Tag: language

NJ lawmakers advance bill defining antisemitism after hours of testimony

An Assembly panel advanced a controversial bill that would create a state definition of antisemitism Thursday after more than seven hours of impassioned testimony from hundreds of supporters and critics alike.

Supporters cited rising rates of antisemitic hate crimes as a reason why lawmakers must pass the bill, which has more than 50 cosponsors.

Opponents said the bill, which would adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, would violate free speech rights by criminalizing criticism of Israel. Several cited crackdowns on campus protests and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who the Trump administration detained and aims to deport after declaring his anti-Israel activism antisemitic.

The disagreement ran so deep that tensions exploded even hours before the Assembly state and local government committee’s hearing on the measure started. Pro-Palestinian advocates held a morning rally outside the Statehouse to condemn the bill, and several pro-Israel activists tried to disrupt it, prompting state troopers to scramble to defuse the resulting shoving match between both sides.

Things didn’t go much more smoothly inside.

Troopers had to open four overflow rooms to accommodate the crowds who showed up to testify, and testimony grew so heated that Assemblyman Robert Karabinchak (D-Middlesex), the committee’s chair, repeatedly pounded his gavel to restore order and threatened to have troopers remove disruptive spectators.

Assemblyman Gary Schaer (D-Passaic), the bill’s chief sponsor, kicked off the testimony just after noon. Four other Assembly members from both parties beside him also testified in support of the bill.

Schaer denied that the bill would infringe upon the First Amendment, saying its goal is simple — to combat rising antisemitism.

“A statutory definition of antisemitism gives law enforcement a clear lens to determine the motivation and/or intent behind a criminal act or bias incident that may have been motivated by antisemitism,” he said. “It may also be incorporated into policy development and anti-bias training. However, the legislation does not create new criminal penalties or criminalize protected speech. Instead, it ensures that when an individual paints a swastika on a synagogue, shouts slurs at a Jewish student, or otherwise targets someone based on their Jewish identity, we have a consistent, recognized standard by which to evaluate.”

Dozens of Jewish groups, mayors, and others echoed that support.

“The Jewish community must stand up to the bullies who see this bill as a threat to their ability to harass and intimidate us,” said Jason Shames, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey.

But DaWuan Norwood, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, said the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition conflates protected political speech with unprotected discrimination.

Keep reading

Tower of Babel: Nearly Two Million Non-Native English Speaking Students in England Schools

A report has found that almost two million students do not speak English as their native language in England as a result of the mass migration agenda imposed upon the country by the Westminster establishment.

Freedom of Information requests from the Daily Mail have revealed that in 2,039 schools in England, English is not the first language for the majority of students.

In total, the report found that 1.8 million students are non-native English speakers, or around one in five pupils in the country.

Zeroing in, at the Kobi Nazrul primary school in the Tower Hamlets borough of London, 92 per cent of students speak Bengali as their native tongue, while none were recorded as speaking English at home as their first language.

Another example highlighted was the Pentland Infant Kirklees school in Dewsbury, where the vast majority of students had an Indian language as their mother tongue, with 36 per cent speaking Gujarati and 45 per cent speaking Panjabi.

The number of students without English as their first language has increased significantly over the past decade, during which successive governments have undertaken record levels of immigration.

According to the report, there are now 700,000 more non-native English speaking students compared to ten years ago.

Keep reading

A Translation Guide To Progressive Slavespeak

I propose that we accompany physical detox with a verbal detox: we need to purge our bloated vocabulary of several concepts that are poisoning our understanding of ourselves and the world.

These concepts have been elaborated by people who would describe themselves as “self-aware,” “progressive,” and “liberated,” but they are actually terms more fit for a society of slaves than a society of free persons. Indeed, these concepts, at least as they are typically employed by “progressives,” could be described, without exaggeration, as a species of slavespeak. By this, I simply mean that they are used disingenuously, to rationalise political oppression and slavery.

