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Gökhan Acikkoglu was, until very recently, a teacher in Turkey. Nobody expected that he would die eight days after a small part of the Turkish army staged a (failed) coup. Yet, that's exactly what happened. After the failed coup Gökhan was arrested by the authorities. Of course, he didn't have anything to do with the coup. After the all, the power grab was carried out by members of the military. Gökhan was sitting at home when it all happened and was just hoping he would be able to continue to teach his students the knowledge they need to succeed in...

The Good Fairy How Merkel clarified the situation on the Bosporus, how our life is being changed, and why Boris Johnson is an unfortunate choice of bogeyman The Week in Review by Hans Heckel July 23, 2016 Why is the man still in power? Wasn’t the era of Erdogan trending to its close last summer already? The Turkish strongman had lost his absolute majority in the June, 2015 elections. And coalitions do not enter into the calculations of someone who is interested in holding all the power. So new elections were set for November 1, 2015. But the polls showed...

Four years ago, the Democratic rank-and-file showed its true stripes in booing references to G-d, and Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, both of which had been omitted from the party’s original platform but were rammed through over a failed voice vote by former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Would it come as any surprise then that in 2016 the younger, angrier, true-believing progressives outside the Democratic National Convention would literally burn that wretched sign of “Zionist imperialism” that is the Israeli flag? In fact, such anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism represents the quintessential act of a progressive movement dedicated to...

AT LEAST one person has been killed and 12 more are injured after a Syrian asylum seeker blew himself outside a wine bar in Germany. The attack took place in Ansbach, near Nuremburg, after the 27-year-old was denied access to the nearby Ansbach Open music festival, according to Germany's interior minister Joachim Herrmann. Hermann said the suspect, who was known to police, had lived in Germany for two years but was denied asylum in the country a year ago. He said it is unclear if the suspect intended to kill others or just himself but said he had “tried to...

Europe is rejecting the idea that multi-culturalism is beneficial to society following a year in which the migrant crisis and Isil-inspired terror attacks have boosted anti-Muslim sentiment across the continent, a new Europe-wide survey has shown. The data from Pew Research, the leading non-partisan US social attitudes survey company, will serve as another sharp warning to Europe’s political elites about the growing strength of grassroots sentiment over the migration issue.

A French woman and her three young daughters were severely injured when they were stabbed at a holiday resort on Tuesday by a Moroccan-born man who reportedly shouted that they were too scantily dressed. The man was arrested after the attack at the Alpine resort of Colombe, near Laragne, in southern France. The youngest girl, aged 8, was rushed to hospital in Grenoble with a punctured lung, according to initial reports. Her mother, 46, and sisters aged 12 and 14, are being treated at the hospital of Gap, closer to the scene of the attack. Their injuries are serious but...

The rise of radical Islamism throughout Europe has left no exceptions. Notoriously tolerant Sweden has found itself on the receiving end of multiculturalism, with religious extremism steadily gaining ground. Recently, a small town in southern Sweden was shocked by extremist stickers advocating violence toward non-Muslim women. Following the unhindered influx of migrants, which was heavily advertised by media and the majority of the political establishment, Sweden has seen an equally unhindered wave of sexual attacks. To add insult to injury, blatantly non-PC stickers advocating violence against women were spotted in the town of Nybro in Sweden's southern province of Småland, the local news outlet 24Nybro reported. "Women who do...

German police Thursday arrested two teenagers with Islamist backgrounds over an explosion that wounded three people at a Sikh temple, labeling it a "terrorist attack". The blast that hit an Indian wedding party at the entrance to the temple in the western city of Essen last Saturday injured three men, one of them seriously. Police arrested two 16-year-olds with known links to regional Islamists over the attack, said city police chief Frank Richter. "We have to presume it was a terrorist act -- religiously motivated terror by the Islamist scene," Richter said in a statement, without linking the youths to...

Bangladeshi law student who criticized Islamism on his Facebook account has been attacked with machetes and killed, police said, the latest in a series of murders of secular activists and bloggers by suspected Islamist militants.

The latest Islamic atrocity entailing the bombing of an airport and train station in Belgium has inspired US President Barack Obama to launch what is being called a "taunting offensive" against the Islamic State. "We will beat them by saying 'you are not strong, you are weak,'" Obama said. The President praised his own behavior as a model for all Americans to follow. "Rather than ranting in rage and threatening them with retaliation as the GOP candidates currently campaigning for president did, I mocked the terrorists by going to a baseball game with Cuban President Raul Castro and tangoing in...

