Rex Murphy: In wake of James Foley’s beheading, can we finally say the I-word?

...Religion, even in a form that civilized people may regard as violently debased, is still a religion to those who embrace it. I stress, and do not apologize for, my use of the word “civilized” there. If hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, subscribe to a violent theological creed, it simply will not do to pretend — as some Western leaders, clergymen, journalists and professors insist on doing — that these are merely misguided souls who don’t properly know how to interpret a holy book.

The BBC’s Security Correspondent, Frank Gardner, said the barbaric ritual beheading “was not about religion.” Well how many “allahu akbars” have to be ululated before Mr. Gardner would accept it and kindred butcheries as religious? Have he and we so soon forgotten the psychiatrist at the military base in Ford Hood, Texas, who stood up and shouted “allahu akbar” before killing 13 people? That was not supposed to be “about religion” either. Military officials and law-enforcement investigators turned collectively blue in the face before acknowledging what the killer himself proudly proclaimed that it was, in his brutal mind at least: a “religious” act...

I agree with the sentiment - Brave Egyptian Female Activist Poses Nude and Poops on ISIS Flag

Her name is Aliaa Magda Elmahdy and apparently she’s an Egyptian social activist and blogger who’s known for doing outrageous things to protest Islamic restrictive and misogynistic theology. However, up to this point, her “protests” have not run the risk of her being publicly beheaded by the most dangerous terror group in the world.

Here’s what she did.

MORE

h/t Kathy S.

Mitch Wolfe: How Olivia Chow Lost The Toronto Mayoral Election

 ...Several months ago, when Chow jumped into the race, the obsequious mainstream media,  that is, the journalistically suspect CBC, Toronto Star and Globe and Mail, declared her the frontrunner. And the candidate to beat. 

But according to a recent Forum Research poll, Chow has fallen precipitously from first place- (35% )to third place- (25%), two points behind the unsinkable Mayor Rob Ford (27%), and 10 big points behind the surging John Tory (35%).

Two recent events have further killed her chances of election.

Councilor and former TTC Chairman Karen Stintz, one of Chow’s opponents on the right, has dropped out of the race. Stintz had been stuck at 5% for most of the campaign.

Stintz fiscally conservative supporters will avoid Chow like the Ebola plague. And instead will gravitate to Chow’s opponents,  John Tory and Rob Ford. Catapulting both of them further ahead of the nose-diving Chow.

But Chow’s most egregious error to date in this campaign, (and there have been a manure load of errors) was to publicly lie about the role of one of her key political advisers.

None other than The Prince of Darkness himself.

The director of her own war room operations...

Lawrence Solomon: The UN’s refugee welfare racket

In the West, it’s known as welfare fraud. In the Palestinian Territories, it’s called refugee relief. In both places, the fraud can become a way of life, seen as an entitlement that children and then grandchildren adopt. Only in the Palestinian Territories, though, does the welfare agency see its goal as putting more people on welfare and keeping them there, the better to keep “the Palestinian refugee crisis” alive.

That welfare agency is called the United Nations Relief and Aid Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA as it’s commonly known. UNRWA doesn’t focus its efforts on resettling Palestinian refugees in foreign countries that would welcome them, as might be expected of a refugee agency, or even on resettling them in their own homeland when possible.

UNRWA doesn’t even limit its efforts to what most people, and all dictionaries, would consider “refugees” — in UNRWA’s books, a refugee can be just about anyone who wants to be one. As a result, the number of Palestinian “refugees,” rather than diminishing to nothing, has grown like topsy over the decades.

UNRWA didn’t always have a create-new-refugees mission. Founded in 1949 as a temporary organization to alleviate the plight of Palestinian refugees fleeing Israel, its laudable goal included emergency relief and “the economic integration of the refugees in host countries.” By funding nearby development projects that would employ the refugees, UNRWA intended to “make them self-sufficient to a point where their names could be deleted from the relief rolls.” UNWRA initially even culled its lists of fraudulent applications, thought to number in the tens of thousands, by people using false births and duplicate registrations with variations of their names.

But UNRWA’s goals soon changed...

There should be no rush to reassign genders to kids

In the coming days, children across Canada will be heading back to school to continue their education and gain the skills they will need to access employment. In Vancouver, however, educational goals are different: A new day at school is little more than an opportunity for social experimentation.

The emphasis on academics is long gone and the higher, far nobler goal is to instil a broad understanding of tolerance related to sexual preferences.

This past June, the Vancouver School Board determined it was necessary to adopt a policy that went even further by better accommodating those with gender identity issues. Most significantly, the policy encourages children to focus on self-identification rather than biological realities. That is, the student can choose his/her own gender; the one assigned at birth and by biology is secondary.

Schools will now adopt gender-neutral pronouns to refer to children and teens who identify as not male or female. They will now be referred to using the terms xe, xem and xyr, pronouns referring to third person, plural and possessive, respectively. Should you feel the need to look these terms up, be prepared for a grammar lesson that will leave you flummoxed and reaching for aspirin.

Students will be able to dress in a manner that “is consistent with their gender identity or gender expression.”

They will have access to the washroom of their choice, or, if they desire greater privacy, an alternative washroom.

