Just one question: are boys ever “honor killed”? Does their behavior—oh I don’t know, torching cars, throwing Molotov cocktails, fighting with police, harassing and beating Jews—ever rise to the level of dishonor? Or is that sort of thing tolerated and even condoned? When was the last time a Muslim male was beaten and suffocated by having a plastic bag shoved down his throat?
The amazing, amazing, amazing thing here is that the student was even aware enough to ask, let alone challenge:
A North Carolina high school teacher was captured on video shouting at a student who questioned President Obama and suggesting he could be arrested for criticizing a sitting president.
The Salisbury Post, which first reported on the YouTube video, did not identify the teacher in question, who is reportedly on staff at North Rowan High School. The video does not show faces, but the heated argument in the classroom can clearly be heard.
“Do you realize that people were arrested for saying things bad about Bush?” the teacher said toward the end of the argument, telling the student, “you are not supposed to slander the president.”
…
The argument started when the classroom began discussing news reports that Mitt Romney bullied a fellow student when he was in high school. At the time, The Washington Post had recently published a lengthy article alleging that Romney, as a teenager, had cut off another student’s hair.
“Didn’t Obama bully somebody though?” a student in the North Carolina classroom asked when the report was brought up, referring to an incident Obama described in his memoir “Dreams From My Father.” In the book, Obama wrote that, as a child, he once pushed a female classmate after other students taunted them — the only two black students in their grade — and called Obama her boyfriend.
The teacher, in the video, said she didn’t know whether Obama bullied anyone — but the argument quickly escalated, as the teacher yelled at the student, telling him “there is no comparison.”
“He’s running for president,” she said of Romney. “Obama is the president.”
The student argued that both candidates are “just men,” but the teacher took issue with the statement.
“He’s just a man. Obama is no god,” the student said.The teacher responded: “Let me tell you something … you will not disrespect the president of the United States in this classroom.”
The teacher went on to say the two candidates are “not equal.”
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“The Rowan-Salisbury School System expects all students and employees to be respectful in the school environment and for all teachers to maintain their professionalism in the classroom. This incident should serve as an education for all teachers to stop and reflect on their interaction with students,” the school said in a statement, published by the Post. “Due to personnel and student confidentiality, we cannot discuss the matter publicly.”
Oh, it’s plenty public, all right. Or will be by the end of the day. I love the part where the teacher says people got arrested for saying things about George Bush. No wonder Obama can’t close Guantanamo—it’s too full of American dissidents who were “disappeared” in the 2000s!
Try walking a mile in their leg braces:
Following are excerpts from a TV report on polio in Pakistan, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on March 14, 2012.
Reporter: This girl is one of the victims of polio in Pakistan. For more than a decade, vaccination teams were forbidden from entering various regions, especially tribal areas, because some believe that the vaccination serum is non-Islamic, and leads to infertility in the long run. Today, however, things have changed somewhat.
Muhammad Habib, Head of the Committee of the Ulema of North Waziristan: Some people said the vaccinations are harmful, but this is wrong. These people rely on myths rather than on logic. Every disease has a treatment. The ulema and the doctors have refuted the claims made against the vaccinations.
Reporter: The struggle to catch up with the rest of the world in fighting polio is ongoing. 60% of all cases of polio recorded in the world last year were in Pakistan. 198 cases were recorded in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Vaccination centers have been set up in city hospitals and clinics, and vaccination teams were dispatched to rural areas. This is no easy task, considering Pakistan’s vastness, and the prevalence of poverty and ignorance.
Wasim Khawaja, specialist in preventive medicine: There should be organized campaigns for raising health awareness. Health awareness is essential so that people are not deceived. Unfortunately, some health teams are unable to reach remote areas, due to terrorism and due to people’s objections.
Reporter : Polio has become a thing of the past in most countries of the world, but it is still widespread in Pakistan. The Pakistani government is striving to eliminate it, despite the obstacles and the lack of means.
The scandal of the US using vaccination to obtain DNA from Bin Laden’s children to confirm his presence in the house where he was assassinated last May dealt a blow to the efforts to eradicate tuberculosis. In addition, it reinforced the position of those who claim that political goals and anti-Pakistani conspiracies are behind the vaccination campaigns.
That last part can’t be right. We couldn’t have used DNA to determine his presence; we might have used it to confirm his death.
Anyway, long-time readers will remember my… frustration a few years ago when a Muslim tribal leader in Nigeria forbade polio vaccines along similar “non-Islamic” grounds. International health authorities eventually persuaded him to allow the vaccinations, but not before the disease had established a toe-hold that spread across Africa and Muslim countries. And bin Laden was alive and in the pink (figuratively speaking) when that episode occurred, so don’t even start with the American complicity angle. Their paranoia, their problem.
