[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.
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 13 October 2019 06:13.
Another Misunderstander Of Islam strikes
4 Oct., by Irish Savant
Where’s Inspector Clouseau when you need him? Because the famous bumbling French detective could hardly do worse than the Paris police investigating the recent mass killing at their HQ. They’re totally baffled as to the killer’s motive.
INVESTIGATORS ARE COMBING an IT staffer’s computer today for clues as to why he stabbed four colleagues to death at police headquarters in Paris. The 45-year-old man killed three men and a woman in a frenzied 30-minute attack that ended when he was shot in the head. A search of the couple’s house found no evidence that the man, who converted to Islam about 18 months ago, had been driven to his criminal deed by radical religious ideology. Shortly after the killings, Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz said anti-terror investigators were not involved in the murder probe. All possible motives were being examined, sources have said, including the scenario of a personal conflict at work.
Which probably means that the sleuths failed to find a statement from the killer (a black immigrant from Martinique) explicitly stating ‘in the Name of the all-merciful Allah I will go in to work in the morning and and stab everyone I can find’. Therefore nothing to do with the Religion Of Peace. Just another Misunderstander Of Islam. He must have thought that when the Koran enjoined him to ‘Slay the unbelievers wherever you find them’ (Qur’an 2:191) the ‘sacred’ text meant, well, kill the unbelievers wherever you find them. And like most misunderstanders he seemed, apart from the mass murdering bit, to have been a swell guy. According to a fellow worshipper “he was a very quiet person. I used to see him going to the mosque but he practised (his religion) in a normal way” . Well he sure did, didn’t he? And remember Jihadi John, the notorious ‘English’ head-chopper for ISIS? He’d been described by his imam as ‘a gentle, spiritual boy’. Indeed.
So what’s to be done? Well I believe I have a solution. Reinterpret the sacred texts in the light of latest thinking and research. You know the way Pope Francis reinterpreted the Bible to mean that homosexuality and all kinds of degeneracy are fully in accord with that book’s teachings. I’ve been working hard and this is the result to date. I seriously believe that when complete it has the potential to eliminate mass murders stemming from misunderstanding the Religion Of Peace.
My initial attempt.
Quotation: “Make war on the infidels living in your neighborhood.” Qur’an 9:123
Scholastic reinterpretation: “Make friends with your infidel neighbours”.
Quotation: “Maim and crucify the infidels if they criticize Islam” Qur’an 5:33
Scholastic reinterpretation: “All discussion on religion should be open and tolerant.”
Quotation: “Punish the unbelievers with garments of fire, hooked iron rods, boiling water;melt their skin and bellies.” Qur’an22:19
Scholastic reinterpretation: We’re working on that one. But meanwhile lads lay off the hooks and rods and melting bellies and all that stuff.
On Tuesday a federal judge ruled against a group of Asian American students who claimed that Harvard discriminated against them in their admissions policy. The full decision is here. There is no question that Asian American students face a disadvantage in gaining admission to Harvard. The question is why and whether Harvard is responsible for it.
The reason that it is harder for Asian Americans to get into Harvard is that their “personal ratings” (a subjective evaluation of personal qualities) are, on average, significantly lower than for white applicants. The federal judge, Allison D. Burroughs, wrote: “the Court therefore concludes that the data demonstrates a statistically significant and negative relationship between Asian American identity and the personal rating assigned by Harvard admissions officers, holding constant any reasonable set of observable characteristics.”
However, the Judge also held that the plaintiffs could not prove that the lower personal ratings are the result of “animus” or ill-motivated racial hostility towards Asian Americans by Harvard admissions officials.
This leaves the question of why Asian American applicants were being deemed to have, on average, poorer personal qualities than white applicants. The court entertained two theories. Judge Burroughs wrote that: “It is possible that the self-selected group of Asian Americans that applied to Harvard during the years included in the data set used in this case did not possess the personal qualities that Harvard is looking for at the same rate as white applicants . . .”
