[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
While the eternal Kraut snubs Majorityrights for not promoting Hitler, while it tries to gaslight and smear me with anything it can for that, it can’t help itself with its mechanistic rule following ad absurdem, whether Hitler or Merkel, whether the final solution to the J.Q. that somehow includes wiping-out half of Europe, including Germany as well, or raising a million Euro with its Jewish friends for a sister ship of its NGO’s to haul genetic replacement into Europe….
Cooperation with the DNA Nations to preserve our species? No, we wouldn’t do that. You don’t love Hitler and Jesus. You are not some scientistic rule following dolt.
But help like this? Sure: The NGO Racket…
Carola Rackete was arrested in Lampedusa on Saturday after forcing her way into port. Photograph: Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters
More than €1m raised for rescue ship captain detained in Italy
Two online campaigns to help the German captain of a rescue ship under house arrest in Italy have between them raised more than €1m.
Carola Rackete’s arrest on Saturday, after she forced her way into port in Lampedusa carrying migrants and refugees she had rescued off Libya, prompted a fundraising appeal by two prominent German TV stars that by Tuesday morning had raised €917,195 from more than 33,000 donors.
A second campaign, started by an Italian anti-fascist group on Facebook, had raised a further €433,993 by Tuesday, well over the page’s stated goal of €349,000, bringing the total raised in support of Rackete to more than €1.3m.
“The wave of solidarity is wonderful,” Ruben Neugebauer, a spokesman for Rackete’s migrant rescue NGO Sea-Watch, told Spiegel Online. “We certainly also need the money.”
The funds will go towards paying Rackete’s legal fees if charges are brought against her. Otherwise, Neugebauer said, the NGO would need about €1m to buy and equip a new ship if Rackete’s vessel, Sea-Watch-3, remained out of action.
The German and French governments have ramped up their criticism of Italy over its handling of the case. France accused Italy on Tuesday of acting hysterically over immigration and failing to live up to its duties.
“I think that basically the Italian government has not been up to the task,” a government spokeswoman, Sibeth Ndiaye, told France’s BFM-TV. “Mr Matteo Salvini’s behaviour has not been acceptable as far as I am concerned. This is a painful subject, a complex subject which the EU and France have previously been in solidarity with Italy over.”
Salvini, who heads the ... League party, Italy’s largest political force, responded: “My behaviour regarding immigration is unacceptable? The French government should stop with these insults and open its ports.”
German politicians have also criticised Italy’s treatment of Rackete, in the first signs of a public pushback against Italy’s criminalisation of migrant rescue vessels in the Mediterranean.
“Italy isn’t any old nation,” said Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in an unusually candid interview with the broadcaster ZDF aired on Sunday evening. “Italy is in the middle of the European Union, a founding state of the European Union. And therefore we should be able to expect a nation such as Italy to deal with a case like this in a different way.”
The foreign minister, Heiko Maas, went a step further, demanding that the Italian authorities set Rackete free. “From our perspective, only the release of Carola Rackete can come at the end of a procedure based on the rule of law,” Maas tweeted on Monday. “I will make that clear to Italy once again.”
Germany has said it will keep up diplomatic pressure on Italy over the case.
Once again free speech is being restricted by anti-terrorist legislation. This happened in 1940 when Defence Regulation 18B was used to detain Oswald Mosley and a thousand of his followers. The Act had been introduced to control the IRA but it was used against peace campaigners. Dangerous extremists should be locked up but law-abiding groups should be free to express their opinions. Transgressors are liable to prosecution, so be careful what you write or say.
Colin Jordan
In 1965 Colin Jordan was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for publishing a leaflet entitled ‘The Coloured Invasion’. He was the first to be prosecuted under the new Race Relations Act. At that time Special Branch were scrutinizing everything produced by the so called far-Right and several people were threatened with prosecution. Bill Whitbread of the Trade Union Anti-Immigration Movement (Tru Aim) got over the problem by publishing a leaflet made up entirely of press cuttings. He could not be prosecuted for reproducing reports from the national press.
In those days Special Branch officers took shorthand notes at street corner meetings. Every word from the platform was dutifully written down. I once brought a smile to the face of a Special Branch officer at a meeting in Bethnal Green by claiming that West Indians are pouring into the country and committing, “rape, arson and buggery.” Today, that would probably get one arrested.
The powerful Zionist lobby links any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. They are hounding Jeremy Corbyn and they had Jez Turner imprisoned for commemorating a Stern Gang atrocity. Their arrogance is intolerable but there’s no point in provoking them. Far better to chose one’s words carefully and remain at liberty.
