United Nations Human Rights Council Ignores 45 Million Held in Slavery

[From article]
On May 31, 2016, the terrorist group Hamas executed three Palestinians, two by hanging, in Gaza City. A week earlier, Hamas had called for the resumption of capital punishment. To no one’s surprise, the silence about this from the UNHRC has been deafening. By contrast, a UNHRC resolution of March 24, 2016, initiated by Palestinians and sponsored by a number of Arab countries, was passed by a vote of 32 for, none against, and 15 abstentions.
The resolution concerned something called “Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territory including East Jerusalem and Occupied Syrian Golan.” It called for a blacklist, a database of all business enterprises involved in Israeli settlements.
[. . .]



Ironically, the UNHRC resolution was passed on the very day registering the fifth year of the Syrian civil war, a conflict that has become not only regional but international and has brought such misery to the area and the world. The Arab commentary in the UNHRC on the day was not on the 250,000 killed or the millions of refugees caused by the war in Syria, or the migration crisis that has consumed Europe. Instead, it was limited to the assertion that construction in the Israeli settlements undermines the regional and international efforts to reach a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
The behavior of UNHRC as well as other international organizations, the BDS movement and activists, and so-called human rights groups towards Israel has largely been one of disgraceful bigotry and possibly manifestations of anti-Semitism. This is not liberal behavior but is reactionary as well as counterproductive in supporting the refusal of Palestinian authorities to come to the negotiating table with Israel.
This relentless concentration of effort and energy against the Jewish State has also meant neglecting almost entirely one of the world’s real great evils -- the existence of modern slavery. The UNHRC and the BDS bigots condemn products made by the labor of free individuals who may differ politically. They are not concerned with products made by slave labor.
The international community has paid little or no attention to the fact, as reported in a 2016 Global Slavery Index, that 46.8 million people are subject to some form of modern slavery. This condition is defined as possessing or controlling persons so as to deprive them of individual liberty through use, management, profit, or disposal.
Modern slavery has many dimensions. It would include domestic slavery, exploited labor, human trafficking, forced or servile marriages, sale or exploitation of children, women trapped in brothels, debt bondage, servitude, cleaning work, work without pay or under threat of penalty, removal of organs, and people subjected to violence. In modern slavery, persons are exploited and cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, abuse of power, or deception.
The paradox is that modern slavery exists despite the fact that all countries have declared slavery illegal. The number of slaves may well be higher because the survey in the Global Index of countries excluded places of conflict or where there was serious disruption of government functioning.
[. . .]



The Index presents a ranking of 167 countries based on the proportion of the population that is estimated to be in modern slavery. The countries with the highest estimated proportion are North Korea, Uzbekistan, Cambodia, India, and Qatar.
Qatar has the highest prevalence of slavery. In these countries there is forced labor, prison labor camps, forced marriages, sexual exploitation. The countries with the highest absolute numbers are India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Uzbekistan. The present U.S. presidential candidates might note that these are countries with low cost labor that allows them to undercut U.S. products.
[. . .]
India is the worst with 18 million slaves, while North Korea has the highest percentage of slaves per capita. Half, 58 %, of the 45.8 million are in five countries: India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Uzbekistan.
The Index ranks ten counties in the Middle East. The situation there has been worsened by ISIS, the Islamist Caliphate, which, among other things, has sold women and children into slavery, and has issued statements on Sharia law saying that it is permissible to buy, sell, or give as gifts female captives and slaves because they are merely property. Forced marriages with child brides are frequent as are “temporary” or “tourist” marriages. Palestinians in Gaza have used children as suicide bombers and human shields.
[. . .]
The UNHRC, BDS bigots, and the relentless enemies of the State of Israel will be unhappy to learn of it, but the country with lowest proportion -- virtually zero -- of modern slaves is Israel. These bigots need to take account of the proper moral calculus in the Middle East, as well as turn their attention to the horrors of slavery.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/06/why_is_the_un_human_rights_council_not_concerned_about_slavery.html

June 3, 2016
Why is the UN Human Rights Council Not Concerned About Slavery?
By Michael Curtis

Software Fights Modern Slave Labor

[From article]
Today, the tools to combat slavery have become decidedly more high-tech (and nonviolent). Made in a Free World in San Francisco, for example, has developed software that helps companies determine whether products they sell or make depend on global slave labor.
But even the most advanced algorithms can’t replace the one thing the United States needed more than guns and cannons to win the conflict 150 years ago: the will to eliminate it.
According to the International Labor Organization, at least 20 million people across the world are being forced to work for no pay. These workers are either directly or indirectly producing the goods sold by major corporations and small businesses alike, including those in the United States.
[. . .]



