There's good news here. There's progress. Whoever bought the lingerie for this alleged act of witchcraft, they may have been spared the awkwardness of buying from a male attendant due to prior Saudi rules to uphold Sharia's segregation of the sexes.
You can't make this stuff up. "Saudi Arabia's 'Anti-Witchcraft Unit' breaks another spell," by David E. Miller for The Media Line, July 20 (thanks to Weasel Zippers):
When the severed head of a wolf wrapped in women's lingerie turned up near the city of Tabouk in northern Saudi Arabia this week, authorities knew they had another case of witchcraft on their hands, a capital offence in the ultra-conservative desert kingdom.
Agents of the country’s Anti-Witchcraft Unit were quickly dispatched and set about trying to break the spell that used the beast’s head.
Saudi Arabia takes witchcraft so seriously that it has banned the Harry Potter series by British writer J.K. Rowling, rife with tales of sorcery and magic. It set up the Anti-Witchcraft Unit in May 2009 and placed it under the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPV), Saudi Arabia's religious police.
"In accordance with our Islamic tradition we believe that magic really exists," Abdullah Jaber, a political cartoonist at the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah, told The Media Line. "The fact that an official body, subordinate to the Saudi Ministry of Interior, has a unit to combat sorcery proves that the government recognizes this, like Muslims worldwide."
The unit is charged with apprehending sorcerers and reversing the detrimental effects of their spells. On the CPV website, a hotline encourages citizens across the kingdom to report cases of sorcery to local officials for immediate treatment.
If there's something strange, in your neighborhood...
In the case of the wolf's head, the Anti-Witchcraft Unit in Tabouk was able to break the spell. The Saudi daily Okaz reported on Monday that the unknown family that had fallen victim to the spell had been "liberated from the jaws of the wolf.”
Who you gonna call:
The Anti-Witchcraft Unit was created in order to educate the public about the danger of sorcerers and "combat manifestations of polytheism and reliance on other Gods," the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.
The belief in sorcery is so widespread in Saudi Arabia, that it is even used as a defense in criminal court cases. Last October, a judge accused of receiving bribes in a real-estate project told a court in Madinah that he had been bewitched and is undergoing treatment by Quranic incantations, known as ruqiyah, a common remedy for the evil eye.
Jaber noted, however, that most sorcerers both inside and outside the kingdom were charlatans that take advantage of illiterate citizens who believed they were afflicted by the evil eye. He said that such beliefs were more prevalent among older, rural and often illiterate individuals than with younger, educated Saudis.
"A while ago my arm was hurt and I couldn't draw," the cartoonist said. "Many older people told me that I must have been afflicted by the evil eye and should be treated by a Sheikh."
"It's a matter of ignorance," Jaber added. "If people were more educated they wouldn't believe in this."....
Witchcraft can be effective against people who believe in it, as a form of psychological warfare. If the Muslims could be made to believe that infidel witches were putting the hex on them, it would really freak them out.
Witchcraft like fake religious beliefs
(Islam) controls primitive minds.
And he'd have got away with it if it wasn't for those pesky kids. Are Scooby Snacks halal? Anyone know?
In the case of the wolf's head, the Anti-Witchcraft Unit in Tabouk was able to break the spell.
That's laughable...It's also job security...As long as the unit can break a spell they have a job...
The evil spell that needs to be broken is the one Allah inflicted on Mahoundians...Islam...
'I put a spell on you
cause you’re mine
You better stop the things you do
I ain’t lyin
No I ain’t lyin
You know I can’t stand it
You’re runnin’ around
You know better daddy
I can’t stand it cause you put me down
I put a spell on you
Because you’re mine
You’re mine'
Allah didn't write it, but he sings it a lot...
Not only effective, but fun and entertaining. In fact, as a fast and dirty way of setting back Iran a couple of decades, try kidnapping Ahmadhimmijerker and the mullahs, dress them as college kids, pour beer over them, and drop them in the middle of New Derby Street in Salem, Massachusetts on Halloween night. Let the cops deal with them.
Just out of curiosity, exactly what the hell is a spell involving a wolf's head wrapped in lacy knickers supposed to do?
