From Winds of Jihad:
Islam in Germany
by sheikyermami on August 2, 2010
Gates of Vienna
Last week a documentary was shown on German TV about the plight of German students who are now a minority in their own school. The following review of “War in the Classroom” appeared in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung before the film was aired. The documentary itself may be found at the ARD website (in German).
Vlad Tepes has done a great job adding English subtitles and you can watch the whole thing on his website. Here’s the first of the lot, for the rest please click on the link: (Vlad Tepes)
When Muslims are a majority in non-Muslim lands. German high schools…
ARD today is showing a portrait of a parallel world: a school where Germans are a minority, where it is tough every day in the schoolyard, and teachers faced with stubborn prejudices resign.
by Regina Mönch
Everything used to be different, even in the schools. That reverberates in the notable film by Nicola Graf and Güner Y. Balci. Nobody says everything was better in Essen-Karnap then, almost three decades ago, when Brigitta Holford became a teacher at the local secondary school. Right at the start, she tells what was different: she liked teaching so much. Her German and Turkish students were a community; there were many friendships. At some point, the Germans began to draw away. At some point, they became the minority in the classroom, and since then things have been difficult in the schoolyard and in teaching.
Brigitte Holford still has these good-natured eyes. She always tries her hardest to give her students the best start in life, but it is immediately apparent that it is a losing battle. In intensive conversations over a long period of time, the two cinematic authors are able to show the difficult situation the students and faculty are in. It is the story of a manifested intolerance which defies all attempts by teachers to crack it.
Brutal Beatings and Insults are Everyday Events
The majority decides who is beaten up and what is customary. During Ramadan, Germans see their soup being spit into, and whoever objects is awaited by all the brothers and cousins at the school entrance. The Turkish and Arab girls stand on one side of the schoolyard and the boys on the other. The few Germans squeeze into a corner as if they were not a part of any of it. “We keep ourselves to ourselves,” says a girl; it is the only way to survive. They tell of brutal beatings and about insults — the more harmless ones are “dweeb” and “Germans always cheat.” “Nazis” and “sluts” are meant more seriously: they refer to ways of behaving that are natural in this country — having your own opinion and the equal relationship between boys and girls.
The inhibited way in which Muslim boys in the school speak of sexuality peaks again and again in nasty insults and grotesque prejudices, in a contempt that seems to include everything German. Teachers like Brigitta Holford try repeatedly to break through. Her 10b is an unusual class at this school. Nearly all of them intend to graduate and have a good chance of doing so. A friendship like that between Shirin and Anastasia is the exception; is considered unsuitable. One of the girls was born in Germany of Lebanese parents; the other came from the Soviet Union. Shirin must constantly justify herself to the other Lebanese students. “What are you doing, going with the Germans?” they ask, and demand an end to the alliance. Stress in the family, says the forceful Shirin, has abated. It had existed because fraternization with the society that took them in, with the Germans, is apparently considered unseemly.
“Eventually, We Have to Talk Openly about It”
In one class lesson, there is an argument about how they are going to live after finishing school. Three Arab girls talk openly about being married and how good it would be if their fathers found nice men for them. “One who doesn’t beat me.” Afterwards, they are scolded. You don’t give away your secrets. The boys think that girls here in Germany have too much freedom. Another confides that he hates the way they dress. Another speaks of honor and respect — two concepts he is not able to explain in words. Culture war in the classroom. The Lebanese teacher of Arabic does his best to make his students friendlier to the idea of living together and to the advantages of German society. But the parents complain: he should not meddle with “internal affairs.”
“We are horrified at how it is becoming more and more intense,” says Brigitta Holford. She has had to learn to defend her profession as an educator from indignant uncles, fathers, brothers. Not every teacher has the strength to do that. Nicola Graf and Güner Balci have succeeded in creating an unusual portrait of a parallel world that is growing before our eyes and can only be countered by what the teacher recommends: “Eventually we have to talk about it.”
WAR IN THE CLASSROOM airs tonight at 12:15.
Monday, August 2, 2010
It's Five MInutes To Midnight In Britain's Battle Against Radical Islam
From Winds of Jihad:
Douglas Murray says it’s five minutes to midnight in Britain’s battle against radical Islam….
by sheikyermami on August 2, 2010
“Britain’s battle against radical Islam?” Never noticed there was one. If there is a battle, then it is against truth tellers like Douglas Murray, as we can see here on the Bunglawussi blog, where they don’t apply political correctness towards this hated infidel:
“Jerusalem Post interviews sinister right-wing bigot“
Today’s Jerusalem Post carries a long, rambling interview with Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion.
Among the aperçus Murray offers is the bizarre claim that multiculturalism led the British police to refuse to investigate murders if they were classed as honour killings (“This is a community matter, they’d say”), the assertion that “you are more likely to become a major terrorist if you’ve gone to university” (as demonstrated by the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who got “in touch with the top jihadis via his Islamic studies society”), and the revelation that Inayat Bunglawala, of all people, is a “very unpleasant sinister figure”!
Whereas there is of course nothing unpleasant or sinister about a right-wing bigot like Murray, who holds that “there’s a very rational fear in being scared of Islam today and wanting to act against it” and who advocates that “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board“.
Anyhow, here’s the article. You are still free to chose and what to believe. Read it all:
A political culture gone bad
By ILAN EVYATAR/J’Post
Listening to Douglas Murray, one gets a picture of a world turned on its head, one where relativism has trumped common sense, where the state pays its enemies more than its soldiers and where turning in the inciters becomes an act of incitement.
Murray is the 31-year-old director of the Center for Social Cohesion, a London-based think tank that studies radicalization and extremism in the UK, and he is an outspoken critic of the British government’s response to the challenge of radical Islam.
Other news from the RoP:
‘Asians’ Held after Parcel Bomb Delivered to MI6…
Air Security to Exempt Muslim Women from Proving Identity…
‘Round the Clock’ Express Fatwa Service Launched…
Mother to Hang for Adultery…
Our meeting takes place shortly after the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks, four suicide bombings committed by British Muslim men that killed 52 people and wounded hundreds of others. Murray believes that while the security services have learned the lesson of that event, government and politicians have so far failed to do so.
Britain’s thinking and its political culture, Murray says, have “gone bad” and it has become afraid to state its own values. Britain has become a society that no longer knows how to draw the line.
He is particularly critical of the government’s “Prevent” strategy, set up after the 7/7 bombings to tackle Muslim radicalization by providing a counternarrative. “Prevent,” says Murray, is an example of the government attempting to “do theology.”
“When the British government comes out after 7/7 and says, ‘Islam is a religion of peace,’ you can understand the reasons it is saying this – it is trying to reach out – but obviously there is something terribly counterproductive about this,” says Murray. “The problem is that the government seems to believe it can do theology. I’m a small government guy and I like government to do as little as possible.
The way I see it is that government can’t do many things very well – it doesn’t even do taxes very well, it doesn’t do policing very well, but the thing it definitely can’t do very well is theology, in particular a theology it knows very little about, or is only starting to learn about.”
For Murray the answer lies not in outreach, but in affirming the values of the state and in laying down the law.
“Instead of getting embroiled in endless wars and debates about a religion which is not our national religion, which after all is a minority religion and has no particular history of any significance in Britain – instead of getting involved in that conflict, which may or not be won by the progressives, you say what you are as a state,” he declares.
“A lot of young Muslims have said to me in recent years, ‘You ask me to integrate, but what are we integrating into? What is Britain, what are British values?’ It’s very hard to tell people to integrate if you don’t tell them what they are integrating into. It’s very hard to tell them to be British if they don’t know and you don’t know what Britishness is. The fact is that we have been very poor in saying what we are and we have also been very poor is saying what we expect people to be. We’ve been very good in stressing what rights people get when they come to Britain and very bad at explaining what responsibilities come with them.”
Britain, says Murray, has made a terrible mistake in the direction it has taken with its Muslim minority since the Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses affair.
“The problem is,” he explains, “that the British government has pushed young Muslims into becoming young Muslims when it should have pushed them into becoming young Brits. In other words, the direction of travel it sent them in has been deeply backward.”
MURRAY DESCRIBES himself as a long-standing critic of multiculturalism.
