Photographer gets attacked by a lion while taking these photos. Worth it. http://t.co/705PnhWMyb pic.twitter.com/bb3qQijDMe
— Melissa Keizer (@KeizGoesBoom) April 11, 2015Last night, I lectured at a synagogue in Westchester. Afterwards, a man came up “to shake my hand.” He had asked me this exact question about Western survival and I had answered him partly based on the Arutz Sheva article I recently wrote on the question. Then he told me:Still more.
“Our son was supposed to be at the finish line at the Boston Marathon. Luckily, something prevented him from going but we spent the weeks afterwards calling up many of his Boston-area friends to see how they were. What will it take for Americans to wake up and to take Jihad seriously? If 9/11 and Ft Hood and the Boston Marathon Bombing did not do it, I am afraid to think of what will.”
A young college student said: “If I say any of the things you have just said, my friends would call me crazy.”
Said I: “So what? If you opt for popularity and conformity you will never develop the strength to stand up to evil or to tell the truth. Remember: Evil always prevails when the good people are afraid to stop it, lest they not only become pariahs--they may also lose their livelihoods and their lives.”
I thought she was going to faint.
When I was asked something about President Obama I cut right to the chase. However, in passing, I said that “of course he is considered a Muslim by the Ummah. He is the son of a Muslim father and by definition this is all that counts". Taking it a step further, Obama might also be seen as an apostate because he embraced Christianity or at least attended a black nationalist Christian church in Chicago.
Again, some people heard me say something else, namely, that I thought Obama is a secret Muslim and that this accounts for his pro-Islamic world policies and statements and his extraordinary “sensitivity” to Muslim feelings. Another college student said that if she said this to her friends they would say she was “crazy.”
Said I. “That’s nothing. Wait until they call you a Zionist and start harassing you in your dorm.”
What will it take for Europeans to wake up?
A colleague who lives in Germany read the piece and sent me the following email:
“Your suggestions about Europe have little chance of happening. Many don't (blame) or call it Islam, including Hollande himself. Many blame the Israeli conflict with Palestine as a major cause. Europe and it's churches, intellectuals, etc., are more concerned about " islamophobia". Yesterday, 100, 000 marched against islamophobia in Germany, but did not bother with the rally in central Berlin in September against anti-Semitism, despite the fact that the rally was addressed by Merkel and president Gauck. They could only raise 4000, mostly Jews, from all over Germany."
The political will and honesty are simply not there! Germans now see themselves as victims of Hitler, Muslims also now see themselves as victims. Palestinians are victims...everything has been turned on its head...
BRUSSELS — Belgian police killed two people in a firefight on Thursday evening, disrupting what authorities called an imminent terrorist plot just a week after Islamist extremists set Europe on edge with massacres in Paris.More.
The plot was aimed at attacking the police, authorities said, and involved people who had returned from Syria, possibly fighting alongside terrorist groups there.
The police operations, which resulted in 10 raids, were the product of an investigation that began several weeks ago, before last week’s killings in Paris at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery, authorities said.
“This group was on the verge of committing a terrorist attack in Belgium,” said Thierry Werts, spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office.
The authorities raised the nation’s terror alert and said police operations continued Thursday evening. A Belgian police spokesman said extra security measures were being taken. Police wielding machine guns were seen patrolling near Brussels’s main courthouse. The Belgian government convened an emergency meeting to discuss the security situation, officials said.
The raids come as a spate of terror attacks and failed plots linked to Islamist extremists have unsettled the Continent, often fueled by turmoil in the Middle East.
Last May, Belgium was involved in the first terrorist attack believed to have been conducted by a person who fought in Syria, when a Frenchman authorities say fought with Islamic State killed four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels.
The firefight on Thursday evening occurred in the eastern Belgian town of Verviers, the authorities said. The police also executed search warrants in Brussels and the Brussels suburb of Halle-Vilvoorde, targeting people who were believed to be involved in the plot.
When the police went to execute the search warrants in Verviers, they were met with automatic gunfire. They also arrested one person after the gunbattle. That person hasn’t been identified. No police were injured, authorities said.
Evidence uncovered later Thursday suggested the plot was sophisticated and ambitious. Belgian media reported that police found explosives in a house they searched in the Anderlecht neighborhood of Brussels, but that the occupants of the house couldn’t be located. Further police searches in a different part of Verviers turned up four Kalashnikovs, bomb-making materials and police clothing, Belgian daily La Libre reported.
Officials declined to discuss whether there was a connection between the plot and Amedy Coulibaly, the French Islamist who killed four people at the kosher grocery last week...
Paris attack http://t.co/Og500wF4Js #CharlieHebdo pic.twitter.com/eqsx790QPz
— The Big Picture (@big_picture) January 7, 2015Paris Anti-Terror March Draws Huge Crowds And World Leaders http://t.co/pUpYJskvxQ pic.twitter.com/sZXZoCHhyy
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) January 11, 2015Photo of the Day! Amazing image from Amanda Brewer who is working to promote shark conservation in South Africa. pic.twitter.com/xt368fyaOg
— GoPro® (@GoPro) October 5, 2014
It's really troubling and absurd to me that people who are concerned about basic human rights are being painted as anti Semitic.
