Tag: religion

Carney Liberals block motion to study Canadian church arsons

A motion by a Conservative MP to study arson attacks and crimes against Christian churches and other religious places was shot down by Liberal MPs, who claimed that it is not warranted.

On October 29, during debate in a House of Commons Heritage Committee meeting, Conservative MP Andrew Lawton made a motion to “undertake a study of no fewer than eight meetings on vandalism, arson, shootings and other criminal attacks against places of worship in Canada.”

Lawton’s motion noted that since 2015, “police-reported hate crimes targeting religion have more than doubled, from 469 to 1,115 a year.”

He called on the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture to “appear on a panel of his own, without other witnesses, for no less than two hours, and invite the Minister of Public Safety, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Statistics Canada, police services and their hate crime units, and representatives of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and other faith communities, including congregations whose places of worship have been attacked, as well as any other witnesses the committee deems relevant,” to discuss the matter.

However, the committee chair, Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner, ruled the motion “inadmissible as it exceeded the mandate of the committee.”

When the question was asked, “Shall the decision of the Chair be sustained?” all Liberal and other MPs except the Conservatives on the committee voted “yes.”

Lawton then brought forward another motion asking the committee recognize that “historic religious buildings and faith traditions are important parts” of Canadian society and must be protected and reported to the House for further debate.

This motion was voted down as well.

Conservative MPs for some time have urged Liberal MPs to back a bill that, if passed, would make church arsonists pay for the damages they cause, saying that it is needed, as “vandalizing places of worship is unacceptable.”

The Liberals thus far have refused to back the bill.

Keep reading

Why Are So Many British Teens Being Treated As Terrorists?

What is going on with Britain’s children? Last year, more than 6,000 under-18s were referred to Prevent, the UK government’s counter-terrorism scheme, with a record number reported for being obsessed with mass violence and extremism. Believe the headlines, and we are raising a generation of committed terrorists and murderous nihilists. But scratch beneath the surface, and a far more complex picture of adult failure begins to emerge.

Clearly, some children really are attracted to terrorism and extreme violence. Last week, Yusuf Shah was convicted of providing cybersecurity support to groups including al-Qaeda. He was just 16 when he was arrested at Heathrow Airport and was found to have downloaded instructions for making explosives and using different types of weapons. In 2024, Axel Rudakubana was 17 years old when he entered a dance class in Southport, killing three girls and injuring eight other children and two adults with a kitchen knife. And in 2018, 18-year-old Safaa Boular became Britain’s youngest convicted female Islamic State terrorist after she helped plan an attack on the British Museum in London.

Yet in all three of these cases, these terrorists were either not referred to Prevent, or Prevent failed to ensure their deradicalization. Rudakubana was referred to Prevent three times between 2019 and 2021, but was deemed unsuitable for intervention as officers could find no evidence that he had a fixed ideology or motivation driving his obsession with violence.

One problem for Prevent officers is their rapidly increasing workload. The 6,085 under-18s referred to the scheme in 2025 represent a threefold increase on the 2,129 participants recorded in 2020. In just that one year, the education sector reported 3,129 individuals.

Another problem is that Prevent focuses on the wrong issue. Data from 2025 show that ‘extreme right-wing‘ concerns accounted for 21 per cent of all referrals. This is more than double the proportion of referrals for ‘Islamist extremism’ (10 per cent). What’s more, compared with the previous year, referrals for ‘extreme right-wing’ concerns increased, while referrals for ‘Islamist extremism’ decreased (down from 13 per cent).

Yet this is completely at odds with the reality of the terrorist threats we face in the UK. Since 2001, nearly 100 people have been killed in terrorist attacks in Britain. Fifty-two people were slaughtered in London on 7 July 2005 when Islamist terrorists bombed public transport. In 2017, three separate attacks resulted in multiple deaths at Westminster Bridge, Manchester Arena and London Bridge. Just two people have been killed by right-wing extremists: Mohammed Saleem (2013) and Jo Cox (2016). Prevent officers kept busy dealing with children referred for right-wing extremism have less time to worry about the far more real threat posed by Islamists.

Panic about children, especially boys, being radicalized by right-wing extremists spills over into actual arrests. Figures from UK Counter Terrorism Policing show that one in five of those arrested for terrorism-related offenses is under 18. Earlier this month, a 15-year-old boy was arrested for calling a Conservative councillor a ‘rent boy’. Four police officers in two cars turned up outside the house of the Reform UK activist, despite Reform being a mainstream political party and it not being illegal to call someone a ‘rent boy’. The boy understandably believes he was targeted for his political views and allegiances. If so, then the definition of ‘extremism’ has been stretched so much it is now meaningless.

