Leaked UN report details French soldiers' abuse against young African boys

This news wasn't surprising at all for me. After watching the 2011 movie, "The Whistleblower," such horrible acts of soldiers working for UN are not a surprise. Heck, even UN's own actions after discovering what French soldiers were doing in Central African Republic are no different than what was portrayed in the movie; bury the evidence, deny any wrongdoing & punish the whistleblower.

Ironically, the world media brings down the house, if & when, these kinds of things are done by so-called "Muslim" groups. Then, the reactions of general public are such that Islam allows these things to happen or Muslims love doing these.

Well, what was driving French soldiers to rape & sodomize small African kids? What was their religion ordering them to do (if they believed in an organized religion / faith)?

Why the general public of "fair" & "just" developed, Western world has such double standards that if a so-called Islamist group performs these acts, then "it's hang-man time" for the whole religion & members of that group but if the same horrible acts are done by their own soldiers, then "it must be a mistake" & "it's all good."

What ISIS do with Yazidi girls / women (I am not condoning those acts ... just putting them in perspectives) is still much less in scope & effect than what soldiers do, under the auspices of UN, in foreign countries from Cambodia to Thailand to Bosnia to Somalia to Central African Republic. At least ISIS doesn't hide what they are doing, unlike UN, which always tries to brush these problems in its rank & file under the proverbial carpet.
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http://rt.com/news/254205-french-soldiers-abuse-boys/

A damning UN report about how French soldiers raped & sodomized starving & homeless boys in the Central African Republic, some as young as 9, has been leaked to the Guardian, & the UN official who blew the whistle is facing dismissal.

French peacekeeping troops were supposed to be protecting children at a center for internally displaced people at M’Poko Airport in CAR’s capital Bangui, when the abuse reportedly took place between December 2013 & June 2014. It was at a time when the UN’s mission at the country, MINUSCA, was in the process of being set up.

An internal investigation was ordered by the UN office of the high commissioner for human rights (UNHCR), after reports on the ground of sexual abuse of children displaced by the conflict.

A member of staff from the high commissioner of human rights & a specialist from UNICEF interviewed the children between May & June last year. Some of the boys were able to give good descriptions of individual soldiers who abused them.

Officials in Geneva reportedly received the report in summer 2014.

Swedish national, Anders Kompass, a senior UN aid worker who has been involved in humanitarian work for over 30 years, passed the document on to French prosecutors because of the UN’s failure to take action, sources close to the case told the Guardian.

The newspaper reports that after receiving the confidential UN report entitled Sexual Abuse on Children by International Armed Forces, French authorities traveled to Bangui to investigate the allegations.

A French judicial source said that the prosecutor’s office had received the UN report in July 2014 & that a preliminary investigation had been launched.

“A preliminary investigation has been opened by the Paris prosecutor since July 21, 2014. The investigation is ongoing,” he said, as quoted by Reuters.

The UN also confirmed Monday that it had given an unredacted report to the French authorities on the alleged abuse of children by French soldiers in CAR.

“The unedited version was, by a staff member's own admission, provided unofficially by that staff member to the French authorities in late July, prior to even providing it to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights' (OHCHR) senior management,” the spokesman for the UN Secretary-General said in a statement.

The report made its way to Paula Donovan from the organization Aids Free World, who then passed it to the Guardian.

“The regular sex abuse by peacekeeping personnel uncovered here & the United Nations’ appalling disregard for victims are stomach-turning, but the awful truth is that this isn’t uncommon. The UN’s instinctive response to sexual violence in its ranks – ignore, deny, cover up, dissemble – must be subjected to a truly independent commission of inquiry with total access, top to bottom, & full subpoena power,” she said.

Last month, Mr Kompass was accused of leaking a confidential UN report & breaching protocols.
 
Kompass was dismissed last week as director of field operations & is now under investigation by the UN office for internal oversight service (OIOS). One senior UN official even said that “it was his [Kompass’s] duty to know & comply” with UN protocols on confidential documents.

Bea Edwards from the US based Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower protection & advocacy organization, blasted the UN for what is little more than witch-hunt against someone who sought to protect children.

“We have represented many whistleblowers in the UN system over the years & in general the more serious the disclosure they make the more ferocious the retaliation. Despite the official rhetoric, there is very little commitment at the top of the organization to protect whistleblowers & a strong tendency to politicize every issue no matter how urgent.”

France’s Operation Sangaris in CAR began in December 2013. It is now being wound down as Paris hands over security to an 8,500-strong UN peacekeeping force deployed to contain the deadly conflict.

The problem with French immersion

Everywhere in the world, everyone is trying to play "one-up"; how do I make my life & my family's life better than other? Even if it means being discriminatory & unfair.

Now, here's an article, in which it is shown, how parents who think their kid is the brightest kid in the world (which parent doesn't think so?), will do everything & anything in their power (the whole family jamming up the French immersion school's phones on an call-in enrolment night is one way or lining up outside your kid's future school, for 3 nights, to get him/her enrolled is another) to get their kid enrolled in a French immersion school ... even if it means, another kid who is equally intelligent gets "bumped down" to an English-only school. Why?