Just in case you might have thought that europe would get real about their terrorism problem after today's (Mar 22) attacks: here was how Brussels reacted to Molenbeek being the HQ of the Paris attacks. https://call.brussels

The Islamic society at a top university has come under fire for holding a gala dinner where men and women were segregated from one another by a screen running down the middle of the room. Muslim students from the London School of Economics had to buy separate tickets to the society's annual dinner depending on whether they were a 'brother' or a 'sister'. When they turned up at the event, held at a banqueting hall in Central London, there was a large screen separating the men's tables from the women's ones, stopping the attendees from even looking at each other....

Two assailants armed with pistols and cleavers attacked Jogeswar Roy, 45, the head priest of Sri Sri Sant Gourio Math, at his home in the temple on Sunday morning, officials said. "The priest was preparing for morning prayers when they pounced on him and slit his head from the body at the verandah of his home inside the temple," said Shafiqul Islam, a government administrator in the sub-district Debiganj where the temple is located. Two devotees were wounded in the attack including one who was shot as he tried to save the priest, he added. The motive for the murder...

The Islamist movement may appear stronger than ever, but a close look suggests two weaknesses that might doom it, and perhaps quickly. Its strengths are obvious. The Taliban, Al-Shabaab, Boku Haram, and ISIS take Islamism - the ideology calling for Islamic law to be applied in its entirety and severity - to unbearable extremes, rampaging and brutalizing their way to power. Pakistan could fall into their hands. The ayatollahs of Iran enjoy a second wind thanks to the Vienna deal. Qatar has the highest per capita income in the world. Recep Tayyip Erdogan is becoming Turkey's dictator. Islamist operatives swarm...

While "Syrian" refugees are flooding Europe -- in large part due to Turkey's policy aimed at letting them pass freely through the country and into Europe -- and Turkey is embroiled in an escalating crisis with Russia, the European Union seems to be willing to take Turkish accession talks further than ever before. According to Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, there are now "strong signals" that Greek Cyprus is willing to remove its veto on five negotiation chapters Ankara wants opened in order accelerate Turkey’s formal entry into the European Union; Turkey has been an associate member since 1963. "There...

I know that we have been taught for the past two generations that Western Civilization is the locus of evil in the world, but I am one of the few unenlightened ones who know differently. Our way of life has brought the majority of improvements in the economic, social, political and technological realms. And that progress and prosperity was made possible by our forebears who developed a system in which government being legitimized by a popular mandate [viz. freedom] can actually work w/o tearing itself apart -- well, not since lately, anyway. So I think that our way of life...

“A man who has been working in the area said he noticed a half-dozen Middle Eastern men in the area in recent weeks, but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.”The same thing happened several years ago in the Fort Dix jihad plot: the young man who inadvertently discovered the plot initially hesitated to contact police, fearing that to do so might be racist. This is what 14 years of pounding in the media from Hamas-linked CAIR and the Left has done: make people think that defending themselves and their country is...

In largely secular western societies, Islam and its history are viewed by many non-Muslims as substantially irrelevant to how devout Muslims behave. Perhaps the view that religion is of little importance to devout Muslims is based on the role, minor if any, that religion and religious history play in their own secular lives. However, both Islamic teachings and history give devout Muslims their grounding in Islam and teach them that Islam is the religion of war, not peace: Islam must become the world's only religion by extirpating all others.Islam was founded by Mohamed ( c. 570 CE – 8 June 632 CE) in the sixth...

We reported previously how Saudi Sheikh Yahya Al-Jana' depicted the Islamist paradise as a celestial Mustang Ranch in which Allah is the chief Mack Daddy. Now Palestinian-Jordanian cleric Sheikh Mashhoor bin Hasan Al-Salman has added an eternal supply of Viagra to the offer. Note, however, that for a female Muslim to enjoy the sexual companionship of the one Chippendales model she gets in Paradise, she must marry him and become his slave. A woman's place in Islamism is at the end of a chain, even in Paradise.

Militant Islamists have declared open war on the entire civilized world, which gives us both the right and the duty to destroy their entire ideology and, if Islam cannot reform itself, the entire Islamic religion. The instant you (the Islamist) use your Koran, your prophet, and your deity to menace us with physical harm and/or violation of our human rights, the inherent right of self-defense entitles us to destroy all three. This does not mean a Koran-burning or cute pictures of Mohammed, but rather the deployment of effective arguments to get your followers to walk away from your system in...