At Wall Street Journal , ” Afghan Immigrants in Canada Found Guilty of Honor Killing “: TORONTO—A Canadian court found two Afghan immigrant parents and their eldest son guilty of murdering four female family members in a so-called honor killing Sunday, the climax of a case that’s transfixed Canada and sparked a wider debate about clashing cultures amid the country’s large immigrant population. Mohammad Shafia, his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and eldest son, Hamed, were found guilty of killing Mr. Shafia’s three teenage daughters and Mr. Shafia’s first wife in an elaborately staged, though ultimately bungled, car accident in June 2009. The defense argued the four died after a late-night joy ride went awry. The four-month trial opened a relatively rare window onto honor killings in North America. The crime, where victims are murdered for bringing shame on their family, is increasingly common in western European countries like Britain and Sweden, which has seen large-scale immigration from countries where researchers say the custom happens most—such as Pakistan, India and Turkey …. The prosecution argued it was honor rooted in Afghan tribal traditions that led Mr. Shafia to cleanse the shame he felt from the conduct of his rebellious daughters, Zainab, 19 years old, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13. The eldest two took unapproved boyfriends, and all three disobeyed their father through their independent behavior and sometimes-revealing dress. Rona Amir Mohammad, who was Mr. Shafia’s first spouse in the polygamous family, was killed, the prosecution argued, because she was a troublesome first wife and lenient step mother. The trial filled the Canadian press with the macabre details of a murder in which police believe the victims were drowned and then placed into a car that was then pushed into a lock outside of Kingston, near Toronto. The local press printed police transcripts of a ranting Mr. Shafia calling his daughters “whores” and boasting, “nothing is more dear to me than my honor.” Video c/o Blazing Cat Fur . And my previous roundup is here: ” Shafia Family Guilty of Honor Killings in Canada: Updates .”
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Shafia Convictions Put Focus on Culture of Honor Killings
The New Zealand Herald : Eleven people have died in what is the worst New Zealand aviation disaster since the Erebus crash in 1979. Two Auckland based nurses who attended the crash described the distressing scene as family members waiting for their loved ones to land witnessed the accident. Family members were making frantic calls to relatives saying: “Come now, we need you. Mum and dad have been in a balloon accident. It’s burst into flames and they’re dead”.
Photo: NZ Herald
In a roundabout way, James Delingpole elaborates on the points I made yesterday in my epic smackdown of racist Walter James Casper III, who has doubled-down — and by now tripled-down — on his backing of the anti-Semitic Occupy movement. See Delingpole’s piece at Telegraph UK , ” Occupy are not the solution: they embody the problem .” Check the link for the introduction to the post. Interestingly, Delingpole posts the same video I posted previously, comparing the tea party to the dregs of Occupy Wall Street. And Delingpole points out that he’s angry about the same kind of crony capitalism and corrupt corporate welfare-state economic meltdowns that Occupy Wall Street protests. It’s just that Occupy’s solutions are, frankly, more of the status quo, and incalculably worse in key respects. He writes: Here’s the weird thing … As I’ve argued before, the greatest division in the Western world today lies not between rich and poor, working class and upper class, or Left and Right, but between on the one hand the rapacious, unaccountable Bankster/Corporatist/Political establishment and on the other everybody else. Why then, aren’t I standing with the Occupy St Paul’s crowd right now, making this point more vociferously? Simple. Because though my analysis of the problem may be quite similar to the Occupy crowd’s, my solution couldn’t be more different. This is why – as the above video explains – Tea Party types like me are unlikely ever to find common cause with Occupy. We’re classical liberals who believe in low taxes, limited government, property rights and equality of opportunity, whereas they are progressives who believe in greater government control and wealth redistribution in order to create equality of outcome. It’s a shame, really it is, because in these terrifying economic times it really would be nice to harness some of that commitment, zeal and self-righteous rage you find among the Occupy crowd and channel it towards a useful purpose. Problem is, we’re dealing here with the victims of two or three generations’ worth of ingrained cultural Marxism. Thanks to the Gramsciite capture of the media and the seats of academe, a lot of these kids simply lack the knowledge base or intellectual wherewithal to appreciate that instead of championing freedom what they’re actually defending is economic stagnation, higher unemployment, more stifling regulation, more entrenched social division and a moribund status quo in which an ever-growing political elite leeches off the backs of us wage-slave Untermenschen. Oh, and there’s one more thing I dislike about the Occupy crowd (and their ideological soulmates): there’s a really vicious nastiness there which you simply don’t find among the classical liberals of, say, the Tea Party or Ukip. Check out this video of Occupy DC in action and you’ll see what I mean. Check the link for the whole thing . See also, Marathon Pudit, ” Occupy Occtrocities: Death Toll at 9 Edition .” Freakin’ commie douchebags.
