Free Republic

CoE school bans girl from wearing crucifix - but allows Sikh pupils to wear bangles A school told a child to remove a Christian cross she was wearing even though it lets Sikh children wear bangles as part of their religion. Lauren Grimshaw-Brown was told to take off a necklace with a cross on it because of health and safety fears. But the eight-year-old's furious mother has accused the school of double standards because they allow children following other faiths to wear jewellery on religious grounds. The mother-of-two says Lauren and brother Callan, five, have always worn crosses at St...

John at Powerline is absolutely right, the proposed Obamacare legislation is more dangerous than the proposed Cap and Trade legislation. Once the American public gets “Free” healthcare, you can never take it away, but they will be more than happy to repeal legislation that increases taxes.

A recent thread on the Al-Falluja jihadist forum discussed the case of whether a Muslim who has nothing else to eat may kill an infidel in order to eat him. The discussion was prompted by a recently published book by Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi, one of the most influential jihadist sheikhs active today"Is It Permitted To Eat The Flesh of American Soldiers?" On June 13, 2009, a member of the Al-Falluja forum who uses the moniker "Al-Maqdisi's Student" wrote a post based on this passage [in full report] titled "Is it permitted to eat the flesh of American soldiers? A quote...

Two of Queens' largest parks are hotbeds for animal sacrifices, according to park rangers and advocates. Longtime Parks Department ranger Joe Puleo told The Post that killing animals for ritualistic reasons in the city is widespread, but that Forest Park and Highland Park are the most common locations. Perpetrators of the outlawed act are rarely busted because they perform their bloody rituals in the dead of night, and the two parks no longer have 24-hour patrols due to budget cuts. "They are never caught, because they are careful, and they never do it during the day. They do it at...

In a recent interview President Obama, I think, was logically trying to say that practical hurdles and costs in the real world mean that we cannot simply force other countries to chose a wiser form of consensual government than their own. Instead, he suggested that, "The message I hope to deliver is that democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion — those are not simply principles of the west to be hoisted on these countries. But, rather what I believe to be universal principles that they can embrace and affirm as part of their national identity, the danger,...

Al Qaeda beheads British tourist kidnapped at African music festival A Briton kidnapped in North Africa has been murdered, reportedly by beheading, by Al Qaeda terrorists after demands for the release of fundamentalist cleric Abu Qatada... The 60-year-old Briton is said to have been killed on Sunday...by Al Qaeda ahead of Obama's speech in... Cairo today. Murdered: Edwin Dyer as seen in a video released by his kidnappers in February The statement...said they 'killed Dyer on May 31, finding that Britain...does not... care for its citizens'. It added: 'The British captive was killed so that he, and...the British state, may...

Ronald Takaki, who made it his life’s work to rewrite American history to include Asian-Americans and other ethnic groups excluded from traditional accounts and who helped start the first doctoral program in ethnic studies in the United States, died Tuesday in his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 70. The cause was suicide, said his son Troy. He battled multiple sclerosis for years. “He struggled, and then he gave up,” his son said. Mr. Takaki, whose Japanese grandfather immigrated to Hawaii in the 19th century and worked on a sugarcane plantation, became a leading scholar of ethnicity and multiculturalism in...

Born and raised in Mozambique and now a naturalized U.S. citizen, Serodio, 45, has filed a lawsuit against a New Jersey medical school, claiming he was harassed and ultimately suspended for identifying himself during a class cultural exercise as a "white African-American."

Several juveniles and adults face charges following a melee ...that began when police stopped and arrested a shoplifting suspect and an unruly crowd gathered. Police responded to a report that a man had stolen two bottles of vodka ... Workers at the store provided a description of the suspect and the car he left in, and police pulled the car over at Franklin Arterial and Fox Street a couple of minutes later. As police were arresting Jimmy Odong, 19, of Portland and recovering the stolen merchandise, a group of about 15 to 30 people gathered, with about 10 of them...

The private-jet industry may have finally found its savior. During a speech to Duke University’s graduating class, Oprah talked about the secrets and joys of success. Among them: owning a mansion and a jet. “It’s great to have a nice home. It’s great to have nice homes! It’s great to have a nice home that just escaped the fire in Santa Barbara,” she told the students. “It’s great to have a private jet. Anyone that tells you that having your own private jet isn’t great is lying to you.” She went on to explain that “you haven’t completed the circle...

