonstrating pedophilic tendencies in the latest edition of the DSM, to which Krueger contributed, states, “if they report an absence of feelings of guilt, shame, or anxiety about the impulses… and their self-reported and legally recorded histories indicate that they have never acted on these impulses, then these individuals have a pedophilic sexual interest but not pedophilic disorder.”

Another notable member of LLH / FRI involved in a leadership capacity in Norway recently came to international attention after being arrested for performing dozens of sadomasochistic castrations out of his home in North London. Norwegian national Marius Gustavson, 46, uploaded recordings of the illicit surgeries to his ‘Eunuch Maker’ website, which was part of a larger network of men who aided Gustavson and performed fetishistic amputations and other procedures for sexual gratification.

From 2001 through 2007, Gustavson was Chairman of the Board for the Buskerud chapter of The Norwegian Organization for Sexual and Gender Diversity, or FRI (Foreningen for kjønns- og seksualitetsmangfold). During the period in which Gustavson was active in the organization, FRI was campaigning to have sadomasochism and fetishism depathologized.

The issue of whether fetishism is a central component of Pride celebrations has been discussed in Norwegian media recently. Parents in Ålesund protested against the Pride flag being flown in public schools and kindergartens, resulting in the symbol being banned from being displayed at educational institutions.

A public debate was held on national news channel NRK this week and featured Kristiansand city council representative Helène Rosvold Andersen, who argued that Pride is a political ideology and therefore an inappropriate topic to be discussed in schools. This perspective was echoed by Gunnhild Kristin Borlauge, herself a lesbian, who said that Pride celebrations had become “sexualised.”

Both the current president of SLM and the leader of Pride Oslo opposed the women’s concerns about fetishism and gender ideology being included in events aimed at homosexual rights. Current director of FRI Viljar Eidsvik argued that it is “extremely important to educate children about the diversity that exists at school” due to the presence of “queer students.”

SLM president Marius Hofseth, who attended the debate in fetish gear, claimed the BDSM group had an important role in the community. Hofseth argued that homosexuals owe their rights to both transgender activists and the leather-fetish communities.

https://reduxx.info/norwegian-bdsm-activist-behind-who-decision-to-remove-transvestic-fetishism-and-sadomasochism-from-psychiatric-diagnoses

The outcry at the so-called ‘Swiss Grannies case’ in early April—in which the European Court of Human Rights told the Swiss government that, as a matter of human rights law, its efforts to reach net zero were not good enough—was entirely predictable. Nevertheless, there may be hope yet, in that it reminded commentators very effectively of just what is wrong with the whole scheme of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as currently interpreted.

To recap: the Verein Klimaseniorinnen Schweiz, a pressure-group of elderly Swiss climate activists, sued unsuccessfully in the Swiss courts complaining that their government’s failure to take legislative steps to impose net zero by 2050 and enact other anti-climate-change measures infringed their human rights. They took the case to Strasbourg. The human rights court, with one dissent (the UK’s Judge Eicke), agreed with them. True, the ECHR says nothing about climate change; but this did not worry the majority. A human right to net zero could be hung on other pegs, in particular the right to private life or possibly to life itself, which do appear in the Convention. Some climate-induced cataclysm might, after all, make an elderly person’s life extremely unpleasant or even kill them. There had therefore been an infringement of the applicant’s human rights and the Swiss government was bound to do something about it.

The decision is deeply problematic. If ever there were a complex subject, it would be climate law, combining complexity with open-endedness and interest-balancing while deciding how clear legal prescriptions should jockey for position with extensive state regulatory powers. Courts are used to deciding individual rights rather than nations’ fates, issuing orders in the fairly simple form “Do X” or “Don’t do Y.” International courts (as the dissenting English judge pointed out, much to his credit) are about the worst agencies one can think of to dictate the content of climate legislation or decide how to balance the myriad interests involved. However, this is only the beginning of the problems demonstrated by the decision.

