European Parliament calls on Venezuelan gov't to disband armed groups

In a resolution adopted with 463 votes in favor, 45 against, and 37 abstentions, the European Parliament urged "the Venezuelan authorities to immediately disarm" and dissolve "the uncontrolled armed groups that have a pro-government character" and to end impunity

The European Union condemned on Thursday the violence emerging in Venezuela since February 12, and expressed its sympathy for the relatives of all the victims.

The European legislators made an appeal on Venezuelan authorities to disarm and break up pro-government armed groups, and to release students and opposition leaders detained during demonstrations taking place in Venezuela for three weeks now.

In a resolution passed by a wide majority, the European Parliament made an appeal on stakeholders in Venezuela to "maintain calm in both actions and words." It also stated that "new protests could lead to more acts of violence that would only further separate the positions of the government and the opposition," DPA informed.

The resolution calls on "the Venezuelan authorities to immediately disarm" and dissolve "the uncontrolled armed groups that have a pro-government character" and to "end impunity."

It reminded "the government of Venezuela that freedom of expression and the right to participate in peaceful demonstrations are fundamental human rights in a democracy as recognized in the Venezuelan Constitution."

The European policymakers also called on Nicolás Maduro's government for the "immediate release" of students and opposition leaders, and to leave aside baseless accusations and arrest warrants against opposition leaders.


Further, they asked for a delegation of the European Parliament to visit Venezuela as soon as possible.

Source: El Universal
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Venezuelan FM seeks support from Paraguay and Argentina

The Venezuelan official went from Bolivia to Paraguay; his meetings are part of the visits to Member States of the Common Market of the South (Mercosur) to inform about the situation of Venezuela and thank these countries for their support for President Nicolás Maduro

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elías Jaua departed on Thursday for Buenos Aires, Argentina, after his meeting with Paraguayan President Eladio Loizaga in Asunción. Jaua's visits aim at calling for support for any debate on the Venezuelan crisis is held within the framework of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) rather than the Organization of American States (OAS).

The Venezuelan foreign minister informed Loizaga about the situation of Venezuela over the last few weeks, "the origin of the politically-based demonstrations, and the actions taken by violent groups," EFE reported.

The visit to Paraguay took place after a previous meeting in Bolivia. The meeting is part of a series of visits intended to inform about the situation of Venezuela and thank countries for their support for Nicolás Maduro's Government.

After talks with Loizaga, Jaua traveled to Argentina and Uruguay. He will then travel to Brazil.

He will close his tour in Suriname and Guyana.

Source: El Universal
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3 European States Freeze Ukraine Ex-Leaders' Assets

ZURICH — Switzerland, Austria and Liechtenstein on Friday moved to freeze assets and bank accounts of up to 20 Ukrainians including ousted president Viktor Yanukovych and his son, after Ukraine's new rulers said billions had gone missing.

The three countries did not say how much money was affected by the asset freezes. The European Union agreed to similar measures earlier last month but they have yet to come into force.

Ukraine's new prime minister, Arseny Yatsenyuk, on Thursday accused Yanukovych of stripping state coffers bare and said $37 billion of credits had disappeared. In the past three years, $70 billion had disappeared into offshore accounts, he said.

The Swiss government ordered the freezing of the assets of 20 Ukrainians, including the fugitive president and his son Oleksander, the Swiss financial markets authority, FINMA, said.

Swiss authorities said the asset freeze would come into force on Friday at noon.

The prosecutor's office in Geneva said it had also launched a money laundering investigation against Yanukovych and his son.

"A penal investigation for severe money laundering is currently being conducted in Geneva against Viktor Yanukovych and his son Oleksander," a statement said.

It said prosecutor Yves Bertossa and the police had searched the office of a company owned by Oleksander Yanukovych on Thursday morning and seized some documents.

Switzerland said Thursday that it would order banks to freeze any funds in Swiss banks found to be linked to any Yanukovych fund.

Austria said it would freeze the bank accounts of 18 Ukrainians as a precautionary measure until EU sanctions entered into force.

