Compare and contrast. If these are the principles that inform the functioning of your society, you have a problem. An update on this story. "Reprieve unlikely for Saudi writer after cleric backs death sentence," from Emirates 24-7, February 13:
A senior Saudi Muslim cleric indicated on Monday that a local young man who offended Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) and fled the Gulf kingdom would be executed after his repatriation from Malaysia.
Sheikh Saleh bin Fowzan Al Fowzan, a member of the 7-man supreme committee of scholars in Saudi Arabia, said it has been established in Islam that any one who insults God or the Prophet should be killed.
“Repenting will not work…any man who insults God or our Prophet (PBUH) should be killed,” he said, quoted by Saudi newspapers.
“But we should first verify that this man (Hamza Kashgari) did insult Prophet Mohammed in his article on Twitter…if verified, then he must be killed……many scholars and people are now demanding his execution.”
Kashgari, 23, fled Saudi Arabia to Malaysia last week after King Abdullah ordered him arrested and punished for writing an article on Twitter deemed by Saudi Moslem scholars as abusive of Prophet Mohammed (PBUH).
He was later reported arrested by Malaysian authorities at Kuala Lumpur airport and western news reports said on Sunday he would be repatriated.
One Saudi daily said on Sunday Kashgari was heading for New Zealand to seek asylum before his arrest.
At 1:41 of the video above, a questioner at Suhail Khan's panel on conservative "inclusion" holds up a paper that apparently Khan had had distributed. It was an article by law professor Marshall Breger of Catholic University, "Why Jews Can't Criticize Sharia Law." Khan, in response to the questioner, claimed falsely that the American Conservative Union (ACU) had barred me, Pamela Geller, David Horowitz and Frank Gaffney.
Having been thus called out, I renewed my challenge to Khan to debate when I saw him in the hotel lobby. He responded with wild hysteria:
Meanwhile, the falsehoods in Breger's piece warrant some attention.
Similarities between Judaism and Islam are easy to see. Both are monotheistic religions for whom the Lord is One. Both are religions based on revelation. In both, law is central, and personal and social existence is governed by a divinely ordained legal system.
This is all true, of course, but note the selectivity. Breger doesn't mention, even to minimize or gloss over, the Qur'an's assertion that Jews are the "most hostile of men to the believers" (5:82), or that Allah transformed the Sabbath-breaking Jews into apes and pigs (2:62-66; 5:59-60; 7:166); or that Jews are under Allah's curse (2:89; 3:112; 9:30). Apparently he is banking on his readers' not knowing about such passages, or about the deeply ingrained tendency toward antisemitism within Islam.
These things would interfere with his thesis, so he ignores them -- not exactly inspiring confidence in the knowledgeable reader. I've been falsely accused myself of not discussing all the peaceful and tolerant passages of the Qur'an, but in reality I have extensive discussions of those passages in my books Onward Muslim Soldiers and The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran, as well as in many other places. It is a common tactic on the Left simply to ignore material that seems to cast doubts upon one's thesis, but it never results in a strong argument or a sound presentation -- yet Breger does this repeatedly.
There are also many obvious parallels between Judaism’s legal system, known as halacha, and the Islamic legal order of sharia. Both purport to instruct us in how to attend to every aspect of one’s life: one’s getting up and one’s going out, one’s sexual practice and one’s business practices. For some adherents of each, religious law also dictates political life, such as for whom to vote.
Sharia doesn't just dictate "for whom to vote." It contains a comprehensive and supremacist political system that asserts authority over unbelievers, proclaims itself superior to all rivals, and mandates that its adherents must fight in various ways to impose it upon unbelieving societies, subjugating the unbelievers as inferiors under its rule. There is nothing like this in Judaism: no imperative to wage war against unbelievers and subjugate them under Jewish law.
Despite this kinship, there are those in the Jewish community who would condemn Islam and sharia, arguing that, unlike Judaism, Islam is not worthy of the protections of American law.
Breger's language here is manipulative: "Islam is not worthy of the protections of American law" -- as if those opposing Sharia were supremacists, no doubt race supremacists, who find Sharia inferior. This language is ironic, since it is Sharia that considers non-Muslims unworthy of equal protection under the law, while anti-Sharia advocates are trying to preserve the principle of equality of rights for all. The question here is not whether or not "Islam is worthy of the protections of American law," but whether the freedoms guaranteed by American law can survive the incorporation of Sharia principles into American society.
David Yerushalmi, author of a model law banning sharia, argues that sharia differs from halacha because of its different “threat matrix.” Sharia, he tells us, requires faithful Muslims to impose Islamic law on the world “violently,” and its adherents should be charged with sedition against the United States.
Common tactic: state a principle of Islamic law or doctrine as coming from an anti-jihad writer, as if that writer invented the principle. Ignore the principle's strong foundations in Islamic law.
But I won't ignore them. Here's just one small sample from a manual of Islamic law endorsed by Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the most prestigious institution in Sunni Islam, as "conforming to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community": Muslim must make "war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians...until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” ('Umdat al-Salik, o9.8). David Yerushalmi did not write that book.
Rabbi Jon Hausman, a self-styled “warrior rabbi” from Massachusetts, tells us that in Judaism, unlike Islam, the law of the state is the law (in Aramaic, dina d’malchuta dina) so you don’t have to worry about such religious “imperialism.”
Hausman is a "warrior rabbi" -- i.e., see, Islam is not more violent than Judaism because of Qaradawi and dozens of other imams preaching jihad violence, suicide killing, hate and supremacism: Judaism has Jon Hausman!
These commentators’ understanding of both sharia and halacha is markedly defective.
1. As Hausman surely knows, the reach of dina d’malchuta dina is debated among rabbinic commentators. Some limit the application of the Jewish legal system to property issues, others extend it to apply to all secular law that does not violate Jewish law. In any case, Hausman’s suggestion that halacha is a personal legal system—not relevant to civic life and politics—neglects both Jewish history and halacha itself. In Baghdad during the Middle Ages and in Poland during the time of the Council of the Four Lands, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, for instance, Jewish communities had their own courts, and Jewish law was enforced by secular authorities. And even today, thousands of Jews in both the United States and Israel look to rabbinic courts and halacha to resolve all manner of civil disputes.
Here again, Breger ignores the coercive and supremacist aspects of Islamic law, which, unlike Jewish law, asserts authority over unbelievers.
While clearly some Muslims do view sharia as a hegemonic political force, the vast majority of Muslims, especially those living in the West, view sharia no differently from the way Jews view the halachic system: as an overarching guide to ordering one’s life.
The first of those Misunderstanders of Islam to "view sharia as a hegemonic political force" was Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, who said, "Islam must dominate, and not be dominated" and "I have been commanded to fight against people until they confess that there is no god but Allah and I am his messenger."
Muslim jurists have always drawn on sharia to mandate that fellow Muslims obey the laws of the land in matters that sharia does not prohibit.
Indeed. But only until they have the strength to bring the laws of the land into conformity with Sharia, via the prescribed fighting (which may or may not involve hot warfare), as I quoted above.
