An independent Islamic faith school that requires girls as young as seven to wear hijabs is to become state-funded, with the council saying the uniform policy is "legally compliant".

When my friend's daughter Rina was seventeen, she spent a year as an exchange student on a cattle ranch in West Texas. Her host father was named Hank. Hank was 56. Built like a fence post that had survived something. Hands like they'd been left out in the weather for thirty years. A white straw hat he took off only for church and supper. Hank spoke about nine words a day. On her first day, he picked her up at the airport in Lubbock. He looked at her for a long time. Then he said: "You Rina?" "Yes." "Truck." That was the whole conversation. Two hours of highway. The radio was off. The dog in the back seat was named Dog. That night, Rina locked herself in the bathroom and cried, very quietly, so no one would hear. She was sure he hated her. She was sure she'd made a terrible mistake. She counted the days to June on her phone. There were 311. His wife, Lori, found her the next morning. "Sugar, he doesn't hate you. He's just built that way. Hank talks with his hands. You'll see." She did see. Slowly. Her bike had a flat on Tuesday. On Wednesday, it was fixed. Nobody said anything. Her room was cold. A week later, there was a space heater by her bed. Nobody said anything. At dinner, she mentioned once, very quietly, that the dark out there scared her. The ranch was twenty miles from the nearest streetlight. The next night, there was a flashlight on her pillow. New batteries. The tag still on it. Nobody said anything. The silence in that house wasn't cold. It was like a barn in winter. Something warm was breathing in the dark. Then she noticed the truck. Every morning at 4:30, before the sun, before the cattle, Hank's headlights went down the long dirt road and disappeared. He was back by six. Every single day. One morning in October, she was waiting by the truck when he came out. He looked at her. She looked at him. "Get in," he said. They drove forty minutes to a nursing home in a small town. Hank walked down a hallway that smelled like bleach and coffee, into a room where an old man sat by the window. His father. The old man looked up at the giant in the doorway, a little afraid. "Morning, sir," Hank said. He filled a little bowl with warm water. He put a towel around his father's neck. And with those enormous, wrecked hands, he shaved him. Slowly. Carefully. Like he was painting something. He hummed while he did it. Some old hymn. Rina had never heard him make a sound like that. His father watched him in the mirror the whole time. When it was done, the old man touched his own smooth face, and said: "You're a nice fella. Do I know you?" Hank wiped the razor clean. "No, sir. I'm just the man who shaves you." He'd been doing it every morning for three years. His father hadn't known his name for two. On the drive home, Rina stared out the window so he wouldn't see her face. Hank didn't say anything. But he turned on the radio, very low. For the first time. In February, the phone rang at midnight. Her grandmother in Japan had died. Her grandmother had raised her while her parents worked. Walked her to school every day for six years. Had held both her hands at the airport and said, "Go see the world. I'll be right here when you come back." Rina had promised to come home in the summer. The funeral was in three days. Her parents said there was no way to get her home in time. Stay. Finish the year. Grandma would want that. So Rina did what Japanese girls are taught to do. She said she was fine. She thanked everyone. And she went to her room and didn't come out. She didn't eat. She didn't sleep. All she could think about was a funeral on the other side of the world, and an empty space in a row of people in black, where she was supposed to be standing. On the third night, at ten o'clock, there was a knock. Hank was in the doorway. Coat on. Keys in his hand. "Get your coat." She didn't ask. She was too tired to ask. They drove into the dark. Hours of it. West Texas at night is the emptiest place on earth. Sleet ticked against the windshield. Dog slept in the back. Hank didn't say a word, and for once, Rina understood that it wasn't because he had nothing to say. At three in the morning, they pulled into a quiet street in Dallas, in front of a small building with a curved roof and a single light on. A Buddhist temple. The nearest one he could find. Five hours away. He had called that afternoon. He had told the monk, an old man from Vietnam, that there was a girl at his house whose grandma had died in Japan, and she couldn't go home, and could they please, please open the door tonight. The monk was waiting on the steps in a sweater over his robes. And Rina looked at the clock in the truck, and her breath stopped. 3:00 a.m. in Dallas. Six in the evening in Japan. The exact hour her grandmother's funeral was beginning. Hank had done the math. Inside, it was warm and smelled of incense. There was a small altar and a golden Buddha and candles. The monk didn't know the Japanese way. Rina showed him. He nodded, and stepped aside. She lit the incense. She bowed. She pressed her palms together and closed her eyes. She told her grandmother she was sorry she wasn't there. She told her she'd seen the world, like she'd promised. She told her about the ranch, and Dog, and a man who said nine words a day. When she opened her eyes, Hank was beside her. He had taken off his hat. He was holding it against his chest. He was copying everything she did. Clumsily. A beat too late. The ash from his incense fell on his boot. He bowed too deep and his bad knee cracked like a branch in the quiet. He got down on that knee anyway, on the hard floor, a six-foot-four rancher in a Buddhist temple at three in the morning, praying for a Japanese grandmother he had never met, in a way he did not understand, because a seventeen-year-old girl under his roof needed someone to stand next to her. That's when Rina finally cried. Not quietly this time. All of it. Every day she'd been holding it in. Hank didn't say anything. He just put one hand on her back. A hand so big it covered her whole back, like a roof. And he left it there until she was done. The sun was coming up over the plains when they drove home. Pink, then gold. Dog woke up and put his head on her shoulder. Somewhere near Abilene, Hank spoke. It was the longest thing Rina ever heard him say. "My dad don't know me anymore. I go anyway. You don't stop showing up for people just 'cause they can't see you. Your grandma couldn't see you tonight. Don't matter. You showed up." Then he turned the radio back on, low, and didn't say another word for the rest of the day. Rina is 24 now. She lives in Tokyo. She went back to Texas twice. She stood in the back of the church at his father's funeral. She called Lori "Mom" before she even realized she was doing it. And every year, on the day her grandmother died, at three in the morning Texas time, her phone lights up. A photo. A stick of incense burning in an old coffee can on a porch rail, the sun coming up over the pasture behind it. And one message. Always the same. "Lit one for your grandma. Still showing up. Hank." Every year, she counts the words. Nine. He has never once gone over.