In a global economy, tracing who does what (and with what, and where) poses a complex challenge, since supply chains are long and convoluted, with companies relying on layers of suppliers who contract work out to smaller suppliers and so on.
“At the level of global brands, forced labor and human trafficking can often be hidden from view, the result of complex and frequently outsourced recruitment and hiring practices,” according to a United Nations report.
[. . .]



Last year, the Associated Press reported on an island off the coast of Indonesia where thousands of enslaved fishermen caught seafood sold by U.S. supermarkets like Walmart and Kroger.
[. . .]
Justin Dillon helped create an algorithm that allows consumers to determine the probability that companies were using slave labor, especially in raw material production, to make 400 popular products like beds, cars and cell phones.
[. . .]
But Dillon realized that consumers were just one half the equation. To create real change, Made in a Free World needed to help companies — not just shame them — to rid slave labor from supply chains.
[. . .]



Companies can enter data into the system and the software — which costs $250 a year for small companies, $25,000 for larger firms — which then spits out probabilities and risks for slave labor, based on information like a country’s government, human rights record, labor issues, and trade and migration flows.
[. . .]
Over the past five years, the movement to clean up corporate supply chains has gained much momentum. In 2010, California passed a law requiring large manufacturers and retailers doing business in the state to disclose their efforts to eradicate slavery and human trafficking from supply chains. The federal Dodd-Frank Act requires companies to state whether they use conflict minerals

[. . .] from the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa.
[. . .]
Many companies would simply rather not know whether they use slave labor, he said.
“Every Western executive would agree with that ... until you ask them what they would be willing to pay to find out whether they're already supporting it. What are they supposed to do with the information once they find out? Action costs even more money. And are their competitors going to be compelled to take similar costly action?”
[. . .]



Large companies mostly react to problems instead of getting ahead of them. And companies generally are not willing to spend money on issues unless absolutely necessary and competitors do the same.
[. . .]
And yet, ethical consumers and companies will want to start somewhere. Made in a Free World’s true value, at least for now, is to provide a means to a worthwhile end. The technology is there — all we need is the will to use it.

http://www.govtech.com/public-safety/Tech-Helps-to-Spot-Modern-Day-Slave-Labor.html

Tech Helps to Spot Modern-Day Slave Labor
'Made in a Free World' has developed software that helps companies determine whether products they sell or make depend on global slave labor.
BY THOMAS LEE

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

FEBRUARY 2, 2016

Cambridge City Councilor Proposes Remarkable Plans

Benzan wants to bring back slavery in Cambridge. Not black people but, persons with disabilities and those without homes who likely did not commit any crime are encouraged to volunteer to improve Central Square. Does this show hatred toward persons with disabilities by this councilor? Why not compel lawyers, professors, politicians, architects, engineers and doctors to volunteer for cleanup? If the end is to treat drug addiction with more beds, why not put a clinic in Central Square instead of police to address the drug problem? High tech trash barrels increase the spread of germs unlike the old ones, which do not require touching. A legacy of the City Council which approved the expenditures. When did I make a vow to others in the community, or others to me? Cambridge citizens, strong conformists, do not support others. With three universities in the city, the academic community dominates as the most competitive, not caring, group in this country.



[From article]
employ members of our community who are currently living in local shelters or receiving mental health treatment
[. . .]
increasing our drug treatment capacity and number of beds
[. . .]



improve trash collection efforts and possibly replace our solar-powered trash barrels
[. . .]
renew our vows to each other as a community

http://cambridge.wickedlocal.com/article/20150921/NEWS/150929485

Guest Column: Cleaning up Central Square
By Vice Mayor Dennis Benzan
Posted Sep. 21, 2015 at 10:50 AM
CAMBRIDGE Chronicle

Daughter Of World War II Slave Laborer Finds Mother, 91, Living In Italy

Photo: Its-arolsen.org
Thanks to the help of the International Tracing Service, Margot Bachmann found her mother alive and well at age 91 in Italy, 70 years after they were separated by the Nazis.

