Mariupol warns Russia is preparing to shut down city to 'filter' all men for forced service, labor - Caitlin McFall

 

​ by Caitlin McFall

Russia has focused all available armed forces into the Donbas region of Ukraine

 

Advisor to the Mariupol city mayor warned Saturday that Russian troops are preparing to shut down the city by April 18 and will "filter" all men for forced service, labor or "isolation."

"Occupiers report that on Monday they will not only finally close all entries and exits to the city for everyone, but will institute a ban on movement across all neighborhoods for a week. During this time, 100% of the city’s remaining male population will be "filtered’," Petro Andriushchenko said in a Telegram post translated by Ukrainian news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda.

RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE: LIVE UPDATES

"Some people will be mobilized to the Russian occupation corps, some will be forcibly deployed to clear the rubble, and those classified as unreliable will be isolated," he added, noting that those who are deported will be taken to a camp in Novoazovsk.

A view of the Mariupol theater damaged during fighting in Mariupol, in territory under the government of the Donetsk People's Republic, eastern Ukraine, Monday, April 4, 2022.  (AP Photo/Alexei Alexandrov)

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said last week that roughly 31,000 residents have been forcibly deported and sent to Russian "filtration camps" in Novoazovsk – a Ukrainian border town 35 miles from Mariupol and just 9 miles from the Russian border. 

Novoazovsk is located in the Donetsk People’s Republic – a breakaway region in Ukraine’s most eastern front that has been backed by Russian forces and engaged in armed conflict with the Ukrainian army since 2014.

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Defense officials have warned that Russia is planning to use all its available force in the eastern Ukraine Donbas region after it failed to take the capital city of Kyiv after over a months-worth of fighting. 

All Russian ground forces are believed to be in eastern Ukraine and Andriushchenko said Russian troops have already launched the "filtration process" in the region. 

The Mariupol advisor said that men are being taken to filtration camps, where they are interrogated and given a body exam. Their devices are also searched. 

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Andriushchenko reportedly claimed that five to 10 percent of the men do not "pass" the filtration process and are then sent to other areas in the Donetsk region, but it is unknown what then happens to these individuals.

Ukrainian officials have been sounding the alarm that residents from eastern Ukraine have also been forcibly deported into Russia.

Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova – who is investigating allegations of human rights abuses – said she has received reports from concerned Russians that some 400 Ukrainians are being held in a fenced camp near the city of Penza, reported U.K. based news outlet i News.

The camp, which is believed to be housing more than 145 children, is a former Russian military base 600 miles from the Ukrainian border and was reportedly used as a munitions dump for Soviet chemical bombs after World War II.

 

Caitlin McFall

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/world/mariupol-russia-forced-service-labor

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Tackling the Iranian Regime's Nuclear Threat - Majid Rafizadeh

 

​ by Majid Rafizadeh

If we closely examine the Iranian regime's nuclear file, it reveals that no deal will stop the ruling mullahs of Iran from pursuing their nuclear ambitions.

• [N]o deal will stop the ruling mullahs of Iran from pursuing their nuclear ambitions.

• The only way to deter or stop Iran is to impose drastic economic sanctions on the regime again, thereby cutting the flow of funding to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and -- one hopes for the sake of the repressed Iranian people as well as any stability in the region -- bringing the regime financially to its knees.

No deal will stop the ruling mullahs of Iran from pursuing their nuclear ambitions. The only way to deter or stop Iran is to impose drastic economic sanctions on the regime again. (Image source: iStock)

If we closely examine the Iranian regime's nuclear file, it reveals that no deal will stop the ruling mullahs of Iran from pursuing their nuclear ambitions.

A few years after the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic appeared to make the advancement of a nuclear program a top item on its agenda after consolidating power in 1984. In the decade after, the Islamic Republic began its nuclear program with the help of some intermediaries such as Russia, China and Pakistan.

At the time, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, acknowledged that Pakistan assisted Tehran. He pointed out "I do have information that some years ago, through intermediaries, we received pieces for centrifuges". According to the United States intelligence, A.Q. Khan, who was known as "the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb", sold expertise and equipment to North Korea, Libya and Iran, and made more than $50 million.

Since then, the Iranian regime has been progressing steadily and investing in its nuclear program for more than three decades. Currently, it has reached a point near the "nuclear threshold." The regime is perhaps weeks away from obtaining the weapons-grade materials necessary for a nuclear weapon. According to a report in the New York Times:

"Iran has come within roughly a month of having enough material to fuel a single nuclear weapon, crossing a threshold that may raise pressure on the United States and its allies to improve the terms of a potential deal to restore the 2015 nuclear agreement."

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, during a briefing at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, told ambassadors from countries on the United Nations Security Council that Iran "is only around 10 weeks away from acquiring weapons-grade materials necessary for a nuclear weapon".

The only times the Iranian regime has supposedly scaled back its nuclear program was due to two critical reasons. The first was linked to the drastic economic sanctions which threatened the ruling clerics' hold on power, forcing the leadership to recalculate its priorities. The sanctions prior to the 2015 nuclear deal, for example, were significant, as they endangered the power of the ruling clergy and ultimately brought Iranian leaders to the negotiating table between 2013 and 2015.

There were four rounds of sanctions. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council unanimously called on all countries to freeze the financial assets of Iranian entities linked to the nuclear program, to ban Iran's import and export of "sensitive nuclear material and equipment," and to sanction the supply or sale of nuclear-related equipment and technology. They also imposed restrictions on Iranian bank transactions and called on countries to inspect Iranian ships and cargo planes where there were reasonable grounds to believe that the regime was smuggling prohibited products.

After the Iranian regime was able to make the world powers lift the major economic sanctions, however, Iran began clandestinely pursuing its nuclear ambitions even during the term of the nuclear deal. For instance, the detection of radioactive particles in Turquz Abad, Iran's reluctance to answer simple questions about the secret facility, and non-partisan evidence about Iran's nuclear activities at the location, all point to the fact that Tehran was most likely violating the 2015 nuclear deal since it was reached.

The second reason the Iranian regime may have scaled back on achieving its nuclear ambitions was linked to the fear of military operations against Tehran. After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Iranian leaders rushed to offer the Bush administration a deal that would reportedly have curtailed their nuclear program. That was probably because the Islamic Republic was concerned that the Bush administration might next attack Iran or its nuclear facilities. then US President George W. Bush did in fact debate bombing Iran, as he pointed out in his memoir, Decision Points, "I directed the Pentagon to study what would be necessary for a strike." He added, "This would be to stop the bomb clock, at least temporarily."

The only way to deter or stop Iran is to impose drastic economic sanctions on the regime again, thereby cutting the flow of funding to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and -- one hopes for the sake of the repressed Iranian people as well as any stability in the region -- bringing the regime financially to its knees.

