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Archive for May 27, 2016
Cartoons of the Day
May 27, 2016CNN Exclusive Explores ISIS Fighters Mixing In with Refugees to Europe
May 27, 2016CNN Exclusive Explores ISIS Fighters Mixing In with Refugees to Europe via YouTube, May 26, 2016
(Surprise! — DM)
Sweden Choosing to Lose War against Middle East Antisemitism?
May 27, 2016Sweden Choosing to Lose War against Middle East Antisemitism? Gatestone Institute, Nima Gholam Ali Pour, May 27, 2016
Sweden has officially surrendered to the Middle Eastern anti-Semitism.
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♦ Who invited this “Salafist megastar,” who denies the Holocaust and is known for making anti-Semitic statements, to visit Malmö? What do you do when anti-Semitism in Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, is so normalized that children in a public school can endorse a conference with anti-Semitic elements?
♦ Anti-Semitism is such a gigantic problem in Malmö that even senior city officials cannot understand how it became so normalized. They seem to dismiss it as part of a non-Swedish culture that, in a multicultural society, must be tolerated, even accommodated.
♦ If there are children in Swedish public schools today who are promoting an anti-Semitic conference, what will these children do in the future?
♦ Is Sweden really turning into a country where Jews are no longer welcome, someday to become a country without Jews? And if that happens, what does that say about Sweden? And who will come next after the Jews?
Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, is an important, visible part of Sweden. If you read the Municipality of Malmö’s political objectives, which the Municipal Council of Malmö has endorsed, you will see that “racism, discrimination and hate crimes do not belong in open Malmö.” The reality, however, is different. Anti-Semitism there has reached bizarre levels — with politicians and other policymakers in Sweden doing nothing about it.
On April 30, 2016, the Islamic imam and preacher Salman Al-Ouda, who has been described in the Swedish media as a “Salafist megastar,” visited Malmö. Al-Ouda apparently inspired Osama bin Laden, has claimed that the Holocaust was a myth, and is known for making anti-Semitic statements.
The first question anyone should ask is: Who invited such a person to visit Malmö?
It turned out that it was a politician from the Green Party, currently part of the Swedish government’s ruling coalition, and which also governs in Malmö locally, together with the Social Democrats.
The second question that anyone should ask is: What kind of reception did Al-Ouda receive in such a large Swedish city?
Well, Al-Ouda got to speak at one of Malmö’s most famous conference facilities, Amiralen, described on the official website of the Municipality of Malmö as a part of the city’s cultural heritage. Al-Ouda was also invited by the Alhambra Muslim student association, at Malmö University. In other words, even though Malmö’s policies officially state that racism has no place in Malmö, Al-Ouda, an anti-Semite, was treated as a diplomat.
On May 6, just a week after Al-Ouda’s visit, the fourteenth “Palestinians in Europe Conference” was held in Malmö. One of the conference’s organizers, the Palestinian Return Centre, has close ties to the Hamas terrorist organization.
The Palestinians in Europe Conference was held at Malmömässan, another famous conference center in Malmö. When a Swedish pro-Israel organization, Perspektiv På Israel, sent an email to the CEO of Malmömässan, Lasse Larsson, to warn him that an anti-Semite was going to speak at his conference center, Larsson replied:
“We, MalmöMässan, do not take positions on the substance of the matter, but have entrusted this to our authorities that have given the go-ahead and therefore we will allow the conference to be conducted.”
The problem is that if you allow someone to spread hatred against Jews, you need to have a clear position. Would he have allowed the hall to be used to spread hate speech against African-Swedes or homosexuals or women?
In Malmö, when it comes to Middle Eastern anti-Semitism, there is currently no clear position from any major institution.
When it was revealed that one of the speakers at the Palestinians in Europe Conference was to be the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ekrim Said Sabri, who has also repeatedly made anti-Semitic remarks, an announcement came that two Swedish Members of Parliament, Hillevi Larsson (Social Democrat) and Daniel Sestrajcic (Left Party), would also speak at it. This arrangement appeared to be no coincidence. In October 2015, both of these MPs spoke in Malmö at a rally in which participants celebrated knife attacks against Jews in Israel. Additionally, when the Eurovision Song Contest took place in Malmö in 2013, it was Daniel Sestrajcic, then chairman of Malmö’s Municipal Cultural board, who argued that Eurovision should suspend Israel.
After the Perspektiv På Israel organization revealed that Sestrajcic and Larsson were to participate in the Palestinians in Europe Conference with Sheikh Sabri, a known anti-Semite, Israel’s ambassador to Sweden wrote a critical op-ed for a major Swedish newspaper — after which the two MPs cancelled their appearance.
