Saturday, May 11, 2024
Helping alcoholics die is one solution to the homeless problem
‘Where’s the Recovery in All This?’: SF Buying Beer, Vodka for Homeless Alcoholics with Taxpayer Money
The war is about the Caliphate where everyone bows to Islam like it or not
Caliphate protests in Hamburg: What is Muslim Interactive?
It's estimated that some 1,000 people gathered at Hamburg's popular street Steindamm late April, following a call to protests by an organization called Muslim Interactive (MI). Some demonstrators chanted "God is great," and held up signs that read "caliphate is the solution," and "Germany = a dictatorship of values."
Public outcry was quick to follow, with many calling for the organization to be banned. A second demonstration is this weekend.
Necla Kelek is a sociologist and head of the Secular Islam Initiative, which is based in Hamburg. She said that she, like many others, had been surprised by the sudden demonstration that MI organized. Her organization joined others in putting together a counter-protest.
"This is a group that organizes itself through social media, such as TikTok," she told DW. "That makes it all the more dangerous. At least a mosque would give people a place to go and ask questions."
Germany's domestic intelligence authorities have been observing the MI group. Hamburg's security authorities have listed the organization in recent reports.
Founded in 2020, authorities believe the group is affiliated with the Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT) organization, which was banned in 2003 after promoting violence and the killing of Jewish people.
Following the ban, authorities report that "informal HuT networks" came into being, including the MI group. German security services believe the groups Generation Islam and Reality Islam are also associated with HuT.
Classified as extremist
Security authorities classify MI as extremist. The group calls for a worldwide caliphate, which rejects the democratic order enshrined in Germany's Basic Law.
"This is a genuinely political program being rolled out, based on Islam and Sharia law," Andreas Jacobs, head of the division for societal cohesion at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, told DW. "Put delicately, this is a revolutionary political movement pursuing a fundamental upheaval of the ruling order, not only in the Muslim world, but worldwide."
He added that, unlike other Islamist movements such as Salafism, MI places less focus on concrete rules of conduct. "The movement doesn't really discuss questions about how to lead one's life, such as whether it's permitted to touch a woman," Jacobs explained.
Instead, the Middle East expert calls MI an "identitarian youth cult," which places it in line with similar identitarian movements such as that of the so-called Reichbürger, or Reichs Citizens.
Instrumentalizing social media
The MI group has over 20,000 followers on TikTok. The videos it posts are professional, and portray prominent movement leaders as modern and eloquent. They conduct street surveys to suggest close ties with the Muslim community.
The strategy seems to be working: The German news portal t-online.de published an article in which an anonymous teacher spoke of how MI leaders were celebrated like pop stars, and how his students were eager to join demonstrations just to meet their "heroes."
The group frequently picks up current debates, such as China's prosecution of the Uighur population, Quran burnings in Sweden, or the possibility of Germany prohibiting people from wearing headscarvesin public.
At the same time, it portrays Muslims as a minority that are discriminated against and ostracized from society — even more so since the Hamas-led attack in Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel's military operation in Gaza in response.
Navid Wali from the nonprofit organization Violence Prevention Network, which combats political extremism, told DW that the language MI and similar organizations employ has become sharper in recent months.
"Muslim Interactive uses well-known influencers, who might share their content without much consideration, and then say, 'Look here, we Muslims need to stick together to fight back against Islamophobia,'" Wali explained. "That is the excuse they use to attract others to join their cause."
Wali believes MI is something like a political sect. Its videos are all in German, and the content is usually broken into short analytical segments.
"Muslim Interactive is geared toward students, academics even," he said. "But the movement isn't primarily focused on gathering more followers as much as it is seeking to become as widely known as possible."
"Its plans can later be enacted by a small circle of insiders," he added.
Should the group be banned?
Jacobs and Wali agree that it would be strategically unwise for MI to take to the streets again, and thereby possibly provoke fresh calls for the group to be banned.
"But from a legal standpoint, the group has positioned itself well," Wali said. "I believe we wouldn't see any extremism at the next protest. The group is more interested in attracting attention."
At the first demonstration in late April, demonstrators were seen wearing sweaters depicting the outline of the state of Israel, with the word "caliphate" written across it. Wali does not expect to see similar provocations at the upcoming demonstration that has been announced.
Banning MI would be difficult, given the organization's careful approach to legal red lines. Much like right-wing identitarian movements, MI appears to be very aware of the legal framework it is permitted to operate in. Calling for a caliphate, as long as it's done in theory, is not prohibited in Germany.
Instead, Wali is concerned that banning MI would play into the victim narrative the organization propagates.
"In that case, we'd probably have to explain to the youth we work with that it's not about banning Muslim life altogether," the educator said. "Instead of a ban, it would be better to show young people alternatives for how Muslim life might look like in Germany."
The Middle East expert Jacobs was critical about the overall lack of knowledge about groups such as Muslim Interactive. "So far there is little systemic inquiry into groups like this — their size, an analysis of their video platforms, links to messages by Hizb ut-Tahrir," he said. "Compared to other Islamist groupings, this is still in its infancy."
