Pakistan: Christian jailed on dubious blasphemy charge

Since Pakistan's blasphemy law was drafted by and is enforced by Muslims, virtually every blasphemy charge is dubious: a Christian can be accused of blasphemy simply by affirming his faith, since the Qur'an states that "they do blaspheme who say: 'Allah is Christ the son of Mary'" (Sura 5:72). Note that this is a tendentious translation: the Arabic word (kafara) that Abdullah Yusuf Ali here renders as "blaspheme" is more precisely "disbelieve." However, Ali expresses a belief that is widely held particularly among radical Muslims: that the very expression of Christian faith is in itself blasphemy.

But this story is a particularly egregious example of the abuse of this widely abused law. The report is from Compass Direct:

In an apparent attempt to settle an old grudge, a Pakistani man who converted to Islam several months ago has implicated a Christian acquaintance for alleged blasphemy.

Anwer Masih, 30, was arrested on November 30 by police officials in Shadhra, an industrial town on the northern outskirts of Lahore.

Two days before his arrest, Masih met a former neighbor in Paracha Colony whom he knew as Naseer Masih. Unaware that the man had become a Muslim about three months earlier and changed his name to Naseer Ahmad, Masih asked where he had been lately.

“I only asked him where he was living, as I hadn’t seen him for a long time,” Masih told investigators who visited him in prison several weeks later. “I further asked him about his beard, but Naseer gradually got infuriated, and started telling me that the beard was Sunnah (Islamic custom) and that every prophet had a beard.”

According to Masih, Ahmad scolded him for questioning his new beard, but the matter was settled after a few minutes and they parted.

But the next morning, Ahmad arrived at Masih’s house with about 100 Muslim militants from Muridke, 70 miles north of Shadhra. Although Masih was not at home, the mob of armed clerics surrounded the house, shouting death threats, throwing stones and trying to set the home on fire.

When neighbors and the district’s elected councilor, a Christian named Salamat Masih, intervened, the police were summoned to record Ahmad’s accusations against Anwer Masih. Although Ahmad’s initial statement objected to Masih’s alleged comments about his beard, it made no reference to any derogatory remarks against the prophets.

A few hours later, the police returned and arrested Masih’s mother, Ceema Bibi. But councilor Masih again intervened, winning her release after promising to bring her son to the police station.

The next day Masih was handed over to police sub-inspector Zulfiqar Cheema, who registered formal blasphemy charges against Masih and sent him to jail. Although the police official recorded statements by three Muslims who were not present at the disputed incident, he refused to accept statements from two Christian eyewitnesses.

This is in line with some Islamic legal theories that allow testimony only from Muslims: see 'Umdat al-Salik o24.2(e).

“Anwer’s family handed him to the police because they were afraid the crowd would kill him,” councilor Masih told the Daily Times.

In the written First Information Report, Masih was charged under Pakistan penal code 295 (disturbing anyone’s religious feelings) and 295-A (slandering a religious prophet). This time, Ahmad’s statement claimed Masih had slandered the prophets and Islamic beliefs.

According to Paracha Colony residents, Ahmad carried a grudge against Masih from an incident two years ago, when Ahmad was indicted for severely beating one of his Christian neighbors. Shahzad “Gora” Masih, 23, went into a coma and still remains paralyzed from Ahmad’s beating. Anwer Masih had angered Ahmad by encouraging the victim’s family to register a case against their son’s attacker, his neighbors said.

Since becoming a Muslim, Ahmad has lived in Muridke at the Markaz-e-Tayyabba madrassah, an Islamic school linked with the banned Lashkar-e-Tayyabba militant group.

According to an in-depth Daily Times article on Masih’s case on December 11, the newly converted Ahmad “collaborated” with a local factory owner to falsely accuse Masih of blasphemy.

Maulvi Ilyas, owner of the Al-Firdaus Textile Mills, had reportedly been pressuring local Christians to change their religion. Ahmad’s own father, Payara Masih, had been employed at Ilyas’ factory for a long time, but “quit his job when Ilyas asked him to convert,” the Daily Times reported.

“Ahmad took my son Dilawar to the factory, where Ilyas offered him money and property to change his faith,” councilor Salamat Masih said. Another young Christian in the neighborhood, Sunil Masih, reportedly ran away from Ilyas without collecting his salary when the factory owner tried to convince him to become a Muslim.

Married with four children, Anwer Masih was a day laborer without work at the time of his arrest. He has been confined for the past eight weeks in the Lahore District Jail, where he shares a cell with two Muslim prisoners also accused under Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.

Lower court hearings on Masih’s case were held on December 15 and January 12. Meanwhile, his defense lawyers representing the Lahore-based Center for Legal Assistance Aid and Settlement (CLAAS) plan to file a bail application on his behalf before the Lahore High Court on January 31.

The allegations against Masih “need to be investigated thoroughly, before it is too late and Anwer ends up spending a few years in jail,” a Daily Times editorial noted on December 13. “So far not a single conviction under the blasphemy law has been upheld in the higher courts.”

The editorial stated that the blasphemy law has been “thoroughly abused and yielded nothing but false cases and suffering for the people. If (the government) cannot reform this law, at least it should seriously consider making procedural changes in it to reduce the chances of its abuse.”

Speaker overturns "misconceptions" of Islamic jihad

CAIR's Hussam Ayloush

Hussam Ayloush of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) spoke at UCLA Wednesday night about jihad. Last year I debated Ayloush on a similar topic. At UCLA he declared that his intention was to dispel misconceptions. (Thanks to Jean-Luc.)

The Muslim Student Association hosted an informational forum – "Operation Jihad: Misconceptions of a Peaceful Intention" – in honor of Islamic Awareness Week on Wednesday night. . . .

Speaker Husam Ayloush – a member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations – discussed the meaning of Islamic Jihad and addressed common misconceptions of the term.

"The word 'jihad' makes most people think of Islamic extremists and events like Sept. 11," Ayloush said.

"But they do not remember that the image of long-bearded men carrying machine guns is media-produced," he added.

This is a strange statement. It seems doubtful that Ayloush means that such men don't exist. Perhaps he means that they don't exist in the numbers suggested by the media coverage they receive. In any case, bearded or no (Atta, after all, was clean-shaven), Islamic radicals are unfortunately not a small group. Just this past week I have posted news stories about jihadist activities not only in the U.S., Israel, and Iraq, but also in Australia, Mali, Pakistan, France, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Thailand, Iran, Chechnya, Germany, and elsewhere. And that's just in the last week! I suppose all this is media-created?

In Arabic, "jihad" means the exertion of effort for the sake of God, and has no implications of war or violence, Ayloush said. . . .

Ayloush mentioned that many individuals incorrectly associate jihad with the idea of a holy war.

This term "holy war" does not exist in Islamic terminology and was only written to describe the Crusades in the 1400s, he said.

Jihad ultimately promotes peace and justice in everyday activities, such as loving Allah above everything else and resisting worldly temptations, he added.

It's true: jihad doesn't mean "holy war" in Arabic. But there are centuries of Islamic tradition, as well as an elaborate Islamic theological and legal structure, behind the concept of jihad as warfare. I explore this in depth in Onward Muslim Soldiers.

In that book I recount instances where other Islamic spokesmen have denied that jihad means "holy war" and then proceeded on the assumption that that in itself meant that Islam and jihad were inherently peaceful. But in fact, while the term "holy war" may not exist as such in Islamic tradition, the concept certainly does. One classic manual of Islamic sacred law is quite specific and detailed about the meaning of jihad. It defines the "greater jihad" as "spiritual warfare against the lower self" and then devotes eleven pages to various aspects of the "lesser jihad" and its aftermath. It defines this jihad as "war against non-Muslims," noting that the word itself "is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion."

This manual stipulates that "the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians . . . until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax." ('Umdat as-Salik, o9.8). The caliph was the successor of Muhammad as the leader of the Muslim community; the caliphate was abolished by the secular Turkish government in 1924. But the manual also states that in the absence of a caliph, Muslims must still wage jihad.

The requirement that non-Muslims first be “invited” to enter Islam and then warred against until they either convert or pay the jizya, the special tax on non-Muslims, is founded upon the Qur’an: "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued" (Sura 9:29).

This verse has been used in Islamic history and jurisprudence to establish three choices for non-Muslims that Muslims are facing in jihad: conversion to Islam, submission under Islamic rule (which involves a carefully delineated second-class citizen status centered around but by no means limited to the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims), or death.

Muhammad himself expands upon the three choices of Sura 9:29 in a tradition found in one of the collections considered most reliable by Muslims: Sahih Muslim. It depicts the Prophet of Islam appointing generals and exhorting his troops:

Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war . . . When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them. . . . If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them. (Sahih Muslim, book 19, no. 4294.)

Out of all this material Muslim jurists have constructed an elaborate legal edifice that is without parallel in any other major religion: a codified, detailed mass of laws for the conduct of warfare in the name of God. Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), the pioneering historian and philosopher, puts it this way: "In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force." Islam is "under obligation to gain power over other nations."

This is the traditional understanding of jihad that radical Muslims worldwide are operating upon. Ayloush would have done a much better service if he had acknowledged the existence of these traditions and mapped out a proposal for how they could be reformed in order to neutralize the threat from radical Islam and to bring Islamic theology and law in line with the principles of freedom and tolerance enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and elsewhere.

Ayloush did say some intriguing things, however, if this report is accurate.

Jihad can also implicate defending one's community from oppression, but it does not automatically call for war, Ayloush said.

"Islam is not about fighting until you teach someone a lesson. It is about fighting until persecution is no more," he said.

So it seems that Islamic jihad does involve fighting under certain circumstances: evidently, when there is "persecution." Of course, this is just the justification Osama bin Laden adduced for September 11: "Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple: Because you attacked us and continue to attack us." This is not to say that Ayloush endorses bin Laden's statement, but it does show that Ayloush's explanation of jihad, at least as it has been reported here, is not adequate to rule out Islamic radical interpretations.

One student protester showed his disagreement with Ayloush.

First-year biology student David Lazar stood outside the forum to protest.

"Alyoush says Islam is oppression and promotes peace, but he ignores the presence of numerous Islamic suicide bombers in Palestine," he said.

"If Islam is not a violent religion, then why did Islamic extremists attack and kill hundreds of women and noncombatants on Sept. 11?" he added.

Ayloush responded by encouraging his audience to remember no religion is immune to extremist sects.

"No one judges Christianity by the acts of Hitler; no one judges Judaism by the acts of Sharon; So if you want to judge Islam, do not judge it by the acts of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein," he said.

"Remember that the mainstream believers, not the extreme few, represent Islam," he added.

This is a familiar and particularly nasty dodge. Hitler was a baptized Christian but was never observant. Nazi ideology was explicitly pagan and anti-Christian; Hitler persecuted the Church whenever it wasn't supine in the face of his tyranny. This is a far cry from the self-conscious, explicit, and sustained justification from Islamic sources that radical Muslims use to further the aims of worldwide terrorism. Hitlerism was never part of Christianity and so never needed to be reformed out of it; but Islamic radicalism must be reformed out of Islam, or it will continue to spread. Blithely dismissing it as "extremism" will do nothing to stop it.