[From article]
“I wanted to find out who my mother was, to see if we were alike, maybe find some photos and some information,” Bachmann said in an ITS press release. “I never dared to hope that I would be able to hold her in my arms. Now I’m overjoyed that she’s doing well and I got to meet her.”
Bachmann’s mother, identified as Gianna, was a forced laborer taken from Italy to work in Germany during the war. During her time there, she fell in love with a German soldier and got pregnant. Bachmann was subsequently born in October 1944, but Nazi authorities severed the mother’s parental rights the next month.
After the war ended, Gianna returned home, believing that her daughter and lover had died in the war. In
truth, Bachmann was saved from an orphanage by her father, who already had a wife, and raised by that couple, eventually becoming the older sister to seven others.
[. . .]

Gianna ended up sentenced to life working in a military installation. She was 20 at the time of Bachmann’s birth and had no idea her lover already had a wife.
Meanwhile, Bachmann was raised by her Germany family, forbidden to ask too many questions about her mother. She was told that her mother was Italian and was led to believe that she was dead.
“Even as a child, I had the sense that something wasn’t right,” said Bachmann, who now lives near Frankfurt. She said she only got the courage to look for her birth mother years after her father, whom she described as strict, died.
Aided by her own daughters, she tracked down her birth certificate and ended up with the ITS, an archive and documentation center that tracks Nazi persecution and the fates of those who survived. The trip to Novellara came quickly after that, during which she met multiple other relatives. An additional visit is already being planned.

http://www.sfgate.com/world/article/70-years-later-mother-and-daughter-separated-by-6440633.php

70 years later, mother and daughter separated by Nazis reunite
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Updated 12:53 pm, Thursday, August 13, 2015

Black Racism Lobbyists Live in The Past

[From article]
But by the time modern concepts of Social Darwinism and race evolved slavery had already been abolished -- these concepts didn’t cause slavery, but came after the fact, though of course, they did help perpetuate Jim Crow and general discrimination against blacks. Nonetheless, blacks -- though they have suffered under these ideas -- did not get the worst of it, white Jews did, suffering six million dead as a direct consequence (out of a population of about 15 million.) [. . .]
For example, after the 9/11 attack Coates felt no sympathy for the firefighters or policemen who died
[. . .]



The recent shout-down of Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders by Blacklivesmatter protesters shows that Coates’ view, far from being radical, is already accepted on the left. O’Malley, who quite reasonably said that not only black lives matter, but that all lives matter, subsequently caved and apologized. For people who see a nation dominated by white racism and privilege, white lives don’t really much matter, just as the lives of the firefighters and policemen who died on 9/11 did not matter to Coates.



Coates likely has little influence on groups like Blacklivesmatter. Unless the Atlantic’s demographics have dramatically changed, his readership is overwhelmingly of the white limousine liberal variety -- people who think self-hate is cool. Indeed, Coates may be behind the curve already. But that is small comfort in a society that now seems to be slowly coming apart at the seams, because frankly, the ideas of Coates’ radical Black Panther father, and those of the American Constitution cannot coexist. And one has to wonder, is this really what a smart guy like Ta-Nehisi Coates wants for himself and his son?

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/07/americas_radical_foremost_intellectual.html

July 23, 2015
America's Radical 'Foremost Intellectual'
By Jonathan Keiler

Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Son of Cambridge MA, Ben Affleck Conspired To Cover Up Unpleasant Truth

Cambridge, MA native Ben Affleck with Massachusett's most prominent and wealthiest politician. 

Looks as if Affleck found his roots and did not like them. So he asked Professor Gates if he could rewrite them, and rewrite them he did. What else was covered up at Harvard University by their scholars which prominent persons did not like? It indicates that all things great and small are for sale even at Harvard University with its $36 billion endowment. 

[From article]
PBS launched its investigation after it was reported that Affleck requested the program not reveal his ancestor's slave-holding history in the 2014 episode. The Associated Press examined historical documents and found that Affleck's great-great-great-grandfather owned 24 slaves.
The review found that co-producers violated PBS standards by allowing improper influence on the show's editorial process and failed to inform PBS or producing station WNET of Affleck's efforts to affect the program's content.
In a statement, series host and executive producer Henry Louis Gates Jr. apologized for forcing PBS to defend the integrity of its programming. He said he's working with public TV on new guidelines to ensure increased transparency.
[. . .]
Gates and PBS said in April they didn't censor the slave-owner details. Instead, more interesting ancestors of Affleck emerged and Gates chose to highlight them instead in the show that traces the ancestry of well-known guests.
But in an email exchange between Gates and Sony Pictures chief executive Michael Lynton, Gates asks Lynton for advice on how to handle Affleck's request.
"Here's my dilemma," says Gates in one email, dated July 22, 2014, "confidentially, for the first time, one of our guests has asked us to edit out something about one of his ancestors — the fact that he owned slaves. Now, four or five of our guests this season descend from slave owners, including (documentary filmmaker) Ken Burns. We've never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found. He's a megastar. What do we do?"
Lynton replied that it all depends on who knows that the information was in the documentary already.

