Open Minded Realism

This video shows a timeline of battles fought and territory acquired by Islam from 620 – 1880, and it also shows the same type of battle and territory timeline for the Christian Crusades which lasted from 1080 – 1100.

The video shows that the Crusades were a relatively minor occurrence compared to the overall Islamic expansion since Muhammad’s death.

The following is a partial transcript from the video:

“Now we can talk about some facts.  Yes, there were Crusades, but they ended centuries ago, but Jihad is being practiced today.  Jihad has been with us for 1,400 years.  There is no comparison between Jihad and the Crusades, certainly not a moral comparison.  And when you are looking at Crusades, remember in one sense all crusades were defensive wars.  Why?  As we saw in the first Jihad map, it was Islam that came out of Arabia and conquered the middle east— a Christian middle east.  And so the Crusaders were trying to free their Christian brothers and sisters from Jihad.  So there is no moral comparison at all.  The motivation of the Crusaders was to free Christians, and the purpose of Jihad was to enslave the Kaffir.  So the next time you hear someone talk about those ‘dreadful Crusades’, you’ve seen some facts about the matter.  Why don’t you pipe up and tell them, ‘you know, you don’t really know the matter’.”

This list of battles is linked to on the video page.

Also see this article about the issue.

The following information is summarized from this Express UK article: 

A migrant from Algeria who attacked two female police officers with a machete in Belgium earlier this month had already been attempted to be deported twice, according to local officials.

The man attacked the two women outside the police station in Charleroi on August 6, lunging and hacking at their heads with a machete while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”  One of the victims received severe facial wounds but they have been described to be not life threatening.  The other officer was less seriously injured.  The attacker was shot in the chest by a third officer and later died.

Police said the suspect was known to authorities for “minor common” offenses but had no known terrorist connections.

Belgium twice tried to deport the man but authorities claim that it is not known how he was able to stay in the country.

Watch a news broadcast of Muslims rioting in the streets of Sydney, Australia in 2012 protesting a film that was posted on YouTube that mocked their Prophet Muhammad.

Also see a Wikipedia page ab0ut the incident. 

A school district in Anne Arundel County, Maryland is implementing extreme policies of catering to transsexual students, including having school teachers and administrators being ordered not to tell parents when transexual males bunk with girls on overnight field trips.

The policies are detailed in a training video which explains how to support transexual students, including specifying regulations about privacy issues which prevent the school district from informing parents about such arrangements.

From the video (below):

“So, many of you might be asking yourselves, ‘So I’m at an overnight field trip, and I have student who’s biologically a male, identifies as a female, and we’ve worked with that student and her family, and that student wants to sleep in the dorms, or whatever sleeping arrangements are, with the females,’” Mr. Mosier says in a video of the training session. “‘They don’t want to sleep in a room by themselves, [sic] they want to sleep with the rest of the females. So what do we do?’”

“And the answer is, they sleep with the females,” he said. “That’s not the easy answer; it’s the right answer. And in some cases, it’s going to cause issues, because … the private information piece doesn’t allow you to share that with parents of all of the other campers. Right? So that’s difficult.”

(Note: relevant portion of the video begins at 27:50)

From the original New American article: 

The June training session was given in response to the May Obama administration order dictating that schools should allow students to use whatever bathrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities they wish, in accordance with their self-professed “gender identity.” The order was justified based on Title IX, and that Anne Arundel County and other localities are submitting to it indicates that not only don’t they understand the science behind the “gender” agenda, but they don’t even understand its terminology.

The Times tells us that two “coalitions of states, totaling 24 in all, have sued the administration over the mandate,” prompting a federal judge in Texas on Sunday to grant “a preliminary injunction blocking the edict’s implementation nationwide.” And rightfully so. …

(See the original article for additional aspects of this issue..)

Despite the American working class being devastated by the loss of good paying factory jobs, actual manufacturing output of the United States has doubled in the previous three decades.

The following information is summarized from this CBS Marketwatch article: 

— Manufacturing still the largest sector of the U.S. economy — The U.S. is second only to China as a manufacturing leader, and manufacturing companies account for 77% of what the private sector spends and research and development each year.

— Manufacturing output in the U.S. is near a record high — U.S. factories produce twice as much as they did in 1984, but with one-third fewer workers.

— Refined oil is America’s top manufactured good — While crude oil often comes from other countries, refining the oil into products such as gasoline and fuel oil are America’s top manufactured product with $700 billion in sales per year, four times as much as the No. 2 product of light trucks.  America’s other top manufactured products in order are pharmaceuticals, airplanes, automobiles, iron and steel, animal slaughtering, plastics, organic chemicals, and petrochemicals.

“Most Americans now work in service-producing industries, where inequalities in opportunities, skills and incomes are more apparent. Recreating an economy that provides equitable growth won’t be easy, especially if we pine for the good old days when a third of us worked at the factory.”

This video entitled “Is Israel an Apartheid State?”, narrated by Dennis Prager, explores the question of if Israel actually is an “Apartheid State” as some people claim that it is.

Following are points that are made in the video:

— When South Africa was an Apartheid state, no one accused Israel of being one.  The reason that charge was never made then, and shouldn’t be made now is because there is no truth to it, as the following points explain.

— 1.5 Million Arabs live in Israel, constituting about 20% of the population and having the same exact rights as all Israeli citizens, and they always have had those rights.  They can vote, they serve in the Israeli parliament, they can own property, businesses, and work in whatever profession they want including as judges.

