Free Republic

Britain's new Orwellian orthodoxy: only Islam embodies virtue. Lately I keep coming back to Britain. Across Western Europe in the last few years, national or regional governments have instituted full or partial bans on Muslim face coverings: no niqab or burka in French, Austrian, or Belgian public spaces, ditto in Bavarian schools, in various localities in Italy, in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland, and in certain public spaces in Barcelona. On Tuesday, after a thirteen-year effort by Geert Wilders, the Dutch Parliament finally approved a French-style ban. These bans may represent only a fraction of what needs to be...

Coming soon to a city near you. This you have to see for yourself.

The father of the Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi has said son is innocent, and has confirmed UK police have arrested a another son. Talking from Tripoli, he said: 'We don't believe in killing innocents. This is not us.'

Yesterday I started a thread 6 Somali-Americans Arrested in ISIS Recruiting Case, linking to a New York Times article with the same title and remarking that the NYT would usually use a title like "6 Minnesota Men Arrested". Sure enough, the NYT has reverted to PC, and the article is now titled "6 Minnesotans Held in Plot to Join ISIS". Who poses more of a terrorist threat -- non-Somali Minnesotans or non-Minnesotan Somalis in America? Since the answer is the latter, the original NYT headline was the right one. But the media does not want people to notice certain patterns.

Germany is already facing a demographic nightmare as birth rates fall despite a slew of family-friendly policies. Now, new statistics show that more people are leaving the country than immigrating -- adding to concerns about the country's shrinking population. Germans fretting about the country's looming demographic problems are unlikely to have been cheered by recent news on birth rates and emigration. With its graying population, the country's cradle-to-grave welfare system could become unaffordable due to a dearth of working-age people to keep the system going. And the country seems to be failing to either attract enough immigrants or produce babies...