A group of Afghan nationals who arrived in the UK illegally accused of r*pe and human trafficking offences involving two girls face a lengthy trial following an investigation into alleged child s*xual exploitation in Norwich. The defendants, who are accused of sexual offences committed between August 2023 and May 2025, pleaded not guilty to all 38 counts during a hearing at Norwich Crown Court on Friday and were remanded in custody. A 12-week trial had been scheduled to begin at Norwich Crown Court on 11 January 2027. It is now expected to take place at Southwark Crown Court, with 4th May identified as the earliest possible start date. Judge David Tomlinson said neither the trial date nor the trial judge had been confirmed. The charges include rpe, conspiracy to rpe, facilitating human trafficking and perverting the course of justice. Individual defendants face different allegations. Police arrested suspects during raids on six addresses in Norwich and one in Dumbarton, Scotland. According to Norfolk Police, the seven men initially charged had been granted asylum. Five arrived in small boats, one concealed in a lorry, and another attempted to enter the country clandestinely through Portsmouth ferry port. Irish police also arrested a further suspect, with legal proceedings underway to seek his return to the UK. Norfolk Police said none of the charged men had lived in asylum hotels in Norfolk and none of the alleged offences happened in asylum hotels. The seven Afghans had been granted asylum in the UK, according to Norfolk Police. Ahmadzai, 20, of Pottergate, Norwich, denies nine counts of rape, two counts of conspiracy to rape, one count of facilitating human trafficking and one count of perverting the course of justice. Khalili, 20, of High Street, Dumbarton, denies seven charges of rape, one count of conspiracy to rape and one count of facilitating human trafficking. Auryakhel, 20, of Eleanor Road, Norwich, denies one count of rape. Kaker, 20, of Black Horse Opening, Norwich, denies four counts of rape, one count of conspiracy to rape and one count of facilitating human trafficking. Mohammed Shinwary, 20, of St Benedicts Street, Norwich, denies two counts of rape. Ahamad, 21, of Pelham Road, Norwich, denies one count of rape and three counts of facilitating human trafficking. Davodzai, 20, denies four counts of rape and one count of conspiracy to rape. Bilal Shinwari denies four charges, including two counts of rape of a girl under 16, one count of conspiring to rape a girl under 16 and one of conspiring to rape a woman aged 16 or over. The final suspect to be arrested, Shinwari, 20, entered the UK on a small boat in November 2022.