— As an example of the amount of diversity in the country, Prager explains that an Arab Judge once sentenced a former President of Israel to prison on a rape charge. Many other examples of well known non-Jewish Arab citizens are mentioned as well.

— All of the road signs in Israel are written in English, Hebrew, and Arabic.

— Arabs in Israel are freer than any Arab in the Arab world.  No Arab in any Arab country has the civil rights and personal liberties that Arabs in Israel have.  That is because Israel is the only pluralistic, liberal democracy in that part of the world.

— Palestinians who live in the “occupied territories” are not citizens in Israel, and they are governed by either the Palestinian authority or Hamas instead of Israel.  The only control Israel has over their lives is when those people want to enter Israel, where they are subjected to long lines and strict searches due to terrorist concerns.

— The security wall around Israel cannot realistically be considered “apartheid” because it serves as the border of the nation rather than causing divisions within the country.

— Israel is called an “apartheid state” by those who hate Israel because by comparing it to the former South Africa they hope to persuade uninformed people that Israel doesn’t deserve to exist.

— Polls show that 82% of Israeli-Arabs would rather be a citizen of Israel than of any other country.

[Note: March 15, 2020— I have revamped the text of this article.]

(Note: I don’t think Israel is innocent, but this documentary is food for thought.  Often people blame the problems of the world on “Zionism” when in fact Zionism is controlled by the global elite just like all major religions.)

This video talks about an annual event that occurs at Western universities called “Israel apartheid week,” which is a protest supported by the Muslim Students Association that is designed to deceitfully portrait Israel as a homicidal state that occupies Palestine and oppresses its people, and also it portrays Israel as a state that does not legitimately exist.

The Muslim Students Association is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is also the creator of Hamas, the terrorist party that rules the Gaza strip.

The founder of Hamas Mahmoud Al-Zahar said, “There is no place for you [Jews] among us, and you have no future among the nations of the world.  You are headed to annihilation.”

The armies of Hamas along with Hezbollah have fired thousands of rockets supplied by Iran and Syria into Israeli towns.

In America, the allies of Hamas and Hezbollah have organized the national university campaigns against the Jewish state that are designed to isolate and demonize Israel, and a parallel campaign has been organized to boycott Israel’s products.

Despite that fact that Israel is the most tolerant and inclusive society in the Middle east, the university Apartheid week events have created a “wall of lies” on the campuses symbolizing supposed Israeli “apartheid.”  This video examines the specific claims that are made a the events and explains the reality of the situations.

(See the video for the specific claims.)

This information has been summarized from this Breitbart article:

A new antisemitic pop song broadcast on Palestinian Authority television celebrates Palestinians being a “thorn in the throat of Zionism” and giving Israel “a taste of grief.”

The song which was translated by the Israeli watchdog group “Palestinian Media Watch (PMW)” promotes violence against Israelis, at one point singing, “We swear in the name of the prisoners, in place of one [prisoner], here are ten!”, implying that the number of prisoners will increase tenfold due to their increase of violent acts.

The video depicts solidarity of Muslims from all regions inside Israel as well as Palestine implying that all should rise up against Israel.

Following is a transcript of the song:

We are not afraid of the enemy – a thorn in the throat of Zionism!
Palestinians – We are! We are!
The people of Jerusalem – We are! We are!
The people of Jenin – We are! We are! …
The people of Gaza…
The people of Jaffa – We are! We are!
The people of Haifa – We are! We are!
The people of Lod – We are! We are!
The people of Ramle
The people of Acre – We are! We are!
The people of Nazareth – We are! We are! …
We swear in the name of the prisoners
In place of one [prisoner], here are ten
We have given them [Israelis] a taste of grief
We have given them a taste of grief – a thorn in the throat of Zionism!

Carlos University and the University of Ottawa hosted an annual “Israel Apartheid Week” in Ottawa in 2010 protesting the treatment of Palestinians by comparing the situation to the Apartheid that South Africa had practiced in the past.

This news broadcast shows a debate between the organizer of the event Ben Saifer who is a Jewish pro-Palestinian activist, and Marvin Kurz who is a spokesperson for the B’nai Brith organization.

Following is text from the YouTube page:

According to a report of the French senate, 2800 churches across the country, many of them centuries old, will be demolished as restoration costs exceed the cost of demolitions over the next years.  This church, Église Saint-Jacques d’Abbeville, a Neo-Gothic masterpiece in Abbeville, Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie dating back to 1868, was demolished for a total cost of 350,000€ in 2013.  The reasoning: It was much cheaper to demolish it than it would cost to restore.

As the number of Frenchmen in France continues to decline due to record-low birth rates, high emigration and Muslim immigration, so do the members of Catholic faith, who are now at an all time low.  For many cities in France, especially cities in which Christians are the minority, the lack of interest and high property value on which the buildings stand simply does not justify the cost of restoring the churches.  Many mayors choose the cheaper demolitions over costly restorations.  Thousands of churches are to be demolished over the next years and replaced with shopping malls, stores, apartments or parking lots.

Mosques, on the other hand, flourish.  The Grand Mosque of Paris recently got a modern, fully retractable roof, as it is usually only found in football stadiums and hundreds of new Mosques are built every year for the hundreds of thousands of new Muslims born or immigrating into French society, often with taxpayer money.

German source:  http://www.katholisches.info/2013/09/01/umbau-der-kulturlandschaft-2800-kirchen-sollen-in-frankreich-verschwinden/