He believes banning the organization would have a number of benefits. "First of all, it would send an important message, and secondly, it would buy security agencies some time to take a closer look at its structures and consider how to deal with replacement organizations."
Kelek told DW that so far, there are no counter-protests planned this weekend. Now that civil society had sent its message, she said, it was time for politics to take action.
This article was originally published in German.
The terrorists are inside Columbia..Hamas/Marxist Leninists and America haters
Columbia professor has mic cut after warning university infiltrated by ‘groups who are supporting terrorists’ at faculty meeting
Schools watchdog begs DOE to ban teacher-student texting in effort to stop sex abuse
Schools watchdog begs DOE to ban teacher-student texting in effort to stop sex abuse
The rich boy anti Semite of the Columbia protests
‘Richie Rich’ Columbia protester sent antisemitic message to Park Slope dad with Israeli flag in profile pic
The cost of letting the violent insane roam the streets....
NYC EMT stabbed eight times by unhinged patient in ambulance speaks out: ‘Thought I was going to die’
Restoring order at RI School of Design
Letter From RI School of Design President to Occupying Protesters Is Something Else—So Is the Result
NYC version of the Stasi
Bragg’s Paralegal Admits His Office Deleted Three Pages of Phone Calls Between Stormy Daniels’ Lawyer and Michael Cohen
May. 10, 2024
President Trump was in court once again on Friday for Alvin Bragg’s Soviet-style Stormy Daniels ‘hush money’ lawfare trial.
Trump was accused of paying porn star Stormy Daniels, AKA, Stephanie Clifford, ‘hush payments’ through his then-attorney Michael Cohen in a scheme to silence her and stop the story about their alleged affair from being published in the National Enquirer.
The payments made to Stormy Daniels did NOT come from Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The payments were made through internal business records – there was no tax deduction taken and there was no obligation to file it with the FEC, according to Trump attorney Joe Tacopina.
An evil SOB through and through
Biden Says Trump Should Have Injected Himself with Bleach: ‘Wish He Had Done a Little Bit’
A decade ago, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates famously declared that Joe Biden, 'has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.'
Biden's betrayal of Israel only means MORE civilians will die: MARK DUBOWITZ explains how Desperate Joe's latest blunder 'endorses' one of the terrorists's most repulsive tactics
A decade ago, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates famously declared that Joe Biden, 'has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.'
Secretary Gates – you'll never believe what Joe's done now.
President Biden has made, perhaps, his most incompetent policy blunder yet (at least since his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan).
In an interview Wednesday, Biden threatened to block the transfer of U.S. weapons to Israel, if the Jewish State launches a military operation against Hamas's last remaining stronghold in southern Gaza.
His ultimatum comes nearly seven months to the day of the October 7 slaughter – and after the White House admitted they had already secretly halted the delivery of bunker-busting bombs that Israel requires to root out terrorists hiding in deeply buried underground tunnels.
Indeed, the mastermind of the Hamas massacre, Yahya Sinwar, is believed to be sheltering in these tunnels – cynically dug beneath the feet of about 1.3 million Palestinians.
It's not only layers of concrete, dirt and sand that shield these terrorists from the Israeli military. These monsters hide under women and children.
But Biden blames Israel.
Friday, May 10, 2024
The Hamas mindset at Columbia
Columbia janitor reveals secret plans left behind by anti-Israel protesters who took over Hamilton Hall armed with zip ties, chains
Find these people and how much they've paid crooked Joe
Who are the dark money groups behind the pro-Palestinian mobs? Republicans claim Biden mega-donors could be involved in 'illegal activity' to help his re-election
Wind turbine inefficiency
New research discovers that wind turbines create a ‘turbulent wake’ that can steal almost 40% of energy from other ‘nearby’ turbines
The Proof of Censorship is…Censored
The Proof of Censorship is…Censored
"It’s not been a good week for the Censorship Industrial Complex."
By Jeffrey A. Tucker, Brownstone Institute
It’s not been a good week for the Censorship Industrial Complex.
The machine has been built and put into action over nearly a decade but largely in secret. Its way of doing business has been via surreptitious contacts with media and tech companies, intelligence carve-outs in “fact-checking” organizations, payoffs, and various other clever strategies, all directed toward boosting some sources of information and suppressing others. The goal has always been to advance regime narratives and curate the public mind.
And yet, based on its operations and insofar as we can tell, it had every intention of remaining secret. This is for a reason. A systematic effort by government to bully private sector companies into a particular narrative while suppressing dissent contradicts American law and tradition. It also violates human rights as understood since the Enlightenment. It was a consensus, until very recently, that free speech was essential to the functioning of the good society.
Four years ago, many of us suspected censorship was going on, that the throttling and banning was not merely a mistake or the result of zealous employees stepping out of line. Three years ago, the proof started to arrive. Two years ago, it became a flood. With the Twitter files from a year ago, we had all the proof we needed that the censorship was systematic, directed, and highly effective. But even then, we only knew a fraction of it.