“Pluralism or multiracial societies seem to me to be good and desirable things,” he says. “Multicultural societies, where you encourage group differences, seem to me to be a very bad thing.”
For Murray, multiculturalism is a moral vacuum, and “into a moral vacuum always bad things creep.”
The Eton and Oxford educated Murray quotes Saul Bellow in his introduction to The Closing of the American Mind: “When public morality becomes a ghost town, it’s a place into which anyone can ride and declare himself sheriff.”
“Once so-called multicultural societies decided that they didn’t have a locus, that they didn’t have a center of gravity, anyone could ride in and teach the most pernicious things,” Murray expounds. “It didn’t matter. It was just another point of view.
“It’s an extraordinary situation. We allow absolutely anything. This is the reason the British police used not to investigate certain types of killing, like honor killings. This is a community matter, they’d say. Police have admitted that now. This is why tens of thousands of women from certain communities have been genitally mutilated. We have made ourselves entirely relative and it’s time to change that.”
Another instance of multiculturalism gone mad that Murray cites is a 2007 case where a Channel 4 documentary, Undercover Mosque, uncovered in the West Midlands clerics who they recorded preaching murder of minorities. The police were sent the tapes by Channel 4 and infamously decided to try to prosecute Channel 4 for incitement in broadcasting this material.
Murray says that a few months after the case, while lecturing senior police officers, he mentioned it and was told by one officer that he “had to understand we live in a very multicultural area.”
Murray replied to the officer that he was basically stating that to pursue the multicultural dream, he would allow certain minorities to have their lives threatened by other minorities because it would cause too much trouble. “He wouldn’t comment,” says Murray, “but this was clearly the decision they had made.”
Murray charges that because of its multicultural approach, the government has allowed certain groups to be approached through self-appointed leaders such as the Muslim Council of Britain.
“In Islam in Britain we have a bizarre situation where people are spoken of, or spoken to, through clergy,” he explains. “If I’m a young man born to Anglican parents, the idea that I can only be accessed via my local vicar is mad, but you now have this weird situation where, as it were, the more religious you are, the more devoted you are to the mosque and to the political organization of certain mosques in Britain, the more likely you are to have a voice.”
Murray paraphrases Henry Kissinger’s famous comment: “What number do I dial to reach Europe?” by saying that the British government has basically decided what number to dial to reach its Muslim minority, handing over the community’s voice to the clergy.
“It’s a pathetic, ridiculous idea,” he charges. “My belief is that you should encourage people to believe that they are represented in the same way everybody else is represented, by their MP, by their local councilor and so on. An Irish immigrant friend of mine put it to me rather beautifully when he said that the moment when you become most integrated into a society is not when you get special bribes, special rights, special laws etc., but when you have to put up with the same sh*t as the rest of us.”
Murray gives what he calls the tragic example of a “very unpleasant sinister figure” from the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawala.
Bunglawala is quoted in Kenan Malik’s book From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy as saying that Rushdie affair is what radicalized him, what got him politicized. He says he didn’t really go to the mosque that much, hadn’t really read the Koran, but that he heard about the novel and he thought, “Why are we being singled out? Why are they only attacking us.”
“This is a tragedy,” says Murray, “because this was the moment when somebody in a position of power could have said: ‘You know what? You’re not being singled out; you are being subjected to exactly the same treatment that free societies exact on everyone.’ Nobody said that. It was repeatedly given out that there was a justifiable grievance and that’s what’s still understood today. We should have at that point said at that point in 1989 said that a society where even your deepest feelings can be trodden on is the only society worth living in. We should have said a long time ago and it’s still not too late to say it now.”
Murray calls Britain a “soft touch” on immigration and welfare, citing the case of Anjem Choudary, a co-founder of the now proscribed Al- Muhajiroun movement, whom he describes as “one of the most notorious loud-mouthed idiots in Britain.”
“Choudary has a few children and a wife – he’s a qualified solicitor but as far as we know has never sought employment. He receives £25,000 a year in benefits, untaxed, and among other things he and his welfare jihadi friends go and abuse British soldiers coming home from Afghanistan when there are homecoming parades.”
“Now this has caused a lot of bitter and understandable resentment in Britain. The thing that people haven’t quite realized is the most perverse about this is that a soldier in Afghanistan, starting out, fighting for Britain, receives something like £15,000 a year on which he is taxed to fight the Taliban, whom Choudary and his supporters support. So the British state will currently give you £15,000 if you’re willing to fight her majesty’s enemies and £10,000 more if you are willing to support her majesty’s enemies.
It’s probably not the first time in history where one side has paid its enemies and its own men, but it’s probably the first war in history where somebody has paid its enemies better than its own men.”
MURRAY SAYS that the Mike’s Place bombing in April 2003, when two British Muslim suicide bombers attacked a bar in Tel Aviv, killing three people, was a transformative moment for him.
“If you have a problem you export, it does come home,” he says. “When those two young men, one of them from Kings College in London, came out to Tel Aviv, that should have been a moment when not just the British police and the British security services, but the British government and the British people woke up, to what they have made.”
Asked why is it that many of those Muslims who have committed terrorist attacks in the West have been very much a product of the West, affluent and privileged rather than poor, marginalized and alienated, Murray points to Britain’s universities as hotbeds of radicalism.
“The Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a rich Nigerian boy, lived in his father’s flat in the most expensive part of London and got radicalized while at University College London,” says Murray as an example. “I’ve said a lot in recent years on the university issue; I’ve kept on trying to get the universities to wake up to this. My center published a report called ‘Islam on Campus’ in 2008 which got huge attention because of very worrying findings, like a third of Muslim students saying that killing in the name of their religion could be justified, things like that.
“I have kept trying, the center has kept on trying to explain to the universities that this is their problem. Omar Sheik [a former student at the London School of Economics best known for his role in the kidnapping and execution of Daniel Pearl], Assaf Hani [one of the Mike’s Place bombers] and another LSE graduate, Abdulmutallab. The list is now pretty long.”
“The only explanation I have for why it hasn’t been dealt with is that it goes so much against the narrative that privileged white Western liberals have got, that they can’t think their way out of it even when the evidence is to the contrary. If you believe Islamist terrorism is caused by poverty, lack of opportunity, lack of education, Israel, then you need things to fit that. Now you can put up with one thing bucking that trend, but when it happens repeatedly some people just dig themselves in and ignore it even more. In Britain, at any rate, you are more likely to become a terrorist if you go to university.”
Again Murray blames a failure to stand up for liberal values. “You are more likely to become a major terrorist if you’ve gone to university because, among other things, these places have two factors: one you come across the very softest, most apologist form of education you could find; you come across soft liberal Western opinion that cannot decide where to draw lines, cannot decide how to defend itself, cannot explain the superiority of some liberal values and won’t argue its case. Then you come across the thing that has taken advantage of this – Muslim groups who week in, week out bring in radical speakers from the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbullah.
“Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomber, is sitting in his penthouse in a country that he doesn’t know very much and he will probably notice the following. He would notice that you aren’t allowed to recruit for the British army at University College London, but he would also notice that pretty well known jihadis can speak on campus. In other words this young man can get in touch with the top jihadis via his Islamic studies society.”
Referring to an earlier he comment on how when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they will always back the strong horse, and how if people see that the state is weak, unbothered even by its assassins, then they will not back the state, they will not back the country they are in and they will not integrate further, Murray says: “You would get a very warped idea about which was strong horse and which was the weak horse if you were Abdulmutallab. After Christmas Day I assumed it would stop, I have to say I’m still waiting for it to happen. I don’t know what it takes, in other words. I thought after Mike’s place they’ll wake up, they must wake up now. I thought that after 9/11, I thought that after 7/7.
After every incident you say, surely they are gong to wake up now. The only good thing is that some people do and everyone that breaks the silence encourages other people to do the same.”
MURRAY DOES feel, though, that with the recent election of a new Conservative-led government the situation has improved somewhat, but on the other hand he says he is “very concerned about the Liberal Democrats, the junior partner in the coalition, because of their tendency to harbor rabid anti-Semites, people like Jenny Tonge.”
“I’m not a supporter of any of the parties,” says Murray, “but the Conservatives do have some people who do get this. [Secretary of State for Work and Pensions] Ian Duncan Smith has stated his desire to stop the welfare culture. He hasn’t said this, but it is the welfare culture which has fueled a lot of this in Britain – the situation where you do jihad on the dole.
