New Surveillance Tool Could Give Law Enforcement Access To All Public Cameras

Computer scientists at Purdue University have created a new tool which could potentially allow law enforcement to access any camera that is not password protected.

Researchers with Purdue University are developing a system which could soon allow law enforcement officers to access any public camera system. The tool is designed to help law enforcement determine where and how to respond to crime. The development of the tool was first reported by WIRED:

The system, which is just a proof of concept, alarms privacy advocates who worry that prudent surveillance could easily lead to government overreach, or worse, unauthorized use. It relies upon two tools developed independently at Purdue. The Visual Analytics Law Enforcement Toolkit superimposes the rate and location of crimes and the location of police surveillance cameras. CAM2 reveals the location and orientation of public network cameras, like the one outside your apartment.

As WIRED notes, search engines like Shodan currently allow users to access camera feeds from around the world, but CAM2 would make the process much easier. However, David Ebert, an electrical and computer engineer at Purdue University, says CAM2 is simply a “way to help people take advantage of information that’s out there.”

Currently, Purdue University limits access to the system to registered users, and also requires users to agree to terms of service which state “you agree not to use the platform to determine the identity of any specific individuals contained in any video or video stream.” How exactly this agreement would be enforced if CAM2 goes live is yet to be determined and that is what makes privacy advocates extremely worried about potential for abuse.

“I can certainly see the utility for first responders,” says Dave Maass, a researcher with digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But it does open up the potential for some unseemly surveillance.”

CAM2 will not allow users access to private camera feeds, but Gautam Hans, policy counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told WIRED there’s no way of knowing when someone violates the terms of service and targets an individual. How exactly government regulation could limit access to this data is also unknown. The system is yet another reminder that the expectation of privacy that most Americans have grown accustomed to is quickly becoming a relic of past generations.

Fortunately, the system is not yet publicly available. Unfortunately, there are many other tools available which allow law enforcement to peer into your private lives and conversations. Just weeks ago, Activist Post reported on Phoenix resident Brian Clegg and his concern about a box he witnessed being installed on a power pole. Clegg said the box was facing his house and he believed it may have had cameras inside. The pole was owned by Arizona’s largest power provider, SRP, who claimed no one had permission to put the box on their pole. Brian Clegg says shortly afterwards SRP sent a crew to remove the box. It was later discovered that the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives (ATF), a branch of the U.S. Department of Justice, installed the box as part of an ongoing investigation. Officials with the ATF would not provide details about their alleged investigation and would not confirm if they were conducting surveillance in the area.

The ATF is not the only federal agency involved with planting surveillance equipment in public. AP recently reported on a former special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s blowing the whistle about the bureau’s practice of installing microphones in public places, including trees, courthouses, and bus stops.

There is also the issue of the FBI’s attempt to suppress information about a massive database which contains fingerprints, palm prints, iris, voice, and face scans, as well as other biometric data, of millions of Americans. Finally, there is also the issue of the national database of information collected by local and state law enforcement agencies via automatic license plate reader (ALPRs) systems.

George Orwell could never have imagined that his book 1984would become a manual for would-be totalitarians of the future. The State has the tools to watch, listen, and learn all your habits and activities. The only question that remains is what are you going to do about it?

Derrick Broze is an investigative journalist for ActivistPost.com and the founder ofTheConsciousResistance.com. Follow him on Twitter. Book Derrick for interviews at derrick@activistpost.com. 

Congress’ Treachery, the FBI’s Double-Crossing and the American Citizenry’s Cluelessness: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

Congress’ Treachery, the FBI’s Double-Crossing and the American Citizenry’s Cluelessness: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

“The evil was not in bread and circuses, per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of the games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers which bread and circuses can never appease.” — Admiral Ben Moreell (1892 – 1978), chief of the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks and of the Civil Engineer Corps

As the grandfather of three young ones, ages 5 to 9, I get to see my fair share of kid movies: plenty of hijinks, lots of bathroom humor, and an endless stream of slapstick gags. Yet even among the worst of the lot, there’s something to be learned, some message being conveyed, or some aspect of our reality being reflected in celluloid.

So it was that I found myself sitting through The Angry Birds Movie on a recent Sunday afternoon, doling out popcorn, candy and drinks and trying to make sense of a 90-minute movie based on a cell phone video game that has beendownloaded more than 3 billion times.