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2015/06/25/pbs-halts-production-finding-your-roots-amid-flap-over-ben-affleck-episode/

PBS halts production of 'Finding Your Roots' amid flap over Ben Affleck episode
Published June 25, 2015Associated Press
Fox News

* * *

[From article]
Well, Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. has learned his lesson about getting cozy with the stars.
After investigating Ben Affleck’s ancestry for his PBS program “Finding Your Roots,” Gates and his team discovered that Affleck, who won an Oscar for producing “Argo” — the film about the heroic rescue of American embassy workers from Iran after the death of the Shah — had an ancestor who was a Hollywood p.r. nightmare: a slave owner. At the request of the star, and obviously his team of handlers, the info was suppressed and not included in the segment on Affleck when it aired last October.
Well, Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. has learned his lesson about getting cozy with the stars. After investigating Ben Affleck’s ancestry for his PBS program “Finding Your Roots,” Gates and his team discovered that Affleck, who won an Oscar for producing “Argo” — the film about the heroic rescue of American embassy workers from Iran after the death of the Shah — had an ancestor who was a Hollywood p.r. nightmare: a slave owner. At the request of the star, and obviously his team of handlers, the info was suppressed and not included in the segment on Affleck when it aired last October. Mortified by this omission, PBS, which depends on grants, corporate sponsorship and viewer contributions to keep itself going, conducted an investigation into “Finding Your Roots,” looking for possible malfeasance — and found plenty. Affleck, they determined, had “improper influence” on the sell-out producers and the scheduling of the third season of “Finding Your Roots” has been delayed pending changes in both staffing and editorial quality control.
[. . .]
But did that mean that Affleck, who promoted his blue-collar Boston roots in the “Good Will Hunting” part of his career, had to get his Hollywood machine to lean on the obviously naive Gates — who must have thought, “Gee, these Hollywood stars must really like me because they’re on my show”?

Mortified by this omission, PBS, which depends on grants, corporate sponsorship and viewer contributions to keep itself going, conducted an investigation into “Finding Your Roots,” looking for possible malfeasance — and found plenty. Affleck, they determined, had “improper influence” on the sell-out producers and the scheduling of the third season of “Finding Your Roots” has been delayed pending changes in both staffing and editorial quality control.
[. . .]
But did that mean that Affleck, who promoted his blue-collar Boston roots in the “Good Will Hunting” part of his career, had to get his Hollywood machine to lean on the obviously naive Gates — who must have thought, “Gee, these Hollywood stars must really like me because they’re on my show”?
http://nypost.com/2015/06/25/ben-affleck-proves-hes-a-common-hollywood-blowhard/

Ben Affleck proves he’s a common Hollywood blowhard
By Robert Rorke
New York Post
June 25, 2015 | 3:42pm

Brigitte Gabriel Speaks To UN About Muslim Slave Trade, White House Has No Comment

Brigitte Gabriel

[From article]
Ms. Gabriel is a Lebanese Christian describing the systematic persecution, murder, rape, and slave-taking against Christians in the Middle East -- Christians who have lived there since the time of Jesus.
If we ever manage to make Americans face the reality of Jihad, it will be due to men and women like Brigitte Gabriel. Like Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Geert de Wilder[s], they are risking their lives to save civilized society, constantly opposed by the malicious liberal media and death threats from Muslim fascists.


Geert de Wilder

As always, the Left’s silence about Islamofascist massacres means consent. The Left is utterly cold-hearted.
[. . .]
I don’t know if Obama is a secret Muslim, but it doesn’t really matter -- because his silence means consent. Whatever he believes, he stands convicted by his silence.
Every week ISIS uploads videos celebrating sadistic murders of innocents. But Obama says nothing.
This collusive silence of the Left is nothing new. The Left was just as silent about Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all the other Marxist murderers, including North Korea’s Kim dynasty.[. . .]
The genocide against Christians and native cultures in the Sudan has been public knowledge for two decades. But Americans still do not know where their president stands on the African slave trade. His silence gives the answer.
[. . .]