“Others have signaled they know the right way to go. The new home secretary [Theresa May] banning [radical Muslim preacher] Zaki Naik was a good example. She said entry to Britain is not a right, it’s a privilege, so he’s not coming in. There are some signs, but to my mind to sort this out now requires a huge degree of political leadership and I don’t think there is any of that or much of that around. You have to break through a set of barriers in order to deal with this.”
While Murray feels the clock is now showing “five minutes to midnight” and the danger exists of a European city falling to Islam – and in Britain the possibility of “no go areas” in Birmingham, the country’s first Muslim majority city – it is not yet too late to turn the situation around, he says.
One of the things Murray calls for is a clampdown on immigration.
“There has to be a clampdown,” he says, “There has to be severe restriction on it. It seems very obvious to me that a society that does not believe it has anything it needs to protect, that it has no identity to keep, will melt down and end. There is a level of immigration above which you cannot integrate people, and I believe that is what we’ve seen in Britain.”
There is, he adds, also a level at which people can be integrated. “It is generally accepted now that the grandparents of young Muslims today are better integrated then their grandchildren are,” he says. “There is something seriously wrong when you are practicing reverse integration like that.”
Dealing with immigration is just the start for Murray. He also calls on the government to take strong line on hate speech and incitement, to expel foreign clerics if necessary and not to allow Britain “to remain a retirement for would-be jihadis who then claim European Convention of Human Rights grounds for not going to other countries.”
He says that Britain must step out of the CHR. “You have to have a British bill of rights,” he says, “which means some of the insanities that now hinder some of Britain’s own fight are not allowed to persist. You have to end the era of funding Muslim groups, you take away the idea that you can get special access to Downing Street or the UK government just for being a so-called, self-appointed Muslim leader.
You say no, like the prime minister of Denmark did during the cartoon crisis when the delegates of Muslims came to him to complain. He said, ‘No, they will have to learn. I am not seeing them; they will have to learn.
We have a free press and the government does not control that; the sooner they learn that, the better.’” Turning the situation around will be the work of at least a generation, probably more, says Murray. But at the end of the day, he adds, what Britain has to do is to return to a period in which it says: “This is what we stand for, this is what we permit and this is what we do not permit. We are not an entirely relative society. We believe some aspects of our society are better than aspects of other societies. We have allies, and we have friends that we stick beside, and that’s nonnegotiable. We don’t put up with blackmail.”
He also believes that one of the things that needs to be tackled to turn the clock back is the UK’s attitude to Israel, which he likens to appeasement. “If it [the British government] continues to feed the lies that have been told, Britain will suffer angst. It is astonishing that the no major politician since [Tony] Blair has understood Israel’s right to defend herself.
“They consistently speak about such a right in theory, but whenever in practice, whether it’s Gaza or the flotilla, they don’t, and they condemn Israel on it. I hate reverting to 1930s quotes, because I don’t think history is an endless lesson of repeating the 1930s, but you know [Winston] Churchill’s famous description of an appeaser as someone who feeds the crocodile and hopes it will eat him last. Some major leader has to explain in relation to Israel and Britain that this crocodile would eat us next, not last. Therefore it would be a very very stupid thing, for your own security, as well as your own sense of what’s morally right, to keep sacrificing Israel in this way.”
ARE YOU optimistic that the battle will be won? I ask Murray in conclusion.His answer is not entirely reassuring; the clock, he says, will continue to tick down. “The problem is that it’s five to midnight. The reason it’s so close is that this is seen currently as being unturnaroundable, and I think it can be turned around because I have faith in the fact that things will happen that will mean that the politicians, eventually, at one minute to midnight, will realize how badly they screwed up and this will have to be rectified.
“I’ll tell you why I’m optimistic, which is this. I honestly believe that our values are better; the values of democratic pluralistic societies are better. I honestly think that in a debate between a rigid totalitarian interpretation of my ideology and liberal democracy, liberal democracy has everything going for it and Islamism has nothing going for it. And if we explain ourselves better, we win. If we explain ourselves as badly as we are at the moment, then we lose.
Douglas Murray says it’s five minutes to midnight in Britain’s battle against radical Islam….
by sheikyermami on August 2, 2010
“Britain’s battle against radical Islam?” Never noticed there was one. If there is a battle, then it is against truth tellers like Douglas Murray, as we can see here on the Bunglawussi blog, where they don’t apply political correctness towards this hated infidel:
“Jerusalem Post interviews sinister right-wing bigot“
Today’s Jerusalem Post carries a long, rambling interview with Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion.
Among the aperçus Murray offers is the bizarre claim that multiculturalism led the British police to refuse to investigate murders if they were classed as honour killings (“This is a community matter, they’d say”), the assertion that “you are more likely to become a major terrorist if you’ve gone to university” (as demonstrated by the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who got “in touch with the top jihadis via his Islamic studies society”), and the revelation that Inayat Bunglawala, of all people, is a “very unpleasant sinister figure”!
Whereas there is of course nothing unpleasant or sinister about a right-wing bigot like Murray, who holds that “there’s a very rational fear in being scared of Islam today and wanting to act against it” and who advocates that “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board“.
Anyhow, here’s the article. You are still free to chose and what to believe. Read it all:
A political culture gone bad
By ILAN EVYATAR/J’Post
Listening to Douglas Murray, one gets a picture of a world turned on its head, one where relativism has trumped common sense, where the state pays its enemies more than its soldiers and where turning in the inciters becomes an act of incitement.
Murray is the 31-year-old director of the Center for Social Cohesion, a London-based think tank that studies radicalization and extremism in the UK, and he is an outspoken critic of the British government’s response to the challenge of radical Islam.
Other news from the RoP:
‘Asians’ Held after Parcel Bomb Delivered to MI6…
Air Security to Exempt Muslim Women from Proving Identity…
‘Round the Clock’ Express Fatwa Service Launched…
Mother to Hang for Adultery…
Our meeting takes place shortly after the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks, four suicide bombings committed by British Muslim men that killed 52 people and wounded hundreds of others. Murray believes that while the security services have learned the lesson of that event, government and politicians have so far failed to do so.
Britain’s thinking and its political culture, Murray says, have “gone bad” and it has become afraid to state its own values. Britain has become a society that no longer knows how to draw the line.
He is particularly critical of the government’s “Prevent” strategy, set up after the 7/7 bombings to tackle Muslim radicalization by providing a counternarrative. “Prevent,” says Murray, is an example of the government attempting to “do theology.”
“When the British government comes out after 7/7 and says, ‘Islam is a religion of peace,’ you can understand the reasons it is saying this – it is trying to reach out – but obviously there is something terribly counterproductive about this,” says Murray. “The problem is that the government seems to believe it can do theology. I’m a small government guy and I like government to do as little as possible.
The way I see it is that government can’t do many things very well – it doesn’t even do taxes very well, it doesn’t do policing very well, but the thing it definitely can’t do very well is theology, in particular a theology it knows very little about, or is only starting to learn about.”
For Murray the answer lies not in outreach, but in affirming the values of the state and in laying down the law.
“Instead of getting embroiled in endless wars and debates about a religion which is not our national religion, which after all is a minority religion and has no particular history of any significance in Britain – instead of getting involved in that conflict, which may or not be won by the progressives, you say what you are as a state,” he declares.
“A lot of young Muslims have said to me in recent years, ‘You ask me to integrate, but what are we integrating into? What is Britain, what are British values?’ It’s very hard to tell people to integrate if you don’t tell them what they are integrating into. It’s very hard to tell them to be British if they don’t know and you don’t know what Britishness is. The fact is that we have been very poor in saying what we are and we have also been very poor is saying what we expect people to be. We’ve been very good in stressing what rights people get when they come to Britain and very bad at explaining what responsibilities come with them.”
Britain, says Murray, has made a terrible mistake in the direction it has taken with its Muslim minority since the Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses affair.
“The problem is,” he explains, “that the British government has pushed young Muslims into becoming young Muslims when it should have pushed them into becoming young Brits. In other words, the direction of travel it sent them in has been deeply backward.”
MURRAY DESCRIBES himself as a long-standing critic of multiculturalism.
