Clean It Up!

This is the feel-good story of the day, and maybe for the entire Christmas season.

A culturally-enriched young man — Mostafa Kamel Hendi by name — approached the counter of a “We Buy Gold” franchise in western North Carolina, waved a gun, and demanded money. After the would-be robber came behind the counter, the clerk decked him with a left, knocking him out cold. When the unfortunate perp came to, the clerk made him mop up his own blood from the floor.

Thank goodness for surveillance video! Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this clip:


Below the jump is the accompanying news story from a local Spartanburg TV station:

Caught on Tape: Clerk Punches, Knocks Out Armed Robber

Clerk Then Makes Suspect Clean Up His Own Blood

HENDERSONVILLE, N.C. -- A clerk at a business in Western North Carolina punched a would-be robber and knocked him out cold just minutes after the man barged in with a gun and demanded money.

It happened about 15 minutes before closing time Friday night at We Buy Gold store in Hendersonville.

“When he came through the door he told me had a gun and he even flashed it,” said Derek Mothershead. “I stood up and threw my hands up and said, ‘Take the money.’”

Mothershead said the man came behind the counter with a bag.

The punch knocked out the would-be thief. Mothershead was able to grab the man’s weapon and realized it was a pellet gun.

“When I pulled it out of his waistband I started laughing,” said Mothershead. “I said, ‘Man, you came in here with a fake gun?’”

Mothershead said he dragged the man over to a desk and held him down with one hand and called 911 with the other.

The man, later identified as Mostafa Hendi, eventually regained consciousness.

“He kind of begged me, begged me to let him go,” Mothershead said. “I said, ‘You came in and tried to rob us. You’re going to jail.’”

While they waited for police and paramedics, Mothershead gave the man a roll of power towels, sprayed the floor with cleaner and told him to clean up his own blood.

“At the time you really don’t think you hit somebody as hard as you do, but looking back at the tape I can say I hit him pretty hard, I guess,” Mothershead said.

Hendi remains behind bars on a charge of attempted robbery with a dangerous weapon. His bond was set at $100,000.

“There was just an opportunity there where I thought that I could actually do something and justice could be served, and I thought that’s what needed to be done,” said Mothershead.

We Buy Gold has dealt with others robberies at its 30 locations between Western North Carolina and the Upstate.

“It’s not even worth hitting us,” said Mothershead. “We’ve got a fast-retrieval money system in order and we really don’t carry that much money to begin with, so there’s no point in hitting us.”

For a complete listing of previous enrichment news, see The Cultural Enrichment Archives.

Hat tip: Takuan Seiyo.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 12/26/2011

The United States has budgeted at least $40 million to buy back anti-aircraft missiles that Libyan militias stole from Muammar Qaddafi’s arsenals. The missiles pose little threat to modern military aircraft, but the U.S. government is concerned that they might be sold to terrorists and used against civilian jetliners.

Speaking of terrorists, the Christmas bombings in Nigeria were so serious that the White House actually used the T-word, condemning them as “terrorism”. President Obama, however, declined to use the I-word or the M-word to describe the ideology motivating the terrorists. The pope also condemned the slaughter in Nigeria. There was general hand-wringing all across the West about the awful events on Christmas.

In other news, Adolf Hitler’s favorite singer died at his home in Bavaria at the age of 108.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, Fjordman, Insubria, KGS, Lurker from Tulsa, Srdja Trifkovic, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

“A Black Day for Austria”

Soeren Kern has written an article at the Hudson Institute about the “hate speech” case against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff. Some excerpts are below:

“A Black Day for Austria”
by Soeren Kern

An Austrian appellate court has upheld the conviction of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a Viennese housewife and anti-Jihad activist, for “denigrating religious beliefs” after giving a series of seminars about the dangers of radical Islam.

The December 20 ruling shows that while Judaism and Christianity can be disparaged with impunity in postmodern multicultural Austria, speaking the truth about Islam is subject to swift and hefty legal penalties.

Although the case has major implications for freedom of speech in Austria, as well as in Europe as a whole, it has received virtually no press coverage in the American mainstream media.

Sabaditsch-Wolff’s Kafkaesque legal problems began in November 2009, when she presented a three-part seminar about Islam to the Freedom Education Institute, a political academy linked to the Austrian Freedom Party.

A glossy socialist weekly magazine, NEWS — all in capital letters — planted a journalist in the audience to secretly record the first two lectures. Lawyers for the leftwing publication then handed the transcripts over to the Viennese public prosecutor’s office as evidence of hate speech against Islam, according to Section 283 of the Austrian Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB). Formal charges against Sabaditsch-Wolff were filed in September 2010; and her bench trial, presided on by one multicultural judge and no jury, began November 23, 2010.

