THE CHURCH MILITANT
Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
A new app developed by researchers at the University of Utah encourages users to report ‘offensive’ speech, including slurs written on bathroom walls.
First Amendment? What First Amendment?
DIGIT Lab’s “Hate Incident Reporting” app turns citizens into spies by accepting “reports beyond crimes captured in police records”.
Although the creators claim that all reporting is confidential and anonymous, “The amount of detailed information a person is asked to provide would make it easy for law enforcement to identify someone,” reports the MassPrivateI blog.
“We’d like to see it used nationally to get better hate incident statistics, and to understand why, how, and where people are active in hateful incidents, and how that offends or hurts people,” said Richard Medina.
The app allows users to submit photos and videos of the alleged “hate” incident, and asks them to classify it “out of multiple types of bias: religion, disability, gender, identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other.”
The app was ostensibly created because the activists behind it are unhappy that reports of “hate crime” numbers are not high enough.
In order to fan the flames of hysteria about bigots and Nazis lurking around every corner, it becomes necessary to artificially inflate cases of “hate incidents”.
What constitutes a “hate incident”? According to Phys.Org, this would include, “derogatory epithets written in bathrooms to slurs yelled from a car window.”
So now rude graffiti or road rage can be conflated into the narrative of soaring hate crime and voila! We have ourselves a freshly served moral panic.
This contrived nationwide hate crime epidemic then surely necessitates left-wing institutions, media and academic bodies be handed more money and power to fight it!
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told CNN’s David Axelrod that if there’s a mass shooting while he’s president “We’re not going to give thoughts and prayers, which to me is just bullshit.”
“I’m sorry to say that, as a man of faith, but I was taught that faith without works is dead,” he continued.
Booker pledged to take action on gun control if elected, saying, “So, when I’m president of the United States, I’m taking a fight to this issue like folks will never see before because we’re better than this as a country.”
Earlier this week, Booker promoted “the most sweeping gun control plan ever” and agreed that law-abiding gun owners should be “thrown in prison” if they refuse to comply with “an assault weapons ban.”
Booker and most other 2020 Democrat hopefuls have been pushing gun control heavily this week, following the tragic shooting at STEM School in Colorado.
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
Says the Vatican in reflecting the muscular efforts of Pope Francis to fully embrace Islam:
“We Muslims and Christians are called to open ourselves to others, knowing and recognizing them as brothers and sisters…. this way, we can tear down walls raised out of fear and ignorance and seek together to build bridges of friendship that are fundamental for the good of all humanity.”
The endearing use of the phrase “brothers and sisters” invokes a vision of harmony and peace together. This is not the case between Muslims and Christians globally. Too many Christians live under the worst conditions in Islamic countries, as they endure violent persecution daily under the Sharia. The Pope of Islamis living a lie and promoting the same. Ongoing, he has abandoned persecuted Christians, and also persecuted other minority groups including minority Muslim groups and other victims of jihad. He has also turned a blind eye to Islamic supremacist assaults and jihad attacks in Western countries as a result of open door immigration.
His pursuit of dialogue has never included the demand that Islamic leaders and adherents accept religious freedoms, and the equality of other faiths and human beings regardless of gender and personal identity. The Pope does not promote a two way street in his so-called advancement of “dialogue”. His expectation is that Christians must embrace “dialogue”, “diversity” and “tolerance” of everyone—including jihadists– but he has no such message and expectation of Muslims.
The Pope has also declared Rome to be a “city of bridges, never walls!,” and further stated that “Jesus demands” we take in Muslim migrants. Meanwhile, he lives in a walled city within Rome, surrounded by security, and he is not taking in any migrants himself.
Conversely, Cardinal Robert Sarah — prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments — compared “the modern influx of Muslim migrants to the invasions of barbarian tribes that ultimately brought down the Roman Empire in a.d. 475.” Sarah also warned that “it is a false exegesis [interpretation of scriptural text] to use the Word of God to promote migration. God never wanted these rifts.”
