Reader’s links for Dec. 14 – 2015

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In order to preserve the flow of conversation about various posted items, and also in order to make it easier for visitors to find the list of related links being shared by other readers, regulars and interested parties in one place, each day a post is automatically created at a minute past midnight ET.

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Thank you all for those that take the effort to assist this site in keeping the public informed. Below, typically people can find the latest enemy propaganda, news items of related materials from multiple countries and languages, op-eds from many excellent sites who write on our topics, geopolitics and immigration issues and so on.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

85 Replies to “Reader’s links for Dec. 14 – 2015”

  1. BREITBART – Hillary Attacks Opponents for ‘Stoking’ Fears Against Muslims, Saying ‘Hateful, Hurtful Things’

    Monday in Brooklyn, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton attacked some Republican candidates are “stoking those fears even more and turning people against Muslim-Americans by saying some really hateful hurtful things.”

    Clinton said, “We shouldn’t let anybody on the public stage say that we are mean spirited, that we are going to build walls mentally and physically, that we are going to shut doors, and we are going to lose the talent and the contributions of millions of people who are here doing the best they can and building lives for themselves and their children. We are a country where people of all backgrounds, all nations of origin, all languages, all religions, all races can make a home. America was built by immigrants. And you know so well our economy depends on immigrants.”

    Not naming Donald Trump, Clinton attacked his campaign slogan, saying, “I disagree with those that say make America great. We are great, and we are going to stay great and we are going to get greater.”

    She added, “We are hearing all kinds of anti-immigrant sentiments in the news right now. Candidates for president are calling immigrants drug runners and rapists. They promise if elected to round up and deport millions of people, build a mammoth wall, militarize the border, tear families apart, and after the terror shootings in San Bernardino, at a time when a lot of Americans are fearful about future attacks here at home, some candidates are even stoking those fears even more and turning people against Muslim Americans by saying some really hateful, hurtful things.”
    + video :

    http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/12/14/hillary-attacks-opponents-for-stoking-fears-against-muslims-saying-hateful-hurtful-things/

  2. Saudi Arabia announces 34-state Islamic military alliance against terrorism, including Egypt

    Saudi Arabia on Tuesday announced the formation of a 34-state Islamic military coalition to combat terrorism, according to a joint statement published on state news agency SPA.

    The countries here mentioned have decided on the formation of a military alliance led by Saudi Arabia to fight terrorism, with a joint operations centre based in Riyadh to coordinate and support military operations,” the statement said.

    A long list of Arab countries such as Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, together with Islamic countries Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan and Gulf Arab and African states were mentioned.

    The announcement cited “a duty to protect the Islamic nation from the evils of all terrorist groups and organizations whatever their sect and name which wreak death and corruption on earth and aim to terrorize the innocent.”

    Shi’ite Muslim Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia’s arch rival for influence in the Arab world, was absent from the states named as participants, as proxy conflicts between the two regional powers rage from Syria to Yemen.

    The United States has been increasingly outspoken about its view that Gulf Arab states should do more to aid the military campaign against the Islamic State militant group based in Iraq and Syria.

    In a rare press conference, 30-year-old crown prince and Defence Minister Mohammed bin Salman told reporters on Tuesday that the campaign would “coordinate” efforts to fight terrorism in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Afghanistan, but offered few concrete indications of how military efforts might proceed.

    “There will be international coordination with major powers and international organisations … in terms of operations in Syria and Iraq. We can’t undertake these operations without coordinating with legitimacy in this place and the international community,” bin Salman said without elaborating.

    Asked if the new alliance would focus just on Islamic State, bin Salman said it would confront not only that group but “any terrorist organisation that appears in front of us.”

    Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab neighbours have been locked in nine months of warfare with Iran-allied rebels in neighbouring Yemen, launching hundreds of air strikes there.

    Especially after a rash of attacks on Western targets claimed by Islamic State in recent months, the United States has increasingly said it thinks that firepower would better be used against IS.

    As a ceasefire is set to take hold in Yemen on Tuesday alongside United Nations-backed peace talks, Riyadh’s announcement may signal a desire to shift its attention back toward the conflicts north of its borders.

