At last someone is addressing those feminist myths.

By Steve Doughty
Last updated at 1:02 AM on 08th November 2008

Further sex equality legislation should be stopped because it is unfair to men, according to an analysis published by a Labour think tank.

The idea that all women at work are victims of discrimination is a ‘feminist myth’, argued a senior academic. Many want to raise families rather than pursue careers.

‘The myth that all or most women would be just as careerist as men, if only they were given the opportunity, has been exploded,’ Dr Catherine Hakim said. Stressed Young Man

While women can choose between work and family, men have fewer choices, a senior academic said

‘The trend towards flexibility in the workforce has also made it clearer that some occupations and jobs will never be family friendly.’

The call from Dr Hakim will provoke unease among ministers and Labour MPs because it has been published by the Institute for Public Policy Research, the party’s most influential think tank over the past decade.

Business Secretary Peter Mandelson is already thinking about whether to push on with planned new family-friendly laws next spring because of their impact on small businesses.

However, the Government’s Equality Commission and feminist ministers are determined to bring in laws to combat what they see as widespread prejudice against women workers.

Dr Hakim, a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics, said: ‘The most misleading feminist myth is that women are united in their goals and priorities.

‘Around one quarter of women - and men - now remain childless, mostly by choice, and their interests and priorities differ substantially from those of parents.

‘I predict that men will continue to dominate in the workforce and public life while women will continue to dominate in family life, even in the absence of sex discrimination, because there are some residual differences in tastes, values and lifestyle choices that have a cumulative impact.’

In a direct challenge to the official Whitehall view, she declared: ‘So why do feminists continue to demand a strengthening of gender equality laws?

‘Largely because feminists continue to manufacture myths about women’s oppression.’

Dr Hakim said that while women could choose between work and family, men had fewer choices. ‘Perhaps equality legislation should address this imbalance,’ she said

Source: http://arabnews.com/

JEDDAH, 29 November 2007 — Saudi authorities yesterday announced the arrest of 208 terror suspects, including 32 terror financiers and a 16-member media cell, adding that some of the suspects had planned to attack oil installations in the Eastern Province.Maj. Gen. Mansour Al-Turki, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said the arrests took place following pre-emptive operations carried out by security forces over the last few months. He said the suspects had been influenced by a deviant ideology.

“Security forces foiled an impending attack on a support oil facility in the Eastern Province,” the spokesman said, adding that an eight-member cell led by an expatriate man was behind the plan.

The expatriate explained to police how he mobilized other militants to carry out the attack after encouraging them to take part in suicide operations inside and outside the Kingdom.

The arrested militants also included an 18-member cell, which had smuggled eight missiles into the Kingdom in order to launch terrorist operations, the Saudi Press Agency quoted the spokesman as saying. An infiltrator, who is an expert in missile launching, headed the team, he added.

“There was a 22-member cell which formed a special team to assassinate Islamic scholars and security officers,” Al-Turki said. The assassination move came after imams and khateebs across the country joined the fight against terrorism and extremism. “As many as 112 suspects were arrested for coordinating with foreign parties to facilitate the travel of militants to disturbed regions,” he said in reference to those that convince Saudis to travel to Iraq in order to fight alongside insurgents.

Al-Turki said the arrested terror financiers included Saudis as well as expatriates, adding that they had provided financial support to Al-Qaeda militants in the Kingdom and abroad.

Speaking about the media cell that was operating in Madinah to promote deviant ideologies and thoughts, he said the cell had provided militants every encouragement to commit various crimes. The media cell published a news bulletin named Sada Al-Rafidain (Echo of Iraq) and facilitated the travel of militants to the war-torn country.

During the security operations police confiscated a number of means of communication and documents, the spokesman said. Details of the confiscated items will not be disclosed at present in order to protect public interest. “Investigations made with the help of arrested militants have also led to information about persons who have links with the militants,” the spokesman said.

The Interior Ministry called upon Saudis who have been approached by deviant ideologists to contact the nearest security agency if they are in the Kingdom or the nearest Saudi mission abroad to clarify their stand. “This will be taken into consideration when dealing with their cases,” the spokesman said.