Because, apparently (I didn't know this & never thought of it of myself), French immersion schools are like private education quality at the public education cost. Who wouldn't want that? You need to be missing a piece of your brain if you don't want a better quality product at a lesser cost.

Problem is though, as the article explains, it starts to discriminate & starts to make & perpetuate socio-economic disadvantages. Parents & their kids who are bilingual are of course going to earn more & have better job opportunities than unilingual families.

The most affected (with this discrimination) are immigrants & families from disadvantaged socio-economic classes. For immigrants, as the article suggests, French immersion schools admission authority will point out to factors like "you are having enough problem with English, since English is not even your first language, then forget about French immersion, & stick to English only."

Slowly & surely, kids from advantaged socio-economic classes gets clumped in together in French immersion schools, & eventually study & grow up together to the point that their strong network gets them to some nice places in employment. Those kids from disadvantaged background (immigrants, Natives etc.) gets clumped in together with all other kids from similar backgrounds & their network for life becomes people of similar disadvantaged groups. Boom !! You just got your two social classes ... & it will keep perpetuating for lives on end !!!

Are the kids from those disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds any less intelligent? Don't they have the right to be considered & treated same as those kids who are / will go to French immersion school?

Be it in a developing country or a developed country, like US or Canada, society keeps discriminating & creating social classes based on socio-economic, educational, income, ethnic etc. factors. This is why the world is in such a chaos.

In developing countries, parents have a choice of private or public school. Socio-economic status defines that choice. Obviously, most parents go for private education for their kids, to the point, that if a poor family has 4 kids (2 boys & 2 girls), then both boys may get private education, at the cost of their own sisters not getting any. Then, the uproar in the West becomes that girls are not getting educational opportunities. How can a poor family does that? That poor family is merely trying to increase the chances of breaking out of poverty cycle by getting their boys educated, who will of course, make more money than their girls will ever earn (even if they also get private education).

Similar to that, in US, for instance, many high-profile individuals in the country, have had a privileged background, from early educational opportunities to all the way to very nice employment opportunities. In Canada, we have this French immersion school system is apparently helping in the creation of social classes, & that's on top of the fact that there is a private school system (religious & secular), which of course, has its education quality just on a separate level than the public school system.

Where is that oft-spoken fairness & justice in this world???
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http://www.macleans.ca/education/just-say-non-the-problem-with-french-immersion/

Hannah Spencer isn’t the kind of mom who leaves anything to chance. When she wasn’t keen on her child attending the English-only school in their zone of Salmon Arm, B.C., preferring her daughter study French immersion at Bastion Elementary, she sent out her husband, Cody, one Saturday night in 2012 to wait by the district’s education centre to check if anyone had lined up already. With limited enrolment, registration was first-come, first-served & Cody was early. Sign-up started on Wednesday.

“We heard about other years with the lineup forming & finishing within an hour,” Hannah says. “If you didn’t get there fast enough, you would miss out.”

Cody slept in the family vehicle that night & the police noticed him parked outside the centre. When he told the officer of his wife’s request, the response was apt: The officer called a few RCMP colleagues, who also wanted their kids enrolled in French immersion, & warned them the lineup was imminent. When Cody decided to start the line around 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, right next to him was a local RCMP parent.
 
Pretty soon, the news had spread to Chantelle Prentice, 25 km away in Enderby, B.C. Looking at the Fraser Institute’s elementary school rankings, she figured the two top schools her son could attend were Bastion Elementary or the private school King’s Christian, but the latter wasn’t ideal for the non-religious family. The only way to get her son into her school of choice was to sign him up for French immersion—& quick. “The anxiety level was huge,” Prentice remembers. “When I was driving into Salmon Arm, I should have got a speeding ticket.”

Prentice arrived at 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, 3 days before registration opened, & was the seventh parent in line for the 17 kindergarten openings. By 5:50 the following morning, all the spots were spoken for. That’s if everyone stuck around. Only a family member was allowed to relieve someone from waiting.
This was especially stressful for Hannah Spencer, who covered 13 hours of waiting during the day while her husband was at work. She was 9 months pregnant with their third child & hoping the baby could wait until at least Thursday. After all, if she got her first daughter, Alyvia, into the French immersion program, her younger son Pierce & the then-unborn baby could later enroll automatically without the wait. “We camped out for 3 days,” she says. “That’s only a day per kid.”

French-English bilingualism rates may be on the decline in Canada, but when it comes to getting kids into French immersion programs—which have come to be seen by many as a free private school within the public school system—there is nothing, it seems, that a Canadian parent won’t do.
 
Alyvia is now in Grade 2 & loving French classes. But for every student who graduates from French immersion, there’s at least one other who has been bumped out of the program & put into an English-only stream that many deem inferior. Well-meaning parents may feel that French immersion is the answer for every child. In reality, it has become an elitist, overly restrictive system, geared to benefit a certain type of student.
 
