Tuesday, February 7, 2017

France's New Islamist Guillotine

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France's New Islamist Guillotine
The Trial of Georges Bensoussan

by Denis MacEoin  •  February 7, 2017 at 5:00 am
  • It is not racist to accuse Muslims of wrongdoing; Islam is a religio-political system, not a race. This conflation of two very different things already causes endless confusion and miscarriages of justice. Such scattershot accusations fail to make a distinction between genuine hatred for Muslims and fair and balanced criticism of some of their behavior and their religion.
  • "Anti-racism... an instrument of intellectual terrorism has become today the greatest channel of the new anti-Semitism". — Georges Bensoussan.
  • The CCIF's charge of "Islamophobia" is almost certainly built, not so much about Arabs but about perceptions of a refusal by Muslim immigrants from North Africa to integrate into French society,
  • "To say that one drinks in anti-Semitism from one's mother's milk means that it is transmitted culturally. I have not spoken of a transmission through blood, which implies a genetic transmission. And I maintain that in some Arab families in France, anti-Semitism is taught. ... I have not invented the Kouachi brothers, who, after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, asked the printer with whom they took refuge if he was Jewish." — Georges Bensoussan.
  • "This visceral anti-Semitism proven by the Fondapol survey by Dominique Reynié last year cannot remain under a cover of silence. Conducted in 2014 among 1,580 French respondents, of whom one third were Muslim, the survey found that they were two times and even three times more anti-Jewish than French people as a whole". — Georges Bensoussan.
  • Why should this be surprising? Anti-Jewish feelings in Muslim countries and elsewhere are deeply embedded, with roots in the Qur'an, the Hadith, Islamic law-books, and general social attitudes from the 7th century onwards.
  • If Bensoussan is convicted, the CCIF and other organisations like it will start further prosecutions of other innocent people and succeed in shutting down debate about what is the greatest single threat to the stability not only of France and Europe, but the West.
French historian Georges Bensoussan has defended remarks he made about anti-Semitism among French Muslims, saying: "To say that one drinks in anti-Semitism from one's mother's milk means that it is transmitted culturally. I have not spoken of a transmission through blood, which implies a genetic transmission. And I maintain that in some Arab families in France, anti-Semitism is taught. I have not invented Mohamed Merah". Merah murdered seven people in 2012, including children at a Jewish school, admitting to anti-Semitic motives.
The French historian and philosopher Georges Bensoussan is best known for his studies of matters relating to the Jewish world, on topics such as the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab countries after the declaration of Israel's independence in 1948 and the signal defeat of Arab armies which invaded the new state between then and 1949. He himself was born in Morocco in 1952, but moved with his family to France in his early years.

Israel's So-Called Poverty Problem
OECD Poverty Lines Do Not Define Poverty

by Malcolm Lowe  •  February 7, 2017 at 4:00 am
  • According to the OECD definition of the "poverty line," you can make everyone fabulously rich while keeping them all as poor as before. But you can eliminate poverty by reducing them all to starvation levels.
  • Assume that large differences between OECD countries in alleged "child poverty" may, nevertheless, have some significance. The consequence of this assumption, however, is that Israel is doing better than numerous other OECD countries when the uniquely high fertility rate in Israel is taken into account.
  • It was a real achievement to raise the employment rate of single mothers from 66% to 81%. To insist that nothing has changed because the same proportion of such families remains below the so-called poverty line is both wrongheaded and could discourage attempts to improve the situation further.
  • It is sometimes thought to be paradoxical that Israel features so highly in the "World Happiness Reports" – at 11th place out of 157 countries in the latest report. There is no paradox if such factors as joy over having children and pride at being in work outweigh artificially defined poverty.
OECD figures about "child poverty" may have little to do with actual poverty. But even assuming that large differences between OECD countries in alleged "child poverty" may, nevertheless, have some significance, it means that Israel is doing better than numerous other OECD countries when the uniquely high fertility rate in Israel is taken into account.
Israel joined the "Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development" (OECD) on September 7, 2010. Since then, Israel has featured in the OECD's annual reports. Every year we are told that "Israel's poverty rates are highest among OECD nations," as again in 2016. Especially bewailed are figures about "the proportion of children living in families below the poverty line."
There are, of course, poor families in Israel. Any social worker dealing with families can name some. The question is whether the OECD reports provide information that can serve to deal with such poverty as exists. The answer is negative because OECD "poverty lines" are falsely construed as measures of poverty. They define, instead, something quite distinct from poverty: income disparity.
This absurd discrepancy is revealed in a little Wikipedia article on "Measuring Poverty," where we are told:

The Trump-Trudeau Tryst

by Thomas Quiggin  •  February 7, 2017 at 12:05 am
  • It had been reported prior to 2015 that the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami front groups would use the Liberal Party of Canada as a vehicle for political entryism.
  • The article also noted the roles of ISNA Canada and ICNA Canada in these efforts. A number of Canadian Members of Parliament have Islamist connections, advocate for sharia law or, in the case of Cabinet Minister Maryam Monsef, states that "Sharia fascinates me :)"
In 2016 Prime Minister Trudeau chose not to observe any official 9/11 memorial ceremony to honour the Canadians who died that day. However, the very next day, he attended the Ottawa Main Mosque which has multiple links to extremism. (Image source: Rebel.media screenshot)
President Trump may be meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada shortly. The two leaders worked across from each other on the world's longest undefended border.

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