Their chosen gender identity will be utilized whenever possible in school lists, but not in letters to parents. In other words, the school will actively encourage gender choices and then actively work to conceal such decisions from parents

The Dismal State of Affairs at The Toronto District School Board

If a satirical novel about civic corruption and greed, of the sort that Sinclair Lewis wrote a century ago, were to emerge today describing the actual goings-on at the Toronto District School Board, it would be dismissed as too absurd and far-fetched to be taken seriously.

Within the last two years, the Board had an Education Director resign after he was exposed as a plagiarist, the Chair of the Board's elected Trustees resigned in disgrace after a newspaper report made it clear a charity being run out of his home was receiving Board funds. A union widely seen as crooked and which was grossly overcharging the schools for services had its untendered contract renewed by the province's Liberal Party government and forced on the Board. That would be the same Ontario Liberal Party which received huge donations from that same union.

The current curriculum was signed into effect by a Provincial Education Minister who admitted she hadn't even read it. That Minister, Liz Sandals, doesn't think students need basic mathematics skills because cash registers can do those calculations for them.

The next curriculum which the Province wants to impose on the Board was widely condemned for introducing over-sexualized content to children at an inappropriately young age.  That curriculum was shepherded in by a Deputy Education Minister who is currently facing charges of producing child pornography.

The Board has an "Equity Advisor" who is a spokesman for an anti-Semitic group and was a featured speaker at a conference promoting the Marxist ideology which caused the murder of tens of millions of people in the 20th Century.

The Board itself sponsored a racist so-called "Equity" conference in which a keynote speaker said the Board needs to focus more on race and should emphasize the collective over the individual. And after his speech, that speaker, Tim Wise, received a standing ovation from the approximately 200 teachers at the conference, almost all of whom were white.

There are current Board Trustees, who have been accused of abuse of expenses,  who continue to excuse the Board's incompetence. Some new Trustee candidates think the answer to the systems problems is to get the Provincial government, which is teetering on bankruptcy, to pony up more tax dollars to the schools. 

It should all be too absurd to be true. But these absurdities are the tragic reality going on at the Toronto District School Board. And it will continue until we do something about it.

Hamas praises ‘heroic’ murder of three Jewish hitchhikers. And there’s the difference

Here is an illustration of a critical difference between Israel and Hamas - between the rule of law and the rule of terrorists.

When Israeli Jews allegedy killed a Palestinian youth they were publicly damned by Israeli leaders, quickly arrested and charged. If found guilty they face long prison sentences.

When Hamas terrorists and sympathisers earlier killed three Jewish hitchhikers they were publicly praised by Hamas spokesmen and hidden. See, this was an organised Hamas operation, as has now been admitted...

Illegal Alien Kills Two Children and Is Allowed to Stay In The U.S.

On a crisp fall day last October, stepsisters Anna Dieter-Eckerdt and Abigail Robinson were playing in a pile of leaves on the side of the road in a Portland suburb.

That big pile of leaves would be their demise, for as they were hiding in the leaves, Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros drove by and – apparently for fun – drove through the big pile of leaves. She didn’t see the two girls, struck them and killed them.

Minutes after Garcia-Cisneros drove through the leaves on her way home, her brother returned to the scene and saw a man standing over the pile, screaming. The man spoke to him briefly. The boy went home and told his sister she might have hit two children.

When her brother told his sister out she may very well have killed the two children, Garcia-Cisneros did nothing. She didn’t return to the site of where she killed the girls. That’s a felony hit and run. She plead guilty and was convicted.

Garcia-Cisneros, 19, is an illegal alien. But because of Obama’s “deferred action” program, she won’t be deported. In fact, President Obama’s actions allowed her to get a driver license in the first place.

Turnabout is Fair Play: Egyptian TV Host Pokes Fun at American Quelling of Ferguson Protests

Obama has been saying the same thing about the Egyptian government's handling of Muslim Brotherhood protests as the Egyptian government is now saying about the US actions against protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, who are considerably less a threat to anyone's security than an organized Islamist terror group.

So it strikes me that this is only fair:

Today in pot-related news

There's a lot on pot today. For the record, I support full legalization of marijuana. It's no more harmful than alcohol, most police chiefs and police officers realize the pot laws are virtually unenforceable and oppose them,  and the "war" on its use only puts money in the hands of criminals. Let's tax it and sell it through regulated outlets. That way, we can create jobs and public revenue and let the police and courts focus on real crime in society.

From the Globe and Mail:

...A lot of Canadians smoke pot – about one-in-three over the age of 15 – but the vast majority do so in moderation.

Marijuana is not addictive – in the common sense of the term, where stopping will cause withdrawal symptoms – but frequent users can become dependent, which is clearly not healthy. But there are a lot more alcoholics than there are stoners.

Public-health authorities need to be pragmatic – to focus on harm reduction. That means warning people about the risks of marijuana smoking and especially about related activities, like the dangers of driving a motor vehicle or operating heavy machinery while stoned.

As with tobacco and alcohol, particular attention needs to be paid to young people and their developing brains. Excessive drug use, including marijuana, can impact learning and, in rare instances, be a trigger for more serious mental illness.