The storyline is simple enough: an island nation of well-meaning, feel-good, flightless birds gets seduced by a charismatic green pig and his cohort who comes bearing food, wine and entertainment spectacles (the Roman equivalent of bread circuses). Ignoring the warnings of one solitary, suspicious “angry” bird that the pigs are up to no good, the clueless birds eventually discover that the pigs have stolen their most precious possessions: their eggs, the future of their entire society. It takes the “angry bird” to motivate the normally unflappable Bird Nation to get outraged enough to do something about the violation of their trust by the pigs and the theft of their personal property.

While one would be hard-pressed to call The Angry Birds Movie overly insightful, it is, as The Atlantic concludes, a “feather-light metaphor for our times… The film functions, effectively, as a fairy tale: It uses its status as fantasy to impart lessons about reality.”

It turns out that we’re no different from the wine-guzzling, food-noshing, party-loving Bird Nation. We too are easily fooled by charismatic politicians bearing gifts. And we too are easily distracted as those same politicians and their cohorts rob us blind.

Case in point: while Barack Obama winds down his presidency with a flurry of celebrity-studded events that is causing the media to hail him as the “coolest” president, and the presidential candidates continue to distract us with spectacular feats of chest-thumping, browbeating and demagoguery, the police state continues its steady march onward.

All of the revelations of government wrongdoing, spying and corruption disclosed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowdenseem to have fallen on deaf ears.

Nothing has improved or changed for the better.

There has been no real reform, no significant attempts at greater transparency, no accountability, no scaling back of the government’s warrantless, illegal domestic surveillance programs, and no recognition by Congress or the courts that the Fourth Amendment provides citizens with any protection against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents.

In fact, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’ve been subject to even more obfuscation, even more lies, even more sleight-of-hand maneuvers by government agencies determined to keep doing what they’re doing without any restrictions on their nefarious activities, and even more attempts by government agencies to listen in our phone calls, read our emails and text messages, monitor our movements, and generally imprison us within an electronic concentration camp.

Writing for the New Yorker, investigative reporter Maria Bustillos concludes, “the machinery of our government seems to have taken on an irrational life of its own. We live in a surreal world in which a ‘transparent’ government insists on the need for secret courts; our President prosecutes whistle-blowers and maintains a secret ‘kill list’; and private information is collected in secret and stored indefinitely by intelligence agencies.”

It’s no coincidence that almost exactly three years after Snowden began his steady campaign to leak documents about the government’s illegal surveillance program, Congress is preparing to adopt legislation containing a secret provision that would expand the FBI’s powers to secretly read Americans’ emails without a court order.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The government is planning to push through secret legislation that would magnify its ability to secretly spy on us without a warrant.

After three years of lying to us about the real nature of the government’s spying program, feigning ignorance, dissembling, and playing at enacting real reforms, it turns out that what the government really wants is more power, more control and more surveillance.

A secret provision tacked onto the 2017 Intelligence Authorization Act will actually make it easier for the government to spy on Americans’ emails as well as their phone calls.

If enacted, this law would build upon the Patriot Act’s authorization of National Security Letters (NSL) which allows the FBI to secretly demand—without prior approval from a judge and under a gag order that carries the penalty of a prison sentence—that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose the demands to the person being investigated or even indicate that they have been subjected to an NSL.

As Reuters reports, federal agencies do not need a warrant to access emails or other digital communications more than 180 days old due to a provision in a 1986 law that considers them abandoned by the owner. However, legislative efforts to require government authorities to obtain a search warrant before accessing old emails have been turned on their head by the insertion of this secret provision giving the FBI carte blanche access to Americans’ emails.

As if the FBI didn’t have enough corrupt tools in its bag of tricks already.

NSLs—in existence since the 1970s—empower FBI operatives to delve into Americans’ most personal affairs based only on the say-so of an agency that has come to be known as America’s Gestapo, or secret police. Incredibly, all the FBI needs to assert in order to justify such a search is that the information sought is relevant to a national-security investigation.

Nicholas Merrill can tell you all about NSLs. The head of a web-hosting company, he challenged the FBI’s unwarranted request for information on one of his customers and its companion gag order. Only after the FBI withdrew its request and a subsequent court-ordered lifting of the gag order was Merrill able to share his experiences. As Merrill recounts:

It was not a warrant. It was not stamped or signed by a court or a judge. It was this letter demanding this information from me. And it also told me that I could never tell anyone that I had gotten the letter. It said that I could tell ‘no person.’ The amount of information that the government can get with one of these letters can paint an incredibly vivid picture of all aspects of a person’s life — from the professional, to the personal, to the political, to their religious beliefs, to invading the privacy of their marriage, to being able to figure out what their sexual preference is. The amount of information that comes out of a national security letter is just so invasive. The fact that the government has been treating it so casually, and essentially going out on mass fishing expeditions and gathering the data of potentially millions of Americans without any suspicion of wrongdoing is very upsetting to me as someone who was raised on ideas about American exceptionalism and the belief that our system of government — with its built-in checks and balances and safeguards against abuse — were what made our country different from other countries.

