Where Conservatives Screw Up

To anyone paying attention, and who is honest, it is Hollywood that dominates the culture. Hollywood is Gay. Hollywood is a land of dress up and make believe. Hollywood is a land of emotional immaturity. Gay. Gay. Gay. (And Lesbian.) The 'news' media takes its direction from Hollywood. Hollywood TV programming. Hollywood movies. Hollywood style magazines. Everything in our culture is downhill from Hollywood. Not only is the news media pro-Gay, but our whole educational system is pro-Gay (again with our teachers/educators/councilors taking direction from Hollywood). If anyone dares the wrath of the Hollywood Gay mandate, they are relentlessly attacked with hate speech ridiculed and marginalized. Now, mostly thanks to Obama, our Military is pro-Gay, with our Justice department falling in line as well. Our business climate is turning (or has turned) pro-Gay. (Caterpillar Industries recently decided to withhold financial support from the pro-Gay Boy Scouts because they were not pro-Gay enough.) The only people who are consistently anti-Gay are old coots like me who are not afraid of social pressure. The lies and perversions of the Hollywood don't scare us, but we increasingly are in a minority. God help us. It is going to get worse, a lot worse, before it starts to get better.I think America is a naturally Conservative (not Libertarian) society. We believe in God, one man / one woman, and freedom. Politically we believe in Low taxes, Energy independence, and Legal Immigration. Naturally we believe in a strong military. These are all gimme issues. Where Conservatives screw up is that we need to become warriors in a cultural battle. Our leaders need to know how to fight. The Left stages fake outrage after fake outrage, and the Right gets defensive, confused and tries to apologize - because we are really quite decent people. The Left then attacks again with another fake outrage, and the Right again gets defensive, confused and tries to apologize. In the meantime the Left gets some kind of Congressional compromise that gives more money and/or power to a Liberal special interest group. This has been happening ad nauseam all of my adult life, and I am 33 years old.

Saint Ronald Reagan had it easy for two reasons (both the same really). As an actor, he knew how to use the media, he knew how to turn a phrase. Reagan knew how to use make up, lighting and staging to deliver the emotion he wanted delivered, Also, as an actor and as a union president, he was one of them. It was difficult for the Left to attack Reagan (not that they did not try) because Reagan was a Hollywood insider. Conservative Republicans, you have the support of the American people. Your mistake is that you keep trying to talk to Liberal Democrats and find common ground. 'F' that. We have been working for 50 years to heal racial relations, and 50 years later Joe Biden said, "They want to put y'all in chains." They don't care about healing, or compromise, or freaking holding hands and singing 'Kumbaya'. Liberals want to destroy our politics, our culture and our country - and you are letting them. You have yet to find the brass balls to take a constant, vicious war to the Liberals. Take a lesson from George Patton. Fight those Liberal Democrats. Fight the Liberal media. Fight Hollywood. "Cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks."

Stunning new research: cats recognize their owners’ voices—but don’t much care

This will hardly come as a surprise to cat owners, but I suppose it needed scientific documentation.  A new paper in Animal Cognition by Atsuko Saito and Kazutaka Shinozuka (from the University of Tokyo and the South Florida College of Medicine, respectively; reference at bottom and link here) shows that cats appear to recognize the voices of their owners compared to the voices of other people. But the kicker is that they don’t show much response, and certainly don’t move their legs when they recognize the voice. This is in contrast to previous studies of d*gs, which show that they not only recognize their owners’ voices but respond much more readily and with more striking behavior.

It’s a short paper, and I’ll send the pdf on request, though I think you can get it free at the link.

In short, the authors exposed 20 domestic cats (19 indoor, one “kept on a university campus by a male owner”) to a sequence of five recorded voices played over  a speaker.  Each voice simply called the cat’s name, and the responses of the cats to each voice were measured “blind,” that is, another observer was given a single video clip of a cat’s response, and scored it without knowing which voice it heard. “Response” was measured six different ways: ear moving, head moving, pupil dilation, vocalization (any sound made by the cat), tail moving, and “displacement” (“more than one step of displacement of both hind paws to any direction”).

The recordings were controlled for volume and speakers were asked to say the name in “the same manner as the owners” (that, of course, is not easily controlled).  To “habituate” the cats to their names, the five recordings were played in sequence: three strangers’ voices, then the owner’s voice, and then another stranger’s voice.

