#online extremists in Pakistan

[germiyahu]

"If you describe a horrific and detailed act of racism committed by an IDF soldier or a Kahanist or other anti Arab extremist (say Baruch Goldstein's massacre), you'll find that a huge majority of Jews condemn him, his philosophy, his actions, denounce him and consider him a poor practitioner of Judaism"

No they don't, that's the whole fucking point.

Whenever IDF soldiers kill Palestinians the only reaction from Israelis you would get is them bringing up how military service is mandatory in Israel so you can't be mad at the soldier, how this is an extremely complex two-sided "conflict" where both sides are equally wrong and equally victims, how everything is the fault of the entire government of Hamas and Bibi (but just Bibi, they will never hold anyone else in the government accountable) and gaslighting people into believing that this is an isolated incident that doesn't normally happen and that the Israeli committing the crime will actually face any type of justice.

And this assuming that they would even acknowledge a crime has been committed instead of calling it "blood libel" and using what happens as a segue to talk about anti-semitism even more.

So you clearly don't know any Jews because Baruch Goldstein is one of the least controversial figures in Jewish history to condemn. Like, he probably has defenders in Israel but they're definitely a pretty small minority, and you'd be very hard pressed to find any diaspora Jews who approve of his crimes.

And aside from that, because yes people do defend the IDF when they are presented with similarly horrific sounding stories... but look what happens, most of these stories turn out to be exaggerated or completely false to begin with! This isn't about starry-eyed Jewish supremacy vs Muslims just doing an oopsie and they had good reasons for it, this is about truth. That's the key element. It's a little ridiculous to whine that Jews won't full throatedly condemn bombing a hospital and killing 500 people when that turned out to be a lie!

Baruch Goldstein was a terrorist, he factually provably committed horrific crimes. Osama Bin Laden was also a terrorist, he factually provably orchestrated horrific crimes. If you ask the average Jew to defend the former, they'd be equally as uncomfortable as if you asked the average Muslim to defend the latter. There are always going to be braindead terrorism fanboys in both groups, duh. I'm talking about the average person.

And here you are, deciding that no, the average Jew is a savage devotee to terrorism and genocide, just like every other Jew Hater online. It's becoming a bit stale. See that last part in particular, this is about a deep envious rage you feel that Jewish people "get away" with doing/thinking/saying "The Bad Thing" and you feel a need to bring them down a peg. You frame a very real thing (like blood libel is not trivial and Jewish people do not actually talk about it frivolously), as a privilege, a cheat code. You're jealous because you probably belong to a demographic that can't "milk" it's own historic oppression and tragedy, so you feel that Jews shouldn't "get" to.

But this is the real world, where exaggerating the alleged crimes of Jews is demonstrably linked with an increase in antisemitic rhetoric (check), harassment of Jews and Jewish institutions (check), and even violence (they just thwarted a planned terrorist attack in Brooklyn, very much the last roadblock to a liberated Palestine).

Anyway my point was that if you zoom out to more and more abstract concepts, a greater percentage of both Jewish and Muslim populations will probably support them. And I think it's telling that "a Jewish state founded on war and large violent population transfers" has a higher moral burden on it than "a Muslim state founded on war and large violent population transfers."

Ask a Muslim if they support "Pakistan exists" and how many would disagree? Realistically? But you dare act disgusted and shocked that a similar number and percentage of Jews support "Israel exists"? My entire question is why "This is a country that has done bad things and it exists amid ethnic conflict" is even on par with "this niche cult within a giant religion (literally they admitted to it) did a massacre on civilians."

If that's the moral equivalence then we're done here. I'm not playing games like that.

[mariacallous]

AI-infused search engines from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity have been surfacing deeply racist and widely debunked research promoting race science and the idea that white people are genetically superior to nonwhite people.

Patrik Hermansson, a researcher with UK-based anti-racism group Hope Not Hate, was in the middle of a months-long investigation into the resurgent race science movement when he needed to find out more information about a debunked dataset that claims IQ scores can be used to prove the superiority of the white race.

He was investigating the Human Diversity Foundation, a race science company funded by Andrew Conru, the US tech billionaire who founded Adult Friend Finder. The group, founded in 2022, was the successor to the Pioneer Fund, a group founded by US Nazi sympathizers in 1937 with the aim of promoting “race betterment” and “race realism.”

Hermansson logged in to Google and began looking up results for the IQs of different nations. When he typed in “Pakistan IQ,” rather than getting a typical list of links, Hermansson was presented with Google’s AI-powered Overviews tool, which, confusingly to him, was on by default. It gave him a definitive answer of 80.

When he typed in “Sierra Leone IQ,” Google’s AI tool was even more specific: 45.07. The result for “Kenya IQ” was equally exact: 75.2.

Hermansson immediately recognized the numbers being fed back to him. They were being taken directly from the very study he was trying to debunk, published by one of the leaders of the movement that he was working to expose.

The results Google was serving up came from a dataset published by Richard Lynn, a University of Ulster professor who died in 2023 and was president of the Pioneer Fund for two decades.

“His influence was massive. He was the superstar and the guiding light of that movement up until his death. Almost to the very end of his life, he was a core leader of it,” Hermansson says.

A WIRED investigation confirmed Hermanssons’s findings and discovered that other AI-infused search engines—Microsoft’s Copilot and Perplexity—are also referencing Lynn’s work when queried about IQ scores in various countries. While Lynn’s flawed research has long been used by far-right extremists, white supremacists, and proponents of eugenics as evidence that the white race is superior genetically and intellectually from nonwhite races, experts now worry that its promotion through AI could help radicalize others.

“Unquestioning use of these ‘statistics’ is deeply problematic,” Rebecca Sear, director of the Center for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London, tells WIRED. “Use of these data therefore not only spreads disinformation but also helps the political project of scientific racism—the misuse of science to promote the idea that racial hierarchies and inequalities are natural and inevitable.”

To back up her claim, Sear pointed out that Lynn’s research was cited by the white supremacist who committed the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, in 2022.

Google’s AI Overviews were launched earlier this year as part of the company’s effort to revamp its all-powerful search tool for an online world being reshaped by artificial intelligence. For some search queries, the tool, which is only available in certain countries right now, gives an AI-generated summary of its findings. The tool pulls the information from the internet and gives users the answers to queries without needing to click on a link.

The AI Overview answer does not always immediately say where the information is coming from, but after complaints from people about how it showed no articles, Google now puts the title for one of the links to the right of the AI summary. AI Overviews have already run into a number of issues since launching in May, forcing Google to admit it had botched the heavily-hyped rollout. AI Overviews is turned on by default for search results, and can’t be removed without restoring to installing third-party extensions. (“I haven't enabled it, but it was enabled,” Hermansson, the researcher, tells WIRED. “I don't know how that happened.”)

In the case of the IQ results, Google referred to a variety of sources, including posts on X, Facebook, and a number of obscure listicle websites, including World Population Review. In nearly all of these cases, when you click through to the source, the trail leads back to Lynn’s infamous dataset. (In some cases, while the exact numbers Lynn published are referenced, the websites do not cite Lynn as the source.)

When querying Google’s Gemini AI chatbot directly using the same terms, it provided a much more nuanced response. “It's important to approach discussions about national IQ scores with caution,” read text that the chatbot generated in response to the query “Pakistan IQ.” The text continued: “IQ tests are designed primarily for Western cultures and can be biased against individuals from different backgrounds.”

Google tells WIRED that its systems weren’t working as intended in this case and that it is looking at ways it can improve.