From Nazis to Schuller to Arabs

Orange County Weekly reports that "Bill Baker has resurfaced as a frequent guest speaker at Muslim functions across North America despite articles in OC Weekly in 2002 that outed the Laguna Hills resident as the former head of the neo-Nazi Populist Party and led to his ouster as a close associate to the Reverend Robert Schuller of Garden Grove’s Crystal Cathedral." (Thanks to Ruth King.)

He just won’t go away.

Bill Baker has resurfaced as a frequent guest speaker at Muslim functions across North America despite articles in OC Weekly in 2002 that outed the Laguna Hills resident as the former head of the neo-Nazi Populist Party and led to his ouster as a close associate to the Reverend Robert Schuller of Garden Grove’s Crystal Cathedral.

Baker’s appearances are causing consternation, public recrimination and bad feelings wherever he goes. He spoke amid protests on Jan. 3 at "Reviving the Islamic Spirit," a conference attended by more than 7,000 people in Toronto, Ontario. The Toronto Star reported that Canadian Jewish Congress-led protesters cited the OC Weekly series as the basis for their descriptions of Baker as a professional anti-Semite, self-promoter and huckster. . . .

In 1984, Baker was national chairman of Costa Mesa-based Holocaust denier Willis Carto’s Populist Party, whose platform called for the repeal of U.S. civil rights laws. Baker now states that, although he planned his party’s national convention, he had no knowledge of its platform or ideology.

His topic in Toronto was "More in Common Than You Think," an attempt to gloss over deep historical and theological differences between Muslims and Christians. A similar talk at the Crystal Cathedral in 2002 left a group of moderate Christian pastors shaking their heads.

According to Toronto conference spokesman Jeewan Chanicka, Baker was recommended "as an individual working towards building bridges between the Muslim and Christian communities. His lectures . . . reflected nothing that could be considered racist or anti-Semitic. Because interfaith dialogue was a component of the conference, once we knew that he was nominated for the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, we thought that he would be a good candidate at such a forum." . . .

A similar appearance by Baker at a Muslim conference in Florida last year produced an angry exchange between the Jewish human rights organization the Anti-Defamation League and the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The latter organization published a letter from Baker claiming that "The so-called ‘quotes’ attributed to me [in OC Weekly] are pure, insulting, and outrageous lies."

Baker also spoke last October at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia as a guest of the Muslim Students Association (MSA). His appearance drew protests from both students and the Philadelphia Jewish community. In the wake of that speech, embarrassed Muslim students exchanged visits and lectures with Jewish students, and their presidents, Muhammed Mekki and Jason Auerbach, signed the following joint statement published in the Daily Pennsylvanian:

"Hillel and the MSA reaffirm our commitment to unity and friendship. As we rediscover our common roots and our shared history, we urge all Penn students to follow our example in rising above perceived differences. Let us be proactive in building interpersonal relationships that, God willing, will further strengthen our unique Penn community and inspire peace in our world."

Contacted by the Weekly, Shaheen Kazi, MSA’s national manager, denied she’d ever heard of Baker, claimed her group would never knowingly invite a neo-Nazi and maintained that an independent chapter had booked his appearance. "We have so many MSAs that we can’t track every one," she said. "We would definitely take [Baker’s background] into consideration, and we would be inclined not to invite him in the future."

Baker’s influence extends to other pro-Arab outlets. The website for the pro-Palestinian magazine Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, widely regarded as representing the views of Saudi Arabia, offers a favorable review of Baker’s incoherent, anti-Semitic book, Theft of a Nation, which it sells for the discounted price of $12.

Hussam Ayloush, director of the California CAIR branch in Anaheim, says he’s heard Baker speak at many Islamic events—and Ayloush was loath to rebuke Baker. "His focus is that we all hold stereotypes—and that we shouldn’t feel threatened by knowledge or interaction," Ayloush said. "As a Muslim, I have been accused of so many things that I would be very hesitant and careful before condemning anyone."

You can read my own exchange with Hussam Ayloush here.

Dhimmitude at the New York Times

Charles at LGF hits the nail on the head about a New York Times op-ed, "My God is Your God" by John Kearney.

Says Kearney:

Last August the Washington Post Web site posed this question to readers: “Do you think that Muslims, Christians and Jews all pray to the same God?” One Muslim respondent wrote yes, each of the three major monotheistic faiths “pray to the God of Abraham.”

Christian respondents, however, were equivocal or hostile to the notion. “Jews pray to Yahweh,” one Virginia woman wrote. “As a Christian, I pray to the same God.” But she insisted that “Muslims pray to Allah. Allah is not the God of Abraham.” This woman might be surprised that Christian Arabs use “Allah” for God, as do Arabic-speaking Jews. In Aramaic, the language of Jesus, God is “Allaha,” just a syllable away from Allah.

It is certainly true that Christian Arabs use "Allah" for God. But Kearney ignores the substantial point that even though they may share a name, any examination of the particulars of Christian and Islamic theology reveals that the deities in question are quite different in character. This is acknowledged by Muslims as well as Christians. The Qur'an says of a central tenet of Christianity: "The Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah's curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!" (Sura 9:30). The same God?

Kearney continues:

Still, who can blame her? Earlier that month, NPR reported Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza City intoning, “there is no God but Allah.” Last week, The Los Angeles Times mentioned mourners for a slain Baghdad professor reciting, “there is no God but Allah” at the university campus. In September, The New York Times reported an assassinated Palestinian uttering, “there is no God but Allah” before he died.

“There is no god but God” is the first of Islam’s five pillars. It is Muhammad’s refutation of polytheism. Yet to today’s non-Muslims, the locution “there is no God but Allah” reads as an affront, a declaration that inflammatory Allah trumps the Biblical God. This journalistic rendition distorts the meaning of the Muslim confession of faith.

Charles remarks:

But Kearney gives no evidence that the phrase “there is no God but Allah” is a distortion, just his own word. This is argument by assertion; politically correct wisdom received from on high. Hasn’t Kearney ever read a transcript of the Islamic supremacist sermons preached in Gaza City mosques? A real case could be made that the phrase as currently used by journalists conveys its precise meaning—that all other gods and all other religions are inferior to Islam.

You can find many of those sermons documented in Onward Muslim Soldiers.

Pakistan: Christian teenager forced into hiding

This is what life is like in our secular ally Pakistan for one member of that nation's Christian minority. This report is from Compass Direct:

A Pakistani Christian teenager kidnapped for more than two weeks in November has been forced to flee his home and stay in hiding to avoid recapture by his Muslim extremist captors.

Leaders of a fanatic Islamic school have vowed to send Zeeshan Gill, who just turned 16 last week, to fight in Kashmir as a newly-converted Muslim jihadi (holy warrior).

Zeeshan Gill was abducted November 7 on his way home from his classes at Garrison Cadet School in Sargodha, in Pakistan’s Punjab province. The boy was duped into accompanying a Muslim acquaintance, an electrician named Amjad Warriach who had done occasional work in his family’s home.

Warriach took Gill to the Jamia al Qasim al Aloom “madressa,” an Islamic school attached to a local mosque. Kept there under guard, the boy was forced to recite the “Kalima” (Islamic creed), perform Muslim ablutions and prayers five times a day, and observe daily fasting for the month of Ramadan then in progress.

The boy was beaten and threatened by his captors, who declared that since he had become a Muslim, they would kill him if he tried to run away or convert back to Christianity. Under the tenets of Islam, simply reciting the faith’s creed makes one a Muslim, and anyone who renounces Islam must be killed.

Gill was also given weapons training in the use of guns, pistols and grenades, and told that soon he would be sent to fight in the Muslim “holy war” in Kashmir. Hundreds of Pakistan’s militant Islamist groups -- now banned by the government -- have been embroiled in the violent dispute over India-administered Kashmir, a flashpoint between India and Pakistan for 15 years.

After three days of searching, Gill’s widowed mother finally learned that her missing son was being held at the Jamia Mosque, where mosque leaders claimed he had “embraced Islam.” A medical technician at Sargodha’s Civil Hospital, Razia Gill has been supporting her two sons and their elderly grandmother since her husband’s death nearly 12 years ago.

After Mrs. Gill contacted a lawyer, a bailiff from the Sargodha District and Sessions Court went together with a local police officer to meet Zeeshan at the madressa. In the presence of his captors, the boy simply said that he had become a Muslim, and that he did not want to go back to his mother.

The bailiff demanded a subsequent court summons on November 14, when madressa leader Maulvi Sohail was ordered to appear with the boy. Before Judge Khawaja Imtiaz Ahmad, the boy reiterated that he had converted to Islam of his own free will, stating that he would return to his mother only if she also became a Muslim.

Although Mrs. Gill asked the judge to allow her to meet with Zeeshan privately, the judge refused, declaring that her son was a “sensible boy,” and even though he was a minor, he “had the right” to convert to another religion.

The laws of Pakistan do not include any provisions regarding religious conversion, although under the Minors Act, children remain minors under their parents’ legal authority until age 18.

On November 20, the madressa leaders sent Zeeshan with a Muslim bodyguard back to his house, where he was told to collect his clothes. Four days later, he was told he was to report for final training at Raiwand’s large Islamic center and then be sent to Kashmir, where he would be expected to “spread Islam at the speed of 120 kilometers [70 miles] per hour.” Before his departure for Kashmir, he was allowed to return home once again -- alone this time -- to say goodbye to his family.

The unaccompanied visit enabled Zeeshan to finally tell his mother exactly what had happened to him, and the plans to send him to Kashmir. She immediately gathered up both her sons and fled the city, taking shelter with relatives miles away. A church leader there heard of the family’s plight and put Mrs. Gill in touch with the Lahore-based Center for Legal Aid and Assistance Settlement (CLAAS) to get legal counsel and a secure hiding place for Zeeshan.

According to CLAAS coordinator Joseph Francis, the Gill family’s dilemma is not unusual among Pakistan’s tiny Christian minority. But the Gills are particularly vulnerable, he noted, since they have no male elder in the family, making it easier for extremists to intimidate the boy and his mother.

CLAAS lawyers have represented a similar case in which the provincial High Court intervened. In this case, the captors who insisted a minor boy had “converted to Islam” were ordered by the court to release him back to his Christian family.

“Afterwards his abductors again kidnapped him and had him sent to Kashmir,” Francis told Compass, “and now no one knows about that child’s whereabouts.”

“There is nothing we can do legally,” CLAAS Coordinator Joseph Francis told Compass this week. “Zeeshan’s mother and little brother Numan have returned to Sargodha, but he must stay apart from them in hiding.”

Tariq Ramadan, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the State Department

Agent of the Muslim Brotherhood? (Photo: Time)

France's Nouvel Observateur (thanks to Joyce) is reporting that controversial European Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan's move to the United States may be related to talks between Washington and the Muslim Brotherhood. Here is my rough-and-ready translation of the French article:

Surprise: Tariq Ramadan, part-time lecturer at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, is on his way to the United States. Next September, he will be named a professor at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. This arrangement comes after multiple offers made to him by many American universities for several months, in particular the University of Chicago. In April, he will also give several lectures in California, and according to him, will be invited to the U.S. State Department, which seems interested in him more and more.

