As far as I remember, he is.
"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."And the power behind Breitbart news too. The man is trouble. And his daughters are likely to pick up the torch for him after he's gone, as they're also involved with Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica, and the new equivalent to Cambridge that is being built, Emerdata.
edited 6th Apr '18 10:18:52 AM by TheWanderer
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |edited 9th Apr '18 8:16:22 AM by AlityrosThePhilosopher
Just as my freedom ends where yours begins my tolerance of you ends where your intolerance toward me begins. As told by an old friendIn general the infamous Memri TV is a source of watching debates in the Middle East get violent.
I came across this recently, though, and it's extremely heartwarming. And they're all agreeing with each other too.
edited 13th May '18 9:01:43 PM by TheWildWestPyro
Ramadhan Kareem to all observants.
Just as my freedom ends where yours begins my tolerance of you ends where your intolerance toward me begins. As told by an old friendRamadhan Kareem to all who celebrate it. In the spirit of giving, let's spare a thought for the Uighur residents of Xinjiang, who are being targeted by the Xi regime for a campaign of concerted cultural erasure.
There, he faced endless brainwashing and humiliation, he said in an interview, was forced to study Communist propaganda for hours every day, and chant slogans giving thanks and wishing long life to President Xi Jinping.
"Those who disobeyed the rules, refused to be on duty, engaged in fights or were late for studies were placed in handcuffs and ankle cuffs for up to 12 hours," he said. Further disobedience would result in waterboarding or long periods strapped in agony in a metal contraption known as a "tiger chair," he said, a punishment he said he suffered.
Between several hundred thousand to just over 1 million Muslims have been detained inside China's mass "reeducation" camps in the restive province of Xinjiang, Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology in Korntal, Germany, said in a report released Tuesday. Zenz is a leading authority on the current crackdown in Xinjiang.
In a region of 21 million people, including 11 million Muslims, the number of those he reports to be detained would be a significant proportion of the population, especially of young adult men.
Emerging accounts of the conditions in these camps make for chilling reading.
"China's pacification drive in Xinjiang is, more than likely, the country’s most intense campaign of coercive social re-engineering since the end of the Cultural Revolution," Zenz wrote, referring to the chaos unleashed by Mao Zedong in the 1960s.
"The state's proclaimed 'war on terror' in the region is increasingly turning into a war on religion, ethnic languages and other expressions of ethnic identity."
China has blamed violent attacks in Xinjiang in recent years on Islamic extremists bent on waging holy war on the state, with radical ideas said to be coming from abroad over the Internet and from visits to foreign countries by Uighurs, the region's predominant ethnic group.
In response, Beijing has turned the entire region into a 21st-century surveillance state, with ubiquitous checkpoints and widespread use of facial recognition technology, and has even forced Muslims to install spyware on their phones that allows the authorities to monitor their activity online, experts say. Long beards and veils have been banned, and overt expression of religious sentiment is likely to cause immediate suspicion.
In an extension of the already pervasive program of human surveillance, more than 1 million Communist Party cadres have been dispatched to spend days on end staying in the homes of (mostly Muslim) families throughout Xinjiang, according to a report by Human Rights Watch released this week, where they carry out political indoctrination, and report back on anything from the extent of religious beliefs to uncleanliness and alcoholism.
"Muslim families across Xinjiang are now literally eating and sleeping under the watchful eye of the state in their own homes"” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. "The latest drive adds to a whole host of pervasive - and perverse - controls on everyday life in Xinjiang."
But reeducation camps that appear to have opened all across the region have sparked the greatest global concern.
Samarkand said 5,700 people were detained in just one camp in the village of Karamagay, almost all ethnic Kazakhs and Uighurs, and not a single person from China's Han majority ethnic group. About 200 were suspected of being "religious extremists," he said, but others had been abroad for work or university, received phone calls from abroad, or simply been seen worshiping at a mosque.
The 30-year-old stayed in a dormitory with 14 other men. After the room was searched every morning, he said, the day began with two hours of study on subjects ranging from "the spirit of the 19th Party Congress," where Xi expounded his political dogma in a three-hour speech, to China’s policies on minorities and religion. Inmates would sing Communist songs, chant "Long live Xi Jinping" and do military-style training in the afternoon, before writing an account of their day, he said.
