Are Christians Being Persecuted in America?
A new study by Lifeway Research found that more than half (54%) of the 1,005 Americans surveyed believe that religious freedom is eroding in the United States. Even more, 59%, said the treatment of Christians and intolerance for their beliefs is getting worse.
"Intolerance is about cultural pushback," Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, explained. "In the American marketplace of ideas, not all systems of thought are welcomed. The majority of all religions notice this pushback against Christians today."
What does one make of these statistics? Relevant Magazine — a Christian publication, the tagline of which is "God, lifestyle, and progressive culture" — is a good place to start. Responding to these findings in a recent article, it gets it right by arguing that, whatever Christians in America may be experiencing, they are certainly not being persecuted the way their counterparts are in other nations and parts of the world:
[C]onservative Christian groups [in America] have a lot to celebrate. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and delivered a big win to Christians who want to pray in public schools. These are big, historic decisions and they don't square with a narrative of diminishing religious liberty for Christians.
This is especially true on the global scale. Open Doors USA's World Watch List keeps track of the countries where it's most dangerous to be a Christian, and the stories on their meticulously detailed database are heartbreaking. Christians in places like Afghanistan, North Korea and Somalia can be imprisoned, tortured and even killed for their faith. ...
Persecution against Christians is real and we should be talking more about it. But it's not what the American Church is facing, and conflating what's happening in other countries with online backlash and political spats in the U.S. does a disservice to that conversation.
It is, indeed, especially silly to argue that Christians in America have it anywhere near as bad as Christians in, say, the Muslim world, where the overwhelming majority of persecution against Christians take place. The same World Watch List referenced above found that the "extreme persecution" meted out to Christians in nine of the top 11 worst nations in the world comes from Islamic oppression or is occurring in Muslim-majority nations. Moreover, the persecution Christians experience in 39 of the 50 worst nations on the World Watch List is also from Islamic oppression or is occurring in Muslim-majority nations.
That said, the Relevant article gets it wrong, very wrong, by minimizing what is happening in America. It argues that what Christians in America are experiencing
isn't so much about actually losing religious freedom as it is losing the war for vibes. ... Christians may not like being confronted with different opinions or having to make space for others in a diverse environment, but that does not necessarily mean they're being met with outright intolerance. It simply means giving others the same freedom you want them to give you.
Such reasoning makes sense only in a vacuum, for it fails to take into account that — unlike all of those other non-Christian nations around the world where Christian minorities are being persecuted — America was founded as a Christian nation. The fact that it is where it is today — where Christians, who still form the majority of the citizenry, are experiencing any kind of intolerance, harassment, or discrimination — is suggestive of a gradual but slippery slope that bodes ill for the future.
It is, for example, rather silly to argue, as Relevant does, that it is a "big win to Christians" that Roe v. Wade was overturned, or that Christians can pray in public schools. Actually, that Roe v. Wade was ever a thing, or that there was ever any question about Christians praying in public, is indicative of the big loss Christians have experienced in this nation.
Put differently, if American Christianity were as influential as the Relevant article implies, there never would have been a Roe v. Wade or questions over public prayer, or any of those many other cultural "values" that currently supersede and directly contradict Christian principles, in the first place — just as principles that directly contradict Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist values have little impact on Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist nations, where their values reign supreme and uncontested.
Imagine a line, a continuum, from 1 to 10. The number 1 represents nations that prioritize their religious principles, and 10 represents nations that have completely abandoned their faith. Most of the non-Western — especially Muslim — world, I would argue, is probably between 1 and 2. Where is the U.S. on this scale with regard to its founding faith? I would guess somewhere between 6 and 7. Maybe worse?
Such a placement is hardly a "big win" for Christianity in America, nor does it suggest that "conservative Christian groups have a lot to celebrate," as Relevant claims. Rather, it shows just how irrelevant Christianity has become.
More to the point, as America gets closer to 10 — and as the number of actual Christians continues to dwindle — prepare to see a concomitant rise in real and actual persecution, the sort experienced in the non-Western world.
