Monthly Archives: March 2017

Ahead of pivotal European elections, rightist websites grow in influence.

Caribbean, Islam, Leadership, politics, Pop Culture., Sint Maarten, Thought Leaders.

The following post by Michael Birnbaum on March 6, for the Washington Post is a potent example, of the increasingly nationalist, populist direction that the Caucasian masses in Europe are willingly marching in. In step with their North American counterparts. The political elite on Sint Maarten will not take heed, the present course of developments in Europe and America will, force the politically progressive in the Caribbean including belatedly Sint Maarten, to unite out of a shared sense of mutual self-preservation.  To you Sint Maarteners who frequent this platform, read with an understanding and learn the salient potent lessons herein.

AMSTERDAM — On the brand-new political news website, the headlines could have been ripped from a speech by President Trump: Immigrants commit more crime, Syrian refugees are raping girls, and Muslim education is taking over the school system.

But the two-month-old Gatestone Europe website is based in the Netherlands; the contributors are Dutch. And their aim, their editor says, is to swing the debate ahead of European elections this year to deliver a tide of anti- immigrant leaders to office in the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere.

Websites that focus on the perils of open borders, immigration and international alliances are expanding in scope and ambition in Europe, seeing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to harness the energy from Trump’s win to drive deep into a continent where traditional political parties are struggling. Some of the websites are registered in Russia. Others, like Gatestone Europe, are being supported by Americans with ties to Trump.

In the Netherlands, some online activists are backing a handful of anti-Muslim candidates, including the fiery Geert Wilders, who is running in a dead heat against the ruling party ahead of March 15 elections. In France, news blogs are spreading innuendo about the rivals of the anti-immigrant Marine Le Pen, who is the most popular presidential candidate in the lead-up to the election in April and May. And in Germany, some of the outlets have spread false stories about refugees raping people that were repeated by the Russian foreign minister. Fed by public anger about refugees, the Muslim-bashing Alternative for Germany party is poised to seize seats in Germany’s Parliament in September.

“There’s quite a lot of news, quite shocking, often with rape or violence and immigrants,” said Timon Dias, 29, who started Gate­stone Europe last month after several years of writing for a different anti-establishment website in the Netherlands. “We want people to learn what’s happening in Europe and vote accordingly, especially ahead of elections this year.”

Although many of the sites are small — the Amsterdam-based Gatestone Europe has only four writers, and no office — they do not need to be well established to score big on Facebook or Twitter. A spicy individual post can go viral with little regard for the history of the outlet.

“It’s a crowbar in the system,” Dias said. “The main line is highly vigilant, highly critical about what the effects are of having a significant Muslim minority in the inner cities.”

The project is funded by the New York-based Gatestone Institute, which is chaired by former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, who was a finalist in Trump’s search for a new national security adviser. Contacted for comment, the Gatestone Institute made available one of its board members, retired Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who said that the organization is nonpartisan and that its aim is to “move the debate to the center.” Bolton did not reply to a request for comment.

As with other similar sites, many of Gatestone’s posts are based on true events, spun aggressively to feed the narrative that mainstream, pro-European Union politicians are selling out their countries to immigrants. The site does not support any one candidate in the Dutch elections, but the anti-E.U. leader of the small Forum for Democracy party, Thierry Baudet, is a contributor.

“We report the news to our readers in a directed way,” Dias said.

Although Wilders is likely to face trouble forming a coalition and Le Pen is forecast to lose the second round of France’s presidential election, both candidates have had success in shifting ­debate in their nations onto

more anti-immigrant, Euroskeptic ground. Far-right websites are often their megaphone.

In the Netherlands, similar news outlets have already made successful forays into Dutch political life.

A referendum last year on whether the Dutch government should ratify a trade deal with Ukraine was triggered by a far-right news site, GeenStijl.

The eventual rejection of the trade deal turned into an embarrassing defeat for the Dutch government, which was forced to backpedal on its commitment to Ukraine. Opponents of the trade deal, including GeenStijl, cited an opposition to E.U. expansion and a desire not to antagonize the Kremlin as reasons to vote it down.

Pro-Ukraine-deal campaigners say they suspect that the Kremlin put a finger on the scale by supporting activists and pro-Russian trolls online, although no link has been proved. The activists, including GeenStijl, deny any connection.

But even absent ties to Russia, the news sites demonstrated a powerful ability to disrupt the pro-E.U. agenda of the Dutch mainstream, creating a political headache for Dutch leaders and feeding Western disunity that coincides with Kremlin efforts.