The results are shown in the graphs below.  The first plot shows that there was habituation: the responses declined between the first and third voice, all from strangers.  Second, when the owner’s voice was played as the fourth sound, the cats perked up, showing higher ear and head movement—but no movement of tails or limbs, and no vocalization.  The last voice, of a stranger, showed responses (measured as the percentage of individuals showing one of the indicators of “attention”) similar to that toward owner, so there was no habituation here. (That has been shown in studies of dogs as well).

The results are statistically significant, but not overly impressive, with p values of 0.03-0.05 (the probability that the increased response would happen purely by chance; 0.05 or lower is regarded as statistically significant):

The figure below shows the magnitude of the cats’ responses (summed over all behaviors) as opposed to simply the percentage of cats responding. There is a significant difference between the size of responses to the third voice—after the cat had been “habituated”—and the owner’s voice, which elicited a larger response.  The last voice, as above, didn’t evoke a response larger than that toward the owner’s voice. The starred comparison is the only one that was significant: between stranger 3 and the owner:

Besides the weak statistical power (and high p values), there’s another problem. It’s possible that the cats aren’t responding to to the sound of the owner’s voice per se, but to the way the owner pronounces the cat’s name. It’s impossible to know from this study which aspects of the owner’s pronounciation or intonation are the ones picked up by the cats, though that could presumably be tested with electronic manipulations of the recording.  Nevertheless, cats do recognize their name when spoken by the owner versus by strangers.  I suspect, though, that the sound of acan opener interpolated in the sequence would elicit all six behaviors, including rapid movement toward the sound!

Finally, the authors give an interesting paragraph that readers might want to ponder:

The communication style of cats is very different from that of dogs, as mentioned above. In fact, Serpell (1996) has shown that dogs are perceived by owners as being more affectionate than cats. However, dog owners and cat owners did not differ significantly in their reported attachment levels to their pets (Serpell 1996). This fact may reflect the difference in expectations between cat owners and dog owners. One research questionnaire revealed that the more affection the dog owners have toward dogs, the more frequently they tended to have physical contact with them. However, no such relationship was observed among cat owners (Ota et al. 2005). Thus, the behavioral aspects of cats that cause their owners to become attached to them are still undetermined.

I’m not sure how a lack of correlation between one’s attachment to a cat and the degree of physical contact with that animal (which is of course determined largely by the cat!) has anything to do with the question of why one bonds with a cat. We ailurophiles can of course give our own answers: the purr, the softness of the fur, the grace of movement, and of course the very independence of the animal.

Finally, a bit of a biology lesson. At the beginning the authors summarize which animals can recognize their own young or individual “herdmates” through vocal cues (they don’t mention penguins):

A social ability widely seen in a number of species is differentiation between conspecifics by using individual differences in vocalizations. For example, zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata castanotis) recognize mates on the basis of their calls (Vignal et al. 2004, 2008); bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) use whistles for mother–infant recognition (Sayigh et al. 1999); mother vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) can distinguish their own offspring’s screams from those of others (Cheney and Seyfarth 1980); and female African elephants (Loxodonta africana) can distinguish the calls of female family and bond group members from those of female outsiders (McComb et al. 2000). Similarly, some domestic animals are also known to be able to recognize individual humans through voice. For example, horses can match the forms and voices of familiar handlers when the handlers were presented together with a stranger (Proops and McComb 2012). Dogs can match owners’ voices and faces from others (Adachi et al. 2007).

I’m curious whether a mother cat can recognize the mews of her kittens versus those of unrelated kittens.  Perhaps work has been done on this, but I think if it had, the authors would have mentioned it.

I wish the authors could use LOLcats as abstracts of papers, because this one is appropriate:

