Tag Archives: Tolerance

News

Terrorist attack: two Scandinavian women beheaded while traveling in Morocco

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Two tourists murdered in Morocco
Two tourists murdered in Morocco

The Daily Caller reports: (H/T Terrell)

Norwegian police confirmed Friday that the recently-surfaced video of a female Scandinavian student being beheaded is likely authentic.

The bodies of 28-year-old Maren Ueland from Norway and 24-year-old Louisa Vesterager Jespersen were recovered and flown to Casablanca on Friday, according to Deustche Welle. The two were reportedly killed in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains earlier this week, and video has since emerged online that appears to show one of them screaming as her head is severed with a knife.

At least one of the alleged perpetrators reportedly has ties to ISIS, reports The Daily Beast.

“There is no concrete evidence indicating the video is not real,” Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service said.

Thirteen arrests have been made in what is believed to be an act of terror.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen called the killings “politically motivated and thus an act of terror.”

News Corp Australia had some information about the attackers:

On Tuesday police detained a suspect said to belong to a militant group in Marrakesh. Three other suspects were subsequently arrested in the city, the Central Bureau for Judicial Investigations said.

They were named as:

● Rachid Afatti, a 32-year-old small businessman from Al Kayed, a village in rural Harbil, 30km outside Marrakech;

● Ouziad Younes, a 27-year-old carpenter from the Marrakech suburb of Al Azzouzia;

● Ejjoud Abdessamad, 25, from the Zeroual district of Marrakech.

Police have not released details of the fourth man arrested yesterday after police seized a cache of knives found on a bus in Marrakech.

The BBC article I looked at had a photo of 3 of the men:

Morrocan police released this photo of 3 of the 4 suspects
Morrocan police released this photo of 3 of the 4 suspects

Now, if I had known those women, and they told me about their plans to go hiking in Morocco, I would have told them not to go. I would have told them not to go, even if they went with male friends, or had a male guide, or whatever. It’s important to be alert and not put yourself in situations where you will be isolated and exposed to harm.

Windsor, Ontario, Canada

On a related note, I wanted to share a story from Windsor, Ontario Canada, where a 76-year-old woman died as a result of her injuries from another attack by a 21-year-old man.

The Windsor Star reports: (H/T Stephanie)

The elderly Windsor woman who suffered severe injuries in a shocking beating on Ganatchio Trail last year has died in hospital.

Sources have confirmed that Sara Anne Widholm, 76, died at Windsor Regional Hospital on Saturday, Dec. 15.

“She was a faithful and beloved member of our church, Riverside Baptist, and we will miss her dearly, but now she is whole and at peace in heaven with her Lord Jesus,” said Pastor Brandon Taylor, leader of the church where Widholm and her husband were members.

[…]On the morning of Oct. 8, 2017, Widholm was walking on the Ganatchio Trail and cleaning it of litter, as was her regular habit, when she became the victim of an attack that Windsor police have described as “vicious” and “unprovoked.”

[…]The long list of injuries included multiple brain hemorrhages, a life-threatening blood clot, extensive skull fractures, and fractured vertebrae.

[…]Later the same day as the attack, police arrested Windsor resident Habibullah Ahmadi in relation to the crime.

Ahmadi — who goes by the first name Daniel and is now 22 — was initially charged with aggravated assault, but the charge was upgraded to attempted murder.

Canada is a country that has embraced open borders and mass migration from Middle Eastern countries, so it’s interesting to see how Canadian leaders responded to the story.

Frontpage magazine reported on that:

Attacker Habibullah Ahmadi was 21, a full adult, but police never released his booking photo. News reports described him as a “Windsor man,” who goes by the name “Daniel.”  Local and national news stories contained no statements from Habibullah Ahmadi, nor any indication that he had declined an interview. Likewise, news reports contained no quotes from Habibullah Ahmadi’s family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, or fellow students in Windsor.