Pamela Geller

Today, black children and women are sold on slaves markets in Africa and the Middle East, just like the public markets used to sell the ancestors of today’s African-Americans. But Muslim slave raiders have no color prejudice. In the Middle East they kill and kidnap Christians of Arab descent, Yazidis, and any “apostate Muslims,” like the civilians of Ramadi who were just murdered on the public streets.
 In centuries past Muslim slave raiders in Africa brought their victims to coastal ports for the Atlantic trade.
[. . .]
African-Americans are whipped up to rage against living white folks for the Muslim slave trade. That is either woefully ignorant, or it is a political lie, meant to squeeze the race racket for money and power, like Mr. Obama’s good friend [and FBI informant] Al Sharpton.
The genocide against Christians and native cultures in the Sudan has been public knowledge for two decades. But Americans still do not know where their president stands on the African slave trade. His silence gives the answer.


Robert Spencer

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/05/silence_about_muslim_horrors_means_consent.html

May 30, 2015
Silence about Muslim horrors means consent
By James Lewis

http://youtu.be/1ZPBCJwdA74

video

Abraham Lincoln and Politicians Overrode Supreme Court On Slavery

From article]
America is at a constitutional crossroads. The federal courts are threatening radically to revise the family law of all fifty states. There is no Constitutional justification for them to do so. If we don't stop them the American experiment will be at an end. We will lapse back into government by an insular aristocracy, exactly what we waged the Revolutionary War to escape.
Most observers now expect the Supreme Court to rule this year that the Constitution forbids states to define marriage as including only relationships between members of opposite sexes.
[. . .]
No homosexual partners can ever fulfill the mission of a marriage. Members of the same sex can't produce children together. They can, as leftists never tire of pointing out, adopt. Sometimes, in the absence of a better alternative, adoption by same-sex partners may be in the best interests of a particular child. But human beings crave close contact with both a mother and a father. No two men can ever give a child a mother. No two women can ever give a child a father. Some homosexual partners raise children, but they never do so in the circumstances society, for very good reason, prefers.
The argument that the law should treat heterosexual and homosexual relationships as equal is absurd.
[. . .]
Reading the Constitution to require that the law be blind to the distinction between something essential and something extraneous is inane.
Unfortunately, that inanity has gotten popular with our legal elite. A cadre of deranged jurists has decided that mothers don't matter, fathers don't matter, men and women are interchangeable and there is nothing special about marriage that states are entitled to recognize.
[. . .]
In fact, the GOP was founded to nullify a Supreme Court decision closely analogous to Windsor. The 1860 presidential campaign was principally about whether the federal government would continue following that decision. Abraham Lincoln's victory ensured that it wouldn't.
The case was Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which Chief Justice Taney proclaimed that the United States had no power to restrict slavery in federal territories. This was almost as absurd as Justice Kennedy's pronouncement in Windsor that the federal government lacks the power to define the terms in its own statutes.
[. . .]
Both Dred Scott and Windsor were foolish attempts to resolve contentious political issues by arbitrary judicial decree. When judges invade politics in that fashion it is up to the politicians to defend their turf. That's what happened with Dred Scott and slavery.
[. . .]
Republicans governed as they had promised. They defied the Supreme Court and banned slavery outright in all federal territories as the prelude to the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th amendment.
[. . .]
When the Court oversteps its bounds it is up to elected officials to smack it down and up to the people to demand that they do so.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/02/same_sex_marriage_and_emdredd_scottem.html

February 25, 2015
Same Sex Marriage and Dred Scott
By J. Peter Mulhern

White House's Misguided Equivalence Shows Ignorance

[From article]

Slavery was outlawed in the U.S. in 1865. Jim Crow ended officially a half-century ago. Indentured servitude, however, continues, almost exclusively among some Islamic groups in the Middle East and Africa. The caste system and ethnic and religious tribalism that institutionalized discrimination and second-class status, quite akin to Jim Crow, persist in places in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. I doubt today whether a Jew of any nationality would be allowed to immigrate and buy real estate in too many corners of the Islamic Middle East. Outside of the West, women and homosexuals are often treated no differently than in the Seventh Century.
[. . .]
The president, is fond of historical sloppiness and moral equivalence (cf. the Cairo Speech). But what is the point of citing sins of 1,000, 500, 150, or 50 years ago, without acknowledging 1) that such pathologies still continue today outside the West, especially in the world of Islam, and 2) that Christianity had a unique role in ending these wrongs?