    Islamic State has pledged to overthrow the monarchies of the Gulf and have mounted a series of attacks on Shi’ite Muslim mosques and security forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

    http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/173526/Egypt/Politics-/Saudi-Arabia-announces-state-Islamic-military-alli.aspx

    • YEMEN – 152 Feared Dead in Yemen Ballistic Missle Strike

      DUBAI — One hundred and fifty-two coalition soldiers are feared dead after a short range ballistic missile strike hit a coalition base at the strategic Bab al-Mandab region in the south, a coalition source told Defense News.

      Among the dead in the attack, which took place Monday afternoon, was the commander of the Saudi Special Forces, Col. Abdullah Al Sahyan, the source confirmed.

      “So far, nine Emirati soldiers, seven Moroccans and 23 Saudis have been identified,” the source added.

      The missile strike was conducted by OTR-21 Tochka mobile missile launch system for short range ballistic missiles, the source said.

      The Saudi-led Arab coalition also announced Monday that the planned cease-fire in the country will start at 12:00 midday, Sanaa time, 9:00 am GMT, on Tuesday, Dec. 15.

      […]“The Houthis fired a long-range missile at a secret headquarters of the pro-government military leadership close to the strategic strait of Bab al-Mandab, killing more than 100 men of the coalition,” said Shehab Al Makahleh, a political analyst and director of Geostrategic Media Middle East.

      “The launch of a Tochka missile on a military base in southwest of Yemen by al-Mandab Strait aims to shift the political scene, which the coalition had been trying to achieve for more than eight months, which culminated in an expected cease-fire tonight before Geneva talks,” he said.

      The strike proves that the Houthi rebels in Yemen have improved intelligence capabilities, Makahleh added.

      “Two other missiles were also launched yesterday and today on Jizan, which led the Saudis to send more troops to the borders with Yemen,” he added.

      http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/2015/12/14/united-arab-emirates/77289732/

  3. Calais migrants given real fur coats worth up to HALF A MILLION POUNDS

    MIGRANTS in the Calais Jungle camp have been given real fur coats worth up to half a million pounds, as well as leather shoes to wear.

    Animal rights charity PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has sent 100 warm coats and dozens of pairs of sturdy shoes to the rubbish dump-turned shanty camp in Calais as well as refugee camps in Syria.

    PETA – whose motto reads that “animals are not ours to wear” – collected the expensive coats and shoes from “compassionate people who have chosen to drop the cruelly produced items from their wardrobes”.

    Leather shoes have also been donated by “supporters who have chosen to swap skins for cruelty-free alternatives.”

    more + pics on the page :

    http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/626615/Calais-migrants-jungle-real-fur-coats-half-million

  4. Turkey’s top cleric: Secularism threw world into total war (hurriyetdailynews, Dec 14, 2015)
    http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkeys-top-cleric-secularism-threw-world-into-total-war.aspx?pageID=238&nID=92503&NewsCatID=358

    “Secularism has thrown the world into a total war by outstripping the level of violence that stemmed from religious conflict, Turkey’s top cleric has argued while criticizing some analyses of the recent spate of jihadist attacks.

    “Humanity set off on a different quest with the French Revolution. It envisaged building a more secular world separate from religion. But secularism sent the world into a total war by also superseding the amount of violence that stemmed from religions,” Mehmet Görmez, the president of the Directorate General for Religious Affairs (Diyanet), said Dec. 14.

    “People were thus able to imagine an atomic bomb with scientific explorations. They produced chemical weapons and several times the number of people who died in wars throughout history have died during wars in modern times. Two great world wars occurred and now a Third World War is being mentioned. Such a sentence can roll off the tongue of even the Honorable Pope,” Görmez also said in reference to Pope Francis’ interpretation of the Nov. 13 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) attack on Paris that killed 130 people.

    His remarks came during a meeting in Ankara with the U.S. State Department’s Special Representative to Muslim Communities, Shaarik H. Zafar.

    “Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction,” the pope said at the time.

    Görmez, meanwhile, joined the chorus against U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s controversial proposal to bar Muslims from entering the country, saying no nation or religious group had the right to ignore the consequences of terrorist violence and wars.