Wait, it gets worse. Prior to the Palestinian conference, a public school class in Malmö participated in a video advertisement promoting it. The advertisement was filmed on the premises of the Apelgårdsskolan public elementary school. The idea that in Sweden a public school openly endorses a Palestinian conference to which an anti-Semite is invited to speak may also sound bizarre, but that is exactly what took place.
As this author also happens to be a member of Malmö’s school board, it seemed normal to contact the school’s director and the municipal councilor responsible for primary schools, to report the advertisement. The councilor never responded — but the school’s director did. The advertising video, he said, was just a “call to participate in the conference.”
What do you do when anti-Semitism in Sweden’s third-largest city is so normalized that children in a public school can endorse a conference with anti-Semitic elements?
Although the school director’s reply was published in the online magazine Situation Malmö (of which this author is the editor), the media in Malmö was, as always, silent.
Apelgårdsskolan elementary school in Malmö (left) openly endorsed a conference to which Sheikh Ekrim Said Sabri, who has repeatedly made anti-Semitic remarks, was invited to speak. Right: Hillevi Larsson, a Social Democratic MP representing a district of Malmö, accepted an invitation to speak at the same conference where Sheikh Sabri was scheduled to speak. Larsson is pictured showing off a Palestinian flag and a “map of Palestine” in which Israel does not exist.
The topic of anti-Semitism is so normalized in Malmö that when children are promoting a conference with anti-Semitic elements, it is not something the media even writes about. The omission seems part of an editorial policy of deliberately choosing not to report about Islamic and Palestinian anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism, is, in fact, such a gigantic problem in Malmö that even senior politicians and officials in the city seem not to understand how it became so normalized. They seem to dismiss it as part of a non-Swedish culture that, in a multicultural society, must be tolerated, even accommodated.
It is only in Muslim countries — and evidently extreme liberal countries such as Sweden — that a public school could promote a conference with anti-Semitic elements without anyone reacting.
That this happens in one of Sweden’s largest cities, means that leading politicians in the country are aware of this rough anti-Semitic wave, but prefer not to do anything about it.
Some of the reasons for this preference are:
- Large-scale immigration from countries where anti-Semitism is normalized.
- A strong pro-Palestinian engagement among Swedish politicians that has resulted in a totally surreal debate about the Israel-Palestine debate, in which Israel is unjustly demonized.
- A desire among political parties in Sweden to win the votes of immigrants.
- A Swedish multiculturalism that is so uncritical of foreign cultures that it cannot differentiate between culture and racism.
- A fear of sounding critical of immigration.
- Important Swedish institutions, such as the Church of Sweden, legitimizing anti-Semitism by endorsing the Kairos Palestine document.
Sweden has officially surrendered to the Middle Eastern anti-Semitism.
The period of April-May 2016, and the visits by assorted anti-Semites to Malmö, show a regrettable pattern. In Sweden in general, and Malmö in particular, there are too many politicians, senior officials, journalists, heads of schools and companies that do not distance themselves from anti-Semitism.
Such a condition cannot only be described as bizarre; it is extremely dangerous.
There are Jewish communities in Malmö and elsewhere in Sweden. Jews are one of Sweden’s five recognized minorities. As one of the countries that has joined the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, Sweden has an obligation to stop the normalization of anti-Semitism in Sweden.
When politicians and senior officials let children in Sweden’s third-largest city endorse a racist conference, with which even the most extreme anti-Israel Swedish MPs refuse to associate, it is obvious that Sweden wishes to lose its fight against Middle Eastern anti-Semitism. Allowing schoolchildren to endorse anti-Semitism deserves nothing but condemnation, whether in Gaza or in Sweden. We expect this pattern in Sweden of indulging anti-Semitism to be fixed.
If there are children in Swedish public schools today who are promoting an anti-Semitic conference, what will these children do in the future? In a European continent where Western values are being challenged by Islamic values and European security is threatened by Islamic extremists, these children are being abandoned and being forced into choosing racist values, because Swedish authorities refuse to say “No” to Middle Eastern anti-Semitism.
The more normalized Middle Eastern anti-Semitism becomes in Sweden, the more you see Palestinian and other Arabic and Islamic organizations pushing the limits of how openly they can express it. You start asking yourself, will Sweden someday become a country without Jews. And if that happens, what does that say about Sweden? And who will come next after the Jews? To cleanse a country of Jews through massive Islamic immigration is no better than doing the same thing through cattle-cars or concentration camps.
