generalspeaking

Humanitarian Sweden

"Back in 1975, the year when politicians decided that Sweden was to become multicultural, the Swedish population stood at 8,208,442. By 2014 it had grown to 9,743,087 -- an increase of 18.7%. This growth is entirely due to immigration, as Swedish women on average give birth to 1.92 children compared to the 2.24 average of immigrant women. One should, however, keep in mind that in the statistics, second-generation immigrants are counted as Swedes."
"Sweden's recent population growth is without parallel. Never before in the country's history has the number of inhabitants increased so fast. Sweden is now the fastest growing country in Europe."
"Over the past 10-15 years, immigrants have mainly come from Muslim countries such as Iraq, Syria and Somalia. Might this mass influx explain Sweden's rape explosion? It is difficult to give a precise answer, because Swedish law forbids registration based on people's ancestry or religion. One possible explanation is that, on average, people from the Middle East have a vastly different view of women and sex than Scandinavians have. And despite the attempts by the Swedish establishment to convince the population that everyone setting foot on Swedish soil becomes exactly like those who have lived here for dozens of generations, facts point in an altogether different direction."
Ingrid Carlqvist and Lars Hedegaard, Gatestone Institute

Sweden's transition to a haven for Muslim emigrants from countries of the Middle East and North Africa, has led to its almost complete transformation. The customs and practises of an entirely alien population have been mass-imported into a formerly homogeneous society. And now it is the indigenous population of Sweden who appear to be the aliens, crowded out by the presence of an often-hostile enclave where Muslims now resent the presence of Swedes among them, and if they happen to be Jews, the threats are very real.

If Sweden had decided to welcome people fleeing conflict and the general unrest with violence in the Middle East, it is amazing that they failed to focus on the plight of the most vulnerable of those people; Christians, Yazidis, Kurds eager to escape the existential threats they live under in the malign presence of oppressive Muslims who deem them disposable human beings. At the very least, the focus could have been on women, women and children, and families. Instead, the vast majority taken in appear to be men and mostly young men.

And then there are people streaming in from Afghanistan. Like the family of eleven people with their 106-old grandmother, Bibihal Uzbeki, a frail, disabled women whose son and grandson exercised enormous physical effort to carry her out of Afghanistan to a hoped-for opportunity for a new life in Europe. And whom, most unfortunately, the Swedish Migration Agency chose to turn down her request for asylum.

106-year old Afghan refugee Bibihal Uzbeki lies in bed in Hova, Sweden, on Sept. 3, 2017. David Keyton—AP

"[They had ] taken a decision regarding an expulsion in the case; generally speaking, high age does not in itself provide grounds for asylum", the Migration Agency had elaborated when questioned about this decision, that the family attempted to hide from their grandmother who, when they finally informed her, evidently suffered a stroke as her health began to deteriorate from the stress it caused to be told she was not welcome there.

"My sisters were crying. My grandmother asked, 'Why are you crying'?'
"If I knew who was the enemy [in Afghanistan], I would have just avoided them."
Mohammed Uzbeki, Bibihal's grandson

Evidently many European countries routinely deny asylum to Afghans coming from areas of the country that the Europeans deem to be safe. "The reasoning from the migration agency is that it's not unsafe enough in Afghanistan", explained Sanna Vestin, head of the Swedish Network of Refugee Support Groups. 

And Mohammed Uzbeki acknowledges the difficulty in proving his family would face a specific enemy if they were all to be expelled from Sweden. They are all awaiting word whether or not their asylum applications will be accepted or rejected. Those whose applications are rejected may appeal, a lengthy process for their applications in various stages of appeal, apart from the rejection of the grandmother's application.

Mohammed cites the presence of the Islamic State group, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Pakistan Haqqani network and suicide bombers all of which present to him and his family ample reason why they fear returning to their country of birth when they would much prefer remaining where they are, in the small village of Hova, in central Sweden. They had lived in temporary exile in Iran, but Iran, a Muslim country, failed to offer them permanent security.