Decades worth of French immersion studies can testify to its benefits. Children learn another language without any detrimental effect to their English skills. Working memory, used in activities like math, is improved, especially among those aged 5 to 7. Even reading scores in English are significantly higher for French immersion students than non-immersion students, according to a 2004 study, which noted the higher socio-economic background of French immersion students alone could not account for the stark difference.
 
Plus, there are the added work opportunities later in life, not to mention better pay. Outside Quebec, bilingual men earn on average 3.8% more than their unilingual counterparts, according to a 2010 study out of the University of Guelph. Bilingual women, meanwhile, earn 6.6% more on average. Within Quebec, those numbers are even more pronounced.
 
In 1977, more than a decade after French immersion’s introduction, the program enrolled 45,000 students across the country. That number steadily increased to more than 342,000 students by 2011. “I’m not even sure that number even accurately reflects what the real demand is, because the constraint on availability is classroom spaces, teachers & resources,” says Lisa Marie Perkins, former national executive director of Canadian Parents for French, a non-profit volunteer advocacy group. “If there weren’t things like lotteries & caps, I think you’d actually see the numbers being greater.”

Pierre Trudeau had a vision of a unified, bilingual country when he pushed for the first Official Languages Act, which passed in 1969, but the school system has not kept up with the challenge. A dearth of French teachers causes school divisions to spend extra resources on the hunt for those who are qualified; community schools get uprooted if they push out the English program to make it French immersion-only; & the program loses a staggering number of students.

“What a program like French immersion does is it siphons off those kids who have engaged families who make sure the kids do all their homework,” says Andrew Campbell, a Grade 5 teacher in Brantford, Ont. “Because of that, the opportunities in the rest of the system are affected because the modelling & interaction those kids would provide for the other kids in the system aren’t there anymore.”

The immersion program creates division along lines of gender, social class & special needs students, wrote a 2008 study from the Canadian Research Institute for Social Policy looking at French immersion in New Brunswick. Girls are more likely to be enrolled than boys & the French stream has fewer kids in need of extra help. All things being equal in New Brunswick, every class—French or English—should have 3.4 students with special needs. But when a school offered French immersion, the average number of special needs students ending up in the English stream was 5.7. This kind of segregation is not unique to that province.
 
The richer the family, the more likely their kids will be immersed in French, according to figures from a Toronto District School Board study. In 2009-10, 23% of all French immersion students came from families in the top 10% of income. Meanwhile, only 4% of French immersion students came from the bottom 10% of family income.

“The program is open to lots of people, but it gets whittled down,” says Nancy Wise, a French immersion educational consultant & former special education teacher in the York region, just outside Toronto. “If you can’t cut it, you probably fall into one of these categories: [you’re a] new Canadian, this is your third language, you’ve got some learning challenges, or there’s a socio-economic factor. They jump on it in the schools & show them the door—& it’s just not right.”

Over the past 20 years, on average approximately 235,000 immigrants have come to Canada each year, & more than 80% of them speak neither French nor English as a native tongue, according to Statistics Canada. One-third of allophone students—those whose mother tongue is neither French nor English—reported their school discouraging their enrolment in a French second-language education, according to a 2008 study commissioned by Canadian Parents for French.

“New Canadians, or those who speak languages other than English at home, are told something along the lines of: ‘English is enough of a challenge for you & your family. Why don’t you stick to the English language program?’ ” Wise says. “There’s no research evidence to support that kind of discouragement.” But it happens.
 
In Vancouver last year, more than 34% of kindergarten to Grade 7 students in the English core program were ESL students, according to data obtained by the Vancouver Sun. For French immersion, ESL students accounted for 2% of the classes. Vancouver students with special needs, meanwhile, accounted for 8% of enrolment in the English-only stream last year; French immersion had lower than half that percentage.
“The special ed people who can handle those with learning challenges are far fewer in French immersion schools—& that’s because of the disproportionate number of children with those needs in English,” Wise says. “It all goes round & round & we keep perpetuating this elitist characterization of French immersion.

“If we’re going to offer this program,” she adds, “how can we justify it if we don’t give kids—from whatever background—the tools they need to succeed?” For all of French immersion’s successes among its pupils, when it comes to embracing all Canadians, the system is far from incroyable.
 
If registration into French immersion is limited, who gets in? “I do think it’s unfair—& I also think it’s not unfair—to do this lineup thing [in Salmon Arm],” Chantelle Prentice admits. “Who can take 3 days off work? What are you going to do with your children?”

Other school divisions register over the phone to avoid the annual sit-and-wait, though parents inevitably find ways to better their odds with tactics like “calling parties,” which involves multiple family members flooding the enrolment centre’s phone lines at the same time once registration opens. A lottery system, while evening the odds, boils down a child’s opportunity at French immersion to the luck of the draw. And it’s not always an unlucky 2 or 3 left out. At École Whitehorse Elementary, in the Yukon this year, there were enough kindergarten students on the wait list for French immersion to fill up an entire classroom. The territory’s education minister has promised to find them all room.
 
