NewsWatch

Austria May Register Jews to Buy Kosher

WashingtonPost.com, 7/20/18, “Austrian state wants to force meat-consuming Jews and Muslims to register, drawing Nazi comparisons” [Excerpts]: Nazi comparisons have become so frequent around the world that they rarely draw attention these days. But in Adolf Hitler’s birth country, Austria, they can still strike a nerve.

They certainly did so this week, after Jewish organizations criticized the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), the ruling coalition party in the state of Lower Austria, over a proposal that would require Jews to register with the government if they seek to purchase kosher meat. 

“This constitutes an attack on Jewish and Muslim life,” the Berlin-based American Jewish Committee wrote in a response. “Soon with a star on the chest?” the Jewish advocacy group asked, referring to the Star of David badges that Jews were forced to wear during parts of the Nazi era. Striking a similar tone, Vienna’s Israeli Cultural Community association branded the law proposal an “Aryan paragraph.”

Austria’s FPÖ has had a number of Nazi scandals in recent years and has been accused of stirring anti-Semitic sentiments, but this time the right-wing populists say they have been  treated unfairly by their critics. “This law proposal dates back to 2017, when it was drafted by the Social Democrat during his last days in office,” Alexander Murlasits, an FPÖ spokesman, told The Washington Post on Thursday. “All we’re doing now is to follow the rules. This is absolutely not about religion—it’s about animal protection.”

(https://goo.gl/TWeMig)

More Evidence Lucy Was Just an Ape

ICR.org, 7/11/18, “More Evidence Lucy Was Just an Ape” [Excerpts]: Certain evolutionary scientists have talked of Lucy since the 1970s as a supposed ape-like ancestor of humans. It’s probably the world’s most famous extinct ape....Scientists recently described a tiny foot from a toddler of this extinct species. But this foot looks like an ape’s, which clearly clashes with the LiveScience article title, “Ancient Human Ancestors Had to Deal with Climbing Toddlers.”  

Zeresenay Alemseged from the University of Chicago...told LiveScience that the big toe on the fossil’s post-it-note-size foot did not stick out to the side like it does in modern chimps, but was curved inward like today’s tree-climbing apes. The study authors speculated that Lucy’s kind could grasp and climb tree branches with its feet. 

So why call it a human ancestor if it possessed non-human feet? 

Even before this new foot description, some evolutionists—depending on which expert is consulted—have concluded that the Lucy type was just an ape kind. The late British zoologist Solly Zuckerman declared, “They are just apes.”

Evolutionists don’t all agree that Lucy was a human ancestor, because not one of its ape-shaped bones was shaped exactly like the corresponding bone in a human body. So, both anatomy and evolutionary disagreement had already debunked Lucy as any kind of human ancestor. This new foot fossil kicks that concept even further to the curb.

(https://goo.gl/RxsjPB)

Patrick Out of St. Patrick’s Day Parade

OneNewsNow.com, 7/19/18, “LGBT de-Christianizing St. Patrick’s Day Parade” [Excerpts]: Organizers of the Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade have started a movement to drop “Patrick.”

Ironically, organizers in 1995 won a United States Supreme Court decision allowing them to keep homosexual organizations out of the parade.

“Then, when Boston Mayor Marty Walsh becomes mayor in 2014, you see this campaign of intimidation against parade organizers, threats of boycotts of the parade by both sponsors and politicians, threats to withhold city parade permits, [and] claims the Boston police cannot protect them from violent disruption,” [Catholic leader C.J.] Doyle pointed out.

And the campaign worked. This year, Bryan Bishop of the homosexual activist group that lost the court decision is the parade’s director of operations.

“The people who now run the parade and the people who are showcased in the parade – these homosexual groups – not only repudiate the moral code of St. Patrick, but they castigate that moral code as bigotry and prejudice and hatred and homophobia,” [Doyle] asserted. 

Catholic groups – for the most part – no longer take part, save one New Hampshire Catholic high school. 

(https://goo.gl/AnPAUg