Clandestine requests. Broad powers. Minimal insight. Intimidation tactics.

That’s how the FBI’s use of NSLs are described, but it can easily be applied to the government-at-large and its voracious quest for ever-greater powers without any real accountability to the citizenry or any adherence to the rule of law.

It’s estimated that the FBI issues approximately 40,000 to 60,000 such NSLs per year and that number is growing.

In 2008, the Justice Department’s inspector general revealed that the FBI had been abusing its NSL authority by making improper requests, collecting more data than they were allowed to, not having proper authorization to proceed with a case, and attempting to sidestep the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret court charged with overseeing the government’s secret surveillance program. In one case, after having its search request denied by the FISA Court on the basis that “the ‘facts’ were too thin” and the “request implicated the target's First Amendment rights,” the FBI used its NSL power to carry out its surveillance.

Even after being called on the carpet for abusing its information-gathering powers, the FBI continued to flout the very laws put in place to keep government abuses in check.

Incredibly, Barack Obama criticized President Bush for his administration’s mass government surveillance programsonly to fully embrace them once he himself had attained the White House. Indeed, the Obama administration has been lobbying for years to expand the FBI’s use of NSLs to include emails.

Now, here we are, eight years later, and we’re still being treated like the gullible birds in The Angry Birds Movie, easily pacified with bread, easily distracted by circuses, and easily robbed of our most precious possessions—our freedoms, our privacy and our right to have a government that abides by the rule of law and answers to us.

There are many ways of reacting to this latest news about the government’s treachery.

You can subscribe to the simplistic, head-in-the-sand routine and do as one of my so-called Facebook “friends” suggests and just obey the law, hoping that it will keep you out of the government’s clutches, but that’s no guarantee of safe passage. Of course, that will mean knowing the law—federal, state and local—in all of its convoluted, massive, growing permutations, understanding that overcriminalization has resulted in the average person unknowingly committing three crimes a day. As author Harvey Silvergate points out, even the most honest and informed citizen “cannot predict with any reasonable assurance whether a wide range of seemingly ordinary activities might be regarded by federal prosecutors as felonies.” For instance, you could be charged criminally for receiving an odd package, taking a fake sick day, reporting on government wrongdoing based on an anonymous source, or creating a website for a religious charity.

You can insist that such concessions to security are making us safer, even though facts suggest otherwise.Barring a few notable exceptions, the politicians are singing the same tune: security at any cost. The NSL provision sailed past the 15-member Senate Intelligence Committee with only Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) dissenting. In a joint statement that underscores the ease with which the Republicans and Democrats work together in order to sell us out, Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) and Vice Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) declared the expanded powers necessary to “keep America safe” and “vital” in order to “provide intelligence agencies with all the resources they need to prevent attacks both at home and abroad.”

This whole line of reasoning, as Nicholas Merrill explains, is hogwash. As he points out, the terrorist attacks in Paris were carried out by individuals “communicating without the use of any type of security or encryption. They were speaking in Facebook groups and using regular text messaging on their phones, without taking any steps to cover their tracks or make it harder to listen in on what they were doing. To me this proves that the whole dragnet surveillance system that we’ve built is actually useless, because it didn’t help us at all to prevent that type of attack.”

In other words, government spying isn’t making us safer, but it is making us less free. “In the end we’ve lost part of our freedom that maybe we’ll never get back. We’ve lost some part of what makes our system great, but in the end we’ve not really gained the security we thought we would get in the tradeoff for the freedom that we’ve given up.”

You can cast your ballot for one of the many slogan-spouting politicians who are long on lies and short on loyalty to their constituents. At the end of the day, these people work for the government and their primary purpose is to remain in office, living the kind of rarefied, pampered, privileged life that the average American only gets to dream about. Every one of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who voted for this legislation is a traitor to their oath of office and should be booted off that committee. What’s more, any member of Congress who votes for this legislation should be sent packing back to where they came from. As Brewster Kahle, another recipient of an NSL who successfully challenged the government’s gag order, reminds us, “The government is not one monolithic thing. It’s a bunch of people, thinking they’re doing their jobs.” It’s our job to make them toe the line when their thinking goes awry.

Or you can stop drinking the happy juice, stop believing the politicians’ lies, stop being so gallingly gullible and out to lunch, and start getting angry. In our politically correct, feel-good, play nice culture, anger has gotten a bad rap, but there’s something to be said for righteous anger acted upon in a nonviolent, effective fashion. It’s what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as “military nonviolent resistance.” It means caring enough to get off your caboose, get on your feet and get actively involved in holding government officials accountable to the simple fact that they work for “we the people.”

