Islamization of the West

NICE, France—Nawel Moumen, a 13-year-old French Muslim, was taken aside last spring by the dean of her middle school. The robe-like dress she had on was inappropriate, Moumen recalled the dean saying, because he considered it a religious garment. He warned her she would face detention if she wore it again.

France is expanding the definition of what kinds of clothes are unacceptable under the rules of laïcité, the country’s strict separation of religion and state. For nearly two decades, public schools have barred students from wearing a visible Christian cross, a Jewish kippah, a Muslim headscarf or any other religious symbol deemed ostentatious by school officials.

The knife has become a weapon of Islamic terrorists in Germany, you only have to read the many news reports – even if they are not always classified as in this case

h/t Kiki9

A Belgian court on Wednesday rejected French terrorist Salah Abdeslam’s request not to be extradited to France, saying that his claim that it would be a breach of his human rights was not “sufficiently substantiated”.

Abdeslam, 33, was transferred to Belgium from France last summer to be tried by a separate Belgian court for his role in two ISIS-claimed attacks in Brussels in 2016 in which 35 people died. He was found guilty in July on all counts and is expected to be sentenced in the coming days.

His lawyers, however, requested in early September that he not be transferred to France to serve a life sentence without parole, the country’s harshest possible sentence, which was issued by a Paris court in June last year.

Baghdad has asked Sweden to extradite Iraqi refugee Salwan Momika, who stoked international outrage by desecrating the Quran, he and his lawyer told AFP on Tuesday.

“Iraq wants him extradited because he burnt a Quran outside the mosque (in Stockholm) in June,” lawyer David Hall told AFP after Swedish police questioned Momika in connection with the extradition request.

Why should a teenage girl not be able to express her religious beliefs and at the same time pursue an education at school?

It is a tough question, but one to which the French believe they have an answer.

Which is, broadly, because there is such a thing as a French nation, and the teenager is part of it. Nothing defines France, and separates it from its neighbours, quite so clearly as the issue of la laïcité, or secularism.

A former soldier who absconded from a prison kitchen by strapping himself to the underside of a delivery van has been recaptured.

Daniel Abed Khalife, 21, was arrested in Chiswick, west London, on Saturday, having gone missing in his cook’s uniform from HMP Wandsworth in London on Wednesday morning.

The Metropolitan police said they had arrested him just before 11am on Saturday.

There’s fevered speculation about inside jobs or state actors involved in the HMP Wandsworth prison break by terror suspect Daniel Khalife. But as police close in on Richmond park, whether he’s found cowering in a ditch or at a press conference in Tehran, this dramatic escape reveals just how close we are to a full blown crisis across our prison system.

Wandsworth has been failing in plain sight in front of helpless officials at the Ministry of Justice for years. Repeated inspections have revealed squalor, overcrowding and chronic staff retention problems with young, inexperienced officers out of their depth. Writing about another filthy jail recently, Chief Inspector Charlie Taylor, rapidly running out of superlatives for crisis, correctly said that dirty and uncared for jails were a proxy for far more serious problems. At Wandsworth, summed up by recent prison leaver Chris Atkins as ‘chaos run by schoolchildren’, all the ingredients for this week’s catastrophe were there already, without the James Bond flourishes.

The footage is mundane and revelatory all at once.

The hallway, filmed from an unmoving closed-circuit camera, appears unremarkable. It’s the point in time, and the people in the former children’s hospital, that make the hours and hours of video from this and other cameras on site extraordinary.

ISIS fighters roamed the hallways of this building complex in the Syrian city of Aleppo, which they had claimed as a headquarters. They moved blindfolded prisoners. They struck them with sticks. They walked past a man being tortured – straining to stand, arms tied aloft behind his back.