The completely disproportionate number of teenage boys being referred to Prevent for right-wing extremism betrays the cowardice of adults. It is far easier to panic about children, social media, hate speech and toxic masculinity than it is to name, let alone confront, the real threat of Islamist terrorism. Teachers, social workers and police officers routinely assume that boys with even mainstream right-wing views pose a serious threat to society.

The increase in referrals to Prevent points to adults’ failure to relate to children in ways once taken for granted. It suggests that rather than engaging with young people by talking to them about their opinions and questioning their views, adults hit the panic button and retreat. Rather than being arrested, the 15-year-old schoolboy critical of his local councillor should have had his interest in politics taken seriously. Perhaps the offended councillor could have suggested some good books for him to read instead of calling the police.

The latest Prevent statistics point to other problems with our failure to socialize the next generation. A growing number of children are being referred to Prevent for having a fascination with ‘mass violence unrelated to a political cause’. Following the Southport attack, the government is updating Prevent to enable it to better deal with children who are obsessed with violence, mass shootings and weapons despite having no obvious ideological motive. Clearly, some of these children are mentally ill and need psychiatric treatment rather than anti-radicalization counseling. Prevent is being expected to pick up the pieces when mental-health services fail.

Something else is going on, too. An increasing number of children obsessed with violence, mass shootings and weapons hints at a prevalent sense of nihilism. As we see playing out across France right now, Western nations harbor a proportion of youngsters who feel only contempt for the society they inhabit. They have no sense of allegiance to their country, its history or its institutions. Teachers, journalists, politicians and cultural curators who should have taught children to love their country and respect their fellow citizens have failed in this task.

Referring ever more children to Prevent helps no one. As adults fail in the task of socializing children and raising decent adults, the anti-extremism program has become the institution of last resort, expected to deal with every disaffected or non-conforming teenager. Meanwhile, the role Prevent should be playing in stopping terrorism – which primarily comes from Islamist extremists – is lost to panic and political correctness.

Keep reading

 Air Force Flu Vaccine Memorandum Sparks Fears of Another “Purge” Among Religious Objectors

A newly circulated Air Force memorandum has quietly expanded the criteria for Seasonal Influenza Vaccine Exceptions to Policy (ETP), effectively creating a system where few, if any, can avoid compromising their religious convictions during their service.

As previously reported over a year ago by The Gateway Pundit, a major Cleveland Clinic study of its workforce during the 2024–2025 respiratory viral season raised significant questions about the influenza vaccine’s effectiveness. The research, which tracked more than 53,000 employees, found that vaccinated working-age adults were statistically more likely to contract influenza compared to their unvaccinated colleagues.

Even after adjusting for variables including age, sex, occupational role, and worksite location, the data indicated a 27 percent higher risk of influenza infection among those who received the vaccine.

Against the backdrop of emerging concern over the flu shot’s effectiveness and efficacy, the new Air Force directive directly contradicts the April 20th declaration from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who stated unequivocally that “effective immediately,” neither Active nor Reserve personnel—nor civilian employees of the Department of War—would be compelled to take the influenza vaccine.

The move has ignited immediate concern among service members with religious objections to vaccination, many of whom are still recovering from what one attorney called “the purge” during the COVID-19 era.

“This is deeply disappointing,” said Davis Younts, a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and military defense attorney who represented numerous clients during the height of the military’s 2021 COVID-19 shot mandate disputes. “Every time something like this happens, I immediately think of the clients who will be impacted.”

Younts estimates he has already heard from nearly half a dozen individuals since the memo circulated—clients who, since COVID, “have done the research, put the thought in, and have valid, significant, reasonable religious objections to vaccines.” For them, he said, the October 20 guidance isn’t just another memo—it’s a breach of trust.

Keep reading

Woman Arrested for Attacking Jews in NYC with Syringe- Faces Multiple Charges Including Hate Crime

A woman was arrested on Saturday after an attack on a rabbi and another Jewish man in New York City

The New York Post reports that Anna Mochalova, 32, was arrested and is facing charges, including assault as a hate crime, after jabbing a young rabbi in Midtown Manhattan. Officials also revealed she attacked another Jewish man just minutes later.

Per The New York Post:

The alleged bigot began to stalk Yosef, a 26-year-old rabbi, who is seen in surveillance video wearing traditional Orthodox garb, before stabbing him in the back with a needle near West 47th Street and Fifth Avenue on Wednesday at 5:50 p.m., according to prosecutors.

Yosef, the young rabbi stabbed with a syringe, previously told The Post he believes he was targeted because he is “visibly Jewish.”

In another incident a few minutes laters, Mochalova is alleged to have deliberately bumped into a 37-year-old Jewish man wearing a yarmulke.