On the first day of the trial, however, it quickly became clear that the case against Sabaditsch-Wolff was not as air-tight as prosecutors had made it out to be. The judge in the case, Bettina Neubauer, pointed out, for example, that only 30 minutes of the first seminar had actually been recorded.

Neubauer also noted that some of the statements attributed to Sabaditsch-Wolff were offhand comments made during breaks and not a formal part of the seminar. Moreover, only a few people heard these comments, not 30 or more — the criterion under Austrian law for a statement being “public.” In any event, Sabaditsch-Wolff says her comments were not made in a public forum because the seminars were held for a select group of people who had registered beforehand.

More importantly, many of the statements attributed to Sabaditsch-Wolff were actually quotes she made directly from the Koran and other Islamic religious texts. Fearing that the show trial would end in a mistrial, the judge abruptly suspended hearings until January 18, 2011, ostensibly to give him time to review the tape recordings, but also to give the prosecution more time to shore up its case.

On January 18, after realizing that the original charge would not hold up, the judge — not the prosecutor — informed Sabaditsch-Wolff that in addition to the initial charge of hate speech, she was now being charged with “denigrating religious symbols of a recognized religious group.” Sabaditsch-Wolff’s lawyer immediately demanded that the trial be postponed so that the defense could prepare a new strategy.

When the trial resumed on February 15, 2011, Sabaditsch-Wolff was exonerated of the first charge of “incitement” because the court found that here statements were not made in a “provocative” manner.

But Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted of the second charge against her, namely “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion,” according to Section 188 of the Austrian Criminal Code.

The judge ruled that Sabaditsch-Wolff committed a crime by stating in her seminars about Islam that the Islamic prophet Mohammed was a pedophile (Sabaditsch-Wolff’s actual words were “Mohammed had a thing for little girls.”)

The judge rationalized that Mohammed’s sexual contact with nine-year-old Aisha could not be considered pedophilia because Mohammed continued his marriage to Aisha until his death. According to this line of thinking, Mohammed had no exclusive desire for underage girls; he was also attracted to older females because Aisha was 18 years old when Mohammed died.

Read the rest at the Hudson Institute.


For previous posts on the “hate speech” prosecution of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, see Elisabeth’s Voice: The Archives.

ESW: The FrontPage Interview

Jamie Glazov interviewed Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff today for FrontPage Mag. Some excerpts are below:

The Persecution of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a free speech activist who was charged last year in Austria with “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion” for asserting that “Mohammed had a thing for little girls.” In February of this year she was convicted, and will have to pay a fine of up to €480. Just recently, on December 20, 2011, her conviction was upheld by the higher court. If she refuses to pay the fine, she may spend a maximum of two months in jail. She grew up and lived in Muslim countries and experienced Islam first-hand.