First, it trenchantly confirmed, if confirmation were needed, that even if the operative words defining the rights remained the same, today’s interpretation of the ECHR is entirely different from the ECHR which war-weary European governments signed in 1950. At that time, the ECHR was a limited instrument aimed simply at discouraging a return to the kind of enormities associated with the activities of the Nazis and Fascists up to 1945. (If you look up the rights protected, they all fairly neatly reflect these concerns: the right to life corresponds to mass murder, the right to privacy corresponds to unlimited searches of homes, and so on. Enforcement was seen as primarily a matter of state pressure, in particular the naming and shaming of backsliders on the international plane. Regular litigation was not contemplated: indeed, individuals could not complain at all unless a state specifically agreed to the right of individual petition, and the current European Court of Human Rights only came into being a good deal later, in 1959.

Compare matters today. The tail of individual petitions now well and truly wags the dog of treaty obligation. The Strasbourg court decides thousands of cases a year. It states that the ECHR is a “living instrument” open to constant development; takes the view that the rights under it should be interpreted so as to reflect progressive state practice and discourage states from holding out against it; and sees as a matter of pride rather than concern the fact that its interpretations of the instrument might go far beyond what anyone would have imagined in 1950. In short, the European court, far from being a little-used backstop against truly horrendous acts, now prefers to take on the mantle of a kind of super-arbiter of constitutional virtue, applying the ECHR as if it were a kind of constitutional palimpsest.

This change matters for a number of reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that no state ever deliberately signed up to these new ideas. The Strasbourg court, free from any governmental control and acting on its own initiative, simply arrogated its new function to itself and assumed (unfortunately correctly) that European governments would be too embarrassed to cry foul at its new role as self-appointed super-arbiter of constitutional virtue. And while on the subject of constitutions, it’s worth pointing out that they can generally be expected to be established deliberately and democratically by states, interpreted by state judges, and amendable by democratic processes, even if those processes are often more cumbersome than those affecting ordinary legislation. The ECHR and its attendant Strasbourg court have none of these features. No democratic vote established the ECHR; the Strasbourg judges are deliberately set up to be transnational and free from state ties; and there is no democratic means to amend the terms of the ECHR.

Second, the case demonstrates that the court does not merely consider itself entitled to interpret the existing rights contained in the ECHR so widely as almost to escape recognition. It is also prepared, with the barest of fig-leaves to cover its nakedness, to invent and force on states entirely new human rights if it thinks them important enough. Its justification for holding the Swiss government in breach despite the ECHR’s complete lack of any reference to environmentalism was, in essence, that if such a right weren’t included, then it should be: everyone now recognised that climate change mattered and it was vital to address it. This, again, matters. The more the Strausbourg court behaves like this, the more it will be seen as a body with a determination to use its position to press a progressive political agenda.

Third, even though the Strasbourg court was officially established merely to interpret the ECHR, this recent decision laid bare that it can act far more ambitiously. A point the majority repeatedly made to justify its decision was that, in 2015, Switzerland had signed another treaty that required it to take steps to mitigate climate change, the Paris Agreement. The problem with this argument is not difficult to spot: the fact that a party has broken Treaty A is no reason to hold that they have also broken Treaty B. Furthermore, unlike the ECHR, the Paris Agreement did not set up any court formally to tell states whether they were obeying it. If so, it seems to say at the very least somewhat presumptuous for the Strasbourg judges to bypass this restriction.

Fourth, the decision raised yet again—and this time very directly—the question of the democratic legitimacy of the Court’s free-wheeling human rights regime. ECHR rights, it has to be remembered, have to be applied without regard to what voters or representatives may think. With the limited ECHR in 1950, this end-run around democracy was acceptable: democratic decision-making cannot justify things like state murder, torture, or the wholesale suppression of all dissent. But with the extended rights now recognised by the Court, this is a much harder position to promote. Extensive rights to privacy, to equality, or (as here) to government measures aimed at climate change may be a good thing. But are they so important that those promoting them need to be given a way to bypass the democratic political process? That’s a hard argument to make.

