Read it.

Paging Rand Paul … Paging Rand Paul….

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According to a recent article in The Daily Mail, the Islamic State has promised that it will soon debut a new method of executing its prisoners….

Techniques used by ISIS to torture or kill prisoners are always modeled on those used by Mohammed and his companions, as described in the Koran or sahih (authentic) hadith.

Think of Mohammed as Tony Soprano with camels.

Richard Fernandez turns over a rock.

They come from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Kosovo. Forth they stream from Bangladesh and the Muslim parts of Burma. They sail past Indonesia and Malaysia toward the hell-hole of Australia. A huge number are making their way overland through Macedonia and Serbia and are even now burrowing under the frontier wire of Hungary. On they come in boats from Libya, South Sudan, Eritrea and Nigeria, pausing only to catch their breath in Greece, Italy and France before going onward to the Promised Land. Not Israel in this case but Great Britain and Germany.

They come from everywhere, even in Europe masses of people have fled the fighting in Ukraine, half a million from Donetsk alone.  They are swarming everywhere.  The director of Human Rights Watch asks, ‘why does nobody care’ not just about the masses of refugees themselves the carnage they are fleeing from?  After all, the West cared enough once so what changed in the interim?

…

What changed in the interval was Western confidence in the normativeness of its values and its ability to intervene in global events. The political delegitimization of Operation Iraqi Freedom added to the disappointment in the Arab Spring has pretty much soured the West on anything except watching the tragedy passively unfold. The “skepticism about America’s right, power and duty to lead the world”, the logical consequence of ‘no more Vietnams’, ‘no more Iraqs’  is no mas, period.

This has set the stage for a self-sustaining chain reaction in failing states.  For example, thousands of Pakistani Christians are stuck in Thailand, persecuted at home and unwelcome abroad; even in the West, perhaps especially in the West.  Refugees often carry with them the last, best hope of their failing countries. They are too frequently the repository of the its greatest human capital, the seed corn of lands plagued by the new locusts.

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On August 21, 2015, what could have become yet another Jihadist massacre of Europeans was prevented at the very last second. Not by the country’s authorities, but by random travelers. An armed militant Muslim on a train to France was overpowered by some of the male passengers, among them several unarmed American soldiers, just before he could start shooting people. Ayoub El Khazzani, a Moroccan national, has been charged with attempted murder of a terrorist nature. The police believe had carefully planned a terror attack.

Mr. Khazzani was known to the security services prior to this incident. Yet they still did not manage to stop him. He was able to move freely in the EU between different Western European countries. He joins the rising number of Muslim terrorists who were able, or in his case nearly able, to carry out terror attacks, despite already being on terrorist watch lists. Why? Because there are just too many Jihadists out there. The authorities cannot stop them all. French authorities are concerned about a truly spectacular Islamic terror attack, perhaps on the scale of the September 11 attacks in the USA in 2001.

Read it.

Guess the Saudis aren’t bend-over-and-spread-em folks like most ‘Western” governments.

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Joost Niemöller’s latest essay takes a look behind the scenes in the “migration” crisis, paying particular attention to the role played by Qatar in expediting the movement of Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East into Europe.

Read it.

A well-known British Islamist preacher, Hamza Tzortzis, has turned up on the Ashley Madison user list that was leaked by hackers earlier this week, according to his own Facebook page.

Tzortzis, who is a prominent member of the Islamic Education and Research Academy, which tours British universities, posted yesterday that he had been tipped off that his details were included in the leak, but he denied ever using the extramarital dating service.

Of course he didn’t. MRDA.

Read it.

Perhaps he knows something we don’t.

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Although ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) publicized an auction for slaves (captured non-Moslem women and children) in June they have since replaced that with a printed price list. Young children are the most expensive going for up to $200 each. Adolescent girls cost about $125 and adult women go for under a hundred dollars. The catch here is the buyers are restricted to ISIL gunmen, as something of a fringe benefit. The sales are made with the understanding that the buyer can resell their slave for whatever they can get. It is also understood that ISIL slave owners can try to arrange for families to ransom the slaves for whatever the owner can get (usually several thousand dollars each). The June 2015 slave auction in eastern Syria sold 42 Yazidi women who were offered to ISIL men for between $500 and $2,000. So being allowed to buy a slave is quite a lucrative fringe benefit.

