Photo of the day

Saudi Arabian Women’s conference. Click here for the story.

Canada’s reputation is tops for third year in a row

‘Canada’s reputation is tanking’ has been a narrative pushed by anti-Conservatives for some time now.

Fortunately, it’s not true.

According to a new poll released Thursday, Canada actually has the best reputation in the world for the third year in a row.

As explained by Forbes magazine, the Reputation Institute’s annual 2013 Country RepTrak Study, asked 27,000 people in all the G8 countries to give their opinions about 50 countries. Respondents were asked four questions on a country’s overall reputation, about whether respondents had a good feeling about said country, about how much they admired the country and about how much they trusted the country.

They were then asked 16 questions under three comprehensive categories: effective government, appealing environment and advanced economy.

Canada finished with a score of 76.6 out of 100 and was followed by Sweden (76.5), Switzerland (76.3), Australia (76.1), and Norway (74.1).

At the other end of the spectrum was are Russia (36.7), Nigeria (34.0), Pakistan (28.8), Iran (22.6), and Iraq (21.2). The United States finished 22nd.

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14 Jews left in Egypt

‘I knew that one day I would be the one that closes the door,” says Magda Haroun, one of Egypt’s last Jews. Numbering 80,000 more than 60 years ago, today only 14 remain. “It is sad and very heavy to bear.”

Video: Lady Rides Her Skull Adorned Motorcycle as Her Pet Bird Flies Alongside

This video may only be 36 seconds long, but you will rewind it again and again to make sure that you did, in fact, just see a real outlaw woman driving down the street on her bright green motor bike, accompanied by her pet bird, with rifles strapped to the wheels and handlebars, and a skull for good measure.

Video: “Zionism is not welcome on native land!”

Just some ignorant, filthy haters in Vancouver.

Kurds fight for place in Syrian civil war

Taking advantage of the chaos of the civil war, Syria’s Kurdish minority has carved out a once unthinkable degree of independence in their areas, creating their own police forces, even their own license plates, and exuberantly going public with their language and culture.

But by pursuing their own path distinct from both the opposition and the regime, they are also colliding with Sunni rebels, who have increasingly clashed with Kurdish militiamen. Rebels have besieged a pocket of Kurdish towns and villages in the mainly Sunni Arab corner of northwest Syria for weeks, leading to reports of shortages of food and medicine.

The fighting threatens to expand into an ethnic war between Kurds and Arabs, adding another layer to the potent mix of fighters and conflicts in a brutal civil war.

Video: The Genesis One Code

Daniel Friedmann, President & CEO of MDA, a Vancouver aerospace company, has written a new book called “The Genesis One Code,” in which he attempts to reconcile science and religion.

“Close Your Wallet” campaign

Pro-Israel groups are now turning to the UJA-Federation and asking that it stop providing funds to organizations which use those funds to promote virulently anti-Israel activists. If not, a “Close Your Wallet” campaign will begin this summer.

What is the Jew?

From JIDF:

“What kind of unique creature is this whom all the rulers of all the nations of the world have disgraced and crushed and expelled and destroyed; persecuted, burned and drowned, and who, despite their anger and their fury, continues to live and to flourish. What is this Jew whom they have never succeeded in enticing with all the enticements in the world, whose oppressors and persecutors only suggested that he deny (and disown) his religion and cast aside the faithfulness of his ancestors?! The Jew – is the symbol of eternity. … He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.” – Leo Tolstoy

Pathological Altruism

Both altruism and empathy have rightly received an extraordinary amount of research attention. This focus has permitted better characterization of these qualities and how they might have evolved. However, it has also served to reify their value without realistic consideration about when those qualities contain the potential for significant harm.

Israel Builds Sinai Border Fence; Illegal Crossings Drop 99.9%

“The fence that we built in the south is achieving the result for which it was erected,” Netanyahu said. “As opposed to the over 2,000 infiltrators who entered Israel exactly one year ago and dispersed to various cities, in May 2013 exactly two infiltrators crossed the border and were detained. Now we need to focus on repatriating the illegal infiltrators who are here, and we will meet this task as well.”

Musical Interlude

The Pakistanisation of Indonesia

Over the last few years, Jakarta has laid down legal infrastructure that discriminates against religious minorities, allowing Islamists to take the law into their own hands.

