Monday, January 23, 2017



More on the Melbourne Muslim Terror Attack

The malign influence of Islam again

Bill Muehlenberg

You will note that I used both the “M” word and the “T” word in my title – something that almost all of our authorities, leaders, politicians and police still refuse to do. As I said in my first piece on this horrible attack two days ago, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that Dimitrious Gargasoulas who drove his car into a crowd of people was a Muslim.

Before proceeding, let me point out the latest tragic news about this attack: we now have a fifth victim: a three-month-old baby. There may well be more deaths in the coming days due to this deliberate and atrocious attack on innocent men, women and children in a busy Melbourne shopping area. We need to keep the grieving families and loved ones in our prayers.

Since the initial attack on Friday afternoon there is even more evidence about who this guy is and what he believes. But from day one I and others were already compiling the growing list of indications of Islam at work. Those included:

-the allegation that he shouted “Allahu Akhbar” as he was wildly driving his car

-his burning of a Bible just before the attack

-his own claim on his own FB page where he said: “I am actually greek islamic Kurdish” [Kurds are Muslims]

-his rants on his FB pages about he and God dealing with the “dogs” – dogs of course are considered to be unclean in Islam, and the term is often used of the infidels

-his deliberate targeting of people with a vehicle, a by now quite common and bloody MO of IS

Yet for simply offering this data and asking relevant questions, I and others were attacked mercilessly. We were accused of being Islamophobic, of being fear-mongers, of stirring up trouble, of stereotyping people, etc, etc. And on top of this, the police had insisted almost immediately after the attack that this had nothing to do with terrorism.

In my first article I asked why this so often seems to be the case. All the evidence seems to indicate an act of terror, and an Islamic act of terror at that, yet the authorities insist from the very outset that this just cannot be the case. Why the desire to protect one political ideology, even though it puts so many people at risk?

And since my first report, we are now learning even more about the attacker. As one news report states:

Dimitrious Gargasoulas, 26, ranted about the Illuminati, called unbelievers ‘dogs’, and vowed to ‘have god’s laws re-instated’ in the weeks before the attack that killed four people. ‘I declare war on tyranny today, you dogs will have the option to either believe in me and his positive energy he offers and stay faithful to me or serve the one who enslaves you at his feet,’ he wrote on Facebook on Monday.

‘I offer freedom no work no bills just that we all keep faith and believe in the one god, the one higher being for the good and protect the energy that he gives with your heart. God bless everyone in the world it is about to change xoxo.’

He claimed to be ‘Greek Islamic Kurdish’ and a follower of Yazdanism, the native religion of the Kurds before the arrival of Islam, also know as the ‘cult of Angels’. ‘I know exactly how to take you DOGS down the power of knowing has revealed and I shall have GODS laws re-instated,’ he wrote last Saturday.

But one of the clearest pieces of evidence now comes from a close friend of his. The article continues:

A close friend said Gargasoulas’ rantings were driven by heavy use of the drug ice, and that he had recently converted to Islam. ‘He was a great guy but ice destroyed him. Then he converted to Muslim and changed very quickly. For over a month he’s been on edge,’ he told Daily Mail Australia.

There you have it. Unless his close friend is a liar, or the media is just making this claim up out of thin air, we now have the smoking gun: he was a convert to Islam and this helped to push him over the edge. It is not the only factor of course, but as his close friend said, it was a significant factor indeed.

Undoubtedly we will learn even more about this guy in the upcoming days, and learn more about the Islam connection. In the meantime, I wonder if any of my critics will now relent and repent. For two days I have been attacked and hated on by all sorts of people for suggesting that the car terrorist may have been a Muslim.

Now we know that he was indeed a convert to Islam, and he had declared war on the infidels. So will any of my critics be apologising to me? Will they admit that they got things wrong in their zeal to defend Islam at all costs? I won’t be holding my breath on this.

Once again, let me make clear what I have been saying all along. Am I saying that Islam alone is the cause of this latest attack? No I am not. Am I saying his drug problems had nothing to do with this? No I am not. Yes we had known all along about his drug issues.

But it is not as if we should be forced to choose here, and insist that either he was drug-affected or Islam-affected. It is clear that he was greatly impacted by both. The truth is, ice makes everything worse. And the truth is, Islam makes everything worse.

They are both dangerous drugs. Neither should never be given a free run in the West, and both need to be closely examined, monitored and assessed for the harm that they may cause. Not all Muslims are terrorists, but almost all of the terror attacks around the world over the past few decades have been committed by Muslims.