The story of America, as I fear history will eventually teach, is the story of one long slippery slope — the individual bumps of which are subtle, gradual, and thus imperceptible — into destruction.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
This Georgia Dem Once Praised Louis Farrakhan as ‘Impressive’
Rep. Sanford Bishop considered joining Farrakhan's anti-Semitic organization
A Democratic congressman running in a competitive House race once praised Nation of Islam leader and infamous anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan as "impressive" and said he considered joining Farrakhan's organization.
Rep. Sanford Bishop (Ga.), who has served in Congress since 1993, made the comments during a 2005 interview series with the former leader of the NAACP, the Jewish Journal reported this week.
Bishop said he met Farrakhan after graduating from college, while the two were attending an event at Morehouse College in 1968.
"Of course, I had the opportunity for the first time to be acquainted with a man known as Minister Louis Farrakhan, who was so impressive that night that people stopped in mid-stride," said Bishop during the interview. "I was just so taken by his message and his manner that I rushed out to the mosque the next day to hear him."
The interview could be an obstacle for Bishop in his closely contested race against Republican challenger and Air Force officer Chris West. Bishop's remarks drew criticism from Jewish leaders who noted Farrakhan's history of anti-Semitic and anti-American rhetoric.
Bishop said he considered joining the Nation of Islam, a group led by Farrakhan that mixes black nationalist ideology with some elements of the Muslim religion. The organization also promotes anti-Semitic, anti-white, and anti-gay conspiracy theories. Bishop said his father opposed the idea and encouraged him to "pause" and reconsider it.
"I had so much exposure, so many influences, and of course when I even mentioned the possibility of joining the Nation, my father, he had a real time with that," he said.
Bishop, who was raised Christian, said he didn't end up joining the group and went on to learn about different religions, including Judaism.
The Jewish Journal noted that Bishop declined to denounce Farrakhan when asked by the Daily Caller in 2018.
Bishop told the Jewish Journal that he "denounce[s] anti-Semitism just as I denounce all forms of racism." The congressman added that he has "been a strong supporter of the State of Israel" and has "the support of the Georgia Jewish community."
Farrakhan has been dubbed the "most popular anti-Semite in America" by the Anti-Defamation League. Farrakhan preaches that "Satanic Jews" have "infected the whole world with poison and deceit."
"To my Jewish friends, I shouldn't use the word ‘friends' so lightly, you have been a great and master deceiver, but God is going to pull the covers all off of you," said Farrakhan in one 2017 speech.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the Jewish Journal that Bishop's praise for Farrakhan seems consistent with some of the congressman's policy positions.
Bishop, who supported the Iran nuclear deal, appears to have "no concerns about a regime that crushes human rights, religious freedoms of its own citizens, executes gays, threatens nuclear Holocaust against [the] Jewish state, and continues to support and deploy terrorist assets from Iraq to South America," Cooper said. "No surprise then he would have no problem with Farrakhan's anti-Semitism and anti-American rhetoric."
Published under: 2022 Election, Anti-Semitism, Georgia, Louis Farrakhan
DO A SEARCH FOR MEXICAN ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS FOR WELFARE IN CA
Pakistan’s Minister of Health: Populate the World with Muslims
Toward what end?
Pakistan’s economy cannot sustain its population. But instead of a massive campaign encouraging birth control, and providing free contraceptives, or even of mandating smaller families the way that China did with its “one-child policy,” the Pakistani Minister of Health is encouraging Pakistanis to migrate to non-Muslim lands, and once there, to procreate to their heart’s content, demographically conquering, little by little, these countries and their indigenous Infidels.
A report on the Pakistani Health Minister’s plan is here: “An ‘out of Pakistan’ solution for population control—produce kids in non-Muslim nations,” by Akansha Sengupta, The Print, July 20, 2022:
Minister of Health and PPP member Abdul Qadir Patel Monday offered an ‘out of Pakistan’ solution to the population problem—couples wanting more kids should leave the country and add to the Muslim population in nations where they are in minority.