Well, I don't know about this being outright witchcraft but clearly SOMEONE needs to investigate it. Withcraft or not, the severed head of a wolf wrapped in lingerie is CREEPY.
I might also add that if it IS witchcraft and someone went through the trouble to cut off a wolf's head, I highly DOUBT that a spell of such an intense nature could be broken by a man that believes that fireflies are mosquitos with flashlights. To counter witchcraft (unless you call upon the LORD), you have to also engage in witchcraft.
They should ALL be put to death!
@sean
muslim children are raised with thoughts and fears about evil spirits and jinn, these being used mostly for discipline.
the thoughts and fears remain; muslims live in fear of the unknown. SHARIA has no answer to the thoughts and fears, except to allow for talismans and other charms for protection.
these only provide a small comfort and are expensive.
"There's good news here. There's progress. Whoever bought the lingerie for this alleged act of witchcraft, they may have been spared the awkwardness of buying from a male attendant due to prior Saudi rules to uphold Sharia's segregation of the sexes."
Oh my God Robert you've caused me uproarious, side-splitting laughter (and in a very public place.)
Hilarious.
Though I don't know anything about Islamic black magic, or the occult significance of the big bad wolf sniffing granny's panties (maybe the TSA could advise?) I would imagine that any anti-Muslim spell could be made far more potent in terms of inducing paranoia by including a few Stars of David in the symbolism.
Well, it's pretty obvious that this is the work of Zionist necromancers, like the business of the fenugreek in the adjoining article.
This is powerful magick, no doubt about it, probably done with the aid of powerful djinn, and the Saudi imam-mages will have to be at their best to counter it.
First, every effort should be made to recover the rest of the wolf, since its bodily organs will probably be used by the evil sorcerors to produce lethal incantations and potions to use against Moslems and Arabs. Also it's important to know the sex of the wolf, although I'm pretty sure that modern analysis could find this from just the head alone.
Here's the symbolism in the case of the wolf being male -- as I think most likely: the wolf represents the untamed fighting ferocity of the Moslem man, and the lingerie represents an attempt to make him weak and effeminate, to emasculate him, to tame him and deprive Islam of its heroes.
Alternatively, if the wolf is female, it represents the fecund, litter-bearing role of the Moslem woman. And the lingerie represents the seduction of her from that role by distracting her with frivolities into trying to keep her attractive girlish figure rather than lose it to a dozen or so pregnancies. In other to neuter her and cut off the supply of future Moslems.
Or maybe it's not the Zionists at all. Maybe the Rosicrucians have summoned Hermes Thrice-Great to smite the Moslems.
Or maybe Cthulu has returned, with the other slithering, gibbering Great Old Ones.
Whatever, the Saudis had better devote a lot of manpower and resources to this.
Now, before we laugh too long and hard at the Saudis, maybe we should note that Wicca is an accepted religion in the American military, and that the services employ Wiccan "chaplains". Possibly they're being employed in our own anti-sorcery units.
Those sorcerers, in Indonesia we call them Dukun or Paranormal, some of them even as famous as celebrity, one of them is Ki Joko Bodo, a sought after dukun that even celebrities and politicians are queued to consult him LOL.
Oh, the dukuns are famous for sending needles, nails and scissors to the abdomen of their victims to cause mysterious dead. Anybody wanna hire a mystic assassin? I can introduce you to them LOL
"If people were more educated they wouldn't believe in this."....
But of course, they would believe that Satan urinates in people's ears !!!
http://crossmuslims.blogspot.com/2011/07/satanic-fart.html
Another for the "You just can't this stuff up" file.
And this "civilization" was supposed to kick-start the renaissance of Western Civilization in the 15th and 16th century.
I am reading Sylvain Gouguenheim's Aristote au Mont Saint Michel. The above article is a further illustration of the veracity of his theses.