In numerous instances (see Koran 5:11), Muslims are told to “honor their contracts” and so to honor the “social contract” represented by the law of the land. The Fiqh Council of North America, the leading interpreter of Islamic law in the United States, ruled as recently as September 2011 that “there is no inherent conflict between the normative values of Islam and the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”
Everywhere Sharia has ever been implemented, and where it is implemented today (notably in Saudi Arabia and Iran), it has denied the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, equality of rights for women, and equality of rights for non-Muslims. The Fiqh Council of North America would apparently have us believe that this was all an anomaly, and that some form of Sharia that has never existed in the world and is fully compatible with the Constitution is actually the real thing.
2. Daniel Pipes recounts in a 2009 article an incident in England when the Indian Muslim owner of an old age home near Manchester proposed to switch to serving only halal food in the facility. After residents complained, the owner retracted the policy. To Pipes, the owner’s desire to remove pork from the menu, even though apparently not implemented, is proof that Islam wishes to impose itself on all around it. But is this drive for “imperium” the only explanation?
Indeed, Jewish law would have great sympathy for the position taken by the Indian entrepreneur. Though there are gray areas, Jewish law generally holds that one cannot benefit (or profit) from the sale of mixed milk and meat products. The legal compendium the Shulhan Aruch forbids Jews from selling non-kosher products on a regular basis (Yoreh De’ah 117.1). And anyone who has read Daphne Barak-Erez’s 2007 monograph Outlawed Pigs: Law, Religion, and Culture in Israel will appreciate the difficulties of commerce in pork products (or “white meat” as it is politely called) in Israel.
Pipes' point here is that the Muslim was trying to impose Islam's restriction on pork upon non-Muslims. There are numerous instances of Islam wishing "to impose itself on all around it" -- see, for example, here and here. The "old age home near Manchester" probably had an overwhelmingly non-Muslim clientele. That is a far cry from Jews not wanting to sell non-kosher products -- if Judaism had an imperative to subjugate unbelievers that large numbers of Jews were working toward implementing, Breger's analogy might hold. But only then.
3. Critics of Islam make much of the Shiite legal doctrine of taqquia and the related concept of kitman, which allow one to dissemble or evade by misdirection in order to save a life or community from imminent destruction (see Koran 16:106). For these critics, the takeaway is that Muslims lie when it is in their interest, so we cannot trust their promises or make treaties with them.
But numerous Koranic references tell the believer to “mix not the truth with falsehood nor conceal the truth when you know what it is” (2:42). And further, “Conceal not [the truth]; for whomever conceals it is burdened with sin” (2:283).
Again, we must look to Jewish law analogues. Even the Chofetz Chaim, the rabbinic scholar most associated with truth-telling, allows “white lies” when they will produce social and interpersonal peace. (No threat of imminent destruction is required.) Maimonides allows one to lie about one’s religion to save one’s own life. And does anyone remember the Marranos?
Certainly taqiyya as a specific concept was indeed elaborated by Shi'tes who were under threat from Sunnis. But the concept itself is rooted in the Qur'an, and consequently is found among both Sunnis and Shi'ites.
Qur'an 3:28 warns believers not to take unbelievers as "friends or helpers" (َأَوْلِيَا -- a word that means more than casual friendship, but something like alliance), "unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them." This is a foundation of the idea that believers may legitimately deceive unbelievers when under pressure. The word used for "guard" in the Arabic is tuqātan (تُقَاةً), the verbal noun from taqiyyatan -- hence the familiar term taqiyya.
The renowned Qur'an commentator Ibn Kathir says that the phrase "unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them" means that "believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers" may "show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly. For instance, Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda' said, 'We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.' Al-Bukhari said that Al-Hasan said, 'The Tuqyah [taqiyya] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection." While many Muslim spokesmen today maintain that taqiyya is solely a Shi'ite doctrine, shunned by Sunnis, the great Islamic scholar Ignaz Goldziher points out that while it was formulated by Shi'ites, "it is accepted as legitimate by other Muslims as well, on the authority of Qur'an 3:28." The Sunnis of Al-Qaeda practice it today.
Also, there is Muhammad's statement, "war is deceit." He also allowed for lying in battle and between a husband and wife. And when he gave permission to one of his followers, Muhammad bin Maslama, to murder one of his critics, Ka'b bin al-Ashraf, he also gave Muhammad bin Maslama permission to lie to Ka'b in order to lure him close enough to be killed.
And Muhammad is the "excellent example of conduct" for Muslims (Qur'an 33:21).
Do other religious traditions allow for withholding of the truth in some circumstances? Yes, but how exactly is this relevant to whether or not Muslim spokesmen may be deceiving us here and now about Sharia and other matters?
My point is not to analyze the nuances of halacha, let alone sharia, but rather to underscore the inconsistency of attacking Islam for activities that Jewish law and practice would also permit, or even require.
These broadside attacks on sharia are reminiscent of Jewish polemical literature after the rise of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries designed to show Judaism as superior. Later scholars such as the Meiri, though, moved on from polemics to classify Islam as a monotheistic religion close to Judaism. While there are certainly fundamentalist interpretations of Islam that we rightfully find dangerous and deplorable, it is time that Jews in America go beyond “gotcha” polemics and stop treating sharia and Islam as illegitimate expressions of man’s search for the divine.
Sure. If they'd drop the supremacism, subjugation and killing, we'd all get along just fine.
Of course, I am shouting into the wind. You may read this, but Marshall Breger and Suhail Khan probably won't, and if they do, they almost certainly will not respond except with smears and invective, a la Khan's performance in the second video above. Those who came to our SRO CPAC event (photos and video here) heard the truth, and a few others will read this. But those advancing lies and half-truths in service of fooling Americans into letting our guard down in the face of a serious threat to our freedoms have all the power and all the microphones. Unless and until that changes, the situation will grow progressively worse.
One of the reasons Islam can never integrate with Western society is because so many things that make up the basic freedoms people in the West enjoy are against the teachings of Islam. Islam has a word for things that it considers ungodly or immoral - Haraam, which means 'forbidden' in Arabic. Islamic leaders don’t just want these things forbidden for Muslims, but think the entire world should adhere to their rules too.
The problem with Haraam is that many of the things that Islam considered forbidden and a sin are part and parcel of normal Western society and range from
mortgages and credit cards to drinking alcohol and eating pork. The list of things that are
Haraam is exhaustive. While some of these are perfectly sensible, such as
murder and theft, many things considered Haraam are downright ridiculous, oppressive or simply archaic, and include some of the fundamental freedoms that have been enjoyed in the West for centuries. Women, Adultery and Sexuality
Islam’s views on women are extreme. The Qur'an states that a woman's testimony is worth only half that of a man's; furthermore, a woman who doesn’t abide by her husband’s wishes is committing a sin. It is Haraam, for instance, for a wife to refuse her husband sex, and she must seek to please him at all times. Men can also punish their wives by beating them, while a woman must dress in accordance with the Qur'an. This means not only making sure they are modestly covered which in some Islamic states means from head to toe, but also
basic feminine preening such as dyeing hair or plucking the eyebrows is considered Haraam.
While adultery is considered wrong by many religions, Christianity included, what makes Islam’s views on adultery so startling is that it often includes being a rape victim. While Islam does consider rape itself Haraam, it sets ridiculous, one-sided rules for proving it. For a woman to claim she has been raped, four men who have witnessed the act need to testify. Failing to provide these witnesses means that a woman is guilty of adultery - and the penalties for such a crime in several Islamic states is often stoning to death.