It is disappointing that a federal judge would indulge in that sort of conjecture. Surely the burden should be on Harvard to prove that its lower evaluation of the personal characteristics of Asian Americans is not the result of racial bias rather than vice versa. The court must be aware of various stereotypes of Asian Americans as “grinds” and math geeks who lack personality. The burden should be on Harvard to prove that such stereotypes are not at play here.
The judge wrote that the racial gap between the evaluation of Asian Americans and whites was small, but they are statistically significant. By definition, that means that it is very unlikely the gap is the result of chance. The court should be demanding that Harvard explain the gap or change their approach. Asian Americans cannot be expected to prove that they have personalities that are as admirable as whites. Given the racial gap, Harvard should have to prove that its evaluation system is fair.
The court’s second explanation for the racial “personal rating” gap is that there is racial bias in the evaluations by teachers and counselors. The judge wrote: “teacher and guidance counselor recommendations seemingly presented Asian Americans as having less favorable personal characteristics than similarly situated non-Asian American applicants . . . Because teacher and guidance counselor recommendation letters are among the most significant inputs for the personal rating, the apparent race-related or race-correlated difference in the strength of guidance counselor and teacher recommendations is significant.” This seems like a smoking gun showing that Asian American applicants are victims of discrimination. Nonetheless, the court ruled in favor of Harvard because she reasoned that: “Harvard’s admissions officers are not responsible for any race-related or race-correlated impact that those letters may have.”
Judge Burroughs should have ruled the other way here. If Harvard is knowingly using instruments that are racially biased (the counselor and teacher recommendations) and does not compensate for that bias, then Harvard’s process is biased. If Harvard didn’t already know the letters were biased, it knows it now.
To be fair to Harvard, it is between a rock and a hard place in some ways. When it relies on objective tests like the SAT’s it is often accused of using an instrument that is biased against African Americans. When it uses a subjective tool such as counselor and teacher letters, it must now contend with the fact that they are biased against Asian Americans. So the Harvard admissions officers are hardly a group of villains. But the judge is wrong to suggest that Harvard can take a “not our fault” approach to demonstrable anti-Asian bias in the letters that it relies upon. Difficult though it may be, Harvard must do better.
....
by Evan Gerstmann
I’ve always been interested in how we should balance individual and minority rights with majority rule. After several years practicing law in New York city, I found my true calling as a college professor and researcher. I’ve written about campus free speech, same-sex equality and racial justice for Cambridge University, The University of Chicago, and Harvard University. My latest book is “Campus Sexual Assault: Constitutional Rights and Fundamental Freedoms”.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 02 October 2019 16:23.
New York man punches a 71 y/o woman in the face in ‘unprovoked’ attack that leaves her laying on the ground with a broken jaw. The incident happened on September 19 in Brooklyn, New York, around 5.30pm.
Carola Rackete, the infamous captain of the NGO migrant transport vessel Sea-Watch 3, brought three men who ran a migrant detention center in Libya where migrants were raped, tortured, and murdered.
According to a report by Il Giornale, three of the 40 migrants who were picked up by Rackete’s boat are men who’ve been accused of raping, torturing, and murdering people in Libya. The suspects are said to have been arrested in the reception center in Messina, Italy.
Police had originally concealed the arrests which reportedly occurred on the same day that the migrants disembarked from the ship. “The captain transported three immigrants accused of torture on the Sea Watch,” Franco Grilli of Il Giornale writes.
“We cannot rule it out, but we have no precise information,” Sea Watch spokesman Ruben Neugebauer told German news agency DPA about the report.
The three men have been formally accused of ‘a criminal association dedicated to the management of an illegal prison center’, complete with torture, rape, kidnapping and even murder.
In response to the news, Italy’s most trusted politician and leader of the national populist Lega party, Matteo Salvini, wrote: “Not only did she violate the law and ram a Guardia di Finanza patrol boat; on June 29th Carola Rackete of the Sea Watch 3 unloaded into Italy three violent migrants accused of rape, kidnapping and murder. Democratic Party (PD) parliamentarians had demanded the landing of all immigrants, including those now suspected of being ferocious criminals.”
