Rapper and game show host Snoop Dogg took to Instagram late Thursday and urged his 31 million followers to post and share videos of Louis Farrakhan to Facebook and Instagram. The antisemitic Nation of Islam leader wasbannedfrom both platforms for what the social media giant said was Farrahkahn’s decision to “promote or engage in violence and hate.”
“If you’re down with it like I’m down with it, post your favorite Mr. Farrakhan videos on your Instagram and Facebook page,” Snoop Dogg said in an Instagram video posted Thursday. “Show some love to a real brother.”
“How the fuck y’all gonna ban Minister Louis Farrakhan for putting the truth out there?” Snoop asked in a separate video. “I stand with him. I’m with him. Ban me, motherfucker.”
Snoop Dogg encouraging his followers to post videos of Farrakahn on Facebook and Instagram appears to be in clear violation of the platform’s rules, which do not allow the promotion of “hate speech […] because it creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion and in some cases may promote real-world violence.”
As recently as October Farrakhan posted a video to Twitter in which he called Jews “termites.” Twitter removed Farrakhan’s “verified” blue checkmark for hate speech.
Facebook and Instagram’s purge of conservative personalities also included Infowars host Alex Jones, Infowars contributor Paul Joseph Watson, and journalist and activist Laura Loomer.
Video released Friday by the non-partisan research groupMEMRI, which translated the Arabic into English, taken from a Facebook posting by the Muslim American Society Philadelphia chapter last month shows a group of Muslim children in Palestinian scarves performing at a Ummah Day celebration where they sang a pro-Palestine and recited a poem calling for the liberation of Jerusalem and its Al Aqsa mosque that says “We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque… We will subject them to eternal torture.”
(UPDATE: A different video clip mentions “Zionists”) Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, so the heads they would be chopping off would belong to Jews.
IPT Exclusive Video: Philadelphia #Muslim school students sing song with violent anti-Semitic pro-terrorist lyrics pic.twitter.com/5tPSqypd2V
On April 22, 2019, the Muslim American Society Islamic Center in Philadelphia (MAS Philly) uploaded a video of an “Ummah Day” celebration to its Facebook page in which young children wearing Palestinian scarves sang: “Glorious steeds call us and lead us [to] the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The blood of martyrs protects us… Take us, oh ships… until we reach our shores and crush the treacherous ones… Flow, oh rivers of martyrs!” A young girl read a poem praising martyrs who sacrificed their lives for Palestine, and she asked: “Will [Jerusalem] be a hotbed for cowards?” Another young girl read: “We will defend [Palestine] with our bodies… We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque… We will subject them to eternal torture.”
MAS Philly belongs to the Muslim American Society (MAS), which has 42 chapters in the United States and one in the United Kingdom. MAS’ website says that its mission is to “move people to strive for God-consciousness, liberty and justice, and to convey Islam with utmost clarity,” and that its vision is “a virtuous and just American society.”
Hungary will not relax rules for international universities despite pressure from the EU and offers from Germany to mediate in a row over a college founded by US billionaire George Soros, a government spokesman said.
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Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a nationalist who has often clashed with the European Union, has been accused of restricting academic freedom with his new higher education rules, which the Central European University said forced it out of the country.
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“There is no change in our core view”, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told Reuters.
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“We will not change the laws and regulations that govern higher education in Hungary. We still operate on that basis.”
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Central European University, set up by Soros, will move part of its operations to Austria from September because of rules forbidding it to issue US degrees.
The dispute, often seen as a proxy for disagreements between Soros and Orbán on migration, is one of the main issues that caused the European Peoples’ Party to suspend Orbán’s Fidesz before European Parliament elections.
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At the initiative of Manfred Weber, the EPP’s lead candidate to head the EU executive after the May elections, the government of the German state of Bavaria and the Technical University of Munich stepped in to help.
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Offering three new professorships and new courses to augment CEU’s teaching, they said they would open a way for CEU to issue international degrees.
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A Hungarian government official told an opposition member of the Budapest parliament that Hungary considered Bavarian participation in the Hungarian higher education sector “a step that builds trust”.
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And Balazs Orbán, a state secretary on the prime minister’s staff, said the government was “ready to examine the possibility for issuing diplomas recognized in the United States and Germany as well as in Hungary”.
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However, he reiterated that all universities had to comply with Hungarian law, and Zoltan Kovacs also made it clear that Bavarian participation, while welcome, would lead to no legal amendments.
While anti-establishment voices are silenced, technological advancements are being made that will bring “fake news” to a whole new level. Who will remain to challenge it?
CNBC lamented shortly after Facebook announced its ban of Infowars that Facebook cannot completely clamp down on accounts, essentially playing “whack-a-mole.”CNBC reported:
It’s yet another sign that while huge companies such as Facebook and YouTube have to fight to keep content under control, it’s tough for both to monitor and remove accounts and content that can pop right back up with new pages. It’s like a big game of whack-a-mole.