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/397992/still-more-president-obamas-moral-equivalence-victor-davis-hanson

Still More of President Obama’s Moral Equivalence
By Victor Davis Hanson
February 5, 2015 1:34 PM

Police Charge English Gentleman With Slavery, Rape and Kidnapping of Three Women

Police charged Aravindan Balakrishnan with 25 offences


[From article]
Police have charged a man with false imprisonment, rape and child cruelty in a suspected slavery case in London.
Aravindan Balakrishnan, 74, has been charged with one count of cruelty to a person under 16, four counts of rape and 19 counts of indecent assault.
The suspected offences relate to three women. No further action is being taken regarding his wife arrested last year.
Mr Balakrishnan, who was arrested in Lambeth in November 2013, is due before Westminster magistrates on 17 December.
Anthony Connell, senior prosecutor at the Crown Prosecution Service, said there was "insufficient evidence" for the prospect of conviction relating to Mr Balakrishnan's wife, who was arrested at the same time.
The three alleged victims - a Briton in her 30s, an Irish woman in her 50s and a Malaysian woman in her 70s - had lived at an address in Brixton until October 2013.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-30431988

11 December 2014 Last updated at 11:51 ET
Man charged in London 'slavery' inquiry

Only Black Americans Have a History on Earth, No One Else

Moses, leader of Jewish slaves who lived on planet Alpha Centauri for thousands of years, before they traveled to Earth and the Middle East in 1948, to steal land from Palestinians. 

Alison Samuels says, "African-Americans are the only group of once-enslaved people who continued to live in the area where their ancestors were held in shackles. That creates a unique and tense dynamic for this country that is too often dismissed and misunderstood." Only group of "once-enslaved [black] people" in USA are living as free men and women alongside group of "once-enslaved" white people. Few Jews live in Egypt where they were "once-enslaved," having been killed off or chased away. Jews in Germany were slaves and killed in concentration camps. Jewish civilians live in Germany now. Today in USA black Americans get rewards without suffering any harms. White Americans are punished for doing no wrong. Where is that discussed? She also says, "We live in a world where anyone can say whatever they please to anyone they please on the Internet and it isn’t always warm, friendly, or nice." Online is not quite the wild west. Many periodicals no longer allow comments. Others censor words "that may offend some person." The concept of free speech was a tradition for 1200 years in Ancient Athens with no law or constitutional provisions. The idea was to protect speech that some people hated. Not so in USA any more.

[From article]
African-Americans are the only group of once-enslaved people who continued to live in the area where their ancestors were held in shackles.
That creates a unique and tense dynamic for this country that is too often dismissed and misunderstood.
[. . .]
We live in a world where anyone can say whatever they please to anyone they please on the Internet and it isn’t always warm, friendly, or nice.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/31/piers-morgan-vs-toure-how-the-cnn-host-blew-it.html

FIGHTING WORDS

03.31.12
Piers Morgan Vs. Touré: How the CNN Host Blew It
Alison Samuels
Daily Beast

Mozart, Western Civilization, And Islam

[From article]
But a much older Western mental habit was also responsible for Mozart's rosy perspective on Islam: lacerating self-criticism, something no other civilization has indulged in. The form it often took was to attribute all virtue to the enemy and all vices to one’s own people. The habit has a long history. In 5th century B.C. Athens, audiences applauded Euripides’ prize-winning plays Hecuba and Trojan Woman. Both dramatize the cruelty of the Greeks to defenseless women and children in Troy following the capture of the city.
[. . .]
Ohio State historian Robert Davis has estimated that between 1530 and 1780 alone, some 1 to 1.25 million European Christians were captured and enslaved by Muslims. These were not just sailors and travelers. North African slavers repeatedly raided European territory. Even Iceland was not immune. During this period and earlier, as many as 3 million Slavs were captured in raids by Crimean Tatars, and tens of thousands of Christian children were seized in the Balkans in the annual “blood tax,” the devşirme. Islamic slavers, Arabs in this case, also captured as many as 18 million Africans before the British intervened to end the trade in the 19th century. There are about 10,000 to 20,000 descendants of these slaves in Turkey today. The 400,000 African slaves shipped to North America have 39 million descendants.
[. . .]
back in the Turkish Empire, the printing press had not even been introduced. The first one appeared only in 1727, imported by a Hungarian convert, and by 1815 a mere 63 titles had been published. (Gutenberg’s Bible dates from 1454 and some 30,000 titles had been printed in Europe by 1500.) Nearly two hundred years before the first press appeared in the Caliphate, the Qur’an, in Arabic, was printed in Venice (1530).
[. . .]
As Said puts it, “Every European, was a racist, imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”

