Dutch Woman With Dementia Euthanized Against Her Will

The Doctor Was Just Cleared Of Wrongdoing

Lethal injection. - stock photo David Hills/Getty Images

By AMANDA PRESTIGIACOMO
The Daily Wire

Three years ago, a 74-year-old Dutch woman with dementia was euthanized by a doctor who drugged the patient's coffee without her knowledge and then had family members physically restrain her for the final lethal injection.

The doctor, who has not been publicly named, was cleared of all wrongdoing by a court in the Netherlands on Wednesday, "clarifying" the country's euthanasia law enacted in 2002 in relation to patients with "severe dementia," according to MedicalXPress.

Patients with dementia can now be killed by their doctors even if they strongly object to euthanasia at the time, so long as they have previously given consent for the fatal procedure. In other words, if a patient were to change their mind about the assisted suicide, a doctor could still legally kill them against their will. "The court ruled that in rare cases of euthanasia that were being performed on patients with severe dementia — and who had earlier made a written request for euthanasia — the doctor 'did not have to verify the current desire to die,'" MedicalXPress reported.

No consent!

And in the case of this specific Dutch woman with dementia, she never once gave an express request to be euthanized. In her will, which was renewed about a year before her death, the woman said she would like to be euthanized "whenever I think the time is right." And when she was asked if she wanted to be euthanized, she reiterated multiple times that her suffering was not bad enough to where she wanted to be killed:

“The 74-year-old woman had renewed her living will about a year before she died, writing that she wanted to be euthanized ‘whenever I think the time is right.’ Later, the patient said several times in response to being asked if she wanted to die: ‘But not just now, it's not so bad yet!’ according to a report from the Dutch regional euthanasia review committee.”

She was killed, anyway.

Part of the rationale for clearing the doctor of drugging the patient's coffee without her knowledge and killing her while she was being physically restrained against her will was in part, according to the court verdict, because "the patient no longer recognized her own reflection in the mirror," the MedicalXPress report said.

As noted by The Daily Wire last August, "A panel had previously cleared the doctor of ethical violations by saying she 'acted in good faith,'" but that decision was overturned by the Regional Euthanasia Review Committees. On Wednesday, the doctor was again cleared of wrongdoing.

The Netherlands has become a hotbed for euthanasia particularly among the most vulnerable. In 2017, 83 people with mental illness were killed in the country, as noted by National Review.

"The Dutch plunge into the euthanasia moral abyss continues to accelerate, with the number of patients killed by doctors exceeding 6,000 in 2017. That's more than 500 a month, 100 a week, and 15 a day," the outlet reported in March 2018. "Demonstrating the consequences of accepting the premise that eliminating suffering justifies eliminating the sufferer, Dutch psychiatrists killed 83 of their mentally ill patients in 2017 — up from twelve in 2012 and 43 in 2014."

Sin is progressive! It can hardly be more obvious. What begins as 'ending someone's suffering', slowly morphs in getting rid of those who are hopelessly sick, especially the aged. It will continue to morph into simply getting rid of the aged whether they are suffering or not. This is another example of #PCMadness!

Conservatism Emerging in Rural Sweden With Backlash Against #PCMadness

‘Tradition is important to us’: Swedish town rebels against

LGBT rainbow flag on city hall

A man holds a rainbow flag during the Gay Pride Parade on August 2, 2014, in Stockholm, Sweden.

© Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP

A municipality in Sweden decided to quit flying LGBT pride flags on public buildings, after conservative parties took over the city council.

The town of Solvesborg in southeastern Sweden has voted to stop hoisting the rainbow-colored flag on the city hall every August during Stockholm Pride, the annual LGBT-themed festival held in the nation’s capital. From now on, only local and national flags are allowed on public buildings.

The idea of flying the Pride colors was introduced in 2013, when the city council was led by the center-left Social Democrats. But now the city is controlled by conservative Swedish Democrats (SD) and three other right-leaning parties, who decided to revise the local flag code.

“Tradition is important to us, and I know many of our older residents share this view,” Mayor Louise Erixon (SD) explained the move to discard the Pride flag.

Not everyone is happy with the new flag policy, though. Politician and LGBT-themed event organizer Sophia Ahlin scolded her colleagues in the Moderate Party who sided with SD against the Pride Flag. “Their decision goes completely against what the Moderates stand for in terms of equality of all people,” she argued.

Having legalized same-sex marriage in 2009, Sweden is considered to be a largely liberal and LGBTQ-friendly country. However, Solvesborg with its population of around 9,000 is often described in the media as an example of conservatism becoming more popular in Sweden’s countryside. The leader of the Swedish Democrats, Jimmie Akesson, grew up in the town, while mayor Erixon is his partner. He wrote in an Instagram post that no flags of political significance would be hoisted on city hall.