For a Muslim, there is no shame in claiming to be bewitched, because Muhammad said he was "bewitched" by an ally of the Jews
From Sahih al-Bukhari, the most canonical hadith collection:
Volume 7, Book 71, Number 660:
On a similar train of thought, Islamic superstition and hutzpah, people might find this article interesting, from Arutz Sheva (Channel Seven), Israel:
'Reincarnated' Boy Cannot Testify
A seven-year-old boy may not testify in place of a deceased man despite the family's belief that the boy is the man's next incarnation, Haifa District Court Justice Yael Vilner ruled Tuesday. Israel's laws regarding witness testimony are clear, and are not subject to change based on religious belief, she said.
The family of Marwan Kassem wished for the child to testify as Kassem in order to dispel claims that Kassem had died while attempting to carry out a terrorist attack. The IDF has argued that Kassem was shot and killed because he attacked soldiers with an ax in what was clearly a terrorist attack; Kassem's family rejects that claim, and says Kassem was killed in a fight that broke out after soldiers refused to allow him on base to visit a former commander.
The “reincarnated” child was born at the time Kassem died.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/215564
"...the severed head of a wolf wrapped in women's lingerie..."
Makes you wonder, which of the two is harder to fine in Saudi Arabia?
Makes you wonder, which of the two is harder to find in Saudi Arabia?
Witchcraft is no crazier than islam so it stands to reason muslims believe in it. The 'evil eye' is so hilarious; I wonder what you have to do to make muslims believe they have been hit with a curse? If we could convince our unwanted muslim invaders/immigrants that they are vulnerable to the curses and spells of witches, maybe they would leave.
Hi Susanp. The Muslims are actually in good company when it comes to believing in the evil eye. I have heard some of my Jewish friends say "Keyn aynhoreh!" which loosely translated means 'No evil eye'. I have a Greek friend who wears some sort of pendant that she once told me keeps away the evil eye.
We in Toronto got a good laugh a few years ago because someone in the city of Brampton (a few minutes drive from Toronto) got charged with practicing witchcraft.
The news item on this read as follows:
Police in Brampton, Ont., say they have charged a man with fraud for pretending to practice witchcraft.
Investigators allege the suspect was taking money for witchcraft-related services at his home.
Yogendra Pathak, 44, of Brampton has been charged with fraud under $5,000 and pretending to practise witchcraft.
Section 365 of Canada's Criminal Code outlaws "pretending to practise witchcraft, etc.," as one of the offences that deal with false pretences.
Pathak is due in court Oct 7.
It's believed the services had been offered for more than a year.
Police are asking for alleged victims or anyone with information to come forward.
Most of us thought it was interesting that only pretending to practice witchcraft was a criminal offense. Obviously, that meant that really practicing witchcraft was okay.
Oh for the love of....
Just when I think Ive heard it all about this pathetic camel loving religion some new absurdity comes out.
From the article: "Saudi Arabia takes witchcraft so seriously that it has banned the Harry Potter series by British writer J.K. Rowling, rife with tales of sorcery and magic".
It's not just the magic that would make Harry Potter haram.
It's stuffed full of all sorts of other things that sharia disapproves of.
Hogwarts Castle - at the gates of which are statues of winged boars, i.e. PIGS - has got pictures and statues from one end of it to the other.
Harry's godfather Sirius transforms into a black **dog** and in that form is represented as being benevolent, brave and lovable. Ron's 'patronus' takes the form of a terrier - that is, a dog.
Then there's all that mixing of unrelated men and women, boys and girls in public and private, throughout the story - Harry and Ron and Hermione hanging around together unsupervised. It's Hermione with her hair flying - not a niqab or burqa in sight, even if the Cloak of Invisibility does come in handy sometimes. Harry takes his first 'crush', Cho Chang, on a date in a tea-shop where pink cherubs hover overhead scattering confetti.
Valentine's Day (which is absolutely forbidden in Saudi Arabia) and other equally haraam! infidel feasts - Christmas and Easter - are all described as being celebrated - for example, in Order of the Phoenix, while spending Christmas with Sirius in his house in London, Harry hears Sirius singing "god rest ye merry Hippogriffs' (to the tune of 'god rest ye merry gentlemen') as he goes upstairs to feed Buckbeak the Hippogriff.