“We have guardrails and policies in place to protect against low quality responses, and when we find Overviews that don’t align with our policies, we quickly take action against them,” Ned Adriance, a Google spokesperson, tells WIRED. “These Overviews violated our policies and have been removed. Our goal is for AI Overviews to provide links to high quality content so that people can click through to learn more, but for some queries there may not be a lot of high quality web content available.”

While WIRED’s tests suggest AI Overviews have now been switched off for queries about national IQs, the results still amplify the incorrect figures from Lynn’s work in what’s called a “featured snippet,” which displays some of the text from a website before the link.

Google did not respond to a question about this update.

But it’s not just Google promoting these dangerous theories. When WIRED put the same query to other AI-powered online search services, we found similar results.

Perplexity, an AI search company that has been found to make things up out of thin air, responded to a query about “Pakistan IQ” by stating that “the average IQ in Pakistan has been reported to vary significantly depending on the source.”

It then lists a number of sources, including a Reddit thread that relied on Lynn’s research and the same World Population Review site that Google’s AI Overview referenced. When asked for Sierra Leone’s IQ, the Perplexity directly cited Lynn’s figure: “Sierra Leone's average IQ is reported to be 45.07, ranking it among the lowest globally.”

Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment.

Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot, which is integrated into its Bing search engine, generated confident text—“The average IQ in Pakistan is reported to be around 80”—citing a website called IQ International, which does not reference its sources. When asked for “Sierra Leone IQ,” Copilot’s response said it was 91. The source linked in the results was a website called Brainstats.com, which references Lynn’s work. Copilot also referenced Brainstats.com work when queried about IQ in Kenya

“Copilot answers questions by distilling information from multiple web sources into a single response,” Caitlin Roulston, a Microsoft spokesperson, tells WIRED. “Copilot provides linked citations so the user can further explore and research as they would with traditional search.”

Google added that part of the problem it faces in generating AI Overviews is that, for some very specific queries, there’s an absence of high quality information on the web—and there’s little doubt that Lynn’s work is not of high quality.

“The science underlying Lynn’s database of ‘national IQs’ is of such poor quality that it is difficult to believe the database is anything but fraudulent,” Sear said. “Lynn has never described his methodology for selecting samples into the database; many nations have IQs estimated from absurdly small and unrepresentative samples.”

Sear points to Lynn’s estimation of the IQ of Angola being based on information from just 19 people and that of Eritrea being based on samples of children living in orphanages.

“The problem with it is that the data Lynn used to generate this dataset is just bullshit, and it's bullshit in multiple dimensions,” Rutherford said, pointing out that the Somali figure in Lynn’s dataset is based on one sample of refugees aged between 8 and 18 who were tested in a Kenyan refugee camp. He adds that the Botswana score is based on a single sample of 104 Tswana-speaking high school students aged between 7 and 20 who were tested in English.

Critics of the use of national IQ tests to promote the idea of racial superiority point out not only that the quality of the samples being collected is weak, but also that the tests themselves are typically designed for Western audiences, and so are biased before they are even administered.

“There is evidence that Lynn systematically biased the database by preferentially including samples with low IQs, while excluding those with higher IQs, for African nations,” Sears added, a conclusion backed up by a preprint study from 2020.

Lynn published various versions of his national IQ dataset over the course of decades, the most recent of which, called “The Intelligence of Nations,” was published in 2019. Over the years, Lynn’s flawed work has been used by far-right and racist groups as evidence to back up claims of white superiority. The data has also been turned into a color-coded map of the world, showing sub-Saharan African countries with purportedly low IQ colored red compared to the Western nations, which are colored blue.

“This is a data visualization that you see all over [X, formerly known as Twitter], all over social media—and if you spend a lot of time in racist hangouts on the web, you just see this as an argument by racists who say, ‘Look at the data. Look at the map,’” Rutherford says.

But the blame, Rutherford believes, does not lie with the AI systems alone, but also with a scientific community that has been uncritically citing Lynn’s work for years.

“It's actually not surprising [that AI systems are quoting it] because Lynn's work in IQ has been accepted pretty unquestioningly from a huge area of academia, and if you look at the number of times his national IQ databases have been cited in academic works, it's in the hundreds,” Rutherford said. “So the fault isn't with AI. The fault is with academia.”

[hindulivesmatter]

Hi, I want to ask a question. I've been seeing many posts about how the situation in I/P is like the situation is Kashmir, where India/Israel are colonizing Kashmir/Palestine. Can I get your thoughts on this? I love your blog, thank you for what you do!

Dear God, the terminally online community is back at it again, huh? India....colonizing Kashmir?... What?

Okay, so no, India is not colonizing Kashmir. If anything it is Pakistan. They took over land, claimed it as theirs and spread terrorists all over the area. They handed over OUR land to China. The Kargil War was a result of us trying to stop them from taking over MORE LAND. Kashmir was, is and always will be a part of India.

Meanwhile, Israel, the only land of the Jews has been struggling to maintain an identity between attacks by Islamic extremists. They were gravely hurt on October 7th, and like any country would, retaliated. Now, the thing about the difference between civilian deaths on both sides is that Israeli buildings have bunkers built into them. It is building CODE. Hamas keeps launching rockets, so they had to do it to protect their civilians. Meanwhile, Hamas steals aid trucks sent by countries to pad their booby-trapped tunnels and hide behind their civilians. And then they scream that Israel is killing its people on purpose. Really shows you how propaganda works, doesn't it? Leftist antisemites now just have to reason to harass Jews, even if they're critical of the Israeli government.

It's like, Oh you're a Jew? Well are you one of the "good Jews"?

Now y'all know why I stand with my Jewish friends.

Thank you for your kind words, they mean so much to me! <3

[victoriadallonfan]

PHO SUNDAY RETROSPECTIVE #2

[PHO Sunday] - Discussion: How would you guys feel about hard limits on declaring sponsors & income streams? : Parahumans (reddit.com)

Let's get this started with May 10th, 2012!

1.) We get a lot of name drops for online capes! AnkyI0 (first thing that comes to mind is dinosaur name), Biggest Ever, and DJ Hardpack (or rather, I guess he's just a DJ themed cape). I can at least guess that Biggest Ever is a size manipulation cape and Hardpack is about condensing things into dense materials (I have no idea what connection that has to their name change of Snarlweed). Cataract being a pro-Fallen group is pretty funny since it's associated with loss of vision and blindness. 2.) This serves as a neat little tie into how Ward describes the Fallen escalating over the years post their attack on BB (or rather, they were already insidious, just now being bolder). Them all using the same scripts is actually something we do see with extremist networks.

3.) Ahhh, the Indonesian Cyborgs. For those who don't know, Worm/Ward/WD documents have been hinting at these guys being a nuisance/threat for quite some time, and we've even visited their Earth briefly during Auger's interlude. Criterion himself also appeared in one of these WD docs, though this is the first time we learn that they've been in conflict with the CUI. It's interesting to put people's reactions to Defiant's cybernetics in the light that cyborg earth is an ongoing situation. I am interested as to why Criterion seems to have gotten off so lightly, though perhaps this is the start of Legend and co going after them.

1.) It's interesting that when it comes to "the Mafia", the user doesn't name any specifics. Which Mafia? Which cape...

2.) Oooh, Suits drama. They seemed to have been pretty well respected come Ward, but here we finally here about them apparently doing foreign operations... and that includes doing something in Pakistan

3.) This whole post reminds me of how Elon Musk and Ron Desantis desperately tried to block and outlaw their private jet flights, because they were getting too much heat. Or Trump family getting "donations" from Russia. And with how the Number Man has fingers in many pies, hero and villain, it's fun to see the public point out that they don't actually know how many of these heroes and villains get funding.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Tom Slater

Published: Mar 30, 2024

‘Forte non Ignave’, ‘Bravely not cowardly’, is the motto of Batley Grammar, a free school in West Yorkshire, founded in 1612. How grimly ironic, then, that three years ago, it became the site of one of the most craven capitulations to religious bigotry Britain has seen since the Satanic Verses controversy.