Censorship is ramping up around the world as mainstream news outlets rally for “regulations” on the first amendment.
While anti-establishment voices are silenced, technological advancements are being made that will bring “fake news” to a whole new level.
Artificial Intelligence systems are currently being developed that will “deep fake” news articles, just as photos and videos have been infamously faked.
In a little-noticed story in July of 2017, it was revealed that a Google grant of €706,000 was given to the United Kingdom’s Press Association to use artificial intelligence to write news articles.
The A.I. system, called RADAR (Reporters And Data And Robots), comes from Google’s Digital News Initiative.
Attorney General William Barr told the Senate Judiciary Panel this week that he has assembled a team at the Justice Department to probe whether the spying conducted by the FBI against the Trump campaign in 2016 was improper, reportsBloomberg.
Barr suggested that he would focus on former senior leaders at the FBI and Justice Department.
“To the extent there was overreach, what we have to be concerned about is a few people at the top getting it into their heads that they know better than the American people,” said Barr.
Barr will also review whether the infamous Steele dossier – a collection of salacious and unverified claims against Donald Trump, assembled by a former British spy and paid for by the Clinton campaign – was fabricated by the Russian government to trick the FBI and other US agencies. (Will Barr investigate whether Steele made the whole thing up for his client, Fusion GPS?)
“We now know that he was being falsely accused,” Barr said of Trump. “We have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon.”
Mueller’s report didn’t say there were false accusations against Trump. It said the evidence of cooperation between the campaign and Russia “was not sufficient to support criminal charges.” Investigators were unable to get a complete picture of the activities of some relevant people, the special counsel found.
Although Barr’s review has only begun, it’s helping to fuel a narrative long embraced by Trump and some of his Republican supporters: that the Russia investigation was politically motivated and concocted from false allegations in order to spy on Trump’s campaign and ultimately undermine his presidency. –Bloomberg
As Bloomberg notes, Barr’s review could receive a boost by a Thursday New York Times article acknowledging that the FBI sent a ‘honeypot’ spy to London in 2016 to pose as a research assistant and gather intelligence from Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulosover possible Trump campaign links to Russia.
The Trump re-election campaign immediately seized on the Times report as evidence that improper spying did occur. “As President Trump has said, it is high time to investigate the investigators,” said Trump campaign manager, Brad Parscale in a statement.
During Barr’s Wednesday testimony, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) told Barr “It appears to me that the Obama administration, Justice Department and FBI decided to place their bets on Hillary Clinton and focus their efforts” when it came to investigating the Trump campaign.
Depending on what Barr finds, his review of the Russia probe could give Trump ammunition to defend himself in continuing congressional inquiries — and in a potential impeachment for obstructing justice. Barr told senators that Trump’s actions can’t be seen as obstruction if he was exercising his constitutional authority as president to put an end to an illegitimate investigation.
Barr’s efforts follow two years of work by a group of House Republicans who have been conducting dozens of interviews regarding the FBI’s and Justice Department’s conduct in the early stages of investigation of Trump and his campaign. –Bloomberg
On Thursday, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) issued a criminal referralfor Nellie Ohr – a former Fusion GPS contractor who passed anti-Trump research to her husband, then the #4 official at the DOJ.
On Thursday, Meadows said that Barr’s “willingness to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation is the first step in putting the questionable practices of the past behind us,” and that the AG’s “tenacity is sure to be rewarded.”
The FBI opened its counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign after a self-professed member of the Clinton Foundation, Joseph Mifsud, fed Papadopoulos the rumor that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton. That rumor would be coaxed out of the former Trump aide by another Clinton-connected individual – Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who would notify authorities of Papadopoulos’ admission, officially launching the investigation.
Barr says he wants to get to the bottom of it.
His review will examine the above chain of events that set the investigation into motion, and whether any US agencies were engaged in spying on or investigating the Trump campaign before the probe was officially launched.
Barr said he’s working with FBI Director Christopher Wray“to reconstruct exactly what went down.” He said he has “people in the department helping me review the activities over the summer of 2016.”
Notably, Barr said his aides will be “working very closely” with the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz.
Horowitz is conducting his own investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation and whether there were abuses when the FBI obtained a secret warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in October 2016 to spy on another foreign policy adviser to the campaign, Carter Page. –Bloomberg
Barr will also investigate when the DOJ and FBI knew that the Democratic Party and Clinton was Steele.
At the mayor-founded academy in Bergamo, a group of about 30 uniformed migrants form two neat rows, hands behind their straight backs in a military-style “at ease” position.
In the corridor of a building, they repeat in chorus: “We are the students of the first course of the Accademia dell’Integrazione Grazie Bergamo, Thank you Bergamo”.
Then they break ranks, line up two by two and move to a larger room, where two of the students, wearing white aprons, begin serving lunch.
The “students” are asylum seekers and participating in a boot-camp style one-year programme whose explicit purpose is to integrate migrants.
Participants attend Italian-language classes, get internships at factories in the area and have to follow a strict routine.