It would be one thing if only Muslim tribal elders were susceptible to polio, but alas that’s not the case. For all we know, they got their vaccines when they were Muslim tribal youngers.
Add this twist to the scourges of human trafficking and flesh peddling: Pills sold as Viagara-style performance enhancers that contain the powdered tissue of aborted fetuses and dead infants.
South Korea has seized nearly 17,500 of the bizarre capsules from tourists’ luggage and international mail since last August, according to the state-run Korea Customs service said in a statement Monday. The capsules were made in northeastern China in a stomach-turning process in which dead babies’ bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder, the Korea Customs Service said.
And that’s not all! Order now and you get more!
The pills, which are typically smuggled in by ethnic Koreans living in northern China, aren’t just creepy, the contain “super bacteria” that is hazardous to human health, the statement said. South Korea began cracking down on the drugs last year after a television network aired a documentary accusing Chinese pharmaceutical companies of collaborating with abortion clinics to make the pills from human fetuses and the remains of dead infants, accordiong to The Wall Street Journal.
In parts of China, consumption of human placentas is believed to help revive blood supply and circulation, according to the China Daily report. In addition, many believe the fetus is a “tonic” for disease has kept the pills in demand, according to the China Daily, which reported Beijing has been investigating the matter as well. But the latest use of fetal tissue is as a sexual performance enhancer, according to a report in the Global Times, a tabloid published by the official People’s Daily.
Sexual performance? You need to have sex to have sexual performance!
And while you don’t need women to have sex, for some of us, it helps!
Chinese dissident escapes Turmoil and intrigue bubble in China Where is blind Chinese activist Chen? The importance of Chen Guangcheng
The issue of forced abortions — and in some cases, forced sterilizations — in China has seized the spotlight in recent days with news of escaped activist Chen Guangcheng.Chen, a blind, self-taught lawyer, rose to fame in the late 1990s because of his advocacy for what he calls victims of abusive practices, such as forced abortions, by Chinese family planning officials. He investigated forced abortions and sterilizations in eastern China — a practice China denies — and helped organize a class-action lawsuit on behalf of victims, for which he served four years in prison.
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About 13 million abortions are performed nationwide each year, the commission has said — about 35,000 a day. It is unknown how many of those are coerced.
But the one-child policy has been blamed for abuses. In some cases, advocates say, fetuses identified as female are aborted, or midwives strangle a female infant with the umbilical cord during delivery, identifying the baby as “stillborn,” according to All Girls Allowed, a nonprofit group that aims to end female “gendercide,” educate abandoned girls, rescue trafficked children and defend women’s reproductive rights.
Other females are abandoned, left to die or raised as orphans.
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Last summer, Xinhua reported that “millions of Chinese men of marrying age may be living as frustrated bachelors by 2020″ because of the gender imbalance. In 2010, China’s sex ratio at birth was 118 boys for every 100 girls, the news agency said.
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The one-child policy could contribute to China’s high rate of female suicide, according to All Girls Allowed.
China is the only country in the world where the female suicide rate is higher than that of men — some 500 women a day, the group said, citing statistics from the World Health Organization and the U.S. State Department.
In its 2009 Human Rights Report, the State Department noted that “many observers believed that violence against women and girls, discrimination in education and employment, the traditional preference for male children, birth-limitation policies, and other societal factors contributed to the high female suicide rate. Women in rural areas, where the suicide rate for women was three to four times higher than for men, were especially vulnerable.”Sometimes the consequences are even more severe. In October 2011, a woman who was six months pregnant died during a forced abortion in eastern China, according to Women’s Rights Without Frontiers.
Last month, a woman in the same region was forced to undergo an abortion while nine months pregnant, the organization reported. The baby was born alive, but then was drowned in a bucket, according to the organization. A photo of the infant’s body floating in the bucket was circulated on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, sparking widespread outrage.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough. In every way, I’ve had enough. Melamine in the infant formula wasn’t bad enough. Now they’re coming after the unborn—and even the recently born. And everyone else from the sound of it.
UPDATE
What was I just saying?
Vegetable sellers in China have been caught spraying cabbages with a formaldehyde solution to keep them fresh in transit, the state news agency Xinhua has reported.
Xinhua said the practice had been common in eastern China for years.
The agency said it was being done because most farmers cannot afford refrigerated trucks for cabbages.