By John Coleman
Original post is here

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild “scientific” scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. Now their ridiculous manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmentally conscientious citizens. Only one reporter at ABC has been allowed to counter the Global Warming frenzy with one 15 minute documentary segment.

I do not oppose environmentalism. I do not oppose the political positions of either party. However, Global Warming, i.e. Climate Change, is not about environmentalism or politics. It is not a religion. It is not something you “believe in.” It is science; the science of meteorology. This is my field of life-long expertise. And I am telling you Global Warming is a non-event, a manufactured crisis and a total scam. I say this knowing you probably won’t believe a me, a mere TV weatherman, challenging a Nobel Prize, Academy Award and Emmy Award winning former Vice President of United States. So be it.

I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct. There is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. I am incensed by the incredible media glamour, the politically correct silliness and rude dismissal of counter arguments by the high priest of Global Warming.

In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious. As the temperature rises, polar ice cap melting, coastal flooding and super storm pattern all fail to occur as predicted everyone will come to realize we have been duped. The sky is not falling. And, natural cycles and drifts in climate are as much if not more responsible for any climate changes underway. I strongly believe that the next twenty years are equally as likely to see a cooling trend as they are to see a warming trend.

By Christopher Booker and Richard North
http://www.telegraph.co.uk

No one can deny that in recent years the need to “save the planet” from global warming has become one of the most pervasive issues of our time. As Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, claimed in 2004, it poses “a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism”, warning that by the end of this century the only habitable continent left will be Antarctica.Inevitably, many people have been bemused by this somewhat one-sided debate, imagining that if so many experts are agreed, then there must be something in it. But if we set the story of how this fear was promoted in the context of other scares before it, the parallels which emerge might leave any honest believer in global warming feeling uncomfortable.

The story of how the panic over climate change was pushed to the top of the international agenda falls into five main stages. Stage one came in the 1970s when many scientists expressed alarm over what they saw as a disastrous change in the earth’s climate. Their fear was not of warming but global cooling, of “a new Ice Age”.

For three decades, after a sharp rise in the interwar years up to 1940, global temperatures had been falling. The one thing certain about climate is that it is always changing. Since we began to emerge from the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, temperatures have been through significant swings several times. The hottest period occurred around 8,000 years ago and was followed by a long cooling. Then came what is known as the “Roman Warming”, coinciding with the Roman empire. Three centuries of cooling in the Dark Ages were followed by the “Mediaeval Warming”, when the evidence agrees the world was hotter than today.

Around 1300 began “the Little Ice Age”, that did not end until 200 years ago, when we entered what is known as the “Modern Warming”. But even this has been chequered by colder periods, such as the “Little Cooling” between 1940 and 1975. Then, in the late 1970s, the world began warming again.

Read full article here.

By ROBERT L. JAMIESON Jr.
P-I COLUMNIST
Source: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com

Their campaign of terror keeps spreading.They want to wipe out those who don’t agree with their way of life.

They’ve spilled blood across the planet for eons, finding justification for the evil they do in holy texts.

What do we call them?

What else? Christian-o-fascists!

While we’re at it, let’s give them a calendar slot — “Christian-o-Fascism Awareness Week” — to be celebrated on college campuses everywhere.

Yes, I drummed up this term this week to show extreme ideas aren’t confined to one religion. Zealots who wrap themselves in Christianity have blown up abortion clinics as well as claimed the lives of non-believers since antiquity. Jewish extremists whack Palestinians. Muslim nutcases bastardize Islam to justify suicide bombings that kill innocents.

Yet, it seems only the radical fringe of Islam gets slapped with a silly but dangerous label, designed to fan fears and taint a whole faith.

This brings me to — drum roll, please — “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” celebrated at more than 100 campuses across the country, including the University of Washington.

Last week’s nationwide event was aimed at fostering awareness of the terror threat posed by a fraction of those in the Islamic faith. Organizers also wanted to blast the “silence of feminists” over the oppression of women of Islam.

Their effort would have been better served by looking at how extremists everywhere, across the spectrum of beliefs, crap up the world.

That actually could foster constructive dialogue about the perils of ultra-radicals.

Earnest dialogue, though, wasn’t on the agenda for the UW College Republicans, the local lackeys for the big week. They’re more about fanning flames of ignorance — and garnering attention — than kindling wisdom. They give wiser GOP minds a bad name.