For decades following WWII, any discussion regarding Germany was bound to deteriorate into a discussion of Nazism and Hitler. If I post something here on this great site about, say, the Swedish National Ice Hockey Team, that thread will sooner or later end up in a discussion about Malmö and how the Muzzies have taken over large parts of Sweden as well as other places in Europe. As a Swede/European, I don't mind. Eurabia is reality and I'm convinced Americans who accuse us Europeans of being naive do so not out of malice or hatred towards Europe, but out of...

With a voice as smooth as a newborn’s bottom, the storyteller captivated his audience with little-known tales about Abraham Lincoln. His energy began to build as Lincoln’s train picks up speed, and when it entered the station and the air breaks flared, “Pssssshhhh,” Jim Woodard brought down the energy, but kept the interest level high. “Worldwide Folktales & Legends” was just one of the 55 lectures, performances, discussions and demonstrations available to students as a part of Multicultural Day on April 15 at Moorpark College. “This is one of my favorite venues to come to,” said Woodard. “The audience was...

Alarmed that a professional golf association proposed to exclude competitors who don’t speak English, the state Senate acted today to prohibit businesses in California from discriminating against customers, including refusing them service, based on the language they use. The Ladies Professional Golf Assn. last year backed down from a policy that would have suspended golfers who do not speak adequate English on the premise that language fluency in speeches and media interviews was critical to the sport's promotion efforts. The golfers were considered "patrons" of the LPGA, not employees. State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) said the policy raised an...

Pop into the firestation and the chances are there'd be a group of reassuringly burly men in there waiting for the call out, with uniforms and firefighting suits tailored for their use alone. The one or two women among them would have to make do with ill-fitting adaptations of the men's outfits while the handful of Muslim women in the service would be wearing their own head scarfs. But, with the fire service anxious to attract recruits of all sexes and backgrounds, it was decided that something had to be done. So yesterday the results were uneveiled, including full-length skirts,...

I don’t know about you, but I’ve gone from frustrated to plain-out bored with multiculturalism. The whole thing has become such a mainstream cliché that I now avoid most things that are “mainstream.”

The NHS is offering to reverse female circumcision amid concerns that there are 500 victims a year with no prosecutions The NHS is to advertise free operations to reverse female circumcisions, with experts warning that each year more than 500 British girls have their genitals mutilated. Despite having been outlawed in 1985, female circumcision is still practised in British African communities, in some cases on girls as young as 5. Police have been unable to bring a single prosecution even though they suspect that community elders are being flown from the Horn of Africa to carry out the procedures.

WATERBURY, Conn. - From a garage near an abandoned factory in the south end of town, the sound was unmistakable: roosters - lots of them - squawking in the night. It's an odd noise to hear in the middle of this city, the former brass capital of the world. But police in Waterbury, about 30 miles southwest of Hartford, knew exactly what they were dealing with recently when they gathered outside the squawking garage. It was another cockfight.

GRAPHIC footage of a youth's brutal bashing at a train station shows three attackers taking turns to kick him in the head. Detectives investigating the vicious assault say they are appalled by the level of violence, which left the 23-year-old man from Sunshine in Melbourne's west with serious head injuries. The man was beaten even after he handed over the backpack that appeared to be the motive behind the gang-attack.

Barack Obama ran for office as a unifier, but it was all a hustle. His brand of politics needs enemies. Like southern slave owners of old, today's conservative Republicans represent the enemy to be vanquished by enlightened progressives from the north.  This is an old storyline that provides unlimited nourishment to America's liberal elites.  Many of us, especially those of us who work in education, have long seen this coming.  In the early stages of the diversity movement for example it didn't take long to realize who was and was not included on the ubiquitous rainbow flag.  "Diversity" was simply...

There’s growing evidence that America may be meeting its educational Waterloo and that our educational system is being captured by radical Islamists. As Robert Spencer put it so well in his classic book, The Stealth Jihad, radical Islam is subverting America without guns or bombs. The radical Islamists have scored dramatic victories in determining what students are taught in America about Islam, and we don’t even seem to know what is happening. The radical Islamists have managed a massive penetration of our educational system that teaches everyone from the youngest students all the way up to students at our colleges...

