Hundreds of officers outside turned their backs

The police fascism in New York is still ongoing. Yesterday at the funeral of Rafael Ramos it was on display again.

While mourners inside the church applauded politely as Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke, hundreds of officers outside turned their backs on him to protest what they see as his support for demonstrators angry over killings by police.

They’re “protesting” against civilian and democratic authority over the police, and that’s fascism. When the police get to call the shots, that’s a police state.

Sgt. Myron Joseph of the New Rochelle Police Department said he and fellow officers turned their backs spontaneously to “support our brothers in the NYPD.”

[Read more…]

What Disco Mullah could do

Remember Junaid Jamshed? The former pop star turned reactionary preacher who had to flee Pakistan for London when he was accused of blasphemy by another reactionary preacher?

First, more about him from the BBC three weeks ago.

…the BBC’s Shaima Khalil in Islamabad says what makes Junaid Jamshed’s case so unusual is the fact that he is a high-profile, wealthy Muslim preacher.

As opposed to a Christian peasant woman like Asia Bibi. [Read more…]

Living Marxism denied Omarska

And now that we’ve revisited Vulliamy’s and ITN’s visit to Omarska, let’s revisit their libel suit against Living Marxism for saying it was all a fabrication. Ed Vulliamy again:

Some will say that Living Marxism won the “public relations battle”, whatever that is. Others will cling to the puerile melodrama that ITN’s victory in the high court yesterday was that of Goliath over some plucky little David who only wanted to challenge the media establishment.

But history – the history of genocide in particular – is thankfully built not upon public relations or melodrama but upon truth; if necessary, truth established by law. And history will record this: that ITN reported the truth when, in August 1992, it revealed the gulag of horrific concentration camps run by the Serbs for their Muslim and Croatian quarry in Bosnia. [Read more…]

Omarska 2012

Bosnia Institute News tells us that Omarska is being wiped from memory.

On 9 May, a group of survivors came to Omarska, near Prijedor in Bosnia, to lay a wreath for those who perished there in 1992. It was Victory Day – a Bosnian holiday to mark the defeat of fascism in the World War II – and also, for them, an opportunity to commemorate the victims of numerous detention camps from the more recent conflict. They did so last year and in the years before at this place, now an iron ore mine but once notorious as a place of torture and death for several thousand Bosnians at the hands of Bosnian Serb forces.

[Read more…]

Omarska 1992

I’ve been re-reading Samantha Power‘s A Problem From Hell, and I feel a need to revisit what happened in Bosnia in 1992 and after.

Power cites the work of Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian. We could start with his Shame of camp Omarska.

The internees are horribly thin, raw-boned; some are almost cadaverous, with skin like parchment folded around their arms; their faces are lantern-jawed, and their eyes are haunted by the empty stare of the prisoner who does not know what will happen to him next. [Read more…]

The eleventh person killed for being Ahmadi

Another horror out of Pakistan.

Gunmen in a Punjab village shot dead a member of the Ahmadi religious minority on Saturday, five days after a Muslim leader denounced Ahmadis on a popular television show.

Luqman Ahad Shehzad was shot in the back of the head near Bhiri Shah Rehman village, a small community of Ahmadis in the Gujranwala district, said Saleemud Din, a spokesman of the community.

He is the eleventh person killed for being Ahmadi in Pakistan this year.

[Read more…]

Teflon child

There was a heated discussion on a post of Tom Flynn’s at the CFI blogs about whether or not to celebrate Christmas because it is or isn’t a Christian festival. I don’t really have a position on that, but it prompted me to try to figure out if I ever really saw it (or felt it) as a religious observance. I may be misremembering, but for the life of me I can’t dredge up any real religious associations with it. By “real” I mean ones that I personally experienced as religious, as opposed to elements that I was aware were religious.

It’s odd, really, because there were a good few of the latter, but to me it’s as if they were just decoration. I somehow sidestepped the real religiosity. [Read more…]

“Our backs have turned to you”

You have got to be kidding.

Ex-NYC-cop and blogger John Cardillo has a message for us:

Late last night I was contacted by a coalition of NYPD cops, Detectives, and supervisors hundreds strong and asked to disseminate the following statement on their behalf. They requested I wait until after the plane towing a banner which reads “DE BLASIO, OUR BACKS HAVE TURNED TO YOU” was airborne.

At 08:50 I received word that the plane was in the air and asked to release the statement and photo below.

The plane was in the air, towing a message to all of us:

Picture

[Read more…]

One nightmare over

News from Ireland: the high court has ruled that that unfortunate woman who was being kept “alive” after brain death because she was pregnant can – and in fact should – be allowed to die the rest of the way.

The woman’s family had asked the court to allow treatment to be withdrawn so she could be put to rest.

Doctors would not grant their wishes as they were unsure of the legal status of the unborn child under the Constitution. [Read more…]

Quick, talk about something else

Meanwhile Erdogan is changing the subject by telling Europe to do something about “Islamophobia” before criticizing Turkey’s approach to freedom of the press.

Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan slammed European countries on Friday for criticizing deteriorating press freedom in Turkey and said they should instead try to find a solution for what he said was increasing Islamophobia in the continent.

Turkish police earlier this month raided media outlets close to US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan accuses of forming a ‘parallel state’ to undermine his rule and orchestrating a graft scandal targeting his inner circle. [Read more…]