It’s not an easy undertaking.

The government has been playing fast and loose with the rules for too long now, and its greed for power and riches is boundless.

Still we are not powerless, although the government’s powers grow daily. We have not yet been altogether muzzled, although the acts of censorship increase daily. And we have not yet lost all hope for restoring our republic, although the outlook appears bleaker by the day.

For the moment, we still have some small allotment of freedoms by which we can express our displeasure, push back against injustice and corruption, and resist tyranny. One Texas man, outraged at being fined $212 for driving 39 in a 30 mph zone, chose to pay his fine with 22,000 pennies. It was a small act of disdain in the face of a government machine that tolerates little resistance, but it was acts such as these that sowed the early seeds of resistance that birthed this nation.

As revolutionary patriot Samuel Adams observed, “It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

 John W. Whitehead

The involution of Islam is just one side of the coin. The other one, which is not less horrifying, is the spiritual degradation of the West that welcomes the primordial predatory world with cute teddy bears, songs about peace and flowers

The primordial world of Islam

The Islamic world of the Middle East is sinking into the gloomy and forgotten past: the Bronze Age, the world of slavery, human sacrifice, pedophilia, sexual sacred traditions, beliefs in conspiracies and now the most terrible - ritual cannibalism

Beaten dogs and “donkeys-occupiers”

In the 90s, when working on an article about homeless animals, I visited a shelter for dogs and cats located between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

The Director of the shelter told me about the miserable life of his pets, lamented how many dogs from Arab villages were brought here in terrible condition: they were beaten, held under the scorching sun starving, got rid of when they were not needed.

Why? He could not give a clear answer. Only later I learned that such attitude to dogs is the norm for Muslims here, because dogs, according to Islam, are “unclean animals”.

Dogs are not the only victims of “Palestinian frustration”. In 2000, the Englishwoman Lucy Fensom set up Safe Haven for Donkeys in the Holy Land to help old and sick donkeys that were abandoned by Arabs as useless. Donkeys are subject to regular abuse by Palestinian teenagers; “fighters against occupants” use them as “shahids” tying explosives to them and sending them to Israelis. There is another kind of entertainment: they paint a donkey in the colors of the Israeli flag, torture it, burn out the Star of David on it, pour over gasoline and set it on fire.

That way, via the relationships between animals and people, I began my journey into the jungle of the Muslim world in the Middle East - the perverted and cruel world, full of anomalies and pathologies, irrational anger and countless superstitions. It is a world where a woman, a child, a person with sexual and psychological aberrations are doomed to the fate of the miserable dog or donkey. It is a world of jinns, spirits, beliefs in conspiracies, legalized pedophilia and actual slavery, “codes of honor” and boundless fanaticism, clans structures, arrogant and suspicious attitude towards the outside world. It is a world that brings us back to the prehistory of mankind.

I was surprised to discover this world. I visited Muslim republics in the former Soviet Union many times. I saw tolerant communities that defended their tradition in the face of the Soviet atheism, and it inspired respect. Murderous conflicts after the collapse of the USSR were caused by the shock of the unexpected dissolution, bleeding old wounds and abscesses, but not by the religious fanaticism. The uprising of Dzhokhar Dudayev in Chechnya against Russians in the early ‘90s was the result of the burst of nationalism and old offences—in memory of the barbaric deportation of Chechens to Siberia in the 40s. But in general, Muslim people of the USSR didn’t express any religious intolerance - Russians, Jews, Germans, Polacks, Koreans deported to Central Asia by Stalin, could confirm this.

Those were the two faces of Islam, but the secret of Janus was quite obvious.

Involution of Islam

Mankind, throughout its very existence, desperately tried to set itself free from firm grips of dark primal instincts, from the viscous swamp of irrational primitive nature. It was a difficult task, but gains were significant.

Moral and spiritual ideals of the prophetic Judaism became the basis of the ethical value system of the Western world. The Greco-Roman philosophy of the late antiquity broke away from primitive beliefs and practices, having created unique and unrivalled systems, such as Stoicism and Epicureanism, Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism. Christianity, having passed through the hearth of tests and pride, returned to its roots and became one of the ways to spiritual salvation and social justice. Buddhism is a religion of consolation, elevation and rejection of carnal beginning.

