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School marked down by Ofsted for being 'too white'

22.11.2014. Parents were angered after Lincolnshire primary school was marked down by Ofsted inspectors for not having enough black or Asian children, according to The Telegraph. See also The Daily Mail.

 


Keeps quiet or stammers about the current war of relgion

21.11.2014. In the face of the offensive of radical Islam, Francis’s idea is that «we must soothe the conflict.» And forget Regensburg. With serious harm also to the reformist currents of Islam. Thus writes Sandro Magister in www.chiesa. He concludes his article as follows (link added by me):

The bishops of the dioceses of the Middle East are calling upon the world for effective armed protection, which never comes. In Rome, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran publishes the most detailed denunciation of the atrocities of the caliphate, and declares an end to all possibility of dialogue with those among the Muslims who do not stamp out violence at its roots.

But when the secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, speaks in New York from the tribunal of the UN, as he did on September 29, he carefully avoids the taboo words “Islam” and “Muslims,” and pays the obligatory tribute to the mantra that denies the existence of that conflict of civilization which is plain for all to see.

Of course, Parolin raises the protest against the “irresponsible apathy” shown by the United Nations. But it is precisely on the UN that Francis calls for the sole legitimate decision on any armed intervention in the theater of the Middle East.

[...]

The Argentine rabbi Abraham Skorka, a longtime friend of Bergoglio, has said that he has heard him say that “we must soothe the conflicts.”

With Islam, even in its theologically bloodiest form, this is what the pope does. He never calls those responsible by name. They must be “stopped,” he has said, but without specifying how. He prays and he has others pray, as he did with the Israeli and Palestinian presidents. He calls for all steps of dialogue to be taken, but on what unites and not on what divides.

In 2006 Benedict XVI, first in Regensburg and then in Istanbul, said what no pope had ever dared to say: that violence associated with faith is the inevitable product of the fragile bond between faith and reason in Muslim doctrine and in its very understanding of God.

And he told the Islamic world clearly that it had before itself the same epochal challenge that Christianity had already faced and overcome: that of “welcoming the true achievements of the Enlightenment, human rights and especially the freedom of faith and its exercise.”

From this came the sprout of Islamic-Christian dialogue that found expression in the “letter of 138 scholars” written to pope Joseph Ratzinger by Muslim figures of various orientations.

In recent days, Pope Francis has greeted some of their representatives, who have come to Rome for a new round of dialogue. But there has been no talk of those capital questions, the sprout has withered.

It has now been a millennium that in Islam the “door of interpretation” has been closed and the Quran can no longer be discussed except at great risk, even that of life.

Read the entire article at www.chiesa.

 


Some Indians consider it their birthright

11.11.2014. Students are often keen to exercise their rights but recently there has been an interesting twist - some in India are talking about their right to cheat in university exams. "It is our democratic right!" a thin, addled-looking man named Pratap Singh once said to me as he stood, chai in hand, outside his university in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. "Cheating is our birthright." Continue reading in The students who feel they have the right to cheat (BBC).

HonestThinking comments: As these kinds of backwards cultures gain more and more influence in the West, our societies become increasingly corrupt as well.

 


How to gain control over the situation in the UK

10.11.2014. It’s the dishonest debate on immigration that poisons the atmosphere for refugees, writes Douglas Murray in his article Who do we let in? It's time to choose. He concludes as follows:

Today it is almost impossible to find anyone, even of the left, who thinks that transplanting whole Kashmiri villages to the North of England in the 1960s was a good idea. Brought in to do low-paid, low-skilled jobs which then disappeared, their children don’t even have their parents’ opportunities. Stuck in areas with few prospects, the religion their parents often sought to escape becomes — predictably enough — the dominating factor in their lives. Did anybody in favour of immigration factor that in during the 1960s? No. Does anybody factor in the multi-generational issues mass migration raises today? No. Experts discuss immigration solely as a fiscal issue. But it isn’t. It is also a societal one and a moral one. Nobody doubts most Somalis are better off here, but are our lives better for having them here? What are the metrics for where the negatives outweigh the benefits? Are there any?

We pretend that Somalis from one of the most dangerous and lawless countries on the planet become secular democrats once they are in Acton. And we like to say that the vast influx of families from the Indian subcontinent simply make East London more ‘diverse’. Sure. But it has also brought Bangladesh-style political corruption and Pakistan’s religious wars to areas such as Tower Hamlets.

Finally, wrapped up in all of this, are genuine asylum seekers. These are the people who get a double dose of bad luck. Though they constitute the tiniest percentage of immigrants to the UK, the advocates and apologists for mass immigration continuously use them as examples. In doing so they make a terrible mistake. Very few people who want stricter border controls object to genuine asylum seekers being given sanctuary in this country. Though we may have to accept that we can’t welcome every gay in Africa or every religious minority in the Middle East, and that countries near to or bordering the conflict zones are the best places for refugees to go. But when the mass economic migration of recent decades is melded together with asylum, the well of public tolerance for genuine asylum seekers is poisoned. One reason France may take in twice as many asylum seekers as the UK each year is that France takes in less than a quarter of the net economic migrants each year that we do.

Only two things really matter on immigration: who you take in, and in what numbers. We refuse to discuss the former and our governments botch the latter. In the years after 1681 Britain took in roughly 50,000 Huguenots — an extraordinary occurrence. But that is equal to a normal six weeks of immigration in 21st-century Britain. Perhaps this will all turn out beautifully. Perhaps everyone will integrate every six weeks as well as those French Protestants did over centuries. Or perhaps they won’t. But what a gamble to take with a country.

Read the entire article in The Spectator.

 



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Norske og skandinaviske lesere vil kunne finne stoff på norsk her.

 


 

HonestThinking is dedicated and committed to the art of thinking honestly. Yet honest thinking is not the same as true thinking, for it is possible to think honestly, but be mistaken. For the same reason, honest thinking is not identical with objective thinking either. Honest thinking is striving to get things right. This involves being truthful about whatever one publishes, but just as importantly, it involves an uncompromising dedication never to suppress relevant data, even when data collides with dearly held prejudices. Such an approach may sometimes cause hurtful revisions in one’s belief system. That’s what HonestThinking is all about! Read the entire manifesto.



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Please send e-mail to postmaster at honestThinking.org (replacing ' at ' with '@') if you would like to tip us about a web resource that we should link to, or if you wish to submit an article for publication here. Quality contributions are welcome from anyone.

 



 

The current European immigration and integration policy is profoundly disrespectful of both Muslims and Islam, because it is built on the tacit assumption that the Muslims will become like us. One claims to have respect for Islam and for Muslims, but one also expects Muslims to give up their orthodox faith when they come here. At the same time one is assuming that Islam will be reformed and modernized as soon as the Muslims become integrated and understand and appreciate how superior our Western culture is compared to their own. This is cultural shauvinism and arrogance indeed! The unspoken premise for this scenario is that Western socities are superior to Islam. Read more.

 


 

 

Human rights and democracy are under pressure. One threat comes from the Western world, in the form of lack of or dishonest thinking. There exists a peculiar Western "tolerance" which is so "tolerant" that it even tolerates totalitarian or anti-democratic ideologies. A tacit assumption underlying such an attitude is that all cultures, world views, and religions are really equally good. As a consequence of this assumption one is cut off from the possibility of critically examining the above mentioned ideologies. Read more.