This information was also confirmed Wednesday by the Genevan daily newspaper Le Temps, which confirms, quoting a spokesman of Tariq Ramadan, that "he will give courses beginning next fall on the relationship between religion, conflict and the promotion of peace." However, according to the paper, the visa application filed by the intellectual is likely to take time, "because there are people who have questions about it."

His departure from Europe is even more surprising since the Genevan theologian (of Egyptian origin) is actively involved in France in the debate over the veil and secularism. Tariq Ramadan is considered, by many European intelligence services, to be one of the clandestine leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that supports the Palestinian kamikazes of Hamas. Is his departure for the United States a sign, as DST [Territorial Surveillance Directorate, France's domestic intelligence service] officials believe, of an accord between Washington and the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood?

Translation corrections welcome. In any case, the connection that this article makes between Ramadan and the Muslim Brotherhood is significant. In Onward Muslim Soldiers I explain how careful he has been to present himself as a moderate Muslim, although there are numerous questions about his real connection to radicals. The Muslim Brotherhood, of course, is the father of virtually all modern-day Islamic terror groups.

Many Turks become Christians, but must tread carefully

UPI reports that 35,000 Turks became Christians last year — a major social movement in that country. There is a certain poetic justice to this, as the report suggests that many are the descendants of Christians who were forced to become Muslims during the time of the Armenian genocide and the persecution and expulsion of the Greeks. However, these Christians still have to be quiet and "not make waves," even in that enlightened, secular, moderate Muslim nation. Now why is that? (Thanks to Susan.)

Some 35,000 Turks converted from Islam to Christianity last year,with most joining evangelical congregations the newspaper, "Milliet," reports. If true, this would amount to a mass movement, considering Christians make up only 0.2 percent of Turkey's 68 million population. "This is news to me," said the Rev. Holger Nollmann, the German Protestant pastor in Istanbul.

However, Ihsan Ozbek, president of the Council of Independent Protestant congregations, said more and more Turks were turning toward Christianity. "However, given the Islamic environment in which we live, most Turks coming to our congregations do not wish to make waves."

The German protestant news service Idea reported most converts are descendants of Orthodox Christians who ostensibly became Muslims to avoid being killed in Turkey's 1914-22 genocide of its Armenian minority.

Hamas in the Florida Classroom

Daniel Pipes and Asaf Romirowsky continue the appalling story of Mustafa Abu Sway, the Hamas activist who is now a visiting professor at Florida Atlantic University:

We broke the news in October 2003 that Mustafa Abu Sway, a visiting Palestinian professor at Florida Atlantic University, is “known as an activist” in Hamas, a group on the U.S. government’s terrorism list. We also revealed that his salary is being paid by the U.S. taxpayer (via the Fulbright exchange program).

Our little scoop met with yawns or with disbelief. Abu Sway himself denounced our article as a “witch hunt.” FAU ignored the revelation (“we have no reason to take any action”). The hometown Palm Beach Post published four skeptical responses, including an editorial insisting that “there is no known evidence” against Abu Sway.

Actually, being named as “a known activist” in Hamas by the Israeli government – who knows terrorism better? – qualifies in itself as “evidence,” but we since October have learned that Abu Sway also:

· Was a board member and raised funds for two Jerusalem-based Hamas-related organizations, the Heritage Committee and the Foundation for the Development of Society, both of which were shut down in February 2003.

· Has worked with the Palestinian “Charity Coalition” that includes such organizations as Al-Aqsa Foundation (South Africa) and Comité de Bienfaisance et de Secours aux Palestiniens (France), both known as Hamas fundraisers.

· Is connected to Sheikh Ra’ed Salah’s Islamic Movement in Um al-Fahm, Israel, 14 members of which were arrested in May 2003 for Hamas fundraising.

If this does not count as evidence of ties to Hamas, we are not sure what does.

In a written response to us, Abu Sway denies each of these points, other than board membership on the Foundation for the Development of Society and meeting Ra’ed Salah one time.

How does one assess his denial? As one usually does in such matters, by checking a person’s general credibility.

Abu Sway these days says, “I cherish the Jewish presence [in Israel] and advocate non-violence.” But in the past, before he was under scrutiny, he spoke very differently:

· At a 2002 interfaith meeting in Israel, reports Christianity Today, he remarked, “to audible gasps from Jews in the audience, that he wished the state of Israel ‘would disappear’.”

· The Jerusalem Jewish Voice, reporting on the same meeting, recorded Abu Sway saying that he wished for “the end of the state of Israel.”

· In a 2003 study published by the U.S. Institute of Peace, Abu Sway is quoted stating “To imagine shared sovereignty or dual sovereignty is not being faithful to Islamic tradition” and specifically calling for an Islamic state of Palestine to replace Israel.

The contradiction here points to a clever switching of messages as suits his needs of the moment.

Another example: speaking to an American audience via ABC News in 2002, Abu Sway deemed the Arabic term jihad “a very beautiful concept which is deep in the area of spirituality.” But in his role as co-author of a Palestinian Authority textbook (available at www.edume.org), he explained to seventh graders that jihad is a military obligation that “becomes the individual religious duty of every Muslim man and woman … if the enemy has conquered part of its land.”

Should the American taxpayer honor someone credibly accused of supporting a terrorist organization with a Fulbright fellowship? Should Florida Atlantic University continue to have him teach its students?

Those students have their doubts, judging by a December 2003 memo sent by FAU Associate Dean Lynn M. Appleton in which she lamented the lack of interest in Abu Sway’s course on “Islam and Politics” this semester and exhorted the faculty to recruit more bodies.

“Enrollment is small and stagnant,” she wrote. “Could you put up some posters – very rapidly! … Is there an email list of majors to which information could be sent? Let me know what you are able to do.” She ends on a plaintive note, “I would hate to see the course cancelled.” Her efforts succeeded; the once-endangered course now boasts 21 registered students.

The Fulbright program and Florida Atlantic University can thus congratulate themselves on promoting militant Islamic indoctrination by a man connected to terrorism.

For those less than thrilled with this class, FAU’s President Frank T. Brogan can be reached at skane@fau.edu. The Fulbright program’s Chair Steven J. Uhlfelder (who is a former member of the board of governors that oversees FAU) is at steve@sulaw.net.

Sex slave jihad

Writes Donna Hughes in FrontPage magazine: "A measure of Islamic fundamentalists’ success in controlling society is the depth and totality with which they suppress the freedom and rights of women." And since they find their justifications for suppressing the freedom and rights of women in the Sharia, this bodes ill for non-Muslims also: the freedom and rights of dhimmis are severely restricted in the Sharia as well.

A measure of Islamic fundamentalists’ success in controlling society is the depth and totality with which they suppress the freedom and rights of women. In Iran for 25 years, the ruling mullahs have enforced humiliating and sadistic rules and punishments on women and girls, enslaving them in a gender apartheid system of segregation, forced veiling, second-class status, lashing, and stoning to death.

Joining a global trend, the fundamentalists have added another way to dehumanize women and girls: buying and selling them for prostitution. Exact numbers of victims are impossible to obtain, but according to an official source in Tehran, there has been a 635 percent increase in the number of teenage girls in prostitution. The magnitude of this statistic conveys how rapidly this form of abuse has grown. In Tehran, there are an estimated 84,000 women and girls in prostitution, many of them are on the streets, others are in the 250 brothels that reportedly operate in the city. The trade is also international: thousands of Iranian women and girls have been sold into sexual slavery abroad.

The head of Iran’s Interpol bureau believes that the sex slave trade is one of the most profitable activities in Iran today. This criminal trade is not conducted outside the knowledge and participation of the ruling fundamentalists. Government officials themselves are involved in buying, selling, and sexually abusing women and girls.

Many of the girls come from impoverished rural areas. Drug addiction is epidemic throughout Iran, and some addicted parents sell their children to support their habits. High unemployment 28 percent for youth 15-29 years of age and 43 percent for women 15-20 years of age is a serious factor in driving restless youth to accept risky offers for work. Slave traders take advantage of any opportunity in which women and children are vulnerable. For example, following the recent earthquake in Bam, orphaned girls have been kidnapped and taken to a known slave market in Tehran where Iranian and foreign traders meet.

Popular destinations for victims of the slave trade are the Arab countries in the Persian Gulf. According to the head of the Tehran province judiciary, traffickers target girls between 13 and 17, although there are reports of some girls as young as 8 and 10, to send to Arab countries. One ring was discovered after an 18 year-old girl escaped from a basement where a group of girls were held before being sent to Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The number of Iranian women and girls who are deported from Persian Gulf countries indicates the magnitude of the trade. Upon their return to Iran, the Islamic fundamentalists blame the victims, and often physically punish and imprison them. The women are examined to determine if they have engaged in “immoral activity.” Based on the findings, officials can ban them from leaving the country again.

Police have uncovered a number of prostitution and slavery rings operating from Tehran that have sold girls to France, Britain, Turkey as well. One network based in Turkey bought smuggled Iranian women and girls, gave them fake passports, and transported them to European and Persian Gulf countries. In one case, a 16-year-old girl was smuggled to Turkey, and then sold to a 58-year-old European national for $20,000.

In the northeastern Iranian province of Khorasan, local police report that girls are being sold to Pakistani men as sex-slaves. The Pakistani men marry the girls, ranging in age from 12 to 20, and then sell them to brothels called “Kharabat” in Pakistan. One network was caught contacting poor families around Mashad and offering to marry girls. The girls were then taken through Afghanistan to Pakistan where they were sold to brothels.
In the southeastern border province of Sistan Baluchestan, thousands of Iranian girls reportedly have been sold to Afghani men. Their final destinations are unknown.

One factor contributing to the increase in prostitution and the sex slave trade is the number of teen girls who are running away from home. The girls are rebelling against fundamentalist imposed restrictions on their freedom, domestic abuse, and parental drug addictions. Unfortunately, in their flight to freedom, the girls find more abuse and exploitation. Ninety percent of girls who run away from home will end up in prostitution. As a result of runaways, in Tehran alone there are an estimated 25,000 street children, most of them girls. Pimps prey upon street children, runaways, and vulnerable high school girls in city parks. In one case, a woman was discovered selling Iranian girls to men in Persian Gulf countries; for four years, she had hunted down runaway girls and sold them. She even sold her own daughter for US$11,000.

Given the totalitarian rule in Iran, most organized activities are known to the authorities. The exposure of sex slave networks in Iran has shown that many mullahs and officials are involved in the sexual exploitation and trade of women and girls. Women report that in order to have a judge approve a divorce they have to have sex with him. Women who are arrested for prostitution say they must have sex with the arresting officer. There are reports of police locating young women for sex for the wealthy and powerful mullahs.

In cities, shelters have been set-up to provide assistance for runaways. Officials who run these shelters are often corrupt; they run prostitution rings using the girls from the shelter. For example in Karaj, the former head of a Revolutionary Tribunal and seven other senior officials were arrested in connection with a prostitution ring that used 12 to 18 year old girls from a shelter called the Center of Islamic Orientation.

Other instances of corruption abound. There was a judge in Karaj who was involved in a network that identified young girls to be sold abroad. And in Qom, the center for religious training in Iran, when a prostitution ring was broken up, some of the people arrested were from government agencies, including the Department of Justice.

