90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, October 22, 2017

THE MEDIA OVER HYPED EVERYTHING

Another grand Western tradition destroyed by the hijrah. Music festivals, concerts, New Year’s celebrations, Christmas markets will fade from public life — the risks will be too great. And in their place, under the falsity of respect for Islam, will be Muslim rituals and traditions.

GERMANY: MIGRANT GANGS TURN VIOLENT, DISRUPT POPULAR FAIR

All attackers were “immigrants or German citizens of immigrant-background.”

As Germany marks the second anniversary of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s fateful decision to open the country’s border to more than a million ‘refugees.’ gangs of migrant men rioted and disrupted a German popular folk fair, the “Fellbacher Herbst,” near the German city of Stuttgart.

“More than 60 youths aged between 15 and 19 planned beforehand to riot on Sunday and Saturday evening” reported the local German-language newspaper Stuttgarter Nachrichten on Wednesday. The rioting led to several injuries and at least one person was hospitalized after being attacked by a “dangerous instrument,” the newspaper revealed.

According to the local police, the violent mob was “exclusively” comprised “of immigrants or German citizens of immigrant-origin.” The media reports did not comment on the nationalities or the actual motives of the rioters.

The folk festival Fellbacher Herbst is regarded as the largest autumn and wine festivals in southern German state of Baden-Württemberg. Stuttgarter Nachrichten reported the incidents that took place last weekend:

Two gangs of youth from Fellbach and the surrounding areas had “planned beforehand to carry out the riot,” the officials from the mayor’s office and Fellbach Police said in a statement concerning [the event] over the weekend. Especially noticeable was the fact that the violent gang was made up of very young men. Around 60 young men between the ages of 15 and 19 clashed with each other. According to information provided by the police, they were all “exclusively German citizens of migrant-origin or migrants”.

The teens managed to evade the police and build small groups, forcing the police to...

A Miami man suspected of being inspired by Islamic extremists was arrested Friday night on a charge of attempting to blow up a bomb at the Dolphin Mall by FBI counter-terrorism agents in an undercover operation.

Vicente Solano, who acted alone, was communicating with a confidential informant who tipped off the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force about his alleged plot to carry out a weapons of mass destruction attack on the sprawling mall in Doral, according to authorities.

Before the planned bombing attack, Solano made pro-Islamic State videos, authorities said. But there is no indication he was directed by ISIS terrorists.

When he was arrested, Solano planned to detonate the WMD, which was a sham bomb that he acquired from FBI undercover agents — a strategy deployed in previous counter-terrorism probes in South Florida.

Solano will have his first appearance in Miami federal court on Monday, when a criminal complaint and affidavit will be filed that charge him with attempting to blow up a WMD.

The FBI’s undercover operations have become textbook procedures in the post-9/11 era. Agents rely on confidential informants to bring them suspicious information, so they can engage a suspect plotting to use a WMD and thwart the plan before it happens. Informants routinely work with undercover agents while recording conversations with the suspect.

In recent years, the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami has obtained convictions against Harlem Suarez, a Key West man who plotted to blow up a bomb on a public beach while supporting a foreign terrorist organization, and James Medina, a Hollywood man who tried to bomb a synagogue in Aventura. Suarez, 25, was sentenced to...

"#MeToo" is the social media meme of the moment. In a 24-hour period, the phrase was tweeted nearly a half million times and posted on Facebook 12 million times. Spearheaded by actress Alyssa Milano in the wake of Hollyweird's Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal, women have flooded social media with their own long-buried accounts of being pestered, groped or assaulted by rapacious male predators in the workplace.

Count me out.

It's one thing to break down cultural stigmas constructively, but the #MeToo movement is collectivist virtue signaling of a very perilous sort. The New York Times heralded the phenomenon with multiple articles "to show how commonplace sexual assault and harassment are." The Washington Post credited #MeToo with making "the scale of sexual abuse go viral." And actress Emily Ratajkowski declared at a Marie Claire magazine's women's conference on Monday:

"The most important response to #metoo is 'I believe you.'"

No. I do not believe every woman who is now standing up to "share her story" or "tell her truth." I owe no blind allegiance to any other woman simply because we share the same pronoun. Assertions are not truths until they are established as facts and corroborated with evidence. Timing, context, motives and manner all matter.

Because I reserve the right to vet the claims of individual sexual assault complainants instead of championing them all knee-jerk and wholesale as "victims," I've been scolded as insensitive and inhumane.

"TIMING DOES NOT MATTER," a Twitter user named Meg Yarbrough fumed. "What matters is what is best for EACH INDIVIDUAL victim. You should be ashamed of yourself."

CNN anchor Jake Tapper informed me, "People coming forward should be applauded." But applauding people for "coming forward" is not a journalistic tenet. It's an advocacy tenet. Tapper responded that he was expressing the sentiment as a "human being not as a journalist." Last time I checked, humans have brains. The Weinstein scandal is not an excuse to turn them off and abdicate a basic responsibility to assess the credibility of accusers. It's an incontrovertible fact that not all accusers' claims are equal.

Some number of harrowing encounters described by Weinstein's accusers and the #MeToo hashtag activists no doubt occurred. But experience and scientific literature show us that a significant portion of these allegations will turn out to be half-truths, exaggerations or outright fabrications. That's not victim-blaming. It's reality-checking.

It is irresponsible for news outlets to extrapolate how "commonplace" sexual abuse is based on hashtag trends spread by celebrities, anonymous claimants and bots. The role of the press should be verification, not validation. Instead of interviewing activist actresses, reporters should be interviewing bona fide experts.

Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist and criminal profiler who heads the Forensic Criminology Institute, is author or co-author of 16 criminal justice books, including textbooks on rape investigation, crime reconstruction, behavioral evidence analysis and forensic victimology.

Turvey's most recent book, written with retired NYPD special victim squad detective John Savino and Mexico-based forensic psychologist Aurelio Coronado Mares, is "False Allegations: Investigative and Forensic Issues in Fraudulent Reports of Crime."

Based on their review of decades of scientific literature, Turvey and his colleagues explode the "2 percent myth" peddled by politicians, victims' advocates and journalists "claiming that the nationwide false report rate for rape and sexual assault is nonexistent." In fact, the statistic was traced to an unverified citation in a 1975 book by feminist author Susan Brownmiller.

"This figure is not only inaccurate," Turvey and his co-authors conclude, "but also it has no basis in reality."

Published research has documented false rape and sexual assault rates ranging from 8 percent to 41 percent. Savino notes that in his NYPD's Manhattan Special Victim Squad, "our false report rate was in the double digits during all of my years. Sometimes, it was as high as 40 percent." Turvey, Savino, and Mares make clear to students that based on the evidence...

The royal court that represented former first lady Michelle Obama’s staff has been slashed under current first lady Melania Trump to resemble more of a game of bridge.

Mrs. Trump has a quarter of the staff that Mrs. Obama had in a comparison of their first year in the White House, resulting in “one of the leanest East Wing operations in recent history,” according to Fox News.

Stephanie Grishamis, communications director for the first lady, said the smaller staff is by design and that Mrs. Trump aspires to be “responsible” with taxpayer’s money.

“As with all things that she does, she is being very deliberate in her hiring, focusing on quality over quantity,” Grisham told Fox News in an email. “It is important to her that the team is a good fit for what she wants to accomplish as first lady, and that everyone works well together. She also wants to be mindful and responsible when it comes to taxpayer money.”

Interestingly, the reaction on social media seemed to evolve around the use of the term “bloated”… here’s a small sampling of responses from Twitter:

4 girls, as young as 7, allegedly victimized by resettled Rohingya man

A Muslim refugee from Burma, also called Myanmar, is facing multiple sexual assault charges after he allegedly tried to kiss and fondled four girls between the ages of 7 and 12 in a New Hampshire town that just over a year ago became one of President Obama’s “Welcoming Cities.”

Police said the incidents allegedly occurred at some kind of gathering but were not more specific.

Mohammod Rafique, 27, a member of the Rohingya Muslim minority that is fleeing Burma, (because the Muslim Rohingas terrorized the Buddhists until they kicked them out) has been living in Nashua, New Hampshire, for almost two years but speaks no English.

Police cracked the case open after a 10-year-old Nashua girl told her family, then police, and then child-welfare advocates that a man “drank too much, (became) ‘touchy-touchy,’ rubbed her upper thigh and touched her buttocks,” according to the Telegraph, Nashua’s local newspaper.

Rafique also grabbed, fondled and tried to forcibly kiss the girls, according to reports.

Rafique has been unable to communicate with his attorneys or corrections staff, his lawyer told the Telegraph, and she tried to get his bail lowered earlier this week but was unsuccessful.

Just last fall, in September 2016, the Nashua City Board of Alderman narrowly voted 8-7 to become a “Welcoming City” under the umbrella of Welcoming America.

Welcoming America was founded by Obama friend and open-borders promoter David Lubell, whose agenda is to “water the soil,” softening up residents of U.S. cities to accept the seeding of Third World refugees and illegal immigrants.

The Obama White House honored Welcoming America as a White House Champion of Change for innovations in immigrant integration. The organization has also been honored by...

In response to a Judicial Watch lawsuit, the State Department claims in a legal document that it has no records involving refugee travel loans that the agency gives foreigners overseas to buy plane tickets to fly to the United States. The program is operated by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an intergovernmental group that assists refugees worldwide with hundreds of millions of dollars from Uncle Sam. The money is channeled through the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM). In fiscal year 2016 the State Department gave IOM $477,257,564, according to the agency’s report on contributions to international organizations. That doesn’t even include millions more that the State Department gives the IOM for special refugee resettlement “platforms” that pop up throughout the year.

On its website the IOM writes that it provides interest-free loans “furnished by the Department of State” to “all refugees arriving in the United States:” Judicial Watch launched an investigation into the refugee loan program and filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the State Department last year to uncover details. In the request Judicial Watch asked for all records from 2010 to 2016 reflecting the number of Refugee Travel Loans furnished by the State Department’s PRM to the IOM per year, the number of travel loans that are defaulted upon per year and the amount of money written off per defaulted loan. The State Department failed to respond to the FOIA request by the federally-mandated deadline and Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit earlier this year.

In a federal court document responding to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, the State Department writes that its “search did not retrieve any records reflecting the number of refugee travel loans furnished per year using U.S. Government funds, the number of such travel loans defaulted on annually, nor the amount of money written off per defaulted loan.” In a footnote the agency writes that it did retrieve some records reflecting IOM’s “general reporting” on refugee travel loans, but none of it contained the “specific information sought” by Judicial Watch. This is outrageous because it suggests that the State Department can’t account for money American taxpayers are lending to foreigners to fly here to declare themselves refugees. A source with inside knowledge of the matter confirmed to Judicial Watch that the records exist and years ago a State Department insider provided figures that show only about half of the travel loans have been repaid since the program was launched in the 1950s, representing a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars to American taxpayers. Judicial Watch viewed the records, which span from 1952 to 2002 and reveal that the IOM issued $1,020,803,910 in “transportation” loans and recovered only $584, 219,453.

The U.S.-funded refugee loan program is a broader racket that extends beyond travel money and involves...