• Follow Majid Rafizadeh on Twitter

 

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US foreign policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18418/iran-nuclear-threat

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A Shooter Puts Critical Race Theory into Practice - Daniel Greenfield

 

​ by Daniel Greenfield

NYC Dems were too busy fighting white supremacy to stop a black supremacist terrorist.

 

Mayor Eric Adams, who had called white people “crackers”, claimed that he needed his brother to head his security because of an "increase in white supremacy" in New York City.

The New York City Board of Health falsely claimed that racism was a "public health crisis" and a public school told parents to abolish their “whiteness”.

After all that time battling white supremacy, which is as easy to find in the city as good manners and parking spaces, the black supremacist subway terror attack came out of the blue.

29 people were wounded, including a pregnant woman and a 12-year-old, when Frank James, a racist gunman, opened fire on a Brooklyn subway train. James was a racial supremacist, but not the one that New York City’s political establishment had spent so much time searching for.

James was just “abolishing whiteness” by putting critical race theory into practice.

The black supremacist mass shooter has been charged with terrorism for a carefully planned terror attack, that included dressing up as a construction worker, deploying a smoke bomb and then opening fire. The racist terrorist’s victims included a pregnant woman, and a number of children and teenagers, some of whom were shot several times by the black supremacist.

Like the black supremacist Jersey City terrorists, James used a U-Haul as a base and was convinced that black people were being victimized.

“These white motherf—--s, this is what they do,” James had ranted in his YouTube videos while claiming that white people were plotting to kill all black people. “It’s just a matter of time before these white motherf—--s decide, ‘Hey listen. Enough is enough. These n—ers got to go.'”

“And so the message to me is: I should have gotten a gun, and just started shooting motherf—--s.”

And indeed that is allegedly what James did.

An initial survey of photos from the scene appear to show wounded white, Latino, and Asian victims, but no black people, suggesting that the terrorist may have targeted people by race.

Where could James have gotten his racist ideas from? While notions such as white replacement by minorities are denounced as dangerous racist conspiracy theories, the inverse, conspiracy theories that claim white people are going to launch a black genocide are mainstream.

The Black Lives Matter protests were accompanied by false claims that police shootings of black men represent genocide. Every policy, from locking up violent criminals to merit-based college admissions, is not just denounced as racist, but as the new slavery and genocide.

A Democrat political candidate even claimed that, “The Banning of Critical Race Theory is an Act of Genocide.”

When everything you don’t like is genocide, it becomes a lot easier to kill. In the mind of the subway terrorist, he may well have been acting in self-defense against a vast conspiracy of whiteness which, any day now, was just going to kill black people like, in his own words, “cattle waiting to be taken to the slaughter." Instead the people on the subway became his cattle.

When even Pizza Hut distributes flyers to teachers encouraging them to indoctrinate their students to believe that "America is a country built on a foundation of slavery, genocide, and white supremacy”, what exactly do you expect from your friendly local racist gunman?

"America is going to come to an end," James insisted in one of his videos, arguing that the country represented the vision of "a handful of Europeans" and that black and white people were as incompatible as different families of monkeys and whales, and could not co-exist.

Or as National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, the 9/11 firefighters and police officers “were not human to me” indicating there’s a thin line between literary awards and shooting people on the N train. Crossing the thin line involves taking their rhetoric seriously.

The incompatibility of black and white people, an idea once reserved for the margins where black and white supremacists resided, has been aggressively mainstreamed with racially segregated campus events and employee groups in corporate offices. HR and DEI offices recirculate claims that every form of professional office behavior is evil racist whiteness.

Beliefs that were marginal a generation ago are now being taught in colleges and schools.

James just put them into action. Critical race theory insists that white people are innately evil oppressors. If its proponents really believe that, why aren’t they shooting white people too?

Or, as Nikole Hannah-Jones, the originator of the racial revisionist 1619 Project hoax raved, “the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world" who continues to "pump drugs and guns into the Balck (sic) community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos and continue to be bloodsuckers in our communities."

If you believe that sort of thing is true, why not act on it?

The language of civil rights has long since been eclipsed by the hysterical language of racism and the institutions, public and private, pushing racism and racial supremacism also deny that mainstreaming racism could possibly have any negative consequences. Instead Senator Cory Booker and Kamala Harris actually worked to dismantle FBI monitoring of black supremacists.

The rising wave of racist attacks in New York City, primarily against Asians and Jews, was met with failed efforts to blame President Trump even though the perpetrators were mostly black.

Instead of reckoning with the reality and the consequences of racist propaganda, New York City, like other woke cities, remained obsessed with white supremacy. While serious white supremacist attacks have happened elsewhere in the country, the Big Apple is not a likely venue for any such attacks. City and state officials who spent all their time warning about white supremacy were disregarding the more likely sources of violence like that of Frank James.

Almost 30 years ago, Colin Ferguson had opened fire on a Long Island Railroad train. In his notebook were a series of racist rants about white people and Asians. His lawyers famously blamed "black rage" claiming that the experience of racism made the killer lose control.

Ferguson and James are familiar characters in the crazed pantheon of urban life. Every New Yorker passes by them on the daily commute, looking away from the mumbling men obsessed with a world only they can see, orbiting their victimhood, until they finally fall and lash out with a knife or a gun. And people bleed in subways and on sidewalks while the news cameras roll.

Maybe both black supremacist monsters would have pulled the trigger even if there weren’t an entire industry making millions by propping up their racist fantasies.

Or maybe not.

There's been a long list of black supremacist killers in the BLM era from Micah X. Johnson, who killed 5 Dallas cops, Kori Ali Muhammad's murder of 4 people in Fresno, and Darrell Edward Brooks Jr. who ran over women and children at the Waukesha Christmas parade. It would be absurd to pretend that the mainstreaming of black supremacism did not play a role in that.

New York City’s leaders needed to spend less time babbling about white supremacy and more time reckoning with the racist black supremacist terrorists who are walking among them.

Before the next black supremacist terrorist attack takes place.

 

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/nyc-dems-were-too-busy-fighting-white-supremacy-daniel-greenfield/

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Apocalypse is in the Air - Bruce Thornton

 

​ by Bruce Thornton

Is it too late to restore our civilizational nerve and morale?

 

 

Ukraine’s scenes of urban rubble, streams of refugees, and piles of slaughtered civilians redolent of World War II. Continuing masks and lethal lockdown protocols of the Covid plague. Record levels of  inflation and gasoline nearly $6 a gallon.  Unchecked hordes of illegal immigrants and criminals penetrating our southern border. Mayhem, murder, and brazen theft stalking and defacing our cities.