On Monday 22 March 2021, a religious-studies teacher at Batley Grammar showed his pupils cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, as part of a lesson on blasphemy. The cartoons were from Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French magazine whose staff paid the ultimate price for their supposed blasphemy in 2015, when two al-Qaeda gunmen showed up at their offices.

The cartoons had been on the syllabus for at least two years, and no one had batted an eyelid. Up to that point, Batley Grammar – a secular state school – had no reason to suspect it should have to respect Islamic blasphemy codes, especially when teaching about religion, free speech and blasphemy. It was in for a rude awakening.

‘The lesson descended into chaos as pupils took out their phones and attempted to film the teacher’, according to one report. The teacher, according to another, had a heated phone call with the father of one Muslim pupil. Then things spun out of control. Word got out online. Protesters – a mix of parents and activists from Leeds, Rochdale and beyond – pitched up outside the school gates, shutting down the school for a number of days.

All the while, the teacher was menaced by death threats. A local Islamic charity, Purpose of Life, published a statement, outing the teacher and comparing his indiscretion – bizarrely – to the brutalisation of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. A group called Muslim Action Forum also published his name, alongside more lurid libels, accusing the teacher of ‘inciting hatred’ and accusing his supporters of ‘blind hatred of the Muslim community’. These groups were, in effect, putting a target on the back of a man they had likely never met. Young men were spotted knocking at the door and trying the handle of the teacher’s house, where he lived with his wife and their children.

The bigoted caricature bore no relationship to reality, of course. According to the teacher’s Muslim neighbour, his was a nice family, who bought cards and sweets for the Muslim kids in the neighbourhood during Eid. Even so, no one should be expected to go through what this teacher went through – facing all the violent intolerance and hysteria of a medieval village, only spread far and wide by social media. He spoke to Dame Sara Khan, for her new report on modern-day mob censorship, which was published by the UK government this week. His treatment, Khan writes, left the teacher feeling suicidal.

He feared for his life, and with good reason. Five months before that fateful religious-studies class in West Yorkshire, French teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in a Paris suburb by an Islamic extremist. Paty’s ‘crime’ was almost identical: showing Charlie Hebdo cartoons to his pupils in a lesson on freedom of expression. Adil Shahzad, an imam from Bradford who shot straight to Batley to lead the protests, warned darkly at the time that Britain risked ‘becoming like France’. Shahzad insisted Muslims should make their feelings known in the ‘democratic way’. But it turns out he has a history of praising murderous anti-blasphemy groups in Pakistan.

Where Britain after Batley certainly differed from France after Paty was in the reaction. Thousands took to the streets in France, in solidarity with the slain teacher and in support of free expression. The murder inspired President Emmanuel Macron to mount a personal crusade against Islamist extremism. In Britain, there was just capitulation. The school suspended the teacher and penned a grovelling apology. For some reason, a West Yorkshire Police officer was enlisted to read it out to the protesters. All this was welcomed heartily by Labour’s Tracy Brabin, then MP for Batley and Spen. She said she was ‘pleased that the school has recognised it was inappropriate and apologised’. After an investigation, the teacher was cleared of any personal wrongdoing, but the cartoons were removed from the syllabus. The mob won. And the teacher is still in hiding.

None of this has calmed tensions, of course. It has only emboldened the hardliners. Capitulation always does. There’s been a string of similar blasphemy scandals since. In 2022, Sunni Muslim protesters managed to get Cineworld to pull screenings of The Lady of Heaven, a Shia-made film they deemed to be blasphemous. In 2023, another school, less than 10 miles from Batley Grammar, this time in Wakefield, found itself in the zealots’ crosshairs, after a schoolboy brought a Koran to school and accidentally scuffed it. He too was bombarded with death threats. In the end, the police took no action against those trying to intimidate a child. A child who also happened to be autistic. But they did record a ‘non-crime hate incident’ against him.

A hardworking teacher forever looking over his shoulder. Shias censored at the behest of sectarians. A schoolboy threatened with death and arson. This is the cost of our cowardice, of our institutions’ inability to make clear that no one can expect to have their views forcefielded from criticism and that a free society cannot tolerate violence and threats in response to mere speech, words, cartoons. Blasphemy trials are back – only they are conducted by the mob, rather than a court. We’ve sent out a signal – loud and clear – that threats and violence and intimidation work.

And we’ve done so due to some genuinely bigoted assumptions about British Muslims. The first is that they are incapable of being citizens of liberal democracies – that, unlike any other religious group, they should expect to have their heretics burned, or at least punished. The second misconception is that the screeching rent-a-mobs that now show up whenever a ‘blasphemy’ scandal erupts are the authentic voice of British Muslims. They’re not. In fact, British Muslims and ex-Muslims are often on the sharp end of anti-blasphemy intolerance. In 2016, Glasgow’s Asad Shah and Rochdale’s Jalal Uddin both lost their lives, within weeks of each other, for their respective ‘blasphemies’. Hatun Tash, an ex-Muslim turned Christian preacher, has been stabbed and been the target of a terror plot for railing against her former faith. Thankfully, she’s still alive.

Three years on from Batley Grammar, we need to fight for the right to blaspheme all over again, before any more Brits – Muslim, non-Muslim or ex-Muslim – pay the price for our cowardice.

==

Said it before and I'll say it again: start revoking citizenship and deporting those who make these threats. They're trying to make our liberal societies into their Islamic hellholes.

[storepakonline]

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[delaneegail]

Blog Post 12 (Week 4, 5)

Academic Research: Brothers of the Gun

Chiovaro, Megan, et al. “Online Social Cohesion Reflects Real-World Group Action in Syria during the Arab Spring.” PLoS ONE, vol. 16, no. 7, July 2021, pp. 1–33. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.proxy.seattleu.edu/10.1371/journal.pone.0254087.

Haran, VP. “Syria: Internal Situation.” Roots of the Syrian Crisis, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, 2016, pp. 2–4. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep09413.4. Accessed 29 Apr. 2024.

Hussain, Nazir. “The Syrian Crisis and Regional Order in the Middle East.” Pakistan Horizon, vol. 66, no. 4, 2013, pp. 39–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24711514. Accessed 29 Apr. 2024.

Khan, Khurshid, and Fouzia Amin. “Understanding Complex Nature of the Syrian Crises.” Journal of Contemporary Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, Winter 2020, pp. 73–88. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=162067507&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

I based my research on the politics leading up to the Syrian Arab Spring. The Syrian Arab Spring was my topic of choice because in Marwan Hisham’s memoir Brothers of the Gun he repeatedly mentions uprising and President Bashar al-Assad. Based on the articles I have read, I learned that the Arab Spring was a series of uprisings that occurred in the Middle East and North Africa region. I initially thought that the Arab Spring only occurred in Syria. However, upon research, I learned that it has occurred in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and other countries. Additionally, in my researched, I looked up President Bashar al-Assad, as his name was mentioned a few times in the memoir. President Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father, Hafez al-Assad in June 2000. President Bashar al-Assad promised reform in Syria. However, his promises were broken as he kept the same tight control as his predecessor. Therefore, peaceful protests started to arise in Syria. In response, President Bashar responded with violent crackdowns. This then led to opposition groups responding in violence as well, which also led to extremists groups becoming involved. Aside from the internal unrest occurring in Syria, I also learned about the external powers, such as the U.S., Russia, Iran, Turkey, and many more countries, becoming involved in the Syrian crisis. These countries supported various groups and the Assad government. Having these external factors mixed into the internal factors of the Syrian conflict relates to the concept Franz Fanon’s House. For example, with the colonists, in this case France, having Syria achieve independence, Syria was left with political instability. Clearly, this political instability is seen with the many years under the Assad government. Furthermore, with more guests (external powers—U.S., Russia, Iran, etc) arriving at the “house” (Syria), more unrest and violence occurs, leaving Syria at a crisis. Lastly, I did research on how social media helped create cohesive ideas on the Syrian protests. I researched a little bit on social media because I noticed how Marwan Hisham kept himself updated on current military fronts and protests. For instance, social media (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube) has helped inform individuals of when a demonstration take place, what time a demonstration will take place, and how those in power responded to the demonstration.