The ruling fundamentalists have differing opinions on their official position on the sex trade: deny and hide it or recognize and accommodate it. In 2002, a BBC journalist was deported for taking photographs of prostitutes. Officials told her: “We are deporting you … because you have taken pictures of prostitutes. This is not a true reflection of life in our Islamic Republic. We don’t have prostitutes.” Yet, earlier the same year, officials of the Social Department of the Interior Ministry suggested legalizing prostitution as a way to manage it and control the spread of HIV. They proposed setting-up brothels, called “morality houses,” and using the traditional religious custom of temporary marriage, in which a couple can marry for a short period of time, even an hour, to facilitate prostitution. Islamic fundamentalists’ ideology and practices are adaptable when it comes to controlling and using women.

Some may think a thriving sex trade in a theocracy with clerics acting as pimps is a contradiction in a country founded and ruled by Islamic fundamentalists. In fact, this is not a contradiction. First, exploitation and repression of women are closely associated. Both exist where women, individually or collectively, are denied freedom and rights. Second, the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran are not simply conservative Muslims. Islamic fundamentalism is a political movement with a political ideology that considers women inherently inferior in intellectual and moral capacity. Fundamentalists hate women’s minds and bodies. Selling women and girls for prostitution is just the dehumanizing complement to forcing women and girls to cover their bodies and hair with the veil.

In a religious dictatorship like Iran, one cannot appeal to the rule of law for justice for women and girls. Women and girls have no guarantees of freedom and rights, and no expectation of respect or dignity from the Islamic fundamentalists. Only the end of the Iranian regime will free women and girls from all the forms of slavery they suffer.

Muslim Britain: More people attend mosques than Church of England

Muslims in Great Britain are asking for greater representation in the House of Lords, based on the apparent fact that there are more practicing Muslims in Britain today than practicing Anglicans. This from the Hindustan Times, with thanks to the many who sent this to me:

More people in Britain attend mosques than the Church of England. It is for the first time that Muslims have overtaken Anglicans. According to figures 930,000 Muslims attend a place of worship at least once a week, whereas only 916,000 Anglicans do the same. Muslim leaders are now claiming that, given such a rise of Islam in Britain, Muslims should receive a share of the privileged status of the Church of England.

A spokesman for David Hope, the Archbishop of York, second in the church hierarchy, said the archbishop had conceded defeat, but added: "He believes that many more people have an affinity to the church than the number recorded as having attended once on a Sunday." The figures were compiled from government and academic resources.

According to the 2001 census, three-quarters of the British population regards itself as Christian. Although there are no registers kept at mosques regarding attendance, but the census had included a question about religious adherence. Those figures have been further supported by surveys to give the first assessment of worshipping Muslims.

Although the census recorded 1.59 million Muslims but Ceri Peach, professor of social geography at Oxford University said the census could not record the correct balance because the question was voluntary. Academics believe the figure to be at least 1.8 million.

Tariq Modood, a professor of sociology at Bristol University has found that 62 per cent of Muslims pray in places of worship. The figure, after excluding young children, most of whom do not worship in mosques, is about 930,000. The figure is said to underestimate the number of practising Muslims. Many, it is said, pray at home.

Immigration from Eastern Europe and conversions are believed to be adding to the number of Muslims. Lord Ahmad Patel, a Labour peer said 10 extra seats should be allocated to other religions. The Church of England has 26 seats in the House of Lords. However, the recent figures do not include Catholics. The Catholic church has 1.5 million British worshippers.

Dhimmitude in San Antonio

Sarwat Husain of the San Antonio chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) insists that "Islam is compatible with tolerance, democracy, personal rights and equality before the law." Characteristically for CAIR, she intolerantly tars courageous and decent men such as Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson as bigots — but she never acknowledges that numerous Muslim voices in Iraq and around the world are loudly saying that Islam is not compatible with tolerance and democracy. Nor, of course, does she have anything to say about the numerous ways that traditional Islamic law denies personal rights and equality before the law to non-Muslims and women.

It would be refreshing for a Muslim commentator to deal with genuine questions about Islam's compatibility with Western notions of human rights head-on instead of denying that they exist and charging those who raise them with bigotry. After all, it was a Muslim, the Iranian Sufi Sheikh Tabandeh, who wrote a book-length critique of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Islamic grounds. I suppose he was a bigot also? This from MySa, with thanks to Nicolei:

As the Hajj season draws millions of Muslim pilgrims to Saudi Arabia, it is instructive to look in that direction and see what has come from there.

Islam influenced the Enlightenment in Europe, just as the Protestant Reformation did. Science, math, international finance, even the English language itself have been shaped by the world of Islam.

The region also yielded Abraham, the patriarch of Islam and two other monotheistic faiths, Christianity and Judaism.

With all of this in common, there can be no clash of civilizations, but you couldn't tell that from listening to some in the American media, including those who claim to be scholars.

Nor could you tell it listening to innumerable radical imams around the world. It is they who are making this into an explicit clash of civilizations, between Islamic Sharia and Western secular republicanism.

As James I. Smith, author of "Islam in America" says, "The growth of Islam during the early centuries of its existence was a difficult phenomenon for Western Christianity to comprehend, and misunderstanding, prejudice, fear and in some cases hatred have characterized much of the history of encounters between the two faiths."

One can understand this misunderstanding, prejudice, fear and hatred among uneducated groups of the West. But what about the educated?

Extremists such as Middle East commentator and author Daniel Pipes, terrorism expert Steve Emerson and preachers Pat Robinson and Jerry Vines should know better. As leaders and scholars in their own respective fields, instead of promoting hatred and misunderstanding, it is their obligation to teach their audiences the truth.

Shame on Ms. Husain for promoting hatred and misunderstanding instead of thoughtfully engaging what Pipes and Emerson (as well as Robertson and Vines) have really said.

The truth is that Islam is compatible with tolerance, democracy, personal rights and equality before the law.

When I look at the 1400-year history of the institutionalized oppression of the dhimmis under Islamic law, I have some trouble with this. I have even more trouble when I see that dhimmitude is a live concept that radical Muslims will happily institute wherever and whenever they can. What is Ms. Husain doing about that?

It is their responsibility to say that there is no clash among Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Until they do, it is up to their fellow citizens to stand against the prejudice, hatred and intolerance these extremists promote.

When moderate Americans remain silent, the extremists carry on.

Indeed. That's why I started Jihad Watch.

Moderate Americans must ask themselves: How can the second-largest religion, followed by one fifth of the population of the world, be terroristic, uncivilized, ignorant and a threat to the West and world peace?

Islam's 1.3 billion people live in all corners of the world, so there must be something inherently profound for it to reach that far and last more than 1,400 years.

The very meaning of Islam is peace and submission to God.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy understood this call to moderate America. In December 1999, he said, "I hope that in the next century we will come to terms with our abysmal ignorance of the Muslim world.

"Muslims aren't a bunch of wackos and nuts. They are decent, brilliant, talented people with a great civilization and traditions of their own, including legal traditions.

"America knows nothing about them. There are people in that part of the world with whom we are simply out of touch. That is a great challenge for the next century."

That next century is here. Let each one of us get actively engaged in learning about and cherishing the best in each other.

I'm ready when you are, Ms. Husain. But let us have an honest exchange, free of personal smears and distortions of Islamic theology, history, and present-day radicalism.

Is France on the way to becoming an Islamic state?

Barbara Amiel in the Telegraph frames the hijab debate in France in the same way that I framed it here last week: "The question is not whether French and Muslims can co-exist with each other so long as Muslim schoolgirls are bareheaded. Rather, it is the fundamental question of whether Muslim groups will become part of the French nation." (Thanks to Filtrat.)

France, wrote Luigi Barzini, wouldn't be the great and endearing country that it is, la lumière du monde, if its quarrelsome people had not been "moulded down the centuries by antagonisms and tensions between tribes, clans, cliques, classes, coteries, guilds, camarillas, sects, parties, factions, regions..." The French are ever at the barricades.

Last week the barricades were at the prime minister's office, the Matignon, where the government was discussing the awkward business of France's proposed new law designed to ban the Muslim headscarf from schools. The Bill, portentously named "Application of the Principle of Secularity", will go to the National Assembly on Wednesday, with a peppy addition to ban beards from schools as well.

Dominique de Villepin, the foreign minister, gravely explained that the law is not aimed at any particular minority, community or religion, though there is, he said, some difficulty in making the essential tolerance of it clear to Arab countries.

Domenica Perben, the justice minister, felt the whole thrust of the issue revolved around the equality of men and women - which clears up why the French may be forcibly shaving prematurely mature Sikh schoolboys: they are a gender offset for de-scarfed female Muslims.

France is facing the problem that dare not speak its name. Though French law prohibits the census from any reference to ethnic background or religion, many demographers estimate that as much as 20-30 per cent of the population under 25 is now Muslim. The streets, the traditional haunt of younger people, now belong to Muslim youths. In France, the phrase "les jeunes" is a politically correct way of referring to young Muslims.

Given current birth rates, it is not impossible that in 25 years France will have a Muslim majority. The consequences are dynamic: is it possible that secular France might become an Islamic state?

The situation is not dissimilar elsewhere in the EU. Europeans may at some young point in the 21st century have to decide whether they wish to retain the diluted but traditional Judaeo-Christian culture of their minority or have it replaced by the Islamic culture of the majority.

In theory, the cultural and legal assimilation of Europe's Muslims would be the ideal. This was supposed to be the notion behind the vision of the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, of a "French church of Islam" with homegrown imams.

But knowledgeable observers say his "moderate" Council of Muslims has made radical Islam the government-sanctioned norm for all Muslims.

For Islamists, assimilation is contamination since, in Professor Bernard Lewis's words, "Muslims must not sojourn in the land of the infidel". Intermarriage should be another route to assimilation, though in France this usually involves an Islamic male and often the wife converts to Islam.

Meanwhile, the state of Christendom in France is perilous. Catholics may not have reached the secular nirvana of the Church of England's working party that declared the Sunday Sabbath redundant, but French Catholicism, except for little pools of the faithful, is taken with the notion that their Church will be borne forward only if the next Pope is ready to "dialogue" with Islam - a code word that augurs dilution of the faith.

Currently, Islamists are only a fraction of France's Muslim population. In last week's demonstrations against the headscarf law, only 20,000 people turned out. But as in all radical movements, the young are the driving force. As their numbers increase, the militancy of Islam is likely to increase as well.

Europe's chickens are coming home to roost. The Great Powers used the Commonwealth or La Francophonie to continue the fiction of Empire. Large numbers of people were admitted mainly from North Africa.

The borders of mainland France seemed extended to include Algeria. Guest workers arrived to satisfy needs for cheap labour. Unloved by their host country, they were marginalised in shabby living conditions, with no attempt made to assimilate them. Political refugees and asylum seekers moved in.

Early arrivals, such as the White Russians or the Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters, never intended to assimilate. They were sitting out bad weather before returning home. More recent ones, who arrived because of Nato policies in the Balkans, have been greeted with hostility and distrust.

European countries are not organically immigrant societies. The groups that went to America in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries did so specifically to become Americans. They wanted to shed their past and, within a generation, they did. America's emphasis today on faith and God is just an echo of the founding Pilgrims for whom Christianity was central.