It is especially difficult to make such a case in the context of Switzerland, whose own constitution provides for compulsory referendums on matters of importance, and had indeed put to a national vote a law of the sort that the claimants were demanding, only to have it rejected. It follows that what we have here is a demand by the unelected members of a transnational court applying norms voted on by no-one. The ruling necessarily sidelines Switzerland’s constitution and ignores the will of its own people on a matter of social policy of immense importance. This may be technically right as a matter of international law: the accepted rules say that a state cannot justify breach of a treaty commitment by citing its own internal laws. But politically, it is very difficult indeed.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, in the Swiss climate change case, the Strasbourg court has managed to illustrate by a single decision almost everything wrong with human rights as practised in Europe today. The resulting calls from England to withdraw from the ECHR were predictable. But on this occasion, these were supplemented, unprecedentedly, by a demand for a Swiss exit, originating from a senior member of one of the heavyweight Swiss political parties, the Swiss People’s Party. To precipitate a call of that kind from the normally stolid and uncomplaining Swiss takes some doing. The Strasbourg court needs to take note. If it does not realise that there are limits to how far it can push states using its self-declared powers, it will arguably have only itself to blame if the system it has so laboriously created begins to break down.

https://europeanconservative.com/articles/analysis/court-of-human-rights-overreach-imperils-its-survival

Nosta Lgia

Patriotic French girls protest sexuaI abuse by fake asylum seekers and are attacked by pro invasion socialists. Men who attack young girls need education. Do you agree? pic.twitter.com/hPzLmarOP1

— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) May 19, 2024

FOREIGN RAPISTS OUT !

Activists from the @Coll_Nemesis group invited themselves to the Cannes film festival demanding that rapists from other countries be expelled from Europe.

We are launching a #MeTooImmigration movement because our voices count too !

Take part in this… pic.twitter.com/4sH0uJI7Xc

— Alice Cordier (@CordierAlice2) May 24, 2024

Once again, the left shows that it has superior arguments and can win every debate.

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/05/france-socialists-assault-women-protesting-sexual-abuse-by-asylum-seekers

The judiciary will have to decide on the 31st of May. The court in Bordeaux will examine the Bordeaux prefecture’s request as to whether or not Abdouramane Ridouane, Nigerian imam of the Pessac mosque in the Gironde region, should be deported. His lawyer explained that his client is accused of ‘his attachment to the defence of the Palestinian cause and his criticism of France’s international policy, including in his home country of Niger’. Sefen Guez Guez added: ‘This agitation is just another example of the authorities’ desire to silence any protesting voice in order to promote themselves in the run-up to the European elections’.

In 2022, the Ministry of the Interior called for the Al-Farouq mosque in Pessac to be closed down because it promoted a ‘Salafist ideology’. Fabienne Buccio, the former prefect of the Gironde department, had also initiated proceedings in order to close the mosque temporarily. It was suspected that the centre regularly hosted imams known for their affiliation to the Islamist movement and their Salafist ideology. The prefecture had even announced a six-month closure.

However, Abdouramane Ridouane’s lawyer insisted that the place of worship had ‘won its cases’. The judge for summary proceedings at the administrative court had declared that the mosque’s internet publications that had led to the closure were ‘not of such an extremist nature that they would incite to commit acts of terrorism by means of hatred and violence’. Gérald Darmanin had appealed in vain. The Constitutional Council had ruled that the temporary closure was ‘a police measure that constitutes a serious and manifestly unlawful interference with religious freedom’.

Gironde : l’imam de la mosquée de Pessac, défenseur de la Palestine, menacé d’expulsion – Valeurs actuelles

Seven people, including four suspected Hamas members, have been arrested in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands on suspicion of planning attacks on Jewish institutions in Europe.

Israel’s Mossad spy agency said Denmark had exposed “Hamas infrastructure on European soil”, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said.

Three of the suspects were detained in Berlin and another in the Netherlands – all four long-standing members of Hamas with close links to the leadership of its military branch, German prosecutors said. A Hamas official denied those held were linked to the group.

Danish police said three people were arrested across Denmark and would be charged under the terrorism clause of the criminal code and put in front of a judge for preliminary questioning.