The pagans readily abandoned primitive cults, too under the influence of highly developed civilizations. Hindus didn’t cling to the grim rituals of widows’ self-immolation (Sati) and Thuggee sects. Christian people of Africa and Siberia got rid of abominable superstitions quite easily. Descendants of the Aztecs and Inca in Mexico and Peru don’t protect their “sacred right” to human sacrifice, and Maori and Polynesians - to the ritual cannibalism.

Muslim nations on the periphery of the Islamic world, like Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Indian Muslims or Hui people in China, are not prone to religious fanaticism and the practice of slave societies. On one hand, they see themselves as heirs of cultures that are more ancient than Islam. In Uzbekistan, historical handbooks and guidebooks remind you about the ancient kingdoms of Bactria and Sogdiana. The Kazakhs are proud of their kinship with the Cumans Empire. In Azerbaijan, they show ancient temples of Zoroastrians to tourists.

On the other hand, Christianity, the great cultures of India and China, and in our time—the secular Soviet ideology softened archaic beliefs and prejudices of Islam. Not surprising that it is Central Asia where, at the junction of civilizations, great Muslim scholars were born, such as the creator of Algebra Ibn Musa Khwarizmi, the mathematicians and astronomers Ibn Kathir al-Farghani, al-Farabi and Ibn Ahmad Biruni, the philosopher and physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Ulugh Beg invented the first Observatory in Samarkand, and the famous Babur was not only a conqueror, but also a poet, a writer and a scholar.

Today, Sufi orders and the Baha’i communities with their center in Haifa flourish only on the outskirts of the Islamic world, in Central Asia, Azerbaijan, India and Africa. Also this is the only place (and only in Israel in the all Middle East) where the truly humanistic Islam movement - Ahmadiyya Muslim Community - is not subject to severe persecutions.

And only in the Middle East, in the realm of its absolute power, the Muslim world made its journey just the opposite. It not only returned human beings to the animal state, but asserted this at the level of the religious law and traditions.

The most advanced, harmonious, tolerant religion of the early Middle Ages, with spiritual searches of al-Ghazali, Jalal al-Din Rumi, Yunus Emre and Averroes, erotic allusions of Omar Khayyam, Sheikh Nefzawi and Ibn Arabi; the religion of Baghdadi and Andalusian caliphs - Islam was withdrawing into itself more and more, sinking into the quagmire of petty disputes, prohibitions, absurd dogmas and narcissism. All movements of the modern Islam - from the “Muslim Brotherhood”, “Hizb ut-Tahrir” and Wahhabi / Salafi to the Taliban, Shiite dogmatists in Iran, “Al-Qaeda” and “Islamic State”—are moving deeper and deeper into the dark tunnel of pre-Islamic prejudices, gloomy rituals, primordial instincts and pathological fanaticism.

Back to the darkness of the past

Modern Islam is characterized by all features of slave-owning, archaic communities.

Slavery

“World of Crescent” is the only place on the planet where slavery flourished legally for centuries and continues to thrive in a disguised form in our time.

Formally, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Yemen abolished slavery in the 60s, but informally actively practiced it in relation to foreign workers (Indians, Filipinos, Ceylonese, Thais, etc). All of them have sponsorship laws (kafeel), which de-facto represent contemporary slavery. “Sponsors” have absolute power over labor migrants. They can deprive them of rights of residence, confiscate documents, pay no salaries, ban them from leaving the country and even their houses on the pretext that the workers might try to “escape”. They can kill and rape them with impunity.

Ownership of black slaves is a special matter. The religious justification of this slavery in Islam is rooted in Biblical interpretation, according to which Africans are sons of Ham who committed an unpardonable sin against his father Noah, and therefore they are doomed to be slaves of descendants of Shem, i.e. the Arabs. So Negros, whose ancestors were brought by Arabs from Africa to the area of Basra as slaves in the earliest days of Islam, remain slaves of Arabic sheikhs up until now. They are called Abd (“slave”).

In Mauritania, slavery was abolished in the early 80s. But until now the whole population in this country is actually divided into castes: lighter-skinned “Moors” - slaveholders, “Black Berbers” or “Haratin”—their subjects, and Negros - the lower class. Slavery is hereditary, and children of slaves remain the property of their owners. The number of slaves in the country is estimated to be up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, though officially the use of the word “slave” in the media is forbidden. In many cases slaves have a certain place in the house, like animals.

In Sudan slavery is thriving. Entire villages are being demolished; men, women and children are being enslaved. In the 90s, the number of enslaved descendants of Ham was estimated to be 100 to 200 thousands.

In Niger slavery is a norm. There are almost a million of slaves there.

ISIS and its branches in Libya and Nigeria officially revived the institution of slavery in its most heinous and barbarous form, but slavery is deeply rooted in the collective consciousness of the Middle East world and is practiced actively.