Since the slaves were not Moslem they could not be married so their owners would use them for sex, housekeeping or whatever. ISIL was depending on Moslem scripture to justify this. Actually, ISIL is not alone as there is still a lot of slavery in the Islamic world. There is also a lot of hatred for non-Moslems especially those considered pagans. ISIL considers the Yazidis pagans but will enslave Christians as well. It was with Yazidis that ISIL reintroduced slavery (of non-Moslems, especially “pagans” like Yazidis) into their new Islamic State. This may appall many in the West and to placate foreigners most Arab nations have outlawed slavery, despite the fact that it still exists and continues to exist with much local support.

Read it.

A crucially important piece of legislation, Bill 59, is currently being considered by the provincial Assembly in Quebec. It isn’t getting much attention outside of Canada, but if it passes, it will effectively empower the Quebec Human Rights Commission to implement UN Resolution 16/18 in the province. At that point Quebec will fall into line with a number of Western European countries, who have already passed laws that enforce sharia rules against Islamic blasphemy.

Read it.

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On a train in northern France, a young Moroccan stepped out of a bathroom with an AK-47 (or similar weapon) and opened fire. Several people were wounded, but happily three [later reports say two] unarmed U.S. Marines were nearby and they disabled and captured the assailant….

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Shortly after the Antiplanner commented on low oil prices last April, the Saudis admitted that their goal in flooding the market with oil was to drive out high-cost producers such as owners of shale-oil and off-shore wells. Now it appears that this policy has backfired on the Saudis, as their economy is hurting from the low oil prices while the shale industry continues to produce oil.

The problem for the Saudis, says one analyst, is that low prices might hurt high-cost producers, but the shale frackers “are mostly mid-cost.” thanks partly to new technologies. This means that, once they’ve made the initial investment in drilling and fracking, they can continue to extract oil, covering their operating costs even when prices are low and won’t be put out of business by a temporary surge in production in the Mideast.

Meanwhile, the Saudi government has seen its revenues decline by more than 30 percent. This has led Standard & Poors to downgrade Saudi credit ratings, saying that the country’s economy is “undiversified and vulnerable to a steep and sustained decline in oil prices.”

In the Bad Old Days, the oil under Saudi Arabia would belong to various European governments, and the Saudis would be wandering the desert on camels rather than buying up most of London and Paris. Which arrangement is preferable is left as an exercise for the reader.

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Touhidur Rahman was arrested along with two other men by Bangladeshi security forces on Tuesday in connection with the beheading of prominent atheist bloggers Avijit Roy and Ananta Bijoy Das in separate attacks, according to ITV News.

Oh, yeah, ‘Touhidur Rahman’ says ‘British man’ to me, right enough.

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This will come as no surprise to anybody who has been paying attention.

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In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

“I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.

Some things are too gross even for the New York Times.

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An impressive compendium of significant scholarship of the latest expression of Islamic totalitarianism.

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Not only are Muslims trying to take back any territory that they ever held, they’re trying to expand into new territory.

Islam is an existential threat to any non-Muslim polity. Eventually people will wake up to that. Hopefully before it’s too late.

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Part of the Iran nuclear agreement enables the removal of individual terrorists from Western sanctions, including notorious Lebanese assassin Anis Naccache.

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According to the latest reports, some soccer fans in the Czech Republic are not only showing signs of Islamophobia, they may even be WAYCISTS.

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Italian police arrested the men, named as Imad Busadia, Abdullah Assnusi, Ali Rouibah, Suud Mujassabi and Shauki Esshaush, on Thursday Reuters reported.

…

The men, who are believed to be part of a Libyan-based trafficking ring, were arrested after survivors were brought to Sicily and gave further information to police.

Read it.

The latest tragedy in the Mediterranean, where a fishing ship smuggling possibly as many as 600 people capsized on Wednesday with about 200 presumed dead, is a portrait in miniature of the mess of policy mistakes, unintended consequences, and human folly that’s turning the Mare Nostrum into a graveyard. (A mark of how bad things are: 200 deaths can be considered “a portrait in miniature”.)

According to the WSJ, many of those aboard the ship came from Syria. For four years, the West has refused and/or been unable to do anything about the plight of that war-torn country, and no wonder people are fleeing it. Meanwhile, the port of immediate departure was in Libya, where the West—at the urging of many European nations—did intervene, but without any intention to stick around or plan to deal with the aftermath. Even as it becomes increasingly clear that Libya’s disorder is at the root of the current immigration crisis, Europe has not the foggiest clue how to fix things there.

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The Simele massacre was a massacre committed by the armed forces of the Kingdom of Iraq during a campaign systematically targeting the Assyrians of northern Iraq in August 1933. The term is used to describe not only the massacre in Simele, but also the killing spree that took place among 63 Assyrian villages in the Dohuk and Mosul districts that led to the deaths of between 600 and 3,000 Assyrians.