Formaldehyde is a toxic cancer-causing compound often used as a disinfectant and for embalming.
It can irritate the skin and cause breathing and digestive problems.
Cabbage is a staple food in China, often used as a filling in dumplings, but also stir-fried or pickled.
In recent years the country has faced a series of food safety scandals, including the lacing of baby-milk with the industrial chemical melamine.
…
[Formaldehyde] has also been reportedly used to soak some dried seafood to make it appear more fresh and plump.
[Bleeping] China, man. Remind me to order Japanese next time I crave a dumpling.
What was I just saying about girls in Afghan culture (see comments in post below)?
For economic and social reasons, many Afghan parents want to have a son. This preference has led to some of them practising the long-standing tradition of Bacha Posh – disguising girls as boys.
When Azita Rafhat, a former member of the Afghan parliament, gets her daughters ready for school, she dresses one of the girls differently.
Three of her daughters are clothed in white garments and their heads covered with white scarves, but a fourth girl, Mehrnoush, is dressed in a suit and tie. When they get outside, Mehrnoush is no longer a girl but a boy named Mehran.
Azita Rafhat didn’t have a son, and to fill the gap and avoid people’s taunts for not having a son, she opted for this radical decision. It was very simple, thanks to a haircut and some boyish clothes.
There is even a name for this tradition in Afghanistan – Bacha Posh, or disguising girls as boys.
Isn’t that cute?
Hey, didn’t Victorians (or Edwardians, or whoever) dress boys up in dresses and put bows in their long, wavy locks? What’s the difference?
An Army sergeant and father of three from Rhode Island who gave his life to save an Afghan child from being run over by a 16-ton armored fighting vehicle is being flown back to the U.S. and will be buried Monday.
Sgt. Dennis Weichel, 29, died in Afghanistan last week after he dashed into the path of an armored fighting vehicle to scoop up the little girl, who had darted back into the roadway to pick up shell casings, according to the Army. Weichel, a Rhode Island National Guardsman, was riding in the convoy in Laghman Province in eastern Afghanistan when he jumped out to save the girl, who was unhurt.
This image, obtained from WPRI.com, shows 29-year-old Sgt. Dennis Weichel.
“He would have done it for anybody,” Staff Sgt. Ronald Corbett, who deployed with Weichel to Iraq in 2005, said in a quote posted on the U.S. Army website. “That was the way he was. He would give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. He was that type of guy.”
A father of three isn’t coming back from Afghanistan because he saved an Afghan girl. That was how he was brought up, how he was trained; he didn’t think, he just acted. The girl lived, and three children in Rhode Island don’t have a dad.
And people write plays about, and name streets after, Rachel Corrie, who died playing olé with a Caterpillar front-loader in order to save illegal Arab settlements. I’m going to be sick.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
The Associated Press (AP) retracted a story that was discovered to be based on a Hamas lie, claiming that an Arab baby died due to the fuel shortage in Gaza.
It turns out that the story was based on a complete manipulation and distortion of the facts and that the story of Mohammed Helou’s death first appeared on March 4 in the local Arabic-language newspaper Al-Quds — before the shortage that allegedly caused his death.
The AP issued a statement saying, it “has withdrawn its story about a 5-month-old baby who was said to have died Friday after the generator powering his respirator ran out of fuel, the first known death linked to the territory’s energy crisis.”“The timing and reason for the death were confirmed to the AP by a man identified as the baby’s father and a Gaza health official, but the report has been called into question after it was learned that a local newspaper carried news of the baby’s death on March 4,” the statement continued.
“A substitute story will be filed shortly reflecting the new information,” added the AP.
Can’t wait!
I don’t blame the AP for getting the story wrong; people get things wrong. But to believe anything coming out of Gaza without discounting, discrediting, and dissecting it first amounts to journalistic malpractice. Fool you once, shame on Hamass; fool you umpteen times, shame on AP and the rest of the press.
PS: And I didn’t even mention the subhuman behavior of using the tragedy of a child’s death to exploit an antisemitic political philosophy. There, I just did.
When EU representative Catherine Ashton managed somehow to put words together that compared the deliberate targeting of Jewish children with what happens in Gaza (rocketing? mortaring? kidnapping? honor killing? inter-clan killing? “industrial” accidents? collapsed tunnels? firing weapons at weddings? children playing with loaded weapons? is that what she means?), I compared her prevaricating language with that of someone a little clearer in his condemnation, Abu Mazen (the nom de guerre of Mahmoud Abbas).