Islam is extremely strict when it comes to sexuality. Not only is homosexuality Haraam, whether gay, lesbian or bisexual, but also Islam forbids women or men dressing as each other. This not only forbids transvestism and harmless drag acts, but also it is Haraam for women to wear clothing such as trousers or shirts.
Capitalism
Modern capitalist society is not one that sits well with Islam. Virtually everything about modern commerce is considered Haraam. Islam is very strict when it comes to business. Any wealth creation in Islam has to be related to the value of the goods traded. It considers interest (Riba) on loans or other financial instruments as sinful. Therefore, everything from getting a mortgage to having a savings account or credit card is Haraam.
Islam also considers gambling Haraam, but this doesn’t just include playing blackjack or roulette. To an Islamic scholar, buying stocks and shares is gambling, as are many forms of insurance. Islam also prohibits the trading of Haraam goods, which includes all sorts of things such as selling alcohol. Goods are also not supposed
to be sold to or purchased from a person or business that has committed a Haraam act.
Archaic Practices
Islam considers all sorts of common food items as Haraam. These range from ham, bacon and alcohol to even medicines that contain ethanol. While Islam allows for the eating of meat, all animals have to be slaughtered in accordance with the Qur'an, which involves ritual bloodletting in order for the meat to be acceptable for consumption. This involves an animal slowly bleeding to death and is far crueler
than modern American methods
Islam is also chalk full of other medieval practices. It is Haraam, for instance, for a slave to run away from its master. Slavery itself, it seems, is something that is not Haraam in Islam. Islam also prohibits the practicing of magic. This not only includes cabaret acts such as David Copperfield and the use of astrology and horoscopes, but also, many modern science practices, which are deemed Haraam. To this end, Saudi Arabia, a country that has proclaimed the Qur'an as its constitution, has deemed the 'crime' of witchcraft as a capital offense, and has repeatedly executed people for it.
Islam is not conducive to Western or modern society. It is a belief system that is based on medieval source documents written in a far bloodthirstier and illiberal time. Too many of the freedoms we in the West take for granted are considered Haraam, and Islam is intent on getting rid of all of them.
Shakila, the ex-Muslim in a Muslim country who writes at Liberated, has a new entry on her evolving views of dogs:
I was probably 12 years old when my Islamic Studies teacher told me that our prophet hated dogs and she even quoted a hadeeth saying Abdullah (b. Umar) reported: "Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) ordered the killing of dogs and we would send (men) in Medina and its corners and we did not spare any dog that we did not kill, so much so that we killed the dog that accompanied the wet she-camel belonging to the people of the desert." (Sahih Muslim, Book 010, Number 3811).
I guess many Muslims don't have the ability to think and I am really ashamed to admit that perhaps I was one of them too. Why else would I actually hate poor little innocent dogs just because I was told to do so?
If the West had the courage of its convictions, this would be front-page news everywhere, with condemnations raining down upon the Saudis and calls for the freedom of Hamza Kashgari. Instead, the UN will probably establish another commission on "Islamophobia."
More on this story. "Malaysia deports Saudi blogger behind Prophet Mohammad tweets," by Stuart Grudgings for Reuters, February 12:
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia deported a Saudi Arabian blogger on Sunday, police said, despite fears voiced by human rights groups that he could face execution in his home country over Twitter comments he made that were deemed insulting to the Prophet Mohammad.
Hamza Kashgari, a 23-year-old columnist, sparked outrage in the oil-rich kingdom with comments posted on the Prophet's birthday a week ago that led some Islamic clerics to call for him to face the death penalty.
Kashgari fled the country, but was arrested by police in majority-Muslim Malaysia on Thursday as he transited through Kuala Lumpur international airport.
"The Saudi writer was repatriated to his home country this Sunday morning," a police spokesman told Reuters. "This is an internal Saudi matter that we cannot comment on."
Malaysia has a close affinity with many Middle Eastern nations through their shared religion. The Southeast Asian nation is also a U.S. ally and a leading global voice for moderate Islam, meaning that the decision to extradite Kashgari is certain to be controversial.
"Saudi clerics have already made up their mind that Kashgari is an apostate who must face punishment," Christoph Wilcke, senior Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement on Friday.
"The Malaysian government should not be complicit in sealing Kashgari's fate by sending him back."
Kashgari's lawyer in Malaysia, Mohammad Noor, told Reuters by telephone that he had obtained a court order to prevent the deportation, but had not been allowed to see his client.
"If the government of Malaysia deports him to Saudi Arabia, disrespecting the court order, this is clearly contempt of court, unlawful and unacceptable," he said.
The Star newspaper quoted Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein as saying that Kashgari had been repatriated and that the charges against him would be decided by Saudi authorities.
"Malaysia has a longstanding arrangement by which individuals wanted by one country are extradited when detained by the other," he was quoted as saying.
Blasphemy is a crime punishable by execution under Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law. It is not a capital crime in Malaysia.
Reuters could not verify Kashgari's comments because he later deleted them, but media reported that one of them reflected his contradictory views of the Prophet - that he both loved and hated him.
Kashgari later said in an interview that he was being made a "scapegoat for a larger conflict" over his comments.
How many things can you think of in Saudi society that would actually be worth this much outrage? Child marriage? Sexual abuse of foreign domestic workers? The treatment of women as permanent minors? Antisemitic preaching and textbooks? Persecution of non-Muslims?
One could go on. But the righteous indignation is reserved for a 23-year-old with a Twitter account. An update on this story. "Saudi committee calls for “harsh punitive measures” against man who insulted Muhammad," from Asia News, February 10:
Riyadh (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Hamza Kashghari, a Saudi writer and poet arrested in Malaysia for a few remarks on Twitter about Muhammad, is an infidel and an apostate. His sacrilegious action deserve “harsh punitive measures”, warned Saudi Arabia’s Permanent Committee for Scholarly Research and Religious Edicts (IFTA). "Whoever dares make a mockery of Allah, the Prophet or the Holy Book undermines the religion and displays enmity toward it. It is the duty of the rulers to try such a criminal," the committee said.
The accusation against Hamza, 23, stem from a few remarks he posted on Twitter last week, birthday of the prophet Muhammad. “On your birthday,” he wrote, “I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.”
“On your birthday,” he added, “I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more. I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.”
In one day, his comment generated 30,000 responses, many accusing him of blasphemy or calling for his death. Even though he removed the offending tweet, and apologised asking for forgiveness, the flood did not stop. Someone posted his address on YouTube, and vigilantes from a nearby mosque went looking for him.
The information minister banned all newspapers from publishing anything written by him, and the Council of Elders issued a rare statement of condemnation and harsh request that he be put on trial. King Abdullah himself issued the arrest order.
Two days ago, the young man tried to leave the country, but he was arrested by Malaysian police. “Kashgari was detained at the airport upon arrival following a request made to us by Interpol after the Saudi authorities applied for it," a police spokesman said.
Malaysia and Saudi Arabia do not have a formal extradition treaty. However, an official with the Malaysian Home Ministry who asked to remain unidentified said Kashgari could be extradited under other bilateral security agreements.