Thanks to discovery from court cases, FOIA requests, whistleblowers, Congressional inquiries thanks to the very narrow Republican control, and some industrial upheavals such as what happened at Twitter, we are overwhelmed with tens of thousands of pages all pointing to the same reality.
The censors developed a belief at the highest levels of control in government that it was their job to govern what information the American people would and would not see, regardless of the truth. The actions became truly tribal: our side favors banning gatherings, closing schools, says the Hunter Biden laptop is a fake, favors masking, mass vaccination, and mail-in voting, and denies the import of voter fraud and vaccine injury, whereas their side takes the opposite approach.
It was a war over information, undertaken in total disregard for the First Amendment, as if it doesn’t even exist. Moreover, the operation was not only political. It clearly involved intelligence agencies that were already hip deep in the “all-of-society” pandemic response.
“All of Society” means all, including the information you receive and are allowed to distribute.
A vast swath of unelected bureaucrats took it upon themselves to manage all knowledge flows in the age of the Internet, with the ambition to turn the main source of news and sharing into a giant American version of Pravda. All of this occurred right under our noses – and is still going on today.
Indeed, censorship is a full-on industry now, with hundreds and thousands of cut-outs, universities, media companies, government agencies, and even young people in school studying to be disinformation specialists, and bragging about it on social media. We are just one step away from a New York Times article – as follow-ups to their recent praise of the Deep State and also government surveillance – with a headline like “The Good Society Needs Censors.”
Incredibly, the censorship is so pervasive now that it is not even reported. All these revelations should have been front page news. But so captured is the news media today that there are very few outlets that even bother to report the fullness of the problem.
Not receiving nearly enough attention is the new report from the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government of the US House of Representatives.
Running nearly 1,000 pages including documentation (however many pages are purposely blank), we have here an overwhelming amount of evidence of a systematic, aggressive, and deeply entrenched effort on the part of the federal government, including the Biden White House and many agencies including the World Health Organization, to tear out the guts of the Internet and social media culture and replace them with propaganda.
Among the well-documented facts are that the White House directly intervened in Amazon’s own marketing methods to deprecate books that raised doubts about the Covid vaccine and all vaccines. Amazon responded reluctantly but did what it could to satisfy the censors. All these companies – Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon – became acquiescent to Biden administration priorities, even to the point of running algorithmic changes by the White House before implementation.
When YouTube announced that it would take down any content that contradicted the World Health Organization, it was because the White House instructed them to do so.
As for Amazon, which is like every publisher in wanting full freedom to distribute, they faced intense pressure from government.
These are just a few of thousands of pieces of evidence of routine interference from government against social media companies, either directly or through various government-funded cut-outs, all designed to enforce a certain way of thinking on the American public.
What’s amazing is that this industry was allowed to metastasize to such an extent over 4-8 years or so, with no legal oversight and very little knowledge on the part of the public. It’s as if there is no such thing as the First Amendment. It’s a dead letter. Even now, the Supreme Court seems confused, based on our reading of the oral arguments over this whole case (Murthy v. Missouri).
One gets the sense when reading through all this correspondence that the companies were more than a bit rattled by the pressure. They must have wondered a few things: 1) is this normal? 2) do we really have to go along? 3) what happens to us if we just say no?
Probably every corner grocery store in any neighborhood run by a crime syndicate in history has asked these questions. The best answer is to do what you can in order to make them go away. This is precisely what they did time after time. After a while, the protocol probably begins to feel normal and no one asks anymore the basic questions: is this right? Is this freedom? Is this legal? Is this just the way things go in the US?
No matter how many high officials were involved, how many in the C-suites of big companies participated, however many editors and technicians of the best credentials played along, there can be no question that what took place was an absolute violation of speech rights that very likely exceeds anything we’ve seen in US history.
Keep in mind that we only know what we know, and that is severely truncated by the force of the machinery. We can safely assume that the truth actually is far worse than we know. And further consider that this censorship is keeping us from knowing the full story about the suppression of dissidents, whether medical, scientific, political, or otherwise.
There might be millions in many professions who are suffering right now, in silence. Or think of the vaccine-injured or those who have lost loved ones who were forced to get the shot. There are no headlines. There are no investigations. There is almost no public attention at all. Most of the venues that we once thought would police such outrages have been compromised.
To top it off, the censors are still not backing down. If you sense a lessening of the grip for now, there is every reason to believe it is temporary. This industry wants the entire Internet as we once conceived of it completely shut down. That’s the goal.
At this point, the best means of defeating this plan is widespread public outrage. That is made more difficult because the censorship itself is being censored.
This is why this report from the US House of Representatives needs to be widely shared so long as doing so is possible. It could be that such reports in the future will themselves be censored. It could also be the last such report you will ever see before the curtain falls on freedom completely.
QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author. This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. These positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.
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