106-year-old Afghan refugee Bibihal Uzbeki rests in bed attended by her son Mohammadollah and daughter-in-law Ziba, in Hova, Sweden, on Sept. 3, 2017.  David Keyton—AP

On the other hand, perhaps they have arrived in a country whose dangers eerily reflect those of Afghanistan, as pointed out in this recent article on gang violence in Sweden which fails to mention that Malmo in particular has been overrun by Muslim immigrants. Typically, the language of such events is delicately evasive of mentioning any involvement of Muslims in gangs and violent incidents:

"In 2016, some 250 shootings (random, fatal and non-fatal) were registered by police in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. In 2014, that number came to 200, indicating that Sweden is experiencing a drastic rise in such incidents."
"We don’t really know why yet, but what we can see is that the increase comes as we also see a rise in gang-related crimes and a growing number of criminal networks,” Manne Gerell, a criminologist at Malmö University, told The Local, after Swedish public radio first wrote about new research he is involved in."
"One study which is yet to be published suggests that Sweden experienced four to five times as many fatal shootings per capita as Norway and Germany in 2008-2014, two otherwise similar countries. Previous figures have shown that deadly violence in general is going down in Sweden, but gun violence has gone up."
Gerell also singled out Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, as the one place where shootings are becoming particularly common."
"Malmö stands out,” he said, noting that the southern city is somewhat more exposed to social problems and poverty in comparison to both the capital and Gothenburg."
The Local, Swedish news

 

Labels: Family, Human Relations, Immigration, Muslims, Sweden

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, September 05, 2017

No! Really?!

"We have so many more men than women. Serious social problems, such as rape and assaults will happen if men cannot find wives. But it doesn't have to be like that if they are given choices."
"No one is forcing anyone to accept 'one wife, many husbands'."
"With so many guanggun ['bare branches': unattached males], women are in short supply and their value increases. The guanggun problem is actually a problem of income. High income men can find a woman because they can pay a higher price."
"What about low-income men? One solution is to have several take a wife together. That's not just my weird idea. In some remote, poor places, brothers already marry the same woman."

Xie Zuoshi, professor of Finance Economics, Zhejing University, China

"Men are publicly debating how to allocate women, as though women were commodities like houses or cars."
"Behind the imbalanced sex ratio of 30 million bachelors lie 30 million baby girls who died due to sex discrimination. But somehow everyone's still crying that some men can't find wives."
Zheng Churan, feminist activist

Well, it is a problem for the world's most populous country. It is, moreover, a problem that the country brought on itself, more or less. In a bid to slow down the expanse of naturally occurring population increase, the government enacted laws forbidding families to have more than one child. And since, in China, as in the second most-populous country in the world India, boy babies are considered to be more desirable than girl babies, such babies were often sacrificed, left to die so another opportunity for pregnancy might result in a boy being born.

With more modern techniques available to determine the sex of an unborn child through an ultrasound, a family can choose to abort, and try again. So when Zheng Churan accuses her society of sacrificing a like number of girls, to the number of young men failing to find a marriage partner, her acerbic prod on society's conscience knows of what it speaks. Even so, it is unlikely to make much of a difference to a society's cultural preferences long engrained and practised.

Sex-selection abortions will continue, even though Beijing has lifted the sanction on more than one child. In the countryside, on farms, in any event, there was a more relaxed version of the one-child policy, and still the selection toward boys remained in practise. And ironically enough, the very same families that selected for a son as opposed to daughter now moan and groan that their adult son is unable to find a wife due to the shortage of marriageable women.


When opportunity knocks, opportunists will open the door. If young women whose scarcity makes them rare objects of desire decide it is in their best interests to accept a proposal from a well-heeled suitor as opposed to a young man with few future economic prospects to speak of, practicality will always win out; or at least most often. The situation of simple supply-and-demand that economist Xie Zuoshi wrote of, did not sit well with most Chinese.

His blog post resulted in a storm of criticism, despite the National Bureau of Statistics revealing that 116 boys are born in China for every100 girls. Which meant that in 2014 about 700 million males were born in mainland china, but 667 million females. The continued disparity is significant, and it remains to be seen whether the more relaxed child policy issued by Beijing will indeed translate at some future date to an more even distribution of the sexes.

