Here’s one they left out of the history textbooks. A recent French film, Free Men, brought to light the remarkable true history of how Muslims gave sanctuary to French Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris during Second World War. An untold “Oscar Schindler” story, the film is inspired by actual events and in this case, our ‘Schindler’ is Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris until 1954.

Underneath the fortress of mosaics and tranquil gardens occupying an entire city block in the Latin Quarter, it is revealed the mosque’s underground caverns once served as a refuge for resistance fighters and French Jews, where they could be provided with certificates of Muslim identity. Meanwhile upstairs, Benghabrit, a wise Algerian-born religious and political leader, was giving tours of the mosque to Nazi officers and their wives, unaware of what was transpiring right under their feet.

A North African Jewish man named Albert Assouline, who had escaped from a German prison camp, wrote about his experience hiding in the mosque:

“No fewer than 1,732 resistance fighters found refuge in its underground caverns. These included Muslim escapees but also Christians and Jews. The latter were by far the most numerous.”

awesome & hil-arious. reminds me of a tim burton movie in a way. also, features RuPaul as a male life-coach at a gay “rehab” camp.

Warm Bodies offers a sweet, well-acted spin on a genre that all too often lives down to its brain-dead protagonists.

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The lines between the military and law enforcement have blurred even further.

 … By making a few subtle changes to a regulation in the U.S. Code titled “Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies” the military has quietly granted itself the ability to police the streets without obtaining prior local or state consent, upending a precedent that has been in place for more than two centuries.

Racist much?

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It started with a report to the state’s Office of the Child Advocate that a child had been expelled from preschool.

Jamey Bell, the child advocate, saw no reason why a child that young should be suspended, and wanted to know how widespread the problem was. She also had learned that a 7-year-old had been arrested while at school.

She would soon find out that at least 1,967 students age 6 and under were suspended last school year — almost all of them black or Hispanic. According to a report from the Connecticut Department of Education, the number of students suspended is actually higher, but privacy issues restrict the state agency from releasing information that could identify unique student information. 

“That’s a lot of kids… I do not think that [suspension] is an appropriate response” to students behaving poorly at school, Bell said. Excluding such young children from the classroom  ”seems to me a non-educational, non-therapeutic response for those who are way too young to be culpable.” 

The leader of the state’s child protection agency, Joette Katz, agrees.

“I was shocked” by the statistic, the Department of Child and Families commissioner told a roomful of people at the state Capitol complex Friday. “Clearly when children are being suspended, something else is not being attended to.”

Officials say that bad behavior of children this young is most often a symptom of something else they experienced in their life

“This is the world the gun lobby is creating for us. Feardom, not freedom.”

Did you hear of the latest Obama scandal? Apparently the President had two marines hold umbrellas over his and the PM of Turkey’s head at a press conference….

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This just goes to show how utterly asinine both the GOP and the military is in this country. Apparently it is prohibited under the Marine Corps Uniform Regulations for a male Marine to hold an umbrella during inclement weather; however, a female Marine is allowed to hold an umbrella, provided she do so only with her left hand.

So the scandal here, according to the GOP, is that Obama let a male Marine rather than a female Marine hold an umbrella over his head …

America, you so dumb.

So apparently there’s a town in Northwest, CT, where high school students have taken to creating something called “White Power Wednesdays,” where all of the white students (ya know, 99% of them) wear white t-shirts to school and make “n———” jokes all day. I was told this by someone who has first-hand knowledge that this phenomenon exists …

African-Americans are not merely another maltreated minority on the scale of non-WASPs. They are a community whose advancement was specifically and actively retarded by American policy and private action. The antebellum South passed laws against teaching black people to read. In the postbellum South, black communities were the targets of a long-running campaign of terror. The terrorists took very specific aim at the institutions of African-American advancement. They targeted churches. They targeted businesses. And they targeted schools. In the mid-20th century, as we have been documenting, it was the policy of this country to deny African-Americans access to the same methods of wealth-building, that it was making available to whites.

This alone would be bad enough, but what makes it much worse is segregation. In his book American Apartheid, Douglass Massey looks at the dissimilarity indexes among African-Americans in various cities across the country in the mid to late 20th century. To summarize (and I can talk more about this) the lowest levels of dissimilarity in black communities are higher than the highest levels of dissimilarity among “white” immigrants.

… This is not merely a problem for your local diversity and sensitivity workshop. It is a problem of wealth and power. When you create a situation in which a community has a disproportionate number of poor people, and then you hyper-segregate that community, you multiply the problems of poverty for the entire community—poor or not. That is to say that black individuals are not simply poorer and less wealthier than white individuals. Because of segregation, black individuals and white individuals of the same income and same wealth, do not live in communities of equal wealth.

The Navy wants to conduct training and testing with sonar and explosives that could kill 1,000 whales. (13835 signatures on petition)

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Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy, in case you hadn’t heard. How dare she remove those ticking time bombs from her chest, amiright? Like, hasn’t she learned by now that her body is public domain and we all get to vote on what she does with it? Sheesh, how selfish can ya get.

stfuprolifers:

kor71:

If you think abortions ok, remember what Horton says.

Awkward. Dr. Seuss and his wife were really liberal and pro-choice. They’ve even threatened to sue pro-life organizations for using this quote the wrong way (the way you’re doing it actually). I guess you didn’t already know that Horton Hears a Who is about the American occupation of Japan post-WWII. He even dedicated it to his dear Japanese friend.

Mrs. Geisel (Mrs. Seuss) continued donating to Planned Parenthood and advocating for reproductive health and rights after her husband died.

tyleroakley:

buzzfeed:

George Takei responds to “traditional” marriage fans. 

George Takei is flawfree.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—The Puerto Rican Senate on Thursday approved a sweeping bill that would ban anti-LGBT discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations and government services in the U.S. territory.

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