[gazetteweekly]

Khalistani preacher Amritpal Singh arrested, sent to Assam jail

The Punjab Police has already invoked the stringent National Security Act (NSA) against the Khalistan sympathizer.

The Punjab police arrested Amritpal Singh in Moga’s Rode village early Sunday, ending an over a month-long manhunt against the radical preacher who styled himself after slain Khalistani militant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.

The preacher was taken into custody at 6.45 am as he came out — in the traditional attire that included a sheathed sword — of the gurdwara in Rode, Bhindranwale’s native village and also the place where he himself took over last year as the chief of Waris Punjab De.

The 29-year-old was detained under the stringent National Security Act and flown to Assam on a special flight to be lodged at the Dibrugarh Central Jail, where nine other associates picked up over the past several weeks are kept.

Shortly after his arrest, a video surfaced online in which the extremist preacher is seen delivering a brief address, indicating that he is surrendering.

Another clip showed him sitting before a portrait of Bhindranwale, who died in a controversial Army operation in 1984 to flush out militants holed up inside Amritsar’s Golden Temple.

Inspector General of Police Sukhchain Singh Gill countered the preacher’s claim that it was a “surrender”, and said the fugitive was cornered.

“A joint operation was conducted by Amritsar police and the intelligence wing of Punjab Police. He was located in village Rode based on operational inputs with Punjab Police. He was surrounded from all sides. The village was surrounded by the Punjab Police,” he said.

He said police did not enter the gurdwara. “It was very important to maintain the sanctity of the gurdwara and police in uniform could not enter inside.” A message was conveyed to the preacher that he had no chance of making his escape, Gill said.

“National Security Act warrants were issued against Amritpal Singh and these have been executed today morning. Further, law will take its own course,” he said.

In a video message hours after the arrest, Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann said those who disturb peace and harmony in the state will face the law, and innocent people will not be disturbed.

Mann said he continuously monitored developments during the night, leading to the arrest.

Former Akal Takht jathedar Jasbir Singh Rode said he met Amritpal Singh at the gurdwara as the preacher prepared to surrender.

In the gurdwara clip, the fugitive recalled that Rode is Bhindranwale’s birth place, and the village where his own “dastar bandi” (turban-tying ceremony) took place – a reference to his taking over Waris Punjab De chief.

He claimed there were excesses by the government against Sikhs while he was on the run, appearing to suggest that the security agencies wanted to harass people rather than just arrest him. He said he would have cooperated with them had arrest been their objective.

“I have decided to surrender and this arrest is not an end, it is the beginning,” he said.

In the “court of the Almighty”, he said he is not guilty.

Police had launched a crackdown against Amritpal Singh on March 18, about three weeks after he and his supporters, many of them brandishing weapons, stormed into the Ajnala police station near Amritsar to secure the release of an arrested colleague.

There were concerns that the preacher had links with Pakistan spy agency ISI and was working towards radicalising the Sikh youth, in an effort to revive the call for a separate nation of ‘Khalistan’.

Amritpal Singh returned from Dubai last year and took over Waris Punjab De after the death of activist-singer Deep Sandhu.

Among the declared aims of the outfit was fighting drug addiction among young people, but intelligence agencies feared that this was just a front.

Several cases have been lodged against him and his associates for allegedly spreading disharmony, attempt to murder, attack on police personnel and obstructing the lawful discharge of duty by public servants.

While the preacher remained on the run for 36 days, authorities continued to pile pressure on him by arresting his key associates.

His wife Kirandeep Kaur, a UK-based woman he married in February, was stopped from boarding a flight to London from Amritsar airport recently.

Scores of sympathises were detained by police, but most of them were released as the Akal Takht and the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee claimed young people were being harassed.

Nine of the preacher’s alleged associates are in the Dibrugarh jail. They are Daljit Singh Kalsi, Papalpreet Singh, Kulwant Singh Dhaliwal, Varinder Singh Johal, Gurmeet Singh Bukkanwala, Harjit Singh, Bhagwant Singh, Basant Singh and Gurinderpal Singh Aujla.

The plane carrying Amritpal Singh landed in Dibrugarh on Sunday afternoon.

[newstfionline]

Many Organizations Banned in Pakistan Thrive Online

AP, July 11, 2017

ISLAMABAD--It’s dusk. The shadows of three men brandishing assault rifles welcome the reader to the Facebook page of Lashkar-e-Islam, one of 65 organizations that are banned in Pakistan, either because of terrorist links or as purveyors of sectarian hate.

Still more than 40 of these groups operate and flourish on social media sites, communicating on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Telegram, according to a senior official with Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency, or FIA, who is tasked with shutting down the sites. They use them to recruit, raise money and demand a rigid Islamic system. It is also where they incite the Sunni faithful against the country’s minority Shiites and extoll jihad, or holy war, in India-ruled Kashmir and in Afghanistan.

“It’s like a party of the banned groups online. They are all on social media,” the FIA official told The Associated Press. He spoke on condition his name not be used because agency officials are not allowed to be quoted by name.

Meanwhile, Pakistan is waging a cyber crackdown on activists and journalists who use social media to criticize the government, the military or the intelligence agencies. The Interior Ministry even ordered the FIA, Pakistan’s equivalent of the American FBI, to move against “those ridiculing the Pakistan Army on social media.”

The FIA official said the agency has interrogated more than 70 activists for postings considered critical. All but two have been released and a third is still under investigation, he said.

Activists, journalists and rights groups who monitor Pakistan’s cyberspace say the banned groups active on social media operate unencumbered because several are patronized by the military, its intelligence agencies, radical religious groups and politicians looking for votes.

Even the FIA official concedes state support for some of the banned groups but said it is a global phenomenon engaged in by all intelligence agencies.

“Everyone is protecting their own terrorists. Your good guy is my bad guy and vice versa,” he said, adding that some sites belonging to banned groups are intentionally ignored to gain intelligence.

On one Facebook page, the Afghan Taliban flag welcomes viewers, its masthead emblazoned with Arabic script identifying the page as belonging to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Still another Facebook site features one of India’s most wanted, Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, another banned organization and a U.S. declared terrorist group.

Saeed even has a $10 million U.S.-imposed bounty on his head. Yet his group, which has been resurrected under several names, is billed as a charity and has several Facebook pages. Currently called Falah-e-Insaniat, the group boasts of its community work, but its pages feature anti-India videos, call Syria a bleeding wound, rail against India and chastise the Pakistan government for siding with the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks.

Facebook and Twitter have said that they ban “terrorist content.” In the second half of last year, Twitter said on its site it had suspended 376,890 accounts because they were thought to promote terrorism, although they say less than 2 percent of the removals were the result of requests from governments. Facebook, meanwhile, said in a blog last month it uses artificial intelligence and human reviewers to find and remove “terrorist content.”