Amidst these portents of apocalypse, it’s instructive to think of W.B. Yeats’ prescient poem “The Second Coming,” and its lines “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” and to wonder with the poet, “What rough beast, its time come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Such intimations of doom, of course, have been regular episodes in the last hundred years, the “rough beasts” ending up as pretenders. But we can’t rely on the cycles of history to prevent devastating changes in our way of life that will make the previous decades seem like the golden age.

Yeats published his poem in November 1920, when the flawed Versailles settlement of the Great War made optimism for the future difficult. Some knew, moreover, that none of the dysfunctions that had led to war had been corrected. Supreme Allied Commander Marshall Foch prophesized about the Versailles Treaty, “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” Communism, Nazism, and Fascism arose, and the Great Depression was the crisis these three vicious political religions did not let go to waste.

Throughout the interwar period, the portents of doom appeared in popular novels and “next war” theorists.  “Trench reminiscences” proliferated, keeping alive the novel horrors of the war like poison gas, machine-guns, and artillery lobbing monstrous shells as heavy as a ton. The aerial bombing of the war’s last years inspired numerous warnings about the even more devastating possibilities of destruction from the air in the next war. Theorists wrote of a “knockout blow” on a nation’s capital that would decapitate the government and turn the streets into “one vast raving bedlam,” as historian J.F.C. Fuller put it.

This obsession with the “next war” created a “never again” mentality that contributed to the anxiety and low morale of the period, stoked by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin who famously said, “The bomber will always get through.” Years later Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would write, “We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare” during the Cold War. All this fear contributed to the mentality of appeasement manifested in Munich.

But the end of times didn’t come. The war that followed was won because the steadfast opponent of appeasement Winston Churchill managed the war, and with his rousing patriotic rhetoric restored confidence and morale by rejecting what he called the “unwarrantable self-abasement” that defined the Thirties.

Another apocalyptic moment occurred in the Seventies. The squandering of the lives of nearly 60,000 American soldiers that followed Congress’s denial of aid to South Vietnam, and the cruel abandonment of our Vietnamese allies, damaged American prestige abroad and emboldened its nuclear rivals like the U.S.S.R. The ginned-up Watergate affair led to Richard Nixon’s resignation, and in a few years the election of Jimmy Carter. Carter’s sermons about America’s “recent mistakes,” his counsel that Americans should not “dwell on remembered glory” but should “recognize its limits,” and his confession that the nation should “simply do its best” and get over its “inordinate fear of communism” all eroded moral and patriotic confidence. Foreign policy now focused on human rights and disarmament, rather than maintaining the country’s deterrent power and military superiority.

Starting in the Fifties, there appeared apocalyptic books and movies, from Jonathon Schell’s The Fate of the Earth and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, to Dr. Strangelove and the televised The Day After Tomorrow. Dystopian post-apocalyptic novels and films proliferated and still permeate movies and science fiction writing. Popular culture fed the anti-nuclear weapons movement, which was also abetted by financial support from the Soviet Union, in an attempt to weaken our military in its containment of a nuclear-armed power.

As the Soviet Union and its proxies boldly rampaged in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, in 1979 Carter was helpless in the face of Khomeini’s Islamic Iranian Revolution. Fifty-one American diplomatic personnel were kidnapped and held hostage for 444 days, just the beginning of Iran’s subsequent 43 years of jihadist assaults and murders of Americans. Stagflation––high inflation and sluggish economic growth–– along with expensive and rationed gasoline created apocalyptic scenes of long lines and fistfights at gas stations.

Once more, a change of leadership cleared away the smog of apocalypse. Ronald Reagan’s campaign theme was “Morning in America,” and he restored the country’s military and deterrent power, along with economic health. This recovery of nerve, epitomized in Reagan’s laconic, “We win, they lose,” culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Today, a weak and feckless President and his administration have brought on another failure of nerve. A disastrous retreat from Afghanistan damaged our prestige aboard, and surrendered that country and billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to the enemy that had helped execute the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In the current conflict, clumsy and confused diplomacy has combined braggadocios threats with less than adequate military support for Ukraine. And an insane policy of banishing cheap, abundant fossil fuels from our energy resources has made much of Europe a hostage to Russian oil products, making them financers of Putin’s savage war.

So the war grinds on, and the spectacle of brutal carnage dominates our media. No one can say how or when it will end, and what will be the long-term fallout. But one thing is obvious: Putin’s threat to use tactical nuclear weapons has contributed to the West’s reticence to provide air power, anti-missile batteries, or heavy artillery to the Ukrainians, ensuring that the war will remain a meat-grinder for months to come.

This state of affairs raises some questions: Can or will there arise a leader like Churchill and Reagan to restore our civilizational nerve and morale? Or, as the presidency of Donald Trump showed, will rabid partisanship, deep-state corruption, and the cognitive elite’s irrational class resentment undermine an effective president who could turn things around? Has our culture deteriorated so deep into boutique fads like transgenderism, “systemic racism,” Critical Race Theory, pronoun etiquette, and apocalyptic “climate change,” and have we the people become so addicted to handouts from the Leviathan Fed, that even a Churchill or a Reagan could not rouse us from our Twitter, Netflix, and Facebook torpor?

Worse yet, the task of recovery from the current crisis is much harder given Putin’s reckless threat to use nuclear weapons. Putin’s signs of mental deterioration and paranoia, and his isolation make such threats more plausible. And neglect of our military budget and nuclear weapon research and development have given Putin an edge. No wonder there’s an air of apocalypse coming from this war.

We may be too far gone, and the cycle back to sanity may never come. Iran and China, emboldened by our timidity in helping Ukraine, will likely indulge in their own aggression, confronting the West with the same dilemma. Yeats’ poem teaches us why: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

 

Bruce Thorntonis a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 

Source:  https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/apocalypse-air-bruce-thornton/

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Bidenflation Bears Down on Americans - Joseph Klein

 

​ by Joseph Klein

The president shirks responsibility for an economic crisis of his own making.

 

The news on the Bidenflation front continues to worsen. Not surprisingly, President Biden and his senior administration officials are in full spin mode.

On April 12^th, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 8.5% annually between March 2021 and March 2022 – the steepest increase since December 1981.

The index for all items less food and energy - what is known as the core index – rose a hefty 6.5 percent during this same period, the largest 12-month change since the period ending August 1982. The shelter index alone rose 5.0 percent over the last 12 months, which the BLS said was the largest 12-month increase since May 1991.

We only had to wait twenty-four hours for the other inflation shoe to fall. On April 13^th, the BLS announced that the Producer Price Index (PPI), the measure of prices paid by wholesalers, rose a whopping 11.2% from March 2021 to March 2022. This was the biggest PPI increase on record.

