Mid-Week Post

The central point of the work-week...


Stephen Harper proposes a niqab ban for civil servants:

A Conservative government would look at banning public servants from wearing the niqab, Stephen Harper told the CBC on Tuesday.

"That's a matter we are going to examine," Harper said in an interview with Power and Politics host Rosemary Barton.

"Quebec, as you know, has legislation on this and we are looking at that legislation."

Harper said the "vast majority of Canadians" understand the Conservative government's decision to try to ban face coverings at citizenship ceremonies.

 
Please, don't stop there.



Ibn Warraq's words should be bronzed:

Last May, I wrote that Canadian Muslims “are the low-hanging fruit in the politics of fear. Omar Khadr is exhibit A; Zunera Ishaq is exhibit B. With an October election, it won’t be surprising to see political machinations at our expense.” Yet the sheer brazenness of the Conservatives leaves one speechless; a 2.0 version of Quebec’s “charter of values” is being used to win votes on the backs of a vulnerable minority. The government’s open hostility has given licence to bigots to vent xenophobia. A pregnant Muslim woman is assaulted in Montreal. A niqab-wearing woman is attacked while shopping with her daughters in Toronto. Mosques are taking precautions. Identifiable Muslim women feel a little less safe, and Muslim youth face difficult questions about identity and acceptance.

If Miss Khan is a second-class citizen, how can she mobilise and get a willing popular press to publish her words? How can any woman in Canada wearing these ridiculous coverings get her voice heard when - let's say- a Pakistani Christian woman would be tortured or killed for some imaginary crime?

Let's take a look at what real victims look like:

The Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters have began forcing the roughly 15,000 Christian Copts of Dalga village in Egypt to pay a jizya tax as indicated in Koran 9:29, author and translator Raymond Ibrahim reported on Sunday.

**

A Syrian woman has revealed how she underwent horrific torture by female ISIS members in order to give up the identity of two of her friends, condemning them to a certain death.

Um Abdo, 30, a primary school teacher from a village near Aleppo, has claimed she was beaten, whipped and burned with hot coals until she revealed the names of two wives of men fighting for a local rebel group.

The mother-of-three says she was then forced to watch as Islamic State militants murdered her friends in a public beheading at a local stadium.

 **

The sexual abuse of non-Muslim children and women at the hands of Jihadist groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram is not only a widespread practice in the Muslim world, but, sadly, has a lot to do with Islamic teachings.

Because it can't be said enough:

Most important, Ibn Warraq  describes the “mind-set” of most Muslims as intolerant, self-pitying, stagnant, and trained to blame others for their own failures. He also sees the Muslim “mind-set” as akin to that of people trapped in totalitarian regimes. The need to control thought and to sacrifice individuality characterizes both Islamic and Marxist regimes. Thus, we understand the affinity that Western “leftists” have with reactionary Islamists. Ibn Warraq contrasts this with a Western “mind-set” which is built upon Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, scientific, and Enlightenment foundations and is characterized by intellectual curiosity, genuine interest in the “other,” a sense of irony, the ability to engage in self-criticism, and a concern with finding the truth.

Elsewhere, Justin Trudeau complains that Harper is using the niqab issue to deflect attention from economic issues.

Not buying it, Justin.

Even his attempts at defending corrupt unions are lame:

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau says Canada must do a better job of promoting its manufacturing sector and ensure its good-paying jobs endure, but he is not making any specific promises to the country's auto sector.

Stephen Harper promises several new benefits for parents.

So he says.



A federal inquiry into missing aboriginal women will be concluded with what is already known-  that roughly forty percent of these women's killers were their spouses or boyfriends, that twenty-three percent were related to the victims, that thirty percent were mere acquaintances and only eight percent were strangers:

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper isn't budging on his refusal to hold a federal inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women, framing the issue Tuesday as a law-and-order problem and noting police have solved most of the crimes. ...

During a campaign stop in Whitby, Ont., Harper said it is "way past the time" for studying the subject because there have been some 40 examinations already.

Instead, a re-elected Conservative government would press ahead with efforts to prevent violence against aboriginal women and ensure appropriate penalties are in place for abusers.

"Our government position on this has been very clear. We have moved forward with a whole series of criminal justice reforms to deal with the problems of violence against people generally, violence against women in particular," Harper said.

"Most of these murders, sad as they are, are in fact solved."