"Austria has decided to freeze possible bank accounts and assets of 18 Ukrainian citizens in Austria. This has been done on the basis of an official request by the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry," the foreign Ministry in Vienna said.

After Ukraine suffered its bloodiest day since the Soviet era in protests that led to Yanukovych's overthrow last week, the EU agreed to impose sanctions such as visa bans and asset freezes on unnamed senior Ukrainian officials.

Austria said it would freeze accounts via a central bank decree under its foreign currency law. It did not identify the people affected or say how much wealth was seized.

"The decree from the National Bank provides the appropriate legal basis to be able to determine which assets are actually in Austria and to prevent potential abuse," Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz told the Austria Press Agency.

The EU cannot unilaterally tell banks to freeze assets without a legal decision agreed among all member states.

Ukraine's acting prosecutor general said Wednesday that the country would ask international organizations to help trace bank accounts and assets controlled by Yanukovych and his allies.

Austria's FMA markets watchdog has already warned banks to be vigilant about dealing with customers from Ukraine.

Liechtenstein will freeze the assets of 20 members of the former Ukrainian government including Yanukovych, a senior Liechtenstein government source said.

In London, the Foreign Office said it was still working with EU partners on implementing sanctions after they were agreed upon on in mid-February. They have not named any individuals they will sanction yet.

Italy will take punitive measures if and when adopted by the EU, foreign ministry spokesmen Aldo Amati said.


Source:The Moscow Times
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European Commission "alarmed" about detention of students in Venezuela

The Commission rejected the detention of dissenters, and called for the end of violence in Venezuela.

The European Commission on Thursday called for the immediate end of violence in Venezuela and said it was alarmed about the detention of students and opposition leaders during demonstrations in recent weeks.


"We reject all acts of violence and intolerance from all sides," remarked Algirdas Semeta, a representative of the European Commission before the European Parliament. He added that "nobody should be detained for exercising their rights to freedom of speech and assembly," AFP reported.

Source: El Universal
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Taqiyya Trials in Europe

The issue of taqiyya – the religious permission, indeed virtue, of Muslim deception to infidels for the good of Islam – is such a uniquely crucial aspect of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially, like in the West, when the former are a minority and the latter a majority, that there have been at least a couple of trials in Europe revolving around it, one recent and the other current.

In May 2013 there was a legal case in Italy in which a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Khalid Chaouki, a Moroccan Muslim immigrant to Italy and now MP, sued another Moroccan immigrant, Souad Sbai, a woman journalist and former Italian MP who had accused him of practicing taqiyya when he was saying that he had renounced the Brotherhood while in fact he still ’shared its goals and ideas of dangerous, extreme Islam’. He lost the case.

In Britain, in the last few days of 2013 Tim Burton, the Radio Officer of the newly-formed Liberty GB, an outspoken counterjihad, pro-Western and Christian civilisation party, got into trouble.

I have to declare an interest in the matter since I am the party’s Press Officer. Liberty GB has some similarities to Holland’s Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, although in no way, having started as recently as March 2013, it’s as yet so popular. We are running in the coming elections for the European Parliament in May.

Tim Burton has been charged by the Police with racially aggravated harassment for a few tweets and is soon due to appear in court.
At this point I must introduce the individual he tweeted about, a prominent albeit colourful Muslim whom Tim called ‘a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist’ on Twitter. He is Fiyaz Mujhal, founder and director of Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), an organisation that acts like a sort of helpline for the victims of ‘Islamophobia’ and in so doing monitors the entity of what it must consider a grave social problem.

If you are looking for a balanced assessment of the impact of Muslim crime, violence, stealth jihad and terrorism on British society you will not find it on Tell MAMA’s literature or website. But you’ll see plenty of examples of ‘hate’ towards Muslims, a great number of which in the form of films, books, political campaigns and, of course, ‘cyber harassment’, ‘cyber bullying’, ‘cyber abuse’, ‘cyber incitement’, ‘cyber threats’, ‘cyber stalking’, or ‘cyber hate’ – which is what got Tim in a legal jam.

Tell MAMA and the other organisation founded by Mr Mujhal, Faith Matters, had been successful in their demand that the UK Home Office ban Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer from entering the country.