In some districts, however, there is no cap on enrolment, but that’s causing other headaches. In the Halton school district in Burlington, Ont., Margo Shuttleworth’s two boys are very happy studying French at Pineland Public School, but she’s not so thrilled with the school’s recent conversion to a single-track French immersion program to keep up with demand. Neighbours who wanted to see their toddlers one day study in the English-only stream no longer have Pineland as an option. “They’re taking a walk to school away from the communities who live here & busing them to another school, so they can bus other children into school for French immersion,” she says. “I don’t think French immersion should take precedence over a community school.”

Meanwhile, in Winnipeg’s south district, enrolment at the French immersion-only École LaVérendrye is “bursting at the seams,” says Winnipeg School Division board chairman Mark Wasyliw. The school was built for 300 students, but is projected to have more than 360 students come September. “Music rooms, art rooms, all those things you take for granted in a modern school system, they’ve all been converted into classrooms,” Wasyliw adds. “It’s affecting programming. These kids aren’t getting the quality & level of education they need.”

One solution can be found a few blocks away at the century-old Earl Grey School, which has fewer than 250 students enrolled but can accommodate a few hundred more. Some parents at LaVérendrye are lobbying for a school swap. Students at Earl Grey could easily fit within LaVérendrye’s walls, while LaVérendrye’s student population could continue to grow in Earl Grey’s building. Simple switch, right? It’s not.

“Earl Grey, demographically, is poor,” Wasyliw says, adding it has a lot of students from single-parent families & a high Aboriginal population. It houses a nursery, & there is a community centre next door for at-risk youth. “We move, we lose that proximity to the [community] centre,” says Darryl Balasko, the parent advisory council chair at Earl Grey.
 
Some Earl Grey parents, meanwhile, have suggested it become a dual-track French immersion school—hosting both French immersion & English-core students—to take some pressure off LaVérendrye’s capacity, but therein lies another problem. “You don’t want the English kids mixing with the French kids because that dilutes the whole purpose of being in an immersion setting,” Wasyliw says.
 
Yet the dogma of speaking French exclusively in the classroom may hinder some learning opportunites, says Jim Cummins, a University of Toronto professor & expert in second-language acquisition. For example, if a word like accélération comes up in French class, teachers could highlight its similarities to the English word, such as the “-tion” suffix. “It’s not a mortal sin to say: ‘Does this word remind you of anything in English?’ ” Cummins says. “Pointing those things out to students increases their sensitivity to language & increases their competence in both languages.”

In Oakville, Ont., Amanda Lee’s son, Conan, was struggling in early French immersion. The school had little support for him in French, she says, & paying for a tutor at home didn’t help him keep up. By Grade 2, “one of his teachers recommended we pull him out,” Lee says. A year later, they did. “It got to the point where we thought that we were burdening him too much,” she adds. “If he was struggling in two languages then we felt we need to take some of that load off him.”

While Conan’s story may resonate with many parents, research suggests pulling a child from French immersion is not always the solution. “These kids who struggle in school, they do just as well in an immersion program as similar children in a non-immersion program,” says Fred Genesee, a leading researcher on dual-language education at McGill University. “The additional challenge of doing all this in a second language doesn’t seem to be harder for them than doing it in a first language. At the same time, they become bilingual.” In effect, if a child is struggling with math in French, the problem might simply be with math, regardless of the language.

“If French immersion is really that good, let’s offer it to everyone. Let’s put it in every school,” says Campbell, the teacher. “The fact that we don’t do that says something about what the cachet of the program really is.”

The perception of weaker students being filtered into the English-only program then becomes more of an incentive for parents who consider their children among the best & brightest to enroll in French immersion. But at what cost to the English-track schools?

“Kids that are in low-income areas use French immersion as a way to get out of those schools,” Campbell says. “When I taught in Toronto, there were kids who lived in Lawrence Heights who would take a 35-minute [transit] ride to a French immersion school because the parents didn’t want their kids going to a school in that neighbourhood.”

Denise Davy, a mother from Burlington, says she pulled her daughter out of Pineland, where French immersion was prioritized, because the English program was so bad. “There were no supports, nothing available for my daughter who was struggling,” she says. “I’m not against bilingualism,” but she does take issue with “the ripple effect the [French immersion] demand is having on other programs.”

Parents who first enroll their kids in French immersion are quick to boast about their little ones speaking both of Canada’s official languages one day, but odds are they don’t think about their child being one of the many that drop out. “You start out with a school that has five classes in Grade 1, & by the time you hit Grade 8 there are two classes,” says Nancy Wise, the French immersion educational consultant.
 