𝐒𝐔𝐏𝐑𝐄𝐌𝐄 𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐓 𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐃 𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐌𝐏 𝐀 𝟔-𝟑 𝐖𝐈𝐍 — 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐒 𝐂𝐀𝐍 𝐁𝐀𝐍 𝐌𝐄𝐍 𝐅𝐑𝐎𝐌 𝐆𝐈𝐑𝐋𝐒’ 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐑𝐓𝐒 At a recent rally, Trump told the crowd about a distance race he’d heard about — a man, he said, beat the best women competing “𝘣𝘺 𝘴𝘪𝘹 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴, 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘺-𝘵𝘸𝘰 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘴, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘴𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘴”, then had to wait around because officials made him stay until “𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘪𝘳𝘭𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘪𝘯” before he could collect his own trophy. “𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘻𝘺, 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵?”, he said. Anecdote aside, the argument behind it already won — for real, in the only court that counts. On 𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟑𝟎, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔, the Supreme Court ruled 𝟔-𝟑 in 𝘞𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘝𝘪𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘢 𝘷. 𝘉.𝘗.𝘑. and 𝘓𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘷. 𝘏𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘹 that the Equal Protection Clause and Title IX both allow states to define girls’ and women’s sports teams by biological sex — closing the door on transgender eligibility claims in school and college sports nationwide. Justice Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, joined by Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett — the majority leaned on the basic physical advantages males retain even after puberty blockers. Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented. The ruling reaches both high school sports (the West Virginia case) and college sports (the Idaho case, which started with a Boise State runner). Twenty-seven states had already passed laws like this since 2020, betting the law was on their side (ACLU). Now it’s not a bet anymore — it’s precedent. 𝐁𝐢𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐢𝐬𝐧’𝐭 𝐛𝐢𝐠𝐨𝐭𝐫𝐲. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐭 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐚𝐢𝐝 𝐬𝐨. Source: Youtube

🎉 We're thrilled to announce the theme for the 2026 Children's Parade - which is also the 40th edition of this wonderful community event! In celebration of the National Year of Reading, this year’s parade will bring stories to life as we explore seven magical genres of books: Realistic Fiction, Historical Fiction, Fantasy, Traditional Stories, Science Fiction and Graphic Novels & Picture Books 📖 Join us for the 40th Children’s Parade, a free, open-to-all celebration of community and imagination. Proudly co-produced with Same Sky and with special thanks to supporters Brighton Girls Find out more: 📸 Jamie Macmillan & Victor Frankowski

On the morning of October 9th, forty-one combines came over the hill at sunrise. In a line. Headlights still on. Engines so loud the ground hummed. Like an army that had decided to be kind. My coworker's son, Hiroto, was standing in the field when they came. He was sixteen. He didn't know what he was looking at. Hiroto had spent the year as an exchange student with the Lindgren family in eastern Nebraska. Corn and soybeans. Nine hundred acres. The same family had worked that ground since 1911. The first month was a comedy. Tom, the father, woke him at 5:30 to feed the cattle. Hiroto had never seen a cow up close. The cow was not impressed. He asked Tom how many kernels of corn were in the field. Tom thought about it and said, "Oh, about forty million." Hiroto stopped asking questions about corn. The farm dog, a scruffy old heeler named Biscuit, decided on the second day that Hiroto belonged to her. Nobody was consulted. And there was Cody. Tom's son. Seventeen. Quiet. Arms like fence posts. For the first two weeks, he didn't say a single word to the Japanese kid sleeping across the hall. Then one night, in the truck, they fought over the radio. Country music versus Japanese pop. It got loud. It got serious. Tom laughed so hard he had to pull over. After that, they were brothers. Nobody decided it. It just was. In July, Tom collapsed in the north field. Heart attack. He was 52. He was gone before the ambulance found the road. Grief in a farmhouse is quiet in a specific way. His boots stayed by the back door. Laced. Like they were waiting for him to come in for supper. Nobody could move them. Ellie, nine years old, started sleeping in her father's seed cap. It came down over her eyes. She wouldn't take it off. And Cody, at the funeral, said exactly one sentence. "I'll bring in the harvest." Nine hundred acres. A job for a whole crew. Tom had brought in every harvest for thirty years. He had never missed one. Not for a broken arm. Not for a blizzard. Not once. Cody was not going to be the Lindgren who missed one. So in September, he started. Alone. Up at four. In the combine before the sun. Back after midnight. Hiroto couldn't drive a combine. So he did the only thing he could. He rode in the cab next to his brother. All day. All night. He held the thermos. He talked. In bad English, about anything. Baseball. Japan. Girls. Biscuit. Anything to keep Cody's eyes open. Some nights Cody fell asleep at the wheel for a second, and Hiroto would shake his arm, and Cody would say, "I'm good, I'm good." He was not good. One night, around two in the morning, in the middle of a dark field, Cody stopped the combine. He put his forehead on the steering wheel. And he broke. All of it. Everything he hadn't let anyone see since July. Seventeen years old. Alone in the middle of nine hundred acres, in his father's machine, in the dark. Hiroto told my coworker he didn't know a single English word that could help. So he put his hand on Cody's back, and said the only word that came. In Japanese. "Niichan." Big brother. Cody didn't know what it meant. He knew exactly what it meant. They sat there until the sun came up. Two weeks later, on the morning of October 9th, Hiroto heard the sound first. He walked out of the house, still in his socks, and looked up at the hill. And they came. Forty-one combines. Grain trucks behind them. Semis behind those. Neighbors from three counties. Men who argued with each other at the co-op every Monday. Men who hadn't spoken to each other in years. Old men. Young men. The high school football team, driving grain carts. Church women unloading folding tables and coolers of sandwiches at the edge of the field. Nobody had called them. Nobody had to. Cody came out of the house and just stood there, staring. He couldn't move. An old neighbor named Arlen, eighty years old, climbed down out of the lead combine, walked across the dirt, and put his hand on Cody's shoulder. "Your daddy helped every single one of us, son. Every one." Then he pointed at Tom's combine. "Get in. You're leading." And Cody climbed into his father's combine, and pulled out in front, and led forty-one machines across his father's land. They brought in nine hundred acres in one day. At sunset, there was one row left. And without anyone saying a word, every combine stopped. They pulled off to the edge of the field. Forty-one machines in a long line, side by side, headlights on in the gold light. Two hundred people stood by the trucks. And they let Cody take the last row. Alone. With Ellie in the cab beside him, in her father's cap, pushing it up out of her eyes so she could see. When he reached the end of that last row, forty-one horns went off at once. You could hear them, people said, in the next town. Hiroto came home to Japan in June. His father asked him what the most important thing was that he'd learned in America. He expected English. Or baseball. Or maybe something about corn. Hiroto thought about it. Then he said: "In Japan, we say a family is the people under one roof. In Nebraska, I learned that family is whoever comes over the hill." Every October now, Hiroto gets a photo from Cody. Always the same picture. A line of combines coming over a hill at sunrise. Always the same three words. "They came again."