Mochalova bumped into the man several times, causing a stinging sensation in his right arm, prosecutors alleged – before chillingly telling the man “run away from here. I have a gun. I’m going to shoot you.”

The man was later treated for lacerations, according to authorities.

Prosecutors also claim that a third potential victim was not harmed after he was Muslim.

Keep reading

Somali-Born Superintendent Sparks Uproar as He Reveals the Disgusting Reason Why He Wants to Change School Policy on Dogs

A Somali-born public school official who invaded the State of Maine years ago now wants to impose his culture on the state’s natives.

As The Maine Wire reported on Wednesday, the Portland Public Schools Policy Committee held a meeting on October 14 that focused on the school district’s newly proposed policy on animals in schools.

As currently drafted, the policy states as follows: school administration must sign off on the animals, service animals must be certified, and domestic animals must be restrained.

But Abdullahi Ahmed, the Somali-born Muslim assistant superintendent for student, family, and community partnerships at Portland Public Schools, claimed that the policy toward dogs must change because of Islamic ‘ritual purity.’

He specifically cited dog saliva as an example.

“In Islamic tradition, there is always love for animals and living things and compassion for animals,” Ahmed said. “With that being said, there are some ritual purity that Islamic traditions state and Muslims exercise, so, for example, dog saliva is considered impure.

Ahmed said he did not want the district “to have a dog as a class pet” and that students and staff “should not be required to interact” with the animals at school.

Keep reading

Utah man federally charged after allegedly making threats online to ‘blow up’ a synagogue

A Utah man who allegedly posted “I wanna blow up a synagogue” online has been indicted on federal charges after investigators recovered six pipe bombs, two rifles, and ammunition from his home, according to the Department of Justice.

Skyler AJ Rose, 22, of Ogden, was indicted Wednesday by a federal grand jury in Salt Lake City. The charges include attempting to commit a hate crime, possession of an unregistered destructive device, and threatening to kill and injure people and destroy a building with an explosive, the Justice Department announced Thursday.

According to court documents, Rose made multiple threatening social media posts on December 23, 2025, including the threat to bomb a synagogue. Investigators traced the posts to an IP address associated with the home where he lived.

The FBI contacted the Ogden City Police Department for assistance visiting the residence, and investigators confirmed that the social media handle belonged to Rose, authorities said.

During a search of the home, law enforcement allegedly recovered six improvised explosive pipe bombs, one inert device, and materials and components that could be used to build additional pipe bombs. Investigators also seized two rifles with accompanying magazines and ammunition, along with a Samsung cellphone.

A subsequent search of the phone allegedly revealed that Rose had searched online for a synagogue near him in November 2025, a month before the threatening posts. Authorities also alleged that the phone contained hundreds of cached images and screenshots depicting child sexual abuse material.

“Today’s indictment stops in its tracks an alleged plan to carry out a violent attack on a synagogue,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “The Department of Justice will take decisive action to protect American worshippers from violent threats, no matter where they occur.”

US Attorney Melissa Holyoak credited federal investigators and local police with stopping the alleged threats before anyone was harmed.

“Let these charges serve as a clear warning: if you attack or attempt to attack a place of worship, you will face the full force of the federal government,” Holyoak said.

Rose’s initial appearance is scheduled for Friday, October 23, at 1:30 pm at the Orrin G. Hatch US Courthouse in Salt Lake City.

Keep reading

Town Gave Muslim School Permission to Bring In 90 Students, Then It Went Rogue and Brought in Hundreds More

Fairfield Township, New Jersey, is a perfect object lesson in what happens when entitled minority populations decide that they can play by their own rules.

Al-Ghazaly High School is an Islamic private institution in the New York City suburbs. Local officials approved the school, run by the Islamic Education Foundation, based on the understanding that it would school 90 students in its current property, according to a report from The New Jersey Progress.

Instead, the school has enrolled around 313 students since it was given a Certificate of Re-Occupancy earlier this year, and practically demanded that local authorities increase its authorized student number to 400.

During a planning board meeting last Tuesday, IEF Schools executive director Hayat Jaludi defended her decision to blatantly disregard the student limit based on the fact that, well, kids wanted to be educated.

Sure, she didn’t have permission, but she apparently didn’t think she needed it to flood the school and break the regulations.

“Hold on, hold on — how can you have 314 students in a building when you’re only allowed to have 90?” one of the board members asked.

Jaludi said that “we came into this building assuming that we have the occupancy of whatever enrolled students we have.”

Keep reading

Is Banning a Church From Building on Its Property’s Just “A Mere Inconvenience”? The Supreme Court Will Decide

The Supreme Court just agreed to take up a case that could reshape how every church in America is treated when it tries to build. Last week, the Court granted certiorari in Missionaries of Saint John the Baptist v. Frederic to define what counts as a “substantial burden” on religious exercise under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA).