For the 2007-08 school year in B.C. public schools, 4,281 Grade 6 students were part of the French immersion program, thanks to an influx of late immersion students. By the time that age group reached Grade 12 last year, approximately 2,230 remained. Meanwhile in New Brunswick, Canada’s only officially bilingual province, of the 1,469 anglophone students that entered early French immersion back in 1995, less than half (only 612) stayed with the program into Grade 12, according to a 2008 report.
 
From those Grade 12 students who then took an oral proficiency test, 99% achieved at least an “intermediate” score, but only 42% reached the mark of “advanced or higher.” So, what about dreams of fluently bilingual kids with the perfect accents? “I think we were naive,” says Genesee. “It can’t happen if you’re only using a language five hours a day, five days a week for 10 months of the year.”

What happens after high school graduation? Turns out native English speakers living outside Canada’s sole francophone province are rather poor at keeping up their French skills as they get older. In 1996, 15% of 15- to 19-year-old anglophones outside Quebec could conduct a conversation in both of Canada’s official languages. Fast forward 15 years & the bilingualism rate for 30- to 35-year-olds in 2011 was 8%.
 
Many of today’s youngsters are part of Canada’s second generation of French immersion students, the children of those who themselves took French immersion. The first wave, however, didn’t produce a giant pool of French teachers. In Winnipeg, Wasyliw says his division is running out of qualified teachers to keep up with demand. “We’re in the middle of budget discussions now & we’re going to spend money on recruitment teams that will be going to Quebec & eastern Ontario to basically start convincing native francophone teachers to immigrate to Manitoba.”

If only things were perfect in La Belle Province. Last November, when the alternative French class of an English-language high school in Châteauguay, Que., saw three teachers go on parental leaves & a fourth teacher didn’t work out, students were left with the computer program Rosetta Stone as the substitute teacher, with a non-French teacher supervising.
 
Canada’s French immersion system was once a model for the world, but it now lags behind countries in Europe where the European Union’s “mother tongue plus two” benchmark—hatched during a 2002 summit—set an ambitious goal for students to learn their native tongue plus two foreign languages. In a 2012 survey of 14 European countries, 42% of 15-year-olds could keep up a conversation in at least one foreign language. The European Commission’s goal is to boost that to at least 50% by 2020. The commission also set out to have at least 75% of students in lower secondary education studying at least two foreign tongues by 2020, compared to the 61% at the time of the report.
 
Credit Europe’s geography, which offers a multitude of cultures & languages in close proximity. Or the Internet & Hollywood for pushing English to the forefront globally. Regardless, Europeans will have plenty more than just one language on their CV in a global economy. According to EU data, more than half of all Europeans are already able to hold a conversation in a second language, while a quarter are able to do so in a third language. Even 10% can keep up a conversation in a fourth language.

“The world is going global & wanting to learn other languages,” says Genesee. “In Canada, we’ve been doing this for 50 years, but rather than expanding these programs, we’re putting a lid on them.”

"I wear my skirt as I like"

I've put several articles here before this one showing the increasing Islamophobia in European & North American countries. People, especially Muslims, always say here that there's no racism or religious discrimination & these are just conspiratorial stories. These discriminations last in pretty much all spheres of the society against every Muslims, or who appears to be a practicing Muslims. Sometimes, it feels like the societies are going back to the time, when Islam was a completely new religion in the world, & Muslim men & women were persecuted in Arabia.
 
By the way, one important piece of information the article doesn't mention but the video on the page does, is that the girl in question, did remove her scarf before entering the school, as per the French ban on religious clothing in public institutions.
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http://rt.com/news/254633-france-dress-ban-schoolgirl/

The public has reacted with a campaign in social networks called "I wear my skirt as I like" after a 15-year-old French Muslim girl was banned from her class for wearing a long skirt reflecting her religious affiliation.
 
The controversial incident happened in the northeastern French town of Charleville-Mezieres, where a schoolgirl named Sarah was sent home twice this month because of her “conspicuous” appearance: a long skirt which symbolizes her affiliation with Islam.
 
This incident caused a massive public outcry in social networks – especially on Twitter where hashtag ‪#‎JePorteMaJupeCommeJeVeux‬ ("I wear my skirt as I like" in English) became a trend.
 
Some users are disappointed with the current developments & blame the authorities for religious discrimination.

“French school bans long black skirts because they are not secular. Um, it’s fashion must have,” says one of campaigners.
 
Another one writes with irony: “Wondering if French president sent Michelle Obama home for wearing a long skirt.”

Some users resort to joking, trying to imagine who else may be banned in France because of a dubious clothing choice: Emma Watson, Elsa from the animation film “Frozen”, princess Leia Organa from “Star Wars”, or even… the Statue of Liberty?
 
Rachid Nekkaz, a political activist, told RT he wonders how the girl could break the law since there isn’t one in France that bans long skirts. According to Nekkaz, “there is a phobia going on in France, a deep fear & deep anger towards Muslims & Islam.” The activist also said "political elite & educational professionals in France need to say: ‘Enough is enough to all this hatred shown to Muslims & Islam!’ We have the historical example of the German government [Nazis] saying to its citizens that the problem in German society was Jews. I think we are approaching a similar situation in France right now.”