Shahzad Ahmed, of the Islamabad-based social media rights group BytesForAll, said Pakistan’s powerful military and intelligence agencies are waging a “communication war” against progressive, moderate voices and those who criticize the government and more particularly the military and its agencies. They use radical religious groups to promote their narrative, he said.

“Their connectivity on the ground, the mosques, madrassas and supporters translates into social media strength and they are (further) strengthened because they feel ‘no one is going to touch us,’” he said.

Ahmed Waqass Goraya is a blogger who was picked up and tortured by men he believes belonged to the country’s powerful intelligence agency, known by its acronym ISI. He said Pakistan’s social media space is dominated by armies of trolls unleashed by the military, intelligence agencies and allied radical religious groups to push their narrative. That narrative includes promoting anti-India sentiment--India is Pakistan’s longtime enemy against whom it has fought three wars.

Critics who openly accuse the military of using extremists as proxies are under attack, said Goraya. He fled Pakistan after social media was used to suggest the he and other bloggers were involved in blasphemy, a charge that carries the death penalty. In Pakistan even the suggestion that someone insulted Islam or its prophet can incite mobs to violence.

Earlier this month, Taimoor Raza, a minority Shiite, became the first person sentenced to death under Pakistan’s blasphemy law for a social media posting.

[sleepysera]

Sep 25 Headlines

WORLD NEWS

Afghanistan: Taliban hang dead body in Afghan city's main square (AP)

"The Taliban hanged a dead body from a crane in the main square of Herat city in western Afghanistan, a witness said Saturday, in a gruesome display that signaled a return to some of the Taliban’s methods of the past."

Turkey: Refugees in fear as sentiment turns against them (AP)

"Anti-immigrant sentiment is now nearing a boiling point, fueled by Turkey’s economic woes. With unemployment high and the prices of food and housing skyrocketing, many Turks have turned their frustration toward the country’s roughly 5 million foreign residents, particularly the 3.7 million who fled the civil war in Syria. In August, violence erupted in Ankara, the Turkish capital, as an angry mob vandalized Syrian businesses and homes in response to a the deadly stabbing of a Turkish teenager."

Germany: Election to set direction after 16 years under Merkel (AP)

"Germany’s closely fought election on Sunday will set the direction of the European Union’s most populous country after 16 years under Angela Merkel, whose party is scrambling to avoid defeat by its center-left rivals after a rollercoaster campaign. The environmentalist Greens also are eyeing at least a share of power."

US NEWS

Afghanistan: US and Pakistan face each other on Afghanistan threats (AP)

"As the Biden administration looks for new ways to stop terrorist threats in Afghanistan, it probably will look again to Pakistan, which remains critical to U.S. intelligence and national security because of its proximity to Afghanistan and connections to the Taliban leaders now in charge. Over two decades of war, American officials accused Pakistan of playing a double game by promising to fight terrorism and cooperate with Washington while cultivating the Taliban and other extremist groups that attacked U.S. forces in Afghanistan."

Gabby Petito: The search for Brian Laundrie enters next phase (CNN)

"Petito, 22, and Laundrie embarked on a cross-country trip in June and were visiting national parks. They posted online regularly about their travels with the hashtag #VanLife, but those posts abruptly stopped in late August. Laundrie returned home with their van on September 1. Petito was reported missing September 11 after her family had not been able to get in touch with her. She was found dead eight days later near a campground in Wyoming's Bridger-Teton National Forest."

R. Kelly Trial: Jury weighs R. Kelly's fate in sex crimes trial (BBC)

"The jury has retired in R. Kelly's sex trafficking trial in New York, after a month of testimony regarding the star's alleged sexual abuse of men, women and underage girls. The 54-year-old is facing one charge of racketeering - which positions him as the head of a criminal enterprise that preyed on young women - and eight counts of trafficking girls and women across state lines for prostitution."

[onlineshadi]

The subject of interfaith marriage in Islam becomes an important concern for overseas Pakistani people, who want to get married in the USA, UK, Dubai, or any other country. Every Muslim knows that interfaith marriages are prohibited for having major religious differences. However, many Muslim brides and Muslim grooms may have some doubts regarding the limitations that make it prohibited in Islam. This issue has developed a critical debate between extremists and liberals Muslims. Liberals interpret the Quranic teachings as per their understanding, and so as the extremists do. Here, we quote all relevant Quranic verses related to interfaith marriages and discuss them according to our understanding.

[mariacallous]

On Feb. 3, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) blocked Wikipedia nationwide. In its statement before the ban, the PTA said the online encyclopedia had refused to remove “sacrilegious contents” from the website. In 2020, Pakistan had threatened legal action against Google and Wikipedia for “disseminating sacrilegious content,” regarding Islamic beliefs held by minority Muslim sects. And while the ban on Wikipedia was overturned three days later, there’s an evident surge in Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy policymaking targeting Muslim minorities, which in turn is further emboldening Islamist vigilantes.

On Feb. 11, a Muslim man was lynched by a mob in the eastern city of Nankana Sahib over allegations of desecrating the Quran. The victim was killed inside the local police station, with the law enforcement authorities being hapless bystanders. Often, local police are complicit in victimizing individuals and communities once Islamist thugs conjure the accusation of blasphemy. And this thuggery has the backing of the state, which is now expanding its already notorious blasphemy codes.

The Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) was co-opted after Partition in 1947 from the Indian Penal Code (IPC) of 1860, with Sections 295 and 298 dedicated to desecrating worship places and outraging religious sensibilities, respectively. The IPC under British rule added Section 295-A to curtail “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings.” The original sections, identically present in the IPC, are equally applicable to all religions. In the 1980s, under the Islamist military dictatorship of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan added Islam-specific clauses, defining violent penalties over blasphemy against Islam alone.

Last month, the National Assembly passed amendments to the PPC to expand its blasphemy laws. One of those amendments, the Criminal Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2023, ups the penalty from three years to life imprisonment for “disrespecting” the companions (including the caliphs), family, or wives of the Prophet Muhammad. The PPC criminalizes any sacrilege against the Quran and the prophet, with penalties including capital punishment.

While Pakistan is yet to execute anyone for sacrilege, its blasphemy laws continue to encourage mob violence; at least 93 people have been killed extrajudicially since 1947—including the most recent victims—and more than 1,500 have been imprisoned since 1987, the year after the death penalty was introduced for heresy against Islam in Section 295 of the PPC. The most high-profile victim of the blasphemy laws was one of their staunchest critics, former Punjab Gov. Salman Taseer, who was gunned down by his security guard Mumtaz Qadri in 2011. Taseer’s killing silenced debate on the blasphemy laws and turned Qadri, executed over terrorism charges in 2016, into a saint, with his tomb turned into a shrine.

Last year, a teacher was attacked and killed by her colleague and students in an all-girls school, a mentally unstable man was stoned to death by a mob, and a man born without arms was drowned, in separate incidents of blasphemy killings.

Last month, a Muslim man threatened to incite mobs against a Christian security officer working at the Karachi airport by accusing her of blasphemy against the prophet after the woman had denied his acquaintance entry into the premises. The brutal killing of Sri Lankan business professional Priyantha Kumara illustrated the menace of Pakistan’s murderous blasphemy laws nearly 15 months ago.

While the blasphemy laws have disproportionately and overwhelmingly harmed non-Muslims in Pakistan, many of those victimized have been Muslims themselves. Sometimes these are individuals targeted for personal vendettas; however, many are Muslims who espouse beliefs deemed divergent from those sanctioned by majoritarian orthodoxy. The man killed for blasphemy in October was killed for expressing devotion at the graves of Sufi saints, a significant tenet of Barelvi Islam that the vast majority of South Asian Muslims have traditionally adhered to.