Habibullah Ahmadi, a male of 21, attacked a defenseless woman, 75, but local and national feminists did not cite the attack as an example of violence against women or toxic masculinity. Likewise, no statement against violence emerged after the attack finally claimed Widholm’s life.

Windsor mayor Drew Dilkens tweeted that Widholm “exemplified the can-do Windsor spirit and my most sincere condolences go out to her family for their loss.” It was as though she had died of natural causes, and no mention of the violent attack.

Former Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynn, a crusader against bullying, never offered a statement on the case. Current Premier Doug Ford of the Progressive Conservative Party did not issue a  comment. News reports turn up no proclamations on the attack from Lisa Gretzky, a New Democratic Party MPP for Windsor, or from the NDP provincial leader Andrea Horwath.

I thought this was interesting about Trudeau, who likes to present himself as a great moral human being because of his tolerance:

Last January, an 11-year-old Toronto girl charged that a man had twice cut her hijab. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced the attack, which turned out to be a hoax. The son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had nothing to say about the attack on Anne Widholm, which was not a hoax.

And the national media has been silent as well:

The one-year anniversary of the attack passed without notice in local and national media. Police and court authorities weren’t exactly keep the public posted about the case.

Last July, CTV news said AM800 News, CKLW, has learned that a date for Habibullah’s trial would be set sometime in January 2019, though no official court or police document was cited. The CTV piece came headlined, “Windsor man going to trial for alleged Ganatchio Trail attack,” and the story cited “an alleged vicious attack of an elderly woman.”  From the start, there was nothing “alleged” about it, and the report offered no insight on the attacker.

I can understand that it is compassionate to risk your own life for someone else, and generous to spend your own money on someone else. What I don’t understand is when politicians want to claim to be compassionate and generous when they risk other people’s lives and spend other people’s money.

Polemics

Paul Copan responds to questions frequently asked by postmodern relativists

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Lets take a closer look at a puzzle
Lets take a closer look at a puzzle

Four articles from Paul Copan over at the UK site “BeThinking”. Each article responds to a different slogan that you might hear if you’re dealing with non-Christians on the street.

“That’s just your interpretation!”

Some of his possible responses:

  • Gently ask, ‘Do you mean that your interpretation should be preferred over mine? If so, I’d like to know why you have chosen your interpretation over mine. You must have a good reason.’
  • Remind your friend that you are willing to give reasons for your position and that you are not simply taking a particular viewpoint arbitrarily.
  • Try to discern if people toss out this slogan because they don’t like your interpretation. Remind them that there are many truths we have to accept even if we don’t like them.
  • ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’ is a statement that is presented as a fact. If it is just an interpretation, then there is no reason to take it seriously.

More responses are here.

“You Christians are intolerant!”

Some of his possible responses:

  • If you say that the Christian view is bad because it is exclusive, then you are also at that exact moment doing the very thing that you are saying is bad. You have to be exclusive to say that something is bad, since you exclude it from being good by calling it bad.
  • There is a difference, a clear difference between tolerance and truth. They are often confused. We should hold to what we believe with integrity but also support the rights of others to disagree with our viewpoint.
  • Sincerely believing something doesn’t make it true. You can be sincere, but sincerely wrong. If I get onto a plane and sincerely believe that it won’t crash then it does, then my sincerity is quite hopeless. It won’t change the facts. Our beliefs, regardless of how deeply they are held, have no effect on reality.

More responses are here.

“That’s true for you, but not for me!”

Some of his possible responses:

  • If my belief is only true for me, then why isn’t your belief only true for you? Aren’t you saying you want me to believe the same thing you do?
  • You say that no belief is true for everyone, but you want everyone to believe what you do.
  • You’re making universal claims that relativism is true and absolutism is false. You can’t in the same breath say, ‘Nothing is universally true’ and ‘My view is universally true.’ Relativism falsifies itself. It claims there is one position that is true – relativism!

More responses are here.

“If you were born in India, you’d be a Hindu!”