Is Sweden really turning into a country where Jews are no longer welcome?
Have the institutions in Sweden really chosen to lose the fight against Middle Eastern anti-Semitism and to let extremist Islam win?
Obama and Ho Chi Minh: Embracing Evil
May 27, 2016Obama and Ho Chi Minh: Embracing Evil, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, May 27, 2016
On his visit to meet with Communist leaders in Vietnam, Obama criticized the United States for having, “too much money in our politics, and rising economic inequality, racial bias in our criminal justice system.” He praised Ho Chi Minh’s evocation of the “American Declaration of Independence” and claimed that we had “shared ideals” with the murderous Communist dictator.
Shortly after the “evocation” that Obama praised, his beloved Ho was hard at work purging the opposition, political and religious. When Obama references these “shared ideals”, does he perhaps mean Ho’s declaration, “All who do not follow the line laid down by me will be broken.”
Perhaps he means the euphemistically named “land reform” which may have killed up to a million people. Like Stalin and Mao, Ho Chi Minh seized land and executed property owners as “enemies of the state”. The original plan had been to murder one in a thousand. But the relatively modest plan for mass murder was swiftly exceeded by the enthusiastic Communist death squads.
Obama has consistently called for wealth redistribution. This is what it really looks like. It’s men being hung from trees or lying in dirt dying of malaria. It’s death squads coming in the night. It’s a declaration that you are to be executed because you are the wrong class in a class war. It’s a man condemned to hard labor in a New Economic Zone and a family starving to death because the regime has commanded that they must be made an example of to other peasants.
What’s wrong with a little wealth redistribution anyway?
As Obama said, on his visit to the brutal Communist dictatorship in Cuba, “So often in the past there’s been a sharp division between left and right, between capitalist and communist or socialist… And especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate, right? Oh, you know, you’re a capitalist Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you’re some crazy communist that’s going to take away everybody’s property… you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory — you should just decide what works.”
Does Vietnam’s Communist dictatorship work? Obama seems to think that it does, talking up the, “skyscrapers and high-rises of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and new shopping malls and urban centers. We see it in the satellites Vietnam puts into space”. What’s a million dead when you’ve got satellites in space? What does it matter if you don’t have freedom of speech when there are skyscrapers in Ho Chi Minh City?
Unlike Pol Pot, whose genocidal crimes leftist activists like Noam Chomsky tried and failed to cover up, the Communist butchery in Vietnam that took place even long before the Vietnam War has largely been erased from common history. The victims of Ho Chi Minh and his successors have become non-persons not just in Vietnam, but in Washington D.C. Instead Obama associates one of history’s bloodiest Communist butchers with Thomas Jefferson.
What of the Declaration of Independence was there in Ho’s concentration camps? The brutal Communist regime whose ideals Obama praises, sent political dissidents to camps. Are those the ideals he shares with Uncle Ho?
Obama praises the “Vietnamese constitution, which states that ‘citizens have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and have the right of access to information, the right to assembly, the right to association, and the right to demonstrate.’ That’s in the Vietnamese constitution.”
The Soviet constitution had the same empty guarantees. The Nhan Van-Giai Pham intellectuals who were purged can testify that these words were as meaningless as those of the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence which Obama had quoted earlier. More relevantly the fourth article of the Vietnamese Constitution states that the “The Communist Party of Vietnam… the faithful representative of the interests of the working class, laborers and the whole nation, acting upon the Marxist-Leninist doctrine and Ho Chi Minh’s thought, is the leading force of the State and society.”
That means there’s no freedom of speech, press, assembly or anything else except within the confines of Marxist-Leninist doctrine and Uncle Ho’s cunning distortions that fooled almost as many American leftists as Uncle Joe’s plans for Eastern Europe fooled Western European leftists.
Obama equates a Communist dictatorship to America in an ugly display of moral equivalence. “This is an issue about all of us, each country, trying to consistently apply these principles.” Vietnam locked up political bloggers for “abusing their freedom” just this March. According to Obama, America has “too much money in politics”. Vietnam doesn’t have that problem. It only has one party.
The Communist Party.
Vietnam only has one party because its Communist leaders banned, purged and criminalized the opposition. But Obama doesn’t think that Communism is a particularly bad thing.
In his speech, he dismissed the Vietnam War as being caused by “fears of Communism” that overcame our “shared ideals”. Why were we afraid of Communism? It might have had to do something with the mass murder of 94 million people by Communist regimes. It might have a few things to do with concentration camps, bans of political parties and the imprisonment and execution of those practicing freedom of speech, assembly and the press.