The ideology of takfir, or excommunicating Muslims, is based on outlawing divergent beliefs and penalizing those deemed guilty per Islamic law, or sharia, with punishments for apostasy that include execution. The takfiri ideology fuels murderous sharia codes and jihadi groups alike. Outfits such as the Islamic State and its Pakistani Taliban affiliates have bombed Sufi shrines over the years, deeming the mystic practices heretical. The Islamic State-orchestrated 2017 bombing at the Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine in Sehwan, killing at least 90 people, remains one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Pakistan’s history.

The Islamic State and the Pakistani Taliban have similarly targeted Shiite mosques across the country, dubbing Shiites, comprising the second-largest sect of Islam, collectively guilty of sacrilege. And the Criminal Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2023, passed last month, is the systematization of this anti-Shiite narrative, which borders on codification of the entire sect’s excommunication.

The new amendments to the blasphemy codes were introduced by Abdul Akbar Chitrali of Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist party that espouses radicalism against, among others, Shiite Muslims across South Asia. In the bill’s Statement of Objects and Reasons, Chitrali argues that the current penalty for sacrilege against Muhammad’s companions, unlike the capital punishment for blasphemy against the prophet, is insufficient deterrence, citing the Quranic verse that upholds fitna (mischief or deviance) as “worse than murder.” Following the amendment, Section 298-A of the PPC, which heretofore upheld lighter penalties for any sacrilege of Muhammad’s companions, will henceforth make it a nonbailable offense punishable by life imprisonment.

The amendment passed by the National Assembly is an extension of a bill passed by the Punjab Assembly in 2020, albeit still awaiting the governor’s signature. These laws, in effect, outlaw Shiite beliefs by enforcing Sunni theology and tradition across the population, in turn playing judge, jury, and executioner over a 1,400-year-old Sunni-Shiite split in Islam.

The Sunni-Shiite divide has been militantly fanned by the Saudi-Iranian proxy wars over the past half a century, with Islamabad doing Riyadh’s bidding from the onset. This proliferated Salafi and Deobandi madrassas and propped up the correlated jihadi militias, including anti-Shiite outfits such as Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). While these groups have militarily gravitated toward the Islamic State and the Pakistani Taliban, their political wings have allied themselves with major parties, especially in Punjab.

The ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), which has historically dominated Punjab, has done so with the help of SSP and LeJ affiliates such as Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat. The PML-N’s rival, Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, and its allies have all backed the anti-Shiite legislation designed to uphold Sunni supremacism in Pakistan by making “respect for the caliphs” a rallying cry to woo the sectarian vote bank.

Sunni Islamists strong-arming veneration for their caliphs is an extension of the general Islamist intimidation over any critique of Muhammad, which even Barelvi jihadis have weaponized.

The idea that even those who do not believe in Islamic figures should be coerced into, at the very least, silencing their views so as to not offend the believers is, at best, an antediluvian notion that represses freedoms of belief, conscience, and expression; at worst, it is a tool of bloodthirsty ethnoreligious cleansing. And in Pakistan, this radical Islamist superstructure of jurisprudential takfir, blasphemy vigilantes, and state-sponsored jihad is founded on the fall of the first excommunication domino: the constitutional apostatizing of Ahmadiyya Islam.

Just as Shiites today are being compelled into shunning their beliefs so as to be accepted as Muslims in Pakistan, Ahmadis were forced to do the same vis-à-vis their belief in their sect’s 19th-century founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, via the Second Amendment to the Pakistani Constitution in 1974. The official declaration of Ahmadis as non-Muslims was followed by Sections 298-B and 298-C a decade later, banning the community from “posing as Muslims,” including referring to Islamic literature or expressions, thus making Pakistan the only country in the world where an individual can be imprisoned for reciting the Quran.

This veritable apartheid against Ahmadi Muslims over the past four decades has seen members of the community killed, their mosques vandalized, and graves desecrated. Ahmadis have to be declared non-Muslims for individuals to obtain a passport, exercise the right to vote, or even get a marriage certificate. Among the Wikipedia contents flagged by the PTA are pages on Ahmadiyya Islam.

While Shiites and Ahmadis are subjugated owing to their beliefs, another Muslim minority is targeted owing to their nonbelief: nonbelievers. Fast-growing atheism, agnosticism, and deism among Pakistani Muslims has been met with a state crackdown, especially online. Atheism and apostasy, as an extension of blasphemy, are punishable by death in Pakistan.

Following the enactment of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act in 2016, the state initiated a war on nonbelief, sending official texts nationwide asking users to notify any form of blasphemy. In 2017, the state promoted a crackdown on dissident bloggers deemed to be posting anti-Islam content online, with the “Pakistani Atheists and Agnostics” Facebook group among those highlighted by the Federal Investigation Agency. With the country’s blasphemy laws going digital, the new expansive codes are going to further stifle online expression in Pakistan, as exemplified by the Wikipedia ban.

The Criminal Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2023 aims to do precisely that: restrict the religious discourse and intimidate Muslim minorities against expressing any contrarian views within Islam, just as non-Muslims have long been silenced into submission over Islam. This, in turn, will encourage vigilantes to expand their hunt for so-called blasphemers, whether in Islamic congregations, university auditoriums, or private WhatsApp chats.

Within a month of the Punjab bill being passed, 42 blasphemy cases were lodged, predominantly against the Shiite community, including against a 3-year-old. The toddler, Syed Fazal Abbas Naqvi, was taken into custody along with his father and uncle, with all of them facing terrorism charges before being released on bail. The Criminal Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2023 has been followed by a spike in Shiite killings in the town of Dera Ismail Khan.

While the financially motivated Arab states that historically spread radical Salafism worldwide are now embracing moderation—even if not free thought in Islam—Pakistan appears to be wholly invested in being the bastion of Sunni fundamentalism and plunging further into takfiri jihadism. With Saudi Arabia expecting Pakistan to toe its line of significant geopolitical moves, such as normalization of ties with Israel, it can ill-afford Islamabad to be bogged down by radical Islamist mobs, which are also expressing condemnations of Saudi Arabia’s ostensible liberalization.

The United States, despite its withdrawal from the region, wouldn’t want a Pakistan that spirals further into radical Islamist disintegration at a time when the Western powers are still mulling the fate of the jihadi takeover in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s devastating economic crisis can further push the United States to condition any economic support to human rights advancements.

The Saudi and U.S. petrodollars that helped sustain Pakistan’s jihadi superstructure in the past are no longer on the table, with barely two weeks’ worth of foreign currency reserves to cover imports currently in the central bank. Global institutions, including the European Parliament, are mulling sanctions over Pakistan’s human rights abuses, especially its grotesque blasphemy laws. Any government expanding these codes in a way that risks increasing global sanctions is clearly not invested in Pakistan’s economic well-being.

Self-sustenance for the country is only possible through a purge of radical Islam at all national tiers, from the constitution to governance to the masochistic security policy. And Pakistan will only truly signal a departure from its jihad-infested past when it sounds the death knell for its blasphemy laws.

[kyndaris]

2019: The Hits and Misses

Happy New Year, one and all. 2020 has finally arrived! And the Earth enters another decade. With 2019 solidly in the rear-view mirror, I thought it was apt to look back on the end of a decade. If I’m being frank, though, it seemed like only yesterday when I graduated high school and headed to university. Yet, so many things have happened since then. Some of it good and rewarding. Others have rung alarm bells for the state of the world. Say what you will of 2019, but it felt like for the first time in a long while when people became fed-up with their respective government and finally began standing up for what they believed in. Whether that was climate change or democracy.