Leftist mainstream media outlets piled on this week to express outrage at my observation, during a speech in Grand Rapids for Mike Rogers, about the troubling dearth of scientific output from the world’s 22 Arab nations over the past five decades. These reporters — @fatimathefatima @AP, @Kanishka183 @Reuters, @rachel_roubein @washingtonpost, @baylisswagner @nytimes, @stevebenen @MSNOWNews — omitted critical context, presumably to bestow plausibility on their accusations that my statements were racist and Islamophobic. However, my speech was not a critique of Arabs or Islam, but of Islamism (also known as “Islamofascism” or “Political Islam”), a toxic ideology conceived and promoted by the terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. Let’s see which reporters take the time to read this post and then correct their stories. Criticizing Islamism is neither Islamophobic nor racist. Islamism is a violent corruption of mainstream Islam that summons adherents back to the seventh-century ideal of bloody jihad, the homicidal and suicidal religious zealotry that propelled a motley cadre of desert nomads to conquer half the world. Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar — the Muslim equivalent of the Vatican and the highest authority in Sunni Islamic thought — has rejected Islamism as “false Islam” and a “perversion of the Islamic religion” and accused it of “barbaric crimes.” Islamism is intensely anti-American, anti-Western, and hostile to modernity. It is explicitly contemptuous of democracy, constitutional government, capitalism, minority rights, gay rights, women’s rights, free speech, and virtually all personal freedoms. Its central aspiration is for a global caliphate ruled by a single theocratic despot with absolute power to impose sharia law that dictates every aspect of human conduct. The Muslim Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, taught that the highest aspiration for a Muslim was martyrdom in the achievement of that goal; the purpose of every Islamic nation is to “perfect the industry of death” until world domination is accomplished. I pointed out in my speech that the Muslim Brotherhood’s antipathy for modernity is a dramatic departure from Islam’s historical affinity for science and learning. During the Muslim Golden Age, spanning the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, Muslim leaders dignified Islam’s wealth and power by promoting a brilliant flowering of innovation and scholarship in science, mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, engineering, architecture, medicine, and navigation that continues to enrich the world today. Arab leaders fostered an intellectual ferment unmatched by any other in human history. A long line of enlightened caliphs assembled—and abundantly rewarded—an unparalleled galaxy of jurists, scientists, physicians, philosophers, musicians, artists, poets, and wits. Muslim rulers elevated the role of reason and tolerance, cultivating a milieu of religious and intellectual freedom—where Jews and Christians also flourished—and encouraged sages of various faiths and ethnicities to collaborate and freely exchange ideas. For five centuries, Arabic was the world’s most learned and literary tongue and the lingua franca of science and scholarship. Most mosques had libraries (Córdoba hosted 600!). Muslim princes in the tenth century often had more books in their personal collections than existed in all of Europe. Baghdad had 100 bookstores in AD 891. England would have to wait another 420 years until 1309 to see paper for the first time. Islam’s second Golden Age during the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) birthed a cosmopolitan and pluralistic civilization centered in Constantinople that yielded additional bonanzas in poetry, music, art, and a tsunami of scientific innovation from coffee to water pumps, steam engines, gears, surgical scalpels and clamps, the first smallpox vaccine, and the cannons that allowed the Ottomans to dominate Europe to the gates of Vienna. In 1928, six years after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Muslim Brotherhood began to spread its dark strain of violent fundamentalism from Egypt to Palestine and across the Muslim world. Islamism’s contagious proliferation ended the dialogue between Islam and the intellectual classes and demoted the role of reason in Islamic life. The Muslim Brotherhood’s principal philosopher, Sayyid Qutb, was contemptuous toward public education in science, math, and philosophy, believing that the only source of truth is the Koran. For Qutb, the purpose of education was not to celebrate life, or to nourish the intellect, but to indoctrinate children in the art of war, the glorification of death, and a blind obedience to an autocratic caliph. Qutb railed against reason, which he considered the seed of apostasy. He sought to silence the humanities and viewed science as a sinister displacement of religion. He derided pluralism, rationalism, innovation, and tolerance. In doing so, he deprived Islam of its modern potential and its own greatest inheritance: the confidence to learn from the world, preserve its wisdom, and surpass it. In his obituary for Muslim culture, The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2010), Robert R. Reilly recognizes that Qutb’s outlook dooms his followers to inertia. A religion that values obedience over initiative, that seeks to obviate independent reason, is a religion of violence. Where there is no framework for rational mediation, all disputes must be settled by force. It didn’t worry Qutb that discouraging education in physics, mathematics, medicine, or engineering would atrophy intellectual and economic development in the Muslim world. Qutb explained that Muslim countries were so far behind the West in the sciences and technology that there was no hope to catch up. Muslims, he preached, should do what they do best—study the Koran and embrace martyrdom as the path for achieving global dominion: “The Muslim community today is neither capable of nor required to present before mankind great genius in material inventions, which would make the world bow its head before its supremacy.” Qutb’s diatribe against Muslims competing in science and technology was nothing less than