His account was corroborated by Omir Bekali, an ethnic Kazakh who was working in a tourism company in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, until he was arrested by police on a visit to his parents in the village of Shanshan in March 2017. Four days of interrogation, during which he was prevented from sleeping, were followed by seven months in a police cell and 20 days in a reeducation camp in the city of Karamay, he said. He was given no trial, he said, nor granted access to a lawyer.
He described a day that would begin with a flag-raising ceremony at 6:30 a.m. followed by a rendition of one or more "red" songs praising the Communist revolution. After breakfast, inmates would spend 10 minutes thanking the Communist Party and Xi for providing everything for people, from food and drink to their livelihoods.
Inmates had to learn the national anthem and red songs, he said, as well as slogans condemning the "three evil forces" of separatism, extremism and terrorism.
"There were so many things to recite, and if you couldn't recite them, they wouldn't allow you to eat, sleep or sit," he said. "They brainwash you, you must become like a robot. Listen to whatever the party says, listen to the party's words, follow the party."
Some inmates committed suicide, he said.
Both men said the food was poor, with meat rare and food poisoning not uncommon. Inmates were sometimes forced to eat pork, forbidden in Islam, as punishment, while Bekali said those accused of being "religious extremists" were also forced to drink alcohol.
Bekali, 42, had emigrated to Kazakhstan in 2006 and become a Kazakh citizen, and said the Kazakh government eventually won his release. Samarkand said he was allowed to leave for Kazakhstan to join his wife and children after having his house and savings, worth about $190,000, confiscated by the government. He was given 500 yuan, equivalent to $80, by police at the border as he departed.
Both men, interviewed by phone, are now in Kazakhstan.
Although the Chinese government has officially denied the existence of these camps, Zenz gathered evidence of 73 government procurement and construction bids valued at more than $100 million, along with public recruitment notices and other documents, pointing to the establishment of camps across the region.
He dates the onset of widespread detentions to March 2017, and a government campaign of "de-extremification" through education. That followed the appointment of Chen Quanguo as party secretary in Xinjiang in August 2016, and his transfer from Tibet, where he oversaw a similar program of intense social control, surveillance and securitization.
Many procurement bids, Zenz noted, mandate the installation of comprehensive security features that turn existing facilities into prisonlike compounds, with walls, security fences, barbed wire, reinforced security doors, surveillance systems, secure access systems, watchtowers, and guard rooms for police.
"While there is no published data on reeducation detainee numbers, information from various sources permit us to estimate internment figures at anywhere between several hundred thousand and just over one million," Zenz wrote in a report first published by the Jamestown Foundation.
"The latter figure is based on a leaked document from within the region's public security agencies, and, when extrapolated to all of Xinjiang, could indicate a detention rate of up to 11.5 percent of the region's adult Uighur and Kazakh population."
Bekali said he met doctors, lawyers and teachers in the camps, while Radio Free Asia (RFA) has reported that wealthy businessmen, 80-year-olds and even breast-feeding mothers have been among the detainees.
One of the most well-known detainees is a Uighur soccer player, Erfan Hezim, 19, a former member of China's youth soccer team and now a forward for Chinese Super League team Jiangsu Suning. Hezim, also known by his Chinese name Ye Erfan, was detained in February while visiting his parents in Xinjiang, according to RFA, on the pretext that he had visited foreign countries, although he had reportedly traveled abroad only to train and take part in soccer matches.
Also detained have been dozens of family members of journalists from the Washington-based RFA, who have been at the forefront of reporting on the deepening crackdown in Xinjiang and the reeducation camps. At least two of the affected reporters, both naturalized U.S. citizens, have reason to believe their family members were detained directly because of their reporting, RFA said.
In one report, RFA quoted a Chinese official as justifying the widespread detentions in blunt terms.
"You can't uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one - you need to spray chemicals to kill them all," the official was quoted as saying. "Reeducating these people is like spraying chemicals on the crops. That is why it is a general reeducation, not limited to a few people."
For all those in our midst seeing Islam as the root cause of all our troubles, the PRC must seem like a fantasyland, a dream come true and the way of the future.
The Hui shouldn’t expect their “Hannitude” (“Hannity”?) to preserve them from a treatment similar to the Uighurs’. It would be hardly surprising should next edition of schoolbooks eclipsing the fact that Zheng He was Muslim, maybe it’s happened already.
Iunno, I've never heard of the Hui referring to themselves as Han. There's admittedly a deep chasm between the two groups driven by their (relatively) preferential treatment under the People's Republic, which reeks of divide-and-conquer.