These enormous price increases are further eroding any advances in real wages since President Biden took office. Workers are behind the eight ball thanks to President Biden’s reckless spending and energy policies. Adjusting for inflation, average real pay was down in March. The 5.6 nominal increase in hourly wages, as calculated without taking account of the increase in the cost of living, means little to workers trying to make ends meet.

During a speech that President Biden delivered in Iowa on April 12th, the president boasted “We’re back.”

Yes, we are back – back to the disastrous hyperinflation days of the Jimmy Carter presidency.

President Biden continued to blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for the inflation surge, particularly for the dramatic rise in prices for food and gas.

“Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has driven up gas prices and food prices all over the world,” Biden said.

Let’s start with food prices. For the twelve-month period ending in March 2022, the CPI increase for food overall rose 8.8 percent. During the same period, the food at home price index rose 10 percent. But the increases in both these price indexes were rising well before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

For example, from February to March 2022 the food at home index rose 1.5 percent. The price index for food at home from January 2022 to February 2022 rose 1.4 percent. This means that the total price increase for food at home for the two months of February and March 2022 combined, which were the months most impacted by Putin’s invasion to date, was slightly less than thirty percent of the twelve-month increase between March 2021 and March 2022.

In short, the responsibility for the food inflation over the last year following President Biden’s signing of the Democrats’ partisan $1.9 trillion so-called “COVID relief” legislation lies mostly with President Biden himself and his spendthrift Democrat congressional colleagues.

Turning to the rise in retail gasoline prices, President Biden told his Iowa audience that “Seventy percent of the increase in prices in March came from Putin’s price hike in gasoline.”

Gasoline prices did rise dramatically this past February and March – 6.6 percent and 18.1 percent, respectively. But the president seems to think Americans will forget that the prices they were paying for gas at the pump were rising steeply months before Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The American people are not that gullible.

By midway through 2021 – months before Putin had gathered 150,000 troops on the Ukrainian border – Americans were already paying on average 32 percent more for gasoline to fill their tanks than they had just six months earlier before President Biden took office. By the end of 2021 - nearly two months before Putin’s invasion -  Americans were paying on average 45 percent more for a gallon of gas than they had been paying at the start of 2021.

President Biden’s war on fossil fuels was largely responsible for those pre-Ukraine invasion gasoline price spikes. Biden set his anti-fossil fuel agenda in motion right away by cancelling the cross-border permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline on his first day in office. The Biden administration froze leases for drilling on federal lands and waters, imposed numerous regulatory roadblocks that impeded more drilling and production, and discouraged financial institutions from investing capital in the fossil fuel industry.

The inevitable result of all these actions, taken in the name of the radical Green New Deal, was the end of the Trump era’s U.S. energy independence and an insufficient domestic energy supply to meet demand. The surge in gasoline prices followed like night follows day.

Out of sheer desperation, President Biden has authorized the release of many millions of gallons of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve. He has gone begging to OPEC nations to increase their oil production with no success to speak of.

President Biden has also taken a step that will add smog to the atmosphere this summer. Biden announced during his Iowa speech that his “Environmental Protection Agency is planning to issue an emergency waiver to allow E15 gasoline that uses more ethanol from homegrown crops to be sold across the United States this summer in order to increase fuel supply.”

E15 gasoline is gasoline that uses a 15 percent ethanol blend.

The Biden administration is projecting that the E15 gasoline waiver will result in a 10 cent reduction in the price of a gallon of gas at the pump. But there is less here than meets the eye.

Aside from the fact that only a few thousand pumps today dispense E15 gasoline, vehicles will typically go 4% to 5%  fewer miles per gallon on E15 gasoline than on 100% gasoline. Vehicles using E15 gasoline will also be able to travel fewer miles per gallon than the more standard E10 blend (ten percent ethanol and ninety percent gasoline). Thus, whatever money consumers may save at the pump in purchasing E15 gasoline for their vehicles, they will have to refill their tanks at the pump more often.

The most disturbing consequence of President Biden's politically expedient decision to waive the ban on E15 gasoline sales this summer is that Americans will be breathing dirtier air. The reason for the Environmental Protection Agency’s ban on summer sales of E15 gasoline in the first place was the concern that emissions produced from higher ethanol content would form ozone in reaction to summer sunlight, thus adding more smog in the atmosphere.

President Biden’s Iowa speech skipped over the core price index, which strips out food and energy prices from its calculation. Even Biden would have a tough time blaming the 6.5 annual increase in the core price index on Putin. If the president or his senior administration officials try to do so, they will have to explain why core prices in the United States have risen more sharply than elsewhere in the world such as Europe.

The annual core inflation rate in the Euro Area increased 3% in March of 2022 – less than half of the annual increase in the United States. Europeans are hurting to be sure, but not as much as the American people are hurting on President Biden’s watch.

President Biden’s dismal performance on the economy is taking its toll on him politically. His overall approval rating has slipped further to 38 percent, according to CNBC’s All-America Survey. Biden’s approval rating on the economy dropped to a dismal 35 percent. The cost of living is the top priority issue for 48 percent of those surveyed.

Clearly, the American people are not buying President Biden’s lame excuses for the consequences of his own disastrous economic policies.

 

Joseph Klein

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/bidenflation-bears-down-americans-joseph-klein/

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Will J6 Be Remembered More Like the Boston Massacre? - J. B. Shurk

 

​ by J. B. Shurk

I don't think Washington, D.C.'s J6 propaganda will succeed.

 

I get so ticked off whenever our contemptible congresscritters or their praetorian propagandists in the press call J6 an "insurrection."  Did the world really witness a bunch of rowdy Americans try to overthrow the U.S. government on January 6, 2021?  Would some of the country's strongest defenders of the right to bear arms really show up for battle bearing none?  Did anybody in that crowd — many of whom were retirees welcomed into the Capitol Building by Capitol Police — actually believe that an "insurrection" was taking place?  The answer to all three questions is a demonstrable, "No!"  But to a federal government addicted to lying about absolutely anything, the "violent attack" on the Capitol was every bit as bad as 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Civil War.  I don't know what's worse — that our government engages in such blatant propaganda against its citizens or that it can no longer be shamed into retracting its propaganda once its lies get called out.  