Let us begin with the month of March - wherein the entire world was shaken by a callous mass shooting in New Zealand. Unlike previous attacks reported in the media, this vile act was committed by a right wing extremist against Muslims attending Friday prayer at their local mosque. What stood out the most during this terrifying event was how New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, handled the fallout. Wearing a headscarf, she reached out to the Muslim community and encouraged others to do the same.

Yet, only a month later, three churches and luxury hotels were bombed in Sri Lanka as a supposed retaliatory attack. It was yet another heart wrenching event that shook the world. For as everyone knows: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

And though Western forces dealt a severe blow to the ISIS caliphate, which saw them ousted from the territory that they had seized from Syria and Iraq, many nations struggled with accepting the women and children of jihadists. Yes, the men might have fallen in the fighting, but they had left behind broken families that only wished to find a place to return. As conditions worsened in refugee camps, there were many that questioned why governments did not take responsibility for their citizens and mount rescue attempts for the innocents that had been dragged into a fight they had not asked for.

In other areas of the world, the climate crisis became a major tipping point in politics. With tightened water restrictions and drought impacting many parts of the world - people took to the streets to protest what they saw as a race towards extinction. Climate change was here and governments had done little to curb its effects on the world. In Australia, demonstrators stopped traffic and buried their heads in the sands. This was further exacerbated by news of the shocking state of the Murray-Darling basin as well as the catastrophic bushfires that had Sydney in a severe smoke-haze for several months.

On the other side of the world, impeachment proceedings began for President Donald Trump of the United States of America. Whether or not he is removed from office remains to be seen. Although, let’s be honest, the 2020 elections might have also seen the businessman turned politician pushed out into the cold (at least judging from some of his more vocal critics).

The United States was also no stranger to mass shootings. And in August, there were attacks in both Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas. These, at least, were the ones that took international headlines by storm. A quick search on Wikipedia quickly revealed that up to the fourteenth of December, there were a total of 409. And if people thought this was due to only violent video games or mentally ill people, then they have another thing coming. 

Wake up America! It’s outrageous that your  schools have metal detectors at their entrance. And that so many of them are designed to stop lone gunmen from infiltrating places of learning: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/09/how-schools-are-being-designed-to-minimize-the-number-of-deaths-during-a-mass-shooting/

This isn’t right! Just look at New Zealand. One mass shooting in a place of worship was enough to have Jacinda Arden ban the use of military style semi-automatics and assault rifles.

Just across the Atlantic Ocean, the United Kingdom struggled to ensure a smooth departure from the European Union. Theresa May, defeated once again with her proposals for Brexit, stepped down. In her place rose a dishevelled blond man that many people saw as the Donald Trump of Britain: Boris Johnson. And while his Brexit deal for October was thrown out, his party managed to secure victory at the very recent general elections. And considering how Australian politics went last year, it came as no surprise that once again a Conservative government managed a snatch victory away from what should have been a win from more liberal parties.

Hong Kong also suffered through several months of civil disobedience that erupted into violence. What first had been demonstrations against a controversial extradition bill turned into, what many believed, for a fight for the people’s very democratic freedom.

And while Hong Kong was the more prolific of these protests, they were not the only ones. Chile, Lebanon, Catalonia, Iraq and Pakistan also saw people rising up to make their feelings known. 

Online, many YouTube channels were shackled again by archaic legislation that threatened to have their entire livelihoods stripped away. At the moment of writing, it is difficult to say exactly how the myriad of channels I follow will be impacted, but I do know it won’t be good. For so long, advertisers pulled the puppet strings of many a YouTube celebrity, ensuring that they conformed to certain standards. But if such standards make them too family-friendly, it may also mean a hit in revenue that isn’t affordable.

And finally, again to New Zealand. On the 9th of December, 2019, a tour group from the Ovation of the Seas stepped foot on White Island. What they did not know was that the volcano would erupt so suddenly and cause such devastation. As of the time of writing, there are still many families missing and unaccounted for. 

2019 has been a roller coaster of a year with many ups and downs. But even though the year has come to a close, I can’t believe how quickly it has gone by. Hopefully 2020 and the new decade that it promises will see resolve some of the major issues plaguing humanity. Or maybe it won’t. The world is on the cusp and if we want to maintain our current standards of living, there are many things that need to be changed. Let’s just hope it’s not too late.

[grungegoths]

That guy is a Pakistan nationalist who is hijacking posts about Kashmir issue to say that kashmir belongs to Pakistan and should have been occupied by Pakistan instead of India lol when integrating Kashmir with Pakistan will be as bad bc of the whole shari vs sunni muslim issue and bad for the hindus especially pundits living in kashmir considering how Pakistan is famous for muslim extremists there forcibly raping, marrying and forcibly converting hindu women. That post had no requirement 1/2

2/2 addition like that anyways. Imagine seeing a post about how women in kashmir are at high risk of being abused and raped by religious extremists and using it to add your own "Pakistan zindabad" comment which had nothing to do with the post???? Why are men like this ughhhhh

Yeahh i scrolled thru that guy's blog and was soo annoyed by his priorities in this situation but honestly men using the plight of women in situations like this to further their own political agenda is really not that uncommon so im not even that surprised smh.Some intra religious tension occurs and one religious extremist group rapes/abuses the women of the other group as a way of "payback" and then the OTHER religious extremist group takes the abuse of their women as an attack on their honour and rapes/abuses the women of the other religious group as ''revenge" .And online spectators use these situations to paint the other side as barbaric and shitty and as always women are sidelined and only dragged in to make their trauma into a political issue .

And this time im afraid of this happening again and its disheartning to see men derailing the topics to talk about their purpose.

[bountyofbeads]

Shootings Renew Debate Over How to Fight Domestic Terrorism https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/us/politics/domestic-terrorism-shootings.html

For starters, try removing and arresting the occupant of the White House and his minions. The fish rots from the head.

Shootings Renew Debate Over How to Combat Domestic Terrorism

By Sabrina Tavernise, Katie Benner, Matt Apuzzo and Nicole Perlroth | Published

Aug. 5, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 6, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — Law enforcement officials have sounded the alarm for months: Homegrown terrorism, including by white supremacists, is now as big a threat as terrorism from abroad. But the mass shooting in El Paso last weekend, the largest domestic terrorist attack against Hispanics in modern history, has made it glaringly clear how poorly prepared the country is to fight it.

The United States spent nearly 20 years intensely focused on threats from Islamic extremists. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, rerouted the machinery of government to fight against threats of violence from the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan. But those attacks have waned in recent years, replaced by violence from white supremacists — an increasingly internet-driven phenomenon of lone wolves, not groups, that will prove immensely difficult to combat.

On Monday, President Trump pledged to give federal law enforcement authorities “whatever they need” to combat domestic terrorism. The motive for the second attack of the weekend, in Dayton, Ohio, remains unknown. But even before the shootings, which left at least 31 people dead, officials said that preventing attacks from white supremacists and nationalists would require adopting the same type of broad and aggressive approach used to battle international extremism.

“We need to catch them and incarcerate them before they act on their plans,” Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, said in an email interview. “We need to be proactive by identifying and disrupting potential terrorists before they strike, and we can accomplish that by monitoring terrorist propaganda and communications.”

Under current federal law, that is difficult. Federal officials have broad powers to disrupt foreign terrorist plots, given to them as part of the Patriot Act passed after the 2001 attacks. They can take preventive action, for example, by wiretapping or using an undercover online persona to talk to people anonymously in chat rooms to search for jihadis.

