Posts Tagged ‘Religious Expression’

The French government is considering banning a far-right group believed to be planning violence at a protest against the country’s new gay marriage laws on Sunday 26 May.

French Interior Minister Manuel Valls announced that he was considering outlawing the Pritemps Francais (French Spring) group after it released a statement threatening to target “the government and all its appendices, the collaborating political parties and lobbies where the ideological programmes are developed and the organs which spread it”.

“This is a call to violence,” Valls told radio station France Info, and said there had been a number of death threats, which he does not “take lightly”.

“Justice will have to act because it is intolerable that in the Republic there can be these messages of hate,” he continued. “There is no place for groups that challenge the Republic, democracy and which also attack individuals.”

The group gathers under its banner several extreme nationalist and fascist splinter groups. The historian Dominique Venner, 78, who committed suicide on Tuesday on the altar of Notre Dame cathedral, had ties with the organisation.

Read more here.

Any rational balance sheet of the last decade would show that the ‘war on terror’ has been a failure in its own terms: it has not prevented terrorism but caused it to spread.”

The attack in Woolwich yesterday was horrific. There can be no justification for a murderous attack on an individual soldier in the streets of London. It must have been awful too for the local people who witnessed it.

Unlike with most terrorist attacks or indeed other crimes, we have been able to see film footage of the perpetrators, hear testimony from the witnesses who saw or talked to them. So we know what these men say motivated them. They claimed that the killing of the soldier was in response to the killing of Muslims by British soldiers in other countries. One said that the government did not care for people and should get the troops out.

The Boston bombers last month were supposedly similarly motivated. The Woolwich attack, carried out by two men now shot and wounded and under arrest in hospital, appears to represent a phenomenon that was pointed out nearly a decade ago by the security services in Britain: that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would lead to a growing threat of terrorism in Britain. Those of us in Stop the War have long predicted that these sorts of attacks would happen because of the war on terror…

…The interventions have spread in the name of ‘fighting terrorism’: drone attacks are taking place in a number of countries including Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The bombing of Libya by the west in 2011 led to at least 30,000 dead. British troops are aiding the French in Mali. The British are intervening in the war in Syria for their own ends, and want to lift the EU arms embargo there in order to escalate the war and achieve regime change. The US and EU continues to back Israel despite its treatment of the Palestinians, even sending the architect of the Iraq war, Tony Blair, as envoy for peace in the Middle East.

In responding to President Barack Obama’s counter-terrorism speech on Thursday, MSNBC’s Martin Bashir was joined on-air by Chris Hayes, another host at the network. In addition to speaking about the president’s proposals and plans, the two had a curious conversation about the horrific machete attack that unfolded in London on Wednesday.

Bashir and Hayes both maintained that the attackers are merely “murderers” and likely not al-Qaeda operatives and that they — and others like them — cannot be used to justify an ongoing War on Terror.

“Two lunatics out of nowhere with no connection to any terrorist nexus or any organization decide to hack a British soldier to death in the name of Allah, as they said,” Bashir noted, going on to connect this scenario back to national security and America’s ongoing war against extremism and asking, “Where does the war end?”

Using the Tsarnaev brothers’ — suspects in the Boston Marathon terror attack — as examples, Hayes noted that they were not connected to larger terror cells. He compared their lack of a link to a larger umbrella group to the suspects in the London attack.

“They may say that they’re some affiliate or something,” Hayes said of the machete murderers. “These are just murderers. These are murderers.”

Read and see more here.

AsiaNet reported, via Religion of Peace:

More than 200 male students protested in Kabul yesterday against women’s rights, calling for the repeal of a presidential decree on the ‘Elimination of Violence Against Women’, which they say is un-Islamic.

The decree bans child and forced marriage, makes domestic violence a crime and says that rape victims cannot be prosecuted for adultery. It also outlaws “ba’ad,” a traditional practice of exchanging women or girls to settle disputes or debts.

The protest came days after conservative lawmakers blocked an attempt to turn the decree into law.

Mawladad Jalali, the mullah of the university mosque, was one of the protest’s organisers. Yesterday, he called for parliament to repeal the decree. Demonstrators slammed the decree “imposed by foreigners” for violating Sharia.

Ambassador Christopher Stevens was in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, the day he died in a terrorist attack, because Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered him there, according to an exclusive statement give WND by the attorney representing Gregory Hicks, the former State Department deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affairs who was in Libya at the time of the attack.

Victoria Toensing, legal counsel to Hicks, told WND that Hillary Clinton had given Stevens direct instructions to prepare the CIA compound in Benghazi to be upgraded to the status of a U.S. diplomatic mission and Stevens, in complying with Clinton’s wishes, was in Benghazi the first time he had the opportunity to do so, cognizant of the need to visit the site before the end of the fiscal year, on Sept. 30, 2012.

“Stevens was in Benghazi because Clinton told him to go there,” Toensing explained.

Hicks’ attorney also charged the Accountability Review Board, or ARB, headed by Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Michael Mullen, was a cover-up designed to contain blame for the Benghazi terror attack at a level below Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the State Department.

On page 34 of its unclassified final report, the ARB stated: “The Ambassador chose to travel to Benghazi that week, independent of Washington, as per standard practice.”

This, Toensing charged, is a complete misrepresentation of the truth despite the attempt of her client, Gregory Hicks, to explain in his testimony to the ARB that Stevens went to Benghazi on Clinton’s specific and go to Benghazi before Sept. 30, 2012, to establish Benghazi as a permanent State Department facility.

Read more here.

Dr. James Dobson was a guest on the Hannity show Friday night to talk about the treatment his Christian, pro-family, group, Family Talk Action got from the IRS when they applied for a 501(c)(4), a process he said “went on and on and on” for 19 months.

Posted by Jim Hoft on Saturday, May 18, 2013, 9:03 PM

CBS News reported:

There were new questions Saturday night concerning if anyone in the White House was aware of the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups.

Inspector General Russell George said he informed a deputy at the Treasury Department in June of 2012 about the probe into the IRS.

The Treasury Department confirmed the timeline but said they did not know the details of the investigation until last week.

It’s the first evidence that someone within the Obama administration knew about the practice during the presidential campaign.

It is unknown whether anyone in the White House was told of the federal investigation.

Republican Congressman Aaron Schock serves on the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the IRS.

“We don’t have any reason to believe at this point that it was anybody outside the IRS directing them to do this,” said Schock. “Obviously there’s been claims that the White House might have been involved and other groups. I don’t have any reason to believe that.”

He says the IRS’ behavior was criminal, claiming it hurt the ability of conservative groups to fundraise and that limited their influence.

“Until we know who it was responsible for the activities, we need to continue to investigate,” Schock said.

A six-month-long investigation by the inspector general failed to pinpoint exactly who made the decision to subject some applications to extra scrutiny.