30 | March | 2012 | blogsense-by-barb

University of Pittsburgh

University of Pittsburgh offers $10,000 reward
after bomb threats

Friday, March 30, 2012
By Sadie Gurman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The University of Pittsburgh is offering a reward of as much as $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone responsible for six bomb threats on the campus in a little more than two weeks.

The latest was today. A bomb threat prompted an evacuation of the Cathedral of Learning this morning.

The university’s emergency notification system informed students of the threat about 10:15 a.m, warning them to leave the 42-story building.

That was the same warning they received on Wednesday evening, when university officials were notified of a threat scrawled in a woman’s restroom.

Earlier that morning, Pitt’s Chevron Science Center was cleared after a threat was discovered there.

Previous threats to the Cathedral of Learning were written in a men’s bathroom, prompting the university to remove the stall doors in some of the restrooms and bolster security in the building.

Officials said after the third bomb threat last week that they had identified a “person of interest” in the crimes but would not elaborate. The FBI is assisting in the investigation.

The false alarms have brought both fear and annoyance, disrupting classes and drawing police. Each incident drives hundreds of students and faculty from the building, which closes for hours while police check it for explosives.

A university spokesman said officials have pledged to prosecute anyone responsible to the “fullest extent of the law.”

The university publicized the reward today via its emergency notification system.

Pitt said it could split the reward among multiple sources of information.

Officers in a news release urged “any witness who was in the areas on the dates and at the times of the threats and observed these threats being made or with information about who made these threats” to call campus police at 412-624-2121.

Bomb Scares In Pittsburgh, Again!

The 21st Century Crusades continue to gain ground around the world

The Global War on Religion

“In a presidential primary campaign season in which GOP candidates have loudly trumpeted the spurious charge that President Obama is waging a “war on religion,” a recent report indicates what real religious persecution looks like around the world — and the news is not good.

“According to the 2012 annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom — an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission — in the past year “an ongoing crisis of equal breadth and scope frequently went unnoticed,” given the predominance of world economic woes.

“Across the global landscape, the pivotal human right of religious freedom was under escalating attack,” the report states. “To an alarming extent, freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief was being curtailed, often threatening the safety and survival of innocent persons, including members of religious minorities.”

Left to right, Mohamed El-Katatni, former secretary general of the FJP and current Speaker of Parliament, Mohamed Mursi current head of the FJP and Essam El-Erian, MP and FJP co-founder (Photo: FJP website)
Muslim Brotherhood = Freedom and Justice Party (FJP)
“In some nations the government is directly persecuting religious groups, the report states. “In Egypt, an epicenter of the Arab Spring, hope turned to dismay.” Human rights conditions, particularly abuses of religious freedom, worsened under military rule. “Law enforcement and the courts fostered a climate of impunity in the face of repeated attacks against Coptic Christians and their churches.”

“In China, government persecution of Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims was at the worst level in decades. Burma, which calls itself Myanmar, has one of the worst human rights records on the planet: “Religious groups, particularly ethnic minority Christians and Muslims and Buddhist monks suspected of engaging in anti-government activity, faced intrusive monitoring, arrest, mistreatment, destruction or desecration of property, severe restrictions on worship…and targeted violence,” according to the report.

“In Iran, the government continued to attack the Bah’ai minority, as well as Zoroastrians, Sufi Muslims, and Christians. “Members of these groups were harassed, arrested, and imprisoned, including Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, a Christian convert who was put on trial for his life.” The theocracy in Iran fomented hatred against Jews through various means, including denying the Holocaust.

“The report notes that other countries, by failing “to prevent or punish violence against vulnerable religious minorities provided a grim portrait of how states can create or fuel a culture of impunity, encouraging private citizens or groups to threaten, intimidate or even murder others.”

“In Nigeria, for instance, the government has for years failed to stem or punish Muslim-Christian violence. Violence in the last year claimed 800 lives, displacing 65,000 people and leading to the destruction of both churches in mosques.

“Pakistan, according to the report, both tolerates religious discrimination and engages in it. Through anti-blasphemy laws and laws persecuting the Ahmadi Muslim sect, Pakistan “continues to both engage in and tolerate systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of freedom of religion or belief.” ………… READ MORE

The war that was skillfully handled by America’s third President – Thomas Jefferson, has returned to haunt not only the USA, but the nations of the world. The many conflicts and struggles globally involve Islam’s edict to rule the world. They may be a minority of Muslims that pursue Jihad, but because they are taught hatred from the cradle and self-sacrifice is the highest virtue, especially if one takes out a few infidels in the process, AND because it is apparently beyond our comprehension that these people value life so little in comparison to their beliefs. It is beyond logic. It is beyond reason. So we blink our eyes as radical Islam sweeps into and across our nation in the name of tolerance! Tolerance!

So … why is Islam finding so much favor in the USA and European nations in spite of the violence and hate they, themselves spew? Are Christians and Jews so naive as to think what? Live and let live? Not going to happen … because the Koran commands them to take over the world, in so many words. Why are schools open to the teaching of Muslim principles but completely censor Christianity or Bible study. Even Valedictorians are strongly discouraged from using their address as an outlet for their faith. Everyone has to endure the increased intrusions at local airports, except Muslim women in religious dress. And why are Marines in Afghanistan ordered to take down a cross marking a Chapel entrance, but they are permitted to fly a rainbow flag, in support of the administrations open-door policy? It all just seems waaaaaaaaaaaay out of balance to me, and certainly not “EQUAL RIGHTS.”

Sarkozy: Toulouse shootings caused 9/11-like trauma; 19 Islamist suspects arrested

French police commandos arrested 19 people and seized weapons in Friday morning swoops on people suspected of radical Islamist activity, in several cities including Toulouse, scene of the killings of four Jews and three soldiers this month.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is waging an uphill battle for re-election in an April-May vote, said more such raids would follow…. MORE HERE

Ayaan Hirsi Ali:The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World
Actually its a War that has never ended.

From one end of the muslim world to the other, Christians are being murdered for their faith.

We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway—an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.

The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries.

The media’s reticence on the subject no doubt has several sources. One may be fear of provoking additional violence. Another is most likely the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation—a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia—and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called “Islamophobia”—a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.

But a fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other. The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity—and ultimately of all religious minorities—in the Islamic world is at stake…. READ MORE