Read it. And watch the video.

 The following report discusses the plight of a young homosexual under the Islamic State, who was faced with the likelihood of either being executed by ISIS or murdered by his uncle to preserve his family’s honor. If he had not escaped from Iraq, he would presumably be dead now.

What is remarkable about this story is that it aired on the BBC, of all places. Did someone fall asleep at the wheel at Beeb headquarters? Or are the times a-changin’?

Owen Bennett-Jones.

… the fact that more British Muslims are fighting for Islamic State than for the British army demands an explanation.

Read it.

And about damned time, too.

The British preacher was arrested last year by officers from the Metropolitan Police’s counter terrorism command.

It is alleged that between June 29 last year and March 6 this year Mr Choudary invited support for the terrorist group, contrary to section 12 Terrorism Act 2000.

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Ilford is the culturally enriched suburb of London where the firebrand preacher Anjem Choudary once had a crash pad. It is also the latest British municipality to feature a local media report in which members of parliament call for the director of public prosecutions to investigate and shut down Gates of Vienna.

For those who haven’t been glued to their sets, Gates of Vienna is located in Virginia. Not sure what a British ‘director of public prosecutions’ (what a great IngSoc name!) is going to do about that. Maybe phone Barack Hussein Obama and bitch him out? If so, he’ll have to stand it line.

The trickle-down effect from the Hate Not Hope “report” is interesting. It starts at The Independent — which, as far as I can tell, never published anything, despite their threatened “deadline” — then moves to The Guardian. From there it travels down the journalistic food chain to the locals, first Bradford, and now Ilford. Where next? There are three remaining MPs who want to bung us in chokey, so maybe their local papers will be next.

Britain is a year or two further down the road to dystopia than we are, so watching what goes on there is a good preview of what Democrites will be pushing over on this side of Mother Nature’s Immigration Fence.

Read it.

An estimated 200 migrants broke down several security fences and were forced to retreat by riot police as they tried to break through the final fence near the entrance of the 30 mile English Channel.

The group clashed with security forces for nearly an hour, reportedly chanting slogans such as “Open the border” and “We are not animals”.

Gee, they sound like Jeb Bush.

Read it.

Turkey says that it, together with the U.S., wants an IS-free zone in northern Syria. That is fine. But who will fill the vacuum in areas cleared of IS? That is an extremely important question Turkey’s American allies should think about with extreme care. Turkey simply finds joining the international campaign against IS an opportunity to install pro-Sunni Islamist rule in areas now controlled by IS.

Islamic radicals say they want to recover Spain, which Muslims once ruled. Well, Turkey once ruled Syria, and not that long ago, either.

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The efforts of the Red-Green Alliance to make people think that jihad means an “inner spiritual struggle” have been a signal failure. When an ordinary Westerner hears the word jihad, he knows it means bloodthirsty Muslims screaming for unbelievers to be killed. It means cutting throats, beheading people, suicide bombings on crowded trains, and all those other lovely activities that keep Islam in the daily headlines. Most people aren’t fooled by the apologists’ attempt to cleanse the word of its traditional Islamic meaning.

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The Kurdish Workers’ Party, known as the PKK, was locked in a bloody war with the Turkish state from the mid-1980s until 2013. The cease-fire has, for all intents and purposes, been destroyed. Turkey is battling both ISIS and the PKK under the guise of fighting terrorism. Yet Turkish attempts to conflate ISIS and the PKK–even in the wake of the suicide bombing in a Kurdish border town that killed 32 young people–effectively ask people to overlook some salient facts.

…

Attempts to conflate Kurdish resistance with ISIS are designed to play on old, deeply rooted Turkish fears. A declaration of a state of emergency in Turkey would give the Justice and Development Party (or AKP), which lost its parliamentary majority in June elections, more flexibility to crack down on political opponents such as the Kurdish majority People’s Democratic Party. More than 1,300 people have been detained recently under the guise of cracking down on domestic PKK and ISIS elements in Turkey.

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I guess there are areas in which Black Lives Don’t Matter.

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John Nuttall told an undercover officer that his wife, Amanda Korody, believed that “grown-up Jews” go to “eternal hell” and that she would be doing Jewish children a favor by killing them and reaching paradise, police records revealed in British Columbia’s Supreme Court show.

“I asked Nuttall how he thinks he will have access to Jewish kids and he said [he and his wife] were both white and could pass for Jewish…They will be regulars in the synagogue. They will gain the trust of everybody. And once they have everything they will get enough guns and ammo to go ahead with their mission,” read the March 2013 record from an undercover RCMP officer.