“The Ukraine referendum has shown what kind of mayhem they can cause,” said Cas Mudde, a Dutch scholar of far-right movements at the University of Georgia. “What impressed a lot of people was their ability to mobilize people who were commenting on websites to go out and actually vote for a cause. People weren’t expecting that.”

Now GeenStijl’s political arm, GeenPeil — Dutch for “no poll” — has spun off into a political party and is contesting the parliamentary election on the promise to hold Dutch leaders accountable.

“Until my generation, everybody had a better life than their parents. That has stopped,” said Jan Dijkgraaf, 54, a former journalist who is now the leader of GeenPeil.

He said he did not consider himself a far-right politician, but he seized on immigration as a major focus for Dutch voters.

Dijkgraaf said he could understand if a mother of three needed temporary refuge from war. “But when there are boys of 25 with these kind of muscles, you have to think, are they really victims of a war, or do they have plans to get rich, or to do something like in Brussels or in Paris?”

The Ukraine referendum sparked a number of political parties, most of which have struggled to break through Wilders’s lock on anti-immigrant discourse in the Netherlands.

Wilders was using Twitter to spark outrage and publicity long before Trump turned to electoral politics. A tweet last month of a leading political opponent, Alexander Pechtold, Photoshopped into a pro-sharia demonstration in London dominated political coverage for days. Wilders later acknowledged that the photo was fake but said Pechtold had recently been to a similar demonstration.

“They don’t care about what is really true, what is a little true, or what is fake,” Pechtold said. “And that’s of course what we have seen in the United States.”

In the far-right Web universe, the faked picture caused no uproar.

“It’s a way of speaking to people,” said Bert Brussen, editor of ThePostOnline, another far-right website where headlines on recent articles have included “Iraqis on Trial for Gang Rape in Vienna” and “Massacre by Islamic terror was again prevented in Germany.”

“A lot of what Wilders says, it’s Internet language,” Brussen said. “The Internet makes them stronger, and they make the Internet stronger.”

In other countries with elections this year, far-right sites are also thriving, attracting the attention of some of the American outlets that helped propel Trump to victory. Last year, Breitbart News — whose former head, Stephen K. Bannon, is now Trump’s chief strategist — said that it would take the plunge into the French and German markets, although there is so far little sign that it is readying to open.

But anti-establishment activists in those countries may need little help.

In France, where far-right candidate Le Pen wants to take a hard line against Muslim immigration, hold a referendum on E.U. membership and embrace relations with the Kremlin, far-right news sites have taken aim at whichever candidate appears most likely to challenge her in the final round of the presidential election, due to be held May 7. (Le Pen is expected to win the first round.)

For months, that was center-right candidate François Fillon. More recently, a surge from the centrist Emmanuel Macron has drawn a volley of darts from ­rumor-mongering websites, some of them branches of Russian state media. Macron recently took on the rumors, joking that his apparent ability to have gay affairs puzzled his wife, who is usually by his side.

And in Germany and Austria, experts say roughly 30 German-language “alternative websites” are currently operating. Many have existed for years, but they have transformed into machines to undermine traditional politicians, especially since the start of Europe’s refugee crisis.

The majority of them, experts say, tend to have opaque ownership structures, making it difficult to ascertain who is behind them. They are almost universally pro-Russian in tone, and some of the German-language sites are operated from Russian servers, though direct links to the Russian government are hard to find.

“They publish stories with a true core, building their own atmosphere around this core, what we call ‘hybrid fake,’ ” said Andre Wolf, a spokesman for Mimikama, an Austria-based fact-checking website.

Many stories seem aimed at undermining German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bid for reelection on Sept. 24. But as a center-left challenger, Martin Schulz, rose in the polls in recent weeks, along surged a flurry of fake reports — including one by the website AnonymousNews.ru falsely claiming that his father once ran a Nazi concentration camp.

Across Europe, Dias said, the possibility of change is alive.

“People feel the epicness of the times they’re living in,” he said.

Michael Birnbaum is The Post’s Brussels bureau chief. He previously served as the bureau chief in Moscow and in Berlin, and was an education reporter.

Study shows poor school infrastructure in Latin America, Caribbean.

Caribbean, Leadership, Sint Maarten, Uncategorized, , , ,

Cross posted from the Jamaica Observer.