Labels: China, Controversy, Family, Human Relations

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Religious Sociopaths

"If the current planning policies continue to be as they have, there will be no need for an election in 2018 because the ultra-Orthodox will already be a clear majority. There is a constant undercurrent of tension, and the more the ultra-Orthodox grow, the more influence they wield in city hall, the more we feel uncomfortable.
Daniel Goldman, Orthodox Judaic religious activist, Beit Shemesh, Israel

"Even if they need to have a re-vote at one or two ballot boxes, the results will stay the same. The city will stay the same city. There is room for everyone. ... I build for everyone. Those who will try to distort my image will face stiff resistance."
Mayor Moshe Abutbul, ultra-Orthodox Judaism, Beit Shemesh

"They've taken over and got funding from the government to build new buildings while I can't pay for my mortgage. But we are not going to give up. It's going to be a war."
Avi Vakhnin, Beit Shemesh merchant

Israel was originally founded as a secular society, a homeland for all Jews, and its first governments were socialist-oriented, under the Labour Party. Collaboration and cooperation, an attitude of collegiality, sweetness-and-light does not necessarily, however prevail, simply because the country is a Jewish one, primarily.

Apart from the presence of a sizeable population of Palestinian Arabs, Christians, Kurds and others, Jews themselves, of varying persuasions and origins and cultures don't get along swimmingly, unfortunately. And for a country that is secular-based, separating government from religion; that hasn't worked out too well, either.

The ultra-Orthodox represent quite a small demographic, relatively speaking. They invoke special privileges not granted to other segments of the country. They have been exempt from mandatory military duty, their penchant for biblical study rather than working for a living, earns them a hefty welfare cheque enabling them to have plentiful broods of children, and despite representing a minority they exert power in the Knesset.

Their political presence may be relatively small, but Israel's system of representational government breeds a myriad of political parties, so that a majority government representing one party is difficult to attain. With the requirement of acquiring the support of other, smaller parties, the ultra-Orthodox parties often, in agreeing to support a minority government to give it clout and staying power, exerts undue pressure to see their agenda in action.

And ultra-Orthodox Jews who represent about ten percent of the Jewish population of Israel have very large families. This is the power of the cradle, that the State supports families living on welfare and giving birth to increased numbers of children, while themselves proffering little to benefit the entire society.

Israel sees an obligation to support these welfare recipients because of their high birth rate, enlarging the Jewish proportion of the population and also on the basis that they represent Judaism at its religious core. They have, therefore, influence beyond all measures of their proportion in size within the Jewish community.

And they are inordinately authoritarian and entitled, feeling themselves immensely superior in any measure to those who are less religious than they, let alone the larger secular population. "I really feel like they) the ultra-Orthodox) are trying to conquer our city. It's not 'live and let live'. They are pushing us out", claimed a woman whose family originated in Morocco, and who has lived her entire life in Beit Shemesh.

A contentious mayoral election between ultra-Orthodox and secular candidates, rivals for the position of mayor, has divided the city of 100,000 west of Jerusalem. The population is split almost equally between secular and ultra-Orthodox. It represents a plurality of types; secular, modern Orthodox, Russian, American immigrants, Jews of MidEast descent, historically coexisting peacefully.

With rising tensions and frictions, however. The secular maintain a separate existence from the ultra-Orthodox to maintain their separatedness. And they resent that the mayor has chosen to neglect their needs. Promising to build a sports stadium, a cultural centre and a library, but in reality declining to follow through, and deciding instead to place resources and construction projects almost exclusively within his own community.

Now they claim that the mayor who is ultra-Orthodox favours those area of the city that reflect his own sect, while ignoring the needs of all other residents. The incumbent mayor, just re-elected, is accused of mismanagement. There are claims of fraud, ballots damaged and disqualified, and residents whose identification is questionable, suspected of having attempted to vote repeatedly. The result being a call for a new election.

What is occurring in Beit Shemesh is reflected in other areas of the country. The high birth rates of the ultra-Orthodox have resulted in their increasingly larger presence in society. They are as much a burden on society as they are a credit to it. In neighbourhoods where they vastly predominate they place signage insisting on separation of the sexes on the sidewalks. "Modesty patrols" are dispatched to enforce chaste female appearance. Stones are hurled at offenders.

Two years ago, an eight-year-old girl was assaulted by ultra-Orthodox extremists, one man spitting on her, calling her a whore for her "immodest" dress, while strolling through their neighbourhood. She was, in fact, a resident, on her way to school. Needless to say, the child was traumatized. And the publicity garnered from the affair shed no kindly light on her assaulters.