For the Pope’s trip to Morocco, Vatican media promotions abandoned the traditional papal insignia and replaced it with the cross and the crescent; and the crescent did not appear “alongside the cross, as if a companion to it. Rather, the Islamic symbol encircles the Christian one” symbolizing a kind of submission to Islam.
In Islamic law, Muslim lives are explicitly worth more than those of non-Muslims. The Shafi’i Sharia manual Reliance of the Traveller dictates: “The indemnity for the death or injury of a woman is one-half the indemnity paid for a man. The indemnity paid for a Jew or Christian is one-third the indemnity paid for a Muslim. The indemnity paid for a Zoroastrian is one-fifteenth that of a Muslim.” (o4.9) Sikhs rank even lower, as they are not People of the Book. The Pope addresses none of this.
Pope Francis has accurately been hailed the “defender of Islam”. As Robert Spencer rightly notes:
Pope Francis is not only disastrously wrongheaded about an obvious fact that is reinforced by every day’s headlines; he is also deceiving and misleading his people about a matter of utmost importance, and keeping them ignorant and complacent about a growing and advancing threat.
“Vatican Wishes Happy Ramadan to ‘Muslim Brothers and Sisters’”, by Thomas D. Williams,Breitbart, May 10, 2019:
The Vatican has sent a special message to all the world’s Muslims, wishing them “a peaceful and fruitful celebration of Ramadan.”
The month of Ramadan, which began this year on May 5, is “a month for strengthening the spiritual bonds we share in Muslim-Christian friendship,” reads the message from the Vatican’s office of interreligious dialogue bearing the title “Christians and Muslims: Promoting Universal Fraternity.”
“We Muslims and Christians are called to open ourselves to others, knowing and recognizing them as brothers and sisters,” the text states. “In this way, we can tear down walls raised out of fear and ignorance and seek together to build bridges of friendship that are fundamental for the good of all humanity.”
“We thus cultivate in our families and in our political, civil and religious institutions, a new way of life where violence is rejected, and the human person respected,” reads the message, which bears the signature of Bishop Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.
Our religions invite us to “remain rooted in the values of peace; to defend the values of mutual understanding, human fraternity and harmonious coexistence; to re-establish wisdom, justice and love,” the text says, citing a joint declaration signed by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam Ahmed a-Tayyeb in Abu Dhabi this past February.
That same declaration brought down heavy criticism on the pope particularly due to the assertion that the plurality and diversity of religions “are willed by God in His wisdom,” just as God wills a plurality of colors, sexes, races, and languages.
A number of Catholic theologians raised objections to the statement, insisting that it seemed to suggest that either God actively wills error, or that all religions are equally valid paths to God. The existence of a variety of colors, races, and languages in humanity is very different from a variety of contradictory claims about God’s identity and way of acting, they said.
In early April, Francis walked back the earlier statement, clarifying that in reality God only permits the existence of many religions without actively willing it.
The Vatican’s Ramadan message steers clear of such theological swampland.
“We are encouraged, therefore, to continue advancing the culture of dialogue as a means of cooperation and as a method of growing in knowledge of one another,” the message says……
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Facebook has put enormous efforts into launching witch-hunts against those who fight for democratic freedoms–like Milo, Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, going so far as to reference them as “dangerous individuals”, right alongside the truly dangerous, violent-minded, anti-semitic, racist nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan who has actually called openly for 10,000 men to murder white policemen, using a Baptist Church platform.
The obvious unmatched, biggest threat today is jihad terror, yet Facebook does not see fit to put resources into tackling that threat. Facebook has recently allowed a platform to a genocidal anti-Christian Muslim cleric and in fact, consulted with Hamas-linked CAIR over who gets banned from its platforms. Now Facebook stands accused of “automatically generating celebratory jihadist videos and promoting terrorist business pages.” Cracking down on jihad terror and murder is just not important enough to Facebook higher ups. They would rather torment and damage those who battle against this grave evil. Facebook is in effect continuing to aid and abet jihad terrorists.