According to Chiara Giannini, who cites ‘reliable sources’, the new interior minister Luciana Lamorgese had asked for the embarrassing news not to be published. But instead, members of the real press made the arrests public, along with the names of the three suspects – Mohammed Condè, 27, Hameda Ahmed, 26 and Mahmoud Ashuia, 24.
Condé is from Guinea, whereas Ahmed and Ashuia are Egyptian.
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 30 September 2019 21:00.
Statue of Bandera in Western Ukraine.
Ukrainian Nationalism and its Demons from the Past
By Sébastien Meuwissen at Visigrad Post
Poland/Ukraine – On January 1st, 2019, several thousands of Ukrainians marched in the streets of Kiev, Lviv and Khmelnytskyï (Western Ukraine) to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of Stepan Bandera. These past years, there were plenty of similar processions in Ukraine, in particular in the Western part. Thousands of young Ukrainians take part in these nationalists marches, where they wave flags picturing Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. Even though they contributed to the creation of an independent Ukraine, the two men have been guilty of many war crimes in their collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Nowadays Bandera and Shukhevych remain controversial historical figures. For some they are national heroes and for others they are criminals.
A territory coveted by its powerful neighbours
In a matter of territorial size, Ukraine is the third biggest country in Europe (behind Russia and France). The name “Ukraine” (in Ukrainian: Україна [ukrɑˈjinɑ]) was used for the first time in reference to the territory of Kievian Rus in the XIIth century. Throughout its history this huge territory was targeted by many invasions and was annexed by some European powers.
During the XVIIth century almost the entire territory of what is now Ukraine fell under the control of the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. Later during the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, the Austro-Hungarian (at the West) and Russian (in the Center and at the East) empires shared this Eastern European territory. After the First World War, Poland reappeared on European maps and took most of the Western parts while USSR took the rest of the territory under its control.
The Soviet context and the “Holodomor”
Ukraine suffered tremendously from soviet occupation. The most obvious example of this harsh time is certainly the Soviet caused famine of 1932-1933. The Ukrainian famine named “Holodomor” (in Ukrainian: голодомо́р, extermination by hunger) is seen by many people as a mass murder that can be related to a genocide (even though this event isn’t in a lot of history books).
In a period of just a year and a half, this starvation caused the death of six to eight million people, according to various sources, with two to five millions solely in Ukraine. Even though most of the victims were ethnically Ukrainians, they were not the only ones afflicted by the murderous policy of Stalin (hundreds of thousands of Russians, Tatars and Kazakhs also died).
A coveted multicultural area
During the first half of the XXth century, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions considerably grew in Western Ukraine. According to a population census from 1931 the Ukrainians (mostly Orthodox) constituted the major part of the local population (64%) in the Western region of Volhynia. Other ethnic and religious groups were the Poles (15,6%), the Jews (10%), Germans (2,3%) and other groups less numerous (Czech, Slovaks, Belorussians, …). (1) The already existent tensions between these various groups would considerably grow during the ’30s to evolve into a true hate during the Second World War.
At this time two Ukraines seemed to emerge. On one hand the Western Ukraine that was earlier under Polish and Austrian influence and on the other hand the russified Eastern Ukraine. To the eyes of Ukrainian independentists, Poland and the USSR were hereditary enemies of the Ukrainian nation and should be fought to allow for the creation of an independent Ukrainian state. This was precisely this goal of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (or OUN), created in 1929.
The strategy of the OUN to reach the creation of an independent Ukraine included violence and terrorism against those who were seen as enemies of an independent Ukraine. Among those cited as the “external” enemies of Ukraine – Poland and USSR – and the “internal” enemies, so to say all people who weren’t ethnically Ukrainian or suspected to collaborate with the enemy. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (or UPA) was a paramilitary nationalist army engaged in a series of conflicts during the Second World War. It was composed by various fighter groups of the OUN. The OUN and the UPA had for leaders, respectively, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych.