FP:		Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff, welcome to Frontpage Interview. I would like to talk to you today about your trial and where it stands now. But let us begin with a bit of background about yourself.
ESW:		Thank you Jamie. My father was posted at the Austrian Embassy in Tehran before the Iranian Revolution. I was also there, a child of seven, and I experienced the pre-revolutionary Iran, a beautiful country with friendly people, great food and even greater skiing. I attended the German school and generally enjoyed myself. Then came the revolution and everything changed. There was religious fervor in the air, chanting, demonstrations featuring black-clad women. And one day in late 1978 my mother, my sister and I were forced to leave Tehran, and we joined the thousands of desperate men and women scrambling to get out of the country, the only difference being that we had a country to return to. I still remember all this as if it were yesterday. I knew that this had to do with religion, with Islam. I knew what “Allahu akhbar” meant, just as I knew that our Iranian housemaid set fire to our house because she no longer seemed to like our Western ways much. (Although I was in the house at the time with my mother and sister, we survived the fire.) My father returned to Austria just shortly before the war between Iran and Iraq broke out. In the coming years my life would touch the Islamic world, sometimes more, sometimes less. My father was posted to Baghdad in late 1982, so we joined him for Christmas and New Year. I experienced life on the other side of the war, Saddam’s side. What I don’t remember is Islam, strange as it sounds. The Iraq of the early 1980s was a secular country, albeit a war-torn one. My mother had to “pack” food and other staples in her luggage so we could celebrate Christmas properly. I also remember attending Christmas mass in Baghdad. After a few years of high school in Chicago, we returned to Vienna, where I graduated and became a ski instructor. In the summer of 1990 I spent three months at the Austrian Embassy in Kuwait, thereby returning to the Middle East for the first time since 1982/3. Memories flooded my brain, everything seemed so familiar. But then Saddam returned to my life: I was in Kuwait on August 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. I was unable to return to Austria until August 26, 1990, but that is another story. In February 1997, I once again traveled to Kuwait, this time as a visa officer at the Austrian Embassy. During my nearly four years in Kuwait, I was able to experience the true Islam for the first time. Because I was older — in my mid-twenties — I reflected more strongly on what I saw and heard. I saw and heard a lot, and I also experienced a lot first-hand. Two examples: First, Ramadan. The first one was sort of fun, a different experience, something new. The second one was a nuisance, especially after I heard reports of harassment, especially of the one against the Coptic husband of my colleague, who was chided for licking the stamps for the Christmas cards. Ramadan coincided with Christmas back in the late 1990s. And the third Ramadan forced me to rebel: I started eating salami sandwiches in the visa section, in plain sight of the fasting applicants. I got away with it because the Austrian Embassy is legally Austrian soil. I started asking myself: what was the point of Ramadan? Our Jordanian translator, a devout Muslim and heavy smoker, suffered greatly during Ramadan, but he was unable, maybe even unwilling to quit during that month of abstention. I did not understand the purpose of his fasting and abstaining if nothing good came of it. This sentiment was furthered by newspaper articles about Ramadan and a Q&A. One question remains with me forever: “I accidentally swallowed a fly while riding my bicycle. Is my fast still acceptable or do I have make it up?” Unbelievable. The second example concerns the relationship between Mohammed and Aisha, a relationship that earned me the conviction in court. Part of my job was to read the two English-language newspapers. I don’t remember what the article was about, but it must have been something about Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha and the subsequent consummation of the marriage. I clearly remember my shock. I got up from my desk and went to our translator, who was also my friend and confidant. “Hussein,” I said, “Is it true what I just read about Mohammed and Aisha? Did he really have sex with her when she was nine? But that, that, that’s…” Hussein looked at me sternly, “Do not ever talk about this again. Do not mention this again.” Now, he did not deny it. He just ordered me never to speak about this. Though I did not know about it at the time, he was actually enforcing Sharia law.

[…]
ESW:		Simply put, I have now been made a victimless convict. On December 20, 2011, my conviction for denigration of a legally recognized religion was upheld by the higher court. What was the reason for this conviction, you may ask. Well, during the course of my seminars, I mentioned the choking EU directive “Framework decision on combating racism and xenophobia,” and in order to illustrate my point I told the audience about a conversation I had with my sister and how she believed that one should find a different word for Mohammed’s actions with Aisha. I said, “How does one name what he did if not call it pedophilia?” And this sentence got me convicted, for I am allowed by law to say that Mohammed had sex with a young girl, but I may not qualify this behavior as this is deemed “excessive” and thus denigrating. The Austrian state has created a victimless crime, and a criminal without a single victim. The trial is now officially over. There is only one way to appeal, and that is taking the matter to the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg. But– this will cost a lot of money and will take a lot time (6-8 years minimum).
FP:		Ok so what is going to happen? Are you going to appeal, go to jail? Tell us what options you face and what you are going to do…

Read the rest at FrontPage Mag.


For previous posts on the “hate speech” prosecution of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, see Elisabeth’s Voice: The Archives.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 12/25/2011

There’s almost no news feed tonight! That’s because everyone is sprawled in their armchairs, semi-comatose from the sin of gluttony during Christmas dinner.

All except for our poor Norwegian friend Tommy, that is. (S)he is curled up in a sequined fetal ball under the Christmas tree, still traumatized by a near-fatal shortage of butter…

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to Gaia, Insubria, KGS, Nilk, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Christmas Comes With Bombs in Nigeria

The Muslim community in Nigeria celebrated Christmas by blowing up Christians as they worshipped in their churches. The terror group Boko Haram (“Western customs are prohibited”) has claimed responsibility for killing at least sixty people in five separate bombings.

Below are three news videos about Christmas in Nigeria, as uploaded by Vlad Tepes. First, from AP:


The second is from Fox:


And finally, from Channel 4:

Censorship and Propaganda in Norwegian Schools

Our Norwegian correspondent The Observer sends us a translation of an op-ed about the pervasiveness of propaganda in the Norwegian educational system. He includes this note:

Utdanning (Norwegian word for “education”) is a magazine that focuses on issues related to education. published by the Norwegian Department of Education. Its front page says that its readers consists of teachers, lecturers, students, and anyone who is interested in educational issues. It also says that it has a circulation of 130,000 readers.