Their beliefs were reinforced by many Christian groups, from Baptists to Mennonites, all in search of religious freedom. These founding fathers decreed separation of church and state, not to make sure the nation was secular, as in France, but to make sure no state religion could interfere with religious freedom.

European countries have none of this melting-pot principle. You cannot become German or Italian with the same ease with which you become American. Also, into this very different European environment came a very different sort of immigrant - people who had no interest in assimilation at all.

They came as settlers, wanting to establish their own communities; at best they favoured a merger - at worst, a takeover. Their approach was nurtured by notions of multiculturalism, a creed appealing to intellectuals, administrators and enforcers, but having almost zero appeal to the home population.

The cultural abrasions that developed, especially between the rapidly growing Muslim community and the French, became the problem that could not be talked about. All respectable political parties, journalists and academics felt it too volatile and far too politically incorrect. The field was abandoned to extreme Right-wingers and nativists who, by default, established the unpleasant tone of the debate and became exclusive owners of a subject affecting the whole nation.

In the absence of openness, the government's response was a cover-up - or, rather, an uncovering: to outlaw Muslim headscarves, shave beards worn for reasons of faith, or ban crucifixes if too large. In Britain, some school Nativity plays were forbidden.

There seemed to be a genuine belief among governments that they could solve this problem by violating Western traditions of religious freedom and by outlawing their own cultural traditions. Far from alleviating the situation, this only aggravated it. Worse, it gave fodder to the extreme Right.

Tribal friction has only two solutions: groups will either unite in the manner of Normans and Saxons, melding into a society that may have different religious practices but subscribes to the same laws and values - in which case headscarves, beards and demographics don't matter a fig. Or they will follow the pattern of warring tribes throughout history.

The question is not whether French and Muslims can co-exist with each other so long as Muslim schoolgirls are bareheaded. Rather, it is the fundamental question of whether Muslim groups will become part of the French nation. This is not one of those old "querelles gauloises" that Barzini so loved. It is the fundamental dilemma of the new century.

Islamisation, Extremism and the Christians of Pakistan

A World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty News & Analysis from WEA RLC Principal Researcher and Writer, Elizabeth Kendal. Thanks to FreedomNow News:

QUID PRO QUO

On 6 June 2003, the WEA RLC produced a News & Analysis posting entitled "Pakistan: Islamisation or dictatorship or both?" That posting examined the relationship between Pakistan's President Musharraf and the Majlis Muttahida-e-Amal (MMA) - an alliance of six anti-West, pro-Taliban, pro-sharia, Islamic parties that hold the balance of power in Pakistan.

In August 2002, Musharraf amended the Constitution by decree (the Legal Framework Order) to give himself vastly increased powers. The October 2002 elections however, resulted in a hung parliament. Musharraf's military-backed Pakistan Muslim League-Qaid-e-Azam (PML-Q) won the most seats, but all opposition parties opposed Musharraf's constitutional amendments. During 2003 the MMA managed to strike a deal with Musharraf; to support the LFO in exchange for his acceptance of their Islamisation package. That package contains 17 points - seven are modifications of the LFO, ten relate to the Islamisation of society.

THE DEAL IS DONE

In late December 2003 the Pakistan Parliament passed the Seventeenth Amendment Bill, which asserts the validity of the Legal Framework Order (LFO), modified in accordance with the demands of the MMA. The amendments made by the Seventeenth Amendment Act and the modified Legal Framework Order, have now been incorporated into the text of the Constitution.

On 1 January 2004, General Musharraf secured a vote of confidence in both houses of parliament and four provincial assemblies, meaning he will remain in power until late 2007, and as military chief until the end of 2004.

Musharraf's success on both counts was due to the support of the MMA. So what has this cost in terms of quid pro quo with the MMA? Details of any deal are proving extremely difficult to find. However, some things are self-evident. President Musharraf's dependence upon the MMA severely limits his ability to deal with Islamist extremism and terrorism, and this puts Musharraf in a hard place. He must appease the U.S. for military aid, and he must appease the mullahs and the MMA for regime survival. This seriously compromises security for Christians in Pakistan. Ultimately it also compromises Musharraf's own security.

RESURGENT EXTREMISM

Reuters reported on 16 January 2004 that the car bomb that exploded outside the Holy Trinity Cathedral/Bible Society complex in Karachi on 15 January "was a fertiliser bomb very much similar to what was used in the U.S consulate". The U.S. Consulate in Karachi (1 km from the Holy Trinity Cathedral) was bombed in June 2002. That attack was attributed to Al-Almi, a splinter faction of Harkat-ul Mujahideen, a group fighting in Kashmir.

TIME magazine reported in the 26 January issue that the militant Islamist group Jaish-e-Muhammad (also fighting in Kashmir) was behind the 25 December 2003 assassination attempt on Musharraf, and that this group is also linked to the June 2002 bombing of the U.S. consulate in Karachi.

Regarding the assassination attempt, TIME magazine comments (and we can apply this to the Bible Society bombing as well), "That Jaish-e-Muhammad has the capacity to launch sophisticated attacks on the President, possibly with insider help, is a situation partly of Musharraf's making. The government in Islamabad has long coddled militant Islamic groups, encouraging them first to help drive the Soviets out of neighboring Afghanistan and later to torment Indian troops in the part of the disputed state of Kashmir that is under Indian control.

"Under pressure from Washington, he (Musharraf) banned various militant organizations in January 2002, but he left their leaders largely unfettered and allowed the organizations to reconstitute under new names. Pakistan's intelligence services, which had helped build up the ground and infiltrate its fighters into Indian-controlled Kashmir, were hesitant to crack down, even after Jaish-e-Muhammad began unleashing religious terrorism within Pakistan."

Compass Direct reported on 23 January that Pakistani Christian teenager, Zeeshan Gill (16), was kidnapped for more than two weeks in November 2003 by Islamist militants training fighters for jihad in Kashmir. Zeeshan was taken to Jamia al Qasim al Aloom Islamic school (madrasa), beaten, forced to recite the Islamic creed, and threatened with death. He escaped home to his mother and they have fled into hiding.

Compass Direct reports, "According to Joseph Francis of the Lahore-based Center for Legal Aid and Assistance Settlement (CLAAS), the Gill family's dilemma is not unusual among Pakistan's tiny Christian minority." Joseph Francis told Compass Direct that CLAAS lawyers represented another boy who had been kidnapped as a minor. It was ordered that he be released from the madrasa. Shortly after his return to his mother, he was re-kidnapped and sent straight to Kashmir. No one knows his whereabouts.

Until the Pakistan government stops supporting the Kashmir jihad, dismantles the terror networks and cuts off their lifelines - madrasas and funds - the Christian community will remain at great risk.

REPORT FROM THE INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP
Unfulfilled Promises: Pakistan's Failure to Tackle Extremism
16 January 2004

The International Crisis Group has released a detailed report analysing and condemning Pakistan's lack of action against extremist Islamist organisations and madrasas. The ICG report notes that the Pakistan government appears to be "more concerned about appeasing a valuable ally [MMA] than tackling the threats of terrorism and extremism in earnest."

The ICG accuses the government of refusing to invoke anti-terrorism laws against the leaders and members of banned militant Islamist organisations or dismantle their infrastructure. Hence when these groups are banned, they simply re-surface with new names and continue operations.

The government's failure to reform the jihadi madrasas is rooted in two issues - government support for the Kashmir jihad, and government dependence on MMA support for regime survival.

MADRASA REFORM & SECTARIAN VIOLENCE

The ICG reports details the links between the mullahs, the MMA and the madrasas and comments that "to appease the clergy and to gain the religious parties' support for the LFO, President Musharraf placed madrasa reform on the backburner".

"President Musharraf's MMA allies have categorically rejected, with a public campaign, government reforms of madrasas and any proposed laws to regulate their functioning, including curricula and finances." (ICG p 9)

Not only has madrasa reform gone on the backburner, but the issue of terrorist financing has been sidestepped altogether. ICG reports, "Within Pakistan, the jihadi madrasa also continues to play a central role in promoting sectarian hatred and violence." And, "Sectarian tensions are bound to increase so long as the jihadi madrasa is allowed to preach religious intolerance." (ICG p 10)

HAMSTRUNG

Excerpts from ICG report page 16, under the heading "Strategies of Regime Survival" and subheading "Appeasing the Mullahs": "President Musharraf's pledges in 2002 to confront and eliminate Islamist extremism were compromised by his desire to obtain MMA support for controversial constitutional amendments and indeed his presidency.

Now that the MMA has played a pivotal role in giving the LFO constitutional cover and helping Musharraf gain a vote of confidence to extend his presidency until 2007, the military-run government may be even less likely to risk taking effective action against the religious alliance and its many extremist offshoots.

"The quid pro quo for Musharraf's deal with the mullahs might never be officially revealed but can be gauged, at least partially, through the MMA's demands. Even prior to the December 2003 agreement, it had insisted upon official support for Islamisation in return for acceptance of the LFO and Musharraf's dual hats of president and chief of army staff. In June 2003, PML-Q leader Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain admitted that the government had accepted ten MMA demands for Islamisation, in addition to pledging government funding to 8,000 madrasas. The ten included legislation in accordance with the recommendations of the Council of Islamic Ideology; restructuring the economy, education and media along Islamic lines; ensuring rights for women in accordance with Islamic injunctions; and giving Islamic subjects equal importance with other fields of study in all educational institutions."

MMA's MASS CONTACT CAMPAIGN

On Sunday 18 January the MMA launched a "mass contact campaign" for the enforcement of its 17-point Islamisation programme, which it describes as "the only solution to the country's many problems".

MMA chief Qazi Hussain Ahmad said that Pakistan had to come out from under American influence, that "Kashmir Solidarity Day" should be celebrated nationwide on 5 February. Ahmad read out the MMA 17-point Islamisation package and said, "We want to enforce true Islamic system in the country and the 17 points covers all aspects of Nizam-i-Shariat [Islamic law] whose implementation would establish Nizam-i-Mustafa [Islamic system] in the country."

INCREMENTAL ISLAMISATION (ICG p 19)

The ICG report comments on the shari'a bill passed by the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) Assembly in June 2003, which pledges to impose "Allah's rule on earth through His pious men".

"Under another proposed law, yet to be presented to the provincial parliament, the MMA government intends to set up a hasba (accountability) department and ombudsman's offices at the provincial, district and local levels to ensure the enforcement of Islamic laws. Each ombudsman will have under his command a hasba force, a Pakistani version of the Taliban's vice and virtue police."

The ICG notes that, "The MMA's policies in the NWFP have encouraged extremists in other provinces and at the centre to follow suit." The report then details cases of Islamist groups in Baluchistan, the Punjab, Lahore, and Karachi, illegally enforcing elements of Islamic law, primarily in relation to depictions women in advertising, not only with impunity, but support from the national government.

"After the MMA's support for the Seventeenth Amendment, Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Jamali emphasised that his party, the PML-QA [Musharraf's military-backed party], and the MMA are 'natural allies', and that both 'favour...implementing [a] complete Islamic system in the country'."

In Europe, is it a matter of fear, or loathing?

Robin Shepherd in the Washington Post contributes a useful summation of the Kilroy-Silk affair in Britain, which he sees as heralding "tectonic shifts" that are underway in Europe. (Thanks to Ruth King.)

