Tag: religion

‘Right This Wrong’: GRACE Act Would Strip Federal Funding From Schools That Ban Religious Exemptions

A member of the U.S. Congress has drafted legislation that would strip federal funding from schools that don’t allow parents to apply for religious exemptions from vaccination requirements for their children.

The GRACE Act, or Guaranteeing Religious Accommodation in Childhood Education Act, drafted by Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.), would target elementary and secondary schools, as well as local and state educational agencies.

The legislation would not require state authorities or educational institutions to offer religious exemptions, but it would deny federal funds to those entities if they maintain vaccine mandates that don’t include provisions for religious exemptions.

“The denial of religious exemptions to families and children is un-American and unconstitutional,” said Michael Kane, CHD’s director of advocacy and founder of Teachers for Choice. “CHD and I thank Rep. Steube for putting forth this important legislation to right this wrong that is a clear violation of the First Amendment.”

The GRACE Act is a response to the “alarming erosion of civil rights” that occurred under the Biden administration, said Cait Corrigan, a former congressional candidate from New York and an advocate for medical freedom and religious liberty.

“This issue is one of religious freedom, individual liberty and parental rights, which I often describe as part of a broader response to years of increasing concern,” Corrigan said.

Steube’s office did not respond by deadline to The Defender’s request for comment on the legislation.

‘A matter of conscience, faith and the fundamental dignity of every family’

Corrigan said the proposed legislation is “not just an issue of policy” but “a matter of conscience, faith and the fundamental dignity of every family in this country.”

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Las Vegas church outrages neighbors as congregation parks SIX HUNDRED cars on lawns and driveways

Las Vegas residents were left outraged as congregants at an Ethiopian orthodox church continue to illegally park their vehicles on lawns and driveways.

Neighbors of the Hamere Noah Kidane Mihret and Saint Michael Ethiopian Church told KLAS they have repeatedly reached out to Clark County Commissioner Michael Naft and used the Fixit app as they were instructed, but nothing has changed in years.

‘We document that and we provide that proof and we have found that there’s no follow up,’ said Daria Wu, who gathered her fellow neighbors to discuss the issues they have faced during the services at the church.

These include a spike in speeding cars, vehicles running the stop signs and illegally parked cars.

‘It’s not great to sometimes have your driveway blocked by someone else’s car,’ Wu noted, as a recent morning ceremony brought more than 600 vehicles, most of which were parked illegally in front of county ‘no parking’ signs.

The swath of illegally-parked vehicles extended more than a mile, completely blocking some off some roads. 

Church members have claimed the hundreds of illegally parked vehicles only come once a year, though residents say it is much more frequently that they are dealing with the issue.

A congregant also reportedly admitted that the parking jobs were illegal according to the signs, but was not an issue because the county has not enforced ‘no parking’ rules.

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Attempt By Antifa Thugs to Start a Major Riot Between Black and Jewish Brooklyn Neighbors Completely Blows Up In Their Faces

A heartwarming scene unfolded in Brooklyn last week as a sinister plan cracked up by a group of Antifa thugs backfired spectacularly.

As Townhall reported, a group of these communists invaded a Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights to needle Black residents into assaulting Jewish residents last Wednesday.

The incident occurred at an annual vigil commemorating the 1991 death of Gavin Catto, a seven-year-old Black child killed by a Hasidic Jewish driver in a car accident.

It also followed a mass shooting that resulted in three deaths.

Sensing an opportunity, Antifa thugs went through with a plan they hoped would end in bloodshed. They shouted vulgar anti-Semitic rhetoric, thinking the Black residents would be dumb enough to attack their Jewish neighbors upon hearing such language.

Townhall noted that Antifa wanted to take advantage of the historical racial and ethnic tensions between Black and Hasidic Jewish communities to incite an all-out brawl.

But as the video footage below shows, they received a nasty surprise instead.