civilizational malpractice—especially given that he wrote it in 1964. Had Japan, Singapore, or South Korea accepted Qutb’s logic in 1964, they would have opted out of modernity. Instead, they chose to accept the challenge of competition. Their decision to engage has yielded stunning achievements that transformed their nations into economic and technological superpowers and enriched all of humanity. The anti-intellectualism of Islamism—the rejection of evidence and the scientific method, the hostility toward objectivity, the suppression of contrary information, the deification of dogma, the embrace of pseudoscience, the contempt for reason as the path for discerning objective truth, and Islamism’s association of science with immorality—has helped close off the Islamic mind. The staggering metrics of intellectual and scholastic enfeeblement in Muslim nations attest to Islamism’s systematic squandering of human capital including the creative potential among the world’s two billion Muslims. Korea issued 260,000 patents in 2024, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, issued fewer than 10,000 in total, with 8,000 of these coming from a single nation—Saudi Arabia—which has made herculean efforts in recent years to de-Islamize its society. Japan, which represents about 1.5% of the world’s population and is practically devoid of natural resources, granted 306,855 patents in 2024 alone. There are 127 million Japanese, compared to 500 million Arabs. According to Hillel Ofek’s 2011 analysis, there were a mere nine scientists, engineers, and technicians per thousand citizens in Islamic nations. The global average was forty-one. Among the 1,800 universities in Muslim nations, only 312 housed scholars who had published articles in journals. Muslims represent 26% of the world’s population, and Muslim countries control half the world’s crude oil resources and 40% of natural gas resources. And yet the 53 Muslim countries combined publish only 5% of the world’s scientific literature. Hillel Ofek points to a 1989 study showing that in a single year, the United States published 10,481 frequently cited scientific papers, but during that same year, Arab countries published just four. A 2002 analysis of Arab science in Nature magazine identified only three scientific areas of excellence from Islamic countries: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction. According to Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg in 2011, “for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading.” Contrast the Arabs’ dismal record of intellectual achievement in modern times with that of their closest cousins, the Jews, nearly all of whom live in democratic societies with laws that separate religion and politics. Keep in mind that Jews, who number 15.8 million worldwide, represent a mere 0.2% of the world population. As of 2025, no Muslim has ever received the Nobel Prize in medicine or economics, and only four Muslim scientists—all living in Western democracies—have received the Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics. In contrast, some 200 Jews have received Nobel Prizes in science. About 26% of Nobel Prizes in math and science, 28% in medicine, 40% in economics, and 39% in chemistry have gone to Jews. Since 1901, some 22% of Nobel Prizes in all categories have gone to Jews. Genocidal hatred against ALL Jews and Christians and other minorities is foundational to Islamism. Only in the West does Jew hatred pretend to require the alibi of Palestine or hide behind anti-Zionism. Muslim Brotherhood cosmology describes the universe as a cosmic, existential war between Islam and Jews that began with Muhammad and which only one side can survive. “Since Islam subdued them [in Medina],” Qutb warned, “they are unforgiving and fight furiously through conspiracies, intrigues, and also through proxies [the United States] who act in the darkness against all what Islam incorporates.” Islamist utopia will only emerge when every Jew is exterminated. Jews in Qutb’s theology are not just political adversaries, but perpetual and metaphysical evil. “The Jews,” he said, “are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of family, and the desolation of society.” And Jewish genocide, for Islamism, is more than a theoretical aspiration. In 1948, the world’s 22 Arab nations were host to 750,000 Jews living in communities that predated Muhammad by 1,000 years. Today, there are virtually no Jews in those nations: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, Jordan, Gaza, or the PA-governed areas of the West Bank; in Nazi terminology, they are Judenrein: Jew-free. There are fewer than 1,000 Jews in Tunisia, down from 105,000. In 1948, Christian populations represented 20% of those nations; today they represent 4%. These are the real ongoing genocides of the Mideast. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime bonded with early Islamists over their shared Jew hatred. The Nazis became the principal funder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s, and the Muslim Brotherhood operated propaganda, espionage, and sabotage operations for the Nazis during World War II. Joseph Goebbels and an army of Nazi and ex-Nazi propagandists built the Muslim Brotherhood’s powerful propaganda machine in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. The massive influx of money from Iran and the Gulf States starting in the 1990s turned this operation into an amplifier of unmatched power that makes Goebbels look like a piker. A global propaganda barrage by this outfit has distracted Hamas’s Western dupes from Islamism’s authentic genocides by persuading them that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, even though, according to the CIA Factbook, Gaza’s population has actually increased since October 7, 2023. Islamism is genocidal against Christians and Jews, but among its most pitiful victims are the Arab societies that suffer the misfortune of living under its rule. Despite all their petroleum wealth, Muslim countries have slipped behind Asia and Latin America in virtually every metric of political freedom, technological progress, and social well-being. Islamism’s merger of politics and religion has robbed Islam of its intellectual vigor and doomed most Muslim populations