Collaboration with Nazi Germany
A few years later, the Second World War began. In 1940, many Western Ukrainians saw Nazi Germany like a partner susceptible to help the creation of an independent Ukrainian state. Hitler was considered a symbol of hope in front of the soviet domination. The act of restoration of the Ukrainian state from the 30th of June, 1941, is very clear on this:
“3. The newly formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian People to free itself from Muscovite occupation.” (2)
On April 28 the division “SS Galizien” was created. It was a military formation mostly made up by Ukrainian volunteers from the region of Galicia (Western Ukraine). Under the initiative of the Wehrmacht, the SS Galizien division slaughtered practically the entirety of the Jewish population of this region.
The massacre of Volhynia
Once the Jewish population were eliminated, the Poles were targeted. It is principally in the Western region of Ukraine that the slaughter of the Polish minority took place. While the Second World War was raging, Ukrainian nationalist leaders commanded their supporters to slaughter the Polish population in the region. Here is a passage of the order given by the OUN on the 2nd of February 1944 to its members:
“Liquidate every inch of Polishness. Destroy the Catholic churches and other Polish cult places (…) Destroy the houses so there is no trace that someone lived there (…) Keep in mind that if something Polish remains, then Poles will come to claim our territories.” (3)
The groups of Ukrainian nationalists went to the towns of Galicia and Volhynia and killed between 40,000 and 60,000 people, mostly women and children. None were spared. On the 11th of July nearly 100 villages were plundered and the population was slaughtered in the most brutal way. Besides murdering the local population, the Banderas tortured with a rare atrocity. Despite the absence of resistance, civilians were killed in their houses, at school, in the churches, or in offices. As practiced later by the Soviet army, rape was largely used as a terror weapon.
The legacy and the demons from the past
The Polish writer Jan Zaleski said: “The Poles living in Volhynia were killed twice. The first time by a weapon and the second time by silence.” With these words he was referring to the way the history of the massacre of Volhynia is often avoided and to the Ukrainian denial of the atrocities that were committed. Besides the numerous crimes committed by the members of the OUN and the UPA, many Ukrainians consider the leaders of these organizations as national heroes. We can see as a proof the various monuments to the glory of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych in the Western part of the country, particularly in the city of Lviv where they are regularly maintained.
The Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Andrej Babis, has slammed policies promoting mass migration and population replacement which are both propagated by globalist governments in Western Europe.
While touching on the subject which is commonly referred to as ’Replacement Migration‘ during an interview with Die Welt, Babis said, “We do not see migration as a means of counteracting a shrinking population, as in Western Europe.”
Echoing his Visegrád partner Viktor Orbán, Babis also spoke about how he would like to increase the low birthrates of his own country where women, on average, have just 1.7 children.
“We want to get the Czechs to have more children,” Babis said.
After the German reporter asserted that it’s “not very climate-friendly” to set government incentives for people to have more children, Babis responded, saying: “I have four children. Then I’m probably climate-damaging.”
In Germany, a country where a large portion of the population seems to have lost touch with reality, there are now certain climate activists who measure everything in terms of carbon dioxide and would, therefore, prefer to ban child-bearing.
Babis went on to say that the only people who immigrate to the Czech Republic are invited by its government.
“We welcome foreigners, more than five percent of our population is born abroad, but we are the ones who decide who comes here and who does not,” the Czech Prime Ministere declared.
Throughout his tenure as the leader of the small central European country, Babis hasn’t wavered in his opposition to mass migration from the third world – something the EU technocrats are certainly not happy with.
In the past, Babis has suggested that the EU should model its asylum policy after the Australian model, which processes those seeking asylum outside of the country.
Statue of Bandera in Western Ukraine.
Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Andrej Babis