The ‘National Action’ case is another matter. Since the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox, threats must be taken seriously. The State was right to lock up Jack Renshaw for threatening to kill Labour MP Rosie Cooper. It’s unlikely that he would have carried out his threat but his drunken boasting has earned him a life sentence.
Just as stupid was the photofit picture of Prince Harry posted by Michal Szewczuk, which got him four years in prison, and the threatening blog posted by Oskar Dunn-Kaczorowski, for which he was sentenced to eighteen months.
Words and actions have consequences. When somebody threw a milkshake at Nigel Farage, the ‘entertainer’ Jo Brand said that it should have been battery acid, She is a former psychiatric nurse, a medical professional who has promised, “to do no harm.”.She is lucky that the police have decided not to prosecute. If she had been a member of National Action she would now be doing a life sentence.
European Army
The idea of a European Army is anathema to the Brexiteers but it makes sense. If the leading nations of Europe pooled their resources we could have an army of half a million men at no additional cost to any member state. NATO is a European army with the addition of Canada and the United States. By having common arms, ammunition and command structures, the nations of the alliance are able to fight together. All that would be necessary to create a European Army would be for the US and Canada to withdraw from NATO. This would not be a hostile departure, 75 years after World War Two, many Americans, including President Donald Trump, think it’s time for Europe to defend herself.
A start has already been made with the Franco-German Brigade, known as Eurocorps, which is stationed at Strasbourg. This is the latest in a long list European Armies.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 29 June 2019 10:09.
JUST IN:
Charred Remains of Missing Utah College Student Found
– Suspect Ayoola Ajayi Charged With Aggravated Murder
Charred remains of missing 23-year-old Utah college student MacKenzie Lueck were discovered after police searched Ayoola Ajayi’s home.
Neighbors said they saw 31-year-old Ayoola Ajayi burning something in his backyard, according to reports.
Salt Lake City police had been searching for MacKenzie Lueck for 11 days before they discovered her charred remains.
According to reports, MacKenzie was dropped off at Hatch Park at 3 AM by a Lyft driver after landing at Salt Lake City airport on June 17. The Lyft driver was cleared of any involvement in Lueck’s disappearance and murder.
Authorities combed through MacKenzie’s phone and social media records where they made the connection to Ajayi — both were at the same park at the same time of her disappearance and Ajayi initially denied knowing MacKenzie.
According to the New York Post, investigators had also been digging into Lueck’s dating apps after receiving tips that she was interested in older men and casually seeing several people.
Ajayi’s booking record in jail says he was born in Nigeria, reported Heavy.com:
“There is a self-published book for sale on Amazon called “Forge Identity.” The author, Ayoola Ajayi, says in his bio: “Ayoola Ajayi was born and raised in Africa. He has been a salesman, an entrepreneur, and a writer. He has survived a tyrannical dictatorship, escaped a real life crime, traveled internationally, excelled professionally in several industries, and is currently curating a multi-platform advertising campaign for his debut novel, Forge Identity, a sample of which can be found on Kindle, Amazon, Facebook, and any current social media. He lives in salt lake.”
More from CBS News:
The Salt Lake City Police Chief fought back tears as he spoke about notifying MacKenzie’s parents of their daughter’s horrific murder:
Ayoola Ajaya was charged with aggravated murder, aggravated kidnapping, obstruction of justice and desecration of a body of MacKenzie Lueck, the Salt Lake City police chief said.
Morrissey has reaffirmed his support for the Ethno-Nationalist, anti-Islam party For Britain and suggested that Nigel Farage “would make a good prime minister”.
The singer, who faced criticism after wearing a For Britain badge on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, responded to the backlash in an interview conducted by his nephew, Sam Etsy Rayner, and posted on his own website.
“The UK is a dangerously hateful place now, and I think we need someone to put a stop to the lunacy and to speak for everyone,” he said. “I see [For Britain leader] Anne Marie Waters as this person. She is extremely intelligent, ferociously dedicated to this country, she is very engaging, and also very funny at times.”
When asked about how he felt at being called a racist for various controversial comments he has made in the past, he responded: “If you call someone racist in modern Britain you are telling them that you have run out of words. You are shutting the debate down and running off. The word is meaningless now. Everyone ultimately prefers their own race … does this make everyone racist?”
Morrissey has faced criticism over previous comments about race, which include describing the Chinese as a “subspecies” and claiming “halal slaughter requires certification that can only be given by supporters of Isis”
DNA tests have been used in Israel to verify a person’s Jewishness. This brings a bigger question: what does it mean to be genetically Jewish? And can you prove religious identity scientifically?