Felicity Huffman’s 14-DAY Sentence Shows Justice is Different for the Rich & Famous

That actress Felicity Huffman will go to jail for only 14 days over college entrance fraud shows there are really two justice systems in the US: one for the rich, famous and politically correct – and another for everyone else.

The ‘Desperate Housewives’ star pleaded guilty to paying $15,000 to falsify her daughter Sophia’s SAT – a college admissions test – and was sentenced to two weeks in jail, 250 hours of community service, a $30,000 fine and a year of supervised release. Altogether, a slap on the wrist to a Hollywood celebrity.

It did not take long for her case to be contrasted with the fate of Tanya McDowell, a Connecticut woman who falsified a residency document in 2011 to enroll her son in a better school. McDowell ended up getting jailed for five years for first-degree larceny, and would have faced an even longer sentence had she not made a deal with prosecutors. 

Comparing the two cases is absolutely apples to apples. That McDowell was later charged with selling drugs to undercover police officers and given a concurrent sentence does not change the severity of her initial punishment – 130 times longer than was meted out to Huffman. 

Could it be that it’s because Huffman is white and McDowell is black, and the US justice system is irreparably racist, as a lot of people have argued?

Another possibility could be Huffman’s fame, fortune – and politics.

After her arrest in April, Huffman was revealed to have donated over $10,000 to Democrats, including over $1,500 to the Senate campaign of Kamala Harris – the tough-on-crime prosecutor in San Francisco and California, now running for president.

The fine is pocket change to an actress of her caliber, and jail time will mean nothing in California, where there has already been a push to redefine felons as “justice-involved persons.” 

Huffman is the first parent to get sentenced in the so-called ‘Varsity Blues’ scandal, which blew up in April. It has ensnared more than 50 people across the US, including parents, coaches, test administrators, college staff and a number of employees at something called the Key Worldwide Foundation.

Federal prosecutors have claimed that the southern California outfit accepted some $25 million in bribes from parents between 2011 and 2018, posing as a charity in order to guarantee their children admission to elite schools. 

“These parents are a catalog of wealth and privilege,” US Attorney Andrew Lelling said at the time, announcing the charges. Friday’s sentence proves him right, if not in the way he intended.

Huffman lived up to her reputation as an actress in court on Friday, crying and apologizing for all the damage she has inflicted – to her daughter Sophia, mind you, not whichever family was cheated out of sending their child to college by her fraud.

“I am deeply ashamed of what I have done,” she said.

That’s an interesting choice of words. For the past decade, her husband William H. Macy – who was not indicted in the scheme – has been the lead star of the comedy drama named ‘Shameless.’ The irony is so thick, it could serve as a sandwich spread.

Massive Tax Fraud Scheme in Denmark Linked to Jihadists/Terrorism

Footing the bill for IS? Jihadists embroiled in massive tax fraud scheme in Denmark, reports say

© Reuters / Scanpix Denmark / Claus Fisker

Two men accused of defrauding the Danish Treasury of millions of dollars in unpaid value-added tax (VAT) are jihadists who may have used their shady businesses to finance terrorists in Syria, according to Danish media reports.

An investigation carried out by Dagbladet Information and Jyllands-Posten found that a large-scale VAT scam in Denmark has ties to Islamic extremists.

The Danish papers revealed that 14 businessmen operated a network that failed to hand over DKK 800 million (about $120 million) in unpaid VAT, and that two of the alleged fraudsters are jihadists with allegiances to Al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

The two suspected terrorists are said to have operated a number of companies that went bankrupt, leaving behind a tax bill of at least DKK 97 million ($14.5 million) in VAT, as well as a DKK 66 million (almost $10 million) debt to private creditors.

While the investigation was not able to determine where the money went, analysts told the two papers that they suspected the cash was used to fund terrorism.

“It is double as serious if a scam goes through and the money is used to undermine our society,” said Lars Krull, a senior adviser at Aalborg University and an expert in money laundering. He added that he feared the scheme could have financed foreign militants.

Professor Tom Kirchmaier, a researcher of financial crime at Copenhagen Business School and the London School of Economics, was puzzled by the fact that the Danish government hasn’t done more to prevent such scams from occurring.

“If you are to stop the jihadists, you have to stop their financing. And this starts with stopping the scams,” he told the papers.

Otherwise, the Danish government is paying for the very terrorism that plagues it. 

In August there were two explosions in Copenhagen in just 4 days, one damaging a police station.