At a seminar in Islamabad, the minister said that by 2030 the population of Pakistan is expected to cross 285 million. “We do not want to decrease the Muslim population. We want Muslims to be better, more educated and provide them with better health care facilities,” he said.
Population is a big reason for Pakistan’s troubles, especially when it remains fragile and debt-ridden. According to a UN projection, Pakistan is set to see a 56 per cent population increase by 2050, which amounts to over 366 million people.
A recent Dawn editorial titled The population bomb highlighted the seriousness of the issue: “We are fighting a losing battle, slipping inexorably towards a dystopian future where want and deprivation will be our lot. The reason? There are simply too many of us: the pace at which Pakistan’s population is growing is fast outstripping our ability to provide for the millions that call this country home. Unbelievably, there still appears to be no well-thought-out and cohesive population control programme in the offing.”
The Pakistanis have already been moving in droves to Infidel lands, especially to the U.K., where there are now several millions of these economic migrants. Once in the U.K., they have managed to take advantage of all the benefits a generous welfare state provides: free or subsidized housing, free medical care, free education, family allowances, and more. In return, the Pakistani migrants have offered their British hosts the Grooming Gangs, made up largely of Pakistani sexual predators, who seduce and rape vulnerable young girls, and then pass them around among themselves for sexual pleasure. In this fashion the Pakistani grooming gang, have ruined the lives of tens of thousands of English girls, in dozens of cities, with Rotherham, Rochdale, Aylesbury, Oxford, Peterborough, and Newcastle being those most affected.. For years these grooming gangs were allowed to operate because the police were afraid to be tarred as “racists” if they went after these Pakistani criminals. As shadow women and equalities secretary Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham has said, Asian grooming gangs had been allowed to thrive because people were “more afraid to be called a racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse.”
Aside from the grooming gangs, the Muslim rates of criminality in the U..K. are unusually high. Muslims in the U.K. – most of them Pakistanis – make up 4.4% of the total population, but nearly 30% of the total prison population.
This plan of demographic conquest is not limited to the Pakistani Minister of Health. Many Muslims have spoken of this being the way that Europe may be conquered for Islam. Muammar Qaddafi told his followers in 2006 that “there are fifty million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe without swords, without guns, without conquest, and will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.
Before Qaddafi, there was Houari Boumedienne, the President of Algeria, who in a speech at the U.N. in 1974 was reported as saying: “One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.“
And then there was, from yet another part of the Islamic world, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who in 2017 addressed Turks living in Europe, urging them to have at least five children, saying they are the future of the continent and that it would be the best response to the “injustices” imposed on Turkish expatriates there:
“Go live in better neighborhoods. Drive the best cars. Live in the best houses. Make not three, but five children. Because you are the future of Europe. That will be the best response to the injustices against you,” Erdogan said.
It’s not only Muslim political leaders who foresee the Muslim conquest of Europe through demography. Muslim clerics generally see the encouragement of family planning for Muslims in impoverished and overpopulated states as a Western conspiracy. “The West’s policy is about reducing our numbers,” said Hassane Seck, an imam from Senegal. “Because of their perverse promotion of contraception, women in Europe are no longer fertile, but ours are. There are going to be many more of us, and they’re afraid.”
Muslims are being told not just to “go forth and multiply,” but rather, “go forth and multiply and overwhelm the Infidels by sheer numbers, until Islam everywhere dominates, and Muslims rule, everywhere.”
Long before Health Minister Qadir Patel made his statement, Pakistanis by the millions had already moved to the U.K. where they have not only followed the command to “go forth and multiply,” but have gone a step further, to “go forth and multiply so as to conquer the Infidel lands through sheer numbers.” This demographic jihad has no limits. The aim is to ensure that Islam everywhere dominates, and Muslims rule, everywhere.
And so far, I regret to say, it’s working.
Boca Raton Mayor Signs Proclamation in Name of Mosque Linked to Terror and Anti-Semitism
Will Scott Singer continue to bow to radical Islam or will he rescind this award?