There are even passages from the Christian scriptures in the final book: carved on gravestones where they are read by Harry and Hermione when they find his parents' grave and a Dumbledore family grave in a churchyard in the final book. (Anyone who's only seen the films won't know this; but the *book* has them both, "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" [this being, in part, a commentary on Voldemort's shown-to-be-absurd-and-futile 'I will hide bits of my soul in assorted earthly treasures in order to make myself unkillable" project] and "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death". First one from the Gospels; the second from St Paul.).
There's the positive representation of monogamous marriage (the Weasley family, and a wizard wedding that takes place - and is described in some detail, complete with alcoholic beverages, music and dancing - at the beginning of the final book).
And the silver-and-ruby Sword of Godric Griffindor is a crusader sword if ever I saw one.
Add to that, that in the *films* the actor who plays Harry Potter is da-da-dum JEWISH (Daniel Radcliffe's mother is Jewish, I understand, which makes him Jewish according to Halakha - he could make aliyah if he so chose) and, well, you get the idea...
Nevertheless, the books have all been translated into Arabic and doubtless the films have been dubbed and/ or subtitled...and I would bet my bottom dollar that at least the spoilt children of the upper echelons of middle-eastern Arab Muslim society have had a peek at them...
Pursuant to my posting above.
The fanatical Shiite mullahs of Iran went one better than the Sunni killjoys of Saudi Arabia - they too banned Harry Potter on the grounds that it was (like everything else) a Zionist plot.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/07/harry-potter-zionist-agent.html
To which I had this to say, at the time (if you click the link and read down through the comments thread, you'll find the following remarks in situ, along with all sorts of interesting observations from other posters, to some of whom I was responding):
"...freedomschool - yes: "It's just a very interesting book showing the problems of a society in which certain things Must Not Be Named".
'And that particular shoe fits a LOT of feet. I've always thought Book Five, with its devastating portrait of that quintessential apparatchik Dolores Umbridge, must have gone down a treat in Vietnam, Cuba, China and Russia, not with the kids but with their parents.
'Waiterc - good point. "Your [Rowlings'] plot to convince muslim children that people can rejoice in their differences, fight evil and not blow themselves up and still be happy, has been discovered by the ayatollahs [sarc off]."
'Well, as far as the idiot ayatollahs are concerned, the whole of Western civilisation is a Zionist plot (ever since the writing of the four gospels in Greek? – or perhaps since the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in Alexandria, long before Christ?)…so, given that Rowlings has re-stated, eloquently, consistently and splendidly, a whole mass of the central principles and images of what one might call 'Christendom', what else can they think?
'The seventh book has two epigraphs. The first is from a pagan Greek tragedy, Aeschylus' "The Libation Bearers". The second is a passage on friendship and eternity, from a book by a Quaker Christian, William Penn's "More Fruits of Solitude". There you have it: Athens and Jerusalem side by side.
'But: it's too late! The ayatollahs didn't figure it out till the seventh book! Think of those millions of Muslim children who have read books one through six! All those little seeds have dropped down into the subconscious, those beautiful, persuasive images of love, hope, laughter, fidelity, truth and troth; courage, joy, hard work, equal and creative partnership between men and women, monogamous marriage (the Weasleys). And maybe, just maybe, some of those golden seeds may blossom into life.
'(Of course, one doesn’t know how much the translations have been…bowdlerised?; but I'm sure many children of the Muslim upper classes, at least, in many countries, know enough English to be able to attempt the English originals or - if Lebanese, or Persian - are reading the books in French).
'Imagine what a Muslim girl, whether in Britain or Saudi Arabia, thinks and feels as she enters a world in which Hermione rebukes and advises her male friends - and is taken seriously?
'I'm sure that when Rowlings started she didn't have The Religion That Mustn't Be Named in mind at all - after all, she'd been working on the first book for some years before it was published in 1997, and the main elements in the entire story arc - books 1-6 - were all worked out from the beginning. If anything, personal grief - the death of her mother at 45, from multiple sclerosis - seems to have been one of the main 'triggers'.