It's the biggest political correctness flap Britain has seen in years. It has pitted one man against the BBC -- Britain's highbrow, purportedly impartial state television network -- and unleashed a national fracas over what may or may not be said about the hottest topic of the moment: Islam and the West. Earlier this month, Robert Kilroy-Silk, a one time Labour MP and for 17 years the host of one of British television's most successful daily talk shows, let loose with a few thoughts about the Arab world. In a column for the mass circulation Sunday Express newspaper, under the deliberately provocative headline "We owe Arabs nothing," he opined, in part, as follows:

"Apart from oil -- which was discovered, is produced and is paid for by the West -- what do [Arab countries] contribute? . . . They should go down on their knees and thank God for the munificence of the United States. What do they think we feel about them? . . . That we admire them for the cold-blooded killings in Mombasa, Yemen and elsewhere? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors?"

The comments exploded in the British media. The Guardian newspaper, the house journal of both the British left and the BBC, lambasted them as "boorish, ignorant and offensive." Kilroy, as both he and his show are known, was promptly suspended by the BBC. Muslim affairs commentator Faisal Bodi, writing in the Guardian, thereupon declared: "Finally, it's safe to turn on your TV. Britain's minority communities can rise this morning in the knowledge that they will no longer be assailed by a vainglorious hatemonger affecting social concern on their screens." Ten days ago, after an extended media furor, Kilroy was forced to step down. He may even face prosecution under race relations legislation that carries a maximum sentence of seven years in jail.

As crude as Kilroy's comments were, the virulent reaction to them was far out of proportion to his actual sin. The full text of his remarks reveals that his quarrel was with Arab governments and those religious leaders who use their positions to whip up a frenzy of anti-Western sentiment among their peoples. His phrasing is careless and smacks of generalization. But surely this is small justification for hounding a man out of his job, let alone threatening to jail him. The swiftness of Kilroy's demise points to something more than a simple scrap over political correctness. It's a symptom of a new European reality: surging growth among Muslim populations and establishment nervousness over how to deal with them -- a nervousness that threatens to stifle much-needed debate over events in the Middle East and Muslim integration at home.

Western Europe's 15 million-strong Muslim community is growing in both power and size. The birth rate among Muslims in Europe is three times that of non-Muslims. While the Muslim population could double by 2015, the non-Muslim population is expected to shrink by 3.5 percent. And this is not a community that lives in the shadows. As it grows, it is also flexing its political muscle. As the columnist Mark Steyn, writing in defense of Kilroy in the right-leaning Daily Telegraph, put it: "[W]hen free speech, artistic expression, feminism and other totems of western pluralism clash directly with the Islamic lobby, Islam more often than not wins."

Bodi himself may have been acknowledging more than he wished to in his revealing observation that the BBC was "left with little choice" in ditching Kilroy because of the "increasing organization of the Muslim community," which put out flyers detailing "names and contacts of editors at the BBC and the Sunday Express, and instructions on how to make complaints."

This would not be a problem if it weren't for the distressing but unavoidable reality that small but significant sections of that growing Muslim community are either outright hostile to or at least ambivalent toward Western values. Skeptical? Consider the following: A survey conducted by the ICM polling agency and published in December 2002 showed that more than 10 percent of Britain's 1.5 million Muslims believed that further attacks by al Qaeda on the United States would be legitimate, and 8 percent supported such attacks against Britain. More than half of those polled refused to accept al Qaeda's guilt in the 9/11 attacks and more than two-thirds believed the war on terror to be a war on Islam.

That's just Britain. France's Muslim population, which is if anything more disaffected and less well-integrated, numbers upwards of 6 million, or 10 percent of the population. Within 20 years, according to some estimates, half of all people under 18 in the Netherlands will be Muslim.

Like America, Britain and Europe have come a long way since the days when racism was a fact of daily life for ethnic minorities and recent immigrants. This is not to say that racism has been wiped out: In recent years, openly racist political groups have made small but significant inroads in local elections in the north of England, while France's Jean Marie Le Pen, who appears to hate Arabs and Jews with equal fervor, came in second in presidential elections in 2002. But by and large, bigotry against immigrants and minorities is now frowned upon in mainstream society.

Much of the credit for this is due to a remarkably effective partnership formed in the 1960s and '70s between leftist activists -- who in most cases were much more welcoming to immigrants than their counterparts on the right, and therefore mopped up most of the Muslim vote -- and post-Holocaust political establishments determined to stamp out racism in all its forms.

Now, however, that partnership has mutated along with wider changes in politics and society. Muslim groups have combined with and helped reenergize a European left that is to a significant degree defined these days by a complementary hostility to the United States and to Israel -- both of which the left sees as representative of the worst excesses of capitalism and imperialism. That hostility is shared by substantial sections of the Muslim community, more than 80 percent of which voted for Labour in Britain's 1997 general elections. Both elements of this new partnership are highly sensitive to any criticism of Islam, seeing in it de facto justification for the policies of governments they implacably oppose. For the equal and opposite reason, criticism of Israel and the United States is welcomed and encouraged, however unbalanced and fanatical it may be.

Alongside this political alliance stands a powerful center-left establishment -- epitomized by the BBC itself -- that is also unremitting in its hostility to Israel and broadly sympathetic to the Arab and Muslim cause, for reasons that some attribute to rising anti-Semitism, others to post-imperial guilt, and many more to an anti-Americanism that appears to grow stronger by the day.

Thus it is that Tom Paulin, a left-wing Oxford academic and poet and a regular contributor to the BBC's "Newsnight Review" program, could, in 2002, say to an Egyptian newspaper about Brooklyn-born Jews living on the West Bank: "I think they should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them," and get away with it, suffering no sanctions of any kind from the same BBC that silenced Kilroy.

Paulin's outburst reveals how smoothly anti-Israeli prejudices slip into anti-American clothing -- it is "Brooklyn-born" Jews who are marked for death. Anti-Americanism is the acceptable face of European bigotry in a way that anti-Semitism is not.

On a continent whose face is rapidly changing, and where memories of the Holocaust are fading fast, new rules of engagement are emerging: You upset the Muslim community at your peril, but the social and political consequences of alienating the much smaller and much more assimilated Jewish communities are negligible.

Seen in this light, the brouhaha over Kilroy's comments offers a perfect illustration of the ruthless attitude being encountered by Islam's critics in Europe. Had he directed his polemic against Israelis or Americans, it hardly seems likely that the BBC, which allows free rein to many of its contributors to do both, would have kicked up such a fuss.

The BBC and its supporters have fallen all over themselves to say that the Kilroy affair is not about free speech, a plainly ludicrous argument. But this case is no ordinary recycling of the familiar pros and cons which that discussion from time to time produces. Tectonic shifts are underway in Europe, reconfiguring the political and social landscape. Kilroy's crime, if he committed one, is that he failed to see that coming.

Iraqi Christians targeted for working with Americans

A chilling story from the Washington Post on how Christians in Iraq who work with American forces there are being targeted for murder. The article says nothing about the larger-scale targeting of Iraqi Christians whether they are working for Americans or not, but it is refreshing to see the major media take any notice of this at all:

There was only one window left in the blue Besta minivan parked in Khajik Serkis's front yard Friday: the windshield, riddled with bullet holes at eye level and spattered with blood. Inside were more holes in the upholstered seats, a carpet of glass shards and a woman's patterned shawl, crumpled and stained red. About 6:30 Wednesday morning, Serkis was driving nine women from Baghdad to their jobs washing soldiers' laundry at a U.S. military base about 30 miles west. It was still dark, and the women were half-asleep, dozing with the rhythm of the road. Some were related; all were friends from the capital's close-knit minority Christian community.

"I heard shouting and woke up. The woman next to me said her finger was gone," said Maggie Aziz, 49, whose left ankle was shattered by a bullet. "The driver was praying to God, and bullets were coming at us like rain. I reached to help the woman in the front seat, but she was shot in the mouth and died."

According to the survivors, the van was attacked by several gunmen in an Opel sedan as they passed through Fallujah, a center of violent Sunni Muslim resistance to the U.S. occupation. They said the gunmen chased the van, shooting continuously as Serkis sped up and tried to evade them. Four women were killed; Serkis and four other women were wounded. In recent weeks, Iraqi insurgents have increasingly shifted the focus of their attacks from American troops to Iraqis cooperating with the occupying force. On Sunday, a car bomb exploded outside the main gate of a U.S. compound in Baghdad as many Iraqis were reporting for work, killing 31 and wounding 120.

In another assault on Iraqi civilians, a bomb exploded Thursday night in an Iraqi Communist Party office here, killing two people, just after a large meeting had ended. Also Thursday, a Muslim woman, Samirah Khalif, 38, a lawyer who worked at another U.S. military base north of the capital, was assaulted and killed by unknown assailants in her home near the base. Relatives at the mourning ceremony in Baghdad on Friday said her house was robbed and burned and that they believed the attackers were retaliating because of her work with the U.S. military.

A U.S. military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, said late Thursday that anti-American forces in Iraq were trying to "send a message of terror to these people: that if you work for the coalition, if you worked alongside and tried to support the coalition, we can reach out and touch you."

In the quiet, largely Christian neighborhood where Serkis and most of his passengers lived, there was no doubt Friday among survivors and community leaders that the van was targeted by extremist groups that want to drive a wedge between U.S. forces and the Iraqi populace.

Serkis said the attackers wore scarves over their faces and that he and two other van drivers took the same route through Fallujah every day to the base, located in the nearby town of Habbaniya. He said he was on a deserted stretch of road when he saw the Opel parked by the side.

"They started chasing me when I sped up, and when I slowed down to try and get away, they pulled in front and started shooting back," he said. "They were definitely trying to kill us, and they were aiming at people's heads."

Aziz, who lay on a couch in her apartment Friday with her injured leg wrapped in bandages, said that as the men were shooting from the sedan, the attackers and victims could see each other clearly. "We shouted that we were women and pleaded with them to stop, but they didn't," she said.

Residents said they were stunned that the attackers would deliberately kill women in a society where women are traditionally respected and sheltered, and the brutal scare tactic already seemed to be working. Relatives said the rest of the 25 women employed in the laundry at the U.S. military base in Habbaniya had quit their jobs Thursday.

"My wife was so happy when she got this job, because we needed the money badly," said Briesh Kivov Stepan, 59, a disabled veteran of the Iran-Iraq war who is married to Aziz. "The Americans were very good to her, to all of us, but now none of the women want to go back to that base. They'll have to find men to work in the laundry. It's too dangerous."

After the attack, survivors and their relatives encountered hostility in Fallujah, first when they tried to seek medical treatment and later when they went to retrieve the damaged minivan, according to Serkis and other witnesses.

Serkis said that when he reached the hospital there, he lied and said his passengers were teachers he was taking to a school. But when some medical staff learned the truth, he said, "they refused to continue treating us and told us to go to the Jordanian hospital," located in the capital.

On Thursday, when Serkis's brother, Shant, drove back to Fallujah to pick up the van at a police station, he said a crowd of people in the streets were "very happy about what had happened. They said it was jihad, and they knew that only Christian people worked in the American bases."

Residents said that although some Muslims are employed at U.S. bases, most low-wage workers hired by several European contractors in Baghdad are Christian. Several of the dead and injured women, including Aziz, had worked at other U.S. bases before shifting to the Habbaniya location last month.