to living in stifling tyrannies with little freedom to elucidate their thoughts and speech or fulfill their creative potential. Those countries are predictably stagnant, unable to evolve in the modern world. The dark shadow of fundamentalism over scholarship and progress has proven toxic to the Muslims’ transition to modernity. The very civilization that practiced tolerance and celebrated pluralism and dialogue, filled a thousand libraries with its books, gave the world observatories and universities, and stunning innovations in science, has become closed, aggrieved, and violent, and averse to reason, curiosity, freedom of inquiry, and scholarship. All 22 Arab nations in the Mideast and North Africa are autocratic dictatorships. Almost all are apartheid states that legally restrict the rights of minorities. Gays in many of the nations are put to death. Under sharia law, women have little more rights than cattle. They live stunted lives behind veiled faces, enduring systematic servitude, legalized domestic violence, child marriage, chattel slavery, and public stoning for adultery, which is legal for their husbands. In September 2021, the Taliban made it illegal for girls to attend school after age 12. The Taliban’s Vice and Virtue law forbids women from speaking aloud in public. If you want to understand the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision for society, look no further than Gaza. Hamas, which rules Gaza, is the Palestine branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Palestinians have received over 4X per capita in international aid than Europeans received under the Marshall Plan. (See Clawson 2002.) Europe used its money to rebuild 17 nations. Palestinians couldn’t build themselves even one. Under Hamas’s iron fist, Gaza squandered its share on bombs, weapons, extravagant salaries for its billionaire kingpins, and a billion-dollar bunker and tunnel system built for its warriors—but off-limits to its citizens. Gaza remains a stunted and stagnant, impoverished society under tyrannical oppression, with no free speech or other basic freedoms. Hamas governs through force, including brutal crackdowns on discourse, public executions of dissenters and collaborators, tight controls on humanitarian aid distribution, and onerous taxes on almost every activity. No elections have occurred since Hamas took over in 2007. Instead of building a nation, Hamas has transformed Gaza into a death cult wallowing in victimhood, nursing aggrievements, addicted to violence, resentments, and yearning for a seventh-century miasma. Hamas nurses Palestinian infants from birth on genocidal hatred of ALL Jews—not just Zionists—and indoctrinates children in the savagery and unspeakable barbarism that the world witnessed on October 7. Hamas shows its contempt for the Palestinian people by deploying them as child soldiers and civilian shields, and placing rocket launchers and ammo dumps in schools and hospitals. Hamas’s greatest strengths are its propaganda operation and its willingness to impose unlimited pain on its own population to achieve its ideological goals. Islamist governments like Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah distract their populations from their misery by blaming the myriad social ills and the predictable government failures on scapegoats: Jews, Zionists, and America. They’ll have us believe that all their derelictions are the result of the evil Zionists, the “Little Satan” Israel, and the “Great Satan,” the U.S. And just as victimhood is paralyzing to personal growth, it deprives Islamist nations of national success by robbing its practitioners of agency. Islamism’s cult of victimhood and its coterminous abolition of self-criticism have stagnated global Islam and locked it in hatred, violence, brooding resentment, and isolationism. Referring to the Arab world, Fouad Ajami described this as “a political tradition of belligerent self-pity.” Contrast Gaza’s failures with the successes of its closest neighbor, Israel, a tiny sliver of swamp and desert 1/600th the size of its Arab neighbors, that blossomed into an agricultural juggernaut and a global economic and technological superpower. Jews took one of the few places in the Mideast with no oil, gas, or other resources, and despite being surrounded by enemies, they nevertheless turned the barren landscape into a vibrant, pluralistic democracy where Jews and Arabs vote as they please; worship according to their convictions; serve beside each other in the judiciary, the army, and political leadership; and enjoy equal rights. Women and gays in Israel have all the rights of men, and Israel’s biggest annual celebration is the Pride parade in Tel Aviv. As the only democracy in the Mideast, Israel is a robust and heroic outpost for freedom and Western values. And Israel is merely a nugget among the bounties bestowed by Jews on Western civilization. There is no ethnic or religious group that has contributed more than Jews to the welfare of humanity or to the advancement of liberal democracy. Jewish traditions of ethics and thinking have shaped Western civilization and global progress through foundational moral concepts, including our monotheistic Christian belief system with its roots in Judaism, milestone scientific breakthroughs, medical innovation, and innumerable cultural achievements in art, literature, education, health, and entertainment. Relative to their proportion of the population, the astonishing contributions by Jews have been breathtaking. An abbreviated list would include medical advances like the polio vaccine (Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin), chemotherapy and immunology (Paul Ehrlich), streptomycin and the age of antibiotics (Selman Waksman), penicillin (Ernest Chain), pacemakers (Paul Zoll), and blood typing (Karl Landsteiner). In sciences, a short list of Jewish luminaries would include Albert Einstein (theory of relativity), Niels Bohr (quantum mechanics), and Paul Berg (first recombinant DNA molecule). Jewish contributions to business and technology include Google (Sergey Brin), Meta (Mark Zuckerberg), Oracle (Larry Ellison), Salesforce (Marc Benioff), Intel (Andrew Grove), and Dell Technologies (Michael Dell). Jews virtually created the American entertainment