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The trans-teen social contagion, and its conflict with parents rights, is now so well-established even the prestige progressive press has been forced to notice. The New York Times caused a stir last week by asking families, educators and teens: Should parents be informed when a teen identifies as transgender and doesnt want mom and dad to know?

Yes. Obviously. Whats striking about the article is just how many once-progressive parents struggle with this question but are also starting to wonder if things have gone too far.Liberals who cheered for gay rights and tell their kids Be your true self suddenly have a teen who insists being his or her true self means irreversible surgeries and infertility.And they want this at an age when its not even legal to get a tattoo.

Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children. These words were written in 1793, by a Frenchman appalled at the madness the French Revolution unleashed. He was right: Revolutions have a momentum of their own. And Americas sexual revolution follows the same pattern. What began with war on the rules governing sex has become war on every natural bond and limit even those of our biology.

And this revolution is devouring American children.

Parents who cheered on earlier stages of the revolution now stand helplessly by as state-empowered ideologues do an end run around their loving authority and butcher their troubled teens under their noses. Meanwhile, a chilling recent case in Virginia shows the path this carves for even darker forms of freedom waiting in the wings for those children liberated from their parents oversight.

Is it time to put the brakes on? Too late, sorry! Having liberated sex from babies and liberated marriage from procreation, the revolution isnt stopping now. Far from it: Activists want to liberate identity from biology and kids from their parents. And they have friends in the White House: President Bidens Assistant Health Secretary Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine, who is transgender, is hell-bent on protecting trans kids, which is to say undermining parents authority to stop their own children from making irreversible surgical decisions based on gender identity.

Levine is only the tip of the iceberg. A growing body of state law favors kids freedom over parents authority. In Washington, for example, laws governing doctor/patient confidentiality and school-based health centers combine to mean a Washington-based 13-year-old girl can get testosterone injections at school, without any need for her parents to consent or even know its happening. In Oregon, too, minors can access transgender interventions at taxpayers expense and without their parents consent.

The revolutionaries will tell you this simply reflects progress in our understanding of childrens rights. But take note: Nave youngsters struggling for independence are a target for predators. And the most vulnerable youths are those who lack attentive, authoritative loving parental oversight.

This has no doubt always been true. But the gender-activist push to undermine parental authority is pouring fuel on the fire. Take the chilling recent story of Sage, a 14-year-old from Virginia who was trafficked for horrific abuse not once but twice after the teens school hid her gender identity from her parents. Sages liberation from loving parental authority, driven by an activist lawyer who bullied her to lie to judges, turned out to be into the sadistic hands of rapists and sex traffickers.

And make no mistake: There will be many more Sages.

Recent laws enacted by Californias LGBTQ+ fanatic state Sen. Scott Wiener have turned the Golden State into a legislative sinkhole, where parental authority evaporates the moment you say gender even if you live out of state.

Once in California, a young person need only get themselves declared abandoned in a family court and have the state assume custody, and hey, presto: no more No from Mom and Dad. And as investigative writer Abigail Shrier shows, this will create a predators paradise.

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Its not the case that every activist working to emancipate teens from parental authority in the name of gender is a closet sex trafficker or child molester. But theyre still carrying water for them.

Disillusioned ex-liberals: Its time to pick a side. If we accept that a 13-year-old can consent to a double mastectomy or hormones that will sterilize her for life, what else can she consent to? You may still have some fondness for the movement flying under the banner of LGBTQ+ rights. But look at where its going. Its waging war on parents loving authority over their kids, replacing the natural bonds of family with a wasteland of for-profit body mutilation and creating a perverts playground.

Whether its No to their kids or No to government meddling, its time to defend the right of Mom and Dad to say No. No more liberation. The revolution stops here.

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd and author of the forthcoming Feminism Against Progress.

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Even liberals balk at where gender wars are headed

Sabrina Maddeaux: Billions in COVID supports may have been abused, and the Liberals don't seem to care  National Post

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Sabrina Maddeaux: Billions in COVID supports may have been abused, and the Liberals don't seem to care - National Post

Then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he said was the size that could be used to hold anthrax as he addresses the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 at the U.N. in New York. Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he said was the size that could be used to hold anthrax as he addresses the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 at the U.N. in New York.

This is part of a special series where NPR looks back at our coverage of major news stories in the past. Listen to the full audio story to hear excerpts from Colin Powell's U.N. speech and more of NPR's archival audio.

There wasn't just one moment that led to the Iraq War. But one speech, delivered 20 years ago at the United Nations, would come to define and undermine the conflict.