Under Sharia (Islamic law), anyone who commits sacrilegious actions that may make him or her kafir should be given three days to repent, failing which the person is to be beheaded.
The blasphemy laws are alive and well in Saudi Arabia. Those who say that they have no part of Sharia as it comes to the West are not being honest; there is no school of Islamic jurisprudence that does not call for death for blasphemy.
Hamza Kashgari has fled the country, but was detained in Malaysia. "Saudi Hamza Kashgari faces death calls after prophet tweets," from AFP, February 10:
A Saudi internet surfer checking her twitter account at a coffee shop in Riyadh. Twitter and Facebook are controversial forms of communication in the conservative country.
A YOUNG Saudi journalist is facing calls for his execution after tweeting about the Prophet Mohammed, and the kingdom's top clerics are demanding his trial after denouncing him as an "apostate".
On the occasion of the Muslim prophet's birthday last week, 23-year-old Hamza Kashgari tweeted: "I have loved things about you and I have hated things about you and there is a lot I don't understand about you."
"I will not pray for you," he added.
The controversial tweet sparked a frenzy of responses - some 30,000, according to an online service that tracks tweets in the Arab world.
In one response, Abdullah, a lawyer, said that since Mr Kashgari was "an adult... we should accept nothing but implementing the ruling according to Islamic law" or sharia.
Insulting the prophet is considered blasphemous in Islam, and is a crime punishable by death.
Mr Kashgari quickly apologised for his remarks, but the calls for his execution only multiplied....
"The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with 'Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death)." -- Bukhari 7.62.88
In Islam, Muhammad is the supreme example of conduct (cf. Qur'an 33:21). Thus he is exemplary even in his marriage to a child: Muslims take this seriously and imitate Muhammad in this. Article 1041 of the Civil Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran states that girls can be engaged before the age of nine, and married at nine: "Marriage before puberty (nine full lunar years for girls) is prohibited. Marriage contracted before reaching puberty with the permission of the guardian is valid provided that the interests of the ward are duly observed."
The Ayatollah Khomeini himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight. Khomeini called marriage to a prepubescent girl "a divine blessing," and advised the faithful: "Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house."
Time magazine reported in 2001: "In Iran the legal age for marriage is nine for girls, fourteen for boys. The law has occasionally been exploited by pedophiles, who marry poor young girls from the provinces, use and then abandon them. In 2000 the Iranian Parliament voted to raise the minimum age for girls to fourteen, but this year, a legislative oversight body dominated by traditional clerics vetoed the move. An attempt by conservatives to abolish Yemen's legal minimum age of fifteen for girls failed, but local experts say it is rarely enforced anyway. (The onset of puberty is considered an appropriate time for a marriage to be consummated.)"
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reports that over half of the girls in Afghanistan and Bangladesh are married before they reach the age of eighteen. In early 2002, researchers in refugee camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan found half the girls married by age thirteen. In an Afghan refugee camp, more than two out of three second-grade girls were either married or engaged, and virtually all the girls who were beyond second grade were already married. One ten-year-old was engaged to a man of sixty.
The above video from December 2009 was just sent to me by Jihad Watch reader Carol. It illustrates an important point: we are constantly assured that no Muslims, none, want to bring the elements of Sharia that are incompatible with Western law into Western countries. We are compelled to believe this on pain of charges of "Islamophobia." But here is clear evidence that at least some Muslims believe that their coreligionists there should push for the legalization of pedophilia.
And note that this is advanced in the video as a human rights cause, a matter of compassion for Muslim men and their families. If such a movement begins in Britain, there is no doubt whatsoever that it would proceed the way attempts to assert Sharia provisions in the West are already proceeding: by claiming "racism" and "bigotry," asserting that all opposition is "hate" and "Islamophobia," and calling for equal rights, human rights, etc. (Don't miss also the brief tu quoque: the photo of Warren Jeffs.) If Britain and the U.S. and other non-Muslim countries do not call a halt to this mau-mauing and insist on their own laws and own cultures, those laws and cultures will certainly be overwhelmed and Islamized.
Here is a terrific piece in WND about our new SION/AFDI billboard campaign, a response to Muslim Brotherhood-linked ICNA's deceptive pro-Sharia campaign. Pamela Geller has more here and here. "Billboard offers defense to Shariah threats: 'They don't want Americans to know truth about gendercide, honor killings, stonings,'" by Michael Carl in World Net Daily, February 7:
A patriotic organization is launching a billboard campaign intended to undermine the efforts to advertise and promote Shariah, the Islamic law that calls for beheadings, executions and amputations, across America.
The group, Stop Islamization of Nations, is buying ad space for a billboard calling on people to learn the dark side of Shariah law.
The effort’s leader, Pamela Geller, says her group, has one real purpose – to counter the impact of the pro-Shariah billboard campaign of the Islamic Circle or North America, an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front organization.
“ICNA is a Muslim Brotherhood group, according to a captured internal document of the Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood groups in America are trying to norm Shariah, mainstream Shariah,” Geller warned.
The billboard will lead people to the Refuge from Islam site.
“The Muslim Brotherhood group ICNA needs to lie to Americans about Shariah and advance a false narrative about the most extreme and radical ideology on the face of the earth. Period,” Geller said.
“They don’t want Americans to know the truth that the gendercide of honor killings, the clitorectomies, the stonings, and the 1,400 years of cultural annihilations and enslavements are all Sharia-mandated,” Geller said.
Geller said that people asking the ICNA tough questions about Shariah will be ineffective.
“People telling ICNA facts on the phone won’t do any good. We need to counter this campaign publicly. We must educate America and arm freedom lovers with facts,” Geller said.
Geller says Muslims have to take a bold step to truly become Americans.
“The U.S. should be calling upon Muslim groups in America to renounce and reject Shariah if they want to be American citizens,” Geller said.
Geller’s billboard campaign directly opposes the ICNA’s Kansas City pro-Shariah billboard project.
The Islamic Circle’s billboard at Interstate 70 and 38th Street in Kansas City, Kan., says, “Shariah: Got questions? Get answers? Call 1-855-Shariah.
The Islamic Circle of Kansas City chapter website says the campaign was launched to defend “religious freedom” and promote understanding of Shariah.
The group’s website says the campaign is broader than a single sign along the highway.
“During this campaign, which will run from Jan. 23 until Feb 19, 2012, ICNA-KC will air messages on Shariah through KMBZ 980 AM radio and post a billboard on Shariah at I-70 and 38th street,” the ICNA said.
“The campaign messages are expected to reach over 200,000 people per week. The messages will invite the public to call the 1-855-SHARIAH hotline or visit our website to learn and ask questions about Shariah and Islam. Visitors to the website and callers to the hotline can request a free copy of the English translation of the Quran and other free literature on Islam and Shariah,” the group said.
ICNA Kansas City spokesman Riyaz Lareef declined to respond to questions from WND.
But Jihad Watch publisher and Islam analyst Robert Spencer said the ICNA campaign is an effort to muddy the waters on Islam.
“ICNA is trying to whitewash Shariah, to hoodwink Americans into thinking that concerns about it are all due to ‘misconceptions’ that can easily be cleared up,” Spencer said.