But domestically, federal officials have far fewer options. A federal statute defines domestic terrorism but carries no penalties. The First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, makes stopping terrorist acts committed by Americans before they happen more challenging. No government agency is responsible for designating domestic terrorism organizations. And individuals who are considered domestic terrorists are charged under laws governing hate crimes, guns and conspiracy, not terrorism.

“It’s a big blank spot,” said Mary McCord, a former top national security prosecutor who has drafted a proposed statute to criminalize domestic terrorism not covered by existing laws. This would include criminalizing the stockpiling of weapons intended to be used in a domestic terrorist attack.

The issue is urgent. Right-wing extremists killed more people in 2018 than in any year since 1995, the year of Timothy McVeigh’s bomb attack on the Oklahoma City federal building, according to the Anti-Defamation League. And the attack in El Paso and an April shooting in a synagogue in Poway, Calif., alone have claimed as many lives as all extremist homicides “of any stripe” in 2018, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

The F.B.I. field office in Phoenix recently issued a report that said conspiracy theories — often with racial overtones and fueled by dissemination online — had become a growing national security threat.

Mr. Rosenstein said that law enforcement needs to model its domestic terrorism response after the international counterterrorism efforts undertaken in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

“In the same way that honorable members of mosques report people who express violent designs, so, too, should people report violent white nationalists to the police,” he said.

The First Amendment’s protection of citizens’ rights to engage in hateful speech makes it difficult to track down attacks before they happen.

“From the perspective of the courts, white supremacy is a hateful but protected form of speech,” said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University. “What courts resist are efforts to classify whole movements as violent as a result of the actions of some of its members.”

The problem touches every aspect of American life — politics, civil liberties and business — and involves complicated new questions around the issue of technology. How much will technology and communications companies, including the big social media platforms, be willing to share information about domestic customers with law enforcement agencies? On the internet, white nationalists can align with other radicals, become inspired and find the resources they need to act alone — a process that has also helped foreign extremists become terrorists.

Perhaps most important, a new focus on white-supremacist violence would test whether Americans are as accepting of aggressive law enforcement tactics when the targets aren’t Muslims, but white Americans.

“If they did the same thing that they did with the Muslims, they’d say every white guy is a potential terrorist,” said Martin R. Stolar, a New York civil rights lawyer. “You can’t do that with white people. The blowback would be outrageous.”

The rise in the white supremacist threat has paralleled an increasing racialization and divisiveness in the nation’s immigration debate. Mr. Trump has used ethnonationalist language that his opponents argue is arousing political extremists. Even in past years, some political leaders have been slow to recognize the existence of domestic terrorism: After the Oklahoma City bombing, Newt Gingrich, at the time the speaker of the House, refused to hold hearings on white nationalist terrorism.

In the years since, the nature of white supremacism has changed. It used to be that white supremacists, for the most part, operated in groups, often living in the same area, said Brian H. Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. The chapters had some control over the timing and choice of targets. He cited as examples Aryan Nations, the Ku Klux Klan and local Nazi skinhead groups.

“The top-down hierarchies of the past have been increasingly supplanted by a more democratized and a geographically dispersed set of erratic do-it-yourselfers,” he said. “Now, so-called lone wolves are turbocharged by a fragmented and hate-filled dark web which has become a modern-day, virtual neo-Nazi boot camp available 24-7 anywhere in the world with an internet connection.”

Examples of these kinds of actors are the attackers in the Poway synagogue shooting, the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last fall and now, according to the authorities, El Paso.

While these men often act alone, the F.B.I. says that technology has allowed American terrorists to plug into a global community of terrorists who espouse similarly hateful ideologies. Domestic terrorists are increasingly citing terrorists overseas in their killings. In his manifesto, the suspected El Paso gunman said that he agreed with the gunman who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The suspect in New Zealand said in the manifesto he is believed to have written that he had been inspired by Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. special agent and the author of “Anatomy of Terror,” said he had been struck by how much white supremacists resemble the jihadis he spent so many years fighting.

“There is a striking resemblance between jihadists and white supremacists, and it goes way beyond just utilizing social media in order to spread ideology,” he said.

[Terrorism from white nationalists shows “stunning” parallels to the rise of the Islamic State.]

Both use violence to reshape society in their own image. Both use recruitment videos that emphasize a lifestyle of “purity,” militancy and physical fitness. Jihadis share beheading videos, while right-wing extremists share the live stream of the attack in New Zealand. He said Ukraine was now a global gathering place for white supremacists, much as Afghanistan was for jihadis in the 1980s.

“This is becoming a global network in so many different ways, just like we’ve seen with the jihadis before them,” he said.

Federal investigators have also found white supremacist elements flourishing in prisons. In March, federal prosecutors in Alaska announced that an investigation had resulted in charges against 18 members and associates of a white supremacist gang known as the 1488s. In May, a federal grand jury indicted members of an Aryan Knights prison gang that had operated in Idaho.

The indictment in the Alaska case described the 1488s as a gang with dozens of members operating in Alaska and elsewhere.

David Neiwert, who has long reported on extremism in the Northwest and has worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said he sees the threat of the Northwest’s racist groups returning to levels of the 1980s, when neo-Nazi elements around the country had moved into the Northwest in a bid to create a white ethnostate. In the 1990s and 2000s, those groups lost much of their power and subsided.

Mr. Neiwert said people with extremist sympathies were now organizing online and attaching themselves to groups that aren’t as explicit about white supremacist notions.

“Local agencies in particular should be better equipped,” Mr. Neiwert said. “On the other hand, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department could probably do a better job of equipping local law enforcement.”

As the international terrorism threat evolved to include more lone actors, radicalized online rather than in terrorist cells abroad, the F.B.I. sought to enlist technology companies in its efforts to combat the threat. But companies have been slow to respond — and have been shielded, in part, by the First Amendment.

“It’s been a very long few years of getting platform companies to understand the role that digital media plays in spreading hate speech, harassment and incitement to violence,” said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change  project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. “Generally, a piece of content is only reviewed if someone else has flagged it first.”

Under intense criticism for their delayed reaction to disinformation and hateful content after the 2016 presidential election, technology companies have started to take a more proactive approach to disinformation and hate speech. In most cases, spokeswomen for Google and Facebook said the companies report white supremacist content only when it poses an imminent threat to life, or when they are complying with valid legal requests.

In May, Facebook evicted seven of its most controversial users, including Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, and Laura Loomer, a far-right activist.

But critics say that is not enough. “White supremacy, at least at Facebook, was seen as a political ideology that one could hold,” said Jessie Daniels, a sociology professor at the City University of New York and the author of a forthcoming book on white supremacy. “It’s only recently that they’ve said they recognize white supremacy as an ideology of violence.”

Ms. Daniels said there was an important lesson in what happened to Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur, after he was banned from using Twitter and Facebook.

“Milo has ceded from view since that happened. I really think that’s an argument in favor of this strategy,” she said. “He lost a book deal. He’s bankrupt. It showed ‘deplatforming’ is a useful tool and we need to find more ways to adopt it in the U.S.”

Ms. Daniels and others say the companies’ own algorithms for deciding what constitutes far-right extremist content are insufficient in tackling the threat. Often they rely on users, and in many cases names and content that percolate in the media, to decide what content and accounts should be taken down.

“We’ve reached this position where these companies have scaled beyond their capacity for safety. We don’t know what the next steps should be,” Ms. Daniels said. “We’re in a pretty significant bind now that we have a very large tech industry we all depend on, and we don’t feel we can trust them to keep us safe.”

[storepakonline]

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