WOMEN OF THE WALL AND THEIR CLOSE ASSOCIATION WITH ANTI-ISRAELI GROUPS

Is it merely a coincidence that so many of Women of the Wall’s leaders have numerous close associations with radical, anti-Israel groups? Or could it be that WOW is a useful vehicle for advancing an anti-Israel narrative that leaves Israel increasingly isolated internationally? Is concealing that agenda the reason why WOW tried to suppress the story of its leaders’ ties to fringe anti-Israel NGOs?

Egypt’s Turn to Russia

In one of my encounters with the Soviet military attaché in Paris in the late 1980s, I was asked how many staff members were assigned to me at the Israeli Embassy. I answered that I was the only officer and was assisted by two secretaries. I asked my Soviet counterpart how many people he had working with him, and he said “16.” I was shocked at the high number. “What are you doing with so many officers and staff?” I asked. I remember his answer as if it was yesterday: “We are still waiting for better times!”

This episode can easily apply to Egyptian-Russian relations as they emerge today. It seems indeed that “better times” is the proper way to describe the latest developments in Russian-Egyptian relations after almost 30 years of strained, always problematic, and sometimes hostile relations. This is happening not because of a deliberate choice made by the Egyptian regime, but rather as an option of last resort, mainly because of what the current Egyptian leadership and probably half of the Egyptian body-politic feel is a betrayal by their American ally.

Musical Interlude

Palestinian debt to IEC passes NIS 1b

Palestinians’ debt to the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) (TASE: ELEC.B22) has exceeded NIS 1 billion, states the utility in its financial report for the third quarter of 2013, which were published on Sunday. Palestinian consumers frequently do not pay their electricity bills, and Israel used to deduct the debt from the Palestinian Authority’s VAT revenues. This practice was halted at the order of the US, and the Palestinians’ debt has since ballooned undisturbed.

Although this debt is negligible compared with IEC’s total debt, but the laws of economics state that a person who does not pay for goods will continue to consume them. This means that the Palestinians’ electricity debt is becoming a time bomb.

This raises the questions why the Palestinians do not generate their own electricity or built even one large power station, despite receiving the greatest amount of foreign aid in the world on a per capita basis. The questions are good ones, especially given the presence of one small, oil-burning polluting power station in Gaza, which could be operated by natural gas. The Palestinians do not lack for gas: BG Group plc (NYSE; LSE: BG) discovered gas at the offshore Marine Gaza license in 1999. This field could meet the Palestinian’s full electricity generating needs for almost 20 years.

On paper, the Palestinians could achieve energy independence within 3-4 years at the most, but nothing has happened on the ground in 15 years. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prepared in principle to allow the Palestinians to develop the Marine Gaza field, and his special emissary, Adv. Yitzhak Molcho, is responsible for talks on the subject. However, the Israeli public has not been informed as to why these talks have continued for so long but gone nowhere.

Information indirectly obtained by the media indicate that the Palestinians are largely responsible for the problem. Their conduct, according to this partial information, has been amateurish, if not actually childish, and is mostly defamatory and slanderous.

However, Israel is also to blame. It considers electricity and Palestinian gas as diplomatic bargaining chips, as part of the limited gestures that Netanyahu is willing to make to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu-Mazen).

The time has come for Netanyahu to realize that Palestinian energy independence is an Israeli national interest, because Israeli electricity consumers will ultimately pay the price for the present conduct.

SOURCE

Beijing getting serious about improving air quality – destroys barbecue grills to cut pollution

Beijing is waging a war against air pollution, one barbecue at a time.

Authorities in the capital have destroyed more than 500 open-air barbecues “to cut PM2.5” — the tiny particulate matter in the air that can enter deep into the lungs.

Photos carried by state media showed workers on Tuesday cutting pieces of metal with sparks flying as city wardens looked on.

Citizens online ridiculed the exercise, suggesting authorities should focus on bigger sources of pollution.

The Politicization of Everything

The Obama presidency has had very little legislative success. Even the signature Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is imploding, and was dubbed a “train wreck” by one of its own Senatorial authors. The lead-from-behind retrenchment abroad from America’s traditional leadership role has won few adherents. The Benghazi tragedy and the series of alphabet-soup debacles involving the IRS, the NSA, and the AP journalists are the most disturbing political scandals we’ve seen since the Nixon administration.