Let’s name them and shame them, one by one:

  1. Misinformation/disinformation: On its face, this means false or misleading information that could be harmful to citizens. But in slavespeak, while it parades under this apparently innocent meaning, it actually means information that some individuals find disagreeable or inconvenient, and therefore want censored or banished from the public square.
  2. Far right: On its face, this means political positions that border on the insane, the pathological, and the irrational, and have violent and oppressive tendencies, with affinities to Nazism, white supremacism, and other dodgy political movements. In slavespeak, “far right” retains these connotations, but the term is applied arbitrarily to any position that disrupts the official narrative of the political Establishment.
  3. Xenophobia: Xenophobia usually means blanket dislike or prejudice against foreigners. But in slavespeak, xenophobia is applied to anyone who affirms the value of national ties or national identity, defends the idea that immigrants should adapt to the their host culture, or dissents from open border policies.
  4. Hate speech: On its face, this means speech that targets particular groups in society with vitriolic language and insults of various sorts, seeking to portray such groups as intrinsically detestable. In slavespeak, hate speech just means any strongly worded discourse that dares to speak critically of any protected cohort of society or its behaviour or opinions. So heated political discourse is treated as insidious hate speech, especially discourse that threatens the reigning ideology.
  5. Tolerance: On its face, this means a disposition to peacefully put up with people, behaviour, or opinions one finds abhorrent or offensive. In slavespeak, tolerance means the uncritical celebration of every conceivable lifestyle under the sun, the anaesthesisation of one’s critical faculties. So verbally expressing disapproval or criticism toward a way of life, which used to be permitted by freedom of expression, is now condemned as intolerance.

Keep reading

Austrian Schoolchildren Forced to Learn Arabic to Communicate with Muslim Classmates

In a troubling revelation from Vienna, a concerned grandparent, Bernhard K., has exposed a growing crisis in Austria’s kindergartens. Speaking to the Austrian news outlet Heute, he described the stark reality at his grandson’s school, where only three of 25 classmates are fluent German speakers.

During breaks and after-school activities, the children revert to Arabic, leaving his grandson isolated. When asked how the boy copes, Bernhard’s response was shocking: “He’s trying to learn Arabic! How else is he supposed to communicate with his schoolmates?”

This is not an isolated incident but a symptom of a broader demographic shift. According to the Institute for Family Research, one in five children under 18 in Austria, roughly 340,000, lacks an Austrian passport.

Meanwhile, the number of native Austrian youths has plummeted from 1.6 million to 1.2 million. The rapid transformation is reshaping the nation’s schools and threatening the cultural fabric of its communities.

As The Gateway Pundit has previously reported, Muslims have now become the largest religious group in Vienna’s compulsory schools, comprising a striking 41.2% of all students across primary, secondary, and vocational education levels.

Meanwhile, just 34.5% of students now identify as Christian (17.5% Catholic and 14.5% Orthodox), more than 23% have no religious affiliation, and the remaining minority includes Buddhists (0.2%), Jews (0.1%), and others (0.9%).

“This is no longer immigration. This is displacement,” said Maximilian Weinzierl, national council member and leader of the FPÖ’s youth wing. “41.2% of Muslim students—that’s no longer a minority, that’s the new majority. What we as the FPÖ have been warning about for decades, but which was always dismissed as right-wing scaremongering, is now reality: Immigration has completely overrun our country.”

Keep reading

SETI Researchers Report Potential Discovery of ‘Communication’ by Non-Human Intelligence in Earth’s Oceans

For the first time, scientists have documented a unique behavior in the animal kingdom that provides new insights into non-human intelligence and potential clues in the search for intelligent life from other worlds.

The intriguing discovery, made by scientists with the SETI Institute in collaboration with scientists at the University of California at Davis, involves large bubble rings produced by humpback whales. These bubble rings are not unlike the smoke rings produced by tobacco enthusiasts, which the cetaceans make while interacting with humans.

Although known from past observations, the researchers say this behavior, which had never been significantly studied until now, could represent a unique form of interspecies communication.

Bubbling Bursts of Communication?

In the past, humpback whales have been observed using bursts of bubbles under a range of different circumstances, including corralling prey and during mating, when males produce trails of bubbles while escorting females.