Erdogan claims Jewish investors behind protests

At first he blamed opposition, hooligans, foreign governments, now Turkey’s PM charges Western, Jewish financiers of scheming to topple economy through prolonged demos.

Video: British Muslims Laughing At The Murder Of Lee Rigby

Jewish restaurant in Montreal firebombed

The Café Shalom restaurant on Queen Mary Rd., just west of Décarie Blvd., was firebombed early Friday by two “incendiary devices,” Montreal police said.

German report: Berlin a hub of Hezbollah activity

Hezbollah has 950 members in Germany, including 250 in the capital, a reported released by Berlin’s domestic intelligence agency released last week showed.

A Hezbollah-controlled orphans organization in Lower Saxony state is used to raise money for the families of suicide bombers targeting Israelis, the 140-page German-language report examined by The Jerusalem Post also showed.

The Lebanese terrorist organization had some 900 members in the Federal Republic in 2010, and 950 in 2011, around the same number it has now.

Dr. Wahied Wahdat-Hagh, a leading European expert on the Iranian regime and Hezbollah terrorism, told the Post on Saturday it had long been known that Berlin was “a strong center of Hezbollah.”

Many Shi’ites fled the Lebanese civil war in 1982 and relocated to Germany, he said.

Berlin became a magnet for Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese refugees.

“It is no surprise that Berlin hosts the annual al-Quds Day march,” Wahdat- Hagh said.

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Manipulating International Law as Part of Anti-Israeli “Lawfare”

• Israel’s record of compliance with international law is remarkably strong. In a long series of decisions, the Israeli High Court has ordered the Israeli government, army, and security services to change policies that, in the court’s view, were in violation of customary international law. The court has even intervened in actual combat situations.

• Perhaps because Israel’s detractors are aware of this reality, they have undertaken a process of manipulating international law in a way that invents rules that are applied only to Israel and not to other states or in other situations.

• Israel’s detractors invented a new international legal concept called “illegal occupation.” In an armed conflict, international law clearly permits military occupation. The UN Security Council has never declared Israeli occupation to be illegal. U.S. occupation of Iraq after the Second Gulf War was universally considered a legal act.

• It is often presented manipulatively as a legal axiom that the Green Line already has the status of a legally binding border. By signing a peace agreement, Israel and Jordan have now mutually acknowledged the termination of the Armistice Agreement and its demarcation line. The validity of an armistice line expires with the expiration of the armistice. Therefore, formally, there is no longer any legal validity to the Green Line.

• By any accepted legal standard, Gaza is not under Israeli occupation. International law requires that, for an area to be considered as under occupation, the territory must be “actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.” Again, there appears to be a unique definition of “occupation” applicable only to Israel.

• The essence of any legal system is that law applies equally to all. Devising tailor-made rules of international law for application only where Israel is concerned undermines international law and can have an insidious and corrosive effect on the rule of law in general.

This is one to bookmark.

Turkey Protests: Police Arrest Several ‘Iranian Provocateurs’

Turkish police have arrested several Iranian nationals in connection with the ongoing anti-government protests across the country as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed “foreign” hand in the demonstrations.

According to a source quoted by the Turkish daily Today’s Zaman, no less than 15 foreigners have been detained by the security forces and most of them are from Iran.

Shayan Shamloo, who is believed to be working for Iranian Intelligence, has also been apprehended by the Ankara officials in the capital following the unrest.

The source added that Iranian agents played a “provocative” role in the peace rally-turned-violent protests.

The government-backed Star Daily has also reported that another Iranian named Ramin Sarabi has been kept in custody for playing a prominent role in the demonstrations. The initial investigation indicates that Sarabi has been working for Iranian Revolutionary Guards, said authorities.

Boycott this: Device From Israeli Start-Up Gives the Visually Impaired a Way to Read

Liat Negrin, an Israeli who has been visually impaired since childhood, walked into a grocery store here recently, picked up a can of vegetables and easily read its label using a simple and unobtrusive camera attached to her glasses.

Ms. Negrin, who has coloboma, a birth defect that perforates a structure of the eye and afflicts about 1 in 10,000 people, is an employee at OrCam, an Israeli start-up that has developed a camera-based system intended to give the visually impaired the ability to both “read” easily and move freely.