Words matter.  They set verbal place markers for the important events through our history, and I do not like this new linguistic gauntlet being cavalierly thrown down by our government.  If an unarmed group of patriotic tourists waving American flags constitutes an "insurrection," then nearly any kind of rollicking assembly of citizen protesters can be deemed an "insurrection."  If free speech, public assembly, and petitioning government authorities for the redress of grievances become "treasonous" whenever those same authorities feel disrespected or threatened, then most all political speech and passionate assembly (directed against the government) become acts of "rebellion."  And if anything can be so easily deemed "rebellion," then the federal government burns all the middle ground between peaceful resistance and forceful revolution.  By treating it as an "act of war," what should have been rebuked no more severely than would have any other political rally morphing into something between the equivalent of a college naked-mile-run and an illicit riot, the U.S. government pushes citizens' backs up against the wall.  People will think twice before they protest the federal government, but because protest is now synonymous with "insurrection," once people commit to the former, they will be prepared for the latter, too.  I'd say that's a pretty dangerous place marker for our country going forward.

Among the many moral failings in recent years that should have brought great shame upon federal authorities (e.g., the FBI participating in a fake Russia "collusion" hoax to frame President Trump as a Russian spy, the Intelligence Community covering up Biden family corruption by labeling it "Russian disinformation," or federal health agencies coercing Americans into taking experimental mRNA "vaccines" against their will), the government's iron-fisted response to J6 political protesters takes the cake.  Mercy, forgiveness, common sense, and any hope for national reconciliation have been thrown out the window so that the sociopaths running the federal bureaucracy can hunt President Trump and persecute his supporters.  

Four people died on January 6 at the Capitol, and all were Trump supporters.  A Capitol police officer gunned down Ashli Babbitt in cold blood moments after she was seen trying to de-escalate the pandemonium inside the Capitol.  Rosanne Boyland was beaten and trampled, although her death was ruled an accidental overdose from amphetamines.  Two other rallygoers died of heart attacks while protesting outside near the Capitol steps.  January 6, 2021, was indeed a deadly day at the U.S. Capitol — deadly for Trump supporters.

Instead, congressional liars and their stenographic sheep in journalist-less pressrooms loyal not to truth, but to government obeisance, routinely obscure this simple fact, so as to fabricate a narrative that a "Trump rebellion" took innocent lives.  In order to perpetuate this falsehood, these same propagandists have pushed an outright lie that Officer Brian Sicknick died from blunt force trauma to the head, when in fact he died from natural causes away from the Capitol after suffering two strokes.  Then, in order to tar Trump supporters — some of the strongest supporters of law enforcement in the country — as anti-police, our Ministry of Truth has done everything in its power to transform four subsequent Capitol police officer suicides into J6 "murders."  

With no shame whatsoever, Joe Biden continues to lie to the world by declaring insouciantly that "five cops" were "killed" during the January 6 "insurrection."  It's a dirty blood libel from a dirty and deranged man whose dementia cannot excuse his vile demagoguery intended to cleave the country in two.  When the federal government cannot be relied upon to report truthfully about the deaths of patriotic civilians and police officers, it cannot be relied upon to report truthfully about much of anything.  Maybe the feds should add their own dissipating credibility to their already long list of J6 casualties.

I will say right now that nothing good can come from the federal government's attempts to harass and criminally imperil Trump by demonizing his supporters, siccing the FBI on J6 political protesters for committing vague crimes hardly more serious than ordinary trespass, locking up defendants awaiting trial for years, or denying the accused access to thousands of hours of potentially exculpatory video evidence.  Nothing good can come from organized efforts to remove Republicans from election ballots because they had the temerity to exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly during a political rally in support of the sitting president.  Nothing good can come from partisan witch hunts conducted by shadowy operatives and anti-American zealots committed to casting shameful, ridiculous, and dangerous aspersions against ordinary patriots intended to render protected political speech as tantamount to the Confederacy's Civil War rebellion.  Nothing good can come from the horrendous gall of the illegitimate congressional J6 Committee in declaring President Trump and his eighty million voters "domestic terrorists," especially when Trump supporters have disproportionately served in the armed forces in defense of this great land.  These kinds of cheap and partisan tactics, bathed in Machiavellian malice, rarely have the effect governing authorities intend. 

Right now, it is the federal government's position that anybody remotely connected to the J6 political rally must be scorned and ostracized.  It is the federal government's position that J6 political prisoners be locked up, tormented, and forgotten.  It is the federal government's position that only speech condoned by political authorities may be freely spoken.  The federal government's positions, in other words, are as crooked as the politicians infesting it.

I don't think Washington, D.C.'s J6 propaganda will succeed.  I don't think the friends and family of J6 prisoners will forget.  I don't think our cancerous political class will get the public relations victory it desires.  There may well come a day in the future when the exact opposite comes to fruition — when Americans who were not even near Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, nevertheless tell tall tales of their personal participation in such a historic event.  J6 may eventually be remembered in a similar vein to other "rebellious" undertakings such as the Boston Tea Party.  Remember, when Redcoat soldiers killed five colonials on March 5, 1770, the Crown took the quite defensible position that its soldiers had been attacked in a clear bout of unjustifiable "insurrection."  We Americans, however, have never known M5 as anything other than a terrible incident of government tyranny richly deserving of its infamous branding as the Boston Massacre.

Image via Max Pixel.

 

J. B. Shurk

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/will_j6_be_remembered_more_like_the_boston_massacre.html

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Charles Murray’s Wake Up Call on Race Problems - John Dale Dunn

 

​ by John Dale Dunn

Disputing with data and logic the fashionable assumption that racial discrimination creates social inequities

 

Charles Murray just can’t help himself; he’s been a social scientist and prolific author for almost 40 years, writing books on the American experience and societal issues. Now he is back in the mix with a book, Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America (Encounter Books 2021), that follows up on the book he wrote with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve (1994).  That magnificent work blew the top off of racial debates in America with its in-depth analysis of racial cognitive ability (IQ) differences and socio-economic mobility of Americans and factors that are associated with success in life.

IQ

The 79-year-old scholar and warrior at the American Enterprise Institute is back at it, trying to substitute facts and analysis for the sloppy thinking and emotions that pervade academia and politics in America.  While the chattering class and media focus on inequities and claims of social injustice, Dr. Murray (Ph.D. MIT) points out that although there is certainly racism in every society and in America, the reality is that the inequities of socioeconomic status are more the result of cognitive ability and criminal activity.

The majority of the relatively short but powerful and scholarly book, Facing Reality, is focused on data and evidence. Murray repeatedly reminds us that all social science research must always be careful to consider contributing factors.

Murray disputes the fashionable assumption that racial discrimination creates social inequities.  The reality, says Murray, is that racial inequalities in America between European- and African-heritage people in health, wealth, position, status, and income can be traced to a significant disparity in African Americans’ cognitive ability and criminal behavior.  The inequalities are also present to a lesser degree for Latin-heritage people.