Muslims Leading the Antisemitism Surge in Europe - Study

Muslim Extremists Are Main Perpetrators of Antisemitic Violence in Western Europe, Major Norwegian Academic Study Concludes

This article is 2 years old but needs to be read. If anything, the situation is much worse now.

by Ben Cohen
Algemeiner

French Muslim youths rioting in Paris during a July 2014 anti-Israel demonstration. Photo: Twitter.

A newly-published report from a leading Norwegian university on antisemitic violence in Europe has concluded that in six of the seven countries it surveyed, “individuals with backgrounds from Muslim countries stand out among perpetrators of antisemitic violence in Western Europe.”

“Antisemitic Violence in Europe” — authored by Johannes Due Enstad of the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo — examines incidents of antisemitic violence in France, the UK, Germany, Russia, Norway, Sweden and Denmark between 2005-15. 

Only in Russia — where the lowest level of violence against Jews was recorded during that ten-year period — do far-right skinheads and Neo-Nazi extremists predominate overwhelmingly among the perpetrators of these acts.

“Attitude surveys corroborate this picture insofar as antisemitic attitudes are far more widespread among Muslims than among the general population in Western Europe,” Enstad wrote.

I have been warning Europe for years that their open doors policy toward Muslims will result in increased antisemitism, and here it is documented with data from even before the mad rush of migrants beginning in 2015. It will only be worse now, and will continue to worsen as Muslim birth rates are much higher than native Europeans. The end result may very well rival that of the 1930s and 40s. Isn't it amazing that we could easily repeat one of the great sins of the world in just 100 years?

The report will make for particularly grim reading in France, where over 4,000 incidents — classified as “physical violence against individuals and serious attacks on buildings that potentially threatened human life,” and not including vandalism or verbal harassment — were recorded. France is currently in the throes of a media and political scandal around the brutal murder of Parisian Jewish pensioner Sarah Halimi by an Islamist intruder in April (2017).

The report stressed that in France especially, Jews in general felt far less safe and were much less likely to visibly identify as Jewish. “France scores much higher than the other countries on questions on considering emigration, worrying about being physically attacked, and regarding antisemitism as a major problem in the country,” the report said.

Manfred Gerstenfeld — a leading global authority on antisemitism and the author of Europe’s Crumbling Myths: The Post-Holocaust Origins of Today’s Antisemitism — told The Algemeiner on Friday, “That France is the Western European country where the problems of antisemitism are greatest has been evident since the year 2000.”

“Most murders since then of Jews — all by Muslims — because of their being Jews have been in France,” Gerstenfeld continued. “Currently the French authorities try to ignore or downplay the antisemitic character of the murder of Sarah Halimi, again by a Muslim.”

The report also highlighted concerns with the UK — which came second to France with almost 3,900 incidents in the 2005-15 period — and the situation facing the tiny Jewish communities in the Scandinavian countries, above all Sweden. “Measured in number of reported incidents per 1,000 Jews — a measure indicating exposure, or Jews’ chances of being subjected to antisemitic violence — Sweden comes out on top with a score four times higher than France, with Germany and the UK in the middle,” the report stated.

The role of Muslim extremists in engaging in antisemitic violence was the key finding of the report, Gerstenfeld said.

#PCMadness

“Antisemitism experts have stated these facts since the beginning of this century,” he noted. “The politically correct Western European establishment has been considering the mention of this evidence about Muslim antisemitic attitudes and criminality a taboo subject.”

In its examination of data provided by law enforcement and communal agencies for France, the UK, Germany and Sweden, the report found that “right-wing extremists, who are often associated with antisemitism, in fact constitute a clear minority of perpetrators. Respondents in all four countries most often perceived the perpetrator(s) to be ‘someone with a Muslim extremist view.'”

The report added: “It is also worth noting that in France, Sweden and the UK (but not in Germany), the perpetrator was perceived to be left-wing more often than right-wing.”

Not to protect far-right extremists, they deserve to be punished hard for antisemitic acts. But the #PCMadness crowds cry relentlessly that it is right-wing extremists who are the biggest problem in the west. This insane protection of Muslim criminals is very likely what leads to the creation of far-right extremist groups. A little truth and sanity is desperately needed.

Should Hurricane Dorian be Blamed on Climate Change? Not so Much!

What AOC & co. get horribly wrong
about Dorian and climate change

By Bjorn Lomborg
NY Post

With Hurricane Dorian striking the Bahamas and the East Coast, the climate blame game is now in full swing again: Global-warming activists, newspaper columnists, TV commentators and politicians are drawing links between climate change and hurricanes.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, warns, “This is what climate change looks like.” Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders one-ups that, tweeting: “Hurricane Dorian has everything to do with climate change, which is the existential crisis of our time.”