To my mind this op-ed brilliantly exemplifies the bias that exists in Norwegian schools.

His translation from Utdanning:

Censorship and propaganda in Norwegian schools

Approximately one million Europeans succumbed to or were killed as slaves under Muslim rule in northern Africa, among them 3,000 to 4,000 Norwegians. Is it a mere coincidence that this historical fact is a non-issue in Norwegian schools?

by Tore Kvæven

About a year ago, after having sustained a minor eye injury and spending a night in hospital, I was driven home from Stavanger by a Palestinian taxi driver originally from Gaza. During the one-and-a-half-hour drive home I had several discussions with him, covering a range of subjects, among them Hitler and Germany’s extermination of the Jews. The driver insisted that the concentration camps never existed and that it was simply a conspiracy theory concocted by the Jews themselves and their European allies, and that there were no evidence of any pogroms perpetrated against the Jews during WW2. My arguments to the contrary failed to make an impression, and I thought to myself that the driver had to be a victim of political propaganda, and that he was most likely exposed to this propaganda at an early age. I assumed that the Palestinian educational system and textbooks were biased when it came to the subject of Jewish history. Of course I could have been mistaken. I know very little about the curriculum and textbooks used in the schools in the Gaza strip. But my impression was that the driver believed in what he was saying.

I had a similar debate along the same lines on a different occasion, but the subject this time was slavery, and my debate opponents were ethnic Norwegians. My assertion was that the Muslims were heavily involved in white slave trade during the Middle Ages, and that they brought more white slaves from Europe (slightly more than one million) than the total number of black African slaves (slightly less than one million)that were shipped over to America. These assertions were met with incredulity. Nor was my assertion that the Islamic slave trade from Africa to Asia exceeded the European slave trade to America accepted. This knowledge was so fundamentally at odds with the knowledge of my Norwegian friends that they were unwilling to accept it, just like the case of the Palestinian taxi driver. And just as his views were a result of sustained propaganda in school and in society, I suspect that many Norwegians’ views are a result of politicised opinions found in Norwegian schools and in Norwegian society.

The following quote is from the textbook Midgard 6: social studies for children:

“When media are used to influence people’s opinions in a certain way, it’s called propaganda. … the purpose of propaganda is to shape the people’s views. Censorship and propaganda are often found in countries ruled by dictators.”

This is obviously a correct assertion. But after having worked as a teacher for ten years, I have to ask the following question; “But isn’t the Norwegian school system also influenced by propaganda, something that this textbook clearly shows?”

Another example:

As a political science teacher for students in years six and seven I taught about the Middle Ages in Europe. One of the chapters in the aforementioned textbook deals with the Muslim colonisation of Spain and Portugal, from 711 to 1492. This is portrayed as an era of great human achievement, and the colonisation itself is portrayed as a positive thing. Everything that deals with this colonisation has positive undertones. Here are some short excerpts from the textbook:

“effective irrigation systems”, “new fruits and vegetables”, “knowledge about how the beautiful silk fabrics could be manufactured”, “the beautiful Arabian horse”, “both Christians and Jews were allowed to worship their religions in peace”, “good relations between Christians, Jews and Muslims”, “many converted to Islam”, “in the city of Cordoba there was a brilliant palace with gardens, water fountains, mosques and public baths”, “during the night the city was illuminated by lamps”, “scholars from Europe and the Arabian empire”, “in Andalucía the majority of the population were literate, while the majority in the rest of Europe at the time were illiterate”, “the farmers produced crops two to three times a year”, “big gardens containing fruits and vegetables surrounded the cities”.

It goes on to claim that the Muslims decorated “buildings and rooms with the most amazing patterns, poems and passages from the Koran.” And last, but not least, that the Christians in the 13th century “conquered” (notice the choice of words) Granada and that “everything the Arabs brought with them to Europe continued to live on in European culture.”

The list of positively charged words from this specific chapter is long, and there’s no mention of any negative factors. There is no mention of the culture that existed prior to the Arab colonisation, no reference to those who died as a result of this conquest, and no mention of the living conditions for the indigenous population under the Cordoba Caliphate.

The Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula was probably not any worse than any other colonisation up through history. But then again it was probably not more benign either. Here are some of the atrocities that the Muslims carried out:

• In his chronicles Sultan abd Allah of Granada describes how Muslims in the year 1066 killed every single Jew in the city of Granada (three to four thousand Jews were massacred).
  
• From 1010 to 1013 huge numbers of Jews were killed in Cordoba under the rule of the Muslim leader Suleiman. The remaining survivors were chased out of the city. The death toll may have been as high as several thousands.
  
