Politics

Moscow News

A group of top Muslim clerics have demanded that Orthodox Christian symbols be removed from the Russian coat of arms and have complained about the Russian authorities and power-wielding structures allegedly refusing to abide by the principle of secularity, the Interfax news agency reported.

“This is not only a question of the Russian coat of arms. We can say that icons are all but put up on the walls of state offices,” Nafigulla Ashirov, chairman of the Spiritual Board of Muslims of Asian Russia, told journalists.
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NYT/International Herald Tribune GRAHAM BOWLEY December 7, 2005

By GRAHAM BOWLEY

BRUSSELS – When Polish members of the European Parliament placed an anti-abortion display in a parliamentary corridor in Strasbourg, France, recently, Ana Gomes, a Socialist legislator from Portugal, felt compelled to act, she said.

The display showed children in a concentration camp, linking abortion and Nazi crimes. “We found this deeply offensive,” Ms. Gomes said. “We tried to remove it.” A loud scuffle ensued as she and the Poles traded insults before the display was bundled away by Parliament guards.
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Christian Science Monitor Patrick Chisholm December 1, 2005

Big-government solutions pull poor people in, and push employers out.

A hurricane exposes the poverty of America’s inner cities, and the champions of big government make political hay out of it. Riots lay bare the underclass in Paris’s suburbs, and the French are astounded that such a thing could exist in their country.

In fact, Democrats have long controlled almost all of America’s inner cities. The Brookings Institution recently ranked the 50 largest cities in the United States according to their concentrations of poverty. A quick check reveals that the 10 cities with the highest concentrations of poverty have Democratic mayors, with the exception of New York City (whose Republican mayor is something of an anomaly in a Democratic-dominated city). By contrast, the few Republican big-city mayors hail mainly from cities with the least concentration of poverty.

This tells us that there is something terribly wrong with the statist policies that Democrats, and to an increasing extent Republicans, favor. The tragedy of the riots in France, where similar policies prevail, illustrates the same point.

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Dhimmi Watch

From MEMRI:

On October 20, 2005, the Lebanese press reported that a delegation from the Presbyterian Church USA, headed by Father Nihad Tu’meh and with Robert Worley as its spokesman, visited southern Lebanon at the invitation of Hizbullah, and met there with the terrorist organization’s commander in southern Lebanon Nabil Qawuq…

A year previously, on October 17, 2004, a Presbyterian Church USA delegation visiting Lebanon also met with Qawuq. MEMRI TV translated excerpts from a report on the meeting that was aired by Hizbullah’s Al-Manar TV. During the meeting, church elder Ronald Stone said, “We treasure the precious words of Hizbullah and your expression of goodwill towards the American people. Also, we praise your initiative for dialogue and mutual understanding. We cherish these statements that bring us closer to you. As an elder of our church, I’d like to say that according to my recent experience, relations and conversations with Islamic leaders are a lot easier than dealings and dialogue with Jewish leaders.”…
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2005.11.15 Interfax:

Moscow, November 15, Interfax – The Russian Orthodox Church wants Vladimir Lenin’s remains buried.

“Lenin should be buried, because the idea of mummification is beyond the realm of Russian cultural and religious traditions,” Metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad Kirill, head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s foreign relations department, said at a press conference at Interfax on Tuesday in Moscow.

“This is an artificial phenomenon with a strange mysticism,” he said.

“Lenin’s burial need not set society ablaze, bring protesters out into the streets, create tensions between a part of population and the authorities or hamper the process of society consolidation, which – disregarding the radicals’ position – is underway with God’s help,” the metropolitan said.

Townhall.com Charles Colson

Commentators have been busily trying to explain the weeks of violence that have turned French cities into war zones. Some say it’s a result of high rates of unemployment among youth. Others suggested it is France’s fault for failing to assimilate the children of its mostly Islamic immigrants. Now, while true in part, these are only symptoms of a much deeper problem: France’s loss of moral and cultural vitality.

The unemployment rate among young immigrant men is 40 percent, as nearly every report notes. But no one asks why there is such joblessness. The answer is the economic system that, as writer Elizabeth Eaves puts it, “is eating [France’s] young.”
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Ed. The “Borking” of Judge Alito takes shape.

New York Times DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 – A coalition of liberal groups is preparing a national television advertising campaign against the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. that seeks to move the debate over his selection beyond abortion rights and focus instead on subjects like police searches and employment discrimination, several leaders of the coalition said.

The possibility that Judge Alito could vote to narrow abortion rights has dominated discussion among both supporters and opponents of his nomination. But Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice and one of the leaders of the coalition, said a poll commissioned by her organization showed the potential to attack Judge Alito on aspects of his record that had received less attention.
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