On Feb. 5, 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell sat in front of members of the U.N. Security Council. He'd been a staunch critic of U.S. intervention against Iraq's authoritarian leader, Saddam Hussein.

But with the world watching, Powell made a case for war.

"My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources solid sources," he said. "These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

Powell used information that intelligence officials assured him was credible. There were reconnaissance photos, elaborate maps and charts, and even taped phone conversations between senior members of Iraq's military.

"Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons," Powell said. "Saddam Hussein has used such weapons. And Saddam Hussein has no compunction about using them again against his neighbors, and against his own people."

Powell repeatedly used one phrase during his hour-long speech: "weapons of mass destruction." He said those words a total of 17 times. It was the phrase the Bush administration kept publicly using to help justify invading Iraq.

A month and a half after the U.N. speech, President Bush ordered air strikes over Baghdad. It marked the beginning of a military operation "to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger," Bush said in a televised address to the nation.

U.S. forces toppled Hussein's regime in a matter of weeks, and the search intensified for evidence of Iraq's so-called "weapons of mass destruction." But the weapons were nowhere to be found.

Americans started asking questions.

"It's kind of embarrassing they haven't found anything," said Allen Hunley, a Tennessee dentist who spoke to NPR in July 2003 while attending the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. "It's almost like they were salesmen and they had a thing to sell."

National security analyst Joseph Cirincione also criticized Powell's speech in comments to NPR. Particularly, Powell's assurances that there was solid evidence behind his claims of sophisticated and illicit Iraqi weapons programs.

"Now we know that that just wasn't true," said Cirincione, then the director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

California Rep. Jane Harman served as the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and voted in support of the 2002 measure OK'ing the use of military force against Iraq. Reports of a "very long and scary list of active weapons of mass destruction" influenced that decision, Harman told NPR.

"I believed what I was told," Harman said on All Things Considered in January 2004. "And I'm as surprised as you that it turns out that there are no stockpiles of weapons."

Journalists and members of Congress started digging into the rationale for war laid out in Powell's U.N. speech. They discovered faulty and exaggerated reports from an intelligence community under political pressure from top White House officials.

There were also claims Bush took advantage of Powell's reputation by dispatching him to the U.N.

"As Bush said to him at the time, 'Maybe they'll believe you. Maybe the audience will believe you,' " journalist and Powell biographer Karen DeYoung told NPR in 2006. "Because it was always clear in the Bush administration that Powell was more popular than anyone else."

To this day, the Iraq War is widely viewed as a foreign policy and humanitarian disaster. The conflict dragged on for almost nine years and claimed nearly 4,500 American lives. Over 185,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, according to Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Some 2 million Iraqis had been displaced from their homes by the time U.S. forces pulled out in 2011.

Three years later, President Obama ordered troops back to Iraq to help combat the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS assuring Americans he would not commit to "another ground war." U.S. forces officially withdrew in December 2021 after almost seven years of fighting.

Powell later called his U.N. speech a "great intelligence failure" and a "blot" on his record, telling NBC News' Meet the Press in 2004 he trusted the information he'd gotten.

"But it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases deliberately misleading," Powell said. "And for that, I am disappointed. And I regret it."

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20 years ago, the U.S. warned of Iraq's alleged 'weapons of mass ...

This discussion surveys the history of Iraq since the 7th century ce. For the earlier history, see Mesopotamia.

In 600 Iraq was a province of the Persian Sasanian empire, to which it had belonged for three centuries. It was probably the most populous and wealthiest area in the Middle East, and the intensive irrigation agriculture of the lower Tigris and Euphrates rivers and of tributary streams such as the Diyl and Krn formed the main resource base of the Sasanian monarchy. The name Iraq was not used at this time; in the mid-6th century the Sasanian empire had been divided by Khosrow I into four quarters, of which the western one, called Khvarvaran, included most of modern Iraq.

The name Iraq is widely used in the medieval Arabic sources for the area in the centre and south of the modern republic as a geographic rather than a political term, implying no precise boundaries. The area of modern Iraq north of Tikrt was known in Muslim times as Al-Jazrah, which means The Island and refers to the island between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (i.e., Mesopotamia). To the south and west lay the Arabian Desert, inhabited largely by Arab tribes who occasionally acknowledged the overlordship of the Sasanian kings. Until 602 the desert frontier had been guarded by the Lakhmid kings of Al-ra, who were themselves Arabs but ruled a settled buffer state. In that year Khosrow II (Parvz) rashly abolished the Lakhmid kingdom and laid the frontier open to nomad incursions. Farther north the western quarter was bounded by the Byzantine Empire. The frontier more or less followed the modern Syria-Iraq border and continued northward into modern Turkey, leaving Nisibis (modern Nusaybin) as the Sasanian frontier fortress while the Byzantines held Dr and nearby Amida (modern Diyarbakr).