[Comment by Jeanne+T. The Explorer •December 14, 2014]
Nothing of beauty emanates from Islam. Nothing. Islam never produced a Mozart, a Beethoven, or a Handel. Indeed, Islam never produced a Vermeer, a Rembrandt, or a Chagall. Islam never produced an Emily Dickenson, a Mark Twain, or a Geoffrey Chaucer. Islam never produced a Blaise Pascal, a Marie Curie, a Sir Isaac Newton, or an Albert Einstein. Islam will never produce any of these kinds of individuals. An incurious and apathetic mindset will never advance any culture.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/12/mozart_and_multiculturalism.html

December 14, 2014
Mozart and Multiculturalism
By Jeff Lipkes

America Ended Slavery in 19th Century, 36 Million Are Still Slaves in Other Countries

[From article]
Almost 36 million people are living as slaves across the globe with an index on Monday listing Mauritania, Uzbekistan, Haiti, Qatar and India as the nations where modern-day slavery is most prevalent.
The Walk Free Foundation, an Australian-based human rights group, estimated in its inaugural slavery index last year that 29.8 million people were born into servitude, trafficked for sex work, trapped in debt bondage or exploited for forced labour.
Releasing its second annual index, Walk Free increased its estimate of the number of slaves to 35.8 million, saying this was due to better data collection and slavery being uncovered in areas where it had not been found previously.
For the second year, the index of 167 countries found India had by far the greatest number of slaves. Up to 14.3 million people in its population of 1.25 billion were victims of slavery, ranging from prostitution to bonded labour.
Mauritania was again the country where slavery was most prevalent by head of population while Qatar, host of the 2022 World Cup, rose up the rank from 96th place to be listed as the fourth worst country by percentage of the population.
[. . .]
The definition includes indentured servitude, forced marriage and the abduction of children to serve in wars.
[. . .]
The index showed that 10 countries alone account for 71 percent of the world's slaves.
After India, China has the most with 3.2 million, then Pakistan (2.1 million), Uzbekistan (1.2 million), Russia (1.05 million), Nigeria (834,200), Democratic Republic of Congo (762,900), Indonesia (714,100), Bangladesh (680,900) and Thailand (475,300).

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/nearly-36-mln-people-slaves-qatar-focus-global-134217592.html

Nearly 36 million people are slaves, Qatar in focus: global index
By By Katie Nguyen
Reuters
November 17, 2014

Misguided Education Priorities

[From article]
Such "educators" teach minorities born with an incredibly valuable windfall gain -- American citizenship -- that they are victims who have a grievance against people today who have done nothing to them, because of what other people did in other times. If those individuals who feel aggrieved could sell their American citizenship to eager buyers from around the world and leave, everybody would probably be better off. Those who leave would get not only a substantial sum of money -- probably $100,000 or more -- they would also get a valuable dose of reality elsewhere.
[. . .]
If you prefer to get your education in the comfort of a library, rather than in person amid the horrors, you might study the history of the sadistic massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire or the heart-wrenching story of Stalin's man-made 1930s famine in the Soviet Union that killed as many millions of people as Hitler's Holocaust did in the 1940s.
Mao's man-made famine in China killed more people than the Soviet famine and the Nazi Holocaust combined. And we should not deny their rightful place in history's chamber of horrors to the 1970s Cambodian dehumanization and slaughters that killed off at least a quarter of the entire population of that country.
[. . .]
slavery was a worldwide curse for thousands of years, as far back as recorded history goes.
[. . .]
More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2014/10/14/draft-n1904942

Irresponsible 'Education'
Thomas Sowell
 Oct 14, 2014

Single Parent Families And Poverty

[From article]
In 1950, female-headed households were 18 percent of the black population. Today it's close to 70 percent. One study of 19th-century slave families found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children lived with the biological mother and father. In 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black households were two-parent households. Herbert Gutman, author of "The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925," reports, "Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents." Also, both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present was rare among blacks.
[. . .]
The black illegitimacy rate in 1940 was about 14 percent; black illegitimacy today is over 70 percent, and in some cities, it is over 80 percent.
[. . .]
Each year, roughly 7,000 blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person. Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation's population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it's 22 times that of whites. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Coupled with being most of the nation's homicide victims, blacks are also major victims of violent personal crimes, such as assault, rape and robbery.
[. . .]
If it is assumed that problems that have a devastating impact on black well-being are a result of racial discrimination and a "legacy of slavery" when they are not, resources spent pursuing a civil rights strategy will yield disappointing results.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns082714.php3