What, then, is the Obama legacy? An insidious politicization of almost everything.

Vietnam announces big fines for social media ‘propaganda’

Vietnam will hand out fines of 100 million dong ($4,740) to anyone criticizing the government on social media, under a new law announced this week, the latest measure in a widening crackdown on dissent by the country’s communist rulers.

Comments that did not constitute criminal offences would trigger fines if held to be “propaganda against the state”, or spreading “reactionary ideology”, according to the law signed by Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.

Vietnam has repeatedly drawn fire for the harsh treatment and lengthy jail terms it has given to bloggers who criticized its one-party regime. The number of arrests and convictions has soared in the last four years.

Video: Californians sign petition to ban petitions

Movember declared ‘sexist, racist, transphobic’ at McGill

The health and education editor of the student newspaper at one of Canada’s most prestigious universities has advised the world that Movember — the month-long pledge by men to grow hair above the upper lip to support men’s health awareness —  is “sexist, racist, transphobic, and misinformed.”

In his 1,120-word essay in The McGill Daily, Ralph Haddad calls “the idea of suggesting that men show solidarity with each other by growing moustaches” to raise awareness about prostate cancer and other issues “completely absurd.”

“Moustache” is the over-lettered Canadian spelling of the word mustache, by the way. And McGill is generally ranked with the University of Toronto as among the best universities in the world.

Haddad’s complaints about Movember are many. To begin with, he says, the concept discriminates against transgender people by linking masculinity “to secondary male characteristics, including having a prostate” and the ability to grow facial hair.

“To be completely clear, you don’t have to be a man to have a prostate, and you don’t have to have a prostate to be a man,” Haddad proclaims.The English and cultural studies major argues that Movember “implies an archaic view of gender that implies that only a male/female gender binary exists, and that you aren’t really a man if you don’t necessarily identify with that binary.”

He asks: “How are people who do not identify with that binary and have a prostate supposed to partake in this cause?”

Haddad claims Movember is also racist because black males are “twice as likely to develop” prostate cancer than white males yet most people celebrating Movember are white. Somehow, this is apparently racist.

Movember is also sexist, according to Haddad. After lamenting a bunch of unlinked, unembedded tweets which allegedly chastise women for wanting to grow leg and pubic hair to celebrate either Movember or No-Shave November (a competing thing, apparently), Haddad charges that the act of not shaving some hair “has been twisted into a misogynistic tool by its own users.

Finally, Haddad aggressively claims that “campaigns like Movember help perpetuate” micro-aggressions–which he defines as “interactions between people of different races, genders, sexualities, and cultures that represent small acts of non-physical violence.”

“Do some basic research, educate yourself on the issue, and think twice before growing a moustache this, or any other, November,” Haddad implores.

SOURCE

FINALLY: New mothers can buy picture frames made from own placenta

 

Parents can now treasure pictures of their newborn babies in photo frames made using the mother’s placenta.

Amanda Cotton has found a way of adding dried and crushed pieces of placenta to moulds filled with clear casting resin to create marble-effect frames, and is already receiving orders from parents, according to the University of Brighton.

Miss Cotton uses the entire placenta to make a frame, first boiling and cooking it and then grinding it into small pieces before placing it into a mould with resin and other materials.

She said: ”I have had a lot of positive feedback from mothers and fathers to be – and I already have clients.”

IDF Chanukah Campaign to Thank Israeli Soldiers

Send ‘Warm Winter’ Packages to Israeli Soldiers

Your participation in the IDF Chanukah Campaign will provide Israeli soldiers with the “warm winter” gear that they desperately need. United with Israel, in conjunction with “Thank Israeli Soldiers”, is honored to thank the young men and women of the IDF who risk their lives to protect the citizens of Israel. Send your gift and personal note to a soldier today!

You know what goes good together? The Holocaust and hot go-go dancing babes

Human rights are sexy!