The person detained in the Netherlands was held on suspicion of plotting to carry out “an act of terror”, officials added.

“This is extremely serious,” Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen said. “It is of course completely unacceptable in relation to Israel and Gaza that there is someone who takes a conflict somewhere else in the world into Danish society,” she added.

Israel is pressing on with its operation to destroy Hamas in the Gaza Strip, following the group’s assault on Israeli towns in October that left around 1,200 Israelis dead.

Authorities issued only the first names and surname initials of those detained. Dutch national Nazih R was arrested by police in Rotterdam, while Lebanon-born Abdelhamid Al A and Ibrahim El-R, as well as Egyptian national Mohamed B, were arrested in the German capital, German prosecutors said.

Abdelhamid Al A had been assigned by Hamas leaders in Lebanon with finding sources for weapons, prosecutors said.

The weapons were reportedly due to be taken to Berlin and kept ready for potential terrorist attacks against Jewish institutions.

“Following the terrible attacks by Hamas on the Israeli population, attacks on Jews in Jewish institutions have also increased in our country in recent weeks,” German justice minister Marco Buschmann said.

Danish police said the raids followed investigations made in cooperation with partners abroad, which had revealed a network of people preparing a terrorist attack.

Seven people arrested in Germany, Netherlands and Denmark over ‘Hamas terror plots’ | The Independent

An Italian school’s decision to exempt Muslim children from studying Dante because the mediaeval poet placed Mohammed in hell in The Divine Comedy has sparked a backlash and a debate over cancel culture.

Politicians from both the Left and Right said that Dante was a pillar of Italian literature and that it was unacceptable for children to be exempted from studying his writing because of their faith.

The row broke out after a secondary school in Treviso in the north of the country reportedly allowed two Muslim children, aged around 14, to not attend classes in which The Divine Comedy was being studied.

Written at the start of the 14th century, it is an allegorical poem that revolves around a man’s journey to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, aided by two guides, Virgil and Beatrice.

In the epic work, Dante places the Prophet Mohammed and his cousin Ali in Hell, where they are tortured by sword-wielding demons.

“How is Mohammed mangled! Before me walks Ali weeping, from the chin his face cleft to the forelock,” Dante wrote.

The exemption was criticised by MPs from across the political spectrum.

Simona Malpezzi, a senator with the centre-Left opposition Democratic Party, said it was “deeply wrong” to deprive any pupils of the chance to acquire the “deep knowledge of Italian culture that studying Dante brings. Knowing Dante does not take anything away from children’s religious faith and adds a great deal to their knowledge of Italian culture”.

Federico Mollicone, an MP from Brothers of Italy, the party led by prime minister Giorgia Meloni, said: “This is just the latest shameful case of cultural cancellation. An exemption like this not only undermines our national identity but deprives new generations of formative scholastic study.”

Carlo Pasquetto, a member of the centre-Left Azione party, said it was “madness” to view Dante as being offensive to Muslims.

“Dante is the father of humanism, of Italy, of Europe. To decide not to teach him in the name of a false conception of tolerance will create enormous problems of integration in society. This is not tolerance, nor integration, it is the suicide of the West which instead of celebrating plurality is cancelling its own identity.” Dante should be taught to all children in Italy, he said, “regardless of the colour of their skin or the religion of their parents”.

“True integration should not be about exempting Muslim children when you talk about Mohammed in the 27th Canto [of The Divine Comedy] but to get them involved so that they can explain their own culture and their own points of view on the narrative.”

Matteo Salvini, deputy prime minister and the head of the Right-wing League party, said on social media platform X that the exemption was “shameful and unacceptable”.

“Those who don’t want to adapt to our culture, traditions and values can quietly go back to where they came from. Dante is the father of the Italian language and a genius who champions our country on the world stage,” he wrote.

Mario Conte, the mayor of Treviso, also criticised the school’s decision. “I would prefer that they cut down on kids looking at TikTok and social media rather than Dante. Less mobile phones, more Divine Comedy.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/backlash-muslim-children-italy-exempted-153745284.html?guccounter=1