Human Sacrifice

A death on the battlefield was considered as honor for a warrior in previous times, because such death opened the way to heaven. The early version of the “Jihad” was no exception: men fought against equal rivals in a fair fight, but by no means against children, women and unarmed men.

The current concept of “Jihad” is much closer to the primitive human sacrifice. The purpose of the ancient cult of sacrifice was to appease the angry and bloodthirsty Deity. For the sacramental ceremony they selected predominantly children, juveniles and girls of their own tribe as the embodiment of naivety and virginity. Sacrifice represented a horrifying theatrical performance. The sacral victims that voluntarily sacrificed themselves went to paradise where they could enjoy carnal pleasures. People from another tribe were slain like cattle.

The same mythologeme we can see in the current interpretation of “Jihad”. For the role of “martyrs” they choose children and adolescents that are too young to realize they are going to the slaughter. They believe that by killing themselves they make their way to heaven - to the embrace of 72 virgins. (What else can a man of the Bronze Age dream about?) On the other side, slashing of people from another tribe chosen randomly, especially women and children, shall delight the cruel Deity and make his enemies tremble from horror.

Finally, the terror of “shahids” is of a public, theatrical and ultimately horrifying nature - with torn bodies, severed limbs, blood flows. This is a typical murderous mystery practiced by ancient people - from Mesopotamia, Syria, and Phoenicia to South America.

The woman as female: prey, concubine, piece of flesh

In the Age of Bronze, the place of woman in the social hierarchy was a little higher than the place of livestock. She had three standard roles: a prey—when speaking about women from another tribe; a slave - for her owner, and a procreation machine; and finally a “currency” - to conclude bargains, tribal and dynastic alliances. Her freedom of choice was similar to the freedom of choice of a horse or a camel.

Islam returned to woman “her” place in the social hierarchy. In the Middle East she can’t leave the house unaccompanied by her husband, father or brother; she can’t work; she loses her son in the case of a divorce; she is subject to beating and humiliation, if she doesn’t satisfy her husband.

Islam legalizes beating of women and advises how to keep her on a tight rein like a horse. Sheikh Muhammad Kamal Mustafa, the author of the book ‘The Woman in Islam’ asserted that “It is forbidden to beat her on the sensitive parts of her body, such as the face, breast, abdomen, and head. Instead, she should be beaten on the arms and legs”.

Sheikh Yousef Qaradhawi, one of the most influential clerics in Sunni Islam: “It is permissible for him to beat her lightly with his hands, avoiding her face and other sensitive parts. In no case should he resort to using a stick or any other instrument that might cause pain and injury”.

In February 2016 Mufti of Gaza Hassan Al-Laham prescribed: “This hitting is a kind of reminder that the love and friendship that Allah commanded, is still found between us (i.e., the couple).” Wonderful, isn’t it? What was the reaction of feminists? It was the arrangement of the women “Peace flotilla” to Gaza.

Female genital mutilations deprive women of their sensuality and turn them into primitive machines for procreation, to insensible dolls.

Any suspicion of adultery leads to their murdering by the family: they can pour acid over them, disfigure them or push them under a truck. The same fate threatens them if they become a victim of a rape. They get married by the decision of the family without their consent.

Primitive tribes considered women of conquered people to be their natural prey. Non-Muslim women today share the same fate.

Long before the ISIS, in 1948, the Arabs set forth to conquer Israel dreaming of killing men and raping women. In Lebanon, Palestinians raped Christian women in Lebanon and thereby provoked the civil war. Secular regimes restrained sexual lusts of Muslims against females of “infidels.” As soon as they broke, Christian women turned into the object of sexual harassment.

On the 10th of April, 2013 Salafi cleric Sheikh Yasir al-‚ÄòAjlawni announced a fatwa that permits to rape non-Sunni women in Syria (if they are not Sunni of course). In Egypt, in February 2013, Ahmad Mahmoud Abdullah, known as “Abu Islam”, justified raping of women in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Raping of girls of Coptic community in Egypt became commonplace in the time of the Mursi ruling. Recently Muslims burned down Christian homes in southern Egypt and forced a 70-year-old Coptic woman to walk naked through the streets.

Non-Muslim women are whores for a Muslim man, especially if they walk alone and wear short skirts—as in Cologne, London, Stockholm or anywhere else.

Sex and power

Primitive people endowed the phallus with a sacred value, and considered the act of copulation as a demonstration of the male power and authority—in relation not only to a woman, but also to a defeated opponent.

The symbolism of sexual possession is well pronounced among aboriginal peoples and monkeys. Konrad Lorenz described the scene in the Berlin zoo.