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Occupy Wall Street Embodies the Soul-Crushing Stagnation of the Status Quo
**Written by Doug Powers Last week the UN General Assembly held a moment of silence for North Korea’s Kim Jong Il (it’s over, you can start talking again, Jimmy ). On Wednesday, in spite of the dictator’s abhorrent human rights record, the UN went a step further : (Reuters) – U.N. offices around the world lowered their flags to half-staff to mark the funeral of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il on Wednesday in a move the world body said was routine but which prompted objections from some human rights activists. In New York, where the flag outside U.N. headquarters was lowered, spokesman Eduardo del Buey said the gesture had been requested by Pyongyang’s U.N. mission but was normal for the funeral of any head of state. “It’s a matter of protocol,” he said. North Korea is a full member of the 193-nation organization. But UN Watch, a Geneva-based advocacy group, said the U.N. human rights message was “at serious risk of being blurred today” because of the honoring of Kim, who died on December 17. “Today should be a time for the U.N. to show solidarity with the victims – the millions of North Koreans brutalized by Kim’s merciless policies of starvation, torture and oppression – and not with the perpetrator,” the group’s executive director, Hillel Neuer, said in a statement. Maybe one of the things about Kim Jong Il’s tenure that appealed to the appease-o-crats and Goracle-worshipping carbon credit dealers at the UN was his refusal to go overboard on the use of planet-destroying electricity: As for the funeral procession, the crowd lining the streets of Pyongyang was stricken with mandated grief, not unlike many at the protocol-rich, common sense-deprived United Nations: **Written by Doug Powers Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
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UN Lowers Flags to Half Staff for Kim Jong Il Funeral
Kenneth Marcus, at FrontPage Magazine , writes about former Israeli consul official Ishmael Khaldi, who gave a lecture at Kent State University, and who had Islamist Professor Julio Pino protest during the question time. Pino stormed out of the hall yelling, “Death to Israel!” The goal of such protests is not merely to disrupt, embarrass, or discomfort Israeli speakers but to silence them. “But ultimately,” as the Arab American News quotes [Bilal] Baydoun, “our goal is to prevent someone like this from even arriving on campus in the first place and we feel confident that we will be able to accomplish this as we continue to spread awareness.” In this respect, Khaldi’s treatment resembles the so-called Irvine 11’s orchestrated disruption of Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at UC Irvine last year. In that case too, the protesters admitted that their intent was to shut down the pro-Israel side of the debate. Indeed, it is now fair to say that there have been efforts nationwide to prevent university speakers from delivering presentations that deviate from the anti-Israel orthodoxy that reigns on too many campuses. It is ironic that academia’s self-appointed guardians of academic freedom and freedom of speech do not recognize this concerted effort to squelch one side of the debate. On the contrary, some are all too eager to recognize academic freedom only when it does not apply and to ignore anti-Semitism where it does. Those who support academic freedom should insist that it not be used as a weapon in support of the silencers and against their victims. If they cannot speak out on the right side of this debate, they should at least not join the wrong side .
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Invoking ‘Academic Freedom’ to Silence Debate
Mohammad Shafia, his second wife Tooba and son Hamed on way to court. (Canadian Press photo)
Sahar Shafia (Court Exhibit)
Zainab Shafia (Court Exhibit)
Geeti Shafia (Court Exhibit)
First wife Rona Amir Mohammed (Court Evidence)
Zurana Horton, 34, died Friday after she was shot trying to shield children during a shooting outside a Brooklyn elementary school. (Media credit: New York Daily News)
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Hero Pregnant Mom Dies Shielding Children From Gunfire at NY Elementary School
The Philadelphia house were police say they discovered four mentally disabled people chained up in a basement in deplorable conditions.