“One thing I immediately noticed when entering the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre gala was how many very attractive women were working the event. Not just the volunteers and serving staff were gorgeous, but there were strategically placed, sexy go-go dancers and a lovely, extremely flexible acrobat in a flimsy outfit doing some interesting contortions inside a transparent plastic bubble.”

Islamophobia alert: Two-Thirds of Religious Hate Crimes Come from Anti-Jewish Bias

Of the 1340 religious hate crimes in 2012, 62% were victims of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.  That figure is five times the number as the number two group, Muslims (12%).

JDL Canada Chanukah Freedom Party with special guest Andrew Bostom: Dec 2

It is that time of year for members of JDL , supporters and friends gather to discuss issues, light the Menorah, eat some great food and grow stronger.

Dr. Andrew Bostom will be joining us as the evening’s guest speaker. Bostom is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Islamic anti-Semitism, sharia and jihad. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear him talk about these and other urgent issues.

And now, old Finnish people with things on their heads

“Photographers, Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen have come up with something truly peculiar and special, in their photo series Eyes As Big As Plates. Their subjects are old, super serious and Finnish, all while wearing ridiculous “organic” head pieces and attire…need I say more?”

Israeli delegation restores eyesight of blind Philippines residents

“The patients who all of a sudden could see after the operation were so excited – it’s a miracle happening before your very eyes”.

Video: Saying Merry Christmas is worse than fornication or killing someone

Even if you say it to an alien!

Video: Fatwa of the day – Extended warranties are haram

Palestinian suspected to be suicide bomber who blew up Iranian embassy in Beirut

Authorities are trying to determine whether a Palestinian with links to fugitive Salafist Sheikh Ahmad Assir is the second suicide bomber who detonated an explosives-rigged vehicle outside the Iranian Embassy earlier this week.

Idiot celebrity of the day

Grammy-winning singer and jazz musician Esperanza Spalding released a music video on Monday that she hopes will inspire viewers to call their members of Congress and tell them to shut down the Guantanamo Bay military prison.

Major Syrian rebel groups join forces

Seven major Islamist rebel groups battling President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria have announced a merger to form an “Islamic Front” and pledged to build an Islamic state in a post-Assad Syria.

Friday’s merger is dubbed as the largest between different groupings and blocs. The new front represents “a full fusion” of groups and not merely a coordination body, rebels told Al Jazeera.

“The Islamic Front is an independent military and social force that is aimed at bringing down Assad’s regime in Syria and at replacing it with a just Islamic state,” the groups said in a statement, published  on Friday.

The factions joining the merger are Aleppo’s biggest fighting force Liwa al-Tawhid, the Salafist Ahrar al-Sham, the Idlib-based Soqour al-Sham, the Homs-based al-Haq Brigades, Ansar al-Sham, and the Damascus-based Army of Islam. The Kurdish Islamic Front also joined the front.

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Blowback is a Bitch

Hezbollah did not invent terrorism, of course. Nor would the Middle East be stable and happy if it weren’t for its suicide bombers. But there is a karmic sort of justice at work now that a terrorist army and its biggest state sponsor are themselves victims of their own deplorable tactics.

WordPress joins its users in court to fight bogus, censoring copyright claims

WordPress has gone to bat for its users in court, joining in two lawsuits over fraudulent DMCA claims that used copyright claims as a means of censoring critics.

Canada ‘at odds’ with allies on Syrian rebels as new report cites abuse

Canada is “at odds” with key allies by not recognizing the Syrian opposition, says a newly released internal memo.

But a separate human-rights report also released Tuesday offers support to the Harper government’s decision not to follow the United States, Britain and others in recognizing the disparate coalition of rebel groups.

 

The report from Human Rights Watch, the New York-based watchdog, says rebel fighters executed civilians in their custody and killed others with indiscriminate sniper fire and mortar attacks during a one-week battle in a mainly Christian village last month in northern Syria.

 

The report was unable to say which of several opposition groups was responsible for the abuses documented.

 

The memo, a briefing note on the Syrian crisis for Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, reiterates Canada’s opposition to recognizing the Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC) in part because of concerns about extremist links. But it says the decision cost Canada membership in an 11-country group that is trying to find a diplomatic solution to the long-running civil war.