“Pluralism or multiracial societies seem to me to be good and desirable things,” he says. “Multicultural societies, where you encourage group differences, seem to me to be a very bad thing.”
For Murray, multiculturalism is a moral vacuum, and “into a moral vacuum always bad things creep.”
The Eton and Oxford educated Murray quotes Saul Bellow in his introduction to The Closing of the American Mind: “When public morality becomes a ghost town, it’s a place into which anyone can ride and declare himself sheriff.”
“Once so-called multicultural societies decided that they didn’t have a locus, that they didn’t have a center of gravity, anyone could ride in and teach the most pernicious things,” Murray expounds. “It didn’t matter. It was just another point of view.
“It’s an extraordinary situation. We allow absolutely anything. This is the reason the British police used not to investigate certain types of killing, like honor killings. This is a community matter, they’d say. Police have admitted that now. This is why tens of thousands of women from certain communities have been genitally mutilated. We have made ourselves entirely relative and it’s time to change that.”
Another instance of multiculturalism gone mad that Murray cites is a 2007 case where a Channel 4 documentary, Undercover Mosque, uncovered in the West Midlands clerics who they recorded preaching murder of minorities. The police were sent the tapes by Channel 4 and infamously decided to try to prosecute Channel 4 for incitement in broadcasting this material.
Murray says that a few months after the case, while lecturing senior police officers, he mentioned it and was told by one officer that he “had to understand we live in a very multicultural area.”
Murray replied to the officer that he was basically stating that to pursue the multicultural dream, he would allow certain minorities to have their lives threatened by other minorities because it would cause too much trouble. “He wouldn’t comment,” says Murray, “but this was clearly the decision they had made.”
Murray charges that because of its multicultural approach, the government has allowed certain groups to be approached through self-appointed leaders such as the Muslim Council of Britain.
“In Islam in Britain we have a bizarre situation where people are spoken of, or spoken to, through clergy,” he explains. “If I’m a young man born to Anglican parents, the idea that I can only be accessed via my local vicar is mad, but you now have this weird situation where, as it were, the more religious you are, the more devoted you are to the mosque and to the political organization of certain mosques in Britain, the more likely you are to have a voice.”
Murray paraphrases Henry Kissinger’s famous comment: “What number do I dial to reach Europe?” by saying that the British government has basically decided what number to dial to reach its Muslim minority, handing over the community’s voice to the clergy.
“It’s a pathetic, ridiculous idea,” he charges. “My belief is that you should encourage people to believe that they are represented in the same way everybody else is represented, by their MP, by their local councilor and so on. An Irish immigrant friend of mine put it to me rather beautifully when he said that the moment when you become most integrated into a society is not when you get special bribes, special rights, special laws etc., but when you have to put up with the same sh*t as the rest of us.”
Murray gives what he calls the tragic example of a “very unpleasant sinister figure” from the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawala.
Bunglawala is quoted in Kenan Malik’s book From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy as saying that Rushdie affair is what radicalized him, what got him politicized. He says he didn’t really go to the mosque that much, hadn’t really read the Koran, but that he heard about the novel and he thought, “Why are we being singled out? Why are they only attacking us.”
“This is a tragedy,” says Murray, “because this was the moment when somebody in a position of power could have said: ‘You know what? You’re not being singled out; you are being subjected to exactly the same treatment that free societies exact on everyone.’ Nobody said that. It was repeatedly given out that there was a justifiable grievance and that’s what’s still understood today. We should have at that point said at that point in 1989 said that a society where even your deepest feelings can be trodden on is the only society worth living in. We should have said a long time ago and it’s still not too late to say it now.”
Murray calls Britain a “soft touch” on immigration and welfare, citing the case of Anjem Choudary, a co-founder of the now proscribed Al- Muhajiroun movement, whom he describes as “one of the most notorious loud-mouthed idiots in Britain.”
“Choudary has a few children and a wife – he’s a qualified solicitor but as far as we know has never sought employment. He receives £25,000 a year in benefits, untaxed, and among other things he and his welfare jihadi friends go and abuse British soldiers coming home from Afghanistan when there are homecoming parades.”
“Now this has caused a lot of bitter and understandable resentment in Britain. The thing that people haven’t quite realized is the most perverse about this is that a soldier in Afghanistan, starting out, fighting for Britain, receives something like £15,000 a year on which he is taxed to fight the Taliban, whom Choudary and his supporters support. So the British state will currently give you £15,000 if you’re willing to fight her majesty’s enemies and £10,000 more if you are willing to support her majesty’s enemies.
It’s probably not the first time in history where one side has paid its enemies and its own men, but it’s probably the first war in history where somebody has paid its enemies better than its own men.”
MURRAY SAYS that the Mike’s Place bombing in April 2003, when two British Muslim suicide bombers attacked a bar in Tel Aviv, killing three people, was a transformative moment for him.
“If you have a problem you export, it does come home,” he says. “When those two young men, one of them from Kings College in London, came out to Tel Aviv, that should have been a moment when not just the British police and the British security services, but the British government and the British people woke up, to what they have made.”
Asked why is it that many of those Muslims who have committed terrorist attacks in the West have been very much a product of the West, affluent and privileged rather than poor, marginalized and alienated, Murray points to Britain’s universities as hotbeds of radicalism.
“The Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a rich Nigerian boy, lived in his father’s flat in the most expensive part of London and got radicalized while at University College London,” says Murray as an example. “I’ve said a lot in recent years on the university issue; I’ve kept on trying to get the universities to wake up to this. My center published a report called ‘Islam on Campus’ in 2008 which got huge attention because of very worrying findings, like a third of Muslim students saying that killing in the name of their religion could be justified, things like that.
“I have kept trying, the center has kept on trying to explain to the universities that this is their problem. Omar Sheik [a former student at the London School of Economics best known for his role in the kidnapping and execution of Daniel Pearl], Assaf Hani [one of the Mike’s Place bombers] and another LSE graduate, Abdulmutallab. The list is now pretty long.”
“The only explanation I have for why it hasn’t been dealt with is that it goes so much against the narrative that privileged white Western liberals have got, that they can’t think their way out of it even when the evidence is to the contrary. If you believe Islamist terrorism is caused by poverty, lack of opportunity, lack of education, Israel, then you need things to fit that. Now you can put up with one thing bucking that trend, but when it happens repeatedly some people just dig themselves in and ignore it even more. In Britain, at any rate, you are more likely to become a terrorist if you go to university.”
Again Murray blames a failure to stand up for liberal values. “You are more likely to become a major terrorist if you’ve gone to university because, among other things, these places have two factors: one you come across the very softest, most apologist form of education you could find; you come across soft liberal Western opinion that cannot decide where to draw lines, cannot decide how to defend itself, cannot explain the superiority of some liberal values and won’t argue its case. Then you come across the thing that has taken advantage of this – Muslim groups who week in, week out bring in radical speakers from the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbullah.
“Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomber, is sitting in his penthouse in a country that he doesn’t know very much and he will probably notice the following. He would notice that you aren’t allowed to recruit for the British army at University College London, but he would also notice that pretty well known jihadis can speak on campus. In other words this young man can get in touch with the top jihadis via his Islamic studies society.”
Referring to an earlier he comment on how when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they will always back the strong horse, and how if people see that the state is weak, unbothered even by its assassins, then they will not back the state, they will not back the country they are in and they will not integrate further, Murray says: “You would get a very warped idea about which was strong horse and which was the weak horse if you were Abdulmutallab. After Christmas Day I assumed it would stop, I have to say I’m still waiting for it to happen. I don’t know what it takes, in other words. I thought after Mike’s place they’ll wake up, they must wake up now. I thought that after 9/11, I thought that after 7/7.
After every incident you say, surely they are gong to wake up now. The only good thing is that some people do and everyone that breaks the silence encourages other people to do the same.”
MURRAY DOES feel, though, that with the recent election of a new Conservative-led government the situation has improved somewhat, but on the other hand he says he is “very concerned about the Liberal Democrats, the junior partner in the coalition, because of their tendency to harbor rabid anti-Semites, people like Jenny Tonge.”