Julian Castro is also tying Dorian to global warming.

They’re wrong, but their warnings fit a pattern. When hurricanes Harvey and Irma both hit mainland US in quick succession in 2017, critics claimed this was the “new normal.”

In fact, those two storms, along with Michael in 2018, were the only three major hurricanes greater than a Category 3 to hit the continental US in the last 13 years. That’s a record low since 1900. For comparison, the average over the same timeframe has been nearly eight major hurricanes.

It’s vital to consider the science. In its most recent assessment, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that “no robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes … have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”

Globally, the international scientific body finds “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency.”

What’s more, “confidence in large-scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones [big events like Superstorm Sandy] since 1900 is low.”

This could be seen as evidence that there is very little global warming occurring. Real global warming will show up in rising sea temperatures. Rising sea temperatures produce more intense cyclones/hurricanes. Since there is no such trend, there would appear to be no such sea temperature increases, hence little or no global warming.

The person who did more than most to link global warming to hurricanes was Al Gore. A poster for his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” showed a hurricane growing out of a smokestack, and the former vice president blamed Hurricane Katrina on global warming.

Gore was following 2005 talking points from the Sierra Club that were intended for environmentalists looking to sell expensive limits on carbon emissions: “Ride the wave of public concern created over extreme weather,” the group advised.

Activists continue to ride that wave by taking advantage of fear, and by misusing the fact that hurricane costs do keep escalating. Yet this cost spike isn’t caused by climate change but by having more people with more wealth live in harm’s way.

Since 1900, the US population has risen four-fold, but Florida’s coastal population increased 67 times. Homes are bigger and have more expensive possessions.

Moreover, adjusted for population and wealth, US hurricane damage actually has not even gone up since 1900. As a percentage of global GDP, global weather damage dipped from 1990-2017.

And while it’s true that climate change will likely make hurricanes become somewhat stronger, it will also make them less frequent.

A major study in Nature showed hurricane damage today runs the world about 0.04 percent of GDP. Accounting for growth in prosperity (which means more resilience), by 2100 this would drop to 0.01 percent.

And the effect of global warming making storms fewer but stronger will see damage end up around 0.02 percent.

No wonder researchers who study extreme weather and climate change warn that overselling the link risks eroding “scientific credibility” and distracting from the things we need to do to be better prepared for extreme weather.

To reduce hurricane impacts, our first priority isn’t cutting carbon. Rather, we need to improve building codes.

And we should not allow so many houses to be built on vulnerable coastlines. One way to achieve that would be to stop subsidizing home insurance for building houses most likely to get wiped out in hurricanes — literally a subsidy for building irresponsibly.

We could also encourage more wetlands to soak up storm surges and undertake some of the many smart, adaptive measures in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan for NYC, including subway covers to stop underground lines flooding.

We also need to keep in mind that more prosperous communities are better able to cope with disasters. This is especially clear when we consider the poor shantytowns in developing countries hit by hurricanes.

They don’t need people in rich countries piously trying to cut carbon emissions, which will at best slightly ease their increased suffering in 2100. They need to grow their economies, feed their kids, stop easily curable diseases and expand access to education so they can move into the 21st century and boost resilience.

For many in America, preparedness for hurricanes is a part of life. Activists and pundits divert our attention from smart policies to ineffective ones when they insist on linking today’s hurricanes wrongly to global warming.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.

Tlaib Blames Israel for Palestinian Muslim Honor Killings

By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz
Breaking News Israel

“Keep far from a false charge; do not bring death on those who are innocent and in the right, for I will not acquit the wrongdoer.” Exodus 23:7 (The Israel Bible™)

A young Palestinian woman was brutally murdered in an honor killing and true to form,

Congressman Rashida Tlaib does not blame the fists that beat the young woman to death but,

rather the Israeli “occupation” that compels Palestinians to murder.

Femicide: Killed for an Instagram Post

Israa Ghrayeb, a 21-year-old Palestinian resident of Bethlehem, died last week amid conflicting reports of how she died. Israa was killed in her hospital bed after receiving treatment for a spinal injury she sustained jumping off the balcony of her family home, reportedly while fleeing male relatives. Her family insists that she died of a heart attack but in a video recorded outside her hospital room her screams and the shouts of her attackers are clearly heard. 

Other sources, most notably the Palestinian Human Rights organization Adalah Justice Project, are claiming Israa was tortured and beaten to death by her male relatives in a case of femicide, or, as it is more commonly known an honor killing. 