“This position is at odds with many of our closest allies,” says the July memo, obtained under the Access to Information Act.

Video: Israel’s econ. minister schools Christiane Amanpour on the “occupation”

Skip to 7:27.

Gitmo good life: U.S. spends millions on landscaping, art classes for terror detainees

Thanks to a multimillion-dollar federal contract, Guantanamo Bay prisoners can enroll in seminars to learn all about basic landscaping and pruning, calligraphy and Microsoft PowerPoint while the U.S. figures out what to do with them.

Prisoners also can get in touch with their artistic sides.

 

Video: Freedom Press Symposium – Sayeh Hassan on the Iranian regime’s tentacles in Canada

H/T SK

Video: Brave Muslim terrorists force little girls to be suicide bombers

Nazi-looted art: German collector says he owns pictures

Mr Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrand, was a dealer who sold art which had been confiscated or bought by the Nazis. However, he kept many works for himself.

Boko Haram seizing slave ‘brides’ in Nigeria

In the gloom of a hilltop cave in Nigeria where she was held captive, Hajja had a knife pressed to her throat by a man who gave her a choice – convert to Islam or die.

Two gunmen from Boko Haram had seized the Christian teenager in July as she picked corn near her village in the Gwoza hills, a remote part of northeastern Nigeria where a six-month-old government offensive is struggling to contain an insurgency by the al Qaeda-linked Islamist group.

In a new development, Boko Haram is abducting Christian women whom it converts to Islam on pain of death and then forces into “marriage” with fighters — a tactic that recalls Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in the jungles of Uganda.

Video: Morons Protest PALESTINE Delegation in London Over Gaza Fuel Blockage

Skip to 3:30 to avoid the preamble.

Canadian parliamentary c’tee calls to recognize Jewish refugees of 1948

The committee’s report cited a correlation between spikes in anti-Jewish measures and “crisis moments” in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and said Middle Eastern Jews had faced discrimination, the revocation of citizenship, pogroms and expulsions, resulting in a mass exodus from countries where they had lived for millennia.

There are 4,315 Jews in the Arab Middle East, down from 856,000 in 1948, according to figures Justice for Jews from Arab Countries presented to the parliamentary committee.

Jewish refugees, many of whom were forbidden to bring property with them when they emigrated, lost $6 billion in assets as a result of the conflict, Dr. Stanley Urman, the organization’s executive vice president, told the legislators.

“Some two-thirds, or nearly 650,000 Jews, immigrated to Israel, while roughly one-third, or over 200,000 Jews, found a safe haven in countries other than Israel, including Canada,” Dr. David Bensoussan, past president of Communauté sépharade unifiée du Québec, told the committee last week.

Recognition of the two-way nature of the refugee problem, the report said, “should be addressed as part of contemporary efforts to achieve lasting reconciliation in the Middle East,” as well as to repair the situation in which the history of the region is “incomplete.”

FBI’s Cyber Most Wanted list

Click the image.

Legal Support for Terrorism at the University of Haifa

In recent days the University of Haifa in northern Israel, where I am also employed, has come under intensive criticism because the “legal clinics” operated by its School of Law here are assigning law students the task of counseling and defending convicted Arab terrorists and mass murderers of Jews. The President of the University recently issued a statement defending the activities of these “clinics.” The Dean of the Law School together with the head of the “clinics” went on the attack and denounced those who criticize the practice of the “clinics” to counsel and defend the terrorists.

The Dean, Prof. Gad Barzilai, is a radical active in leftist “human rights” groups and involved in academic politicization in Israel (Barzilai was a defender of the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University – the worst anti-Israel agitprop center in the country – when an international panel of experts called for shutting it down). He claims that all criticism of the law school for its involvement with terrorists is politically motivated. In particular he denounced the Zionist student movement “Im Tirtzu” for criticizing the law school. Several faculty members at the University called for filing SLAPP suits against the students to silence them, and one anti-Israel faculty extremist complained that the clinics were not defending the terrorists enough.