“I’m not a supporter of any of the parties,” says Murray, “but the Conservatives do have some people who do get this. [Secretary of State for Work and Pensions] Ian Duncan Smith has stated his desire to stop the welfare culture. He hasn’t said this, but it is the welfare culture which has fueled a lot of this in Britain – the situation where you do jihad on the dole.
“Others have signaled they know the right way to go. The new home secretary [Theresa May] banning [radical Muslim preacher] Zaki Naik was a good example. She said entry to Britain is not a right, it’s a privilege, so he’s not coming in. There are some signs, but to my mind to sort this out now requires a huge degree of political leadership and I don’t think there is any of that or much of that around. You have to break through a set of barriers in order to deal with this.”
While Murray feels the clock is now showing “five minutes to midnight” and the danger exists of a European city falling to Islam – and in Britain the possibility of “no go areas” in Birmingham, the country’s first Muslim majority city – it is not yet too late to turn the situation around, he says.
One of the things Murray calls for is a clampdown on immigration.
“There has to be a clampdown,” he says, “There has to be severe restriction on it. It seems very obvious to me that a society that does not believe it has anything it needs to protect, that it has no identity to keep, will melt down and end. There is a level of immigration above which you cannot integrate people, and I believe that is what we’ve seen in Britain.”
There is, he adds, also a level at which people can be integrated. “It is generally accepted now that the grandparents of young Muslims today are better integrated then their grandchildren are,” he says. “There is something seriously wrong when you are practicing reverse integration like that.”
Dealing with immigration is just the start for Murray. He also calls on the government to take strong line on hate speech and incitement, to expel foreign clerics if necessary and not to allow Britain “to remain a retirement for would-be jihadis who then claim European Convention of Human Rights grounds for not going to other countries.”
He says that Britain must step out of the CHR. “You have to have a British bill of rights,” he says, “which means some of the insanities that now hinder some of Britain’s own fight are not allowed to persist. You have to end the era of funding Muslim groups, you take away the idea that you can get special access to Downing Street or the UK government just for being a so-called, self-appointed Muslim leader.
You say no, like the prime minister of Denmark did during the cartoon crisis when the delegates of Muslims came to him to complain. He said, ‘No, they will have to learn. I am not seeing them; they will have to learn.
We have a free press and the government does not control that; the sooner they learn that, the better.’” Turning the situation around will be the work of at least a generation, probably more, says Murray. But at the end of the day, he adds, what Britain has to do is to return to a period in which it says: “This is what we stand for, this is what we permit and this is what we do not permit. We are not an entirely relative society. We believe some aspects of our society are better than aspects of other societies. We have allies, and we have friends that we stick beside, and that’s nonnegotiable. We don’t put up with blackmail.”
He also believes that one of the things that needs to be tackled to turn the clock back is the UK’s attitude to Israel, which he likens to appeasement. “If it [the British government] continues to feed the lies that have been told, Britain will suffer angst. It is astonishing that the no major politician since [Tony] Blair has understood Israel’s right to defend herself.
“They consistently speak about such a right in theory, but whenever in practice, whether it’s Gaza or the flotilla, they don’t, and they condemn Israel on it. I hate reverting to 1930s quotes, because I don’t think history is an endless lesson of repeating the 1930s, but you know [Winston] Churchill’s famous description of an appeaser as someone who feeds the crocodile and hopes it will eat him last. Some major leader has to explain in relation to Israel and Britain that this crocodile would eat us next, not last. Therefore it would be a very very stupid thing, for your own security, as well as your own sense of what’s morally right, to keep sacrificing Israel in this way.”
ARE YOU optimistic that the battle will be won? I ask Murray in conclusion.His answer is not entirely reassuring; the clock, he says, will continue to tick down. “The problem is that it’s five to midnight. The reason it’s so close is that this is seen currently as being unturnaroundable, and I think it can be turned around because I have faith in the fact that things will happen that will mean that the politicians, eventually, at one minute to midnight, will realize how badly they screwed up and this will have to be rectified.
“I’ll tell you why I’m optimistic, which is this. I honestly believe that our values are better; the values of democratic pluralistic societies are better. I honestly think that in a debate between a rigid totalitarian interpretation of my ideology and liberal democracy, liberal democracy has everything going for it and Islamism has nothing going for it. And if we explain ourselves better, we win. If we explain ourselves as badly as we are at the moment, then we lose.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
At Hell's Gate
From The American Thinker:
August 01, 2010
At Hell's Gate
Peter A. Olsson MD
Polite, ‘modern', Western congregations and their preferred theologians don't like to discuss Hell. Might some ‘new' burgeoning forms of Evil in our newspapers dent our American collective denial? Bitter Binghamton murderer, Pittsburg Cop killer, California child killing dad. An evil icon might be Bruce Pardo who dressed as Santa shot a little girl in the face before killing his ex-wife and many of her family and friends as he set her house on fire. Hell like miracles, angels and heaven is really not far away. It should be easier to detect, but often isn't because of our protective cocoon of denial and PC!.
The recent epidemic of mass murder on school campuses goes on like some bizarre interscholastic competition for a satanic championship record. Even elementary school children have joined the American clamor for the murderer's notoriety and celebrityism. Palestinian children are taught death games with little bomb vests. They frequently practice murder bombing with the disgusting approval of their deluded and sadistic parents. Our president would never consider condemning such despicable parenting.
Suicide murder bombers have added women to their ranks as they continue their exponential performances of evil. Murder bombers are deluded or brainwashed into thinking that God/Allah/Yahweh approves of their heinous psychodramas from Hell. It is impossible to conceive of God wearing anything but an infinite frown in a flood of cosmic tears after a suicide bomb's detonation. Hell not Paradise will surely greet any murder-bomber wherever on earth she locates her evil act..
Another increasingly popular form of murder is the homicide-suicide. These cowardly men kill their wife and kids, or even strangers at a shopping mall and then before the police arrive, they kill themselves. Some of these murderers are women who kill their own children amidst the delusion that God requires this of them. These modern murderers seem to think the school campus, shopping mall crowd, or their own family, are fair targets for the discharge of their impotent rage, failure, and resentment. They also seem to think they are ‘off-the-hook' in terms of responsibility as soon as they murder themselves via a well-placed bullet or the bomb they detonate.
Imams, priests, rabbis, ministers...are they really so easily ‘off the hook'? Please move beyond nauseating political correctness and condemn these killers.
In years gone by, there were too many "wolf-crying" threats of "Hellfire and brimstone" made by Western clergy. Today, clergy persons seem hesitant to explore the humbling or frightening mysteries stretching beyond death. Few Christian, Jewish or Muslim theologians have offered vigorous, thoughtful, and appropriate theological condemnations of the geometrically expanding variety of these increasingly popular, media covered, sensationalized, and therefore glamorized murder crimes.
Where have all the clergy gone? Especially credible Muslim theologians and preachers! Authentic Muslims need to be very clear that murder - bombers go straight to Hell and not paradise! Is Hell that hard to locate? For starters, try the lives of the surviving families of the victims of the cowardly murder-bombers.
"To appreciate heaven well
'tis good for a man to have some fifteen minutes of hell."
Will Carleton (1845 - 1912), American poet
Posted at 01:01 AM
August 01, 2010
At Hell's Gate
Peter A. Olsson MD
Polite, ‘modern', Western congregations and their preferred theologians don't like to discuss Hell. Might some ‘new' burgeoning forms of Evil in our newspapers dent our American collective denial? Bitter Binghamton murderer, Pittsburg Cop killer, California child killing dad. An evil icon might be Bruce Pardo who dressed as Santa shot a little girl in the face before killing his ex-wife and many of her family and friends as he set her house on fire. Hell like miracles, angels and heaven is really not far away. It should be easier to detect, but often isn't because of our protective cocoon of denial and PC!.
The recent epidemic of mass murder on school campuses goes on like some bizarre interscholastic competition for a satanic championship record. Even elementary school children have joined the American clamor for the murderer's notoriety and celebrityism. Palestinian children are taught death games with little bomb vests. They frequently practice murder bombing with the disgusting approval of their deluded and sadistic parents. Our president would never consider condemning such despicable parenting.