I can’t say I’m shocked. In 2003, the College Republicans held an anti-affirmative action bake sale on the UW campus to spark “dialogue.” White students paid $1 for a cookie, for example, while minorities paid anywhere from a quarter to 95 cents.

Don’t get me wrong: The group had every right to exercise its free, if stupid, speech back then, as it does now. But what’s troubling about “Islamo-Fascism” week is the lack of voices from high places on campus countering the madness.

At least during the bake-sale shenanigans, the president of the UW Board of Regents wrote a letter saying the stunt was “tasteless, divisive and hurtful — learning is not advanced when the dialogue is demeaning and disrespectful.”

This time, a UW assistant provost wrote human rights activists — to reassure them there was “no indication” conservative pundit Michael Medved would speak on campus as part of a “terrorism awareness” tie-in. But, “it turns out that did happen,” Assistant Provost Patricia Huling said of Medved’s campus chitchat.

The university says Muslim and Arab students did pass out literature and set up a table on campus to offer counterpoints to the demeaning, disrespectful and narrow presentation of Islam.

But that was like talking into a hurricane. True learning, a thought-provoking dialogue, wasn’t advanced.

Maybe the stunt was fun and games for the publicity-seeking Republican college group. But it’s serious business for the folks behind last week’s national event, sponsored by David Horowitz of the Los Angeles-based Freedom Center, a conservative think tank. These right-wingers want to grab power by creating campaigns that spread fear and invoke made-up, hot-button words.

As Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times puts it: “There isn’t actually any such thing as Islamo-Fascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination.”

The term, he adds, became a fashionable way for Iraq hawks “to gloss over” the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked us, to Saddam Hussein, who did not.

But hey, the conservative kids on campus don’t sweat such pesky details.

They know sometimes it’s best to gloss over truths, exploit fear and be only as aware as you want to be.

Well, al-Baabaa Benedict XVI decided to find an obscure quote from a debate around 600 hundred years ago claiming that Islam brought nothing but evil and the spreading of the faith by the sword. I came across this response from Jewish atheist (?), Uri Avnery. Here are some excerpts from his response to al-Baabaa Benedict:

In his lecture at a German university, the 265th Pope described what he sees as a huge difference between Christianity and Islam: while Christianity is based on reason, Islam denies it. While Christians see the logic of God’s actions, Muslims deny that there is any such logic in the actions of Allah.

As a Jewish atheist, I do not intend to enter the fray of this debate. It is much beyond my humble abilities to understand the logic of the Pope. But I cannot overlook one passage, which concerns me too, as an Israeli living near the fault-line of this “war of civilizations”.

In order to prove the lack of reason in Islam, the Pope asserts that the Prophet Muhammad ordered his followers to spread their religion by the sword. According to the Pope, that is unreasonable, because faith is born of the soul, not of the body. How can the sword influence the soul?

Jesus said: “You will recognize them by their fruits.” The treatment of other religions by Islam must be judged by a simple test: how did the Muslim rulers behave for more than a thousand years, when they had the power to “spread the faith by the sword”? Well, they just did not. For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.

In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were still the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country, did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the Arabic language and the Muslim faith - and they were the forefathers of most of today’s Palestinians.

About Muslim Spain, Avnery writes:

There no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the “spreading of the faith by the sword”?

What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics reconquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi (”Spanish”) Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.

At the closing of his piece, Avnery writes:

Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times “by the sword” to get them to abandon their faith.The story about “spreading the faith by the sword” is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims - the reconquista of Spain by the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. I suspect that the German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables. That means that the leader of the Catholic world, who is a Christian theologian in his own right, did not make the effort to study the history of other religions.