Spencer adds that any inquiries about Shariah’s darker side will receive soft replies.
“I expect that if any inquirers asked about stonings, amputations, the denial of the freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and equality of rights for women and non-Muslims, they’ll be told that none of that is really part of Shariah,” Spencer said.
“ICNA’s goal is to foster complacency and ignorance about Shariah on the part of Americans,” Spencer said. “I don’t think people phoning in with questions like that will rattle ICNA. Only a counter-campaign calling attention to those aspects of Sharia would accomplish that.”
Spencer echoes the reason Geller gives for her group’s campaign.
“The U.S. should be undertaking its own campaign to raise awareness about how Shariah is incompatible with constitutional freedoms, and calling upon Muslims in America to reject those aspects of it,” Spencer said....
Jihad Watch readers, we need your action now. James Lafferty, chairman of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force (VAST) and SIOA board member, has been working hard to get Sharia prohibition legislation passed.
Delegate Bob Marshall of Virginia has introduced HB 825, which restricts any Virginia court from using "foreign law" as the basis for any decision or action. An odd alliance of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, Virginia Bar Association, Muslim Association of Virginia and the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) Center of Northern Virginia testified against Marshall's bill Friday and are working against the bill's supporters -- the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force (VAST), SIOA and elements of the Tea Party.
It is up to you to fight Muslim Brotherhood groups and the imposition of their anti-freedom agenda. Please contact Speaker Howell and get this out to everyone you can. We are the soldiers in this battle. It is up to us.
Most politicians in Germany have gotten the message: The quickest way to spark a career-damaging controversy is to make a facile comment about Nazis or the Holocaust. Media critics and political opponents are quick to pounce.
But that isn't the only way to attract unwanted attention, as Jochen Hartloff, the interior minister of the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, found out this week. In an interview with the Berlin tabloid BZ, Hartloff said that Sharia law, in a "modern form," would be acceptable in Germany. In comments published on Friday in the center-left daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, he added that using the Islamic moral code "is certainly conceivable when it comes to questions pertaining to civil law."
Hartloff, a politician from the center-left Social Democrats, made clear that he was referring specifically to family law issues such as divorce settlements and alimony, but also certain instances of contract law in which devout Muslims seek to avoid paying interest. Applying Sharia rules, he said, could help avoid hostility in such cases. ....
He was seconded by Stephan Mayer, a parliamentarian for the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats. Mayer, a legal expert, demanded Hartloff's resignation. "It is inconceivable that a justice minister fosters such ideas," he told Bild. "There is no room in Germany for Islamic law. The Sharia is barbarous and inhuman in all its forms." ...
Michael Frieser, expert on integration issues for conservatives in German parliament, said that Muslim justices of the peace could perhaps be used to prepare the groundwork for a civil law judgement. He told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that he has nothing against immigrants seeking judgements according to the legal systems they are used to. "That can ultimately serve the cause of integration," he said.
They say there is no formal law on the books that forbids women from driving. Not that authorities will respond by saying "Oh, hey, you're right. Here are the keys. Sorry about that." It is, if nothing else, a signal to authorities that they are not going away quietly. "Saudi activists sue government over driving ban," from Agence France-Presse, February 4:
Two Saudi female activists have filed law suits against the government for refusing to issue them driver's licences and banning them from driving a car, they told AFP on Saturday.
Manal al-Sherif, the icon of an Internet campaign launched last year urging Saudi women to defy a ban on driving, and human rights activist Samar Badawi filed their suits against the interior ministry.
Sherif, who was arrested in May 2011 and detained for 10 days after posting on YouTube a video of herself driving, said she decided to file the lawsuit after having been denied a driver's licence.
"There is no actual law that states woman can't drive" in Saudi Arabia and therefore "no justification for preventing them from issuing a licence," said Sherif, one of the activists behind a "My Right, My Dignity" campaign aimed at ending discrimination against women in Saudi Arabia.
Badawi said the grievance board at the interior ministry had informed her to "follow-up in a week" to confirm a court appointment for her lawsuit.
Ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia is the only country where women are not allowed to drive. However, they sit behind the wheel in desert regions away from the capital.
Women in the kingdom who have the financial means hire drivers while others must depend on the goodwill of male relatives.
They also have to be veiled in public and cannot travel unless accompanied by their husbands or a close male relative.
Wherever Sharia experiences a resurgence, the observable effect is that tolerance decreases and harassment of all kinds increases. Muslims are certainly not immune, especially if they belong to sects at variance with the dominant practice of the country, such as Sufis, Ibadis (also facing persecution in Libya), Ahmadis, or Shi'ite minorities in Sunni countries and vice-versa.
Those who would go after Christians and Jews will eventually come for their fellow Muslims who for whatever reason are found ideologically impure. "Freed from Gaddafi, Libyan Sufis face violent Islamists," by Tom Heneghan for Reuters, February 1:
(Reuters) - Freed from Muammar Gaddafi's 42-year dictatorship, Libya's Sufi Muslims find themselves under renewed pressure from violent Islamists who have been attacking them and their beliefs as heretical.
The desecration of graves belonging to Sufi saints and sages in recent months have put the peaceful Sufis on the defensive, prompting some to post armed guards at their mosques and lodges to ward off hardline thugs.
But the birthday of Islam's Prophet Mohammad, one of the highpoints in the Sufi calendar, is on Saturday and Libyan Sufis are determined to take their traditional processions through the streets to show they will not be cowed.
At a meeting of Sufi scholars to plan the celebrations, Sheikh Adl Al-Aref Al-Hadad said even being driven out of his zawiyah (Islamic school) late last year by Islamists known as Salafis would not deter him from marching.
"I'm worried but I'm not afraid," said Al-Hadad, whose Tripoli school was stormed by armed men who burned its library, destroyed office equipment and dug up graves of sages buried there. They turned the school into a Salafi mosque.
On January 13, extremists crashed a bulldozer through the walls of the old cemetery in the eastern city of Benghazi, destroyed its tombs and carried off 29 bodies of respected sages and scholars. They also demolished a nearby Sufi school.
Sheikh Khaled Mohammad Saidan, whose Dargut Pasha Mosque faces Tripoli's port, said most Islamists in post-Gaddafi Libya disagreed with Sufis, but peacefully. "But there are no police around and you never know what some people might do," he added.
Sufi lodges from around Tripoli will march on Saturday through narrow alleys of the walled old town, waving flags and chanting poems in praise of Mohammad to the beat of cymbals, drums and tambourines.
To the puritanical Salafis, these practices amount to bida (innovation) and shirk (idolatry), both grave sins that must be stopped, by force if necessary.
Sufism, a mystical strain in both Sunni and Shi'ite Islam, dates back to the early days of the faith. Apart from their prayers, Sufi devotions include singing hymns, chanting the names of God or dancing to heighten awareness of the divine.
Revered saints, scholars and holy people are buried in shrines and some are honored with annual pilgrimages. While many Islamic scholars say this is admissible, puritanical schools of Islam such as Saudi Arabia's Wahhabis or the Afghan Taliban consider it heretical. [...]
Libya's Sufis also worry they are being outflanked politically. Many new religious officials have Salafi leanings, they say, and are appointing Salafi imams to mosques vacated by pro-Gaddafi preachers. Salafi preaching is now widespread on Libyan television and radio, they say.