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Man who alleged hundreds were raped and buried in Indian temple town arrested

Police in India have arrested a man who recently alleged that he had been coerced into burying hundred of bodies of women who were raped before being murdered.

His startling claims had thrown the tiny religious town of Dharmasthala in the southern state of Karnataka into turmoil.

Home to the centuries-old temple to Manjunatha Swamy – an incarnation of Shiva from the Hindu holy trinity – the town attracts thousands of pilgrims daily and is central to the fabric of local people’s lives.

A political row in the state resulted in the government setting up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to verify the man’s allegations.

A SIT official who did not want to be named told the BBC on Saturday morning that the man “has been arrested for perjury”.

In early July, the middle-aged man had lodged a police complaint and appeared before a magistrate to record his statement. His identity has been withheld and, so far, he has appeared in public dressed fully in black, including a hood and a face mask.

In the police complaint which the BBC has seen, the man said he worked as a cleaner at the temple from 1995 to 2014 – and alleged that he had been forced to bury the bodies of hundreds of girls and young women who were brutally raped and murdered.

He narrated five alleged incidents where he gave specifics, and said there were many others. Some of the victims, the man alleged, were minors.

He said he had been in hiding since 2014 and had returned and spoken up to silence his nagging conscience.

The cleaner did not name anyone but blamed the “temple administration and its staff” – allegations the temple chief rejected as “false and baseless”.

When he was taken to the magistrate, the man went on to produce a human skull from his bag as evidence. He said it belonged to a body he had buried and that he had retrieved it recently from the spot.

“The skull and skeletal remains he produced are not brought from any spot in which he claimed to have buried the bodies,” the SIT official said.

Saturday’s arrest comes as a major turn in a saga that has set off a firestorm within the state and outside.

The allegations received intense media coverage. After concerns were raised by the state’s women’s commission, the government launched a major criminal investigation and set up the SIT.

For the past several weeks, the team conducted excavations at locations in and around Dharmasthala to verify the man’s claims. He had initially identified 13 spots – some of them in hard-to-reach areas covered by dense foliage and reportedly infested with venomous snakes.

Sources in the SIT confirmed to the BBC that human remains, including a skull and nearly 100 bone fragments, have been found at two of the spots and had been sent for forensic testing. It is not clear who they belong to.

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REPORT: Muslim Student Was Exempted From Suspension in Loudoun County Locker Room Case Where Boys Objected to Presence of Female

A group of boys at a grade school in Loudoun County in Virginia were recently suspended from school because they objected to a female student in their locker room who identifies as male.

The female student even took pictures in the locker room but the boys were suspended for objecting. The case is outrageous.

The Gateway Pundit reported on this story:

The radical madness in Loudoun County, Virginia, just hit a new low. Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) has decided to SUSPEND two boys at Stone Bridge High School, not because they misbehaved, not because they broke the law, but because they dared to ask why a girl was in the boys’ locker room.

7News reported earlier this year that LCPS launched a Title IX investigation against the boys after they were caught on video asking the obvious question: Why is there a girl in the boys’ locker room?

That video, however, wasn’t recorded by the boys; it was recorded by the female student who identifies as male. A direct violation of LCPS policy, according to the news outlet.

Yet instead of disciplining the rule-breaker, the school launched a full-blown investigation against the boys themselves.

The school’s Title IX Office determined the boys were guilty of “sexual harassment” and “sex-based discrimination.”

Their punishment? A 10-day suspension, a no-contact order with the female student, forced meetings with administrators, and a permanent smear on their academic records that could destroy their college prospects.

Now it is being reported that one of the boys was exempted from the suspension. He happens to be a Muslim.

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Islamic Sharia Law Legally Valid in Austrian Civil Disputes, Vienna Court Rules

A court in Vienna ruled this week that Islamic Sharia law can be legally upheld in Austria in civil disputes, sparking accusations that the nation’s Christian values are being undermined by multiculturalism.