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Horrific: Four Mentally Disabled Adults Found Chained in Philadelphia ‘Dungeon’
Three are dead. Seven are wounded, some in critical condition. Keep the victims and their families in your prayers. After going on a bloody early morning rampage in Cupertino, Calif., Shareef Allman is still on the loose. His friends and colleagues can’t believe their “peaceful” community activist friend would do such a thing. Time for a reality check: The Shareef Allman they know would try to stop violence, not deal it out with an assault rifle in a workplace massacre. Sunny and kind, his tattooed boxer’s biceps as big as his personality, Allman would help people when they had trouble at work, friends said Wednesday. He was the one who stopped gang fights. And he was the one on his cable show “Real 2 Real” interviewing Jessie Jackson about hope and local street walkers about salvation. As law enforcement launched one of the largest manhunts in South Bay history, ministers and community activists who knew him tried to shake off their tearful disbelief to urge Allman to peacefully surrender. Absurdly to them, this 47-year-old single father, who wrote a book about overcoming domestic violence, was now a major suspect in an early morning mass murder that began at Lehigh Hanson’s Permanente Cement Plant in Cupertino and left three dead and seven wounded. Those who knew Allman said they all had the same terrible contradiction in their minds: How could Shareef — who wrote Christmas plays for churches — have done something like this? “He’s the one who would go out and solve the problem, not to be the problem,” said Pastor Jeff Moore II, the head of the Silicon Valley NAACP, who said Allman is a sharp-dressed, peaceful and uplifting man devoted to the South Bay black community. “He was a quiet storm and I’ve never seen him lift his hand to anyone, ever. This is not the Shareef that we know.” People surmised there was trouble at the quarry in Cupertino, where most of the victims were killed. But few could pinpoint exactly what it was. Over and over people kept saying: He must have snapped. The latest on the manhunt : Shareef Allman, 47, of San Jose remained at large late Wednesday. The search was concentrated on the border between Cupertino and Sunnyvale, where Allman was last seen. Police said they had found four weapons but believed Allman remained armed and dangerous. Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith said Allman showed up for a scheduled 4:15 a.m. safety meeting attended by about 15 people at the Lehigh Permanente Plant, in the hills above Cupertino. He left the meeting, came back and opened fire with a rifle and handgun, she said. Smith described Allman as a disgruntled worker but did not disclose details of what preceded the shooting. Allman was next seen in a Hewlett-Packard parking lot a mile away, where he allegedly shot an HP employee in the leg and tried to take her car. The victim was taken to a hospital, where she was listed in fair condition. San Jose residents John Vallejos, 51, and Mark Munoz, 59, died at the quarry. Manuel Pinon, 48, of Newman, south of Modesto, died later at an area hospital. The wounded were not identified by police. Nine law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, joined the ensuing manhunt. Sheriff’s patrol cars blocked the street leading to the plant. Helicopters flew overhead in a hard rain. Search teams at times were heard on emergency radio frequencies going door to door, sometimes roof to roof. Police cordoned off Allman’s San Jose apartment. Some schools in the Cupertino area were locked down as word spread that the shooter remained at large. Video of Allman with Jesse Jackson: *** Update – Allman reportedly dead.
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“Peaceful” Shareef Allman is fugitive Cupertino quarry shooting spree suspect; Dead
Some of the boys were as young as fourteen. The investigation arose initially out of suspicion that Ms. Davis threw parties serving alcohol for the boys. One of the victims told his mom, who, strangely, contacted the woman’s ex-husband. Seems to me you’d go straight to the police. Either way, this is sickening. At Los Angeles Times , ” Hockey mom accused of having sex with son’s underage teammates .”
Originally posted here:
Kathia Maria Davis, Laguna Niguel Hockey Mom, Accused of Sex With Son’s Teammates