Some of his possible responses:

  • Just because there are many different religious answers and systems doesn’t automatically mean pluralism is correct.
  • If we are culturally conditioned regarding our religious beliefs, then why should the religious pluralist think his view is less arbitrary or conditioned than the exclusivist’s?
  • If the Christian needs to justify Christianity’s claims, the pluralist’s views need just as much substantiation.

More responses are here.

And a bonus: “How do you know you’re not wrong?“.

News

Christian mother Asia Bibi is being hunted house-by-house in Pakistan

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The sign the Pakistani men are holding should read "Hang Asia"
The sign the Pakistani men are holding should read “Hang Asia”

Have you heard about Asia Bibi? She’s the Christian woman who was imprisoned because of unsubstantiated charges made against her by her neighbors in Pakistan. Although she was finally found innocent, she remains in Pakistan. But she can’t live there because radicals trying to kill her. And they don’t want to let her leave the country.

The radically leftist UK Guardian says:

The family of Asia Bibi, the Christian woman who spent eight years on death row in Pakistan for blasphemy before being acquitted three weeks ago, claim they are being hunted by extremists going house to house with their photographs to try to track them down.

Bibi’s family have been in hiding since her acquittal by the country’s supreme court. She is in protective custody as part of a deal between the government and a hardline Islamic party, under which violent protests were called off while a review of the court ruling was undertaken.

Bibi’s lawyer, relatives and supporters have appealed for the family to be given asylum in a European or north American country.

Although the United Kingdom has taken in millions of unskilled immigrants from the Middle East – including many who started sex-trafficking rings  using underage British girls – they don’t want to take in Bibi. Why not?

A few months ago, I added the book “The Strange Death of Europe” to my reading list on the blog. It talks about the immigration policies of all the European nations, and what happens to people who question those policies. Not just to their careers, but to their lives. That book was written by Douglas Murray, and he wrote a column about Asia Bibi in National Review.

He writes:

Her case has had ramifications throughout Pakistani society in the years since. For instance, it provoked the statement by the brave governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, which led to his own murder by one of his own bodyguards. In the days since her release from jail, there have been mass protests in Pakistan where thousands of enraged fanatics have called, literally, for Asia Bibi’s head.

[…][T]oday there are reports that the British government has said that it will not offer asylum to Asia Bibi. The reason being “security concerns” — that weasel term now used by all officialdom whenever it needs one last reason to avoid doing the right thing. According to this report, the government is concerned that if the U.K. offered asylum to Bibi it could cause “unrest among certain sections of the community.” … The “community” that the British government will be scared of is the community that comes from the same country that has tortured Asia Bibi for the last eight years.

The government is right to expect a backlash. There have been cases before of this “community” expressing its views. From the book-burnings and protests over The Satanic Verses affair in 1989 to the mass protest against cartoonists, which was the “community’s” response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015, the Pakistani Muslim community in the U.K. has never been shy of expressing its views. Occasionally you even get a case like that at Easter 2016, when a Muslim from Bradford drove up to Glasgow to kill another Muslim (a shopkeeper called Asad Shah) because Mr. Shah came from a minority Muslim group that his killer deemed heretical. Which you might say is another example of “diversity.”

These days, many people are voting for policies on the basis of how it makes them feel about themselves, or how it makes them look to others. As long as they aren’t spending their own money, or risking their own safety, these feelings-based voters want to be very  generous. Very generous spending other people’s money. Very generous risking other people’s safety. Is that real generosity?

We should definitely have a system that allows highly-skilled immigrants to come here to work. And if they prove that they are hard-working and law-abiding, then they should be able to apply for permanent residency. But we also need to be careful about bringing people in who will not respect basic human rights, like Asia Bibi’s right to religious liberty. That’s not compassion, it’s foolishness.

By the way, don’t expect Western feminists to say anything about Asia Bibi’s situation. That would be going against their “intersectional” allies – something they aren’t willing to do.