Our leaders, politicians and security forces need to decide whose side they are on here. Is the defence and protection of innocent citizens their top priority, or is a politically correct and dangerous fixation on exonerating Islam at all costs their number one priority?

I think many ordinary Australians and Westerners already know the answer to that question.

SOURCE





Politicians are elected but by no means are they representative

by Jennifer Oriel

Political leaders are in a state of ­advanced denial about the decay of liberal democracy and their contribution to its decline."

Their refusal to adopt realism in analysing the root causes of rising ­nationalism, popular democracy and counter-revolutionary movements is self-serving. It en­ables the political class to sustain denial in the face of overwhelming evidence that their old world order of supranationalism, centralised power and political correctness has done incalculable harm to the free world.

The politicians’ expenses scandal is yet another example of how removed the political class is from the people. Yet political leaders such as Foreign Minister Julie Bishop continue to promote the myths of the politically correct ­establishment, whose faithful will converge this week for the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Last week, an opinion piece by Bishop was published in US News: “Economic Globalisation and Elites under Siege”. She framed her argument in reference to Samuel Huntington’s 2004 essay on the denationalisation of America’s elite. Bishop revised the essay to include politicians in the elite category and surmised that Huntington’s core thesis was “the inevitability of globalisation was increasingly distancing the elites from the majority”. The solution, according to Bishop, is for “political elites” to “challenge those making false promises of returning people to a lost era of greater simplicity, prosperity and certainty”. Instead, the elites should “better explain why globalising forces … cannot be turned back”.

Bishop’s article illustrates some of the intellectual habits of the political establishment: a tendency ­towards historical revisionism that results in social, economic and political solutions that deepen the democratic deficit. Kudos to Bishop for breaking ranks with the PC supranationalists by quoting the supremely politically incorrect Huntington, but let’s be true to his writing. Huntington divided transnationalism into three descriptive categories: universalist, economic and moralist. He contended that economic transnationalism was rooted in moralism. The moralistic approach “decries patriotism and nationalism as evil forces and ­argues that international law, ­institutions, regimes and norms are morally superior to those of ­individual nations”. Huntington’s solution was not to ­entrench “globalising forces” but rather to ­embrace “nationalism devoted to the preservation and enhancement” of American culture rooted in Anglo-Protestant values.

During the Brexit debate, I categorised the moralistic approach as supranationalism. It is an anti-democratic form of gov­ernance that threatens the ­future of free trade. Yet the WEF continues to champion it. In the Global Risks 2017 report, WEF leaders propose that the five major challenges for 2017 are: reviving economic growth, reforming market capitalism, facing up to the ­importance of identity and community, managing technological change, and strengthening global mechanisms. It associates ­Eur­ope’s popular movements for sovereignty and traditional values with polarisation. In yet another misdiagnosed risk assessment, the WEF lists a range of minority categories associated with neo-Marxism and contends that rapid changes in attitudes towards them have led “older and less-educated” voters to feel left behind. The ­results are “cultural schisms” and a lack of political cohesion.

It is difficult to deduce how the WEF maintains global power with so little demonstrable capacity for evidence-based reasoning and its devotion to neo-Marxist ideology. Almost a decade before Huntington described the dead soul of transnationalist moralism, economist Bernard Connolly wrote an extraordinarily prescient book analysing the neo-Marxist origins of the European Union. Connolly served as a senior economist in the European Commission before ­exposing its dogmatic ideology in The Rotten Heart of Europe. Apart from presenting an extensive economic analysis of the EU, Connolly predicted a coming era when a “self-serving trans­national” collective comprising “political, bureau­cratic, business, financial and media elites” might sacrifice sovereignty to satisfy their own interests, or act as Lenin’s useful idiots for “the soc­ially destructive neo-Marxists”. ­Unfortunately, as the 21st century has shown, the two paths to supranational rule are not mutually exclusive.

The self-serving ethic of the political class is a pronounced threat to democracy rarely recognised by supranationalists. The past week of Australian politics is a case in point. Like many Western countries, Australia is buckling under a record high national debt and deficit. In such a context, one would expect the politicians so fond of telling us to live within our means to live within theirs. But far from modelling austerity, politicians from both major parties have been caught out in yet another ­expenses scandal. Labor frontbenchers have lavished taxpayers’ money on business class seats for family members to join them on junkets across the country. The Australian noted that in the six months to June last year, Opposition leader Bill Shorten claimed $51,531 in family travel - more than three times that claimed by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. But the Liberals have their own big spenders. Former health minister Sussan Ley lost her post after revelations she spent time looking at rental properties while on business trips in Queensland.