But hey, at least the Uighurs get to share their iftar with an enthusiastic house-guest now.
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)Speaking of fasting, my own family members actually said that I am not a Muslim, so don't fast the way they do back during my university days when I actually fasted for the entire fasting month.
Does this count as Islamophobia?
The Hui shouldn’t expect their “Hannitude” (“Hannity”?) to preserve them from a treatment similar to the Uighurs’. It would be hardly surprising should next edition of schoolbooks eclipsing the fact that Zheng He was Muslim, maybe it’s happened already.
The motivations and means are rather different.
(I'm not playing apologist for China, just pointing out that they're different)
Does this count as Islamophobia?
China's run by Redditors who take "remove kebab" completely to heart.
Except no it's not, remove Kebab is used in the context of ethnic cleansing or genocide while China seems to be more engaged in cultural suppression at best cultural genocide at worst.
As I said in the previous post they're rather different means and motivations.
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -HylarnEssentially it refers to the destruction of culture instead of people, the Holocaust was purely genocide in that the Nazis attempted to exterminate the Jewish people and other minority groups while an example of cultural genocide would be the practice of taking native children from their families and being taught 'proper' Western culture that occurred in Australia, the US, and Canada.
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -HylarnSo last Thursday was my sister's birthday and seven of her friends came visiting. All Muslim women. It became clear that we were not on the same page, particularly concerning our views on women, drugs and materialism, as they proceeded to watch Germany's Next Top Model. And trying to get me to smoke a cigarette.
But Islam isn't compatible with Western society! Muslims can't integrate! They're more at home here than I am.
Just found it funny and thought I'd share.
This reminded me of a certain kind of bigotry that even Muslims of my own country (begrudgingly) agree with:
The belief that local Muslims are hypocrites who are willing commit all kinds of sins except eating pork.
Is this the case in the rest of Muslim majority countries?
I would imagine thats a perception shared by all humanity about about every religious community since the dawn of time.
Frankly it's mostly accurate, not the hypocrisy part but it simply isn't realistic for someone to follow every rule of their religion. Especially because most people don't even know their religious that well. So picking and choosing what one follows is very much the norm, even if one doesn't necessarily know what they're doing.
edited 20th May '18 10:30:36 AM by Fourthspartan56
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -HylarnThe Canadian Forces expelled three officer cadets for desecrating a Quran. Several others are being disciplined.
Play stupid games...
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Forgive my belated reply Fourthspartan 56, in your #1712 from May 17 you wrote:
So unless they seek to expel or exterminate them, it’s what then? Your average ordinary everyday xenophobia?
As in “Islamophobia is hating/fearing/resenting Islam and Muslims more than is necessary”?
These are just questions, not meant as an attack.
That the PRC will persecute anything and anyone perceived by the party as a threat to its total domination is a given, when it targets Islam and Muslims it’s that kind of bigotry, which is usually called Islamophobia for short (ish), methinks.
Just as my freedom ends where yours begins my tolerance of you ends where your intolerance toward me begins. As told by an old friendI absolutely don't view this as an attack.
And I apologize if I wasn't clear but I wasn't saying China isn't being Islamophobic, my point was that their Islamophobia is different from the common Islamophobia in the the 'West' in that it's meant to destroy the culture of the Muslim minorities instead of physically removing them.
edited 30th May '18 7:07:30 AM by Fourthspartan56
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -HylarnThank you for your reply and for the clarification Fourthspartan 56.
The difference between Western and Chinese histories make the context.
China has, throughout the millennia, expanded and assimilated various populations, sinicising (not sure it’s a word) them, and the various Muslim ethnoi of in the PRC are probably seen as more of the same.
Christendom has traditionally deemed Islam, from way back, as both the great rival and as intrinsically alien to itself, and Western Islamophobes today (including non-Christian ones) share that view.
Pervasive racialist views may mean that many Western Islamophobes probably consider the assimilation of Muslims (as in de-Islamising them) is impossible and that only a physical removal will do.
However, racial theories have gradually entered PCC ideological discourse and so they might arrive to similar conclusions. Observing the ruthlessness that regime is known for, yes, I be very afraid.
Just as my freedom ends where yours begins my tolerance of you ends where your intolerance toward me begins. As told by an old friendhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-44289957
Indian law enforcement is in trouble as an officer who protected a Muslim man from Hindu mobs is being targeted too.
Isn't Robert also the one that kept funding Cambridge Analytica?
Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, we should find the absolutes that tie us.