Joe Kaufman is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Chairman of the Joe Kaufman Security Initiative. He was the 2014, 2016 and 2018 Republican Nominee for U.S. House of Representatives (Florida-CD23).
The Islamic Center of Boca Raton (ICBR) has a long history of terror relations. From Hamas to Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) to al-Qaeda, ICBR’s widely chronicled links to terrorism are prolific. And the mosque’s attacks on Jews and Israel are well documented. So when a politician, like Boca Mayor Scott Singer, who is Jewish himself, grants ICBR a proclamation, residents should be outraged. Yet incidents such as this – the prizing and legitimizing of radical Muslim institutions with officially signed proclamations – are often underreported. That is why Mayor Singer’s contemptable action needs to be exposed, and the proclamation, rescinded.
On June 30, 2022, Mayor Singer issued a City of Boca Raton Proclamation “to proclaim July 2022 as Muslim Heritage Month.” The document was enacted in the name of ICBR, making note of ICBR’s involvement in “community-service initiatives” and invitations to “neighbors and community and government leaders to participate and share in events.” The document further mentions ICBR’s founding in 1998. It is a significant mention, as those who founded the mosque in that year included persons with major links to Islamic terror.
One of ICBR’s founders was current ICBR Secretary Bassem Alhalabi. Alhalabi was an assistant to Sami al-Arian, at a time when al-Arian was actively developing a US infrastructure in Southwest Florida for Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a group that al-Arian would be convicted of providing material support to. Alhalabi wrote materials with al-Arian and even used al-Arian as a job reference, when he applied for a teaching position at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). In June 2003, Alhalabi was charged by the US Commerce Department with illegally shipping a $13,000 thermal imaging device to Syria. Alhalabi has also been arrested for assault.
According to the South Florida Muslim Federation (SFMF), an umbrella group for local radical Muslim outfits, including ICBR, Alhalabi was instrumental in getting Mayor Singer to issue the proclamation. Indeed, Singer has participated with and, on different occasions, posed for photos with Alhalabi. As well, David Steinhardt, the rabbi of the synagogue Singer is affiliated with, B’nai Torah, has a close relationship with Alhalabi, as the two have been involved in interfaith events together. Steinhardt has also been photographed with ICBR President Abdulrauf Khan, who has used his social media to promote Louis Farrakhan videos and to vilify Jews and gays.
Others involved in the founding of ICBR include former website developer for Hamas, Syed Khawer Ahmad, who taught classes at ICBR, and founding imam of ICBR, Ibrahim Dremali, who would later be arrested for marriage/immigration fraud and put on the federal no-fly list. Dremali’s replacement as ICBR imam, Muneer Arafat, once roomed with Ziyad Khaleel, the al-Qaeda operative who delivered the satellite phone used by Osama bin Laden to plan the ‘98 bombings of two US embassies in East Africa, and admitted in court that he (Arafat), himself, was a member of PIJ and had the goal of destroying Israel.
The seed money for the building of ICBR’s current mosque – $600,000 – came from the Global Relief Foundation (GRF), an al-Qaeda-related charity that was shut down by the US government in December 2001 and an entity that ICBR, itself, had donated nearly $17,000 to. According to the US Treasury Department, “The Global Relief Foundation (GRF), has connections to, has provided support for, and has provided assistance to Usama Bin Ladin, the al Qaida Network, and other known terrorist groups.”
ICBR has published violently antisemitic essays on its website. One, titled ‘Why can’t the Jews and Muslims live together in peace?’ described Jews as “people of treachery and betrayal” and “enemies” and spoke of a “Day of Judgement” when Muslims will “fight the Jews and kill them.” Writing in Salon.com, in 2001, Jake Tapper reported that then-ICBR spokesman Daniel McBride defended the essay “word for word” and also believed “Jews have ‘carried out chemical and radiational [sic] experiments on their prisoners, and taken organs from them for transplant into Jewish patients.’” The ADL declared the essay was “filled with poisonous anti-Semitic bigotry.”
