"Nadie que viene aquí tiene derecho a poner su cultura o sus creencias religiosas por encima de nuestras leyes"

Alemania quiere frenar la poligamia

DEUSTCHE WELLE.- Justice Minister Heiko Maas has promised to clamp down on polygamy, preventing Muslims in Germany from maintaining multiple marriages. "No one who comes to us has the right to put their cultural roots, or their religious beliefs, above our laws," Maas told Tuesday's edition of "Bild" newspaper. "For that reason multiple marriages cannot be recognized in Germany."

Though polygamy is already outlawed in Germany, the newspaper alleged that German authorities "often look the other way" if a Muslim migrant brings several wives into the country. Maas said that there needed to be a crackdown on arranged marriages, especially if underage girls were involved. "We have to assess this very carefully," he said. "We cannot tolerate forced marriages."

In fact, the legal circumstances are already fairly clear. Polygamy is not only illegal in Germany, it is a criminal offense, and authorities cannot register more than one woman as a wife to the same man, migrant or not. Neither the "Bild" newspaper nor the Justice Ministry elaborated on what measures could be implemented to limit polygamy.

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Orlando ha dejado al descubierto el veneno de las políticas identitarias

SP¡KED.- There has been something deeply disturbing in the Western response to the Orlando massacre. There has been an instinct, actually a concerted effort, to estrange the 49 victims from the broader human family, to prevent their being talked about as part of humanity. Across the media, and in gay-rights circles, observers have insisted we refer to them as ‘queers’ first and avoid turning them into ‘disembodied, undifferentiated and abstract “human” lives’, as one academic put it. To talk about these people in the same breath as ‘Western values’, to allow their murder to be ‘generalised’, to refer to their slaughter as ‘an attack on humanity’, is wrong, commentators insist, because doing this erases their specific identities and the specific reason they were killed: their gayness. This is all meant to sound PC, and gay-friendly, an attempt to uphold the truth about what happened in Orlando; but in fact it exposes the profound anti-humanism of identity politics.

Within hours of the atrocity, the response had descended into a squabble over whether it was a homophobic crime or an attack on humanity. It surely speaks volumes about the moral disarray of the West that we cannot even agree on how the act and its victims should be referred to, far less what kind of robust, collective response to take to such Islamist-justified barbarism. A writer for the London Review of Books flagged up the ‘faultline’ between the way ‘many straight people are interpreting the Orlando attack’ and the way ‘many LGBT people understand it’. The straights are wrong, he says, to view this attack as ‘anti-Western’; it was anti-gay. An American journalist went further, saying: ‘If you are a cisgender, heterosexual, white person, please do not write about [Orlando].’ Guardian columnist Owen Jones told a news presenter: ‘You don’t understand this because you’re not gay.’ So, from the get-go, efforts were made to suppress solidarity, in essence; to prevent anyone who doesn’t share the specific identity of the victims from expressing an opinion or grief over their slaughter; to distinguish the victims, ‘queers’, from everyone else: ‘humanity’.

And as the days go on, this perverse removal of the Orlando victims from any broader narrative of humanity or the West or just ‘us’ – a writer for the Independent sniffily mocks the idea that it was an ‘attack on us all’ – has intensified. The commentators insisting that the massacre be given its rightful name of a ‘homophobic hate crime’ claim they are only trying to prevent the murdered revellers’ identities from being erased. We must stop this ‘erasure of the sexual and gender identities of the victims’, says one. Yet no one – literally no one – is denying that the Orlando massacre was an anti-gay attack. How could they? What gay-rights activists, identitarians and observers are really bristling at is the line that follows the acknowledgement that it was a homophobic attack, the line that says: ‘But it was something else, too. It was an attack on humanity.’ It’s this they find unacceptable, because the inexorable instinct of identity politics is separatism, an urge to emphasise the differences between various sections of humanity and most importantly the differences in victim status. | Brendan O’Neill

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Colbert y Mazarino: el programa fiscal de la izquierda.

Non è vero, ma è ben trovato

Este supuesto diálogo histórico que se atribuye a Jean-Baptiste Colbert y al Cardenal Mazarino, ministros de Luis XIV, es en realidad un fragmento de la obra teatral "El diablo rojo" (Le diable rouge) estrenada en 2008 y cuyo autor es el dramaturgo francés Antoine Rault.