The reverse is true for Asians, who have higher IQs and socioeconomic success than Europeans.  Murray holds to the conviction that American society is not pervasively and irredeemably riddled with racism and that meritocratic America is egalitarian and emphasizes individual opportunity, rewards, and accountability.  As Murray points out, if the pipeline to particularly high achievement is considered, the number of high IQ persons in that pipeline is colorblind. 

Murray’s view of the disparate higher rate of criminality in the African and Latin communities is a separate analysis that has to do with how members of a group fit into the society as good citizens.  If your group has a violent crime rate 2 or 3 times or more than the rate of the Europeans and Asians, that produces less assimilation and less success. 

Murray aims to revive what he calls the “American creed,” a set of ideal commitments to foundational freedoms, human dignity, individualism, equality under the law, and the use of neutral, colorblind measures of individual talent and competence to assign economic and social roles. Central to this code, still supported by Americans, is a meritocratic and impartial standard for all.  Murray condemns the distortion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by the government, judiciary, and political class to create reverse discrimination, quotas, and set-aside racial preferences, impacting employment and academic choices.   Critical Race Theory and its associated concepts have created an environment that repudiates the principles of the founding and created counterproductive and polarizing abandonment of the American principle of a meritocracy and treatment of citizens as individuals, not members of a race, ethnic group, or tribe.

In the cognitive function section of the book, Murray makes the case that widely used and properly developed tests in academia, business settings, and the military do measure cognitive ability and IQ (also called g) and there is no evidence that the tests fail to measure the potential for academic success.  

Murray is assiduous in his use of statistics and research methods.  His population studies information show traits usually fall quantitatively in a bell-shaped pattern with the big bulk of the population in the middle and tails on the low and high sides.  That shape amplifies differences on the tails. For example, Murray estimates that of the 23 million Americans who are in their late twenties, there are currently about 228,000 with I.Q.s in excess of 135. That pool contains only about 2,800 Africans and 9,500 Latins, compared to 50,000 Asians and 160,000 Europeans.  Africans are about 14% of the population but represent only slightly more than 1% of the 135 IQ plus pool -- or about 1 in every 100 people headed for high-level jobs or professions.  So the pipeline to high achievement is dominated by Asians and Europeans (whites).  Such realities create inequities that have nothing to do with racism.

Murray’s opponents continue to cling to the theory that racism creates inequities, and demand a war on structural racism and systematic racism. But Murray is skeptical about the chances to change the fundamental reason for the inequities: cognitive differences.  There is no known way to raise IQs and reduce inequalities in cognition, but Murray points out that genetic determination of IQ is somewhere between 40 and 80%.

 Crime rates

What about the role of racial gaps in criminal offending? Murray’s message can be simply stated: Africans and Latins commit crimes, especially violent crimes and homicide, at higher rates than other groups in American society. Europeans, and especially Asians, are much less involved in criminal activity.  Especially in minority-heavy urban centers, violence is almost exclusively committed by Africans and Latins and is intraracial, or between, Africans and Latins. Asians and Europeans take a pass. 

Murray tallies criminal activity reports and rates of unlawful violence among Africans and finds that it is as much as 9 to 11 times that of the background population.  Latin crime rates lag but still are higher. The left has faulted Murray’s evidence on crime, claiming police racism, but criminal involvement is far more common among Africans than in other demographic groups.  For violent crime, Murray emphasizes that police bias is much less of a factor in decisions to arrest.

Murray asserts effectively that crime creates community disorder and civil chaos that damage racial relations and certainly impacts the residents, due to the high rate of black-on-black or Latin-on-Latin crime, particularly violent crime.  But this differential crime rate also impacts the choices of other groups on starting or maintaining businesses or choosing homes. Widespread residential de facto segregation is directly related to security and crime issues.  The reality is that elites who claim to be social justice supporters choose high-end neighborhoods, avoiding contact with minorities except for minorities of their social strata.

The American meritocracy that Murray promotes requires dismantling the Diversity Equity Inclusion (DIE) governmental business and academic bureaucracies, now well developed and able to preserve their hegemony.  At present these bureaucracies are blind to the realities Murray discusses.

In The Bell Curve, which was my introduction to Murray 30 years ago, Murray and Herrnstein emphasized that civil conduct and the adoption of sensible and moral social behavior will overcome some of the disadvantages of a lower IQ.  Marriage and work create an ordered personal life that extends to community participation and social justice.  Societies need to promote norms of behavior.

We know little about improving IQs, but the research of Murray and Herrnstein showed that people of limited cognitive ability will be successful if they complete high school, then work and work effectively, marry before children and live a good citizen’s life of obeying the law. Imagine a national program to promote strong intact families and civil society.  Common sense, but far removed from the current political-social attitudes.

Law enforcement is a reasonable activity to reduce crime across the board but, first, the elites need to abandon the idea that criminals should not be held accountable since they suffer from some deprivation or mental disease that makes them criminal.  The mentally ill are a special problem but it is essential not to confuse personality disorders with mental illness. Defunding police and excusing or pitying criminals is not going to fix the crime rate.  The rule of law is the basis for civil order and peace. 

Facing Reality goes over some old ground but the evidence presented is compelling.  Solutions to our problems are not so easy to achieve given the ideologies that dominate the public square.  Murray recommends the American credo, individual freedom, responsibility, accountability, and morality. This is an ideology that can be traced to Aristotle and other ancients and is now the foundation of the conservative consensus.

 

John Dale Dunn, MD JD is a resident of Brownwood, Texas

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/charles_murrays_wake_up_call_on_race_problems.html

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Duke Divinity School Students: ‘God Is Queer' - Robert Spencer

​ by Robert Spencer

To the Left, God is gay, woke, and whatever else they're idolizing at the moment.

 

It was inevitable that Leftist divinity students, marinating as they are in the relentless insanity of the Left’s pet causes, would end up making gods in their own image: gay, woke, and whatever else the Left is idolizing at the moment. Duke Divinity School is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, which is already like being affiliated with the Maoists (gay, gender-fluid Maoists, that is), so it was the perfect place for a recent “Pride worship service” in which participants offered prayers to “the Great Queer One.”

Hope Rawlson of the Institute for Religion & Democracy reported Tuesday that the Pride worship service was designed to proclaim “God’s acceptance and support for LGBTQ relationships.” The bizarre service was the brainchild of Divinity Pride, a Duke student group that “affirms the dignity, faithfulness, and strength of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and gender/sexuality non-conforming Christians! We are committed to intersectional advocacy, education, and support for queer people and our allies specifically in the Divinity School, but with a Kingdom-reaching vision. We facilitate educative dialogues for the whole community, and we are here to support anyone who is reconciling their gender/sexuality and faith, facing persecution, or desiring a safe space.” They succeeded: the Pride worship service was plenty safe for men who think they’re women, and vice versa.