industry, including founding six of the eight major Hollywood studios responsible for 75% of the classic Golden Age movies. They also revolutionized laughter. A 1978 TIME magazine survey found that 80% of professional comedians were Jewish. The major figures of twentieth-century Western thought—Jesus Christ, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Karl Marx—were all Jewish. Twenty percent of philanthropic giving in the United States comes from Jews. Jews compose twenty-five percent of America’s most generous givers. They are overrepresented on lists of secular organizations that benefit human rights, social security, higher education, personal freedom, and constitutional rights. They represent 14% of doctors and 29% of psychiatrists. Their contributions to America’s global economic leadership include Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Blackstone, Wells Fargo, and Vanguard. In a rational universe, wouldn’t non-Jews be expected to celebrate these contributions with gratitude? Now, here are some things that Jews don’t do: suicide bombings, rape gangs, beheading people, killing gay people, aspiring to kill all non-Muslims, forcing young girls to wed older men, lynching women for wearing makeup or showing hair, female mutilation, religious dictatorship, Christian genocide, polygamy, rioting and burning down cities, applying the death penalty for leaving Islam, cooking babies in ovens, hijacking airliners (and driving them into buildings), bombing buses and crowded restaurants, disfiguring girls with acid for failing to wear the hijab, operating modern slave markets where hereditary Black slaves are bought and sold by Arabs, advocating global jihad, and committing 90% of the terrorist acts globally. These are the gifts that Islamism has bestowed on the world, along with closed minds, poverty, starvation, ignorance, oppression, and violence. This comparison begs the question, “Why does the world hate Jews and embrace Islamists? The answer, of course, is a sophisticated mass propaganda campaign that ignores evidence and inverts reality to make Israel a global villain. Looking at Islamism’s track record, seven nations with substantial Muslim populations—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, and Russia—have outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, branding it as a terrorist organization. Kenya and Argentina have also banned the Brotherhood for fear of its impacts on their societies. The Brotherhood today sees its best opportunities for expansion as Western nations that are unequipped to deal with its tactics. In 2004, the FBI discovered the U.S. Brotherhood’s archives in a Virginia basement, including a 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” characterizing the Brotherhood’s work in America as “a kind of gradual Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Muslim Brotherhood documents describe this process of gradual infiltration as “gradualism,” “entryism,” or “Da’awa.” In a 1995 speech in Toledo, Ohio, the Brotherhood’s leading cleric, Yusuf al-Waradawi, told his audience: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’awa.” As a board member and outreach chair of a Muslim Brotherhood front group, Abdul El-Sayed ran a high-school recruitment program entitled “How to do effective Da’awa.” The Muslim Brotherhood’s explicit written strategy for taking over Western nations is to broaden its appeal through a “red–green alliance” by adopting Leftist rhetoric and allying itself with liberals, socialists, and communists. This was the strategy first initiated by Yasser Arafat in the 1960s and then implemented by Muslim Brotherhood acolyte Ayatollah Khomeini during his 1979 Iranian Revolution, and later by Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi during his 2011 color revolution in Egypt. After they gained power, the Leftists, in each case, learned that they were not actually Islamism’s partners, but only its useful idiots. Khomeini hunted down, jailed, and murdered his former Leftist and communist allies. Morsi sidelined his. A 2012 Arabic-language statement bearing Abdul Al-Sayed’s name backed Morsi’s presidency and urged him to “purge” the media and police. Anyone wondering what America’s future looks like if the Muslim Brotherhood gets its way has only to look at France, where Islamist mobs of the red–green alliance, following the Muslim Brotherhood playbook, chant communist phrases, wave Palestinian flags, and vent their destructive hostility toward the West by destroying the iconic monuments of our shared civilizations. Abdul El-Sayed mocks his critics as Islamophobic or anti-Arab racists when they inquire about his continued loyalties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But El-Sayed and his family have long and deep entanglements with the terrorist organization. A 20,000-word investigation by The Project for the Investigation of Terrorism documents El-Sayed's two decades of intensive affiliations with the Muslim Brotherhood, and nearly every one of its legacy front groups that the Brotherhood set up in the U.S. to Islamify and destroy our democracy. That same organization recorded dozens of instances in recent years where Abdul El-Sayed has either directly lied about his relationship or refused to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. On Oct. 1, an Ohio voter became the latest to ask Al-Sayed to disavow the Brotherhood. Under persistent badgering before national news cameras, Al-Sayed finally caved: “Sure. Yeah, absolutely!” he said unconvincingly. He then spent five minutes attacking the man’s motives. El-Sayed said nothing about the Brotherhood itself, its ideology, or the Muslim Brotherhood front organizations he works with. A disavowal that names nothing and condemns nothing is a disavowal in name only. Why can’t El-Sayed give us a full-throated and detailed condemnation of this terror group, and disavow also its poisonous ideology without ambiguity? Why can’t he acknowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood is a despicable terror organization, and that Islamism and sharia law are anathema to American values? Americans shouldn’t have to worry whether a U.S. Senate candidate has loyalty to an ideology that openly hates our country and has vowed to destroy it.