Another anti-Jewish ICBR published essay, titled ‘The importance of al-Quds for the Muslims – and do the Jews have any right to it?’ stated, “[I]t is clear that the Jews have no right to the land, whether according to religious law or in terms of who lived there first and possessed the land… We ask Allaah to rid Bayt al-Maqdis (Jerusalem) of them sooner rather than later…”
Following then-ICBR congregant and physician Rafiq Sabir’s May 2005 arrest for allegedly conspiring to provide medical treatment to injured al-Qaeda fighters overseas, McBride, speaking on behalf of ICBR, called Sabir a “friend” and said that his organization would raise funds for him. Sabir would soon be convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
All of the above information about the Islamic Center of Boca Raton and its bigoted and terror-tied history should alert Mayor Scott Singer to the fact that he has made a grave error and compel him to rescind his proclamation immediately. ICBR presents both a danger to the community and to national security. By honoring this entity, Mayor Singer has bestowed ICBR with a mantel of legitimacy, which the mosque will undoubtedly exploit to continue in the promotion of its Islamist agenda. By not rescinding this decree, Mayor Singer will be officially endorsing the hatred and violence of others, including that of his own people.
Beila Rabinowitz, Director of Militant Islam Monitor, contributed to this report.
Muslims Slaughter 20 Nigerian Christians in ‘Retaliation’ For Western Actions
The Islamic terrorist’s "blame game."
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Last May, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (“ISIS”) published a video of the execution of about 20 Christian civilians in Nigeria. As with many other such ISIS-type videos, the terrorists stood behind their bound and kneeling victims, before knocking them over and carving their heads off to cries of “Allahu Akbar.”
Before doing so, one of the masked Muslims, speaking in the Hausa language, said that the execution of these Christians was “to avenge the killing of the group’s leaders in the Middle East earlier in 2022.” This is apparently a reference to ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi—a man with a reputation for extreme brutality—who was killed last February during an airborne raid by U.S. and Kurdish forces in northwestern Syria.
The reader may be pondering how impoverished Christian civilians in Nigeria are connected to or responsible for the activities of U.S. and Kurdish forces in Syria. The fact is, Muslim terrorists are notorious for offering any number of pretexts—many of which border on the absurd—to justify their cowardly targeting and murdering of the Christian minorities in their midst.
For example, ISIS cited similar “grievances” to justify its grisly slaughter of 21 Christians—20 Copts and one Ghanaian—on the shores of Libya in 2015. An article in Dabiq, the Islamic State’s online magazine in English, titled “Revenge for the Muslimat [Muslim women] Persecuted by the Coptic Crusaders of Egypt,” claimed that the 21 Christians were slaughtered in “revenge” for two Coptic women who, back in 2010 and according to Islamic propaganda, were compelled by Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church to recant their voluntary conversion to Islam and return to Christianity.
Indeed, the late Coptic Pope Shenouda III, who was then nearly 90-years-old and immobile, was portrayed as “a U.S. agent, an abductor and torturer of female Muslim converts from Christianity, who was stockpiling weapons in monasteries and churches with a view to waging war against the Muslims and dividing Egypt to create a Coptic State.
The Islamic State also cited the 2010 bombing of Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad as a product of “revenge” for those same supposedly forced-to-reconvert-back-to-Christianity women in Egypt. Then, armed jihadists had stormed the Iraqi church during worship service, opened fire indiscriminately, before detonating their suicide vests, which were “filled with ball bearings to kill as many people as possible.” Nearly 60 Christians—including women, children, and even babies (pictures of aftermath here)—were slaughtered.
Nor is this blame-the-victim strategy limited to the Middle East. Speaking two days after a series of bombings rocked Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, 2019, killing 359 people, a junior defense minister said that the attack “was in retaliation for the attack against Muslims in Christchurch,” where an Australian man killed 51 Muslims in two mosques in New Zealand.