Master of Divinity (M.Div) student Caroline Camp kicked things off, and set the tone for the proceedings, with a prayer to the “strange one, fabulous one, fluid, and ever-becoming one,” and the “drag queen, and transman, and gender-fluid.” All this fluid put me in mind of Moss Hart’s wicked parody of Noel Coward’s precious and pretentious song lyrics in his riotous play The Man Who Came to Dinner: “Softly a fluid Druid meets me, Olden and golden the dawn that greets me…” Moss Hart had nothing on the Duke Divinity School. Camp also prayed, more prosaically, to the “mother, father, and parent,” Oh brother — that is, Oh brother, sister, and sibling.

Another M.Div student, Tirzah Villegas, declared: “You are never called to abandon yourself. Abandoning the self is negating the truth of who you are, and that is always a lie.” Now, just a minute: Duke Divinity School is supposed to be a Christian school, at least vestigially, and I seem to remember someone involved with Christianity saying “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25). But the one who spoke those words is not someone who appears to get much traction at Duke Divinity.

Villegas added that the assembled worshippers that their god was a “queer god,” which is likely true, as they have made a god out of their own proclivities. Nor are these divinity school students the first Leftists to make a religion out of their sociocultural delusions. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Grey Goose) a year ago gave thanks to her god for his salvific sacrifice: “Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice.” Catholic University displayed a painting of George Floyd as Jesus.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D-Planned Parenthood) proclaimed in September 2021 that the unvaccinated “aren’t listening to God and what God wants.” The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which is so far-Left as to make Duke Divinity School look like MAGA country, last October published a new hymn entitled “The Climate is Changing.” In September 2019, climate idolaters at Union Theological Seminary began worshipping potted plants as a “liturgical response to our climate crisis.”

Another Duke divinity student, a “self-identified trans woman,” declared that while men pretending to be women and women pretending to be men “can be framed as a choice,” actually “transition is better framed as a calling. It is a calling to wrestle with God and not let go until we receive a blessing in our own bodies.” This was in stark contrast to the judgmental religion some of those in attendance claimed to have encountered. One young man, or whatever, Justis Mitchell, said: “In the pews we listen to the pastor who preaches about commandments, condemning those who disobey, predicating a future of fire and turmoil.” Where does this being Mitchell go to church? In 1895?

Mitchell offered some hope, however: “We can become holy, we can become worthy, we can become valued…even as we remain queer, even as we discover our own queer God whose presence is within these walls.”

Making up a god to suit oneself has a long history. While it’s strange to see it happening in a place that is supposed to be dedicated to Christian theological inquiry, which historically has not taken a positive view of idolatry, it isn’t surprising. The corruption of the institutions is everywhere. Sane people desperately need an alternative.

 

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/duke-divinity-school-students-god-queer-robert-spencer/

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Turkey: Kurdish Children Killed, No Consequences - Uzay Bulut

 

​ by Uzay Bulut

According to a 2012 report by the Diyarbakır branch of the IHD, 569 Kurdish children were killed between 1988 and 2013 by state violence such as police or military fire, gas bombs, mines, or explosions of abandoned or derelict ordnance.

• In the indictment concerning the latest killing, the police officer said that the child "hit his vehicle".

• "These reports are defective. It is a massive problem that these reports list many faults of the defendant but conclude that he is guiltless or is just secondarily at fault. It is also a huge problem that these reports are prepared not by independent persons or institutions, but rather by the police or other state institutions. Evidence was blacked out, and not collected properly. And a crime scene investigation has not been thoroughly conducted. The conclusions of these reports do not reflect reality." — Ömer Sansarkan, human rights lawyer who joined Tektekin's trials on behalf of the Diyarbakir Bar Association's Children's Rights Center, to Gatestone, April 5, 2022.

• According to a 2012 report by the Diyarbakır branch of the IHD, 569 Kurdish children were killed between 1988 and 2013 by state violence such as police or military fire, gas bombs, mines, or explosions of abandoned or derelict ordnance.

• Because of the "political tendencies of the government", "the actions of the public officials in line with these tendencies" and "a lack of independence of the judiciary", "human rights violations resulting from arbitrary practices by public officials are considered legitimate and the perpetrators are protected with impunity." — The Working Group on Children Affected by War and Conflict of the Children's Rights Center of Diyarbakir Bar Association, March 2, 2022.

• These crimes also constitute discrimination, as they occur mostly in the majority-Kurdish region of Turkey, the report added.

• "None of the perpetrators has received a fair punishment." — Ömer Sansarkan, to Gatestone, April 5, 2022.

The killing and wounding of Kurds caused by Turkish security forces in armored vehicles appear to be a systematic problem in the majority-Kurdish southeast of Turkey. Those police officers or soldiers who hit the Kurds with these vehicles seem to always get away with their crimes. Pictured: An armored vehicle manned by Turkish Army soldiers drives though the majority-Kurdish city of Sanliurfa as women and children pass by, on October 17, 2019. (Photo by Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images)

On September 11, 2019, a five-year-old Kurdish child, Efe Tektekin, was killed crossing the street when a Turkish police officer hit him with his armored vehicle in Diyarbakir. The officer, after facing trial for "causing death by negligence," was acquitted following the final hearing of the court case on March 29.

If Tektekin had run out into the road too fast for the policeman to stop, then there would have been a proper investigation and all evidence would have been used. But the lawyers have said that the legal system protects police officers. Moreover, there have been many other similar cases of killings by armored vehicles: in none of them is the driver ever punished. These armored vehicles, are only deployed, discriminatorily, in Kurdish-majority communities. They endanger public safety and should not even be driving in the streets.

Human rights lawyers say that impunity for state authorities or public officials who commit crimes against Kurds are systematic in Turkey.

After Tektekin's death, the police officer who hit him was never arrested. He has continued, on duty as a police officer, driving his armored vehicle ever since.

During the final court hearing, the Tektekin family lawyer, Sedat Çınar, noted the obstacles they faced during the investigation and trial:

"Right after the incident, the armored vehicle was taken away from the scene immediately. Photographs of the vehicle were not taken, necessary determinations were not made regarding the accident, and cameras from the workplaces around were not collected and examined. Witnesses stated that the vehicle's camera was working [at the time of the incident], and it could see the images around, but in a reply letter [sent by authorities] it was reported that the vehicle's camera was defective. It is clear in the defendant's statements that he had gone out of his regular route [right before the incident]. It is against reason and science to find a 5-year-old child at fault in the incident."

Çınar added that "when the scope of the current court file is evaluated as a whole, the defendant's action should be assessed within the framework of conscious negligence or possible intent and the defendant be punished accordingly."