Bosniak Handzar Division

The Bosnian Muslim Government and Army of Alija Izetbegovic reformed and revived the Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division from World War II. This startling fact was first revealed by British journalist and military analyst Robert Fox in the Daily Telegraph news report from December 29, 1993. The report was entitled “Albanians and Afghans Fight for the Heirs to Bosnia’s SS Past” and was reported from Fojnica in central Bosnia. This was one of the most remarkable stories to emerge during the Bosnian civil war. The Bosnian Muslim Government and Army had reformed a Nazi SS Division right under the eyes of the U.S. and Western media. And only Robert Fox caught it. That is a remarkable example of media censorship and collusion to cover-up the facts. And this was accomplished the U.S. and Western media. This story started when Robert Fox went to investigate the horrific murder of two Roman Catholic priests in Fojnica. Bosnian Muslim Army troops had executed two priests, Nikola Milicevic, 39, a parish priest, and Mato Migic,56 ,a vicar, were Franciscan priests who had been murdered by Bosnian Muslim soldiers at the Holy Spirit monastery, execution-style. While investigating this war crime, Fox soon discovered that the Bosnian Muslim Army had reformed a Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division from World War II, the 13th Waffen SS Division Handzar or Handschar, “dagger”, which is derived from the Arabic word khanjar, the term for a curved, double-sided Ottoman knife prevalent in Arabic and Muslim countries.osnian Muslims in Sarajevo threatened to reform and to revive the Bosnian Muslim Nazii SS Division Handzar and to cut off the heads of Serbian leaders. The cover of Novi Vox magazine, October, 1991 with the headline: "The Handzar Division is ready!" This is how Fox described his encounter with the reformed Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division: ’DOCUMENTS!’ shouted a man in a beret with an insignia in green Arabic script outside the UN house in the Bosnian mountain town of Fojnica. He was hostile and demanded our presence at the police station. Later the police chief apologised, but made clear that authority had passed to the men with the Koranic texts hanging from their fatigues. These are the men of the Handzar division. ‘We do everything with the knife, and we always fight on the frontline,’ a Handzar told one UN officer. Up to 6000-strong, the Handzar division glories in a fascist culture. They see themselves as the heirs of the SS Handzar division, formed by Bosnian Muslims in 1943 to fight for the Nazis. Their spiritual model was Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who sided with Hitler.” Fox personally observed that Albanian Muslims were part of the recreated Handzar Division, which was also made up of veterans, mujahedeen, from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Fox reagraded the presence of Albanian Muslims in the division as evidence that the conflict would spread to Kosovo, which Albanian Muslim separatists sought to detach from Serbia and to create a Greater Albania. How was this event missed by the mainstream media? Why was Robert Fox the only Western journalist to report on the reformed Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division? What does this cover-up and media censorship reveal about the U.S. and Western media? The Bosnian Muslim faction had threatened to reform and to recreate the Handzar Nazi SS Division. In October, 1991, the Bosnian Muslim magazine Novi Vox in Sarajevo, in issue no.3, well over half a year before the civil war broke out in 1992, published a front-cover illustration showing a Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS officer in the Handzar Division stepping on the decapitated and bloody heads of Serbian leaders, including Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. The caption read: “The Handzar Division is ready!” Another headline announced: “The Fourth Reich is coming—Welcome!” This revival of Bosnia’s Nazi and SS genocidal past was censored, suppressed, and covered-up in the U.S. and the Western media. But the Bosnian Serb population got the message very clearly. he Bosnian Muslims were reviving the Handzar Nazi SS Division which they had formed in World War II and they were planning to decapitate Bosnian Serb Orthodox Christians. This was hardly a reassuring message about a supposed secular, multi-ethnic society and religious and ethnic tolerance and pluralism. In fact, the message was an incitement to genocide and to racism and racist and religious hatred and enmity. The Bosnian Muslim Government and Army proved good on these threats. The Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division Handzar was indeed reformed and recreated and was made a part of the Bosnian Muslim Army.

Eilmer of Malmesbury

William of Malmesbury wrote about 100 years after the event in his epic ‘Deeds of the English Kings’:

‘He was a man of good learning for those times; of mature ge and in his early youth had hazarded an attempt of singular temerity: he had by some contrivance fastened to his hands and feet in order that he might fly as Daedalus, and collecting the air, on the summit of a tower, had flown for a distance of a furlong (200m); but agitated by the violence of the wind and a current of air, as well as the consciousness of his rash attempt, he fell and broke both his legs, and was lame ever after. He used to relate as the cause of the failure that he had forgotten to provide himself with a tail.’

Then, a young Benedictine monk leapt with a crude pair of cloth wings from a watchtower of a church abbey at the beginning of the 11th century. This monk, known to history as Eilmer of Malmesbury, covered a furlong--a distance of approximately 200 metres--before landing heavily and breaking both legs. Afterwards, he remarked that the cause of his crash was that "he had forgotten to provide himself with a tail."

We know of Eilmer's attempt through the writings of a historian, William of Malmesbury, who mentions the flight in passing. Of more interest to William was that Eilmer, late in his life, was the first person to spot a comet, which people then credited as being an omen of the Norman invasion of England by William the Conqueror.

Eilmer typified the inquisitive spirit of medieval enthusiasts who developed small drawstring toy helicopters, windmills, and sophisticated sails for boats. As well, church artists increasingly showed angels with ever-more-accurate depictions of bird-like wings, detailing the wing's camber (curvature) that would prove crucial to generating the lifting forces enabling a bird -- or an airplane -- to fly. This climate of thought led to general acceptance that air was something that could be "worked." Flying was thus not magical, but could be attained by physical effort and human reasoning.