Our “fears of Communism” were as real and valid as our “fears of Nazism”. It is only the fellow travelers of the left who deny this undeniable fact.
After one bout of mass murder, Ho Chi Minh dismissed his crimes with the words, “One cannot waken the dead.” Obama clearly agrees. The dead, American and Vietnamese, must be written off as part of an unfortunate conflict. We must forget why they died and embrace their killers.
Obama marked the lives lost on “both sides” as if the Communist terror squads butchering Vietnamese farmers or massacring Catholics were somehow morally the equal of American soldiers dying to stop them. Lives were also lost on both sides when America fought the Nazis. Reagan was rightly criticized for that sort of moral equivalence when he equated Nazi soldiers at Bitburg and concentration camp victims. And yet the liberals who protested that equivalence have nothing but applause when Obama equates murdered American soldiers and butchered Vietnamese families with their Communist killers.
When Viet Cong terrorists threw grenades into markets, are we supposed to mourn the children who were torn apart by shrapnel and the grenade throwers as morally equivalent? If we equate “the names of 58,315 Americans who gave their lives in the conflict” with the evil they were fighting, then we render their sacrifice worthless.
Their deaths become a meaningless mistake in an unnecessary war caused by our failure to understand our “shared ideals” with Ho Chi Minh and our irrational fear of Communist concentration camps.
That is Obama’s real message. We should have adapted some aspects of Communism and learned from our shared values. We should have closed our eyes to Ho Chi Minh’s atrocities as a matter of having to break human eggs to make Socialist omelets while celebrating him as another Thomas Jefferson.
That is the way the left saw it. That is still the way it sees it.
Obama’s trip to Vietnam is not a mere strategic journey, but yet another opportunity for him to remind us that the left has not repented or recanted of its solidarity and support for Communist terror whether in Cuba, in Vietnam or anywhere else. It still sees every Communist dictator as a role model worth emulating and every Communist mass grave as the price that must be paid for a better world.
The petroyuan is the big bet of Russia and China, by Ariel Noyola Rodríguez
May 27, 2016The petroyuan is the big bet of Russia and China by Ariel Noyola Rodríguez After the economic sanctions that the United States and the European Union imposed against Russia, Moscow and Beijing put together an imposing energetic team that has radically transformed the world oil market. In addition to increasing their interchange of hydrocarbons exponentially, both oriental powers have decided to put an end to the domination of the dollar in fixing the prices of the black gold. The petroyuan is the instrument of payment of strategic character that promises to facilitate the transition to a multipolar monetary system, a system that takes various currencies into account and reflects the correlation of forces in the current world order.
Voltaire Network | Mexico City (Mexico) | 20 May 2016
Source: The petroyuan is the big bet of Russia and China, by Ariel Noyola Rodríguez
In place of humiliating Russia, the “economic war” that Washington and Brussels had promoted was counterproductive, since it only contributed to fortify the energy team between Moscow and Beijing. We recall that in May of 2014 the Russian company Gazprom agreed to supply gas to China up to 38 billion cubic meters annually during three decades (starting in 2018) through the signing of a contract for 400 billion US dollars with the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNCP) [1].
At the present time both powers coordinate the work of an ambitious plan of strategic projects that include the construction of gas and oil pipelines as well as the combined operation of refineries and large petrochemical complexes. Without proposing to do so, the coming together of Moscow and Beijing has produced deep changes in the world oil market in favor of the Orient, dramatically undermining the influence of Western petroleum companies.
Even Saudi Arabia, that until recently was the principal supplier of petroleum to the Asian giant, has been undermined by Kremlin diplomacy. While from 2011 the petroleum exports of Saudi Arabia to China were growing at a rhythm of 120 thousand barrels per day, those of Russia grew at a velocity of 550 thousand barrels per day, that is to say, almost five times more rapidly. In fact, in 2015 the Russian companies managed to overcome the sales of petroleum from the Saudis four times: Riyadh had to conform with being the second provider of crude to Beijing in May, September, November and December [2].
It is worth noting that the countries that make up the European core have also seen their share of the market diminished in the face of the Asian region: Germany, for example, was supplanted by China at the end of 2015 as the greater buyer of Russian petroleum [3]. In this way, the great investors operating in the world oil market can hardly believe how, in a few months, the principal purchaser (China) became the favorite client of the third major producer (Russia). In accord with the Vice-President of Transneft (the Russian company charged with the implementation of national oil pipelines), Serge Andronov, China is disposed to import a total volume of 27 million tones of Russian petroleum during 2016 [4].