[This article from City journal appears essentially the same in Dalrymple's new book] Multiculturalism rests on the supposition - or rather the dubious premise - that all cultures are equal and that no fundamental conflict can arise between the customs, mores, and philosophical outlooks of two different cultures. Reality though, has a way of revenging itself upon the frivolous, and September 11 has concentrated minds a little. Some signs indicate that in Britain the pieties of multiculturalism, for years an official orthodoxy, are being challenged. The sillines, for example, of the government language practices that multiculturalism has spawned. One can...

In Toronto, anti-Israel demonstrators yell “You are the brothers of pigs!”, and a protestor complains to his interviewer that “Hitler didn’t do a good job.” In Fort Lauderdale, Palestinian supporters sneer at Jews, “You need a big oven, that’s what you need!” In Amsterdam, the crowd shouts, “Hamas, Hamas! Jews to the gas!” In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year’s Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from January 1st 2009 but from 2005, and, while the corpses are...

Fears that the conflict in Gaza could spark violence between Jews and Muslims in France have been heightened as three teenagers were arrested today for an alleged anti-Semitic attack on a 15-year-old girl. An inquiry was launched after the victim said she was insulted, knocked to the ground, kicked and punched by a gang of 10 youths as she left Leon Blum school in Villiers-le-Bel north of Paris. Three of her alleged attackers - aged between 13 and 15 and all from her own school - were arrested on suspicion of ’aggravated violence and anti-Semitic insults’, according to a police...

<p>A judge in New York has ruled against a Liberian woman who cited religious reasons for smuggling meat from an endangered species of monkey into the United States.</p> <p>Raymond J Dearie, a federal US district judge, said that Mamie Manneh was wrong when she claimed that her faith - a sect of Christianity - meant that she did not need to apply for permits to import exotic food stuffs.</p>

A Liberian woman from the West Brighton section of Staten Island, charged with smuggling monkey meat, has failed to persuade a judge that she needed the butchered carcasses for religious reasons. Mamie Manneh was arrested three years ago after customs agents seized a shipment of primate parts as it passed through Kennedy Airport on the way to her Bement Avenue home.

NEW YORK (AP) ― A Liberian woman accused of smuggling endangered monkey meat from Africa to New York has failed to persuade a judge that she shouldn't be prosecuted because she needed the butchered carcasses for religious reasons. ... The dozen boxes containing the skulls, limbs and torsos of monkeys and baboons had been shipped from Guinea and were headed to Manneh's home on Staten Island. Agents who searched her house found 33 more animal parts in her garage.

Just for a lark, I decided to google “international condemnations of Hamas” this morning. You can guess what came up, right? Naturally, searching for condemnations of Hamas, one finds only international condemnations of Israel. An Australian report noted that the “British Foreign Secretary David Miliband is calling for an urgent ceasefire, while Russia’s Foreign Minister says he’s told his Israeli counterpart to urgently halt the military action.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, “strongly condemned Israel’s disproportionate use of force,” as did Brazil. Indonesia called on all countries to “sever all forms of diplomatic and business...

The concept of child workers or slaves is nothing new to Islamic countries such as Yemen, Egypt, and in parts of Africa. Some of these children have to work because of poor economic conditions, others are forced to work and many are beaten to work harder. They are basically treated no better than slaves. Now American Muslims are once again bringing part of the Islamic culture here.

IRVINE, Calif. – Late at night, the neighbors saw a little girl at the kitchen sink of the house next door. They watched through their window as the child rinsed plates under the open faucet. She wasn't much taller than the counter and the soapy water swallowed her slender arms. To put the dishes away, she climbed on a chair. But she was not the daughter of the couple next door doing chores. She was their maid. Shyima was 10 when a wealthy Egyptian couple brought her from a poor village in northern Egypt to work in their California home....

Christmas is being compromised in one New York town in the name of inclusivity. In the New York village of Armonk, officials have placed a menorah for the Jewish faith and the Islamic star and crescent for the Muslim faith alongside the town's Christmas tree. Bill Donahue of the Catholic League does not believe a Christmas tree correctly represents the Christian faith. Instead, he says the Christian religious symbol of this season should be a nativity scene. Last year, a Muslim resident in Armonk asked officials to display Islamic symbols so Muslims could be included in Christmas celebrations. This...