    “In a country like America, candidates are able to hold discussions before the election, saying, ‘We might let Muslims into America or we might not.’ It is not right for any nation or the member of any religion to blame another,” Görmez said.

    “We are suffering grave problems in this region. We are not suffering these problems just because of what terrorist organizations have been doing as in the case of groups like Daesh that have appeared recently,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for ISIL.

    “Each of these is a result, but not a reason. The first reason for all of these has particularly been the transformation of this region into a conflict zone for global powers. At the end of the wars first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, Bosnia and Chechnya, many generations who were deprived of education and who grew up under the shadow of violence and savagery emerged,” Görmez said.

    “On one side, migrations started out well. These migrants couldn’t integrate into the countries they went to. They built their own ghettoes and they were ‘otherized.’ They couldn’t find the opportunity to learn about their religion. Moreover, they started following the wrong interpretations. An affinity has emerged between the children of migrant generations who learned religion in an incorrect way and young people who grew up under the shadow of violence in that region. These generations have chosen to hold onto religion as an ideology,” he said.”

  5. Young people vote far-right in Europe (DW, Dec 14, 2015)
    http://www.dw.com/en/young-people-vote-far-right-in-europe/a-18917193

    “In the European Union, which was founded upon ideals of democracy and inclusion, more and more young people are turning to far-right parties that lure them in with simple messages. Some experts see democracy in danger.

    The National Front in France and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) are just two examples of far-right nationalist parties that are currently receiving an upsurge in support in European Union member states – and they’re especially popular with younger voters. Even though the National Front didn’t win any regions in the second round of France’s regional elections, it managed to pick up 35 percent of votes from 18-to-34-year-olds in the first round. And in state parliamentary elections in Austria’s Vienna district, the FPÖ picked up 24 percent of the vote among under-30-year-olds.

    In countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark and Poland, far-right parties are gaining traction among young voters as well. One reason: the longing for a national identity inside the European Union.

    The far-right parties “place great emphasis on the issue of identity,” Jan-Phillip Albrecht, a member of the European Parliament for the Green Party, told German daily “Die Welt.” “And that’s something that young people are always looking for.”

    In Austria, support for the FPÖ does not come from all young voters, but from one group in particular: young men, many with low levels of education. Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache tries to appeal to this demographic by presenting himself as cool and down-to-earth.

    He doesn’t wear suits, but jeans and sunglasses, and he even filmed a music video with rapper MC Blue as an ad for the Vienna regional elections in October. In it, young people chant “HC, HC,” Strache’s nickname, over an amped-up version of the famous Strauss waltz “The Blue Danube.”

    Although this seems odd at first, it fits perfectly with the explanation the Democracy Centre Vienna has for the FPÖ’s success with parts of the younger generation.

    “They campaign aggressively, but their party program doesn’t play much of a role,” Gertraud Diendorfer, head of the Democracy Centre Vienna, told DW. “They have clear and very simple messages.”

    She puts the preponderance of male support for the party largely down to the dearth of female FPÖ politicians.

    Us vs. them

    One central message is the idea of “us and them,” which is becoming ever more popular, especially in countries that are feeling the heat of the refugee crisis. One of them is Austria, through which the thousands of refugees wanting to reach Germany via the Balkan route pass – and sometimes stay.

    Many young men with low levels of education are worried that these refugees will take away their low-skilled jobs, which is why they move toward the FPÖ, Diendorfer explains. And the FPÖ knows exactly how to catch them.

    “They go to the discos at night and talk to people there,” Diendorfer said. “Their rhetoric is full of black-and-white: the foreigners are freeloaders, different and worth less than the ‘we-group.'”

    That has worked well for other politicians as well. Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban has erected a wall against the refugees and asked his citizens in a national poll whether refugees should be deported, locked up or sentenced to forced labor when they enter the country illegally.

    German young people ‘historically educated’

    In Germany, too, the mood has been growing more hostile towards refugees, the more that arrive, as the sadly high number of burning refugee homes shows. But the far-right German National-Democratic Party (NPD) is not as successful as nationalist parties in other European countries. It currently holds seats in only one of the country’s 16 state parliaments: in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where it garnered 6 percent in the state elections in 2011.