Salafis have also begun denouncing traditional imams to the authorities, prompting them to be replaced by hardliners. "About half the imams here have been replaced by Salafis," said one imam at a large Tripoli mosque where Salafis in the congregation are campaigning against celebrating Mawlid.
Political parties are starting to form, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Libyan Salafis have not yet announced if they plan to launch a party and contest elections, as in Egypt....
I tried to tell you. "Christians fear losing freedoms in Arab Spring," by Oren Dorell and Sarah Lynch for USA Today via the Tucson Citizen, January 30:
From her home in a labyrinth of stonewalled alleyways, Samia Ramsis holds a key chain bearing the face of the Virgin Mary as she sits in her yellow pajamas on the morning of Orthodox Christmas.
Sunlight pours in through a window. Outside, visitors come to look upon the spot where Egypt’s Christians — most known as Copts — believe the Holy Family found refuge after fleeing Bethlehem and assassins sent by King Herod to kill the baby Jesus.
Once crowded with Christians, Cairo’s Coptic quarter where Samia lives with her husband, Mounir, and two children is home to fewer than 50 Christian families.
“We know many Christians have left,” says Mounir Ramsis, speaking not only about this quarter but about all of Egypt. “But we love this country and will stay until death.”
The Arab Spring uprisings that have toppled secular dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa have unleashed long-suppressed freedoms that have allowed Islamic parties to gain a share of political power they have been denied for decades. Their rise is creating near-panic among ancient Christian communities that dot the Muslim world and predate Islam by centuries.
•In Tunisia, where the regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ousted last year after 32 years in power, the dominant political party, Ennahda, has worried some of Tunis’ 22,000 Catholics by vowing to tilt the country’s yet-to-be-written constitution toward sharia, or the detailed and often harsh system of Muslim theocratic laws.
•In Libya, Christians are uneasy as the powerful head of the Tripoli Military Council, Abdul Hakim Belhaj, who once led an Islamic militia with links to al-Qaeda, has said he plans to run for office in elections scheduled for April.
•In Afghanistan, no new building permits have been issued for churches, and the last church open to the public was demolished over the summer. In Iraq, the Christian community has decreased by two-thirds since 2003 amid bombings of churches and assassinations of priests.
•And Christians in Syria, where Muslims have risen up against President Bashar Assad, have been subjected to murder, rape and kidnappings in Damascus and rebellious towns, according to Christian rights groups, including Open Doors, which helps Christians facing persecution.
Many had hoped for better in an Arab movement that proponents said was about replacing tyrannies with democracies.
“The outlook is grim,” says John Eibner, CEO of the California-based human rights group Christian Solidarity International.
“If the current trajectory continues, it’s reasonable to think that within a generation these (Christian) communities will not look like functioning communities,” Eibner says. “They’ll look more like the once-flourishing Jewish communities” across the Arab world that are all but gone.
Nowhere is the irony more profound than in Egypt, where an estimated 8 million Christians live with more than 70 million Muslims.
Christians demonstrated alongside Muslims early last year to oust Hosni Mubarak. Before Mubarak’s overthrow, Christians had suffered from years of church burnings and murders at the hands of radical Muslims who want an Islamic state free of religious minorities. And after the ouster, the military regime that has been running the country has refused to make any arrests in attacks on Christians.
Mina Bouls, 25, a Copt who fled to Philadelphia, recalls cowering with his mother in 1997 as a mob stoned the family home and chanted anti-Christian slogans. But the difference then was that Mubarak ordered the military to protect Christian communities and jail extremists, Bouls says.
In October, Copts organized a protest in downtown Cairo over the authorities’ failure to investigate attacks, including the bombing of a church in Alexandria on New Year’s Day 2011 that killed 20 people. The military attacked the demonstrators and 17 Christians were run down and killed by military vehicles, according to Human Rights Watch.
Bouls wants to bring his family to the United States because he says he is petrified by the new society forming in Egypt. The first free elections in decades held in the past two months handed power not to moderates but to members of the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Salafi candidates, who combined took nearly 70% of seats.
“If people try to rule the country with the Koran, with sharia law, that means they look to us as second-class people,” Bouls says....
The exodus came amid 60 church bombings and the deaths of 900 Christians, says William Warda, chairman of the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization in Baghdad.
“We consider that genocide,” he says.
Malik says Western nations must stand up for the rights of Christians, who he says may be cleansed from lands where democratic elections are used to oppress minorities rather than empower them.
Malik says it must be done “in a way that is not misperceived on the other end.” However, “the West should not be cowed.”
This is an extremely important case, as it touches on the nature of Sharia and the U.S. Government's role in promoting it, which gallops ahead in other areas today. I was one of the experts who testified for the plaintiff. "AFLC Attorneys to Argue Before Federal Appellate Court that AIG Bailout Was Unconstitutional," from the American Freedom Law Center, January 30:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has
announced that it will hear oral argument in Cincinnati, Ohio on April
20, 2012, in an appeal challenging the AIG bailout. The case, which is
captioned Murray v. United States Department of Treasury, et al., was brought by American Freedom Law Center attorneys
David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise, representing the plaintiff, Kevin
Murray, a taxpayer and former combat Marine who served in Iraq. The
federal lawsuit alleges that the U.S. government’s takeover and
financial bailout of AIG was in violation of the Establishment Clause of
the First Amendment.
Specifically, at the time of the government bailout (beginning in
September 2008 and continuing to the present), AIG was (and still is)
the world leader in promoting sharia-compliant insurance products.
Sharia is Islamic law, and it is the identical legal doctrine that
demands capital punishment for apostasy and blasphemy and provides the
legal and political mandates for global jihad followed religiously by
the world’s Muslim terrorists. By propping up AIG with taxpayer funds,
the U.S. government is directly and indirectly promoting Islam and, more
troubling, sharia.
In May 2009, U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Zatkoff, who presides
in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan,
rejected a motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the Obama
administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and later rebuffed their
efforts to stay the proceeding so they could avoid discovery and take an
extraordinary appeal to the Sixth Circuit.
After a year of document requests, depositions of current and former
government witnesses, and three separate subpoenas issued to AIG and the
New York Federal Reserve Bank, Yerushalmi and Muise filed a motion for
summary judgment, arguing that the undisputed facts demonstrate that the
government, through its absolute control and ownership of AIG, and with
tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, has directly and indirectly
promoted and supported sharia as a religious legal doctrine in violation
of the U.S. Constitution.
What makes this case all the more egregious is that this doctrine —
sharia — also happens to be the underlying legal and military doctrine
animating jihad against the West by Muslims from the Middle East, Asia,
Russia, Africa, and even right here at home, as evidenced by the tragic
Fort Hood massacre. Each and every one of the domestic and foreign
jihad terrorists has proclaimed allegiance to sharia and its call for
“jihad against apostates and infidels.”
Two experts on sharia, sharia-compliant finance, and jihad testified
at length through affidavits in support of the plaintiff’s case. The
government could not — and did not — oppose this expert testimony with
any contrary evidence....