Sarah’s case is not an altogether rare occurrence. About 130 girls weren’t allowed to attend classes because of their clothes, the Telegraph reports. France prides itself as being a secular state & the law has banned Islamic headscarves, the Jewish kippa, or skullcap, large Christian crosses or any other "ostentatious sign of religion" at schools since 2004.
 
Recently the independent Council of Europe claimed that France has become more intolerant to ethnic minorities including Jews & Muslims. Studies on this had been conducted before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, which is why experts believe religious discrimination is a long-term trend in France.

 

Dieudonne M'bala M'bala charged with inciting terrorism

Dieudonne M'bala M'bala, 48, was in the dock at the Palais de Justice in central Paris charged with inciting terrorism, as prosecutors called for a fine equivalent to £22,000.
 
But the controversial entertainer denied any wrongdoing & said the case exposed the hypocrisy of a country which 'pretends' to be a bastion of free speech.
 
'Je suis Charlie' (I am Charlie) has since become the French government-backed rallying cry for those who support the magazine, but Dieudonne says this displays double-standards.

 

Dieudonne, who has convictions for anti-Semitism, said his humour was no different to Charlie Hebdo's.

 

He wrote: 'Tonight, as far as I'm concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly.'

 

The comedian told the court yesterday that he 'condemned the attacks without reservation & without any ambiguity'.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2940446/French-comedian-joked-Charlie-Hebdo-massacres-faces-22-000-fine-despite-claiming-condemned-attacks-without-reservation.html

France identifies its terrorism breeding grounds

As I have blogged in some of my previous blog posts that assimilation is a 2-way street. Most, if not all, countries of Northern & Western Europe, & North America, are being chosen by immigrants, from South Asia, Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, & even Middle East, as their new adopted home.
 
These immigrants come with so much hope & so many dreams to these countries. They all range from different backgrounds; religious, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, economic etc. But, once they land in these countries, they are relegated to the back of the society by the indigenous or born-nationals of that country. These immigrants are subjected to discrimination in education & jobs.
 
When these immigrants or their kids are sidelined by their new adopted country, regardless of how much they want to assimilate or love their new country, they grew hatred towards their new adopted country. And that time, they are easy to be radicalized & molded by people & organizations who can get them to do whatever these kids can do.
 
Blaming those kids or their families for not assimilating or hating their adopted country is not the solution to resolving the issue of uprooting criminality & terrorism out of the country. That blame unjustifiably will only radicalize those youths even more.
 
The solution is to provide education & jobs to these immigrants & kids; not doing them any favours, but based on objective merits. Then, immigrants can't complain if they don't get a certain job or degree, because they can see that they themselves don't posses the skills for those jobs. But, in reality, we see hurdles / demands which are clearly been put up to sideline these immigrants & their kids; networking, relevant work experience, education obtained from that country's institution (math is same everywhere, Newton's & Einstein's theories are same everywhere, Debits & Credits are same everywhere, in the world).
 
For example, in Canada, we can see in any major city that taxi / cab drivers are, overwhelmingly, South Asians. Once you start talking to them, you come to realize that most of them are quite educated; doctors, engineers, PhDs, CAs, MBAs etc, but they are told to bring Canadian education & experience to get any job in their field.
 
Their kids usually suffer almost similar fate. Since, they have Canadian education &, in most cases, work experience, too, they get better jobs than what their parents are able to do, but, not better than, the similarly educated & experienced Canadian counterpart. Compared to that born-Canadian (esp. a Caucasian), that immigrant's kid is actually underemployed. That's why, we see immigrants, esp. South Asians, Africans, & even Eastern Europeans, gather several designations & degrees to move up the corporate ladder, but only a few are able to do so.
 
Some people of these European & North American countries counter that why don't these immigrants leave their country, if their conditions are so bad. Where they are going to go? Back to their own country? They may not have any financial means to go back; spent all their money to get in their new adopted country in the hope of a better future. We all have heard stories of people scrounging money to pay to human smugglers to get into a country.
 
Those people, perhaps, can't go back to their own homeland. Most people love their homelands, but due to civil wars & terrorism, they are forced out of their homes in their homelands. We can't say to those people that it's their country's fault, because in most cases, those civil wars & terrorism & their governments' heavy-handedness is supported by these Western countries.
 
For example, take the example of Yemen & Egypt right now. Egypt arrested many of its citizens during Arab Spring demonstrations, & imprisoned them on false charges. Their ruler has the full blessing of Western countries & the government receives millions in aid from these Western countries. Yemenis are being killed by Saudi Arabian army. Saudi Arabia doesn't have any arms-manufacturing facilities in its own country. It buys all of its arms & weapons from US, Canada, & several European countries, including France, Germany, UK, Sweden etc. Those arms are also used by the country's rulers on their own citizens to subdue any dissidents & opponents. We all know this. So where will or can these immigrants go? They certainly can't go back their own countries.
 