The Russian-Chinese energy alliance is proposed to go longer. Moscow and Beijing have made their interchanges of petroleum a channel of transition towards a multipolar monetary system, that is to say, a system that is no longer based on the dollar alone, but takes into account various currencies and above all, that reflects the correlation of forces in the current world order. The economic sanctions imposed by Washington and Brussels drove the Russians to eliminate the dollar and the euro from their commercial and financial transactions, since otherwise, they would be too exposed to suffer sabotage in the moment of realizing buying and selling operations with their principal trading partners.
For this reason, from mid-2015, the hydrocarbons that China buys from Russia are paid in yuans, not in dollars, information that has been confirmed by high executives of Gazprom Neft, the petroleum branch of Gazprom [5]. This has lead to the use of the “people’s currency” (‘renminbi’) in the world oil market and at the same time allows Russia to neutralize the economic offensive launched by the United States and the European Union. The underpinnings of a new financial order supported by the petroyuan is emerging: the Chinese money is preparing to become the axis of commercial exchanges of the Asian-Pacific region with the principal petroleum powers.
- © David Manrique
Toda Russia realizes its interchanges of petroleum with China in yuans, in the future the Organization of the Petroleum Exporters Countries (OPEC) will do the same if China demands it. Or will the cult of Saudi Arabia for the dollar make them lose one of their principal clients? [6] Other geoeonomic powers have already followed the path of Russia and China, since they have understood that in order to establish a more balanced monetary system, the “de-dollarization” of the world economy is a priority.
No less important is that after the fall of oil prices, more than 60% (from mid-2014), the Chinese banks have become a decisive financial support for the joint energy infrastructure works. For example, to establish as soon as possible the Russian-Chinese gas pipeline “Force of Siberia”, Gazprom requested from the Bank of China a five-year loan for an amount equivalent to 2 billion euros this past month of March [7]. This is the greatest bilateral credit that Gazprom has contracted with a financial institution to date. Another example is the loan that China gave Russia some weeks ago for a total of 12 billion US dollars for the Yamal LNG project (for liquefied natural gas) in the Arctic region [8]. Obviously, the foreign policy of Russia in energy have not lost any strength due to isolation, on the contrary, it is now enjoying its best moments, thanks to China.
In conclusion, the hostility of the leaders of the United States and the European Union against the government of Vladimir Putin has precipitated the strengthening of the Russian-Chinese team that at the same time has only increased the weight of the Orient in the world market of hydrocarbons. The great bet of Moscow and Beijing is the petroyuan, the strategic instrument of payment that brings with it a challenge to the dominion of the dollar in the fixing of prices for black gold.
Iran supplying weapons, cash and training to Taliban
May 27, 2016Iran supplying weapons, cash and training to Taliban, Jihad Watch,
Sunnis and Shi’ites hate each other, but not as much as they hate the Infidel. Hence Iran’s support for the Taliban, as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad: Sunnis who are waging jihad against Infidels are allies of Iran, as far as the mullahs are concerned. Such support also strengthens Iran’s ongoing maneuvering to be the leader of the Islamic world.
Mullah Mansoor first entered Iran almost two months ago, according to immigration stamps in a Pakistani passport found in a bag near the wreckage of the taxi he was travelling in when he was killed by a US drone strike.
The passport, in the name of Wali Muhammad, also showed he had only just returned to Pakistan from the border crossing of Taftan, some 280 miles (450km) away from the site where he was killed, an area called Ahmed Wal, where he had stopped for lunch.
On Monday, the Iranian foreign ministry denied that “such a person had entered Pakistan from the Iranian border”.
“Iran welcomes any efforts made in bringing stability and peace to Afghanistan,” said spokesman Hossein Jaberi-Ansari.
It is not known where Mansoor went inside Iran, whether his trip was secretly facilitated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or whether he stayed among the large populations of Afghans living in eastern Iran, especially in the cities of Mashhad and Zahedan.
The Taliban also have ties to Sunni extremist groups operating in the Iranian province of Sistan and Balochistan.
A Pakistani official from Dalbandin, a district bordering Iran, said he did not think Iran would back foreign insurgents with links to such groups.
“All Afghan militants hold Pakistani nationality, it is not written on their forehead whether he is a militant or not,” said the official, who did not wish to be identified.
Nonetheless police and intelligence officials in western Afghanistan often complain the local insurgency is being managed and supplied with weapons and training from Iran….
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