• In the period 1130-1232 the Muslim Almohadane tribe carried out genocidal atrocities against the Jewish and Christian civilian population in Spain and North Africa. In the city of Tlemcen Jews who refused to convert to Islam were killed. It is possible that as many as 220,000 Jews and Christians were killed in the cities of Fez and Marrakesh during this period. Every single Jewish community in the Spanish cities of Seville, Cordoba, Jaen and Almeria were affected by genocide. Families who chose to convert to Islam to avoid being killed had their children taken away from them.
  
• Jews and Christians had to pay higher taxes and had fewer rights within the judicial system. It is true that the majority of Christians and Jews converted to Islam during the occupation, but their motivations for doing so were of a much less noble character than what is insinuated in the textbook.
  
• It’s also reported that Jews who converted to Islam were the victims of abuse and racism even three generations after the conversion took place.

But despite all this, the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula is still being portrayed as something wholeheartedly positive. The victims seem to be “censored away”.

Could the European colonisation of South-Africa, the USA, or New Zealand be portrayed in a similar manner? Long lists of positively-charged words and vivid narratives of all the positive things that the Europeans brought with them? About progress and civilisation, about medicine and railroads, about hospitals, books, schools, etc.? While at the same time not mentioning anything about the suffering of the indigenous populations? That’s hardly likely. That type of description would be considered to be propaganda and an insult to all the Indians, Maoris and black Africans that were killed as a result of this colonisation. Norwegian textbooks are in this case very specific: Europeans atrocities and the indigenous suffering is something the students are taught about, anything else would be disrespectful and repression of historical facts.

But not when Muslims were the colonisers and Europeans were colonised?

This is not the only example of the filtration of facts and undue bias based on ethnicity in Norwegian schools. On the contrary, it’s symptomatic of what appears to be a politicised spin in several areas in the subjects of history and social studies. One has to look very hard to find any mention of Muslim atrocities in Norwegian textbooks. And this is not only limited to Muslims. This is also the norm for most non-Western cultures and religions. Atrocities perpetrated by these groups seems to be deliberately ignored or downplayed.

Isn’t that also propaganda? (A question, by the way, which I intend to ask the Norwegian minister of Education.)

Other examples:

A student who graduates from a Norwegian school has a good knowledge of the Ku Klux Klan and the numerous murders carried out by the organisation against blacks in the USA (perpetrators were white), but the same student has no knowledge of the equally horrific and even more numerous killings of white South African Boer farmers, including women and children, that has occurred since the introduction of democracy in that country. White Boer farmers have the highest risk of being murdered in the world, and they are living under conditions that resemble genocide with murder rates that are four times higher than that of average South-Africans (perpetrators are black).

The same student will have learnt about the Norwegian role in the transatlantic slave trade (through Danish rule). But he will be unaware that somewhere between three and four thousand Norwegians were captured as slaves by Muslims in North Africa between the years 1600 and 1800, and that the majority of these Norwegians died or were killed as slaves, according to Torbjørn Ødegaard’s book Nordiske slaver — afrikanske herrer (“Nordic slaves —African masters”).

The student will also have knowledge about apartheid and white South-African racism, but be unaware of the plight of the Christian Copts in today’s Egypt.

The student will have knowledge of the Spanish massacres of Indians in South and North America, but be unaware of the genocide perpetrated by Turks against the Armenians in the early 1900s.

In the textbook Kosmos 9, social studies for high school, racism is listed as one of the motivations for European colonisation:

“Many Europeans believed that they were superior to other races.”

This is probably a true assertion, but I have yet to see non-Westerners described as racists in our textbooks. If there’s a perception in our society that only white people can be racists, are Norwegian schools then guilty of giving rise to this idea? And if that is the case, isn’t that also racism?

Propaganda in Norwegian schools is characterised by the downplaying of simple facts, and an over-emphasis on others, in order to achieve the desired effect. This type of propaganda is more difficult to expose and to counter than the lies found in totalitarian states, but is it more acceptable?

Of course I could be wrong, but I would assume that many of those who read this article, and who share the values embraced by Norwegian schools, and have the same political view that has shaped the Norwegian school, have an implicit understanding that the propaganda and censorship that I have referred to in this article hovers like an invisible veil over certain portions of information presented in the subjects that have been mentioned here. Even so, there are few critical voices. On the contrary many believe that this of censorship and propaganda is in the service “of a good and noble cause”, and consequently should continue. But hasn’t this type of justification always been endorsed by the machineries of propaganda throughout history?