When my parents sent their saliva away to a genetic testing company late last year and were informed via email a few weeks later that they are both “100% Ashkenazi Jewish”, it struck me as slightly odd. Most people I know who have done DNA tests received ancestry results that correspond to geographical areas — Chinese, British, West African. Jewish, by comparison, is typically parsed as a religious or cultural identity. I wondered how this was traceable in my parents’ DNA.
After arriving in Eastern Europe around a millennia ago, the company’s website explained, Jewish communities remained segregated, by force and by custom, mixing only occasionally with local populations. Isolation and intermarriage slowly narrowed the gene pool, which now gives modern Jews of European descent, like my family, a set of identifiable genetic variations that set them apart from other European populations at a microscopic level.
This genetic explanation of my Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry came as no surprise. According to family lore, my forebears lived in small towns and villages in Eastern Europe for at least a few hundred years, where they kept their traditions and married within the community, up until the Holocaust, when they were either murdered or dispersed.
But still, there was something disconcerting about our Jewishness being “confirmed” by a biological test. After all, the reason my grandparents had to leave the towns and villages of their ancestors was because of ethno-nationalism emboldened by a racialized conception of Jewishness as something that exists “in the blood”.
The raw memory of this racism made any suggestion of Jewish ethnicity slightly taboo in my family. If I ever mentioned that someone “looked Jewish” my grandmother would respond, “Oh really? And what exactly does a Jew look like?”
Yet evidently, this wariness of ethnic categorization didn’t stop my parents from sending swab samples from the inside of their cheeks off to a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company. The idea of having an ancient identity “confirmed” by modern science was too alluring.
Not that they’re alone. As of the beginning of this year, more than 26 million people have taken at-home DNA tests. For most, like my parents, genetic identity is assimilated into an existing life story with relative ease, while for others, the test can unearth family secrets or capsize personal narratives around ethnic heritage.
But as these genetic databases grow, genetic identity is re-shaping not only how we understand ourselves, but how we can be identified by others. In the past year, law enforcement has become increasingly adept at using genetic data to solve cold cases; a recent study shows that even if you haven’t taken a test, chances are you can be identified by authorities via genealogical sleuthing.
What is perhaps more concerning, though, is how authorities around the world are also beginning to use DNA to not only identify individuals, but to categorize and discriminate against entire groups of people.
In February of this year, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported that the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, the peak religious authority in the country, had been requesting DNA tests to confirm Jewishness before issuing some marriage licenses.
In Israel, matrimonial law is religious, not civil. Jews can marry Jews, but intermarriage with Muslims or Christians is legally unacknowledged. This means that when a Jewish couple want to tie the knot, they are required by law to prove their Jewishness to the Rabbinate according to Orthodox tradition, which defines Jewish ancestry as being passed down through the mother.
While for most Israeli Jews this simply involves handing over their mother’s birth or marriage certificate, for many recent immigrants to Israel, who often come from communities where being Jewish is defined differently or documentation is scarce, producing evidence that satisfies the Rabbinate’s standard of proof can be impossible.
In the past, confirming Jewishness in the absence of documentation has involved contacting rabbis from the countries where people herald or tracking genealogical records back to prove religious continuity along the matrilineal line. But as was reported in Haaretz, and later confirmed by David Lau, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, in the past year, the rabbis have been requesting that some people undergo a DNA test to verify their claim before being allowed to marry.
For many Israelis, news that the rabbinical judges were turning to DNA testing was shocking, but for Seth Farber, an American-born Orthodox rabbi, it came as no surprise. Farber, who has been living in Israel since the 1990s, is the director of Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center, an organization that helps Israeli Jews navigate state-administered matters of Jewish life, like marriage and conversion. In the past year, the organization has seen up to 50 cases where families have been asked to undergo DNA tests to certify their Jewishness.
Those being asked to take these tests, Farber told me, are mostly Russian speaking Israelis, members of an almost 1 million strong immigrant community who began moving to Israel from countries of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Due to the fact that Jewish life was forcefully suppressed during the Soviet era, many members of this community lack the necessary documentation to prove Jewishness through matrilineal descent. This means that although most self-identify as Jewish, hundreds of thousands are not considered so by the Rabbinate, and routinely have their Jewish status challenged when seeking religious services, including marriage.
[...]