— Cassandra (@CassandraRules) July 23, 2014
#photo2 #manifgaza pic.twitter.com/kVrV0aeHzX
— Olivier Faye (@olivierfaye) July 23, 2014
.@CassandraRules Thinkin' I might have a cookie too. @beautifulchaosJ @drginaloudon http://t.co/DaAvrWJxbv Keep respectfully reaching out.
— W. James Casper (@repsac3) July 17, 2014
The people speaking out for Gaza right now are the same people who would have been speaking out against the Nazis.
— Cassandra (@CassandraRules) July 17, 2014
TELL ME HOW THIS IS DIFFERENT THAN NAZI GERMANY. SOMEONE FUCKING TELL ME RIGHT NOW http://t.co/tRkVjcahLV
— Cassandra (@CassandraRules) July 18, 2014
Suck it flag wavers. #Anaheim pic.twitter.com/uvJ5yFmoS0
— Cassandra (@CassandraRules) July 19, 2014
Good. More dead Israeli soldiers please RT @AmPowerBlog: Israeli soldier from Los Angeles is killed in Gaza. #Israel http://t.co/DG5qAQjOQk
— Captain Howdy (@jackherer20) July 21, 2014It's legal in America to take pictures of public buildings — and pretty much everything and everyone else in public. That's something that law enforcement agencies routinely take advantage of in arguing that people have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" when they're out and about and being surveilled by the government.That everyone else includes police officers, despite their protestations, and private citizens, like the ANSWER thugs who used criminal violence in an attempt to shut down "American Power."
Three years ago, a labor leader named Marty Beil was one of the loudest opponents of Gov. Scott Walker’s “budget repair bill,” a proposal that brought tens of thousands of protesters out to the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison in frigid February weather. A gruff-voiced grizzly of a man, Mr. Beil warned that the bill was rigged with booby traps that would cripple the state’s public-sector unions.Photo Credit: Althouse (on Flickr).
He gets no satisfaction from being right. Since the law was passed, membership in his union, which represents state employees, has fallen 60 percent; its annual budget has plunged to $2 million from $6 million.
Mr. Walker’s landmark law — called Act 10 — severely restricted the power of public-employee unions to bargain collectively, and that provision, among others, has given social workers, prison guards, nurses and other public employees little reason to pay dues to a union that can no longer do much for them. Members of Mr. Beil’s group, the Wisconsin State Employees’ Union, complain that their take-home pay has fallen more than 10 percent in recent years, a sign of the union’s greatly diminished power.
“It’s had a devastating effect on our union,” Mr. Beil, its executive director, said of Act 10. He was sitting in his Madison office, inside the headquarters that his union, hard up for cash, may be forced to sell. The building is underused anyway, as staff reductions have left many offices empty.
Wisconsin was the first state to grant public-sector unions the right to negotiate contracts. Before Gov. Gaylord Nelson signed that law in 1959, only unionized workers in private companies had a government-protected right to bargain collectively. But the Wisconsin idea soon spread around the country. Act 10 is an about-face, and Mr. Walker and his Republican supporters see it as a tough-minded strategy that other states can follow. History repeating itself, if in reverse.
Many labor leaders and union members are still fuming about the law. It bars public-sector unions from bargaining over pensions, health coverage, safety, hours, sick leave or vacations. All they can negotiate is base pay, and even that is limited: any raises they win cannot exceed inflation.
“I speak to union officials in other states, and I tell them, ‘Don’t be misled,’ ” Mr. Beil said. “We thought this could never happen here. But it did. You have to stay vigilant.”
Mr. Walker, who is widely viewed as a Republican presidential contender in 2016, has already emboldened other Republican-controlled states to enact measures that weaken unions and cut benefits. Tennessee and Idaho passed laws that cut back bargaining rights for public schoolteachers, while Ohio curbed collective bargaining for all state employees — though that law was repealed in a 2011 referendum. Even longtime union strongholds like Michigan and Indiana have enacted right-to-work laws that undercut private-sector unions by banning any requirements that workers pay union dues or fees. (A state judge’s decision that declared the Indiana law unconstitutional is being appealed to the state’s Supreme Court.)
Mr. Walker’s tough stance toward public-employee unions has steeled governors and mayors grappling with large unfunded pension obligations. And his criticisms of pensions have been reinforced by the turmoil in Detroit, where the often-generous and sometimes scandal-ridden pension system played a substantial role in the city’s bankruptcy.
“You’re seeing more politicians willing to stand up to public-sector unions,” said Gary Chaison, a professor of labor relations at Clark University. “Fairly or unfairly, public-sector unions are increasingly being seen as part of the problem.”
Heads up! That's a 6-by-4 feet chunk of ice falling 1,776 feet from One World Trade Center this morning. #yikes pic.twitter.com/IbBgfXWpWH
— amNewYork (@amNewYork) February 19, 2014