WASHINGTON, United States (CMC) — A new study has found that only one in four students in basic education in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) attends an educational centre with sufficient school infrastructure.

 

The study undertaken by the Education Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in Latin America and the Caribbean involved a comparative analysis of the relation between the state of school infrastructure in the region and learning among students from 15 countries.

 

The research involved a comparison of students’ results in the assessments of the Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (TERCE) and school infrastructure characteristics and it revolved around the concepts of sufficiency, equity, and effectiveness.

 

The TERCE study was carried out by the Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education (LLECE), which is coordinated by the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in Latin America and the Caribbean.

 

 

 

The study concludes that only one in four students in basic education in the region attend an educational centre with sufficient school infrastructure.

 

“Sufficiency is a concept related to access to six infrastructure categories: water and sanitation; connection to services; educational or academic spaces; offices areas; multipurpose rooms, and classroom equipment. In contrast, almost one third of the students in basic education attend schools with only two or less categories that met sufficiency levels of school infrastructure.”

 

Similarly, the analysis reveals significant inequalities in access to the different categories of school infrastructure, both in terms of students’ socioeconomic status and the geographic location of schools. In general, lower income students from countries that participated in TERCE attend schools with infrastructure in poor conditions.

 

The study also confirmed that most of the school infrastructure categories are positively and significantly associated with the students’ learning achievements.

 

“Although the situation is slightly different in each country, pedagogical and educational spaces (other than classrooms), followed by connection to services and the presence of multipurpose classrooms, are the infrastructure categories that are most often associated with higher learning achievements,” the report noted..

 

The IDB and UNESCO note that the research “highlights that the challenges for countries in the region lie not only in the provision of school infrastructure, but also in ensuring that these facilities truly become spaces and environments that promote a quality education”.

Umm Musa al-Finlandiyyah: What they never told me.

Islam, Uncategorized, , , , , ,

The following is a testimonial from a Finnish woman in the Islamic State explaining her conversion experience, and various creeds and doctrines within the Islamic State as pertains to Islam. Many of the points brought up by Umm Musa are indeed valid, one crucial point being that a Muslim is one who practices and observes all the Islamic tenets on a daily basis. One cannot be a Muslim homosexual, since in Islam that lifestyle as in true Christianity is a sin. There Muslim is no Muslim porn star porn and Islam, Christianity or Judaism is mutually exclusive, porn in and of itself is a defilement of the soul, all of the monotheist faiths are premised on the sacredness of the believers soul and their relation to God. The western attempt to reinterpret, Islam, Christianity and Judaism out of a secular modernist prism, is failing and will continue to fail, for no one is an expert in any area of human endeavor except participants, including faith communities. Resultantly all attempts by secularists to reinterpret faith, for contemporary public consumption will continue to meet with ruin and disaster.

Umm Musa al-Finlandiyyah: What they never told me.

All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of the creation, and may peace and blessings be upon the one who was sent with a sword as a mercy to mankind. After coming to Islam, I was given a pile of guides compiled for the new Muslim. These books and booklets explained the five pillars of Islam and the six pillars of iman, and also taught how to perform wudu and salah. At first, I thought this was quite a lot, as I had previously seen the lack of religious adherence by so-called “Muslims” – those whom I had thought to be Muslims – who didn’t pray, possibly fasted during Ramadan, and whose extent of following the Shari’ah was restricted to the avoidance of eating pork.

After my iman (iman is faith) started to root deeper and I gained a better understanding of what Islam really means, I started to wonder how these customary “Muslims,” who would neither pray nor fast, could even call themselves Muslims. When I asked about this problem, I received varying answers from both lay “Muslims” and supposedly knowledgeable “Muslims.” The responses were so different; I couldn’t decide which one of them to follow. Most of them claimed that even if a person doesn’t pray, he can still be considered a Muslim. Perhaps due to the number of those who said that, I decided to follow that claim without investigating the topic any further.

I didn’t face this particular matter again until sometime later. Then, someone who was braver than most of the others, dared to open his mouth and say that leaving the salah is, indeed, kufr. This time, I couldn’t let the matter rest, so I decided to start looking for an answer to this question myself. I started to read books about ‘aqidah. One of them mentioned something that I had never heard of before as a Muslim: the nullifiers of Islam. I was shocked! This was partly because I had never given thought to such a serious matter, and partly because nowhere else was I taught that, “Yes! In a blink of an eye, you can nullify your Islam and go from being a Muslim to being a murtadd kafir!”