“In the Berlin Zoo, I once watched two strong, old male Hamadryas Baboons assaulting each other in real earnest for a minute. A moment later, one of them fled, hotly pursued by the other, who finally chased him into a corner. Unable to escape, the loser took refuge in the submissive gesture, whereupon the winner turned away and walked oft, stiff-legged, in an attitude of self-display. Upon this, the loser ran after him and presented his hindquarters so persistently that the stronger one eventually “acknowledged” his submissiveness by mounting him with a bored expression and performing a few perfunctory copulatory movements. Only then was the submissive one apparently satisfied that his rebellion had been forgiven”

Rudiments of this culture remained in marginal societies, for example, in prisons.

In the Middle East, a sexual act as a personification of power over a defeated rival became the norm. Lawrence of Arabia was a victim of such barbaric tradition. Iranian dissidents, Chris Stevens and Gaddafi faced an even more frightful fate: they were raped and murdered. This barbarity brings us back to the times that mankind hasn’t known since the appearance of the great religions.

Pedophilia and other sexual perversions

This disgusting phenomenon was inherent to all people in all times, but only Islam legalized it. Things that were considered to be shameful in Judaism, Christianity and in the secular culture, became the norm in the Middle East. Raymond Ibrahim cites Dr. Saleh bin Fawzan, a prominent cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council.

Bin Fawzan just issued a fatwa asserting that there is no minimum age for marriage, and that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle.”

Fawzan insists that nowhere does Sharia set an age limit for marrying girls: like countless Muslim scholars before him, he relies on Koran 65:4, which discusses marriage to females who have not yet begun menstruating (i.e., are prepubescent) and the fact that Muhammad, Islam’s role model, married Aisha when she was 6-years-old, “consummating” the marriage—or, in modern parlance, raping her—when she was 9.

Ibrahim gives examples of girls who died as a result of such “child-marriage”, pointing out that leading Islamic authorities, such as Yusuf Qaradawi, took young girls as wives.

According to THE INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR RESEARCH ON WOMEN, in 2005 there were 51 million child marriages and almost all of them - in Muslim countries.

Ayatollah Khomeini wrote: “A man can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby”.

Bestiality? Why not? Ayatollah Khomeini: “A man can have sex with animals such as sheep, cows, camels and so on. However he should kill the animal after he has his orgasm. He should not sell the meat to the people in his own village, however selling the meat to the next door village should be fine.” (From Khomeini’s book, Tahrir al-Vasyleh, fourth volume, Darol Elm, Gom, Iran, 1990).

In May 2010 in Gaza, 450 Hamas men married girls that were younger than 10 years old. Feminists? Oh, yes, we forgot—they are busy arranging the “Flotilla of peace” to Gaza.

Mutilated and mentally ill people

Animals feel irrational hatred to any aberration within their own species. In my childhood I saw a flock of sparrows that attacked a sick bird - they were trying to peck it to death. The miserable sparrow managed to escape having flown into the window of some house.

Civilizationn has moved beyond this disgusting prejudice, but those unlucky fellows who were born crippled in the Middle East have no way to escape.

This is a “black hole” of the Islamic world, and what we know is just the tip of the iceberg. Last December, the Palestinian agency Maan wrote that in the South of Hebron they found a mentally ill man, who had spent 25 years on the chain in a sheepfold. His family chained him up when he was 10 years old, and he ate together with sheep and chickens. In February 2016, Maan wrote about a mentally ill person in Bethlehem. He was handcuffed, chained up in a shed without ventilation and heating and was fed from a bowl like an animal.

The reason of such attitude is primordial fear. According to Islamic belief, a mentally ill person is in the grip of the jinn and possessed with evil.

Let alone homosexuals—this is commonplace. They are hanged on cranes, as in Iran, and thrown from roofs of buildings. LGBT-community, “Doctors Without Borders”, “Christians for Human right”, “Rabies for Human right”? Of course, they are fully focused on the fight against Gaza blockade!

Like primitive cultures, Islam of the Middle East rejects any and all manifestations of civilization, even if it’s a dead civilization.

It’s the only culture that fights against antiquities: Buddhist temples in Afghanistan, Palmyra, Tuareg sanctuary. It destroys anyone who does not belong to other religions, whether Yazidis, Christians, Zoroastrians and Bahá’ís.