Suicide murder bombers have added women to their ranks as they continue their exponential performances of evil. Murder bombers are deluded or brainwashed into thinking that God/Allah/Yahweh approves of their heinous psychodramas from Hell. It is impossible to conceive of God wearing anything but an infinite frown in a flood of cosmic tears after a suicide bomb's detonation. Hell not Paradise will surely greet any murder-bomber wherever on earth she locates her evil act..
Another increasingly popular form of murder is the homicide-suicide. These cowardly men kill their wife and kids, or even strangers at a shopping mall and then before the police arrive, they kill themselves. Some of these murderers are women who kill their own children amidst the delusion that God requires this of them. These modern murderers seem to think the school campus, shopping mall crowd, or their own family, are fair targets for the discharge of their impotent rage, failure, and resentment. They also seem to think they are ‘off-the-hook' in terms of responsibility as soon as they murder themselves via a well-placed bullet or the bomb they detonate.
Imams, priests, rabbis, ministers...are they really so easily ‘off the hook'? Please move beyond nauseating political correctness and condemn these killers.
In years gone by, there were too many "wolf-crying" threats of "Hellfire and brimstone" made by Western clergy. Today, clergy persons seem hesitant to explore the humbling or frightening mysteries stretching beyond death. Few Christian, Jewish or Muslim theologians have offered vigorous, thoughtful, and appropriate theological condemnations of the geometrically expanding variety of these increasingly popular, media covered, sensationalized, and therefore glamorized murder crimes.
Where have all the clergy gone? Especially credible Muslim theologians and preachers! Authentic Muslims need to be very clear that murder - bombers go straight to Hell and not paradise! Is Hell that hard to locate? For starters, try the lives of the surviving families of the victims of the cowardly murder-bombers.
"To appreciate heaven well
'tis good for a man to have some fifteen minutes of hell."
Will Carleton (1845 - 1912), American poet
Posted at 01:01 AM
Mulsim Aparthied Policies Forbid Blacks From Entering Swimming Pools
From Bare Naked Islam:
LEBANON: MUSLIM ‘apartheid’ policies forbid blacks from entering swimming pools
“According some pool owners, Lebanese clients would be disgusted to swim in a pool next to a black person.”
OBSERVERS.france.24We decided to film this with a candid camera after receiving various complaints about the treatment of coloured people in private swimming pools. A candid camera video shot by a Lebanese anti-racism association shows that coloured people aren’t permitted in several of the city’s private pools.
On July 12, two activists from the Lebanese environmental, cultural, and social activist organisation IndyAct showed up at the gate of a private pool accompanied by a female volunteer from Madagascar and a camera hidden in a bag. The employee there asked the two men who the person accompanying them was; when they responded that she was their maid, he refused to let her in.
More than 200,000 foreign workers, most of whom come from Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Ethiopia, are employed as servants in Lebanese homes. According to Human Rights Watch, they are frequent victims of abuse and racial discrimination.
“People of colour are also barred from accessing many nightclubs” These racist, discriminatory practices don’t only concern swimming pools. People of colour are also barred from accessing many nightclubs. We have had reports of several incidents between club bouncers and black tourists from Europe or the United States.
NOW LEBANON Imagine you’re a domestic worker who, after six days of working full-time, decided to head to the beach for a well-deserved day in the sun. You purchase a ticket to enter, find the perfect spot, but then, right as you’re about to jump in the pool, the resort manager approaches and tells you to stay out of the water because “people are not used to the sight of workers swimming.”
Such discrimination is the rule rather than exception at beach resorts in Lebanon. African and Asian domestic workers are usually allowed into beaches only when accompanied by their employer, and even then they are denied access to facilities.
According to the watchdog organization Human Rights Watch, 17 private beaches (out of a nation-wide total of 27) do not allow African and Asian domestic workers into swimming pools.
A number of resorts claimed to offer “designated areas” where workers can wait while their employers relax at the beach. One manager at a private beach said workers were not allowed as guests because, according to the resort’s rules, “maids come in for free.” A free or discounted entry may encourage families with children who want to go to the beach and bring their maids for help, but don’t want to pay for an additional ticket.
In at least one resort Asian and African workers are allowed to swim in the sea but not in the pool, because “not all people like maids to swim with them in the water.” At another, they are not even allowed to wear bathing suits, according to HRW.
Given how dire conditions are for many foreign domestic workers in Lebanon – employers often restrict their movement, give them no time off and pay them next to nothing – going to beach is often the least of their concerns.
Lebanese labor law does not cover the basic rights of these workers, let alone their right to enjoy leisure activities. To make matters worse, there is no anti-discrimination law in Lebanon. The Lebanese constitution refers to discrimination under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but there is no separate law to counter discriminatory practices.
“We are aiming to expose this discrimination by publicizing it and getting people to talk about it,” said Nadim Houry, HRW’s Beirut director. “We need to start facing racism. It is not unique to Lebanon, but we haven’t started tackling the problem yet. Many unacceptable things are tolerated and embraced here.”
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August 1, 2010
LEBANON: MUSLIM ‘apartheid’ policies forbid blacks from entering swimming pools
“According some pool owners, Lebanese clients would be disgusted to swim in a pool next to a black person.”
OBSERVERS.france.24We decided to film this with a candid camera after receiving various complaints about the treatment of coloured people in private swimming pools. A candid camera video shot by a Lebanese anti-racism association shows that coloured people aren’t permitted in several of the city’s private pools.
On July 12, two activists from the Lebanese environmental, cultural, and social activist organisation IndyAct showed up at the gate of a private pool accompanied by a female volunteer from Madagascar and a camera hidden in a bag. The employee there asked the two men who the person accompanying them was; when they responded that she was their maid, he refused to let her in.
More than 200,000 foreign workers, most of whom come from Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Ethiopia, are employed as servants in Lebanese homes. According to Human Rights Watch, they are frequent victims of abuse and racial discrimination.
“People of colour are also barred from accessing many nightclubs” These racist, discriminatory practices don’t only concern swimming pools. People of colour are also barred from accessing many nightclubs. We have had reports of several incidents between club bouncers and black tourists from Europe or the United States.
NOW LEBANON Imagine you’re a domestic worker who, after six days of working full-time, decided to head to the beach for a well-deserved day in the sun. You purchase a ticket to enter, find the perfect spot, but then, right as you’re about to jump in the pool, the resort manager approaches and tells you to stay out of the water because “people are not used to the sight of workers swimming.”
Such discrimination is the rule rather than exception at beach resorts in Lebanon. African and Asian domestic workers are usually allowed into beaches only when accompanied by their employer, and even then they are denied access to facilities.
According to the watchdog organization Human Rights Watch, 17 private beaches (out of a nation-wide total of 27) do not allow African and Asian domestic workers into swimming pools.
A number of resorts claimed to offer “designated areas” where workers can wait while their employers relax at the beach. One manager at a private beach said workers were not allowed as guests because, according to the resort’s rules, “maids come in for free.” A free or discounted entry may encourage families with children who want to go to the beach and bring their maids for help, but don’t want to pay for an additional ticket.
In at least one resort Asian and African workers are allowed to swim in the sea but not in the pool, because “not all people like maids to swim with them in the water.” At another, they are not even allowed to wear bathing suits, according to HRW.
Given how dire conditions are for many foreign domestic workers in Lebanon – employers often restrict their movement, give them no time off and pay them next to nothing – going to beach is often the least of their concerns.
Lebanese labor law does not cover the basic rights of these workers, let alone their right to enjoy leisure activities. To make matters worse, there is no anti-discrimination law in Lebanon. The Lebanese constitution refers to discrimination under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but there is no separate law to counter discriminatory practices.
“We are aiming to expose this discrimination by publicizing it and getting people to talk about it,” said Nadim Houry, HRW’s Beirut director. “We need to start facing racism. It is not unique to Lebanon, but we haven’t started tackling the problem yet. Many unacceptable things are tolerated and embraced here.”
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arab-muslim-slave-masters
sudanese-genocide-how-come-the-media-never-mention-that-muslims-are-the-slaughterers
why-do-black-people-become-muslims
August 1, 2010
University Teacher In West Bengal Barred From Class After Refusing To Wear A Burqa
From Jihad Watch:
University lecturer barred from class after refusing to wear a burqa
We always hear in the West that women who choose to don the veil are doing so of their own free will, and are perfectly free not to wear it. Yet the leader of the students' union at Aliah University is willing to put this kind of pressure on Sirin Middya, and he is by no means alone in this. "Woman not allowed to teach after burqa refusal," from Sify News, July 30 (thanks to all who sent this in):
A lady teacher in West Bengal's first Muslim university, the Aliah University, was not allowed to teach after she refused to wear the burqa (veil) inside the varsity premises.