Kufr and riddah are two words that are taboo in the “Muslim” community of Finland. Few dare to utter them aloud and even fewer dare to accuse anyone of falling into them. But what is most dangerous is that most of them don’t even know that there are actions that take people out of Islam, so many people think they are still Muslims, while in reality they have fallen into kufr and riddah.

Many people think Islam is like a citizenship – once you get it, it remains with you until the end of your life. But Islam doesn’t work with the same principle. It has conditions by which one enters it and nullifiers by which can leave it – even without knowing it.

Just as wudu, salah, and fasting can be broken by certain actions, so too can one’s Islam be broken, and nothing restores it except sincere repentance. It is the responsibility of every Muslim to protect himself and others from kufr, so it is necessary to know about those actions which lead to it.

The nullifiers of Islam that deal with democracy and man-made laws are those least mentioned. Participating in government elections and voting in them, as well as military service, working as a lawyer, and criticizing the Shari’ah of Allah, are only a few of the many things which can nullify one’s Islam, and all of them are easy to perpetrate when living in Dar al-Kufr.

The kufr of these actions is rarely explained to the Muslims, nor are they warned about it; in fact, they are often even incited to commit them by the many evil scholars, the imams of kufr and their followers! Blame for this negligence could just as easily fall upon the reason for this ignorance is the lack of study of the religion among individuals.

Though most of the the imams, the “scholars,” and the lecturers. Instead of warning about shirk and kufr, they belittle their importance, possibly even recommending that one commits kufr for the sake of some passing worldly benefit or for the sake of “tolerance.” They hold firmly to what they have learned at Murjiah-run schools in the Arab world and elsewhere, teaching – in practicality– that no Muslim can truly fall into kufr, as they criticize anyone who declares the riddah of a claimant to Islam for his commission of shirk or another act of blatant kufr.

However, Allah has promised in His Book that even if the Muslims were to abandon their religion, they would be replaced by those who would remain faithful to Him and to His limits. He said, “O you who believe! Whoever of you should revert from his religion, Allah will bring forth a people He will love and who will love Him, who are humble toward the believers, powerful against the disbelievers; they strive in the cause of Allah and do not fear the blame of any blamer. That is the favor of Allah, which He bestows upon whom He wills, and Allah is Encompassing and Knowing” (Al-Maidah 54).

 

Perhaps the fulfillment of this ayah in our time came only recently. As the masses of “Muslims” in the world have been falling day by day into kufr and riddah, into accepting only an Irja-based creed, and rejecting the clarity of the Quran and the Sunnah, it was only a matter of time that Allah would replace them with true Muslims who applied the Shari’ah, rejecting kufr and guarding themselves from riddah, without appeasing anyone who criticized them for doing so. The Islamic State rose from sincerity and was nourished by the blood of shuhada who took the fight against kufr seriously, striking at it until they met their Lord in that condition, striving in His cause.

And by the grace of Allah, the Islamic State has continued to have a firm policy against kufr and riddah. It hasn’t hesitated to make takfir despite the blame of any critics. This is because it didn’t come about to please the people, but rather, to please the Lord of creation. Thus, when the Messenger of Allah ordered to kill anyone who leaves Islam, the Islamic State listened and obeyed, as “It is not for a believing man or a believing woman, when Allah and His Messenger have decided a matter that they should have any choice in their affair” (Al-Ahzab 36).

When the kafir media began spreading the news about the mass executions conducted by the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham, many foolish people accused it of being of the “Khawarij.”

And when it burned Muath al-Kasasbeh, it was called an “un-Islamic extremist organization.” As many of the so-called “Muslim” world protested and disavowed themselves from these actions, no one brought up the kufr and riddah of which these who were executed and burned were guilty! And how could they, for they themselves didn’t know what the nullifiers of Islam were or what they included.

There is not a single enemy which the Islamic State is fighting that is free of kufr. Those factions that it wages war against have committed at least one nullifier– and most have committed more than one – which is usually their supporting the kuffar against the Muslims, as well as their endeavor to replace the law of Allah with man-made legislation. And even though

this fact has been brought out several times, it doesn’t benefit the Muslims unless they know that these actions are, in fact, riddah and kufr. For this reason, the ignorant “Muslims” are blaming the Islamic State for spreading fitnah and “spoiling the jihad,” though the only true jihad for Allah’s cause is what the IslamicState is actually conducting – for all of its enemies do nothing to support the establishment of Allah’s rule on earth.