They also have to do community service work for free.
The academy’s students can only use their smartphones for a few hours a day. For the best part of the day, their rooms are empty, with perfectly made beds. No language other than Italian is allowed. And they look more like cadets than students.
They must always wear a uniform and have three kinds of outfits.
When they are inside, it is a blue tracksuit with the words “Grazie Bergamo” in large print on the back; the second uniform is orange, similar to waste collectors, and also bears the words “Grazie Bergamo” in large print; the third, worn in free time, is a blue shirt and grey sweater with a small school logo, which also allows them to take the city’s public transportation free of charge.
“This is not a school for everyone”, Giorgio Gori, mayor of Bergamo, a wealthy city in northern Italy, about 50km east of Milan, told Al Jazeera.
It’s no place for slackers, he says, because participants “must respect a series of rules of cohabitation” and professional training is mandatory, “with the aim of getting them to a job”.
To get into the programme, participants must pass three interviews assessing their knowledge of Italian, the level of schooling and their ability to respect the rules.
Christophe Sanchez, the mayor’s chief of staff, who created the academy, believes that Italy’s system of asylum seekers’ management is not working and attributes its failure to the fact that they have rights but few duties: “Asylum seekers can stay in bed all day and there is no legal instrument to force them to do something.”
The underlying message of the academy seems to be that participants must demonstrate that they are hardworking people, that they really like Italy and are not troublemakers – in other words, that they deserve to stay.
The fact that the programme includes free-of-charge community work, not to mention the “Thank you” part in the name, gives the impression that migrants must be grateful.
Stefano Quadri, an activist from the Bergamo migrante antirazzista group, an anti-racist organisation, objects to the idea that migrants need to prove they deserve to be hosted, since asylum is a human right, and says free labour “destroys the local economy”.
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A worker at the Ruah coop, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, is worried that students live in relative isolation, with little contact with locals: “Integration means inserting a person in society,” he said.
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But organisers brush off criticism, saying that the programme is effective.
“We have so far done 380 hours of volunteer work and all our students understand Italian”, says Sanchez.
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As for the free labour, Gori insists it is not really free: “Between food, lodging and classes, we are investing 1,000 euros per months on each of them, so in a way they are getting paid.”
In his recently updated and expanded book on former President Obama, “Obama: The Call Of History,” The New York Times’ Chief White House CorrespondentPeter Bakeraddresses several hot-button topics, including why Obama failed to adequately address Russian meddling ahead of the 2016 election and his response to “buffoonish showman” Donald Trump shocking the world by defeating Hillary Clinton, a response that involved “multiple emotional stages.”
In one of the sections of the book highlighted by The Daily Mail Friday, Baker peels back the curtain on why Obama was so weak in his response to Russian meddling ahead of the election in 2016 — something for which Trump has hammered Obama amid all the Robert Mueller-debunked “collusion” allegations.
“Anything the Russians did concerning the 2016 Election was done while Obama was President. He was told about it and did nothing! Most importantly, the vote was not affected,” Trump tweeted last month.
The reason Obama didn’t act more decisively and rebuke Russia more directly, says Baker is that he feared that it might “escalate” the Russian interference campaign. This cautious approach, Baker suggests, flows out of Obama’s “don’t do stupid sh**” foreign policy philosophy, an approach for which Obama has been criticized in the past.
But fearing the escalation of the campaign wasn’t the only reason Obama didn’t act more forcefully, says Baker: Obama reportedly once admitted that “if I speak out more, he’ll just say it’s rigged.”
According to Baker, in one meeting Obama — who was convinced like most of the political establishment that Clinton was going to win — said confidently that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “backed the wrong horse” by supposedly helping Trump’s campaign.
As the Daily Mail notes, it was only after the election, which Trump won in stunning fashion, that Obama finally took action against the Russians as punishment for the meddling his administration had known about for months. Obama’s decision to expel a bunch of Russian diplomats conveniently fed into the “collusion” narrative that had already gotten rolling and which the election’s loser, Clinton, helped promote.
The Daily Mail also draws attention to another juicy passage in the book which reveals new details about Obama’s response to Trump’s upset victory over the woman who was supposed to protect Obama’s legacy.
Accoring to Baker, Obama watched the Marvel film “Dr. Strange” on election night with Michelle and Valerie Jarrett. At one point, Baker writes, Obama received an update on his phone and said, “Huh. Results in Florida are looking kind of strange.”
While Michelle went to sleep early, Obama stayed up and witnessed Trump’s devastating defeat of Clinton, which Baker suggests Obama found unthinkable because he thought there was “no way Americans would turn on him.”
According to Baker, Obama phoned Clinton at 1 a.m. and advised her to concede quickly, advice she didn’t take. In response, she supposedly said, “I’m sorry for letting you down.”
Obama and his team, Baker says, did in fact feel that Clinton had let them down. “To Obama and his team … the real blame lay squarely with Clinton. She was the one who could not translate his strong record and healthy economy into a winning message.”
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