So, the solutions are that either these Western countries stop arms selling to these corrupt countries in Asia, Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, Central & South America OR accept these immigrants in your countries with open arms & get them education & jobs, which they worked hard for & they rightly deserve.
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French counter-terrorism experts have identified 64 suburbs in dozens of cities that act as breeding grounds for Islamic extremism.
 
So-called 'ghettos' with high rates of youth unemployment, immigration and single-parent families, such as L'Ariane near Nice, have been linked to the radicalisation of young & vulnerable people.
 
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls last month admitted that the country had collapsed into social & ethnic 'apartheid' - the first time a senior politician has conceded that economic marginalisation & religious tensions have led to serious divides.
 
In total 64 French suburbs have been identified as breeding grounds for extremism, each of them sharing startling similar characteristics, according to Sky News.
 
Unemployment, for example, is on average 23% in the suburbs, rising to a staggering 45% among the young. Up to half of all families in the 64 suburbs also have just one parent.
 
For those lucky enough to have work, the average income is just €11,000 (£8,300) a year, leaving many with barely enough money to survive.
 
As many as 50% of those living in the suburbs are also first generation immigrants or their children, many of them having travelled to France from war-torn nations.
 
Such patterns of have now proved to the French leadership that vast swathes of the population are falling behind economically, resulting in ghettoised suburbs where mental & social attachment to France as a nation holds little sway, & where criminal & religious leaders often wield power.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2937879/France-identifies-terrorism-breeding-grounds-Ghettos-high-unemployment-large-numbers-single-parent-families-mainly-immigrants.html

The Palace of Shame that makes China angry

Good article. The West developed itself, in the past 500 or so years, primarily through the looting of treasures of inanimate objects & enslaving millions in the process. In many cases, they also occupied whole countries.

The West forced their way into several countries / kingdoms of yesteryear (South Asia, Latin America, North America, Africa, Australasia, Middle East) in the guise of "increasing trade & economy", then took over those lands through brutal means, kept it occupied for decades, & then after emptying the lands for whatever they were worth (all their treasures, financial & human capital), left the indigenous population fighting for scraps among themselves for decades to come. All this was going on, while, "civilized" society was ruling over "barbarians".

The Western countries still do the same thing by letting their companies force their way into their former occupied lands (developing countries) in the name of trade & taking advantage of weaker / corrupt governments of those countries (which are propped up by the West), then start plundering the mineral wealth of that country without ever properly compensating those countries, e.g. Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Uganda, Libya, Congo, Peru, Venezuela, Iraq etc.

When a good leader does come along in those former occupied lands, he/she asks for compensation, debt forgiveness, & reassesses all those contracts for mineral wealth being looted out of his/her country. Those leaders are scorned & the West tries to rile up a small minority of that country to create trouble for the that leader, e.g. Venezuela's late leader Chavez. Some other countries, like Greece, when asks for compensation for past wrongs, they are essentially told to go screw off, & "look to the future instead of past." When African countries, e.g. Congo asks for debt forgiveness, they are told that "a loan is a loan & has to be repaid", even though, that loan was essentially paid to a corrupt dictator, who was widely known that he was a corrupt dictator, but he kept getting the loans from international banks & monetary agencies.

How can the public & the honest governments of the developing countries ever trust the Western countries & their leaders, when the recent history of the world is replete with the West's dishonesty, lies, & exploitation of the developing countries with any means necessary?
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There is a deep, unhealed historical wound in the UK's relations with China - a wound that most British people know nothing about, but which causes China great pain. It stems from the destruction in 1860 of the country's most beautiful palace.

It's been described as China's ground zero - a place that tells a story of cultural destruction that everyone in China knows about, but hardly anyone outside.

The palace's fate is bitterly resented in Chinese minds & constantly resurfaces in Chinese popular films, angry social media debates, & furious rows about international art sales.

And it has left a controversial legacy in British art collections - royal, military, private - full of looted objects.

These days the site is just ruins - piles of scorched masonry, lakes with overgrown plants, lawns with a few stones scattered where many buildings once stood. The site swarms with Chinese visitors, taken there as part of a government-sponsored "patriotic education" programme.

As everyone in China is taught, it was once the most beautiful collection of architecture & art in the country. Its Chinese name was Yuanmingyuan - Garden of Perfect Brightness - where Chinese emperors had built a huge complex of palaces & other fine buildings, & filled them with cultural treasures.

A new digital reconstruction by a team at Tsinghua University gives a vivid idea of what this extraordinary place looked like when, 155 years ago, a joint British-French army approached Beijing.

The army was sent towards the end of the Opium Wars to force Chinese imperial rulers to open up their country further to Western trade & influence. In command on the British side was the 8th Earl of Elgin, from one of the most famous families in British imperial history.

French troops reached Beijing & the Summer Palace, where they began helping themselves to porcelain, silks & ancient books - or simply destroying what they found.