What the public needs from health authorities is non-judgmental information, not Reefer Madness hysteria...

David Asper in the National Post:

...Many people in different political parties have differing views on the subject, including within the Conservative party. I’m a Conservative and happen to support legalization and regulation, because, as I’ve noted before, mere decriminalization would continue to keep the supply lines (i.e. the drug traffickers) in the shadows rather than eliminating them by regulating and taxing the product as we do with alcohol...

An editorial from The Edmonton Journal:

...The Canadian Medical Association’s reaffirmation this week of the medical dangers of smoking “pot” — and critics’ inevitable rejoinders about the evils of prohibition — give us all an excellent opportunity to prepare ourselves for thoughtfully deciding where we stand on the issue, and why exactly we take this position.

No doubt, opponents of decriminalization will be heartened by the doctors’ insistence that the inhaling of any plant smoke has an assortment of scientifically proven negative impacts, and that — on a per-cigarette basis — marijuana is 10 times worse than tobacco.

After all, we live in a world increasingly horrified about and eager for regulations to limit the impacts of alcohol and nicotine. How and why could this trend to health-related regulation be bucked for pot smokers?

As everyone knows, however, the potential for health harms to the user or bystander is hardly ever the only issue, or society’s only concern, when it comes to regulatory intervention by the state.

If it were, Prohibition would never have been repealed, tobacco would be treated far more harshly than marijuana, and there would be no resistance to a host of modern health-related initiatives ranging from bans on cellphone use in cars to vaccination of young girls against sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV)...

ISIS 'justifies' genocide of Yazidis: "We offered them the chance to convert to Islam first"

Our inane, gutless media that calls sociopathic beheaders "militants" and "fighters"

Watching some of the media coverage about the vicious murder of activist journalist James Foley by an ISIS sociopath, I was thinking exactly what Sun News' Michael Coren describes in his monologue.  Watching the CBC and CNN describe the monster who commenced beheading Foley with a knife on camera as a "militant" and "ISIS fighter" was a sickening abuse of language that is the nadir of moral relativism and political correctness that has infected our culture like an Ebola of the mind.

"Terrorist." It's terrorist.

Be it ISIS or Hamas, these vile, evil murderers who sadistically torture and slowly, brutally kill in the name of their reprehensible religious ideology are terrorists. It's impossible to have respect for anyone in the supposedly free west who is afraid to say that.

More Proof We're Being Governed By Idiots

Yup...

In Declassified Report, Israel Defense Force Lays Out Evidence Hamas Used Human Shields

New Declassified Report Exposes Hamas Human Shield Policy from IsraelDefenseForces

See HERE

Police and protesters fight in Hebron as Palestinian demonstration turns violent

It was Palestinian Authority police firing tear gas and beating back pro-Hamas demonstrators in Hebron yesterday. The video's Arabic description translates (according to Google Translate) to:

 "Hebron: the suppression of an unprecedented security apparatus after a peaceful march came out in support of the resistance in Gaza"

However if you watch the video, you'll see the "peaceful march" includes demonstrators throwing large rocks at the PA police, which may be the concept of 'peaceful' for Hamas and those that support it.

Trudeau's soft grasp of homegrown terrorism

Hamas executes 3 Palestinians as Israel kills 3 top Hamas commanders

JERUSALEM — Israeli airstrikes killed three top Hamas commanders in Gaza on Thursday, marking the most significant blow to the leadership of the Palestinian group’s armed wing in six weeks of fighting in the battle-scarred enclave.

Hamas spokesmen confirmed that Israel killed the three men, whose bodies were pulled from a demolished building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

The killings came a day after an assassination attempt on Mohammed Deif, the top commander of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military wing. Hamas leaders mocked Israel for failing to kill Deif, although Israeli analysts said it was possible that the organization was withholding information on his death to maintain morale.

The al-Qassam Brigades said in a statement that Mohammed Abu Shamala, Raed al-Attar and Mohammed Barhoum were killed in the al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah.

And...

Hamas militiamen in the Gaza Strip on Thursday executed three Palestinians suspected of "collaboration" with Israel, according to Hamas-affiliated websites.

A senior Hamas security source was quoted as saying that the three, whose names were not released, were executed "after the completion of revolutionary procedures" with them...

James Foley killing: Why ISIS beheaded the U.S. journalist

The gruesome video showing the beheading of journalist James Foley may actually be fuelling the popularity of ISIS, which is likely unconcerned that the "barbarity" of the video will galvanize American support for U.S. airstrikes in Iraq.

"They [Islamic State militants] believe these actions serve them," said Scott Stewart, vice-president of tactical analysis for the geopolitical intelligence firm Stratfor.

"For months, they’ve been beheading, amputating the hands of thieves, crucifying people in areas they control in Syria," said Stewart, a former special agent with the U.S. State Department who was involved in hundreds of terrorism investigations.

"Despite these barbaric displays … it's been successful. They've been able to grow and flourish, and they have been able to attract people to their cause despite this barbarity — perhaps because of it."...

Why Israel Has Border Checkpoints

And now, for your viewing pleasure, Nicki Minaj's Anaconda