Until now reading aids for the visually impaired and the blind have been cumbersome devices that recognize text in restricted environments, or, more recently, have been software applications on smartphones that have limited capabilities.

In contrast, the OrCam device is a small camera worn in the style of Google Glass, connected by a thin cable to a portable computer designed to fit in the wearer’s pocket. The system clips on to the wearer’s glasses with a small magnet and uses a bone-conduction speaker to offer clear speech as it reads aloud the words or object pointed to by the user.

The system is designed to both recognize and speak “text in the wild,” a term used to describe newspaper articles as well as bus numbers, and objects as diverse as landmarks, traffic lights and the faces of friends.

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Video: “It’s widely speculated the Harper regime is replete with homosexuals”

Joshua Blakeney on Press TV. Click here for the whole story.

Canadian Arab Federation not giving up on trying to get tax dollars to fund their Jew-hatey work

The Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) is currently fighting a legal battle against Jason Kenney in the Federal Court regarding his abrupt and unwarranted decision to cut federal funding in March 2009, as Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. Our case is a strong one but it urgently needs your financial support to make a victory possible. CAF’s legal team is not billing for its work (and hasn’t been billing since it took the case), but it currently faces thousands of dollars in unavoidable costs to cover disbursements and costs associated with the proceedings in the court. By contrast, the government has countless resources to fight its case – a fleet of full-time lawyers and unlimited access to the mainstream media and Canadian tax dollars to fund their legal fees. CAF needs to raise $10,000 to cover disbursements and costs associated with the proceedings in the court.

Please consider making a donation to the CAF case; a case where our victory represents a victory for free speech in Canada.

The government of Canada must never be allowed to use the power of the state to penalize any individual or group that criticizes government policy.

No donation is too big or too small. Please make cheques or money orders payable to the Canadian Arab Federation at 1057 McNicoll Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, M1W 3W6

SOURCE

Occupy jackasses are shocked, SHOCKED by the oppressive, brutal Turkish regime

Cause, like, you know, before the other day, no one knew….

“Come out in solidarity. This is OUR common struggle against governments that bully our minds, developers that trample our history, and police that assault our freedoms.”

BREAKING: Bernie Farber, Toronto Board of Rabbis & York Regional Police speak out against Shia hate fest!

I kid. They like to go after brave Jewish Zionists like Pamela Geller. Muslim Jew hating, homophobic, misogynistic savages in Canada, not so much.

Click the image for info on standing up to the Khomeinists.

Iran cuts Hamas funding over Syria

The two former close allies have also ceased military cooperation, effectively ending a warm relationship that saw Tehran provide weapons, technical know-how and military training to Hamas fighters.

The rupture has been caused by Hamas’s refusal to toe the Iranian line by supporting President Bashar al-Assad, whose Alawite regime is religiously loosely related to the Shia Islam practiced by Iran’s ruling theocracy.

Hamas – which runs the Gaza Strip – has sided with its Sunni co-religionists trying to unseat Mr Assad, in common with other mainly Sunni countries like Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Ghazi Hamad, Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, described relations with Iran frankly as “bad” before adding: “Diplomatically, I have to use other words.”

Asked about Iranian funding, he said: “I can say it is not like the past. I cannot give you the exact amount. For supporting the Syrian revolution, we lost very much.

Egyptian wrestler BITES, breaks fingers of Israeli opponent

Promptly gets her ass kicked:

In the semi-final, Kartysh met the African champion, Anas Mostafa of Egypt. At the beginning of the match, Mostafa refused to shake hands with her. During the fight, she broke two of the Israeli’s fingers and bit her in the back – causing her to bleed. At the end of the match, unsurprisingly, she refused to shake hands with her again.

” I can’t remember such dirty behavior in sports,” Kartysh told Ynet after the fight. “In wrestling you must shake hands at the beginning of a match and at the end of a match. But not only did she refuse to shake my hand, she even broke my fingers and bit me until I began bleeding.

“On the ground, when she was on top of me, she just bit me. I have her teeth marks on my back, and I began bleeding too,” the Israeli wrestler adds. “Because of her dirty behavior my desire to beat her grew stronger.”