Que la atribución histórica sea falsa no menoscaba un ápice la verdad factual que transmite la ficción.

Las confluencias de Podemos se reúnen en secreto en Barcelona con los independentistas

Las confluencias de Podemos se reúnen en secreto en Barcelona con los independentistas https://t.co/FHioOpcBM4 #ca

— The Catalan Analyst (@CatalanAnalyst) June 15, 2016

Rivera destacó pero necesita mejorar

ARCADI ESPADA:

1. Rivera resultó ayer convincente cuando señaló el origen de la financiación del partido Podemos. Menos, cuando con datos no probados, acusó de corrupción al presidente del Gobierno.

2. Rivera no atacó a Pedro Sánchez y evitó así que Sánchez le atacara a él. La única ventaja es que evitó así que Sánchez le llamara, sumándose a Iglesias, escudero del Pp. Pero no aprovechó esta circunstancia para hacerle ver a Iglesias la incongruencia de llamar escudero del Pp al que pacta con el primer enemigo del Pp.

3. Rivera debe de creer que el pacto de la anterior legislatura sigue teniendo vigencia. Es posible. Pero tanta vigencia como inutilidad. No se vislumbra un horizonte en que PSOE y C's puedan gobernar en España. Esta paz bilateral perjudica especialmente a Rivera, que no pudo reprochar a Sánchez las responsabilidades socialistas en la deriva catalana.

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La religión moderada engendra el fundamentalismo

El efecto Josías

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings, it occurred to me that the Kouachi brothers’ experience was likely similar. And that was what led me to think, I am Cherif. It was a sentiment not of solidarity, but terror — terror that the same evil might lurk within me. And, equally horrifying, I had to admit that I felt a sense of understanding.

While the rest of the world saw nothing but a monster, I saw in Cherif a young man who was desperate to accomplish something of eternal significance with his life — a desire that I myself had felt. I saw someone who probably found purpose in a literal interpretation of the book that he had been taught was the word of God — a purpose to which I myself had once clung.

Most frightening of all, I saw in Cherif a man who was doing what he thought was right. He was not a nihilist or a lunatic; rather, he was a young man with an all-or-nothing attitude who was acting on imperatives that followed logically from a set of very bad axioms. If my circumstances had been different, I might have become the same kind of monster.

The forces that engendered in Cherif a will to destroy human life are not unique to radical Islam. Even now, Steven Anderson, pastor of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona, preaches that all homosexuals should be put to death, and there are many Christians who share his attitude — a fact that should give us pause as we come to terms with the recent massacre in Orlando, Florida.

The likeness between Anderson’s and a jihadist’s visions for society is striking, and one must wonder whether these visions are acquired in similar ways. When asked by Mark Curtis of USA Today how he had arrived at his views, Anderson said, “I grew up in a Christian home, but it wasn’t until I read the Bible cover-to-cover at age seventeen that I discovered the truth of what the Bible really says.”

Change the age to eighteen, and Anderson’s words perfectly describe my own experience. He, too, was primed by years of religious upbringing to accept the Bible’s contents as the word of God when he picked it up as a teenager. And he embraced all of it, including the most abhorrent parts. How many jihadists have had similar experiences with the Koran?

In both Islam and Christianity, it is easy to dismiss fundamentalist doctrines as perversions of scripture. But the fundamentalists have a ready defense against this charge. When Curtis suggested that Anderson might be perverting Christianity, Anderson said, “Let the viewers read for themselves. Let them pull the Bible off their shelf and look up Leviticus 20:13, and then let them be the judge.”

The disturbing truth is that Anderson is right: If you look up the verse, you’ll find that it says exactly what he claims it says — just as the Koran says precisely what jihadists claim it says. This simple fact is what makes it so easy for fundamentalist clerics to convince vulnerable youth to subscribe to destructive doctrines.

Islam and Christianity are not the only religions subject to violent interpretation, of course. And as it turns out, the phenomenon of a young man becoming radicalized after reading his religion’s holy book for the first time has been around for thousands of years. The Bible itself describes one particularly famous case: that of King Josiah. | QUILLETTE - Henry Rambow

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