Just think of it as REALLY late-term abortions.

Read it. And watch the video.

The Islamic State has released yet another grotesquely violent execution video. This one is directed at a French-speaking audience, and after he shoots his captive, the executioner promises that there will be corpses in the streets of Paris if the French do not submit to Islam.

I’m certain that he’s correct; there will be corpses in the streets of Paris. The question is: Whose? It is, after all, not that many generations since the French proved themselves adept at creating corpses with great efficiency…

Read it. Feel free to laugh.

The problem, however, lies not in chronicling the successes of the movement, but in explaining how something so improbable became possible. The explanations so often given for its rise—the anger of Sunni communities, the logistical support provided by other states and groups, the movement’s social media campaigns, its leadership, its tactics, its governance, its revenue streams, and its ability to attract tens of thousands of foreign fighters—fall far short of a convincing theory of the movement’s success.

Oh, maybe it’s the whole Koran/Mohammed/Jihad business. Naw, that couldn’t be it.

But this simply raises the more fundamental question of why the movement’s ideology and actions—however slickly produced and communicated—have had popular appeal in the first place.

Perhaps it’s adherents read the Koran and took it seriously. Naw, that couldn’t be it.

The clearest evidence that we do not understand this phenomenon is our consistent inability to predict—still less control—these developments. Who predicted that Zarqawi would grow in strength after the US destroyed his training camps in 2001? It seemed unlikely to almost everyone that the movement would regroup so quickly after his death in 2006, or again after the surge in 2007. We now know more and more facts about the movement and its members, but this did not prevent most analysts from believing as recently as two months ago that the defeats in Kobane and Tikrit had tipped the scales against the movement, and that it was unlikely to take Ramadi. We are missing something.

Yeah – it’s called ‘Islam’. (Make you wonder what ‘we’ he’s talking about.)

The author has wide experience in the Middle East and was formerly an official of a NATO country.

Oh, well, then, that explains it.

We hide this from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. And we will not remedy this simply through the accumulation of more facts. It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.

‘Baffled?’ Try ‘clueless’. Try ‘dumber than a box of rocks’. Try ‘invincibly ignorant’.

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Last week residents of the Italian town of Quinto di Treviso, near Treviso, protested angrily about the resettling of immigrants in their neighborhoods and residences. After two days of protests, the town’s mayor ordered the unwanted migrants moved elsewhere.

They didn’t come for work, they came for benefits; that’s why they’re desperate to get to Britain.

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In a speech to be delivered to an audience of Muslim men and women in Birmingham, David Cameron is expected to announce that only those in the Muslim community willing to take a stand against jihadist violence will be supported and those who “walk up to the border of illegality” will be denounced.

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.

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We don’t know Abdulazeez’s story yet. However, we do know the story of Carlos Bledsoe (aka Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad), another Islamist terrorist from Tennessee who killed a soldier at a military recruiting center. We know Bledsoe’s story because his father told it to the House Committee on Homeland Security in 2011. Unfortunately, as Americans for Peace and Tolerance said in a press release yesterday, the warning offered by Bledsoe’s father has not been taken to heart.

Read it.

Shocking, we know: the Saudis are none too pleased with the Iran deal, and after biting their tongues for a few days they’re letting their displeasure be known in public.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The Saudis, who know more about Islam than Barack Obama, more about Iran than Barack Obama, and more about what’s going on in the Middle East than Barack Obama, probably know whether this was a good deal or a bad deal. And they apparently think it was a bad deal.

Maybe they know something Barack Obama doesn’t….

Richard Fernandez show us what’s behind the curtain.

In the last 24 hours the news has been dominated by president Obama’s outrage at an newsman for asking him about four US hostages left in Iranian custody despite his deal.  Someone was raining on his parade, ruining his moment of historic achievement and legacy.

But in other news, ISIS sank an Egyptian naval vessel, attacked France which thwarted a second attack on a military base, the Philippines has reopened the old US Naval base at Subic, the Japanese armed forces are now authorized for combat for the first time since World War 2.  Meanwhile, a person identified as Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez attacked a military recruitment depot in Chattanooga, killing four and wounding a police officer, before being killed himself. A website reports that an ISIS related site is tweeted “Chattanooga” at the same time as the attack.

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More ‘workplace violence’, I suppose.

