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IHT:

Spain’s National Court agreed Friday to review evidence in a lawsuit filed against four alleged former Nazi concentration camp guards.

A decision by the court to file charges in the case could lead to the four men’s extradition from the United States to face trial over the deaths of Spanish citizens.

The lawsuit — filed on behalf of victims’ relatives by Brussels-based rights group Equipo Nizkor — asks the court to charge the four with genocide and other crimes. It names John (Iwan) Demjanjuk, Anton Tittjung, Josias Kumpf and Johann Leprich as defendants.

Judge Ismael Moreno said Friday that his court would review the evidence in the suit, which claims the suspects served as guards in concentration camps at Flossenberg and Sachsenhausen, in Germany, and Mauthausen, in Nazi-occupied Austria.

The case states that more than 7,000 Spaniards were incarcerated at Mauthausen, and at least 4,300 of them killed, the judge said in a statement. Most Spaniards who ended up in Nazi camps were leftist Republicans who fled to France during the Spanish Civil War and were captured while fighting German troops.

Technorati Tags: Spain, Nazism, Spanish+Civil+War, World+War+II, John+(Iwan)+Demjanjuk, Anton+Tittjung, Josias+Kumpf, Johann+Leprich

The Great Pumkpin:

Seven years ago, the United Nations held a conference on racism in Durban, South Africa to address what some saw as growing trends in hate speech and discrimination. Lofty ideals aside, the conference quickly collapsed into an anti-American, anti-Israeli spectacle. As then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat delivered rants on the conspiratorial and racist goals of Israel, others handed out flyers celebrating Adolf Hitler. Having had enough, the United States rightly walked out in protest.

Today, the United Nations is gearing up for a Durban follow-up set for 2009. Like the first conference, “Durban II” would be funded through the regular U.N. budget, 22 percent of which comes from the American taxpayer. In a symbolic gesture, the United States withheld equivalent funds from the U.N. budget, and voted against its final passage.

Regardless, Durban II will proceed, and the prospects for it taking a 180-degree turn are not good. Like the first Durban conference, some of the worst human-rights violators will serve on Durban II’s panel. Participating members were selected by the gravely disappointing U.N. Commission on Human Rights – the same commission that has passed light condemnations of the regimes in Burma and Sudan. Its passion is democratic Israel, which has been condemned 15 times over the past two years.

Technorati Tags: Durban, UN, United+Nations, Human+Rights, Human+Rights+Abuses, anti-americanism, anti-israeli, anti-semitism, USA

Polish President after rejecting any ratification very harshly because it was “pointless”, has now… ratified it. Looks like there were some problems with “illegal” state aid paid to historic shipyards of Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin. The estimated amount of that state aid is of €2.1 billion, a more than important amount which should be repaid. But it was solved by visiting Sarkozy:

Thus, completely coincidentally, the news later emerged that, while the commission is indeed going to make its ruling today, it has indicated that it will delay execution for three months. By then, a refinancing deal will doubtless have been stitched up, the details of which we will not be allowed to know until the treaty ratification is safely in the bag.

This rather cast Barroso in the role of the “good cop”, having yesterday spent a good deal of time on the phone with prime minister Donald Tusk, stitching up agreeing the details. But there is no such velvet glove treatment for the Irish.

Meanwhile, Czech people are not very keen on the ratification. In fact the majority is opposed to ratification. 43% support the ratification, while a 27% don’t understand the treaty. Me neither.

Yesterday, Irish politician of all signs reacted angrily at Sarkozy who asked for another vote to be held on Ireland about the referendum. It’s important to note that the reaction was the same, whether they were opposed to the Lisbon Treaty or in favour of its ratification.

Technorati Tags: Lisbon+Treaty, Poland, Sarkozy, France, Czech+Republic

Daily Mail:

A five-year-old girl had her passport form rejected when an official said the bare shoulders on her photograph could offend Muslims.

The post office assistant stunned Hannah Edwards’s parents by claiming the skin exposed by her daughter’s halter-neck dress would not be accepted by the Passport Office as it might prove unacceptable in a Muslim country.

The incident happened when Jane and Martin Edwards took the picture (above), which was taken in a photo-booth, to a post office in the Sheffield area along with the completed form for checking ahead of a family holiday in the South of France.

The counter clerk told them she was aware of at least two other cases where applications had been rejected because a person’s shoulders were not covered in their photo.

Mrs Edwards, a GP in Sheffield, had to rush around for two hours getting new pictures taken and countersigned.

Technorati Tags: UK, Great+Britain, multiculturalism, Islamism

The Land of the Free.net:

On Sunday, July 13, in Jonesboro, Georgia, an immigrant Muslim father strangled his daughter to death in a so-called “honor killing” because she protested being forced by her family to marry a man she did not know. No feminist uttered a word about the murder of twenty-five-year-old Sandeela Kanwal. On the following Wednesday officials in the city government of Atlanta, Georgia bowed to the pressure from one feminist nut to stop posting “men at work” signs in the city because they are “sexist.”

The contrast is stark as well as revealing, if not entirely disgusting. It reveals an American feminism that is a hypocritical, unserious, sham that deserves nothing but derision. A movement that indulges in oblivious, frivolity while real pain surrounds them.

(…) This is the result of liberal moral equivalence. The western liberal’s self-destructive insistence that each culture is just as good as the next, yet at the same time the assumption that our own is somehow worse for its “oppression” and “discrimination,” courses throughout the veins of pernicious feminism. The delusional insistence that we, the west, are the bane of civilization as poor young girls like Sandeela Kanwal lead pitiful existences often meeting a violent end right under the noses of these same “feminists” who claim moral superiority is an outrage. The belief that a paper sign alerting passersby that people are working in the area is worse than the murder of Sandeela Kanwal and others like her is a travesty.

via USA Partisan.