At gatherings Friday in homes of survivors of the minivan attack, residents from the small Armenian and Assyrian Christian communities said they strongly supported the American mission in Iraq but that they had good long-term relations with Sunni Muslims and other groups.

"We were born and raised here, and our community gets along well with everyone," Stepan said. "Now my wife is injured and cannot work. Women trying to support their children have been killed. Why would anyone do such a thing? They only want to frighten people and create chaos."

From PLO terrorist to born-again Christian

Rosie DiManno of the Toronto Star here profiles Walid Shoebat, a Muslim convert to Christianity whose days as a terrorist in the PLO have given way to a fervent Christian Zionism. The article is interesting on a number of levels, including DiManno's own strange take on Shoebat — beginning with the contradiction in her labeling him a "secular terrorist" even though he grew up a "Jew-hating Muslim." (Thanks to Nonie Darwish.)

Perhaps it's not so long or strange a trip from political terrorist to religious fundamentalist.

The secular terrorist, it might even be said, has become something of an endangered species these days, when so many of the world's violent struggles have been infused with religious justification. Piety serves as both motivating tool (recruiting foot soldiers from among the exploited believers) and deflective shield (interpreting scripture to rationalize murder and suppress opposition).

Walid Shoebat grew up a zealous, Jew-hating Muslim in the West Bank, progressing from a boy who threw stones to a young man who lobbed bombs.

He is now a born-again California Christian Zionist, having renounced both violence and Islam, which he persists in viewing as fatally intertwined — a position that will justifiably appall hundreds of millions of Muslims who neither practise nor condone violent tactics, while causing a great many Jews to just as understandably recoil from his ardent friendship, given that the fundamental Christian literalists love Jews only insofar as they can serve their End of Days purpose, as prophesied in Revelation.

How silly of Shoebat to persist in seeing violence and Islam as fatally intertwined! Has DiManno ever heard of Osama bin Laden, or Abdullah Azzam, or Omar Bakri, or Abu Hamza Al-Masri, or Abu Bakr Bashir, or Sayyid Qutb, or Syed Abul Ala Maududi, or Hasan Al-Banna, or any of the multitudinous others who have insisted, through their teachings on jihad, that violence and Islam are indeed intertwined?

Sure, there are millions of non-terrorist, non-violent Muslims, but where are their theorists? Where are they standing up and combating radical Islamic theology among Muslims? In the New York Sun today, Diane Ravitch says this of Irshad Manji: "In the aftermath of September 11, many people wondered out loud 'Where are the moderate Muslims?' When would we hear from thoughtful Muslims who were as offended by the poisonous hatred of fundamentalist Islam as the rest of us? Judging from Irshad Manji's 'The Trouble With Islam,' that near-deafening silence now may have ended." That's great, but where are all the other Manjis? You mean to tell me that we can only muster one courageous moderate Muslim spokesperson in two and a half years?

DiManno is faulting Shoebat for making an equation that Muslims are laboring strenuously to make around the world today.

Israel has pitifully few friends these days, assailed on all sides by a new version of anti-Zionism that's no more than the old version of anti-Semitism — denial of Israel's right to exist, but couched in a different language: the argot of occupation and Israel's perceived abuse of power, coupled with an alarming resurgence of pure anti-Semitism in Europe, a robust bigotry that doesn't even pretend to be what it's not, though hardly more virtuous for its transparency. This isolation might account for Israel forging an unholy alliance with the Christian right, though I'm prepared to accept that many righteous Christians have a genuine affection for Israel, a commitment to its political survival, and do not merely support the state as a Biblical prerequisite for apocalyptic annihilation and the dawning of the New Jerusalem.

In that context, maybe it doesn't matter much that Shoebat is a Christian fundamentalist, widely condemned as a traitor to Palestine, excoriated for betraying his family, his original Muslim faith and his troubled people. For which Shoebat does not apologize.

Why should he apologize? He has to live out the rest of his life under the death sentence given to apostates. If his family is made up of decent people, they should love him regardless of his religious faith. And why is acknowledging Israel's right to exist a betrayal of his people? Why cannot one support both Israel and Palestine? What about a two-state solution? It has been lost in jihadist intransigence: the biggest enemy to a negotiated peace is Hamas and its allies.

He's had his epiphany, and he speaks with the moral certitude of the enthusiastically converted. "The more you accept the teachings of the Bible, the more peaceful you become. The more you accept the teachings of the Qur'an, the more violent you will become."

This is patently absurd. It is also offensive. But there is truth in the far more qualified observation that Qur'anic teachings (like Biblical teachings, actually) have been disgracefully distorted in some quarters to promote jihad and to demonize the West, Christians and Jews and moderate Muslims alike.

What's that? Biblical teachings have been disgracefully distorted to promote jihad? DiManno's anxiety to repeat PC slogans is making her careless. In any case, why is it absurd and offensive to assert that the Bible contains more peaceful teachings than does the Qur'an? Has DiManno read either? This is not the same thing as saying that Christians have always been peaceful and Muslims violent. That really would be absurd. But evidently PC sensibilities also require that we assume that all religious texts are absolutely equal in their ability to inspire both peace and violence. I don't know why that must be the case. It is as absurd as insisting that all cars are equal in their gas mileage or that all schools provide exactly the same quality of education.

Although, it must be noted, even moderate Muslim states have little tolerance for Israel. Hating Israel is a common denominator and not exclusive to Muslim nations.

Hence the mythologizing of Palestinians, transformed these past 20 years into the most darling and blessed of the oppressed. It lends Palestinian terrorism a certain qualified éclat, distinguishing it from the garden-variety version of killers.

Shoebat was once a terrorist. To that extent, he knows whereof he speaks. Though I doubt whether his terrorist CV will gain him much street cred among Palestinians, or Canadians blindly supportive of the Palestinian cause.

The 43-year-old computer programmer was brought to Toronto yesterday by the local chapter of Betar Tagar, an international Zionist organization, to participate in a radio program, entitled Let's Talk Peace, emanating from the University of Toronto. The format had Shoebat interviewed in front of a student audience for a two-hour live taping of a radio show hosted by New York-based Rabia Tovia Singer. It's the first time the show, heard in Israel, has been taken to any university campus. Canada was picked, says Singer, because the case for Israel is not being made, or properly heard, in this country, where pro-Israeli voices have sometimes been silenced by Palestinian activism on campuses.

"The world does not see the truth about what's happening in the West Bank," Shoebat told the Star in an interview yesterday afternoon. "My purpose is to tell the West that they aren't getting the real picture, that what they're seeing is propaganda. I know the truth because I was there, I was part of it. And the truth is, we wanted to kill Jews long before the occupation. I wanted to kill Jews."

Shoebat's mother is a blonde, blue-eyed American Christian who converted to Islam upon marriage, his father a Palestinian Arab and professor of Islamic studies. Born in a village near Bethlehem, Shoebat grew up immersed in Islam but also steeped in hatred for Jews, even though he never met one until his teens. Even during the two years when he attended a Lutheran school in Jericho, says Shoebat, he was taught to vilify Jews. "I remember going to a zoo in Israel where they had a monkey that smoked cigarettes. We believed that monkey's ancestors were Jews."

Hmm. Why might that be? Might it be because the Qur'an says that Allah turned Jews into pigs and monkeys (suras 2:62-65, 5:59-60, and 7:166)? I am sure that DiManno doesn't know that those passages exist. I am waiting for the courageous moderate Muslim multitudes to fashion an exegesis of them that rules out race hatred.

"My life as a modern-day slave"

Mende Nazer, former slave

Slavery is taken for granted in the Qur'an, and is still practiced in the Islamic world — most notoriously in Sudan, from which this report comes. It is of interest to those who are concerned about the equality of rights of all people in Islamic societies as an example of the fact that Muslim radicals will enforce Sharia in its fullness, including its institutionalized discrimination against non-Muslim dhimmis and women. This report comes from BBC News, with thanks to FreedomNowNews:

On the surface, Mende Nazer is a bright, bubbly, confident young woman, quick to break into a beautiful infectious smile, which lights up her whole face.

Nothing to suggest that she spent eight years of her life as a slave after being captured from her village in Sudan's Nuba Mountains.

But the smile soon disappears when she talks about her past and her eyes start to well up with tears.

"I still have nightmares," she told BBC News Online in London three years after she managed to escape to freedom.

'Unclean'

She was just 12 when one night her village was targeted by Arab slave raiders, who snatched her away from her loving family to be a slave in far away Khartoum.

The story of her capture and life in servitude, published in her book Slave, reads like something from the Middle Ages but it happened in the early 1990s and she says this is still the lot of many young girls from southern Sudan.

She worked from first thing in the morning until late at night, washing, cleaning and ironing, without any pay or days off, sleeping in a locked shed in the garden.

At first, her mistress thought she was unclean and diseased, so she wouldn't let Mende touch the children.

But after a while, looking after the children and cooking for the family were added to her list of duties.

She only ate the scraps left by her mistress' family - "like an animal," she said.

Eating these leftovers on her own in the kitchen was particularly demeaning for her, as sharing food is a central part of her Nuba culture, where no-one eats alone.

She was often beaten and on one occasion, after preparing fried eggs instead of poached eggs, her mistress "seized the ladle out of the frying pan, and thrust the burning hot metal against my forearm.

"I cried out in agony, as she ground it, sizzling, into my skin," she wrote.

Her left arm is still badly scarred.

'Terrified'

This is the life she was leading at the start of the 21st century.

Then, a train of events began which would eventually lead to her freedom.

Her mistress's sister, married to a Sudanese diplomat in London, had twins, so she was "given" to her to help her out.

"Well, it's easy for us to get you another abda [slave]... whereas I understand it's impossible for people to find one in London," the wife of a slave-dealer told her mistress.

Her new "owners" returned on holiday to Sudan, leaving her in the custody of some colleagues and she realised this was her chance to escape.

But she spoke no English and had no concept of claiming asylum or how to survive in a bustling city of eight million people.

She went up to anyone she saw on London's streets who looked like they could be from southern Sudan and greeted them in Arabic.

After receiving endless quizzical looks and dismissals, she found someone working in a garage from Sudan and who knew someone from the Nuba Mountains.

A few days later, they waited for her outside her owner's house and told her to run away.

What was that first taste of freedom like?

"I was terrified that they would come and capture me again," she says.

After eight years of being beaten and threatened into submission, physical freedom was one thing, mental emancipation would take far longer.

Family reunion

When she first escaped, her family was taken to Khartoum and told to try and persuade her to return home.

They were told she had been kidnapped and forced to renounce Islam and convert to Christianity.

But once the family spoke to her, she was able to tell them her true story and is now in regular contact with them.

But she can't go to Sudan and so once every three months or so, her mother makes a day-long trip by lorry from her village to a town where there is a telephone, so they can talk.

She hopes one day to meet them again - if she can get them to another country.

Although Slave has already been published in Germany, she says she is worried that the publicity surrounding its release in the UK might cause more trouble for her family.

"I could keep quiet because I've had my freedom but while others are still in slavery in Sudan, a part of me is, too," she says.

Launching the book and traipsing from one media interview to another, stoking up all the painful memories, is hugely stressful but she says this is the one thing she can do to help those she left behind.