Gay Pride. Jewish Pride. Black pride. Hispanic Pride. Multiculturalism. Ethnic pride. Minority rights vs. tyranny of the majority. For a generation, America has been awash in the celebration of minorities and minorities celebration of themselves. Just recall Black is Beautiful or I am a woman, I am invincible. At the same time, the majority group in America -- white Christians -- has been allowed to celebrate very little. Rather, they have constantly been reminded of what they should be ashamed of -- their racism, sexism, homophobia, patriarchy, and xenophobia -- real and alleged. But what about minority shame? Why does...

Americans, in general, have grown to become apathetic and cynical about what it means to be an American of faith and to have belief in God. And, either they have resolved themselves to the fact that our democratic republic has gone wrong and flipped or else they have just plain given over the entire nation to so-called hyphenated Americans who have crept into the fabric of the United States of America and rewoven the foundational structure. Could we be so blind that we cannot see? Enter Barack Hussein Obama and America’s Near Total Demise Obama is the man who said...

All-permeating "white-guilt" did not appear out of thin air. It has taken a sustained propaganda effort, a wide-ranging mobilization of education and culture, to inculcate and sustain self-loathing among American Caucasians. Like the Coca-Cola TM brand, white-guilt needs endless repetition to remain struck in the thought and behavioral processes of the masses. The movie Pathfinder, which I saw on cable, offers a vivid example of the sort of brainwashing intended to refresh the white-guilt TM brand in the thinking habits of young people in particular. Set around 900 AD, the film deals with Viking incursions into North America.  The Vikings...

Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnar wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline: “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.” Indeed. And so it goes. This time round — Bombay — it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims “found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion.” ' Oh, I don’t know about that. In fact, you’d be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was “linked” to any religion,...

A JORDANIAN man slowly strangled his 16-year-old married sister, using wire and the girl's scarf, after she visited a female friend because he had to "cleanse family honour". After jailing the unidentified 20-year-old man for seven years, Judge Hassan Amayreh said: "It took him 30 minutes to strangle his sister to death with a metal wire and her own scarf." In such cases in Jordan, if family members drop charges against those who carry out the crime, a court usually commutes or reduces sentences. Amayreh said the brother "has confessed, and claimed that he killed his sister to cleanse his...

CLAREMONT, Calif. (KABC) -- There is a costume controversy in Claremont. The school board changed a decades-long tradition of students dressing up to celebrate Thanksgiving, and some parents are outraged. The tradition involves kindergarten students at Mountain View and Condit elementary schools. The kids usually dress up in costumes. Each school takes turns dressing up as pilgrims and Indians, and then join together for a Thanksgiving feast.This year, however, there is a big change. The school board decided to continue holding the feast, but they are not allowing the students to dress up. The board is concerned the Indian costumes...

Almost half of married Egyptian women have been physically abused by their husbands, a study by the government statistics centre said on Wednesday. The study by CAPMAS said that 47 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 49 reported being victims of domestic violence and seven percent said a spouse raped them, state news agency MENA reported. Domestic violence is punishable under Egyptian law, but police are reluctant to intervene in something that is considered a private matter, said an Egyptian women's rights activist.

What if Christians demanded the following: 1. If anyone around Christians at work or school eats pork then they would get fired or severely chastised because we believe that scarfing down pig really offends God (and of course his people). Yep, BLTs—according to our take on Christ’s commands—really ticks him off and therefore bacon should be banned. Not only that, but any food that has even trace amounts of Porky the Pig in it must be verboten and banished from our presence everywhere we go because we’re Christians, and Christians don’t dine on swine. This means Jell-O shots at Tu-Tu-Tango’s...

ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2008) — Non-white medical students are more likely to embrace orthodox medicine and reject therapies traditionally associated with their cultures. That is one finding from an international study that measures the attitudes of medical students toward complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). While seemingly counter-intuitive, white students view CAM more favorably than their non-white counterparts, the study authors say.CAM is the common, collective term that describes non-orthodox therapies considered not intrinsic to the politically dominant health system of a particular society or culture.Despite the growing popularity of CAM, many medical schools do not include CAM teachings within basic...