Israa’s crime was posting an Instagram video showing her with her fiancé. Among the family members named in the reports as responsible for Israa’s death is her brother, Ihab, who attends college in Canada. 

Apparently, being alone with your fiance is against Sharia.

Tlaib Cites Article: Honor Killing Not Muslim or Arab But Caused by Israel

Congressman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) posted a tweet decrying the murder.

Rashida Tlaib✔

@RashidaTlaib

"Isra’s death illustrates an ever-present toxic masculinity and control over women’s bodies and lives." 

Help get #JusticeforIsraa by exposing the truth: https://baby-fist.com/get-inspired/isra-gharibs-murder-exposes-stories-of-power-we-cant-ignore …

Her tweet linked to the Palestinian feminist website Babyfist. The article was prefaced by a disclaimer about honor killings, more accurately referred to as femicide: 

Honor killings are not Muslim and they are not Arab. This is a universal phenomenon which takes places in nearly all corners of the globe, from the United States to Europe. The US president stands accused of rape. Honor killings were legal in Italy until the 1970s and still happen today. Do not use this narrative to reinforce dangerous stereotypes of Arab culture and Islam. Patriarchy exists every where. 

Though technically correct, the disclaimer is a lie. According to Haaretz, 11 Palestinian women in the West Bank and nine in the Gaza Strip were suspected victims of femicide last year. Social pressure on families prevents accurate reporting. In North America, a study of 172 honor killing incidents worldwide involving 230 victims, 91 percent of the perpetrators were Muslims. In North America, 84 percent of the killers were Muslim. In Europe, Muslims constituted 96 percent of the killers. 

Even worse, the article goes on to claim that since femicide is not linked to culture or religion, femicide is caused by “social and political power structures present in Palestine, in the occupation, and even in diasporic activism.” It seems clear that under the Palestinian Authority which administrates Bethlehem, Israa’s murder will go unpunished. 

The article names two culprits responsible for Israa’s death and other cases of femicide: “Israeli military occupation and a corrupt Palestinian Authority.”

Palestinian protesters are demanding the law be changed in the Palestinian Authority but that will be difficult. The Palestinian Parliament has not functioned since 2000 and PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who is currently in the 13th year of a four-year term, has yet to act on a petition with 12,000 signatures submitted to him requesting the law be changed. 

UN Blames Israel for Palestinian Violence Against Women

This claim by Babyfist that was picked up by Tlaib is not a recent invention. At the 35th session of the Human Rights Council, Ms. Dubravka Šimonović, Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, presented her findings from a visit to Israel. Her report to the UNHRC focused on the “gendered impact of the occupation”. She cited a “clear link between prolonged occupation and gender-based violence”, blaming the prevalence of violence against Palestinian women by Palestinian men entirely on Israel. 

As if it doesn't happen in a hundred other countries where Israel has no presence or influence. They ignore the very obvious problem of male over-dominance of women and girls in Islamic society. Sharia prefers to keep women invisible by covering them head to toe when in public. Is this because Islamic men have no self control? They can't seem to control themselves but insist on the privileged of controlling women in Muslim society.

These antiSemitic ravings remind me a little of Flip Wilson.

This premise was challenged by UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer who noted that her report failed to bring any data or facts to substantiate this claim.

“Is it right to continue infantilizing Palestinians, such that when a man in Ramallah beats his wife, we encourage him to say ‘Israel made me do it’?” Neuer stated. “Why did you fail to mention that official Palestinian TV regularly broadcasts Islamic preachers who tell the people how to beat their wives?” he said, citing several examples. 

“The hitting is a kind of reminder that the love and friendship that Allah commanded is still found between the couple,” Neuer said, quoting a Mufti in Gaza.

The Babyfist article went on to criticize the lack of international attention on the case while also criticizing its overage in the Israeli media.

“Doubtless some Hebrew articles being published by some Zionist news outlets to try and pink-wash occupation,” the article writes. The intention was that the “Zionist news” is using the murder of Israa to discredit the Palestinian cause.  

Tlaib: Israel Responsible for Palestinians Murdering Jews

Neur’s claim that the UNHRC report “infantilized Palestinians” should go double for Rashida Tlaib. Not only did she cite an article blaming the murder of a Palestinian woman by her Palestinian brother but she also blamed Israel for a Palestinian terrorist attack which killed a Jewish teen-aged girl two weeks ago, Tlaib blamed Israel. 

Tlaib retweeted a post by the anti-Israel group IfNotNow which blamed the attack specifically on “the occupation”, a historically and factually inaccurate term anti-Semitic groups use to refer to Israel.

My comments above would appear to 'infantilize' Sharia-bound Muslims as well. Perhaps this needs more exploration.