I don’t think that only feminists are not really considering honor killings. The whole of Western societies do not consider them… at all. People do not see the real suffering in closed communities, where it’s very difficult to get out and where anything extraordinary (that is, not-inside-the-range-of-normal-behaviour) is considered as dishonorable. They consider that those things do not happen here as often as to be worried about.

Are feminists responsible for this? They are responsible for not alerting about the ideas that make a society to admit and even to defend such behaviour. But where are the rest of the people? MSM hide the expression “honor killing”, Governments censor gender/sex violence but are not interested in publishing statistics showing special characteristics of the agressor (religion, ideology, if he is or not an immigrant…)… And this is something people do not speak about: they don’t expect it to happen to them, so what is the use of worrying?

Also read: The deadly cost of honor killings:

When primitive patriarchal dominance subjects intelligent, educated, and reasonable women to the whims of sometimes-uneducated, -unreasonable and -fanatical males, the consequences can be criminal. The women, at their peril, will rebel, and the men will react in the extreme.

Ironically, in fanatic Islamic circles, the murdered victim is disgraced as the one who brought shame to the family, while the male murderer is defended as the injured party.

A history of physical and/or sexual abuse in such cases is not uncommon.

Technorati Tags: honor+killings, women’s+rights, Islamism, Human+Rights, gender+violence, sex+violence

WSJ:

That’s more than can be said for the U.N., which initially sought to suppress its own candid report on the crisis for fear of offending Mr. Bashir and his Khartoum thugs. The U.N. later distinguished itself with a 2005 legal judgment that claimed that, despite mass murder, pillage and rape, Darfur could not be called a genocide because “genocidal intent appears to be missing.”

This U.N. absolution was particularly significant because it might have obliged the world body to intervene under the terms of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The Security Council has since done little more than sanction a handful of individuals and authorize a weak peacekeeping force that can barely protect itself, let alone innocent Darfuris. President Bush also proposed a no-fly zone, only to be talked out of it by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Meanwhile, China has voiced concern and misgivings at the indictment. Must be they think they could be indicted too and that they could lose a few benefits in the country:

“China expresses grave concern and misgivings about the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s indictment of the Sudanese leader,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a regularly scheduled news conference in Beijing, according to the Reuters news service. Liu said that the court’s actions should promote stability and an adequate settlement in Darfur, not the contrary.

A Chinese Africa expert, however, was quoted as saying he did not expect China to move on its own to hold off the ICC, with the Beijing government anxious to make the best possible impression as Olympic host. He Wenping, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the court’s ruling would “have many consequences that China won’t like” and would impede its ability to mediate over Darfur, where an estimated 450,000 civilians have died and 2.5 million have been displaced since 2003.

China, which has a vast stake in Sudanese oil, is also Sudan’s main arms supplier and has faced criticism from the West over its links to Khartoum. The BBC’s “Panorama” program said it had evidence that China’s export of 212 army trucks to Sudan was in violation of a 2005 arms embargo.

Technorati Tags: China, Sudan, Al-Bashir, ICC, International+Criminal+Court, UN, Khartoum, war+crimes, genocide, genocide+in+Darfur

The Economist blog Certain ideas of Europe has a post about the problems of Belgian state nowadays and defends the division between French and Dutch speaking communities:

Prime Minister Yves Leterme, who only took office in March, submitted his resignation after failing to push through measures to devolve more power to the regions. His offer must be accepted by King Albert before it takes effect.

If Mr Leterme sounds impatient, consider this: he accepted the top job only after nine months of political deadlock between French- and Dutch-speaking parties, and had set a July 15th deadline for them to agree on changes in their power-sharing arrangements.

Many Belgians have told pollsters they expect their country will break up, and The Economist has supported this line. As the paper argued last fall:

Rancour is ever-present and the country has become a freak of nature, a state in which power is so devolved that government is an abhorrent vacuum. In short, Belgium has served its purpose. A praline divorce is in order.

According to EU Referendum, the reason for this Government’s existence was only one: the Lisbon Treaty. Now that it has ratified it, it’s no longer needed.

Technorati Tags: Belgium, Leterme, King+Albert, Lisbon+Treaty

WMD:

A San Francisco city and county board resolution that officially labeled the Catholic church’s moral teachings on homosexuality as “insulting to all San Franciscans,” “hateful,” “defamatory,” “insensitive” and “ignorant” will be challenged tomorrow in court for violating the Constitution’s prohibition of government hostility toward religion.

Resolution 168-08, passed unanimously by the City and County of San Francisco Board of Supervisors two years ago, also accused the Vatican of being a “foreign country” meddling with and attempting to “negatively influence (San Francisco’s) existing and established customs.”

It said of the church’s teaching on homosexuality, “Such hateful and discriminatory rhetoric is both insulting and callous, and shows a level of insensitivity and ignorance which has seldom been encountered by this Board of Supervisors.”

As WND reported earlier, Resolution 168-08 was an official response to the Catholic Church’s ban on adoption placements into homosexual couple households, issued by Cardinal William Levada of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican.

The board’s resolution urged the city’s local archbishop and the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of San Francisco to defy the Vatican’s instructions, concluding with a spiteful reminder that the church authority that issued the ban was known 100 years ago as “The Holy Office of the Inquisition.”

When this soooo brave people would say this same thing to Islamist doctrines?

Technorati Tags: Homosexuality, San+Francisco, Catholic+Church, Cardinal+William+Levada, Congregation+for+the+Doctrine+of+the+Faith, Vatican