Those who wage jihad to impose Sharia push a circular argument: Sharia is the only way to peace and security because it is the only condition under which they will allow peace and security to take hold. They try to prove the supposed necessity of Sharia by attempting to create it, through harassment, sexual assaults, and acts of terrorism.
It is this man's mindset that also likely explains some of the reported surge in sexual assaults in the Maldives, and in Scandinavia as well. When you are a second class citizen, as women and unbelievers are under Sharia (women become perpetual minors, and unbelievers are dhimmis), you bear a disproportionate burden to keep the peace by knowing your "place." If you are found to be out of that place, you forfeit your protection, such as it is.
"'Strict Muslim' raped four women at knifepoint to 'punish them for being on the streets at night'," Nick Enoch for the Daily Mail, January 25:
A Muslim man who raped women to 'teach them a lesson' for being on the streets at night was jailed indefinitely today because of the danger he poses to women.
Sunny Islam, 23, who comes from a strict Muslim family, dragged his terrified victims - including a 15-year-old - from the street at knifepoint, bound and assaulted them during a two-month reign of terror.
Police fear that Islam may have attacked many more.
Three of the assaults took place close to his home in Barking, east London, while a fourth occurred in nearby Forest Gate.
Judge Patricia Lees, sentencing him to a minimum of 11 years, said: 'The harm you have done to your victims is incalculable.
'The nature and extent of these offences drives me to the conclusion that you represent an extreme and continuing danger to women, particularly those out at night.'
He was traced through the number plate of his girlfriend's car after he kidnapped and raped the 15-year-old in September 2010.
He grabbed her from behind as she walked home with a friend and bundled her into the car at knifepoint before driving to a secluded spot where he raped her twice despite her claiming she was only 11 years old.
Judge Lees said: 'You told her you were going to "teach her a lesson", and similar things were said to the other women.
'Those words are a chilling indictment of your very troubling attitude towards all of these victims.
'You seem to observe women out at night as not deserving respect or protection....
The common factor in the persistence of female genital mutilation outside of Africa is the Shafi'i school of Islamic jurisprudence, which holds the practice to be obligatory. The Maldives has been on a fast track here of late toward intensified observance of Sharia, and the government has already ruled with respect to Sharia's criminal punishments that "there is nothing to debate about in a matter clearly stated in the religion of Islam." As this report makes clear, that attitude threatens the bodily integrity of Maldivian girls and women.
When the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, visited the Maldives late last year, she urged that the practice of flogging women for having sex outside marriage - while very rarely punishing men for the same - should be abolished.
''This practice constitutes one of the most inhumane and degrading forms of violence against women,'' she told local reporters then.
The response was as fierce as it was unexpected. The next day protesters rallied outside the UN building, carrying placards that read ''Ban UN'' and ''Islam is not a toy'' and threatened to ''Flog Pillay''. A website later promised to ''slaughter anyone against Islam''.
Similar protests have followed, and a growing religious divide between moderate and fundamentalist Muslims - constitutionally, all Maldivians are obliged to follow Islam - has led many to question the direction of religion in the Maldives and, in particular, the place of women in Maldivian society.
In an interview with the Herald, the Maldivian President, Mohamed Nasheed, conceded an emergent religious fundamentalism had changed the way women were viewed, and treated, in his country.
He said he was distressed by religious groups who campaigned for girls to be circumcised or to be kept home from school.
''We were a matriarchal society. Our inheritance, also, in the past was from women. But, with a new kind of radical Islam, the perceptions some of them have on women are not familiar to many Maldivians,'' Mr Nasheed said.
Once again, wherever Sharia enjoys a resurgence, the observable effect is that tolerance decreases, harassment increases, and respect for human rights decreases.
Anecdotal reports suggest female circumcision is undergoing a resurgence in the Maldives, particularly on the outer islands, where local imams hold significant influence.
Shadiya Ibrahim, member of the newly formed Gender Advocacy Working Group and a long-time campaigner for women's rights, said Maldivian society was growing more oppressive towards women.
''Being a woman is harder now. The religious Wahhabist scholars preach more forcefully than anyone else can. They have this backing of religion as a tool.
''No one can make the argument to have a more liberal, a more positive attitude towards women. Day by day, it is becoming harder for women to live in this country,'' she said.
Ms Ibrahim said women were excluded from positions of power, from taking jobs and even from education, particularly beyond primary level.
The practice of flogging women for extramarital sex was common across the Maldives, she said.
''It happens everywhere. Normally, this punishment is given when you give birth, which is why it is almost always women. If you have 140-odd women being flogged, you have only two or three men.'' The flogging is public and done with a paddle or a cane, and is intended more to humiliate than to cause serious injury.
Ms Ibrahim said flogging was accepted by many Maldivians, and there were other, more serious issues emerging, including a growing number of instances of sexual violence.
''This week, there have been two cases of a gang rape of [a] minor, one 16-year-old, one 12-year-old and, very often, while there is an effort to catch the perpetrators, eventually, the media will turn it into 'the girl was wearing this', 'the girl had gone there','' he said.
When you are a second-class citizen, if you are found out of your supposed place, you forfeit your right to protection. You are "asking for it."
Domestic violence is common. A nationwide survey done in 2007 found one in three Maldivian women had been abused, sexually or physically.
Aneesa Ahmed, president of advocacy organisation Hope for Women, said a domestic violence bill before the Maldivian parliament would raise awareness of an issue rarely discussed in the Maldives. But the legislation has been stuck in parliament more than 14 months. Only five of the Maldives' 77 parliamentarians are women.
Ms Ahmed said Maldivian women's control over their lives was being eroded. ''Men in the Maldives feel that the women's role is reproductive and in the home. That's what women should do and that's all we should do.''
In Human Events this morning, I discuss Newt Gingrich's anti-Sharia statements:
Just before his stunning victory in the South Carolina primary, Newt Gingrich drew the ire of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the deceptive Islamic supremacist group that bamboozles many with its pose as a neutral civil rights organization. Gingrich, fumed a CAIR spokesman, was "one of the nation's worst promoters of anti-Muslim bigotry." How did Gingrich earn this dubious honor? By telling the truth about Islamic law, and making clear his determination to resist it.
It all started last Tuesday, when Gingrich took a question about whether he would ever endorse a Muslim for President. "It would depend,” Gingrich answered, “entirely on whether they would commit in public to give up Sharia,” the Islamic legal code that mandates stonings, amputations, and restrictions on the freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, and institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims.
"A truly modern person who happened to worship Allah would not be a threat,” Gingrich continued, but “a person who belonged to any kind of belief in Sharia, any effort to impose it on the rest of us, would be a mortal threat." He even came out in favor of a federal law banning the use of Sharia in American courtrooms.
Gingrich also displayed an admirable grasp of the realities of Sharia, noting that the “rising Islamization of Turkey has been accompanied by a 1,400% increase in women being killed,” and pointing out other negative manifestations of Sharia: “The application of Sharia in places like Iran … churches being burned in Nigeria and Egypt, and … the decline of Christians in Iraq from a million, 200 thousand, when the Americans arrived, to about 500,000 today.”
Gingrich concluded: "I think the time has come for us to have an honest conversation about Islamic radicalism. I don't think we should be intimidated by our political elites, and I don't think we should be intimidated by universities who have been accepting money from the Saudis and who, therefore, now have people who are apologists for the very people who want to kill us."