The Vienna Regional Court for Civil Law Matters has upheld the findings of a Sharia arbitration tribunal concerning a civil dispute between two men in Austria, with the group of informal Islamic mediators ruling that one owed the other €320,000 ($372,000).

The man appealed to the Vienna court, arguing that Sharia diktats have no standing in Austria and that the Islamic code violated the constitutional rights of the European country.

Yet, according to Kronen Zeitung, Vienna judges found that it was permissible for private individuals to settle civil disputes through the manner they saw fit, and that Sharia arbitration did not violate the basic law of Austria.

However, the court noted that this would only apply to civil matters and that Sharia is not applicable in criminal cases. Nevertheless, critics warned that the ruling demonstrated an erosion of the Western liberties and Christian ethics upon which Austria was founded.

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Islamic Extremist Terrorist Attacks Are Not a Conspiracy Theory: Here’s the Real Data

Liberals and Democrats would have you believe that diversity is our strength and that Islamic extremist terrorism is merely a right-wing conspiracy theory. They also claim that other groups commit as many, or even more, terrorist attacks. The numbers tell a very different story.

According to Fondapol, a French think tank, between 1979 and May 2021, at least 48,035 Islamist terrorist attacks took place worldwide, causing more than 210,000 deaths. The overwhelming majority of this violence has occurred in Muslim-majority countries: 86.3% of attacks happened there, accounting for 88.9% of all deaths, over 222,000 lives lost.

ISIS alone has been responsible for enormous casualties. Between 2002 and 2015, groups affiliated with the Islamic State carried out more than 4,900 attacks, killing over 33,000 people and injuring 41,000. Using machine learning analysis, researchers attributed another 15,000 deaths to ISIS since 2007, bringing the total death toll to about 40,000.

Since 2014, Europe has endured more than 20 fatal Islamist terrorist attacks. France was hit hardest between January 2015 and July 2016, suffering eight major incidents, including the January 2015 Île-de-France attacks, the November 2015 Paris attacks that left 130 dead, and the July 2016 Nice truck attack that killed 86. In 2017, the United Kingdom saw three major attacks within four months: the Westminster attack, the Manchester Arena bombing, and the London Bridge attack. According to Europol, 62 people were killed in ten completed jihadist attacks across the European Union that year.

Outside Europe, some of the deadliest incidents were even more devastating. In 2018, the Taliban attack on Ghazni, Afghanistan, killed 466 people after assailants armed with mortars, explosives, and firearms stormed the city. That same year, ISIL was responsible for 1,328 deaths worldwide.

In 2019, the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka killed 270 people, including at least 45 foreign nationals and five Americans, in coordinated ISIS-related suicide bombings targeting churches and luxury hotels.

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Man ARRESTED In UK For Saying “We Love Bacon”

A British man has been arrested for saying “we love bacon” while protesting the building of a proposed giant mosque.

The Telegraph reports that the protest occurred at the site of planned super mosque in the Lake District, which is populated by an almost 100% white population.

The report further notes that the 23-year-old man, was not otherwise being disruptive, causing any damage or being in any way violent.

The arresting police officer claims that the grounds for the detainment were “racial abuse.”

Telegraph writer  Isabel Oakeshott notes:

Of course Muslims don’t eat pork. As a result, they cannot share this particular delight with the rest of us. However, despite a steady rise in our own Muslim population, the UK remains a Christian country. Supposedly, we also enjoy free speech. Why then did the unfortunate father find himself frogmarched away from the protest by two police officers?

Saying ‘We love bacon’ is simply a truism. We British do love it, and there is nothing wrong with saying so.

As for remarks about bacon near a religious site or in the company of Muslims, they hardly constitute public disorder, still less ‘racial abuse,’ as the officer who arrested him can be heard suggesting.