Two points give the lie to all such claims of Islamic “retaliation” due to “grievances”:
First, and as mentioned, what did the 20 Nigerian Christians recently slaughtered have to do with U.S. and Kurdish forces in Syria? What did the Iraqi Christians of Our Lady Church, or the one decapitated Ghanaian, have to do with the imagined crimes of the Coptic Church?
For that matter, what do Christians in the Middle East, Africa and Asia have to do with the secular West? Whenever the latter somehow offends Muslims—whether by publishing cartoons or launching military operations in Afghanistan—Muslims “respond” by terrorizing the Christian minorities in their midst. As such, what exactly do brown Sri Lankan Christians celebrating Easter have to do with a white man killing Muslims in New Zealand? Moreover, if the Easter Day attack was a form of retaliation, what explains the fact that Muslims bomb churches on virtually every Easter (most recently in Indonesia).
Which leads to the second point: since when did Islamic terrorists that regularly preach hate for the other ever need a reason or excuse to make the lives of non-Muslims, chief among them Christians, miserable? Since July 2011, for instance, I have been compiling monthly “Muslim Persecution of Christians” reports (published by Gatestone Institute). In virtually every one of these monthly reports, Muslims bomb, burn, or ban churches and generally terrorize Christians. Are we seriously to believe this is all due to Muslim “grievances” against the disempowered Christian minorities in their midst?
Even the Muslim terrorists who cite “grievances” often let out the truth behind their actions. For example, in 2021, Muslims videotaped the murder of yet another Christian, Nabil Salma, in the Sinai region. In the video, the terrorists falsely accused the Copt of building a church which was “cooperating with the Egyptian army’s and intelligence’s war on the Islamic State.” Yet, immediately before murdering Salma, the speaker standing behind him said this:
All praise to Allah, who ordered his slaves [Muslims] to fight and who assigned humiliation onto the infidels [this latter part was said while the terrorist contemptuously pointed at the bound and kneeling man before him] until they pay the jizya while feeling utterly subdued.
This, of course, is a paraphrasing of Koran 9:29, which commands Muslims to wage jihad against the “People of the Book—Christians and Jews—until they pay tribute and feel themselves utterly subdued. Note: the Koran does not cite any grievances against Christians and Jews—except, of course, for the fact that they are Christians and Jews, that is, infidels, who reject the authority of Muhammad, and are therefore the enemy.
In short, all “grievances” cited by those Muslims who terrorize already disenfranchised religious minorities in their midst are false and meant to “legitimize” the Muslims’ otherwise cowardly and atrocious deeds.
Last year, a Lund University study revealed that a majority of those convicted for rape in Sweden were either migrants or from migrant backgrounds, with nearly half of the convicts being people born outside of Sweden.
THE MUSLIM CULTURE OF VIOLENCE
Meanwhile, fifty people on the terror watch list have been apprehended at the Southern border so far this year, and there is no telling how many got across without being caught. Welcome to Old Joe Biden’s America.
VIDEOS:
Denmark: provoking the limits of tolerance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sM8p7hnprM
Why does SWEDEN NO LONGER WANT IMMIGRANTS? - VisualPolitik EN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CSUimZjiI0
Muslim Man Tries to Slaughter Coptic Christian Woman with a Sickle
Terror-Linked Muslim Umbrella Group Brings Hundreds to DC to Lobby Congress
US Council of Muslim Organizations delegates included individual who joked about threatening to blow up school.
JOE BIDEN’S ASSAULT ON AMERICA’S HOMELAND SECURITY
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/06/joe-bidens-assault-on-homeland-security.html
REMEMBER THE MUSLIM INVASION SEPT 11 AND THE WORLD TRADE TOWERS
What could possibly go wrong? Border Report reported Monday that “a shelter for Muslim migrants opened over the weekend in Tijuana, the first of its kind in all of Mexico.” This is no small-time effort: “The Latino Muslim Foundation, based in San Diego and Tijuana, raised half a million dollars to make the facility a reality.” Meanwhile, fifty people on the terror watch list have been apprehended at the Southern border so far this year, and there is no telling how many got across without being caught. Welcome to Old Joe Biden’s America.
