Bits
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- Oh god someone religious has something weird on a plane TERRORIST:
A passenger was alarmed by the phylacteries, religious items which observant Jews strap around their arms and heads as part of morning prayers, on the flight from New York's La Guardia airport heading to Louisville....
Phylacteries, called tefillin in Hebrew, are two small black boxes with black straps attached to them. Observant Jewish men are required to place one box on their head and tie the other one on their arm each weekday morning.
We really need to calm down as a country before we start stabbing each other in the eyes.
- Speaking of calming the fuck down, a planned London mosque won't be built because people in Britain are scared shitless by Muslims:
Alan Craig, a Christian Peoples' Alliance councillor, said: “I'm delighted that the council has finally seen the light on this. It's a key site for the local community that would have been lost if the mega-mosque had been built. It is a big step forward, but a lot could still happen.
“The authorities use planning terms, but they've come to see the misogynist nature of the group themselves and don't want to give them that platform.” Newham council issued enforcement notices against Tablighi Jamaat on Thursday. The council is also considering compulsory purchase of the land where a temporary mosque has been operating illegally for three years.
You don't want it because they're bad and wrong and it'll bring down the quality of the neighborhood. Typical racist nonsense.
Funny thing is, although we've pegged the Muslim organization Tablighi Jamaat as having links to Al-Qaida (and what Muslim organization haven't we pegged that way), many people, including a former CIA agent, don't understand why we've done so, and the shoe bomber Richard Reid left the group because he didn't think it was violent enough. And still the article calls Tablighi Jamaat "Islamist" which is synonymous with "scary terrorists".
Meanwhile, Al-Arabiya, a Saudi Arabian state-run media outlet, says the mosque won't be built for "technical" reasons. I lol'd.
- Yemen right now is in the midst of a civil war and Tina has been directing me a lot of article about what's going on over there, so I'll write up something about it in the coming week, but right now I want to focus on this last paragraph in this article about Yemen's stricter international visitor regulations:
Yemen, an impoverished country with a weak government whose authority does not extend far outside the capital, is Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland. The offshoot al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula was formed a year ago when Yemen and Saudi militant groups merged.
I keep seeing articles refer to Yemen has "Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland" like it means anything. Bin laden's father moved from Yemen into Saudi Arabia, and Osama himself was born there, not Yemen, so why do we keep bringing this point up? Hitler's family came from Austria, but we don't see Austria referred to as "Hitler's ancestral homeland." I can only guess we're trying to vilify Yemen here as the homeland of terrorists, so we must continue the War on Terror there. How more propagandist can you be?