U.S. Foreign Aid to the Palestinians (FY 2012-2013)

Since the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the mid-1990s, the U.S. government has committed over $4 billion in bilateral assistance to the Palestinians, who are among the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid. Successive Administrations have requested aid for the Palestinians to support at least three major U.S. policy priorities of interest to Congress:

• Combating, neutralizing, and preventing terrorism against Israel from the Islamist group Hamas and other militant organizations.
• Creating a virtuous cycle of stability and prosperity in the West Bank that inclines Palestinians—including those in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip— toward peaceful coexistence with Israel and prepares them for self-governance.
• Meeting humanitarian needs and preventing further destabilization, particularly in the Gaza Strip.

Since June 2007, these U.S. policy priorities have crystallized around the factional and geographical split between the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Some U.S. lawmakers have taken action since August 2011 to delay the obligation of some already-appropriated FY2011 U.S. aid to the Palestinians, largely due to Palestinian efforts— currently on hold—to seek greater international support of Palestinian statehood outside of negotiations with Israel. Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Additionally, various agreements since May 2011 between Fatah and Hamas leaders have raised concerns among some Members of Congress about continuing U.S. budgetary and security assistance to a PA government whose composition could be subject to the approval of a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (Hamas) that claims to reserve the right to violently oppose Israel’s existence. Prospects for implementation of the agreement remain unclear.

From FY2008 to the present, annual U.S. bilateral assistance to the West Bank and Gaza Strip has averaged over $600 million, including annual averages of over $200 million in direct budgetary assistance and over $100 million in non-lethal security assistance for the PA in the West Bank. Additionally, the United States is the largest single-state donor to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). However, whether UNRWA’s role is beneficial remains a polarizing question, particularly with respect to its presence in Hamas controlled Gaza.

Because of congressional concerns that, among other things, funds might be diverted to Palestinian terrorist groups, U.S. aid is subject to a host of vetting and oversight requirements and legislative restrictions. U.S. assistance to the Palestinians is given alongside assistance from other international donors, and U.S. policymakers routinely call for greater or more timely assistance from Arab governments in line with their pledges. Even if the immediate objectives of U.S. assistance programs for the Palestinians are met, lack of progress toward a politically legitimate and peaceful two-state solution could undermine the utility of U.S. aid in helping the Palestinians become more cohesive, stable, and self-reliant over the long term.

READ IT ALL

Is This Really Happening? Obama accedes to Israel’s possible annihilation

Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. Many of its top brass have expressed a wish to see an earth rid of Jews altogether. For Mr. Obama to trust these people—the same ones who killed 300 Marines in a terror attack in Beirut 30 years ago last month—to actually change their stripes and suddenly become trustworthy is deeply naive or worse. If that trust turns out to be mistaken, it’s a bad day for Mr. Obama.

It’s death for Israel.

When a “palestinian” teen shed the last traits of humanity

I cannot get the vision of Eden Atias, stabbed again and again and again, and bleeding to death in his blue fabric seat on a bus at Afula bus station on Wednesday morning, out of my head. And I’m sure I’m not alone in the abiding sense of horror and despair.

A young man, conscripted into the Israeli army just two weeks earlier, fast asleep in his seat on a bus inside Israel, knifed over and over by a Palestinian teenager so consumed, so spilling over with hatred as to have truly lost “the image of God.”

All killing is foul, all terrorist murders indefensible. But this assault is particularly depraved and depressing. For it sickeningly demonstrates an atmosphere and a mindset evidently prevalent, among at least some Palestinians in the West Bank, that leaves no room for optimism in the short-term. And it underlines the nature of the task ahead if there is to be any substantive change for the better in the medium-term.

Human nature is flawed. We all grapple with what seem to be instinctive tendencies to be selfish, materialistic, suspicious of the unfamiliar, resentful of others who we think have it easier or better than we do. Some of us deal with these unpleasant aspects of our personalities better than others. In the best of us, good wins out over evil more often and more completely.

But even in the most stained and weak of characters, there are limits to the horrors and the wrongs that our flaws will push us to commit. At some point, other, better instincts kick in. Many folks drive irresponsibly; some cheat on their taxes; fewer carry out robberies and assaults. Most people recoil at the idea of taking a human life.

Almost nobody, no matter how flawed, how skewed, how filled with hatred, sinks so low as to take a life in cold blood.