Last year, a study estimated that more than 11,000 southern Sudanese had been abducted in 20 years, many of whom probably remain in bondage.

Islamic scholar: women driving cars is a sinful thing

Al-Qarni

More Wahhabi follies: a Saudi cleric is under fire for giving people the impression that he was in favor of allowing women to drive cars. This rarified silliness is only worthy of note because Saudi Wahhabism has been spread all over the world via Saudi oil billions. It is a significant presence among Muslims in America. It is clear that just as the Wahhabis insist on enforcing the Sharia's rulings on women down to the last detail, so also will they enforce the dhimmi oppression of non-Muslims wherever and whenever they can. This from Arab News:

MAKKAH, 25 January 2004 — Sheikh Ayed Al-Qarni, the well-known Islamic scholar, has denied telling the press that it was permissible for women to drive cars in Saudi Arabia. Al-Qarni was responding to reports in Arab News and other papers published two weeks ago.

“I have recently stated that the issue of women not driving cars is not considered to be one of the basics of our religion. What I meant by that was that it is a subsidiary issue. The statement was used against me. It was then portrayed as if I had said it was permissible for women to drive cars in our country and this is something that is totally wrong,” he told Al-Madinah newspaper.

The sheikh said he did not understand how his statement to the press could have been misused when he made it clear that he would not allow his own daughters or sisters to drive.

Al-Qarni also said he mentioned clearly that such an issue should be brought up with the relevant religious institution. What he meant, he said, was that the senior Islamic scholars in the Kingdom had already issued fatwas (religious edicts) saying that women driving cars was sinful and not permissible in Islam. “My statements were misused. This is not the right way for those who search for the truth,” he said. He set out four statements as clarification:

“One: I do not see women driving cars in our country because of the consequences that would spring from it such as the spread of corruption, women uncovering their hair and faces, mingling between the sexes, men being alone with women and the destruction of the family and society in whole.

“Two: Sadd Al-Dharaie principle (the closing of doors which could lead to corruption or sinful actions) is one of the values in our religion. Women driving cars is a sinful thing. It is used by those who want to wage a war against purity and hijab.

“Three: One of the principles of our religion is protecting honor and moral values. Women driving cars would threaten these principles because of the dire consequences resulting from it.

“Four: Such public issues must be brought up with the certified religious institution who have the say in such matters as I have said many times before.”

Female genital mutilation in Italy

Female genital mutilation is not strictly speaking an Islamic practice. It is not found in the Qur'an or in generally accepted ahadith. However, it is widespread in some Muslim countries (most notably Egypt), and is often justified on Islamic grounds -- as I demonstrate in Islam Unveiled. Now it has come, in a supposedly modified and humane from, to Italy. The larger concern, even beyond the human rights of the girls involved, is the question of how far will multiculturalism go? Can it be resisted on human rights grounds? If not -- and if every custom from around the world must be accepted and officially sanctioned in the West in the name of tolerance -- how will Europe prevent the Sharia and dhimmitude from coming in as well? On what basis can a multiculturalist society stop them, after it has relativized all moral standards? This report is from the The Star, with thanks to Twostellas:

Health authorities in Florence have sparked an outcry after they officially welcomed a version of female circumcision.

A gynaecologist in Florence is proposing to perform a "light" version of infibulation, the mutilation of the genitalia of young girls which is practised in many African countries.

Dr Omar Abdul Kadir, a gynaecologist who has been working in Florence for several years, claims that his operation satisfies the traditional demands for the operation of many African mothers, yet causes neither pain nor damage.

But the proposal, and its acceptance by the local health authority, has outraged Italians campaigning against female genital mutilation (FGM).

Cristiana Scoppa, who works for Aidos, a Rome-based non-governmental organisation working in Third World countries on women's development, says the operation will break Italian law.

"You can be prosecuted for cutting an organ that is healthy," she said. "If the damage is so big as to eliminate the organ, you can get 12 years in prison."

Kadir's procedure involves making a small hole in the girl's clitoris and drawing a drop of blood.

He said: "We have proposed to make a small, pinhole-sized puncture in the clitoris of the child after applying a local anaesthetic, making a drop of blood appear. The little girl will then go home to celebrate this type of 'baptism'."

Kadir said he had received support from immigrants from 10 African countries, who wrote in a joint statement: "It is not enough merely to say one is opposed to infibulation.

"While some of us have realised that this practice is useless, cruel and not prescribed by religion, others among us are too attached to their culture and do not accept that the mutilation has negative consequences for their daughters."

The proposal for the operation to be performed in Florence's hospitals will go to the regional health authority's bio-ethics committee in March. It would have to be agreed at regional level before hospitals could carry out the procedure.

A councillor on Florence's health authority, Enrico Rossi, said: "The opinion of the regional committee is fundamental, but we must also involve women immigrants in the decision-making process.

"We are dealing with a delicate question which must be confronted without prejudice, and we must listen to all opinions."

But Aidos, which is working to combat the practice in many African countries, is incensed that it might be about to take root in Italy.

Scoppa said: "The reason for the operation is to control women's sexuality.

"But they don't say that is the reason, they say it is tradition. It's like the many Italian families who do not go to church but who send their children to be baptised because it has always been like that and the parents want to do that. It's the power of custom.

"But the custom can be changed. You will not get people to give up FGM unless you work on the demand for FGM.

Working on the demand means working within the culture.

But if you legitimise this in a hospital in Italy, it legitimises the whole cultural belief system that is behind it."

Scoppa is also sceptical that Kadir's proposed light mutilation will prevent girls being mutilated in traditional fashion later on, with the removal of most of the genitals and the stitching up of what is left to form a cover over the vagina.

British MP fired for suicide bomber sympathy

British MP Jenny Tonge was also the Liberal Democrats' spokeswoman for children, until she was removed for suggesting that if she lived in the PA, she'd become a suicide bomber too. It is refreshing that this astounding example of moral confusion was not met with supine dhimmitude from Liberal Democratic officials. The report is from the Guardian, with thanks to nevermindlv:

Charles Kennedy has asked Jenny Tonge to step down as the Liberal Democrats' spokeswoman for children following her claim that she might consider becoming a suicide bomber if she lived in the Palestinian territories. The MP made her remarks at a meeting of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign [PSC] on Wednesday, and has subsequently insisted she did not mean to condone suicide bombings.

Yesterday the party distanced itself from the MP, with a spokesman saying: "Jenny Tonge was expressing her personal views. The Liberal Democrats do not condone terrorism."

But Dr Tonge and the Lib Dems have continued to suffer a barrage of criticism, including a demand from the shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, that Mr Kennedy condemn his colleague.

Mr Ancram claimed the party's response to Dr Tonge's remarks was "fainthearted" and asked the Lib Dem leader whether he believed it would "satisfy those who have suffered at the hands of suicide bombers".

"I urge you to personally intervene by distancing both yourself and your party from Dr Tonge's comments as a matter of urgency," he demanded.

Dr Tonge has also been condemned by a spokesman for the Israeli embassy, who said: "We would not expect any human being - and surely not a British MP - to express an understanding of such atrocities."

The Labour MP Louise Ellman, a member of the Holocaust educational trust, also demanded that she apologise for "giving the green light to terrorism".

Dr Tonge told the PSC: "This particular brand of terrorism, the suicide bomber, is truly born out of desperation.

"Many, many people criticise, many, many people say it is just another form of terrorism, but I can understand and I am a fairly emotional person and I am a mother and a grandmother. I think if I had to live in that situation, and I say this advisedly, I might just consider becoming one myself.

"And that is a terrible thing to say."

This morning she sought to clarify her remark, telling BBC Breakfast: "That doesn't mean to say I condone suicide bombers, I don't. "I think it's appalling and loathsome. But we have to try and understand where they are coming from and understand the situation in which they live."

This is now utterly garbled. If it's appalling and loathsome, what exactly does understanding the situation add? Does it make it less appalling and loathsome?

Diana West's follow-up: French fashion II

Diana West expands on some points made here at Dhimmi Watch in further considerations of France's headscarf ban in today's Washington Times:

My e-mailbag was brimming with responses to last week's column about Jacques Chirac's proposed ban on Islamic head scarves — along with jumbo crucifixes and all yarmulkes — in France's public schools. "Good grief," one correspondent declared, concluding a negative critique, "it's just a scarf!"

Good grief, it's anything but. And I say that not so much to reprise last week's arguments, but rather to consider intervening developments — such as the reaction of Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Sheikh to a newspaper photograph of a leading Saudi Arabian businesswoman without her head scarf.

"This," said the grand mufti, Saudi Arabia's leading religious authority, referring to the head-exposed Muslim woman, "is forbidden for all. I severely condemn this matter and warn of grave consequences. I am pained by such shameful behavior in the country of the two holy mosques. What was published in some newspapers about this being the start of liberating the Saudi woman ... such talk is null and void. One's duty is to obey sharia by complying with orders and shunning that which is forbidden." Not doing so, he said, will "cause the doors of evil to open before the people of Islam."

The doors of evil? This sounds like a melodramatic mouthful from an old Saturday serial, but then again, maybe the mufti has a point. That is, if women were ever to achieve equality throughout Islam — and that means achieving a range of extremely basic rights, from the vote to the driver's license — maybe the whole of Islam would unravel. Sharia, or Islamic law, which codifies the inequality of women and non-Muslims, would be shredded, and the hoary hierarchy would lurch, if not topple.

This is a big "if," but not inconceivable. This may explain something about the intensity of the opposition to France's hijab ban among Muslim activists, from France's officially recognized Council for the Muslim Faith to Britain's extremist group Al-Muhajiroun. The question is, in rejecting the Muslim head scarf, do Western governments affirm secular values — namely, Western civilization's highly evolved traditions of tolerance, equality and liberty? Last week, I wrote that given Islam's tradition of repressing women and non-Muslims, a result of the twin precepts of jihad and dhimmitude, the head scarf as a trapping of that tradition could well be banned from secular schools without sacrificing Western principles. I still think so. But to what end? This week, French education minister Luc Ferry noted that beards, too, if they were determined to be signs of faith, could be outlawed under the school ban on religious symbols. This prompted author and Islamic expert Robert Spencer to explain on his Web site www.jihadwatch.org why he believes the French approach — under consideration or in effect in Belgium and a large part of Germany — is way off the mark.

In an entry dubbed "A close shave for French Muslims?" Mr. Spencer writes: "Instead of going after the root of the problem, [the French] are targeting minutiae. They can't or won't get Muslims to renounce the sharia and accept Western principles of tolerance and equality; instead, European Muslim groups are loudly denouncing assimilation. So the French instead go against the outward manifestations of the Islamic rejection of those things. But does [the French government] really think that beardless, bareheaded Muslims will not try to institute an Islamic state?"

I still don't have a problem with the French ban on head scarves or even beards in their public schools. After all, my own secular school uniform, an LA-does-GB costume of blue blazers, pleated skirts and saddle oxfords, included a haircut code for boys that banned beards — as if — and stipulated sideburn length. But Mr. Spencer raises a thought-provoking point: That France's actions — and similar actions contemplated across Europe — are strictly cosmetic patches to mask the underlying conflict between the West and Islam, between a European Christianity that is con