Blacks Must Confront Reality

By Walter Williams
Published August 27, 2014

Slavery Made me Do It

[From article]
The saga of University of California, Santa Barbara feminist studies professor Mireille Miller-Young has taken yet another bizarro twist after her defenders urged a judge to excuse the criminal allegations against her because of the “cultural legacy of slavery.”
Miller-Young pleaded no contest last month to misdemeanor counts of battery, theft and vandalism after she rallied up a small gaggle of female vigilantes and attacked abortion protesters Thrin Short, 16, and Joan Short, 21. The radical feminist armada forcibly stole a graphic anti-abortion sign from the two protesters. Miller-Young scratched and appeared to push the 16-year-old girl, then destroyed the sign.

http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/16/professors-now-say-slavery-forced-colleague-to-batter-teen-destroy-her-anti-abortion-poster/

Professors Now Say SLAVERY Forced Colleague To Batter Teen, Destroy Her Anti-Abortion Poster
8:27 AM 08/16/2014
Eric Owens
Education Editor

Robert E. Lee's University Trashed By Racist Law Students

[From article]
In recent years, many colleges have considered their institutions’ ties to slavery, and how to appropriately acknowledge that history. Such a discussion has come to a head at Washington and Lee University, where the president on Tuesday acknowledged and apologized for a history in which the university owned slaves, and announced that Confederate flags that have been on display next to a statue of Robert E. Lee will be removed. 

Having a spine is a disqualification for being a University President. When will these law students apologize for the racist attacks on white people by gangs of black teenagers? Or the murders and rapes of white women by violent black thugs?

http://collegeinsurrection.com/2014/07/washington-and-lee-university-forced-to-apologize-for-owning-slaves-in-early-1800s/

Washington and Lee University Forced to Apologize for Owning Slaves in Early 1800s
Posted by Nathaniel Hunter

Friday, July 11, 2014 at 12:30pm

Reparations Argument Is Specious

[From article]
One of the most ignored facts about slavery's tragic history — and it's virtually a secret today — is that slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years. It did not become a moral issue until the 18th century. Plus, the moral crusade against slavery started in the West, most notably England.
I think the call for slavery reparations is simply another hustle. Advocates are not demanding that government send checks to individual black people. They want taxpayer money to be put into some kind of reparations fund from which black leaders decide who receives how much and for what purpose.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns061814.php3#.U65sB90--yM

Jewish World Review

June 18, 2014 / 20 Sivan, 5774
Slavery Reparations
By Walter Williams

People Haven't Changed

[From article]
Americans go into a frenzy about insensitive language or politically incorrect behavior by some celebrities and public figures -- L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling, the "Duck Dynasty" TV family, celebrity chef Paula Deen, former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, and Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy. But if we are postmodern and sensitive, what do we say or do about premodern racists with nuclear weapons, like the North Koreans?
[. . .]
We should not confuse material progress with moral advancement. Just because Boko Haram members have cell phones and AK-47s does not mean that they have evolved much from their predecessors' days of whips and chains. And just because the Sultan of Brunei flies in private jets does mean that his worldview is any different from that of his forefathers who on horseback enforced the same Sharia law.
We should also reset our notion of multiculturalism. That is the popular campus fad that postulates all cultures are roughly equal and just different from one another -- as opposed to any one either being better or worse. Left unspoken is the universal standard by which we judge as evil the enslaving, stoning or whipping of the innocent. That moral belief system is Western to the core.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0514/hanson051514.php3#.U4H8KN0--yM

Jewish World Review May 15, 2014 / 15 Iyar, 5774
Modern world is still premodern in many ways
By Victor Davis Hanson

Slavery Human Trafficking In United Kingdom

[From article]
'Similar investigations in other parts of the country show the issue of forced labour, domestic servitude and human trafficking is prevalent in many areas of society.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2520279/Breaking-News-Three-slavery-victims-rescued-raids-traveller-sites.html

Breaking News: Three 'slavery victims' rescued after raids at traveller sites
Police carry out a series of raids across South Gloucestershire and Bristol
Three men, aged in their 30s, 40s and 50s taken to safety by officers
Officers also find cash and cannabis plants during searches
By LUCY CROSSLEY
Daily Mail (UK)
PUBLISHED: 11:23 EST, 8 December 2013 | UPDATED: 12:51 EST, 8 December 2013