Her stepson called with news that chilled her to the bone. He told her that a strange man had stopped by their house asking specifically for her teenage daughter Deidre. That man was Charles Manson. In the late 1960s, Angela Lansbury was living in Malibu with her husband, Peter Shaw, and their children. To the outside world, she was a celebrated Hollywood star, already a three-time Oscar nominee and a Tony Award winner with a flourishing career. But behind closed doors, her family was facing a quiet, agonizing crisis. Her teenage son Anthony was struggling with a heavy heroin addiction, and two of his close friends had already died from tragic overdoses. Meanwhile, young Deidre was being drawn into a dangerous counterculture full of communes, drugs, and charismatic wanderers promising love and freedom. Before August 1969, the general public did not yet know the horrifying atrocities Charles Manson and his followers would commit. Back then, Manson was simply another odd figure drifting around Los Angeles with a guitar, charm, and radical speeches about revolution. He went around knocking on doors, looking for young teenage girls by name. Angela recognized the danger before the rest of the world caught on. She watched her children slipping away and knew that staying in California would eventually destroy them. While other Hollywood parents might have relied on local therapy or rehab facilities, Angela realized something far more drastic was necessary. She looked at her husband and said, "We have to leave. Now. Everyone. Leaving everything." She was not talking about taking a brief vacation. She meant stepping away from their whole life: Peter's position as an executive at MGM, Angela's acting career, their Malibu home, and the vast social network they had built over decades. Peter looked at his wife, who had been working constantly as an actress since she was seventeen years old, and agreed without a second thought. They chose rural Ireland, settling in a peaceful area of County Cork that was light-years away from Los Angeles. There were no communes in the nearby hills, no toxic influences, and no Manson knocking on their door. Angela informed Hollywood that she was stepping away, keeping the true motivation hidden so she could focus entirely on protecting her family. For an entire year, Angela turned down every acting job offered to her. Living in the quiet Irish countryside, she dedicated every single day to helping her children recover. They found medical support for Anthony to overcome his addiction. Deidre took longer to break free from her past lifestyle, but away from the toxic environment, both children slowly began to heal. Then, in August 1969, terrifying news echoed across the world. Sharon Tate and four others were brutally murdered in Los Angeles, followed by the LaBianca murders the next night. The public finally saw Manson for the monster he was. Many of the young women drawn into his circle had been targeted in the exact same way Deidre had been approached. The key difference was that Angela had pulled her daughter away just in time. When Angela eventually returned to acting, she had to rebuild her career from scratch. Yet she had already won the most vital battle: her children were safe, alive, and thriving. Anthony later became a successful television director, eventually directing 68 episodes of his mother's famous series, Murder, She Wrote. Deidre became a skilled chef and built a fulfilling, happy life. In 1984, at age fifty-nine, Angela landed her iconic role as Jessica Fletcher, bringing joy to millions across twelve seasons. She won more Tony Awards, earned a Grammy, and was named a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II. Reflecting on those choices years later, Angela shared, "I have no doubt we would have lost one or both of our children if we hadn't brought them to a completely different environment." It was not just luck. It was a mother's relentless love, courage, and unwavering instinct. Angela Lansbury passed away in October 2022 at ninety-six, leaving behind a legacy of iconic performances. Yet her greatest masterpiece was never shown on screen. It was the warm, loving home she saved, proving that no award or stardom will ever match the power of a mother fighting for her family.

So many artists. So many unforgettable stages! From the sparkle of Girls2 to the effortless charm of Tiffany Young, the energy of NEXZ, and the unforgettable vocals of Ailee, and every artist in between, MAGICORE was filled with music all day! And at the highlight moment, fireworks lit up the stage. Pure magic!🎆 #KBW2026# #MAGICORE# #LotteWorldAdventure#