Sirin Middya, a guest lecturer of the university, along with eight other lady teachers got a 'diktat' from the leaders of the students' union to wear burqa and attend the college.
'I was asked by the leaders of the student's union to wear burqa and attend the college and if I don't abide by the diktat, they won't allow me to attend the college. Then after a few days as we were entering the university campus, they started shouting slogans 'those who are against purdah system should go to hell',' Middya told IANS.
Middya was appointed in March this year and got the union's 'diktat' in the second week of April. From April-end, she has been unable to go to the Aliah University's Calcutta Madrasah Campus.
A notice issued by the university clearly stated that 'university has no dress code, any pressure from any corner will not be allowed regarding the use of burqa inside the university campus. If anybody creates pressure on female teachers to use the burqa, necessary steps will be taken by the university authorities', she said.
'The University Grants Commission and the university itself do not prescribe any such dress code. Who are they to dictate us what we should wear and what we should not. The most unfortunate part is that the students and leaders of students union are forcing us to wear burqa. A few of the teachers gave into their demand but I didn't,' Middya said.
According to her, she has no issues with wearing a burqa - but if she dons one, it would be of her own free will.
'Most of the teachers do not like the diktat of the students to wear burqa. But they have no option but to accept it. This is Talibanisation of educational premises and there is no one to our rescue,' she said....
Posted by Robert on July 31, 2010 5:12 AM
University lecturer barred from class after refusing to wear a burqa
We always hear in the West that women who choose to don the veil are doing so of their own free will, and are perfectly free not to wear it. Yet the leader of the students' union at Aliah University is willing to put this kind of pressure on Sirin Middya, and he is by no means alone in this. "Woman not allowed to teach after burqa refusal," from Sify News, July 30 (thanks to all who sent this in):
A lady teacher in West Bengal's first Muslim university, the Aliah University, was not allowed to teach after she refused to wear the burqa (veil) inside the varsity premises.
Sirin Middya, a guest lecturer of the university, along with eight other lady teachers got a 'diktat' from the leaders of the students' union to wear burqa and attend the college.
'I was asked by the leaders of the student's union to wear burqa and attend the college and if I don't abide by the diktat, they won't allow me to attend the college. Then after a few days as we were entering the university campus, they started shouting slogans 'those who are against purdah system should go to hell',' Middya told IANS.
Middya was appointed in March this year and got the union's 'diktat' in the second week of April. From April-end, she has been unable to go to the Aliah University's Calcutta Madrasah Campus.
A notice issued by the university clearly stated that 'university has no dress code, any pressure from any corner will not be allowed regarding the use of burqa inside the university campus. If anybody creates pressure on female teachers to use the burqa, necessary steps will be taken by the university authorities', she said.
'The University Grants Commission and the university itself do not prescribe any such dress code. Who are they to dictate us what we should wear and what we should not. The most unfortunate part is that the students and leaders of students union are forcing us to wear burqa. A few of the teachers gave into their demand but I didn't,' Middya said.
According to her, she has no issues with wearing a burqa - but if she dons one, it would be of her own free will.
'Most of the teachers do not like the diktat of the students to wear burqa. But they have no option but to accept it. This is Talibanisation of educational premises and there is no one to our rescue,' she said....
Posted by Robert on July 31, 2010 5:12 AM
Domestic Abuse (Endorsed By The Koran) Is Rampant In "Modern" Turkey
From Jihad Watch:
Domestic abuse rampant in modern, moderate Turkey
Qur'an 4:34, the verse in which Allah green-lights beating one's wife, has far-reaching consequences in letter and spirit. It makes the Muslim family a microcosm of the Qur'anic deity's ordering of the universe and society, where submission is paramount, and the one who feels entitled to be in charge -- whether Muhammad's deity or the man of the house -- can do as he pleases, and is free to resort to brutality to ensure submission... while demanding to be called compassionate and merciful, of course. To do otherwise might hurt his feelings, and the rage that ensues would be your fault, naturally.
Thus, even in an ostensibly secular Muslim society, the idea that it is okay to beat your wife persists. And there is only one way it can be passed off as "culture": recognizing that the culture is informed and suffused with the priorities, issues and hangups of Muhammad's own culture (and of Muhammad himself), which upholding him as a prophet make sacrosanct.
"Domestic abuse still a taboo in Turkey," by Ivan Watson and Yesim Comert for CNN, July 30:
...Video footage filmed in September of 2009 shows Sidika outside of the hospital in the provincial capital of Van. Her face was horribly bruised; her head encased in bandages. Part of Sidika's right ear had been sliced off. The woman could barely walk and leaned on her brother for support, as she hobbled a few short steps into the hospital.
After the incident, Turkish authorities separated Sidika Platin and her children from her husband and placed them in a state-run women's shelter. But barely two months later, a local criminal court asked that Sidika and her children be handed back to Faruk Platin. He had not served any jail time for beating his wife.
"At that time, because he showed regret and because his [criminal] record was clean, his sentence was postponed," said Meral Demirbas, the governor of Saray district where Kapikoy is located.
"Also, the wife withdrew her complaint."
Sidika Platin is an ethnic Kurd who speaks no Turkish. According to eyewitnesses, when she appeared in court, she could not understand the judge or prosecutor, and relied on her husband to translate legal proceedings.
On a snowy day last December, local women's rights activists like Hamide Yeni could do little more then watch helplessly, as Faruk Platin led his mutilated wife away from the courtyard, back to the village where they lived.
"This kind of thing happens in every village," says Yeni, one of the founders of a grassroots local family protection association in the Saray district of southeastern Turkey. "There are thousands of women like Sidika out here."
In fact, according to a 2009 Turkish government report, 42 percent of women surveyed said they had been the victims of either physical or sexual abuse by their husband or partner. The report concluded that one in four married Turkish women had been injured by partner violence. Meanwhile, one in 10 Turkish women were injured by such violence while pregnant.
Some Turkish activists fear the real statistics for violence against women may actually be much higher.
"In all domestic surveys there are 'shadow figures.' That is because women are not willing to tell about the violence, it's a very sensitive issue," says Pinar Ilkkaracan, a co-founder of the Istanbul-based group Women for Women's Human Rights.
"We think it's much higher then 42 percent."
Domestic violence against women is not confined to economically-depressed, rural regions of eastern Turkey. According to the Turkish government survey, the statistics for physical and sexual assault were roughly the same in the countryside as in the most developed, fast-growing cities in the western part of the country.
Over the past 15 years, Turkey has adopted several progressive pieces of legislation to protect women, including a 1998 Protection Order against Domestic Violence. Reform of Turkey's Civil Code in 2001 gave women legal equal status to men in the family.
Meanwhile, changes to the country's Penal Code in 2004 criminalized marital rape. But critics argue that the Turkish state has lapsed far behind in implementing these laws....Posted by Marisol on July 31, 2010 8:45 AM
Domestic abuse rampant in modern, moderate Turkey
Qur'an 4:34, the verse in which Allah green-lights beating one's wife, has far-reaching consequences in letter and spirit. It makes the Muslim family a microcosm of the Qur'anic deity's ordering of the universe and society, where submission is paramount, and the one who feels entitled to be in charge -- whether Muhammad's deity or the man of the house -- can do as he pleases, and is free to resort to brutality to ensure submission... while demanding to be called compassionate and merciful, of course. To do otherwise might hurt his feelings, and the rage that ensues would be your fault, naturally.
Thus, even in an ostensibly secular Muslim society, the idea that it is okay to beat your wife persists. And there is only one way it can be passed off as "culture": recognizing that the culture is informed and suffused with the priorities, issues and hangups of Muhammad's own culture (and of Muhammad himself), which upholding him as a prophet make sacrosanct.
"Domestic abuse still a taboo in Turkey," by Ivan Watson and Yesim Comert for CNN, July 30:
...Video footage filmed in September of 2009 shows Sidika outside of the hospital in the provincial capital of Van. Her face was horribly bruised; her head encased in bandages. Part of Sidika's right ear had been sliced off. The woman could barely walk and leaned on her brother for support, as she hobbled a few short steps into the hospital.