An expensive, attention-seeking inquiry doesn't change the facts.


Also: it's a cold thing to say but it's rather true:

Women who have gone missing along British Columbia's Highway 16 — also known as the Highway of Tears due to the number of unsolved murders and disappearances of women along the route — were "putting themselves at risk," former Conservative MP John Cummins says.

"Many of those cases where people have been on the highway — northern British Columbia, Highway 16 — they've been picked up by God knows whom and their remains are found days later and there simply aren't any clues." Cummins told host Rick Cluff on CBC Radio's The Early Edition.

"It's not simple and easy to solve these matters. But what is I think fairly clear is that, you know, quite often people are engaging in behaviour — hitchhiking on these lonely roads by themselves at night, that behaviour is dangerous," Cummins said.

Obama eventually apologises for something that happened a week ago:

President Barack Obama apologized to Doctors Without Borders on Wednesday for the American air attack that killed at least 22 people at a medical clinic in Afghanistan, and said the U.S. would examine military procedures to look for better ways to prevent such incidents.

I guess he was busy but with what I can't tell. It's not like he does any actual work.



Joe "Bad Touch" Biden is a sleaze:

According to multiple sources, it was Biden himself who talked to her, painting a tragic portrait of a dying son, Beau’s face partially paralyzed, sitting his father down and trying to make him promise to run for president because “the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.”

It was no coincidence that the preliminary pieces around a prospective campaign started moving right after that column. People read Dowd and started reaching out, those around the vice president would say by way of defensive explanation. He was just answering the phone and listening.

But in truth, Biden had effectively placed an ad in The New York Times, asking them to call…

“Calculation sort of sounds crass, but I guess that’s what it is,” said one person who’s recently spoken to Biden about the prospect of running.

Planned Parenthood worker filmed selling eyes called an ambulance because of a botched abortion:

This is Tram Nguyen, who is the Director of the Ambulatory Surgery Center, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, in Houston, Texas. Nguyen is featured in the Center for Medical Progress video released on August 4, 2015 – ironically the same day as the botched abortion – titled “Intact Fetuses ‘Just a Matter of Line Items’ for Planned Parenthood TX Mega-Center.”

During the emergency call placed by Nguyen, she explained to the 911 dispatcher the condition of the patient.

“We have a patient who just had a medical procedure and she’s experiencing bleeding and needs to be transported to Ben Taub per our physician orders,” she said. “She has I.V. access so we need an ACLS-equipped ambulance, please.”

Safe, legal and rare. That's the line.



A photo of a police officer carrying a crying child from a car wreck goes viral:

Deputy Ric Lindley, from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, holds the baby tight, walking her away from the carnage that she just experienced.

Passengers involved in the crash - that involved an ambulance and a tractor trailer - and there were no serious injuries.

After the picture was posted on the sheriff’s office Facebook page, it soon went viral, with commenters praising the actions of the officer.

(source)

And now, a happy accident:

An unexplained technical glitch on Facebook, where an Arkansas man found himself logged into the account of a complete stranger, has resulted in the pair getting married.

In a post on Imgur, Schuyler Benson describes how six years ago a bug on the mobile version of the social network logged him into the account of a woman he’d never met. He explains:

“In 2009 while living in South Arkansas, I used a flip-phone to log into my Facebook account. I opened the browser, went to facebook.com, and wasn’t even given a chance to enter any login information. I was already logged in. I had to make several posts in order to find out I wasn’t logged into my own account.

“Turns out, I was in the account of a nice lady named Celeste, who lived in Boulder, Colorado. She and I had never met, never lived in the same state, had no mutual friends in real life or online, shared no Facebook interests. For some reason, I was unable to logout of her account. And every time I logged in from my phone for the entire week, I found myself in Celeste’s account”.

The pair were left baffled by the technical hitch until Celeste sent a friend request that unexpectedly fixed the problem, though the story didn’t end there. 

“After some understandable confusion (and a little panic on both parts), I was able to log out after she sent me a friend request. She’s admitted that she intended to delete me a few days later, but it turns out we had a lot in common” said Benson.

The two soon became close friends online and finally met in person in the summer of 2013. Just months later, Celeste relocated to Arkansas so that the two could be together. 

The following year, the couple got engaged before finally moving to South Carolina and getting hitched in June 2015.

I guess Facebook is useful for something.