The inhabitants were of mixed background. There was an aristocratic and administrative Persian upper class, but most of the population were Aramaic-speaking peasants. A considerable number of Arabs lived in the region, most of them as pastoralists along the western margins of the settled lands but some as townspeople, especially in Al-ra. In addition, there were Kurds, who lived along the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, and a large number of Greeks, mostly prisoners captured during the numerous Sasanian campaigns into Byzantine Syria.

Ethnic diversity was matched by religious pluralism. The Sasanian state religion, Zoroastrianism, was largely confined to the Persian ruling class. The majority of the people, especially in the northern part of the country, were probably Christians. They were sharply divided by doctrinal differences into miaphysites, linked to the Jacobite church of Syria, and Nestorians, linked to the Church of the East. The Nestorians were the most widespread and were tolerated by the Sasanian kings because of their opposition to the Christians of the Roman Empire, who regarded the Nestorians as heretics. The miaphysites were regarded with more suspicion and were occasionally persecuted, but both groups were able to maintain an ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the Nestorians had an important intellectual centre at Nisibis. By that time the area around the ancient city of Babylon had a large population of Jews, both descendants of the exiles of Old Testament times and local converts. In addition, in the southern half of the country, there were numerous adherents of the old Babylonian paganism, as well as Mandaeans and gnostics.

In the early 7th century the stability and prosperity of this multicultural society were threatened by invasion. In 602 Khosrow II launched the last great Persian invasion of the Byzantine Empire. At first he was spectacularly successful; Syria and Egypt fell, and Constantinople (modern Istanbul) itself was threatened. Later the tide began to turn, and in 627628 the Byzantines, under the leadership of the emperor Heraclius, invaded Iraq and sacked the imperial capital at Ctesiphon. The invaders did not remain, but Khosrow was discredited, deposed, and executed. There followed a period of infighting among generals and members of the royal family that left the country without clear leadership. The chaos had also damaged irrigation systems, and it was probably at this time that large areas in the south of the country reverted to marshlands, most of which remained until modern times. It was with this devastated land that the earliest Muslim raiders came into contact. (See also Islamic world: Conversion and crystallization [634870].)

The first conflict between local Bedouin tribes and Sasanian forces seems to have been in 634, when the Arabs were defeated at the Battle of the Bridge. There a force of some 5,000 Muslims under Ab Ubayd al-Thaqaf was routed by the Persians. In 637 a much larger Muslim force under Sad ibn Ab Waqq defeated the main Persian army at the Battle of Al-Qdisiyyah and moved on to sack Ctesiphon. By the end of the following year (638), the Muslims had conquered almost all of Iraq, and the last Sasanian king, Yazdegerd III, had fled to Iran, where he was killed in 651.

The Muslim conquest was followed by mass immigration of Arabs from eastern Arabia and Oman. These new arrivals did not disperse and settle throughout the country; instead they established two new garrison cities, at Kfah, near ancient Babylon, and at Basra in the south. The intention was that the Muslims should be a separate community of fighting men and their families living off taxes paid by the local inhabitants. In the north of the country, Mosul began to emerge as the most important city and the base of a Muslim governor and garrison. Apart from the Persian elite and the Zoroastrian priests, whose property was confiscated, most of the local people were allowed to keep their possessions and their religion.

Iraq now became a province of the Muslim Caliphate, which stretched from North Africa and later Spain in the west to Sind (now southern Pakistan) in the east. At first the capital of the Caliphate was at Medina, but, after the murder of the third caliph, Uthmn ibn Affn, in 656, his successor, the Prophet Muhammads cousin and son-in-law Al, made Iraq his base. In 661, however, Al was murdered in Kfah, and the Caliphate passed to the rival Umayyad family in Syria. Iraq became a subordinate province, even though it was the wealthiest area of the Muslim world and the one with the largest Muslim population. This situation gave rise to continual discontent with Umayyad rule that took various forms.