In a bid to reflect Britain's multicultural modern society, Prince Charles is proposing to adopt the title of "Defender of Faith" when he becomes king instead of the traditional "Defender of the Faith". But it is high on symbolism because it would mean that the king, as supreme governor of the Church of England, would not be known as Defender of the Faith for the first time since the 16th century.

interesting, humorous

The children gather around “Miss Danielle” Buehner. “Good morning. Buenos dias," she welcomes the preschoolers. “Buenos dias, Miss Danielle,” they chime. In this class of 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds, the children come to learn social skills and practice their numbers, colors and thinking skills. They also come to learn a second language — Spanish. Of the 14 students enrolled in Irving Recreation Center’s dual language preschool, two live in Spanish-speaking homes, two have a bilingual parent, and another with Latino ethnicity was adopted into an Anglo home. All the rest are English-speaking youngsters whose previous exposure to the Spanish language...

A Paramus middle school student was sent home Friday after he came to school dressed up as Jesus for Halloween. For a few hours, Alex Woinski was the messiah of West Brook Middle School, but like the real Jesus, Woinski was condemned, so to speak. "Sort of like a new remake of what supposedly happened," Woinski told CBS 2. Decked out in sandals, a robe, fake beard and thorns, the 13-year-old joined 500 other students at his school's Halloween celebration, and on this day, he was the chosen one - to go home. "It was offensive to some students," Woinski...

A man accused of killing his neighbour carried the dead man's head on a bus before dumping it in a canal... The court heard Mohammed Boudjenane, 46, from Kilburn, north London, hit Lakhdar Ouyahia, 43, on the head with an object believed to be a claw hammer. Earlier he allegedly raped a woman at his flat and beat her after abducting her as she made her way to church. Mr Boudjenane told police he had been planning to kill the woman but released her when she agreed to marry him. "She was very fortunate to escape with her life," ......

"Out of one, many.” That was how Al Gore famously botched “E Pluribus Unum,” the motto chiseled on the great seal of the United States. Barack Obama’s Latin may not be any better than Gore’s — he did have to admit being an English-only kinda guy this summer . . . after complaining that Americans embarrass him with their lack of language proficiency. Understand this, though: If we hear the Democrats’ standard-bearer saying, “Out of one, many,” it won’t be a mistranslation. It will be a succinct statement of his ideology. It’s the “fundamental change” he has in mind for...

It is time to confront the unhappy fact about our country: There are now two Americas. Not a rich one and a poor one; economic status plays little role in this division. There is a Red one and a Blue one. For most of my life I have believed, in what I now regard as wishful thinking, that the Right and Left wings have essentially the same vision for America, that it's only about ways to get there in which the two sides differ. Right and Left share the same ends, I thought. That is not the case. For the...

While the state has seen demographic shifts in suburban school districts, the isolation and intense concentration of minority students in the 31 Abbott school districts is worse today than it was 20 years ago.  That's the basis for a "friend of the court" brief filed jointly by the New Jersey Black Issues Convention and the Hispanic Directors Association, two influential umbrella organizations. They are among nine groups challenging the state's overhaul of the school funding formula that guaranteed additional aid to the state's neediest districts. Locally, Paterson, Passaic and Garfield are classified as Abbott districts.   The court is scheduled...

President Bush will speak in a few minutes. Get to a TV and watch it, if you have the stomach for it.

UNC-Wilmington decided recently that the way to bolster its failing diversity program is to dump more money into it. Without any help from the Bush administration’s financial advisors, they have decided that rewarding failure is a good way to ensure success. That’s why they created a new Associate Provost of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion position. And that’s why they paid big bucks to Jose Hernandez to fill the slot. According to a university press release, the new tolerance czar will focus on four areas of “diversity and inclusion” including the following: Centro Hispano, the Multicultural Center, the African-American Cultural Center,...

The roots of today's mortgage-based financial crisis can be traced back to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which Jimmy Carter signed in 1977. Seeking to address complaints from anti-poverty activists and housing advocates about banks allegedly discriminating against minority borrowers and "redlining" inner-city neighborhoods, the CRA decreed that banks had "an affirmative obligation" to meet the credit needs of victims of discrimination in borrowing. To add a government stick to the process, the CRA decreed that federal banking regulators would consider how well banks were doing in meeting the goal of more multiculturalism in loaning when considering requests by banks...