A business page generated by Facebook for al-Qaeda received over 4400 “likes” and provided the group with “valuable data” to use when recruiting new followers
“Facebook accused of auto-generating terrorist propaganda, creating page for al-Qaeda”, by Fatima Olumee,9 News, May 10, 2019:
Social network Facebook has been accused of automatically generating celebratory jihadist videos and promoting terrorist business pages.
The videos were uncovered by an anonymous whistleblower who filed a complaint with a US regulator, accusing Facebook of misleading investors on its efforts to clean up the platform.
A five-month study of more than 3000 accounts found Facebook’s artificial intelligence algorithms were creating ‘memories’ and video celebrations for active users, including accounts of extremist organisations such as al-Qaeda, white supremacist groups, and self-identified Nazis.
A business page generated by Facebook for al-Qaeda received over 4400 “likes” and provided the group with “valuable data” to use when recruiting new followers, according to the complaint.
Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorists are also openly networking on Facebook’s website, according to the whistleblower’s research.
The confidential complaint, supported by the US National Whistleblower Centre (NWC)
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According to The Associated Press, the social media giant automatically created an animated, bubbly video on a local “business” page for Al-Qaeda and extremist contents “auto-generated” by the social platform include a celebratory jihadist video.
Al-Qaeda’s local business page “automatically” generated by Facebook’s algorithm had over 7,400 likes, with reports saying that Facebook gave the group “valuable data” when they were recruiting people. Facebook’s tools put job descriptions uploaded by users on their profile. It also copied flags, images, and branding used by the extremist group.
FROM WEBSITE ABOVE: republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
Summary of Key Findings
The whistleblower analyzed 3,228 Facebook profiles of individuals expressing affiliation with terror or hate groups. The analysis produced the following key findings:
Terror and hate speech and images are proliferating on Facebook. Thousands of Facebook profiles and pages reviewed by the whistleblower contained speech and images expressing support for, and affiliation with, terrorist organizations and hate groups around the world.
Contrary to its assurances, Facebook has no meaningful strategy for removing this terror and hate content from its website. As noted above, Facebook has stated that it has put in place a strategy that enables it to block 99% of the activity of selected terrorist groups before it is reported by users. The whistleblower presents extensive research showing that this is untrue, and that in fact, Facebook has not yet put in place controls needed to monitor the extremist content that users are creating. Large amounts of terror and hate content, including content generated by groups allegedly targeted by Facebook, remained on the website five months after initially being found by the whistleblower.
Facebook is generating its own terror and hate content, which is being Liked by individuals affiliated with terrorist organizations. The whistleblower demonstrates that Facebook is a terror and hate content creator, producing terror and hate content using its auto-generation feature. One page created by Facebook, for the Syrian Salafist militant group Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (“HTS,” also known as al-Qaeda in Syria), received over 4,400 Likes. Several of those Liking this page have profiles using terrorist iconography; one lists his employment as “mujahid.” Several are associated with illicit looting and trafficking of antiquities, an activity that HTS regulates and taxes in the region as a source of terror financing.
Facebook is providing a powerful networking and recruitment tool to terrorist and hate groups. Some of the terror- and hate-related pages on Facebook have thousands of Likes, a feature that terrorist and hate groups can use to identify and recruit supporters. The widespread and persistent promotion of violent content and extremist ideology by terror and hate groups shows that they see Facebook as a valuable tool for networking and recruiting new members.
Facebook has argued it is not a content provider, failing to disclose that it is generating terror and hate content. In its press releases and other public statements, Facebook has never disclosed that it auto-generates its own terror and hate content and that this content is being Liked by individuals who affiliate themselves with terrorist organizations. To the contrary, its core defense in litigation filed by families of terror victims is that it is a mere platform, not a content provider.