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ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) recently got some media attention because they had beheaded two Moslem women accused of sorcery. For a Moslem the only thing unusual about this was how the women are killed. Public beheading is usually reserved for men. Sorcery, on the other hand, is quite common in the Islamic world, even though it is strongly condemned in the Koran. Many Islamic majority countries consider sorcery a capital (the guilty are executed) crime. But there’s a lot more to sorcery than that.

For example, back in 2013 Mehdi Taeb, a senior cleric in the Iranian government explained that the major reason so many nations went along with the increased economic sanctions against Iran was because Israel had been using magic to persuade the leaders of these nations to back more sanctions. Without the Israeli witchcraft, the sanctions would not exist. Taeb explained that the Israelis have used this magic before, as in 2009, against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was running for president. Many Iranians openly opposed Ahmadinejad, who won anyway. This, to Taeb, was proof that devout Moslems could defeat the Jewish magic.

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In June 2015 ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) held a slave auction in eastern Syria. On sale where 42 Yazidi women, who were offered to ISIL men for between $500 and $2,000. Since the slaves were not Moslem they could not be married so their owners would use them for sex, housekeeping or whatever. ISIL was depending on Moslem scripture to justify this. Actually, ISIL is not alone as there is still a lot of slavery in the Islamic world. There is also a lot of hatred for non-Moslems especially those they consider pagans. ISIL considers the Yazidis pagans. It was with Yazidis that ISIL reintroduced slavery (of non-Moslems, especially “pagans” like Yazidis) into their new Islamic State. This may appall many in the West and to placate foreigners most Arab nations have outlawed slavery, despite the fact that it still exists and continues to exist with much local support.

Read it.

The Sinai-based Islamic State affiliate Wilayat al-Sina (Sinai Province) claimed responsibility for the firing of three Grad rockets at Israel on July 3. This attack, which caused no casualties, came closely after a large-scale assault by the group against Egyptian security installations in the Sheikh Zuweid area of northern Sinai.

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On July 2, shortly after Friday prayers, thousands of devout Sunni Muslims marched to the Hotel Madimak. They broke through the weak police barricades surrounding the hotel, chanting “Allahu Akbar” (in Arabic, “God is the greatest”). When they reached the hotel, they set it alight, with policemen allegedly standing by and watching. The city’s Islamist mayor refused to send fire brigades to put out the fire. The assault took eight hours, without any intervention from the police, military or fire department. When what would later be internationally known as the “Sivas massacre” ended and the mob dispersed, 35 people, mostly Alevi intellectuals as well as a Dutch anthropologist, had died, along with two hotel employees. Two arsonists also died. Ironically, Aziz Nesin survived the attack.

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Boko Haram violence has left over 600 dead in the last six weeks. Since Boko Haram began operating in 2002 they have caused over 13,000 deaths and they have little popular support even in the most conservative areas of the Moslem north. The army says it is still going after Boko Haram camps and bases. President Buhari unexpectedly ordered the army to stop using troops for manning highway checkpoints. This enabled Boko Haram gunmen to move more freely because the police did not replace all the abandoned army checkpoints. The early July checkpoint order was because the president felt that internal security is the job of the police and that the army was only helping out temporarily. Buhari is being criticized for the checkpoint order and for not acting to replace less capable military leaders and put more effective officers in charge. Buhari is a retired general and he knows how this works, but has said nothing about what he will do and when he will do it. This again raises questions about the ability of the government to coordinate army and police operations in the fight against Boko Haram. The new president now has to deal with accusations that the abandoned checkpoints played a role in the growing Boko Haram violence in the northeast.

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These days, it is quite dangerous for anyone with Far Eastern facial features to take a stroll on a Turkish street or to enjoy a plate of sushi. To angry Turks, every Far Easterner is a Chinese to attack.

In protesting China’s alleged ill treatment of Muslim Uighur Turks, angry Turkish Turks attacked a Chinese restaurant in Istanbul’s Tophane district. Cihan Yavuz, the owner of the (no longer) “Happy China” restaurant, almost in tears, told reporters: “We are Turkish. Our cook is an Uighur Turk … We do not even sell alcohol here … It seems I will close down the restaurant and leave.”

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An outbreak of violence between Algeria’s Mozabite Berber and Chaamba Arab populations resulted in at least 22 deaths in the last two days, the deadliest such clash since tensions between the two groups emerged after the vandalization of a Berber shrine in late 2013.

A pointed reminder that the reason this region is Muslim is because it was invaded and conquered by Arabs.

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A recent arson attack did severe damage to a church in Israel on the Sea of Galilee, at the site where tradition says Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes to feed five thousand hungry people. When it turned out that the perpetrators were zealous Muslims, the press dropped the story. Nothing to see here. Move along, folks.