British troops joined in when they arrived shortly afterwards. "Officers and men seemed to have been seized with temporary insanity," said one witness. "In body & soul they were absorbed in one pursuit which was plunder, plunder."

Lord Elgin ordered the British troops to burn down the entire Summer Palace complex. The destruction, he wrote later, was intended "to mark, by a solemn act of retribution, the horror & indignation... with which we were inspired by the perpetration of a great crime".

I visited the current Lord Elgin, at his ancestral home in Scotland, to ask how he explained what had happened in 1860.

"There are things that perhaps you might have done differently," he says of his ancestor. "At the same time you've got to judge what was the feeling - intense feeling - at that particular moment."

China rejects such explanations.

"This is what they say to justify their actions," says Wang Daocheng, a leading Chinese scholar of these events. "That's the way they try to maintain the so-called moral high ground."

Soon after the Summer Palace's destruction in 1860, the 8th Earl of Elgin made a triumphant entry to the centre of Beijing, his procession symbolising British & Western domination - & Chinese humiliation.

China is also focusing increasingly on all the art that was looted by French & British forces - & taken to Europe. It was widely traded & still sits in all kinds of private & public collections.

"We're making a plan to start a series of actions to recover these antiques & get them back to China," says Niu Xianfeng, general director of the National Treasures Fund, affiliated to the Chinese Ministry of Culture.

"China will never give up the right to bring these looted or stolen treasures back."

Liu Yang, a researcher who has spent 15 years tracking down the artworks, says "British museums never reply" when he writes to ask what they have. But he has collected hundreds of images of looted items on his computer.

The Royal collection has several other items thought to be connected with the Beijing Summer Palace, including Chinese imperial sceptres, brass plaques & a mahogany screen.

The Wallace Collection in London has magnificent imperial vases from the palace.

British military museums have many items too. At the Royal Engineers' museum in Kent deputy curator James Scott showed me a beautiful jade ornament brought back from the 1860 campaign. There are also parts of a Chinese imperial throne acquired by the officer Charles Gordon - used for many decades as part of the furniture in the officers' mess.

Labelling these items is a sensitive matter. "We don't actually mention the word loot at all. We try to keep the interpretation as neutral as possible," says Scott.

Similar sensitivities are needed by auctioneers, who can make huge profits when items originally taken from the Summer Palace are re-sold today. Proof of their origin as part of the Chinese imperial collection - such as inscriptions by made by the soldiers who looted them - hugely increases their potential value.

Some newly wealthy Chinese have bid for such items. But having to pay for art that was stolen - as many Chinese see it - causes increasing resentment.

And what of the Elgin family? Does today's Lord Elgin think art should be returned to China?

"It's a very good arguing point" he concedes. But "the beauty of something is inherent in it wherever it happens to be".

"These things happen," he says of the 1860 events. "It's important to go ahead, rather than look back all the time."

The French, who joined in the looting of the palace, have been more open about their regret. "We call ourselves civilised & them barbarians," wrote the outraged author, Victor Hugo, about the destruction of the Summer Palace. "Here is what Civilisation has done to Barbarity."

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30810596

Picking sides in the fight for France

But some do follow the call. Often it’s people who feel some affinity, Muslims born or converted, often with, at first, only a shaky grasp of the Quran’s content.
 
Economic conditions may also have some effect. Long-term unemployment has been high for a generation in France, has increased sharply since 2009, & hits hardest in the largely Muslim “zones urbaines sensibles” (ZUS), hundreds of problem neighbourhoods targeted for special government intervention. Successive studies ...of these ZUS neighbourhoods show that their populations are shrinking only very slowly, while economic conditions rapidly deteriorate. It’s hard to escape the feeling, living in these desolate neighbourhoods on the outskirts of big cities, that France has no interest in seeing you get out.

 
One 2011 survey of ZUS residents found that almost 90% of descendants of immigrants living there agreed with the statement, “I feel French.” But when the question was whether they were perceived as French, the number fell to 67%. Among descendants of Moroccan & Tunisian immigrants the number shrinks to 40%. It’s a big problem when many thousands of a country’s most economically vulnerable citizens feel their affection for France is unrequited.
 
Of course, money doesn’t explain everything. “The socio-economic correlation is valid for many,” Amellal said, “but it has its limits.”

What binds them loosely together is a blanket rejection of everything modern societies seem to value. Amellal calls them “electrons that become free, that completely break with society. It’s not hate, it’s a rejection of everything that makes the system: elites, politics, but also values, the Republic, secularism. Of course, Charlie Hebdo was an extraordinary symbol of all of that. Extraordinary.”

The Muslims of France are there. They have spent their lives in France, learned its history & its pop culture, & in most cases want nothing more than to participate in France’s still sorely unrealized potential.
 
The polarizing effect of the attacks isn’t over. The murders forced everyone in France to pick a side. Most—not all but most—French Muslims are happy & eager to pick freedom’s side. It would be tragic if nobody in power dared listen to them.

http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/picking-sides-in-the-fight-for-france/

 

Creating Second-class Citizens