In a case that will test the limits of Dutch freedom of expression, firebrand lawmaker Geert Wilders appeared in court Friday for the first public hearing in a hate speech prosecution.

The pretrial hearing at a tightly guarded courtroom on the edge of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport comes with Wilders’ anti-Islam Freedom Party standing atop opinion polls a year ahead of Dutch parliamentary elections and with anti-immigrant sentiment rising across Europe.

Prosecutor Wouter Bos said the case pits two key pillars of the Dutch constitution against one another: A ban on discrimination and the right to freedom of expression.

“The importance of freedom of speech is great,” he said. “It is one of the essential elements of our democratic society.” But, he added, “freedom of speech is not absolute.”

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Socialism is amongst other things, a utopian fallacy. In Venezuela, that fallacy is coming to a full and dramatically dark fruition.

Colonel Saunders fans please take note:

When last we checked in on our favorite socialist paradise, Venezuela, it was the world’s worst performing economy and barring a sudden (not to mention large) spike in crude prices, the country will in all likelihood default this year as 90% of oil revenue at current prices must go towards debt service payments.

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SCHOOLS and canteens in Germany have BANNED pork from their menus over fears of offending Muslim migrants, a top politician has revealed.

An increasing number of public canteens, child daycare centres and schools have stopped serving sausages, bacon and ham over religious considerations.

Now members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party are fighting to keep pork on the menu, insisting the consumption of pork is part of German culture.

Daniel Günther, party representative, claimed that pork products were being taken off the menu in schools, nurseries and canteens across the country.

He said: “The protection of minorities – including for religious reasons – must not mean that the majority is overruled in their free decision by ill-conceived consideration.

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Zero

Zerohedge reports today that Canada officially has no gold. Yes, that’s right. Selling off the nation’s barbarous relic of last resort has been a long played out policy. However, as readers can see from the chart above, since the arrival of President Pool Boy reserves have been steered into the ditch faster than a Laramie Longhorn driven by a guy called Kyle.

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It has long been suspected that the Labour government of Tony Blair operated a ‘open door’ immigration policy after coming to power in Britain in 1997, as anyone who lived in a large urban centre at the time can attest.

In 2009 a former government adviser confirmed such suspicions, but now a new biography of the former prime minister by the celebrated investigative journalist Tom Bower claims Mr Blair ordered his Labour government not to publicly discuss the issue.

The book claims that Mr Blair and his Government ‘cynically repackaged’ asylum seekers as economic migrants to the benefit of 350,000 asylum seekers.

Tony Blair is accused of ‘presiding over a silent conspiracy’ that allowed two million migrants to enter Britain during his decade in power.

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When Ariel Agudio called 911 in January, she told a dispatcher that she had been the victim of a racially charged crime.

“They were calling us [N-word] and all this stuff,” Agudio told a dispatcher, the Albany Times Union reported. “And if someone doesn’t come and take this down or something, I’m going to call the news.”

Agudio, Alexis Briggs and Asha Burwell, all three 20-year-old black students at the State University of New York at Albany, claimed they had been targeted by a group of white men and women on a bus at about 1 a.m. on Jan. 30.

The story made national headlines. There was a rally in the wake of the news, which reportedly drew hundreds. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton even tweeted about it.

But the allegations weren’t true, authorities say.

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Two US scumbags gynecologists have drunk the Kool-Aid and are advocating for the legalization and even the promotion of “less harmful” forms of female genital mutilation, the better to appease Islamists be more culturally sensitive:

Worldwide, around 3 million girls every year are subjected to genital mutilation, mostly in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The practice can range in severity from nicking genitals to removing the clitoris and labia then stitching up most of the vagina.

Such operations are now illegal in the UK and US, but Kavita Shah Arora and Allan Jacobs, gynaecologists based in Ohio and New York, say such laws might leave girls more vulnerable to harm by pushing the practice underground. They argue that so far, attempts to clamp down on FGM have not succeeded in wiping it out, and can be viewed as racist or culturally insensitive.

Right… because not seeming racist is far more important that not mutilating helpless little girls.

Instead, Arora and Jacobs suggest doctors should promote and perform only operations that they think will not affect women’s ability to have children or long-term sexual satisfaction, such as small cuts or removing parts of the clitoral hood or labia. This, they say, is “a compromise that respects culture and religion but provides necessary protections against child abuse”.

Never mind the fact that as these two assholes want to “promote and perform” such mutilations in the USA, there are extensive campaigns to eradicate the practise in Africa and elsewhere (eg, the image above is a roadside sign in Uganda).

Fortunately, their colleagues remember that pesky “first, do no harm” part of the Hippocratic Oath:

Some cultural practices don’t deserve respect, says Ruth Macklin, a biomedical ethicist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “Female genital alteration has its origin and purpose in controlling women,” Macklin writes in another comment article. “A cultural tradition designed to control women – even in its least harmful form – is best abandoned.”

Earlier this month, the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics reaffirmed its zero-tolerance stance towards female genital mutilation, calling it a violation of human rights that should be completely eliminated.

Read the whole piece here

And a rebuttal against Arora and Jacobs’ shitty Shari’a idea here: “In Defense of Genital Autonomy for Children” by Brian D Earp

If you thought things were bad in France, spare a thought for hapless Sweden, who has been drinking the multicultural Kool Aid for so long, that Norway believes its neighbour is in danger of collapse, and is provisioning for just such an event.

For those who have been following events in Europe, none of this will come as much of a surprise. If one nation has embodied the utter insanity of the European immigration nightmare, it’s Sweden.

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A radical Canadian imam called for Muslims to “look forward” as “Rome will be conquered,” in a Friday sermon posted on the Internet on Feb. 16 and translated by the Middle East Monitoring Research Institute (MEMRI).

“The prophecies of the Prophet Muhammad came true. But some prophecies have not come true yet. Look forward to it, because the Prophet Muhammad said that Rome would be conquered! It will be conquered,” preached Imam Shaban Sherif Mady.

Mady, based in Edmonton, also spoke of restoring the “rightly-guided” Islamic Caliphate.

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It’s difficult to understand exactly what is going on with the global calls from Central Bank planners for the abolition of large denomination currency notes and simultaneous experimentation with negative interest rate policies (NIRP).

Thankfully Zerohedge has come to the rescue with an easy to follow explanation:

These are strange monetary times, with negative interest rates and central bankers deemed to be masters of the universe. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that politicians and central bankers are now waging a war on cash. That’s right, policy makers in Europe and the U.S. want to make it harder for the hoi polloi to hold actual currency.

The real reason the war on cash is gearing up now is political: Politicians and central bankers fear that holders of currency could undermine their brave new monetary world of negative interest rates. Japan and Europe are already deep into negative territory, and U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said last week the U.S. should be prepared for the possibility. Translation: That’s where the Fed is going in the next recession.

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