Khan’s London Suffers Most Sex Assaults in Decade, Attacks on Males Up 59 Per Cent
London is experiencing the highest number of sexual assaults for a decade, with attacks on males aged over 13 up by an astonishing 59 per cent.
Some 7,500 women told London’s Metropolitan Police they had been sexually assaulted in 2021, according to Home Office statistics reported by the BBC, with the number of police-recorded sexual assaults against men and boys aged 13 and over standing at 924.
“These record numbers are of great concern, as more rape victims will wait longer for justice,” commented Claire Waxman, London’s Victims’ Commissioner, in a social media post.
“Govt’s ambition of improving rape charges and convictions hardly seems achievable now, especially with record crown court backlog & a chronically underfunded [Criminal Justice System],” she lamented.
“We know sexual offences have been underreported in the past and we have been working hard to increase reports to the Met in order for us to investigate,” wheeled a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police in comments to the BBC.
“The public is rightly less tolerant of these crimes and are speaking out,” they added, appearing to try and feed the well-worn narrative that rises in serious violent and sexual crimes are never due to law enforcement failures or a breakdown in social cohesion, but merely a result of “more people coming forward” to report crime that was always there.
Notably, the figures released by the Metropolitan Police do not even provide the full picture for sexual offences in the British capital, as some attacks will have been reported to the City of London police, an independent force covering the Square Mile centred on the Bank of England, and the British Transport Police (BTP), which has responsible for law enforcement on much of the public transport network, both in London and nationwide.
Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery
Follow Breitbart London on Facebook: Breitbart London
France Repatriates 51 Citizens From Former Islamic State Territory
PARIS (AP) – French authorities on Tuesday repatriated 51 women and children from the former Islamic State group-controlled areas in Syria, according to a statement from the national counterterrorism prosecutor´s office.
It´s the single largest return of women and children to France from camps in northeastern Syria since the territorial defeat of IS in March 2019. France saw more of its citizens leave to join the group than any other country in Europe.
Tuesday’s group was made up of 16 women, ages 22 to 39, and 35 minors, seven of whom are coming to France unaccompanied by adults. All but two of the women in the group are French citizens. Twelve women returned with their children and four of the women had previously agreed to the return of their children, according to the prosecutor´s statement.
Eight women were taken into custody for questioning and the other eight were detained on arrest warrants. The children were placed in the care of the child protective services attached to the Versailles Judicial Court.
One of the 35 minors is in police custody on suspicion of participating in activities of a terrorist criminal enterprise, according to the prosecutor´s statement. The minor will shortly turn 18, the statement said.
Many European countries were slow to allow the return of women and children for fear they would violently turn on their homelands. France, which saw more of its citizens join IS in Syria than any other European country and suffered multiple deadly attacks beginning in 2015, has been especially reluctant.
French authorities have insisted that adults, men and women, who fought with IS should be prosecuted in the country where they had committed crimes. Authorities also insisted on bringing back citizens and their children on a case-by-case basis, a long and cumbersome procedure that has been repeatedly criticized by human rights groups.
In December, a 28-year-old Frenchwoman with diabetes died in the Roj camp in Syria, leaving her 6-year-old daughter an orphan, according to the family´s lawyer, who had been requesting their return since 2019.
The orphaned girl was in the group of children repatriated on Tuesday, according to a statement by the United Families Collective, a group of families that has been campaigning for repatriations of women and children detained in the Kurdish-controlled camps of Syria and Iraq.
The United Families Collective hailed the government’s repatriation effort and urged the French authorities to continue bringing home children and mothers trapped in “inhumane” and “degrading” living conditions at the detention camps.
The collective said there were still 150 French children and their mothers trapped in the Roj camp.
“France must repatriated (them) as soon as possible (…) and close this shameful chapter in our history without delay,” the group’s statement said.
No comments:
Post a Comment