After the incident, Turkish authorities separated Sidika Platin and her children from her husband and placed them in a state-run women's shelter. But barely two months later, a local criminal court asked that Sidika and her children be handed back to Faruk Platin. He had not served any jail time for beating his wife.
"At that time, because he showed regret and because his [criminal] record was clean, his sentence was postponed," said Meral Demirbas, the governor of Saray district where Kapikoy is located.
"Also, the wife withdrew her complaint."
Sidika Platin is an ethnic Kurd who speaks no Turkish. According to eyewitnesses, when she appeared in court, she could not understand the judge or prosecutor, and relied on her husband to translate legal proceedings.
On a snowy day last December, local women's rights activists like Hamide Yeni could do little more then watch helplessly, as Faruk Platin led his mutilated wife away from the courtyard, back to the village where they lived.
"This kind of thing happens in every village," says Yeni, one of the founders of a grassroots local family protection association in the Saray district of southeastern Turkey. "There are thousands of women like Sidika out here."
In fact, according to a 2009 Turkish government report, 42 percent of women surveyed said they had been the victims of either physical or sexual abuse by their husband or partner. The report concluded that one in four married Turkish women had been injured by partner violence. Meanwhile, one in 10 Turkish women were injured by such violence while pregnant.
Some Turkish activists fear the real statistics for violence against women may actually be much higher.
"In all domestic surveys there are 'shadow figures.' That is because women are not willing to tell about the violence, it's a very sensitive issue," says Pinar Ilkkaracan, a co-founder of the Istanbul-based group Women for Women's Human Rights.
"We think it's much higher then 42 percent."
Domestic violence against women is not confined to economically-depressed, rural regions of eastern Turkey. According to the Turkish government survey, the statistics for physical and sexual assault were roughly the same in the countryside as in the most developed, fast-growing cities in the western part of the country.
Over the past 15 years, Turkey has adopted several progressive pieces of legislation to protect women, including a 1998 Protection Order against Domestic Violence. Reform of Turkey's Civil Code in 2001 gave women legal equal status to men in the family.
Meanwhile, changes to the country's Penal Code in 2004 criminalized marital rape. But critics argue that the Turkish state has lapsed far behind in implementing these laws....Posted by Marisol on July 31, 2010 8:45 AM
Obama Regime Is Notably Silent On Morocco's Treatment Of Christians
From Jihad Watch:
Obama administration "notably silent" on Morocco's treatment of Christians
Surprising? Not at all, but newsworthy nonetheless. It is but one more example in the broader pattern of disturbing conduct by the Obama administration in its drive to gain the approval of the Muslim world at seemingly any cost.
It will not make us safer. It will not make us, or anyone else, freer.
An update on this story. "Stop preaching or get out: The king is unamused by Christians who proselytise," from The Economist, July 29 (thanks to Twostellas):
Evangelical Christians in the poor world are rarely accused of undermining public order. All the more surprising, then, that in recent months around a hundred have been deported from Morocco for just that. The Christians, mostly from the United States and Europe, have been accused of trying to convert Muslims to Christianity, a crime punishable by imprisonment under Moroccan law, which protects the freedom to practise one's faith but forbids any attempt to convert others.
In accordance with Sharia.
Rules against proselytising are quite common in Muslim countries but Morocco has long enjoyed a reputation as a bastion of religious tolerance in the region. Almost all the country's 32m citizens are Sunni Muslims but churches and synagogues exist, alongside mosques, to cater for the 1% of the people who are Christian or Jewish.
Such open-mindedness presumably appealed to the Christian missionaries who ran the "Village of Hope" home for children 80km (50 miles) south of Fez, a former capital known for religion and scholarship. The 16 aid-workers had cared for abandoned children for over a decade when, in March, the Moroccan authorities sent inspectors to the orphanage, then gave the workers a few days' notice to leave the country. Witnesses reported distraught farewells between the Moroccan children and the foreigners who had acted as foster parents.
Morocco's communications minister, Khaled Naciri, said the missionaries "took advantage of the poverty of some families and targeted their young children". The aid-workers deny pumping the children with Christianity. But sympathisers say that even if they did, a few hours of preaching was a small price to pay for education and pastoral care. There have been further expulsions since then, most recently of an evangelical Spanish teacher.
"Moral rape," and "religious terrorism," the Moroccan officials called the alleged evangelization activities in the prior story linked above.
Local residents are quick to point out that it is not only Christians who have been targets; last year a similar campaign was waged against Morocco's even smaller population of Shia Muslims. But the motivation for the crackdowns is probably political more than religious. Morocco's constitution is based on the hereditary position of the king as "commander of the faithful". Any drift of Muhammad VI's subjects away from the dominant stream of moderate Sunni Islam might, his advisers fear, diminish his authority.
A false dichotomy of politics and religion, where there is clearly no such distinction here, with Islam active in its capacity as a political system claiming divine sanction.
The American branch of an evangelical organisation, Open Doors, which speaks up for persecuted Christians across the world, is backing a campaign by a Republican congressman, Frank Wolf, to press the Moroccans to be kinder to the evangelicals. Seeing that Morocco is one of America's closest Arab allies, the American administration has been notably silent.Posted by Marisol on July 31, 2010 1:33 PM
Obama administration "notably silent" on Morocco's treatment of Christians
Surprising? Not at all, but newsworthy nonetheless. It is but one more example in the broader pattern of disturbing conduct by the Obama administration in its drive to gain the approval of the Muslim world at seemingly any cost.
It will not make us safer. It will not make us, or anyone else, freer.
An update on this story. "Stop preaching or get out: The king is unamused by Christians who proselytise," from The Economist, July 29 (thanks to Twostellas):
Evangelical Christians in the poor world are rarely accused of undermining public order. All the more surprising, then, that in recent months around a hundred have been deported from Morocco for just that. The Christians, mostly from the United States and Europe, have been accused of trying to convert Muslims to Christianity, a crime punishable by imprisonment under Moroccan law, which protects the freedom to practise one's faith but forbids any attempt to convert others.
In accordance with Sharia.
Rules against proselytising are quite common in Muslim countries but Morocco has long enjoyed a reputation as a bastion of religious tolerance in the region. Almost all the country's 32m citizens are Sunni Muslims but churches and synagogues exist, alongside mosques, to cater for the 1% of the people who are Christian or Jewish.
Such open-mindedness presumably appealed to the Christian missionaries who ran the "Village of Hope" home for children 80km (50 miles) south of Fez, a former capital known for religion and scholarship. The 16 aid-workers had cared for abandoned children for over a decade when, in March, the Moroccan authorities sent inspectors to the orphanage, then gave the workers a few days' notice to leave the country. Witnesses reported distraught farewells between the Moroccan children and the foreigners who had acted as foster parents.
Morocco's communications minister, Khaled Naciri, said the missionaries "took advantage of the poverty of some families and targeted their young children". The aid-workers deny pumping the children with Christianity. But sympathisers say that even if they did, a few hours of preaching was a small price to pay for education and pastoral care. There have been further expulsions since then, most recently of an evangelical Spanish teacher.
"Moral rape," and "religious terrorism," the Moroccan officials called the alleged evangelization activities in the prior story linked above.
Local residents are quick to point out that it is not only Christians who have been targets; last year a similar campaign was waged against Morocco's even smaller population of Shia Muslims. But the motivation for the crackdowns is probably political more than religious. Morocco's constitution is based on the hereditary position of the king as "commander of the faithful". Any drift of Muhammad VI's subjects away from the dominant stream of moderate Sunni Islam might, his advisers fear, diminish his authority.
A false dichotomy of politics and religion, where there is clearly no such distinction here, with Islam active in its capacity as a political system claiming divine sanction.
The American branch of an evangelical organisation, Open Doors, which speaks up for persecuted Christians across the world, is backing a campaign by a Republican congressman, Frank Wolf, to press the Moroccans to be kinder to the evangelicals. Seeing that Morocco is one of America's closest Arab allies, the American administration has been notably silent.Posted by Marisol on July 31, 2010 1:33 PM
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