A Catholic religious organization in Park Hills, Kentucky, wanted to build a small chapel on land next to its church. The construction would be about the size of a backyard swimming pool. The city’s board approved the permit, but neighbors sued, and the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled against the church.

The court’s reasoning was alarming. It said that being barred from building a chapel was “a mere inconvenience” because the church could build a smaller one somewhere else. It also called the burden self-imposed because the church knew about the ordinance before it applied.

Under that logic, a complete ban on a religious use of your own property isn’t a substantial burden as long as a judge thinks you could worship some other way. Judges, not believers, would decide what matters to the faith.

The ACLJ filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to take this case. We told the Justices that lower courts have been eroding RLUIPA’s protections by adding qualifiers Congress never wrote. Congress passed this law to stop local governments from treating churches as second-class property owners, and it told courts to read the statute in favor of broad protection of religious exercise.

The grant confirms that RLUIPA’s land-use protections have gone too long without guidance from the Supreme Court. Now that the Court has taken the case, the ACLJ will file an amicus brief on the merits, standing with houses of worship across the country as the Justices decide this question.

Keep reading

Post-Genocide Israel 2026: Fragmented, Divided, Segregated Election With Few Alternatives

Israel’s 2026 election is occurring in a highly polarized and incendiary political atmosphere that recalls 1995. Then, the Oslo process had split Israeli society between an increasingly radicalized right and a peace-oriented government. As the incendiary political climate was condoned by the right-wing Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Labor’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was publicly branded a traitor and assassinated by a Messianic Jewish extremist.

The analogy has its limits. In 1995 the central political question was whether Israel should negotiate with the Palestinians. In 2026, the argument is taking place after October 7, three years of war, the obliteration of Gaza, intensified West Bank settlement and displacement, and Israeli military operations involving Lebanon and Iran.

In the past 10-15 years, the country’s political center of gravity has shifted sharply toward security and military power, documented in my The Fall of Israel (2024).

Recent polls have the Netanyahu and opposition blocs tied at about 50 seats. Neither side has a reliable governing coalition, while the Israeli Arab parties held the balance – until their representation was undermined.

International media muses about the “knife-edge Israeli elections” between the incumbent Netanyahu and his rivals, tacitly suggesting that the latter offer “hope” and “change.” In reality, the Israeli vote is not a conventional left-right election, but a referendum on who controls the Israeli state after years of permanent war – and what kind of state emerges from it.

It’s not a pretty picture.

Two major blocs and the unaligned

In the 120-member Israeli parliament, the Knesset, no single party has a majority. Effectively, the rivalry is between two blocs of parties: the Netanyahu-led harsh-right and the rival bloc, led by former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, that is portrayed as centrist (though it, too, is slanted toward right).

Current polling suggests that the election may produce no clear outcome. Each major bloc attracts about 50 seats. Garnering up to 20 seats, the smaller unaligned groups are expected to have a critical role in the next government coalition. Or so the conventional wisdom goes.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud remains committed to military primacy, opposition to Palestinian statehood and a security-centered conception of Israeli sovereignty.

Once again, Likud’s campaign presents him as the indispensable protector of Israel in a hostile region, despite the catastrophic October 7 failure occurring under his watch. That depiction is fully misaligned with the war crimes he remains accused of.

In the absence of effective opposition alternatives, Netanyahu’s main rival, the centrist-populist Yashar (“honest”) bloc, has promoted itself as a more moderate option. Yet, its leader Gadi Eisenkot is a security hawk and the architect of the Obliteration Doctrine that was first tested in Dahiya, Beirut in 2006-7 and perfected in the Gaza genocide 2023-26. Eisenkot regards Palestinian statehood as effectively “irrelevant.”

Recent reporting, however, reinforces the limits of the promised alternative: the opposition says it would curb extremist settler violence, dismantle illegal outposts and restore some cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, yet its leading figures still reject Palestinian statehood. A change of government could alter methods and international relations without changing the underlying territorial consensus.

Next come labor, far-right, religious and Arab parties, which each could attract about 7-11 seats.

Led by Yair Golan, the labor Democrats are the clearest major Jewish-Zionist force advocating a negotiated Palestinian settlement, while still maintaining a strongly security-oriented posture. For a year or two, the popular Golan has tried to consolidate and expand Israeli left. His dream is to restore the broad labor front that governed Israel until Likud’s election triumph in 1977. But that’s a tall order.

Since the mid-2010s, Israel has shifted toward the Messianic far-right, thanks to hardened domestic sentiments and billions of U.S. dollars in annual military aid and conservative American-Jewish funding. When the country is consistently rewarded for policies that international law considers crimes, this is hardly surprising.

Keep reading