Reader Jeanette wasn’t buying then, and she’s probably not buying now:
Palestinian Authority leaders, spokespeople and the official Fatah Facebook page have recently found it appropriate to honor terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who, with other terrorists, killed 37 innocent people:
“This is Dalal, my eternal love… Dalal is my mysterious young woman, my revolutionary
Jihadi inspiration. I loved her but knew only her name, Dalal Mughrabi.”
[Fatah official Facebook page, accessed March 22, 2012]“The bride of the coast, Dalal Mughrabi, and other female fighters have roles of honor in the national struggle.”
[Governor of Ramallah and El-Bireh Laila Ghannam, March 17, 2012]“Dalal was a model of a fighting Palestinian woman… who fulfilled her obligation towards her land and homeland.”
[PA Civil Defense Commissioner Abu Al-Sheikh, March 7, 2012]“We have days of heroism that were recorded by women… Martyrs (Shahidas) like Dalal Mughrabi and others.”
[Women's rights activist, Zaynab Al-Ghanimi, March 7, 2012]…
“The Political and National Orientation [Authority] held a lecture for the Civil Defense in Azoun on the life of the fighter, Martyr (Shahida) Dalal Mughrabi, on the occasion of the approach of the anniversary of her death as a Martyr. The lecture was delivered by Civil Defense Commissioner Samir Abu Al-Sheikh…
Abu Al-Sheikh said that Dalal was a model of a fighting Palestinian woman, since Dalal is the story of a bleeding homeland, the story of a person who fulfilled her obligation towards her land and homeland.”
[The Political and National Orientation Authority is an educational structure under the PA]
All those love letter within the last two weeks.
Who is Dalal Mughrabi? I know a set-up question when I hear one.
She always gets mad at me for picking a picture without her face on. (But it’s been shot away, darling!)
And this is her handiwork:
Of course, she has a stnding date for the annual prom dance in Hell:
Kuntar was convicted in an Israeli court for murder of an Israeli policeman, Eliyahu Shahar, 31 year-old Danny Haran, and Haran’s 4-year-old daughter, Einat Haran, whom he killed with blunt force against a rock. He was also convicted of indirectly causing the death of two-year-old Yael Haran by suffocation, as her mother, Smadar, tried to quiet her crying while hiding from Kuntar. In 1980 Kuntar was sentenced to four life sentences.
From which, naturally, he was released, to great fanfare from Arabs so concerned about the welfare of children.
So, thanks for the awfully nice words and the flowers, Palestinian Arab leadership. We’ll make sure one goes in one ear and out the other, and that the other goes straight to the compost heap.
Have you heard about the Joseph Kony movie? I am posting it here. And here’s the grumpy question? Why is it ok for Palestinian Arabs to teach children to strap on suicide vests?
Do you think it is because Kony isn’t Muslim? Because from what I understand, the militias in Khartoum do and have done the same things to the children of South Sudan. However, the South Sudanese are usually either Christian or practice traditional African religions. Help me out here. I am trying to understand why Kony is fair game but so many African militia leaders (and Middle Eastern terror leaders) are given a free pass.
- Aggie
Oh wait, they’re not the Monkees? I thought the little guy on the left looked like Davy Jones (may he rest in peace).
Then who are they? The Dave Clark… Three? Chad & Jeremy & Mahmoud? Paul Revere and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade?
Last week, official Palestinian Authority TV repeatedly broadcast video tributes to terrorists from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). The tributes included glorification of the terrorist “Martyrs,” as well as their many terror attacks, in which dozens of Israeli civilians were murdered. Palestinian Media Watch reported last year that PA TV ran similar videos honoring DFLP terrorists.
PA TV glorified the Ma’alot massacre in which school children were taken hostage. 22 of them were murdered along with four adults. A poster honoring the three DFLP terrorists was shown during the video tributes, in addition to posters glorifying dozens of other terrorists and their murders of civilians.
…
The terror attacks DFLP carried out in northern Israel include:
-The 1970 attack on a school bus near the town of Avivim in which 9 children and 3 adults were killed;
-The 1974 attack in the town of Ma’alot in which 22 children and 4 adults were killed, when terrorists took them hostage in a school.
-A 1974 attack in the city of Beit Shean in which 4 civilians were killed.
-A 1979 bomb attack in the city of Tiberias in which 2 civilians were killed.
You may remember Ma’alot better this way:
Or maybe you can see the movie:
The mass screening of “Their Eyes Were Dry,” by 24-year-old Los Angeles filmmaker Brandon Assanti, is as much a tale of one young man’s commitment to telling this heart-wrenching story as it is testimony to the pain and suffering of the survivors who for decades kept their memories to themselves.