The South Lakes Islamic Centre, often referred to as the Kendal mosque due to its proximity to the town of Kendal in Cumbria, is a £2.5 million facility under construction in Dalton-in-Furness on the edge of the Lake District.

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US Ignores Horrific Syrian Govt Massacres Caught On Video As Sharaa Embraced In Amman

The number of people killed in the massacres in Syria’s Suwayda Governorate is still yet from being fully documented, as tensions continue to flare and the whole governorate is effectively on lockdown from the government. Talks aimed at addressing concerns about that situation are scheduled for this week in Amman, Jordan.

But while early reports were that a number of representatives of the Druze minority would be present for the talks, that turns out not to be the case, as the Syrian Islamist government has insisted only government representatives could participate, and therefore no Druze will be present.

That’s hugely important since the violence in Suwayda mostly involved massacres of the Druze population, and the Syrian government security forces are accused of participating in at least some of those. The talks are now scheduled to only involve Syria and Jordan’s respective foreign ministers, as well as US envoy Tom Barrack.

Barrack said the talks will affirm their “collective determination to move towards a future in which Syria and all its people can live in peace, security and prosperity.” It’s not at all clear, however, that any concrete efforts will be discussed at these talks.

State Department spokesman Michael Mitchell urged “restraint” in Suwayda, and warning against excessive use of force against protesters. The administration in general, however, seems to be overwhelmingly behind the Syrian government on effectively all issues, and is pushing for the Druze, the Kurdish SDF and others to voluntarily disarm so that the Islamist central government has a monopoly on arms.

The Kurds have rejected those demands, and the Druze seem to be headed in that direction as well, with their religious leaders united against the Syrian government after last month’s massacres.

A new video has drawn more attention to the killings in Suwayda, showing uniformed forces entering a hospital and summarily executing an unarmed man who was identified as a hospital volunteer. They had rounded up hospital staff for questioning and killed the man after he confirmed he was Druze.

Before the video surfaced, state media was accusing Druze forces of carrying out the massacre at the hospital, and while this video only shows a single execution, it’s plainly by government security forces. The government is now promising an investigation into the matter.

That probably won’t lead to much, as myriad promised investigations into the massacre of Alawites in northwest Syria earlier in the spring similarly were just extended until the matter was more or less dropped publicly. Both the anti-Alawite purge and the violence against the Druze led to well over 1,000 deaths, and simmering violence that has continued to rage in both cases.

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UK speech police could break Wikipedia, keep punishing Christian expression: critics

From crowdsourced Wikipedia entries to public religious expression, the United Kingdom’s speech regulation is drawing alarm on both sides of the pond for its potential and actual effects on shared knowledge and conscience rights at home and abroad.

The U.K. High Court knocked down a challenge to the Online Safety Act by the U.S.-based Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, on the grounds that it must wait for the Office of Communications to actually subject Wikipedia to “Category 1,” which would strip the anonymity underlying its volunteer model for creating and editing entries.

While some observers warn the ruling Monday could lead Wikipedia to go dark in the U.K., the nonprofit looked for the silver lining, noting Justice Jeremy Johnson said Ofcom and the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology do not have “a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia’s operations.”

Swiss-based Proton VPN promoted its “anti-censorship” virtual private network services to circumvent the law, given that the “government could soon be asking its citizens to provide ID to access Wikipedia … Created to ‘protect children online,’ the OSA is increasing censorship for everyone.”

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales told BBC Newsnight that “forums for self-help” including a “stop-drinking app” now have to block U.K. users who refuse to identify themselves in line with the law, which he called a “human rights violation” that is not “reining in Big Tech.” He’s also promoting VPNs, or virtual private networks, to circumvent the law. 

His co-founder, Larry Sanger, has been a vocal critic of Wikipedia’s alleged capture by the “woke” left for years and has even called for some recourse for people it defames. American conservatives have aggressively targeted it for biased though decentralized editorial decisions such as trashing President Trump’s Cabinet nominees.

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