'Rowlings' political scenario seems to draw mainly on the rise of Nazism. But then: there are lots of affinities between Nazism and Islam. The fact that Voldemort kills out of hand anyone who tries to leave his service is ...interesting, shall we say?
'I've sometimes thought that the Muggle/Magical division in Rowlings' world flows from the habit of mind that we have in the West, the 'separation of church and state', the distinction between Religion and Politics. The two realms interpenetrate each other yet are clearly distinguished: the Magicals have submitted to a Separation of Powers.
'And this is where it gets interesting: the war in Rowlings' world takes place between two parties of Magicals. Perhaps: as Christians and Jews, say, to Muslims, so the Order of the Phoenix to the Death Eaters. The 'Dumbledore' party, among the Magicals, have chosen (since 1689, interestingly) NOT to interfere with, or exercise abusive power over, Muggles (thus parallelling the separation of church and state, the spiritual and the temporal, in Western civilisation) - see the first chapter of book six. The separationists limit their own use of power even among themselves, subordinating it to ethics - and their basic moral code is the same as that of any moral Muggle. The Dark Wizards, above all the Voldemort party, accept no such division of spheres, no such self-limitation, with regard either to Muggles or to other Magicals. They believe that Magic must rule, absolutely: there can only be tyrants and slaves.
'The mullahs may not be able to articulate WHY they find Rowlings’ books disturbing. But all her core assumptions - especially, perhaps, this image of a society governed by the Separation of Powers, along with the ethics, the principles of reciprocity and of the Golden Rule - flatly contradict, at every level, the way in which Islam imagines the world.
'Within Rowlings' world, it is in the faces of the Death Eaters and Voldemort, all eaten up with spiritual pride and the ugly desire to hurt and control and kill those whom they regard as impure or inferior , that the faces of the ayatollahs appear as in a mirror. [And I will today, in 2011, say that there is a scene toward the beginning of the seventh book, fairly accurately rendered in the seventh film, a scene that one might call The Killing of Charity, in which Voldemort behaves as ruthlessly as any Mohammedan warlord].
'Rowlings - like every traditional Western writer, ever since Christianity [itself anchored in Judaism] turned the world upside down - gives short shrift to spiritual pride, lies, the lust for power, greed, selfishness, cruelty. She delights in humility, compassion, wisdom, grace, forgiveness, mercy, truth; and she revels in plain honest passion, eros, and uproarious, vulgar laughter, especially laughter that punctures all pretentious pride. So her worldview collides with Islam - how could it not?
'Being a poet, steeped in medieval and renaissance lit (her books are full of heraldic images - the White Stag, the Unicorn, the Hippogriff, the Griffin, the Phoenix, to name a few) Rowlings could not but have sensed, at some level, what's been happening in the world. That we do have 'death eaters' in our midst, ready to wreak random terror and murder upon those they believe impure or inferior, in order to achieve absolute power. Her response to that has been a sustained act of affirmation of all that is good in our civilisation, in our history.
'As she's been writing her way along, and as the moviemakers have galloped at her heels, events have - so to speak - caught up with them. Real events, like the various terror bombings in New York or Madrid or London, have added a whole extra layer of meaning to images and analogies in the novels.
'(As for Tolkien [some posters had raised the subject of the LTR trilogy - dda]: he was a medievalist, and a Catholic, and I am convinced that his epic consciously draws on, or is inspired by, some of the episodes in the West's 1300-year defence against the Jihad. I think that 1300-year-war has far more to do with Tolkien than do either of the two World Wars or the Cold War. There is at least one major episode in his story, the ride of the Rohirrim to break the siege of Gondor, that has clear parallels with Jan Sobieski's ride to relieve Vienna in 1683. I wouldn't be in the least surprised if Tolkien, like Chesterton, Churchill, and Belloc, felt Islam on the horizon as a dark shadow rising; though maybe, unlike them, he never articulated that warning. Instead he drew on the deep history and transformed it into a myth with contemporary resonance.)
End of essay! Sorry to go on at such length, but it's something I've thought about quite a bit over the past couple of years.
I guess you all can now see why I chose my particular internet 'handle'."