Hussein Rawarda sank that low on Wednesday morning. He deliberately ended the short life of a young man about whom he knew nothing, who had never done him any harm, who he happened to find sitting next to him on a bus. Killed Eden Atias as he slept the sleep of the innocent. Killed him because he was an Israeli, because he was wearing the uniform of the Israel Defense Forces. Killed him because the opportunity to kill him presented itself. Hussein Rawarda killed Eden Atias because he was so consumed with hatred for this sleeping man-child that none of those last human failsafes, those final limits that protect us from shedding the last traits of our humanity, none of those could compete with his cold insistence on taking that life.

However badly the world treats people, however bitter their experiences, and however hopeless the future may appear, they simply don’t do what Hussein Rawarda did to Eden Atias on Wednesday morning. Only the most foul of indoctrinations, only the most relentless of inculcations, can produce the kind of evil on which he acted.

Good news: Pakistan has no favorite groups in Afghanistan

Pakistan has warned that any political vacuum in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of international troops in 2014 could prove harmful for the region.
In an interview ‚ the Foreign Office spokesperson Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry said Pakistan‚ on its part will continue to play positive role to push forward the Afghan reconciliation process‚ which is all inclusive.
He said Islamabad strongly supports an afghan-led and afghan-owned peace process. We believe that the Afghan people should decide their own fate and no regional country should interfere in it. He made it clear that Pakistan has no favorite groups in Afghanistan.
When asked about relations with India‚ the spokesperson said New Delhi has never demonstrated sincerity at the bilateral level to resolve the outstanding issue of Kashmir.
He said Pakistan supports mediation of third party particularly of the United Nations to resolve this lingering dispute but India is opposed to it.

SOURCE

Nearly 400 children rescued and 348 adults arrested in Canadian child pornography bust

Nearly 400 children have been rescued and 348 adults arrested following an expansive and “extraordinary” international child pornography investigation, Canadian police announced Thursday.

The three-year project, named Project Spade, began when undercover officers with the Toronto Police Service Child Exploitation service made contact with a Toronto man allegedly sharing “very graphic images” of child sexual abuse in Oct. 2010, Toronto Police Service Chief William Blair said at a press conference on Thursday.

Police said their investigation revealed an entire child movie production and distribution company in Toronto operating via the web site azovfilms.com.

The site was run by 42-year old Brian Way, according to police, and sold and distributed images of child exploitation to people across the world.

Inspector Joanna Beaven-Desjardins, head of Toronto’s Sex Crimes Unit, said they enlisted the help of the United States Postal Inspection Service since many of the videos were being exported to the U.S. and began a joint investigation.

After a seven-month long investigation, officers executed search warrants across the city of Toronto including at the business, located in the city’s West End.

Investigators catalogued hundreds of thousands of images and videos of “horrific sexual acts against very young children, some of the worst they have ever viewed,” Inspector Beaven-Desjardins said at the press conference.

Police seized over 45 terabytes of data from the $4-million business that distributed to over 50 counties including Australia, Spain, Mexico, Sweden and Greece.

As a result of the investigation thus far, 50 people were arrested in Ontario, 58 in the rest of Canada, 76 in the United States, and 164 internationally.

What was most alarming, Inspector Beaven-Desjardins said, was that many of the arrests were of people who worked with or closely interacted with children.

Among those arrested were 40 school teachers, nine doctors and nurses, six law enforcement personnel, nine pastors and priests and three foster parents, she said.

Citing a particularly egregious example, she said police found over 350,000 images and over 9,000 videos of child sexual abuse in the home of a retired Canadian school teacher. Some of the images were of children known to the man and he was also charged with sexually abusing a child relative.

The inspector said an indispensable aspect to the success of the operation and the rescue of 386 children from child exploitation was the expansive cooperation between Toronto police and organizations worldwide.

“[This] confirms that when we work together regardless of the borders that divide us we can successfully take down those who not only prey on our most vulnerable but also profit from it,” she said.

Police said the children were “rescued from child exploitation” but did not give more details.

Way was charged with 24 counts, including possession of, distribution of, and importing and exporting child pornography.

The investigation is ongoing and more arrests could be made, police said.