Another interesting read is “The Jews of Islam” by Bernard Lewis, where he demonstrates the claim that Islam was spread with the Qur’an in one hand and the sword in the other is in fact a falsification.There is also the encyclopedic, “A History of the Jewish People” by Hayim Ben-Sasson. This is a detailed Jewish history book written by Jewish scholars from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and offers an objective viewpoint on this subject. Some quotes that relate to the period between 600-1000 CE

The height of magnificence and luxury was reached by the wealthy Jews in the lands of Islam, particularly in Moslem Spain. We know that the court bankers of Baghdad in the tenth century kept open house for numerous guests and for the poor. Similarly, the ceremonies of the Jewish leaders in Babylonia and the patronage of the leading Jews in Moslem Spain, indicate conditions of ease and plenty. (p.401)

The need to maintain undisturbed relations with those on whom the existence of an economic structure and civilization depended gradually shaped the Moslem attitude towards those members of the ‘peoples of the Book’ who refused to accept Islam. The attitude toward these non-Moslems in the Islamic territories was shaped in principle in accordance with the concept of dhimma, meaning protection granted to them by agreement or treaty… The major expressions of dhimmi status were the poll-tax or jizia, which all male non-believers above the age of fifteen had to pay, and the special land-tax, known as the kharaj. In return, their lives and property were protected and, in accordance with the general attitude of Islam to infidels, they were assured liberty of faith and worship. They were also permitted to organize themselves as they wished, and the Jews fully availed themselves of that permission. Naturally there were changes for the better or for the worse in various places and at various times; but the principles established in the early days of Islam continued to serve as the basis for the relations between Moslem and dhimmi throughout the ages. (pp. 404-405)

From the Jewish viewpoint, this conglomerate of Moslem attitudes to infidels was easier to live with than the one that had been established by Christianity, particularly in the Byzantine Empire. As we have noted above, for hundreds of years the overwhelming majority of Jews lived in the Islamic territories. Although it is possible to perceive some Christian impact on the Moslem attitude towards non-believers and even towards the Christians themselves, the moderation with which the Moslems applied this influence proved to be of great importance to the majority of Jewry over a long period. Unlike the masses of Christians and pagans who joined the Moslems over the first half century or so, the overwhelming majority of the Jews under Moslem rule held firmly to their own faith. (p. 405)

The exilarch served as manifestation of the splendour of bygone days, which the Jews wished to preserve, to the extent that the Moslem government would permit a dhimmi people. He was ‘like one of the lords of the king in his behaviour’ - the reference being to the ministers of the Moslem caliph. The exilarch used to enter the royal court, speaking to the caliph ‘with pleasant words until he granted his request’. Thus the resh galuta majestically represented the Jews and performed the diplomatic function of intercession at the caliph’s court. He also appointed judges, as has been mentioned, and had an authoritative say in matters of Jewish law and the organization of the yeshivot. His office, though maintained in the shadow of the caliphate and interwoven with the leadership of the scholars and sages of the yeshivot, reflected on a small scale the ancient monarchy of Judah. (pp. 422-423)

The Jews of the Middle Ages, as we have remarked, inherited from ancient times an entire range of viewpoints and ideals that were transmitted in an extensive literature and were preserved throughout the generations. Many of their guiding institutions were, or at least claimed to be, continuations of institutions of the ancient past. Naturally, however, the social and cultural circumstances and trends of the contemporary environment had their effect. Life in the Islamic countries, with its flow of commerce and bustling urban activity, exerted considerable influence. An equal and possibly even greater influence was the new Arabic culture, in wihch the Platonic, neo-Platonic and Aristotelian elements moulded much of the spectrum of thought.

The Jewish literature of the period came to be dominated by Arabic, which gradually became the spoken and written language of the Jewish masses, as well as the language of study, even in matters pertaining to sacred Jewish tradition. Jewish religious philosophy, which made its appearance in the tenth century, was written mostly in Arabic. Admittedly, however, Arabic never fully displaced Hebrew and Aramaic. Furthermore, the Arabic of the Jewish scholars and merchants came to be written in Hebrew characters and acquired a style and grammar of its own, gradually becoming a Judeo-Arabic dialect. From the eleventh century there is evidence of cultural ties within Jewry extending from Babylonia [Iraq] to Moslem Spain by way of the Mediterranean islands. In addition, there were communications between the geonim and other Jewish scholars, on the one hand, and with the surrounding Moslem and cultures, on the other…

Under the impact of Arab culture and language, contemporary Arabic literary and verse forms were adopted by Jews, together with verse metres and genres. These were widely and successfully used in Hebrew and proved to be fruitful elements in the emergence of new literary styles. (pp. 439-440)