In the recently documented behavior, researchers with the WhaleSETI team say humpback whales also generate these bubble rings while interacting with humans during friendly encounters.

Keep reading

Asking Someone to “Speak English” in England Could Be a Hate Crime, Police Warn

An elderly man in the UK has been warned by police that telling someone to “speak English” in England could be considered a hate crime. A video of the incident, currently going viral across social media, begins with the officer asking a man for video evidence after he allegedly told someone to “speak English,” explaining that such a remark might be classified as a hate crime.

The officer said, “Apparently, during some conversations between yourself, apparently, you’ve alleged—we weren’t here, so I don’t know you’ve said it—but you’ve alleged to say, ‘Speak English,’ or words to that effect?”

The elderly man responded, “I said ‘Speak clearly.’”

A woman off-camera then explained that the man was deaf and had simply asked the person to “speak clearly” so he could understand them. Despite the clarification, the officer presses the issue, explaining that such a remark could be perceived as a hate crime.

“That’s fine,” the officer replied. “That’s why we’ve just come to speak because potentially someone could perceive that as a hate crime. If someone said to me, ‘Officer, I believe this,’ then we need to look at it because someone is potentially reporting it as a hate crime.”

The video surfaces amid escalating tensions in the UK, where many native Britons feel that the establishment is enforcing a two-tier system of policing and justice—one that, in their view, unfairly marginalizes them under the pretext of uplifting “global majority” groups.

Keep reading

Trump Signs Executive Order Making English the Official Language of the United States

The United States has always been a land defined by shared values. Our founding documents established principles of liberty and justice that have guided generations. Citizens from diverse backgrounds have united around these ideals, creating the strongest nation on earth.

Americans have overcome countless challenges by working together toward common goals. This unity requires effective communication and mutual understanding—something that’s becoming increasingly rare in our divided times, wouldn’t you say?

For nearly 250 years, our nation has operated without an official language. That changed today.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday making English the official language of the United States for the first time in American history. The order rescinds a mandate issued by former President Bill Clinton in 2000 that required federal agencies and recipients of federal funding to provide language assistance to non-English speakers.

Fox News reported: “The order is intended to celebrate multilingual Americans who have learned English and passed it down to their family members, while also ’empowering immigrants’ to reach the American dream via a common language.”

Keep reading

Democrat DEI Brain Rot Is A LOT Worse Than You Think…

Democrat Illinois Representative Jan Schakowsky suggested in a Congressional hearing that the word ‘Manufacturing’ is sexist.

Yes, really.

Because it begins with ‘man’ it is somehow holding back women from going into the manufacturing industry.

Schakowsky, the ranking Democrat member on the House Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee, for some unfathomable reason, posited that only around 13 percent of people in manufacturing are female because the word itself just “sounds like a guy.”

The word originates from the Latin manu which means ‘hands’ and factum which means ‘made by’.

Yeah, made by hand. Anyone’s hand. Male or female. 

Keep reading

“Just give me the f***ing links!”—Cursing disables Google’s AI overviews

If you search Google for a way to turn off the company’s AI-powered search results, you may well get an AI Overview telling you that AI Overviews can’t be directly disabled in Google Search. But if you instead ask Google how to turn off “fucking Google AI results,” you’ll get a standard set of useful web suggestions without any AI Overview at the top.

The existence of this “curse to disable Google AI” trick has been making the rounds on social media in recent days, and it holds up in Ars’ own testing. For instance, when searching for “how do you turn off [adjective] Google AI results,” a variety of curse word adjectives reliably disabled the AI Overviews, while adjectives like “dumb” or “lousy” did not. Inserting curse words randomly at any point in the search query seems to have a similar effect.

There’s long been evidence that Google’s Gemini AI system tries to avoid swearing if at all possible, which might help explain why AI Overviews balk at queries that contain curses. Users should also keep in mind, though, that the actual web link results to a query can change significantly when curse words are inserted, especially if SafeSearch is turned off.

Keep reading