The Prime Minister has resolved to prevent future scandals by establishing a watchdog and making MPs’ expenditure public. There is a cost neutral alternative. Some members of Israel’s conservative Likud party make both their finances and weekly schedules publicly available to promote transparency and accountability.

When Australians are struggling to pay taxes, bearing the cost of green ideology in exorbitant utility bills and trying to pay down debt, the sight of politicians raiding the public purse to fly business class with their families is more than bad optics. It typifies the trashy ostentation of the nouveau riche. The democratic deficit is deepened not by a “less educated” public, as the WEF and PC establishment contend, but by citizens smart enough to see the emperor is naked, obese and unfit to govern. The solution is not to punish the people for their powers of reason but the emperors for their cupidity.

If the WEF wants to maintain free trade, it must relinquish supranational ideology and ­respect democracy. The West will be governed by the consent of the people. The soul of the free world is not for sale.

SOURCE






CFMEU fined for threatening 'Armageddon' at Royal Adelaide Hospital site

The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) has been fined $57,500 by the Federal Court after threatening "Armageddon" and national industrial action in a dispute at the Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH) site in 2013.

The union's Aaron Cartledge and Michael McDermott were also penalised $3,750 each for threatening to organise industrial action at the construction site which breached a Fair Work Commission order.

The Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) said the union officials made threats with the intention to deter the head contractor from enforcing an order requiring employees on the project not to take industrial action.

It said Mr McDermott threatened there would be "Armageddon" if the contractor took steps to enforce the order.

In handing down the penalties, Justice Anthony Besanko said the CFMEU had a significant record of non-compliance with workplace laws.

ABCC commissioner Nigel Hadgkiss said the decision meant more than $1 million in penalties had been imposed by the Federal Court against the union for unlawful conduct across Adelaide in a nine-month period.

SOURCE





Crocodile tears?

A rich reward for a few tears. Hotel ordered to pay $313,000 for ‘serious and shocking’ sex attack.  But was it?  An old man touched her upper thigh and groin and tried to pull down her underpants, so she told him to go away, which he did. Or is it a case of feminism making women weaker not stronger

A NATIONAL hotel chain has been ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to a worker sexually assaulted by a colleague. After a lengthy legal battle, the company will have to fork out part of the $313,000 damages awarded to the young woman, aged 21 at the time of the “serious and shocking” assault.

The victim suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and depression after the December 2010 attack and was unable to return to work until 2015, a tribunal found.

She had been staying at a Brisbane hotel owned by her employer at its suggestion after moving to the city to take up a guest service agent position, sharing an apartment with the hotel’s night caretaker.

The Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal found that the man — almost 70 years old at the time — crept into her room naked at 5am, touched her upper thigh and groin and attempted to take off her underpants.

She asked him to stop and to leave the room and broke down crying, prompting the older man to leave after saying: “I’ll let you get changed”. He then returned and said: “This can be our little secret”, the tribunal heard.

QCAT member Ann Fitzpatrick rejected the hotel chain’s argument that the victim could have chosen not to live in the apartment with the caretaker, finding that the assault took place in the course of both parties’ employment.

“I do not think it is unreasonable for such a person to feel that when her employer is transferring her to Brisbane and taking active steps to arrange her accommodation that she is required to live in that accommodation,” Ms Fitzpatrick said, accepting the victim’s evidence.

“She was assaulted in her bedroom and was awoken from sleep. She was plainly very vulnerable and she underwent a frightening experience,” she said, noting that the victim was “a very young woman” at the time of the attack.

Ms Fitzpatrick accepted medical evidence of the “severe and prolonged” psychological effects of the assault, including nightmares, psychotic illusions of seeing the assailant, agoraphobia, need for help with the activities of daily living, anxiety, fear, panic attacks, poor sleep, depression, loss of confidence and trust, suicidal thoughts, attempted suicide, self-harming and drug and alcohol abuse.

She rejected the hotel’s argument that the woman had pre-existing psychological and substance abuse problems that would warrant an adjustment of any compensation, along with its claim that the incident could not have been that damaging since she had recovered from an earlier, unrelated sexual assault.

Both the hotel and the assailant were jointly ordered to pay $313,000 as compensation for the assault.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here



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