They live in the permanent atmosphere of paranoia. Their own troubles they justify with theories of conspiracies, but not with their own miscalculations. They believe in “Sharks of Mossad”, as the governor of South Sinai, Mohammad Abdul Fadhil Shousha: in “Israeli wild boars” that destroy agricultural fields in the West Bank, as it was claimed by President Mahmoud Abbas; in “Israeli wild hyenas” that were released by Israeli settlers in the West Bank to frighten Palestinian people (by the way, Palestinian people triumphed “Zionist” hyena: in 2015 they cornered and stoned the miserable animal to death in Hebron); in “supernatural rats”, as it was published in July 2008 by the official Palestinian news agency Wafa to cause panic in East Jerusalem.

“The Jews have the greatest powers of sorcery, and they make use of this tool”, claimed Mehdi Taeb, a friend of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the head of Khamenei’s Ammar Base think tank. Not so bad for “think tank”....

They are sure that the ISIS is the result of a conspiracy of CIA and Mossad, that Coca-Cola and Pepsi contain pork and alcohol to poison Muslims.

Do you know the case of natural cataclysms? Mallam Abass Mahmud, a Muslim cleric in Ghana, explains: “Allah gets annoyed when males engage in sexual encounters and such disgusting encounter causes earthquake.”

Like in primitive cultures, there is no hint of self-criticism. India, China, Asian and Christian countries in Africa forgot about colonialism, although they experienced plenty of grief and humiliation. The Middle East was a mandated territory for 20 years only, in the period between the world wars, but Arabs still blame the West for all their of miseries. The civilization that was great at some point, has now slipped to primordial culture, but apparently it is not the lowest point of their fall.

In May 2013, the world witnessed something horrifying: Abu Sakkar, the leader of “Al-Farooq” group (now a part of “Jabhat al-Nusra”), carved the heart of Assad’s dead soldier out and ate the human flesh. Comrades supported him yelling “Allah Akbar”. It was not a single incident. In November 2013, Theodore Shoebat wrote, quoting Arabian news source Zaman al-Wasal and Orient News Television, that Kuru disease caused by cannibalism only had been spreading in Syria. According to Michigan State University, in 2014 only there were about 8 to 10 cases of Kuru registered in Syria. It was written, “Kuru re-emerged in the Muslim community recently among Syrian rebels, who reportedly used to eat the hearts of victims. Two of these rebels were then hospitalized and transferred to Germany to be treated for the disease, which signified the emergence of the disease in Syria”.

It’s a ritual cannibalism, a terrible relic of the primeval world. Oh, what a lovely cultural diversity!

***
The involution of Islam is just one side of the coin. The other one, which is not less horrifying, is the spiritual degradation of the West that welcomes the primordial predatory world with cute teddy bears, songs about peace and flowers. Anti-Utopia has come true.

Canada needs to heed the warning of Belgium and other European states and follow the example of Britain and the majority of American states in rejecting this evil

Life is precious and is not just another commodity

In February 2015 the Supreme Court tossed out prohibitions against assisted suicide and euthanasia, saying that such prohibitions “unjustifiably infringe” Charter rights (section 7) of the individual, which are the rights to “life, liberty and security of the person.” So how does forcing physicians to kill their patients not break down the all important physician-patient trust relationship or in any way enhance the “life, liberty and security” of Canadian citizens? Where in the world do the rights of the vulnerable or the moral conscience of physicians fit into this perverse notion?

The advocates for death are putting tremendous pressure on not only our most vulnerable citizens but every physician who has taken the Hippocratic Oath to preserve life. It is not difficult to imagine that with the ever escalating costs of health care and an aging population assisted suicide could conceivably become the most acceptable, inexpensive “treatment” for terminal illness.         

Legalization of physician-assisted suicide is a path toward self-destruction. The majority of doctors do not believe it is their right to determine when life begins or ends or whether or not it is viable or too burdensome to endure. This authority belongs to God the Creator of life only and men who would usurp this right are very poor amateur providences. It can never be ours to question the value of life and because a person is gravely ill by no means diminishes the value of their life. Putting to death the sick or disabled shows a profound disrespect for the sanctity of life and constitutes a great moral offence and human tragedy. 

Proper palliative care already provides “dying with dignity” and compassionate care for the dying and should be encouraged and better funded.                                                             

We need look no further than the experiences of Belgium and Holland down this dark path to see where it leads. It is a myth that doctor assisted suicide can be properly regulated and what begins as voluntary euthanasia leads to involuntary euthanasia. Euthanasia in Belgium has now become a “normal medical procedure” with doctors no longer even reporting cases. Bill C-14 is radical legislation based on a perceived need of a tiny remnant of the population and amounts to a false compassion that trumps the rights of the majority. Canada needs to heed the warning of Belgium and other European states and follow the example of Britain and the majority of American states in rejecting this evil.