Eilmer was an individual of remarkable daring and boldness. He leapt from the top of a tower,

passed over a city wall, descended into a small valley by the River Avon, and then fell into a marshy field (now known as St. Aldhelm's Meadow) fully  200 metres lower than the point of his leap. Of his wings, we can surmise that they were constructed of ash or willow-wand, covered with a light cloth, and perhaps attached to pivots on either side of a back-brace, with hand-holds so he could hopefully flap them.

Given the geography of the Abbey, his landing site, and the account of his flight, he must have remained airborne about 15 seconds. At low altitude he apparently attempted to flap the wings, which threw him out of control. His post-flight assessment qualifies him as the first "test pilot," for he sought to understand, in technological terms, what happened on the flight and why he crashed. Malmesbury exists today, much changed and quite quaint, near Swindon and Bristol. The Abbey features a stained-glass window of Brother Eilmer. Alas, a nice pub named "The Flying Monk" is no more, replaced by a shopping center.

Zionism

The undeniable truth is that Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Any objective reading of the history and ideology of Zionism makes it very clear that Zionism has nothing to do with 'settler-colonialism', 'Racism' or 'Facism' as the loathsome critics of Zionism and Israel repulsively charge.Zionist ideology holds that the Jews are a people or nation like any other, and should gather together in a single homeland. Zionism was self-consciously the Jewish analogue of Italian and German national liberation movements of the nineteenth century. The term "Zionism" was apparently coined in 1891 by the Austrian publicist Nathan Birnbaum, to describe the new ideology, but it was used retroactively to describe earlier efforts and ideas to return the Jews to their homeland for whatever reasons, and it is applied to Evangelical Christians who want people of the Jewish religion to return to Israel in order to hasten the second coming. "Christian Zionism" is also used to describe any Christian support for Israel.The Zionist movement was founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897, incorporating the ideas of early thinkers as well as the organization built by Hovevei Tziyon ("lovers of Zion"). I do not know where else in history that we have a people disposed from a land for two thousand years, scattered all over the world, who reconvene through an international movement and regain their homeland. I also can not recall any group suffering the violent and irrational hatred of so many nations as the Jews have. The many decisions from world leaders could have gone much differently if made a few years sooner or later. Jews did not initially support it broadly many prefered assimilation to their country of birth and some felt that the growing socialist movement provided a better answer to anti-Semitism. Even within the Zionist movement political infighting was strong. Yet the worst fears of those seeking a refuge from growing European anti-Semitism did not forsee the scope of the Holocaust, exterminating 6 millions out of the 7 millions Jews in Europe. This emboldened the survivors and motivated just barely enough world sympathy to formulate the creation of the Jewish state. The reaction of the Arabs was neither surprising or unique in the course of developing nations. This shows Zionism not as a righteous holy ordained movement, nor is it a an evil racist colonial movement as the modern Arab media prefers to portray it. It was a politically and diplomatically unique solution to a very serious and unique problem. That the success of the Zionist enterprise has not yet yielded the peace they so desperately seek, makes this work only an introduction, but a valuable source to those seeking to understand the volatile Middle East of the 21st century. There are many more chapters to be written.In 1946 David Ben-Gurion in his testimony before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, he put forward the following paradigm for the Jewsih case "Our case, and I think you have just seen many such cases in Europe, is like that of the Jews who were forcibly expelled from their homes, which were then given to somebody else. Those homes changed hands and then after the Nazi defeat some Jewish owners came back and found their homes ocupied. In many cases they were not allowed to return to their homes. To make it more exact, I shall put it in this way. It is a large building, the building of our family, say fifty rooms. We were expelled from the house, our family was scattered, somebody else took it away and again it changed hands many times, and then we had to come back and we found some five rooms ocuppied by other people, the other rooms destroyed and uninhabitable from neglect. We said to these ocupants "We do not want to remove you, please stay where you are, we are going back into the uninhabitable rooms, we will repair them". And we did repair some of the rooms and resettle them.' The Jewish people returned to their ancient land which was of central importance to their faith and nation. While certain landmarks were of importance to the Christian and Islamic faiths, to only the Jews has Eretz Yisrael in it's entirety been central to their being.The Jews returned with malice to none, and with no intention to 'displace' or 'occupy' anyone, but were confronted with malice by the Arabs and British colonists begrudging the Jews the tiny corner of their ancient land. Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, and Israel is the home to a very large portion of the Jewish people.To oppose Zionism is to oppose a people's basic freedoms and human rights.

The Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division

During World War II, Bosnia-Hercegovina was one of the bloodiest battlefields of the war and of the Holocaust. The Bosnian Serbs are representatives of the Orthodox Christian Church and of the Byzantine culture and are part of the larger Serbian nation.The Bosnian Croats are representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and the Austro-Hungarian culture and are part of the Croatian nation.The Bosnian Muslims are representatives of Sunni Islam and were part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire and culture. The Bosnian Jews are representatives of Judaism and are mostly descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain following the Inquisition and expulsion of the Jews. From 1941-1945,Bosnia-Hercegovina was part of the NDH,the Independent State of Croatia and was one of the bloodiest arenas of the Holocaust and battlefields of the war.With the assistance of Haj Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler, the Bosnian Muslim leadership undertook the systematic extermination of the Jewish and non-Muslim,non-Croat population of Bosnia-Hercegovina.Two Waffen SS Divisions and other Nazi and fascist formations were formed to advance the goals of the Third Reich and of Islam.The goal of the Muslims was to achieve autonomy and independence for Bosnia-Hercegovina under Muslim rule. The Bosnian Muslims formed two Nazi SS Divisions during World War II,the 13th Waffen Gebirgs Division der SS “Handzar” (or “Handschar” in German) from the Turkish hancher, “dagger”, and the 23rd Waffen Gebirgs Division der SS “Kama”,from Turkish kama, “dagger,dirk”.

During the war, Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler,the “architect of the Holocaust”, was photographed and filmed reviewing the Handzar Division in a famous German newsreel in 1943 while the division was being formed and trained in Silesia, at the Neuhammer Waffen SS Training Camp in Germany. The Bosnian Muslims had 20,000-25,000 men in the Waffen SS and police,roughly 4% of their total population,one of the highest ratios of membership in the Nazi ranks as a percentage of total population during the war. The Schutzstaffel or SS, meaning “protective rank” or “defensive squadron” in German, was a branch of the German National Socialist Worker’s Party (National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei),the NSDAP,or Nazi party.The two Bosnian Muslim Waffen SS Divisions, Handzar and Kama, were radical departures from the racial theories heretofore applied by the SS.Before Handzar, SS members had been either German or Germanic,that is,Aryan or Nordic,the herrenvolk (the master race),and were Christians. Thus, inclusion of the Slavic Muslims represented a revolutionary and radical departure for the SS at that time. The approximately 20,000 Bosnian Muslim troops in the 13th Waffen SS Gebirgs Division “Handzar” and the several thousand in the 23rd Waffen SS Gebirgs Division “Kama” wore a field-green fez,while officers wore a red or maroon fez.On the fez itself appeared the Totenkopf (Death’s Head) insignia of the SS and the Hoheitszeichen (a white or silver eagle and the Nazi swastika). While Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,Kemal Pasha, had outlawed the fez in 1925 for Turkey in the Hat Law,the Bosnian Muslims,continued to wear the fez. The Muslim Handzar and Kama Divisions were organized on the model of the Bosnian Muslim regiments of the Austro-Hungarian Army.The divisional names are derived from the Turkish words “hancher” and “kama”, which in Turkish mean “dagger”.The handzar and kama were Turkish daggers which the Ottoman Turkish Zaptiehs or police customarily carried as weapons when Bosnia was under Turkish Ottoman rule. The Handzar Division would be commanded by SS Brigadefuehrer and Generalmajor of the Waffen SS,Karl Gustav Sauberzweig, and at its peak strength by the end of 1943 would consist of 21,065 men,making it the third largest of the approximately 40 SS Divisions formed during the war. In June,1944,Sauberzweig was promoted to Generalleutnant and assumed command of the IX SS Mountain Corps. SS Brigadefuehrer and Generalmajor of the Waffen SS Desiderius Hampel replaced him as commander of the Handzar Division. The Donauzeitung newspaper of December 31, 1942 reported that the Mufti had donated over 240,000 Kuna,the currency of the NDH regime, to the Muslim charity organization in Sarajevo from the coffers of Nazi Germany. In the spring of 1944,in a German radio broadcast from Zittau,Germany, he issued a call to Bosnian and Yugoslav Muslims to hold Islamic prayer services for 7 days to pray for the success of Hitler’s forces. The Bosnian Muslim Handzar and Kama Divisions were indoctrinated to kill Jews and Orthodox Serbs,who made up the bulk of the guerrilla and resistance movements, and who were associated with the enemies of the Third Reich, Communism and England,or as Heinrich Himmler termed it, the “ common Jewish-Anglo-Bolshevik enemy”.On March 1,1944, the