SOURCE

Join Eyecrazy, Adam Vaughan and Carolyn Bennett for a free movie and a talk about Social Justice in Education

“Remember Thursday November 14 in the Auditorium at Central Technical School (at the Corner of Bathurst & Harbord Streets) in Toronto, you’ll get to join Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett, Toronto City Councillor Adam Vaughan and me for a fantastic movie and what promises to be a very interesting discussion about Social Justice and Activism in the education system.

It starts promptly at 6:30 PM, so be sure to be there early!”

New Study Explains How and Why Parents Choose Private Schools

Why do parents choose a particular school? What information do they consider in making that choice? Do they prioritize high standardized test scores, rigorous college preparation, moral or religious instruction, or something else?

This morning, the Friedman Foundation released a new study, “More Than Scores: An Analysis of How and Why Parents Choose Private Schools,” that sheds light on these questions. The study surveyed 754 low- and middle-income parents whose children received scholarships from Georgia GOAL, a scholarship organization operating under Georgia’s scholarship tax credit law.

The study’s findings provide analysts and advocates across the education policy spectrum with much to consider.

Private Donors’ Funds Add Wild Card to War in Syria

The money flows in via bank transfer or is delivered in bags or pockets bulging with cash. Working from his sparely furnished sitting room here, Ghanim al-Mteiri gathers the funds and transports them to Syria for the rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad.

Mr. Mteiri — one of dozens of Kuwaitis who openly raise money to arm the opposition — has helped turn this tiny, oil-rich Persian Gulf state into a virtual Western Union outlet for Syria’s rebels, with the bulk of the funds he collects going to a Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda.

One Kuwait-based effort raised money to equip 12,000 rebel fighters for $2,500 each. Another campaign, run by a Saudi sheikh based in Syria and close to Al Qaeda, is called “Wage Jihad With Your Money.” Donors earn “silver status” by giving $175 for 50 sniper bullets, or “gold status” by giving twice as much for eight mortar rounds.

“Once upon a time we cooperated with the Americans in Iraq,” said Mr. Mteiri, a former soldier in the Kuwaiti Army, recalling the American role in pushing Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991. “Now we want to get Bashar out of Syria, so why not cooperate with Al Qaeda?”

Hamas too moderate for Islamic Jihad

Islamic Jihad was set up by Palestinians who believed other Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned Hamas, were too moderate.

Tribute to Helen Thomas!

Click the revolting image.

Remember

Assets of the Ayatollah

The 82-year-old Iranian woman keeps the documents that upended her life in an old suitcase near her bed. She removes them carefully and peers at the tiny Persian script.

There’s the court order authorizing the takeover of her children’s three Tehran apartments in a multi-story building the family had owned for years. There’s the letter announcing the sale of one of the units. And there’s the notice demanding she pay rent on her own apartment on the top floor.

 

Pari Vahdat-e-Hagh ultimately lost her property. It was taken by an organization that is controlled by the most powerful man in Iran: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. She now lives alone in a cramped, three-room apartment in Europe, thousands of miles from Tehran.

 

The Persian name of the organization that hounded her for years is “Setad Ejraiye Farmane Hazrate Emam” – Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam. The name refers to an edict signed by the Islamic Republic’s first leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, shortly before his death in 1989. His order spawned a new entity to manage and sell properties abandoned in the chaotic years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

 

Setad has become one of the most powerful organizations in Iran, though many Iranians, and the wider world, know very little about it. In the past six years, it has morphed into a business juggernaut that now holds stakes in nearly every sector of Iranian industry, including finance, oil, telecommunications, the production of birth-control pills and even ostrich farming.

 

The organization’s total worth is difficult to pinpoint because of the secrecy of its accounts. But Setad’s holdings of real estate, corporate stakes and other assets total about $95 billion, Reuters has calculated. That estimate is based on an analysis of statements by Setad officials, data from the Tehran Stock Exchange and company websites, and information from the U.S. Treasury Department.

Just one person controls that economic empire – Khamenei.

There’s no racist like a liberal racist

Protester nails testicles to Red Square cobblestone

A Russian performance artist was hospitalised Sunday after stripping naked and nailing his testicles to a Red Square cobblestone in protest against the Kremlin’s crackdown on political rights.