In 680 Als son al-usayn arrived in Iraq from Medina, hoping that the people of Kfah would support him. They failed to act, and his small group of followers was massacred at the Battle of Karbala, but his memory lingered on as a source of inspiration for all who opposed the Umayyads. In later centuries the city of Karbala and Als tomb at nearby Najaf became important centres of Shii pilgrimage that are still greatly revered today. The Iraqis had their opportunity after the death in 683 of the caliph Yazd I, when the Umayyads faced threats from many quarters. In Kfah the initiative was taken by al-Mukhtr ibn Ab Ubayd, who was supported by many mawl (singular, mawl; non-Arab converts to Islam), who felt they were treated as second-class citizens. Al-Mukhtr was killed in 687, but the Umayyads realized that strict rule was required. The caliph Abd al-Malik (685705) appointed the fearsome al-ajjj ibn Ysuf al-Thaqaf as his governor in Iraq and all of the east. Al-ajjj became legendary as a stern but just ruler. His firm measures aroused the opposition of the local Arab elite, and in 701 there was a massive rebellion led by Muammad ibn al-Ashath. The insurrection was defeated only with the aid of Syrian soldiers. Iraq was now very much a conquered province, and al-ajjj established a new city at Wit (Medial), halfway between Kfah and Basra, to be a base for a permanent Syrian garrison. In a more positive way, he encouraged Iraqis to join the expeditions led by Qutaybah ibn Muslim that between 705 and 715 conquered Central Asia for Islam. Even after al-ajjjs death in 714, the Umayyad-Syrian grip on Iraq remained firm, and resentment was widespread.

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Iraq - History | Britannica

UNITED NATIONS (AP) The U.N. special envoy for Iraq urged the countrys new government Thursday to keep fighting corruption and move quickly on much-needed economic, fiscal and financial reforms.

Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert told the U.N. Security Council many other areas also need immediate government attention, among them ensuring human rights, resolving issues with the Kurdistan Regional Government, improving public services, addressing environmental challenges, and continuing to return Iraqis from camps and prisons in northeast Syria.

The hope is that the confirmation of Iraqs new government will provide an opportunity to structurally address the many pressing issues facing the country and its people, she said. The urgency is for Iraqs political class to seize the brief window of opportunity it is awarded, and to finally lift the country out of recurring cycles of instability and fragility.

A more than year-long political stalemate punctuated by outbreaks of street violence ended in late October with the confirmation by Iraq's Council of Representatives of a new government and Cabinet led by Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani.

Hennis-Plasschaert said that during its first three months, al-Sudanis government has shown a commitment to tackle endemic corruption, poor public services and high unemployment.

Turning to the fight against corruption, she pointed to a number of important steps taken by the government, including trying to recover stolen funds and investigating allegations of graft.

That said, I can only encourage the Iraqi government to persevere, as those who stand to lose will undoubtedly seek to hinder these efforts, she said. But if Iraq is to build a system that serves the need of society instead of serving a closed community of collusion, then ensuring accountability across the spectrum is absolutely essential.

The U.N. special representative said systemic change is vital to address corruption and improve services that directly affect peoples lives.

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As for economic, fiscal and financial reforms, Hennis-Plasschaert expressed concern at the increase in the exchange rate on the parallel market adding to the pressure on everyday Iraqi women and men.

On the short term, it is obviously essential that the federal budget is passed expeditiously, she said. A further delay will only result in worsening the situation due to the well-known spending constraints.

Despite high unemployment, Hennis-Plasschaert cautioned against any further bloating of Iraqs already extremely inflated public sector.

She cautioned the government against relying totally on the countrys oil, which is vulnerable to price shocks, and urged it to focus on diversifying the economy, including by developing an employment-generating private sector.

Hennis-Plasschaert said the government also needs to swiftly implement the Sinjar Agreement brokered by the U.N. in October 2020 between Baghdad and the Kurdish-run regional government to jointly manage the Sinjar region. It is home to Iraqs Yazidi religious minority, and the agreement aims to restore the states hold over the patchwork of militia groups and competing authorities in the area after the defeat of Islamic State extremists.

When IS fighters swept into northern Iraq in 2014 the militants massacred thousands of Yazidi men and enslaved an estimated 7,000 women, including Nadia Murad, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her campaign to end sexual violence as a weapon of war. She returned to her home village in Sinjar this week with actress and activist Angelina Jolie to meet survivors of IS brutality and see progress in redeveloping the region.

U.S. deputy ambassador Richard Mill called on the government to improve its respect for human rights and commit to implementing the Sinjar Agreement in close consultation with the Yazidi community.

He said the United States supports the prime ministers efforts to root out corruption and improve public services, particularly providing electricity, and encourages development of the private sector and job growth, with a focus on increasing womens participation in the workforce.

Mills added that the Biden administration is eager to work with the government on addressing the negative impacts of climate, including through the use of renewable energy and reducing gas flaring.

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UN envoy: Iraq's new leaders must keep fighting corruption