    Rudolf van Hüllen, a political researcher and expert on right-wing extremism, believes that young people in Germany don’t fall for the NPD in droves, because the country does a good job educating them about the horrors of the last time a far-right regime was in power during the Third Reich. Starting prevention early, he says, is key.

    “That’s what makes youth and young adults less susceptible to any form of extremism: right-wing, left-wing and Islamism,” van Hüllen told daily “Die Welt.” “I see encouraging success there.

    It’s a strong and self-confident generation that’s growing up today.”

    Still, the NPD is also aiming to garner more support among young people by shedding its skinhead neo-Nazi style .

    ‘Dangers for democracy’

    Society needs to intervene in places where nationalist parties are gaining more ground among young people, Gertraud Diendorfer says. The head of the Democracy Centre Vienna emphasizes that parties like the FPÖ and its equivalents should not be left alone to spread their rhetoric among young people.

    Instead, other politicians need to approach youth and young adults who feel the established parties have nothing to offer them. If this chasm between disenchanted young voters and democratic parties cannot be bridged, it could have serious consequences for Europe, according to Diendorfer.

    “We have to take this phenomenon in Europe very seriously,” she said. “More and more xenophobia and prejudices and a growing distance between young voters and politicians constitute dangers for democracy and for an open-minded, liberal society.””

    • Maybe it is my fault but I dont recall anyone from the “mainstream” complaining about Hollande and his “Niggas in Paris.”

      It is almost comical to invoke democracy and yet undemocratically push for applied pathological altruism and all that comes with it (just like emotional extortion, confusion between prejudice and proper model building based on observables and careful reasoning, failing to acknowledge actual differences between cultures – even irreconcilable ones, and so on)…

  6. DAILY MAIL – Hundreds of migrants arriving in Norway had mobile phones containing images of executions, severed heads and dead children, police reveal

    Police discovered hundreds of disturbing images of executions on phones
    Images included ISIS flags, dead children and victims of war and terrorism
    Amid heightened fears ISIS is exploiting the migrant crisis to reach Europe
    Experts insist the photographs could be on phones for innocent reasons

    Hundreds of asylum-seekers entering Norway were discovered to have images of ‘executions’ and ‘severed heads’ on their mobile phones.

    The revelation comes amid heightened fears that ISIS is exploiting the migrant crisis to smuggle fighters into Europe, following last month’s attacks in Paris.

    Police admitted that the ‘explosion’ of refugees crossing into the country over the summer and in recent months meant that security checks were less thorough than required, and weren’t checking the background of those entering the country.

    The Police Immigration Service (PU) in Norway has been forced to work overtime and under severe pressure due to the massive numbers of asylum-seekers hoping to take refuge in the country.

    But after searching belongings and mobile phones belonging to refugees and migrants crossing the border, police discovered ‘hundreds’ of examples of ‘photos and videos of executions and brutal punishments, such as images of people holding up severed heads or hands’.

    They also reportedly found photographs of dead children and other victims of war, crimes and terrorism.

    Numerous images of ISIS flags and symbols belonging to other terrorist organisations were also found, according to Norwegian newspaper Nettavisen.

    Erik Haugland, head of Norway’s asylum programme pointed out that it was possible the images were on the phones for innocent reasons.

    He explained that asylum-seekers might have the photographs in order to bear witness to the war and horrors they were fleeing in their home country, or they may have been a tactic to sneak through jihadi-controlled areas unharmed.

    He added that although the images may seem alarming, there are possible innocent explanations.

    Meanwhile, an ISIS manifesto released earlier this month boasted of plans to exploit the migrant crisis to sneak jihadists into Europe.

    It has already emerged that at least three of the group that carried out the Paris attacks in November had disguised themselves as refugees in order to enter Europe.

    This includes Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who masterminded the plot and was later killed in a police raid on his hide-out in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis.

    The forged documents were found at the scene of one of the suicide bomb attacks at the Stade de France, fuelling further speculation that ISIS may have a ready source of blank passports.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3359901/Hundreds-migrants-arriving-Norway-mobile-phones-containing-images-executions-severed-heads-dead-children-police-reveal.html