A video of the graphic action, available on Russian websites, showed artist Pyotr Pavlensky sitting naked outside Lenin’s Mausoleum being covered with a blanket by police officers while horrified passersby looked on.

The state-run RIA Novosti news agency said Pavlensky was taken to a police station after being treated in a central Moscow clinic.

The Saint Petersburg-based artist said in a statement posted on the Grani.ru website that he was trying to draw attention to Russian society’s inaction in the face of the development of a “police state”.

Russia marked its annual Police Day holiday on Sunday.

It is not the first time the 29-year-old has resorted to eye-watering methods of protest.

He has previously sown his lips together to demonstrate against the jailing of two female members of the Pussy Riot punk band who staged an anti-Kremlin performance inside Moscow’s main cathedral in 2011.

He was also arrested after wrapping his naked body in barbed wire outside a Saint Petersburg government building in May.

SOURCE

Why Did so Many Wanted Nazis Convert to Islam?

There are Nazi grafts in Arab-Islamic terrorism.

At the top of the most wanted list of the Simon Wiesenthal Center there is a man who today would be one hundred years old. His name is Alois Brunner and he is responsible for the deaths of over 130,000 Jews. The Nazi hunters still place him in Syria, where he was last seen in 2001, protected by the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Brunner was one of the most zealous ideologues and officials of the “Final Solution”, the plan for the extermination of the Jews. The idea haunted him to the point that in 1985 he said to the German magazine Bunte: “I regret that I didn’t finish the job”.

When the United Arab Republic of Syria was formed, Dr. Brunner took up residence at 7 George Haddad, in the embassy district of Damascus. In 1961, the year that Adolf Eichmann was captured by the Israelis in Buenos Aires, Brunner received a bomb-letter, probably from the Mossad and lost an eye.

Brunner, a personal friend of Hafez el Assad, took part in the construction of Syria’s secret services on the model of the Gestapo.

In November 1967, the neo-Nazi organization Bund Heimattreuer Jugend published in Esslingen Hegensberg, West Germany, the obituary of Karl van Kynast: “Lieutenant (res.) of the Bundeswehr, Captain in the army of the United Arab Republic, he felt at the Suez Canal on 12 September, 1967”.

Brunner is, in fact, only the best known of a number of Nazi officials who participated in the construction of of the Islamic regimes and who died in those lands after converting to Islam.

This alliance between the Nazi swastika and the Islamic Koran is well explained in a 1942 article written by Johann von Leers, the best known of Nazi converts to Islam. Published in the newspaper “Die Judenfrage”, the article presented Judaism and Islam in terms of Hegel’s thesis and antithesis: “The hostility of Muhammad towards the Jews had a consequence: the Oriental Jews were totally paralyzed. If the rest of the world had adopted a similar policy, we would not have the ‘Jewish question’. Islam has made an eternal service to the world by preventing the conquest of Arabia by the Jews”.

The Pakistani Mullah Who Targeted Malala

Mullah Fazlullah was no doubt disappointed when the four-man hit team he dispatched after the Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai failed to kill her.

But the heroic survival and recovery of this 14-year-old education activist after being shot in the head and neck so captivated the world as to make his crime all the more infamous.

And that notoriety surely was a big factor in Fazlullah ascending to supreme leader of the Pakistani Taliban this week, his predecessor having been killed by a drone strike.

How better to defy the U.S. than to crown the guy who tried to kill the girl who became the West’s darling?

Better yet, the autobiography she survived to write, I Am Malala, has an entire chapter devoted to Fazlullah titled, “Radio Mullah,” the nickname he acquired when staring out as a pirate Islamist radio personality, whose many female fans included her own mother. The book recounts how he went on to institute a reign of terror, ordering countless deaths, including that of a woman shot for dancing, and of a man killed along with his father because he refused to wear his shalwar above his ankles in the Taliban way.

Fazlullah eventually ordered the death of Malala herself. And that bugled hit now proves to have been a great career move for a 30-something jihadi who has proven to be not just a homicidal psychopath but a terrific self-promoter.