Boris Shindler, a political activist and active member of the Russian speaking community, told me that he believes that the full extent of the practice remains unknown, because many of those who have been tested are unwilling to share their stories publicly out of a sense of shame. “I was approached by someone who was married in a Jewish ceremony maybe 15, 20 years ago, who recently received an official demand saying if you want to continue to be Jewish, we’d like you to do a DNA test,” Shindler said. “They said if she doesn’t do it then she has to sign papers saying she is not Jewish. But she is too humiliated to go to the press with this.”
What offends Shindler most is that the technique is being used to single out his community, which he sees as part of a broader stigmatization of Russian speaking immigrants in Israeli society as unassimilated outsiders and second-class citizens. “It is sad because in the Soviet Union we were persecuted for being Jewish and now in Israel we’re being discriminated against for not being Jewish enough,” he said.
Ibid: But according to Yosef Carmel, an Orthodox rabbi and co-head of Eretz Hemdah, a Jerusalem-based institute that trains rabbinical judges for the Rabbinate, this is a misunderstanding of how the DNA testing is being used. He explained that the Rabbinate are not using a generalized Jewish ancestry test, but one that screens for a specific variant on the mitochondrial DNA – DNA that is passed down through the mother – that can be found almost exclusively in Ashkenazi Jews.
A number of years ago Carmel consulted genetic experts who informed him that if someone bears this specific mitochondrial DNA marker, there is a 90 to 99% chance that this person is of Ashkenazi ancestry. This was enough to convince him to pass a religious ruling in 2017 that states that this specific DNA test can be used to confirm Jewishness if all other avenues have been exhausted, which now constitutes the theological justification for the genetic testing.
For David Goldstein, professor of medical research in genetics at Columbia University whose 2008 book, Jacob’s Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History, outlines a decade’s worth of research into Jewish population genetics, translating scientific insights about small genetic variants in the DNA to normative judgments about religious or ethnic identity is not only problematic, but misunderstands what the science actually signals.
“When we say that there is a signal of Jewish ancestry, it’s a highly specific statistical analysis done over a population,” he said. “To think that you can use these type of analyses to make any substantive claims about politics or religion or questions of identity, I think that it’s frankly ridiculous.”
But others would disagree. As DNA sequencing becomes more sophisticated, the ability to identify genetic differences between human populations has improved. Geneticists can now locate variations in the DNA so acutely as to differentiate populations living on opposite sides of a mountain range.
In recent years, a number of high-profile commentators have appropriated these scientific insights to push the idea that genetics can determine who we are socially, none more controversially than the former New York Times science writer, Nicholas Wade. In his 2014 book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, Wade argues that genetic differences in human populations manifest in predictable social differences between those groups.
His book was strongly denounced by almost all prominent researchers in the field as a shoddy incarnation of race science, but the idea that our DNA can determine who we are in some social sense has also crept into more mainstream perspectives.
In an op-ed published in the New York Times last year, the Harvard geneticist David Reich argued that although genetics does not substantiate any racist stereotypes, differences in genetic ancestry do correlate to many of today’s racial constructs. “I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism,” he wrote. “But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races’.”
Reich’s op-ed was shared widely and drew condemnation from other geneticists and social science researchers.
In an open letter to Buzzfeed, a group of 67 experts also criticized Reich’s careless communication of his ideas. The signatories worried that imprecise language within such a fraught field of research would make the insights of population genetics more susceptible to being “misunderstood and misinterpreted”, lending scientific validity to racist ideology and ethno-nationalist politics.
And indeed, this already appears to be happening. In the United States, white nationalists have channeled the ideals of racial purity into an obsession with the reliability of direct-to-consumer DNA testing. In Greece, the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party regularly draw on studies on the origins of Greek DNA to “prove” 4,000 years of racial continuity and ethnic supremacy.
Most concerning is how the conflation of genetics and racial identity is being mobilized politically. In Australia, the far-right One Nation party recently suggested that First Nations people be given DNA tests to “prove” how Indigenous they are before receiving government benefits. In February, the New York Times reported that authorities in China are using DNA testing to determine whether someone is of Uighur ancestry, as part of a broader campaign of surveillance and oppression against the Muslim minority
While DNA testing in Israel is still limited to proving Jewishness in relation to religious life, it comes at a time when the intersection of ethnic, political, and religious identity are becoming increasingly blurry. Just last year, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government passed the Nation State law, which codified that the right to national self-determination in the country is “unique to the Jewish people”.
David Baruch Lau, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel
Carola Rackete was arrested in Lampedusa on Saturday after forcing her way into port. Photograph: Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters
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