Labels: Extremism, Family, Israel, Judaism

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, November 02, 2013

Portuguese Roma?

"I'm still having trouble sleeping, it was a horrifying sight, seeing this little girl in her own excrement, not able to hold up her head, white as a sheet.
"We were deeply shocked because she didn't find this abnormal. We told her to remove the little girl [from the trunk] and give her something to drink right away."
Guillaume Iguacel, mechanic

Seems it might be time to give Europe's Roma a break. They raise their children in poverty, vulnerable to degraded living conditions and the contempt of the general society which views them as expendable, not fit for genteel company. Deserving of their state of unemployed welfare-seeking. A society and a culture whose customs and values are not fit to mingle with decent people.

Where the greater society suspects child abduction and human trafficking if a dark-hued mother is seen with a light-skinned child. A condition that clearly marks the adult as a criminal, and the child needing rescue from the malevolent keep of the only family she has ever known, to be taken from the parents who love her. Even if albinism created a genetic inheritance of light skin, or a child was given to parents whose biological parents pleaded for them to care for her.

In giving the Roma a temporary break from accusations, perhaps it's time to mark all Portuguese as cruelly child-abusing. Since a Portuguese mother of  three children, two boys aged nine and ten, and a four-year-old girl, also gave birth to a fourth child. Whom she decided -- on giving birth on her own, without, she claims, her husband suspecting she was pregnant -- not to produce; to hide, and where else than the trunk of the family car.

There she kept the baby, unclothed, uncovered, unloved and neglected, never taking it out of the car trunk for any reason.  "The car always stayed outside at night so if the little girl was inside it, we didn't see anything" said one neighbour in the couple's village of Brignac-la-Plaine, Correze, in France.

The condition of the child was discovered by automobile mechanics who were repairing the vehicle. Hearing strange noises from the trunk that the mother claimed were emanating from "toys" in the vehicle, they insisted on opening the trunk. And there they saw a small, dehydrated, feverish child, naked, lying in excrement she had extruded.

They called paramedics who took the two-year-old child to a hospital. "It appears that the child had been hidden from her birth, and even worse is seriously retarded", explained the prosecutor in nearby Brive-La-Gaillarde. The child's height, weight and mental development did not reflect normal conditions, appropriate to her chronological age. Nor can she speak. "It's a situation that defies the imagination", he said.

How can it be wondered that the child hasn't developed normally  -- physically, mentally. The baby had no exposure to normal child care, no opportunities to develop normally. If the child survives its ordeal it is possible that at her age steps can still be taken to encourage normal growth and human development.

She may be somewhat retarded in development, it may take awhile, but it is still possible that with the love and attention and emotional investment of a caring family she will develop. Unsurprisingly the couple's other three children have been taken into care.

The father, the mother claimed, was kept in the dark about the presence of the baby in the car trunk. Knowing nothing of her birth or of her presence, or her condition. An unemployed builder whom the mother appeared not to want to burden with the reality of another mouth to feed. So while the child may have been fed, it would not have been generously.

One must ask of the intelligence, the emotional stability, the psychological state of a woman who could endure the very thought of depriving a helpless child of comfort, warmth, love and care. The police were unable to question the father when he was taken into custody, since they claim him to have been inebriated.

"We didn't have much contact with them. She barely said hello, and they didn't really want to integrate into the neighbourhood. How could we have known?" said a pensioner living opposite the couple. How indeed....

Clearly, the Portuguese have much to answer for....

Labels: Bigotry, Child Abuse, Child Welfare, Family, Human Relations

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, October 30, 2013

A Horribly Troubled Place

"The man handed himself in and is in custody now. I think he is not mentally fit but we are questioning him."
Col. Isak Ali Abdulle, Somalian Police Force

"He had some health problems, but he had no mental problems.
"They were born in Kenya, but they were Canadian because the father was Canadian."
Qadro Addawe, Mogadishu

In Somalia, police have arrested 60-year-old Omar Hassan. He is the father of 11, 9, 7 and 6-year-old children. Their mother is 29-year-old Qadro Addawe. Their children, explained Ms. Addae, had never been to Canada. Their father had emigrated to Canada 30 years before. And presumably visited from time to time, explaining the birth of the four children.