In the indictment concerning the latest killing, the police officer said that the child "hit his vehicle". The report prepared by authorities stated that the dead child was found to be "the main culprit" while the police officer was determined to be "the secondary culprit". When the lawyers opposed the report, a second report claimed that Efe's father, Ahmet Tektekin, was "primarily at fault" on the grounds that he "did not take care of his child during the accident and endangered his safety." The report also found the police officer "secondarily at fault", saying:

"The evidence at hand is that the driver managed the vehicle in a way that could be dangerous for the life, health and property of the people around without reducing his speed according to the environmental conditions. This accident should have been predictable and preventable had the driver paid the necessary attention and care."

A third report by authorities found the dead child to be primarily at fault while calling the police officer "secondarily at fault."

Human rights lawyer Ömer Sansarkan, who joined Tektekin's trials on behalf of the Diyarbakir Bar Association's Children's Rights Center, told Gatestone:

"The first report was prepared by the police. The second report was by the Diyarbakir branch of the forensic medicine institute (ATK). And the last one was prepared by the Istanbul Traffic Specialization Office of the ATK.

"These reports are defective. It is a massive problem that these reports list many faults of the defendant but conclude that he is guiltless or is just secondarily at fault. It is also a huge problem that these reports are prepared not by independent persons or institutions, but rather by the police or other state institutions. Evidence was blacked out, and not collected properly. And a crime scene investigation has not been thoroughly conducted. The conclusions of these reports do not reflect reality."

During the first court hearing in February 2020, the family's attorney Çınar said that it was only the police force who collected the evidence regarding the offending officer.

"The driver's license of the accused is not presented in the court file and there is a lot of other [evidence] that is missing. In our region [Kurdish-majority southeast], human lives are not valued [by police and other state authorities]... There are cameras, there are witnesses. If the police want to, they can find them and put them in the file. But the witnesses chosen for this court are two people who have committed criminal offenses. While there are many other witnesses, only the testimonies of these two people were taken. The boy's father said that he watched the event from the vehicle's camera. We want the camera records to be requested from the police."

All of the requests of the family's lawyers were not met.

The killing and wounding of Kurds caused by security forces in armored vehicles appear to be a systematic problem in the majority-Kurdish southeast of Turkey. Those police officers or soldiers who hit the Kurds with these vehicles seem to always get away with their crimes.

In the last 14 years, 90 Kurdish civilians were injured in 77 armored vehicle crashes. At least 43 people, 20 of whom were children, were killed as a result of being hit by armored vehicles, according to a local branch of the Human Rights Association (IHD) in the city of Batman.

A January 2022 report by the IHD noted that armored vehicle crashes have become commonplace in the cities and towns of Turkey's majority-Kurdish region.

"As the Human Rights Association, we want armored vehicles to be removed from living areas [neighborhoods], and legal deterrent measures to be taken against the careless use of vehicles by law enforcement officers that endanger the right to life of citizens. We demand effective judicial and administrative investigations against law enforcement officers whose actions have caused death and injury, and an end to the protection of armored vehicles."

According to a 2012 report by the Diyarbakır branch of the IHD, 569 Kurdish children were killed between 1988 and 2013 by state violence such as police or military fire, gas bombs, mines, or explosions of abandoned or derelict ordnance. A 12-year-old Kurdish child named Ceylan Önkol, for instance, was killed by a mortar shell on September 28, 2009 while grazing cattle in Diyarbakır.

Other reported killings of Kurdish children include:

• Umut Furkan Akçil, age 7, was killed on October 10, 2010 in the city of Sirnak. He was escaping from pepper gas thrown by the police during demonstrations but was then hit by a passing vehicle.
• On October 6, 2010, Ahmet İmre, age 12, was killed and another child of the same age was seriously wounded as a result of the explosion of a metal object that they had found in the rural area in Şırnak. The area where the children were playing was near a military zone.
• On September 17, 2010, 15-year-old Enver Turan was shot by a sergeant who had exited his vehicle during protests in Hakkari. The child died in hospital.
• On July 22, 2010, 16-year-old Canan Saldık, on the way to a picnic in a village near the city of Van, was killed by a bullet that hit her in the head. The gunfire allegedly came from a nearby military barracks.
• On June 24, 2010, Birem Basan, age 14, was hit and killed by a police armored vehicle in Şırnak.
• On May 25, 2010, in the city of Van, an explosion occurred while some children were playing about one meter outside the military barracks shooting range. Oğuzcan Akyürek, age 13, was killed and four children were wounded. It was alleged that a soldier from the barracks had thrown explosives at children.
• On April 23, 2010, 14-year-old Izzettin Boz, who was grazing animals in a village in Mardin, was killed when an object he found exploded. The munition reportedly belonged to the Turkish military.
• On April 2, 2010, 14-year-old Mehmet Nuri was shot dead by Turkish soldiers in a village near the city of Van.

The Working Group on Children Affected by War and Conflict of the Children's Rights Center of Diyarbakir Bar Association issued a report on March 2 entitled "Armored Vehicle, Mines and Combat-War Waste Induced Child Rights Violations".

The report analyzed the years 2011 to 2021. It noted that 22 Kurdish children were killed and 27 children were wounded as a result of being hit by an armored vehicle driven by police officers or shot by fire from armored vehicles.

From 2011 to 2021, mines, conflict, or unexploded ordnances in eastern Turkey killed 45 Kurdish children and wounded 135 children.

The perpetrators, however, are "protected," the report noted:

"The concept of impunity means that no investigation or prosecution is opened in accordance with legislation or practice, that investigation and prosecution processes are not carried out properly, and/or that the judgment rendered as a result of these processes is incompatible with justice or it is not executed. In short, it means that the perpetrators of human rights violations are immune from punishment."

Because of the "political tendencies of the government", "the actions of the public officials in line with these tendencies" and "a lack of independence of the judiciary", "human rights violations resulting from arbitrary practices by public officials are considered legitimate and the perpetrators are protected with impunity."

These crimes also constitute discrimination, as they occur mostly in the majority-Kurdish region of Turkey, the report added:

"These rights violations that also violate the prohibition of discrimination are not seen throughout Turkey, but they are specific to a region of the country. Children's rights violations arising from mines, conflict-war wastes, and armored vehicles systematically take place in the provinces of Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia Regions especially where [military] conflicts are intense. This situation should be considered within the scope of violations of the prohibition of discrimination defined in national and international legal texts."

The arbitrary rights violations by state authorities including law enforcement officers in Turkey have led to the deaths and injuries of dozens of Kurdish children. But as Sansarkan concluded, "None of the perpetrators has received a fair punishment."

 

Uzay Bulut, a Turkish journalist, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18419/turkey-kurdish-children-killed

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