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Assanti steps back and lets those who suffered through the horrible day unwind the story, hour by hour. Their almost dispassionate retelling, born of years of submerging painful memories, is interspersed with stunning archival footage but no narration. Assanti says he wanted his subjects to tell the story themselves, without outside commentary. The powerful technique works to his advantage.
Inured as people may be now to children being murdered in wars and terrorist attacks, it’s rare that one has the opportunity to go inside an actual hostage situation and view it through the eyes of the children suffering through it. That’s what Assanti and his subjects give us, and it is strong medicine indeed.
Yishy Maimon, the former mayor of Safed, was 17 at the time, and he describes standing by an open window in the classroom about to jump to safety when he remembered his younger brother, Shimon, was still being held. How could he go home and face his parents having left his brother behind?
Maimon-Bokris, who was famously photographed being carried to safety in her brother’s arms, recalls the terrorist leader telling the children that they were “all going home now” before spraying them with gunfire and hurling a grenade at them.
“Throughout the day we tried to persuade them not to kill us,” she relates in the film. “One said, soon you’ll be soldiers — we have to stop you now.”
Major Gen. (Res.) Amiram Levin, who commanded the rescue operation, relates the conflict that raged that day between Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who urged decisive military action, and Chief of Staff Moshe Gur, who favored caution.
When he finally reached the classroom and saw the carnage — flesh clinging to the walls, headless bodies swimming in pools of blood — Levin’s heart broke.
“The whole operation took 30, 35 seconds,” he tells the camera. “If we’d been able to do it in 10, how many more could we have saved?”
If the Arabs want to advertise their inhuman, sub-human, butchery, why shouldn’t we?
A delegation of Israeli doctors and volunteers from the Eye from Zion organization traveled to Ethiopia recently to perform 160 cataract surgeries in a portable operation room donated by Chaim Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer. During their visit, they met Kavda Imsak, a 10-year-old girl who suffered from a large tumor in her eye.
Since Ethiopian hospitals are not equipped for such operations, Imsak had to live with the large growth until the Israeli delegation arrived.
At first the team, headed by Dr. Nachum Rosen, preformed a preliminary surgery to discern whether the tumor was cancerous or benign. Later on, they decided to bring her to Israel to remove it.
“The chances of recovery are very slim,” said Eye from Zion founder Nati Marcus, who insisted on bringing the girl to Israel. “As soon as I saw her I decided to take a chance,” he explained.
Once it was decided to bring her to Israel for surgery, arrangements were coordinated with MASHAV, Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, the Foreign Ministry, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the surgeons who agreed to operate pro bono.
According to Marcus, many offered to help, including the best doctors in the country who asked to take part in the complex operation, and hospitals that offered to donate surgery and recovery rooms.
Show-offs.
And this really toasts my crumpets:
This is not the first pro bono operation for Ben-Simon. Together with friends and colleagues he volunteers in various places with Eye from Zion and independently. The delegations consist of volunteers who fund their own travel.
Eye from Zion operates in various places including Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Micronesia, Myanmar and Ethiopia, sending advanced equipment, specialists, operating room nurses and experts to remote locales.
What are they trying to prove?
Where once they burned girls’ schools, now they build them:
When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, Maulvi Qalamuddin headed the Committee to Protect Virtue and Prevent Vice, the religious police that shut down girls’ schools, beat up men with insufficiently long beards and arrested those in possession of music or video tapes.
Nowadays, the 60-year-old Taliban cleric is on a different mission: He is overseeing a network of schools that teach reading, writing and math to thousands of girls in his home province of Logar, an insurgent hotbed just south of Kabul.
“Education for women is just as necessary as education for men,” Mr. Qalamuddin thunders. “In Islam, men and women have the same duty to pray, to fast—and to seek learning.”
When I was in school, boys took shop and girls took home ec, so I’m in no position to judge (especially as I sucked at shop). Who knows? Maybe the Taliban will next rebuild the Bamiyan Buddhas they blew up.
Anyhow, school sure beats the other uses to which they used to put girls:
Taliban insurgents used an eight-year-old girl carrying a bag of explosives to attack a police checkpost in central Afghanistan, the Afghan government said on Sunday, making her one of the youngest child bombers of the decade-old conflict.
The incident took place in Char Chino district of central Uruzgan province, the interior ministry said. “The insurgents handed over a bag with a homemade bomb to an eight-year-old girl and asked her to take it to police forces,” it added.
“As the girl was getting close to the police, it exploded and killed the girl.”
Could have been worse: she could have learned how to read.