The group has a Working Definition of Anti-Muslim Prejudice that includes ‘insults or attacks against Islam’, of which it’s safe to assume well-documented criticisms will be seen as examples. It is also good at crafting new expressions like ‘Anti-Muslim Cultural Racism’, which is Liberty GB’s sin in Tell MAMA’s eyes, as it describes us as ‘guilty of racialising Muslims’. How somebody can achieve such a feat is anyone’s guess.

What prompted Tim Burton to label Mr Mujhal on Twitter “a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist” and “a lying Muslim scumbag” were some revelations appeared in The Daily Telegraph. In the wake of the beheading of British soldier Lee Rigby in a London street by two jihadists crying “Allahu Akbar” and giving the Quran as their motive in May of last year, Mr Mujhal in June reported

“a wave of attacks, harassment, and hate-filled speech against Muslims … an unprecedented number of incidents”, including “a rise in street harassment of Muslims – unprovoked, opportunistic attacks from strangers as Muslims go about their lives”.

He added: “Over the past week or so, these sorts of hate crimes have noticeably increased in number and, in many instances, become more extreme.

“The scale of the backlash is astounding … there has been a massive spike in anti-Muslim prejudice. A sense of endemic fear has gripped Muslim communities.”

The media, especially the BBC, have accepted the claims without question. A presenter on Radio 4’s influential Today programme stated that attacks on Muslims were now “on a very serious scale”.

Talk of a “massive anti-Muslim backlash” has become routine. And it is that figure issued by Tell Mama – of, to date, 212 “anti-Muslim incidents” since the Woolwich murder – which has formed the basis of nearly all this reporting.

But when journalist Andrew Gilligan investigated a bit further, it turned out that 57 per cent of the 212 reports referred to activity occurring just online, like postings on Twitter and Facebook, a further 16 per cent of the 212 reports had not been verified and not all the online abuse even originated in Britain.

Contrary to Tell MAMA’s claims of a climate of violence, only 17 of the 212 incidents, 8 per cent, involved the physical targeting of people and there were no attacks on anyone serious enough to require medical treatment.

The organisation has received a total of £375,000 from the UK government. But as a consequence of these revelations and even previous discoveries of discrepancies between its figures and police official figures – showing Tell MAMA’s inflated rates of and increase in anti-Muslim crimes – it had its public funding discontinued.

This hasn’t stopped its activity, though:

Mujhal asserted that tougher sentences were needed to tackle Islamophobic crime, noting that the guidelines by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to monitor social media were “not fit for purpose”.

“They raised the bar of prosecution significantly.

“Now unless there is a direct threat to somebody on Twitter or Facebook, the CPS will not prosecute. The CPS is just plainly out of sync with reality.

“We also need more robust sentencing. In one case, a pig’s head was left outside a mosque and the perpetrator came away with a community sentence.

Perhaps the lawsuit against Tim Burton is part of this campaign which seems apparently to target in particular social media.
Liberty GB is trying to make taqiyya the keystone of this trial. Given the special position of taqiyya in the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially in non-Muslim-majority countries, if we, by making this case public, manage to make the British and Western people understand the meaning and nature of taqiyya, we will have managed to make them understand the whole nature of Islam in relation to us through it.

The Western public has been misled about Islam and believes that the ‘religion of peace’ is fundamentally similar to Christianity in its ethical outlook. Replace God with Allah, Jesus with Muhammad, and you still have the same moral commandments: love your enemies, be benevolent towards non-Muslims, and thou shall not lie or give false testimony. If the authority of a court can establish that taqiyya was indeed practised, Westerners can start to see that lying to them is not only allowed but encouraged by Islam as one of the means of submitting them to it, which is the final goal. As a consequence of this, people in the West may gradually become more and more reluctant to accept everything that Muslims say about Islam and may begin to doubt all the distortions they are currently fed.

One issue that we intend to bring to public attention is this: how can a Muslim’s swearing on the Quran in court be accepted as declaration of the truthfulness of his testimony when the very book he is swearing on gives him divine permission to lie?

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