Grand Mufti issued from Berlin the following call to all Muslims: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them.This pleases God,history,and religion. This saves your honor.God is with you! Numerous eyewitness accounts testified that the Handzar Division committed the “worst atrocities against the Serbian population.” In a photograph of troops of the Division,members are seen reading the pamphlet Islam und Judentum (Islam and Jewry), which explained the Nazi position on the Jewish Question and how it related to Muslims.These were prepared from the Mufti’s schools and training centers in Germanythe Dresden school for Muslims in the Waffen SS,and the Goettingen school for Muslims in the German Wehrmacht. Heinrich Himmler was determined to create the two Bosnian Muslim Waffen SS Divisions,although he met with opposition from the NDH regime and from sources within the SS itself. The Bosnian Muslim troops in the Waffen SS Divisions were accorded the same privileges they had enjoyed in the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army: special rations and the observance of Islamic religious rites.Each battalion in the Divisions had an Imam and each regiment a Mullah. ” On June 23,1943,Himmler prepared a special SS oath for the Bosnian Muslim troops which read as follows: I swear to the Fuehrer,Adolf Hitler, as Supreme Commander of the German Armed Forces, to be loyal and brave. I swear to the Fuehrer and to the leaders whom he may designate, obedience unto death.

Muslim Persecution of Christians

Half of Iraq's indigenous Christians are gone, due to the unleashed forces of jihad [holy war]. Many Christians fled to nearby Syria; yet, as the Assad regime comes under attack from al-Qaeda and others, the jihad now seeps into Syria, where Christians are experiencing a level of persecution unprecedented in the nation's modern history. Similarly, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their native Egypt since the overthrow of the Mubarak regime; and in northern regions of Nigeria, where the jihadi group, Boko Haram, has been slaughtering Christians, up to 95% of the Christian population has fled. Meanwhile, the "big news" concerning the Muslim world in the month of February—the news that flooded the mainstream media and had U.S. politicians, beginning with President Obama, flustered, angry, and full of regret—was that some written-in [in Islam it is forbidden to write anything in a Korans] in Afghanistan were burned by U.S. soldiers because imprisoned Muslim inmates had been using them "to facilitate extremist communications."Unlike those nations, such as Saudi Arabia, that have eliminated Christianity altogether, Muslim countries with significant Christian minorities saw much persecution during the month of May in Egypt, Christians were openly discriminated against in law courts, even as some accused the nation's new president of declaring that he will "achieve the Islamic conquest of Egypt for the second time, and make all Christians convert to Islam"; in Indonesia, Muslims threw bags of urine on Christians during worship; in Kashmir and Zanzibar, churches were set aflame; and in Mali Christianity "faces being eradicated." Elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa—in Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan, the Ivory Coast—wherever Islam and Christianity meet, Christians are being killed, slaughtered, beheaded and even crucified. Categorized by theme, May's assemblage of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed in alphabetical order by country, not severity. Note: Because Pakistan had the lion's share of persecuted Christians last month, it has its own section below, covering the entire gamut of persecution—from apostasy and blasphemy to rape and forced conversions. A mob of 600 Muslims threw bags of urine, stones, and rotten eggs at the congregation of a Protestant church at the start of Ascension Day service, while shouting profanity and threatening to kill the pastor. No arrests were made. The church had applied for a permit to construct its house of worship five years ago. Pressured by local Muslims, the local administration ordered the church to shut down in December 2009, though the Supreme Court recently overruled its decision, saying the church is eligible for a permit. Regardless, local Muslims and officials demand that the church shut down. Following protests "by hard-line groups including the Islamic Defenders Front," nearly 20 Christian houses of worship were sealed off by authorities on the pretext of "not having permits." Authorities added that only one church may be built in the district in question to accommodate the region's 20,000 Christians. The Muslim mayor who illegally sealed the beleaguered GKI Yasmin church, forcing congregants to worship in the streets, has agreed to reopen it—but only if a mosque is built next door, to ensure the church stay in line. As well as opposition from the mayor, "the church has faced hostility from local Muslims, who have rallied against them, blocked them from accessing the street where the church is situated and disrupted their outdoor services. It is unlikely that they will suddenly embrace the Christians."