The four boys, according to their mother, were beheaded by their father. She has no idea why. As far as she is concerned, no motive for the father of their four boys existed for him to destroy their lives. Let alone so gruesomely. Their bodies were found near a village, according to a regional police commissioner, and were buried.

The killings were said to have taken place in the central town of Beledweyne, about 330 kilometres north of Somalia's capital Mogadishu. Her husband Hassan, said Ms. Addawe, was a taxi driver in Calgary. He had returned home to Somalia a few months earlier.

"The community is very sad about it. It's unheard of", said Mohamed Jama, president of the Somali Canadian Society of Calgary, who pointed out that neither he nor others in their group knew Hassan.

Beheadings are certainly not unknown in Somalia. They are particularly favoured by Islamists. It is the way that the American journalist Daniel Pearl met his death.

The viciously Islamist group al-Shabab, associated with al-Qaeda, practise beheading those they are particularly not fond of. So it is not 'unknown' in Somalia. What is unknown is why a father would do such a horrible thing to his four young children.

Labels: Atrocities, Child Abuse, Crime, Family, Somalia

posted by Pieface @ Friday, October 04, 2013

The Irony of Hypocrisy

"Three years ago I was a single workaholic, travelling the globe with an amazing job at the U.S. State Department. I could not have imagined how much my life would change in three short years.
"For years I spent my professional life at the back of the room, far from the stage or the microphone. I kept my personal life private, even as the people I was close to lived in the public eye. But all that changed two years ago and Anthony and I have spent these past few years working through the very private challenges we faced on a very public stage. So when people tell me they're surprised to see me out on the campaign trail, I understand because, trust me, no one is more surprised than I am. 
"So why am I doing this? Because Anthony has always been a smart, caring, and dedicated person, and while he's the same public servant who wants what's best for the people he represents, he is now something else -- a better man. New Yorkers will have to decide for themselves whether or not to give him a second chance. I had to make that same decision for myself, for my son, for our family. And I know in my heart that I made the right one."
Huma Abedin, New York City

Kathy Willens/The Associated Press

Now what's a smart, beautiful young woman with personal ambition doing standing steadfastly alongside someone like her husband, Anthony Weiner who appears functionally incapable of reining in his adolescent hormones, anxious to share his sexuality with any woman who might conceivably find him as irresistible as he believes himself to be? His wife, Huma, admittedly has a mentor, yet another intelligent woman no longer young, but who also famously chose to stand by her man.

Even when as he so often occasioned to release his imposed inhibitions sufficiently to allow himself to step out of his adult persona to take on that of an arrested juvenile, besotted with his ego and charm so enticing to women prepared to surrender their dignity and their bodies for the brevity of satisfying his appetite. Ms. Abedin has worked for years alongside Hillary Clinton, and was an invaluable assistant to her when she held the post of Secretary of State. She has been around, she knows politics.

And she knows, without a shadow of a doubt that what she wrote for Harper's Bazaar, repeated above, is pure claptrap, useful propaganda for her husband's mayoral campaign for the New York City campaign. Ruefully, for no woman willingly seeks to forgivingly overlook a husband's infidelities when she knows by experience that they will be repeated, despite interregnums of tearful apology, and repeated yet again.

Anthony Weiner's flaunting of his belief of self as super-stud Carlos Danger, and his mock regret for political advantage in meeting the forgiving acceptance of New York voters is a telling tale of the sordidness of politics in an era of lost expectations of character. "I love him, I have forgiven him, I believe in him", pledged his wife courageously, willing to soldier on and permit the man who fathered her son to teach him how to be a good boy and then a responsible adult.

She must know, because women in these circumstances do know, that what her errant husband needs is a sound spanking and to be sent up to his bedroom without dinner to think deeply about his lack of remorse and his inability to school himself away from a salacious addiction that enhances his life far more than the willingness to become a dependable and loving companion to a woman who deserves just that, and a child who requires a father he can model himself after.

Labels: Family, Fidelity, Human Relations, Hypocrisy, Sexism, Social Failures, United States

posted by Pieface @ Friday, July 26, 2013