This isn’t the first time Gingrich has challenged politically correct pieties so directly, and spoken so forthrightly about the realities of Islamic law. In August 2010, Gingrich made a point that our political elites of both the Left and the Right have still largely failed to grasp: “This is not a war on terrorism. Terrorism is an activity. This is a struggle with radical Islamists in both their militant and their stealth form. … One of the things I am going to suggest today is a federal law, which says no court anywhere in the United States under any circumstance is allowed to consider Sharia as a replacement for American law.”...
According to Article 2 of the existing constitution, which is not likely to budge from the next one, Islam is the religion of state, Arabic the official language, and Sharia the basis for legislation, so the improvised addition to the oath is somewhat redundant. Still, some form of Islamic supremacist touchdown dance was probably inevitable. "Egypt Islamist MP scolded for religious reference," from Agence France-Presse, January 23:
A newly elected Islamist deputy was scolded on Monday for adding a religious reference to the swearing-in oath at the opening session of Egypt's first post-revolution parliament.
The deputies started to be sworn in one by one, pledging to "preserve the safety of the nation and the interests of people and to respect the constitution and the law."
But when ultra conservative lawyer Mamduh Ismail took the microphone vowing to also "abide by the law of God", he was sharply told off by the chair Mahmud al-Saqqa -- the most senior member of parliament.
"Please stick to the text," an angry Saqqa urged Ismail, asking him to repeat the oath several times.
"Mr Ismail, my friend, please stand up and read the oath, and stick to the text," Saqqa pleaded.
Ismail finally agreed, read the oath and then insisted on adding, "and to abide by the law of God."
Egypt's lower house of parliament was holding its first session since a popular uprising ousted veteran president Hosni Mubarak and propelled Islamists to the centre stage of politics.
The first incident described below was blamed on Salafists, who also just won 25% of parliament. The second was attributed both to members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, who together will control 75% of parliament, and stand to control the drafting of the next constitution.
As one can see, they're already working together. More on this story. "Egyptian extremists against Copts, two wounded, houses burned and churches attacked," from Asia News, January 21:
Cairo (AsiaNews) - Anti-Christian violence continues in Egypt, according to local sources, the episodes are linked to the attempt of fundamentalist Islamic fringe - Salafis - to block the vote of the religious minority in the next election. On 19 January, a mob attacked the Coptic Christian community of the village of Kebly-Rahmaniya, near the town of Nag Hammadi, Qena governorate, Upper Egypt. The assailants, chanting "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) attacked and burned down houses, huts, shops and businesses (click here to see the video). The raid was also caused two injuries: a 16 year old boy, struck by a bullet and a 40 year old man with facial injuries.
Witnesses quoted by Assyrian International News Agency (AINA) report that Egyptian security forces did not intervene promptly to repel the onslaught and defend the Christians. Even the teams of firefighters delayed their intervention, arriving only 90 minutes after the assault, and when most of the buildings were already in flames. A source adds that a hut belonging to a Coptic Christian was burned to make room for the construction of a mosque. Moreover in the area there are now 300 Muslim places of worship, compared to only one Christian church even though Christians are 50% of the local population.
According to the Copts, the anti-Christian violence is related to the upcoming parliamentary elections: the Salafis, in fact, want to prevent the religious minority from voting which, with its 20 thousand members, can shift the balance of power in the area. The Copts are close to the Muslim moderate wing, which opposes the Islamist front. A witness confirmed that "no Copt from Rahmaniya-Kebly could vote" and that "the Salafis will win the elections."
In a second incident, which also occurred January 19, the Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood - together - broke into the church of Abu Makka in Bahteem, Qaliubia, informing members of the congregation that the place of Christian worship is illegal. An extremist also said that the 1,300 square meter building "is perfect for building a mosque and a hospital." The local bishop was to inaugurate the church and celebrate the first Mass, has suspended all ceremonies for security reasons, sparking the anger and disappointment of the whole congregation.
Sharia forbids the construction of new churches or the repair of existing ones.
There is nothing "moderate" about the Maldives, where religions other than Sunni Islam are forbidden. The government appeared willing to consider a variety of measures toward further Islamization of the nation when protesters demanded concessions ranging from a complete ban on alcohol and pork to a ban on direct flights to Israel.
That appears only to have emboldened the protesters, who, together with opposition members in government, seem to be trying to summon the zephyrs of the "Arab Spring" to the Maldives. "More arrests in Maldives as protests spread," from Agence France-Presse, January 21:
Dozens of anti-government activists were arrested in the Maldivian capital Male, the opposition said Saturday as the government accused them of whipping up religious extremism.
Opposition parties said police fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of activists on Friday night and that dozens were detained, raising to 82 the number of arrests in the past four days.
"The police detain people and release them after a few hours," opposition spokesman Mohamed Shareef said adding that a total of 82 had been arrested during the past four days.
Maldivian authorities said the protesters had attacked government facilities, including two police vehicles and vandalised the home of a government minister during the protests.
The government said six journalists and staff of the state-run national television broadcaster had been attacked by anti-government protesters while private media organisations accused the government of intimidating them.
Anti-government activists have been keeping up pressure on President Mohamed Nasheed who initiated the arrest Monday of the head of the country's criminal court on charges of misconduct and favouring opposition figures.
A senior figure in the opposition Dhivehi Qaumee Party (DQP), Mohamed Jameel, was also re-arrested on Wednesday as police investigate him and the party for allegedly spreading hate-speech.
The government has accused Jameel, a former justice minister, of making public remarks that Nasheed was working under the influence of "Jews" and "Christian priests" to weaken Islam in the Maldives.
The government on Wednesday raised fears of Islamic extremism taking hold in the Indian Ocean atoll nation, which is best known for its upmarket tourism and as a destination for honeymooners.
Honeymooners might consider Key West or Hawaii instead. Or Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Or a cold day in Hell, Michigan, where a snowball's chances are rather good just now.
The foreign ministry said it was "extremely concerned" by an increase in extremist rhetoric used by the government's rivals that could lead to "stigmatization, stereotyping and incitement to religious violence and hatred".
There have been anti-Semitic protests recently about the transport ministry's decision to allow direct flights from Israel, while a restaurant that hung up Christmas decorations in 2010 was also targeted.
The last great hope of the West here is that Libya will be a "moderate" Islamic regime. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, Western governments have kept hoping to see the emergence of a model Sharia regime that will operate as Sharia has been advertised to them -- not what Sharia is, but what it could, would, should be according to academic exercises removed from how Sharia has been practiced and enforced for over a millennium.
The motto of Western governments in their policy toward the Muslim world could well be the words of the woman at the end of the article: "We all want Sharia, but not the one they're talking about."
Accordingly, Sharia never works as advertised, but it does work according to its design. Unfortunately, it is a politically correct article of faith that the publicity and substance are one and the same. Caveat emptor: "war is deceit."
We tried to tell you. "Libyan Islamists rally to demand sharia-based law," from Reuters, January 20:
(Reuters) - Hundreds of Libyan Islamists rallied on Friday to demand that Muslim sharia law inspire legislation in what organizers called a response to the emergence of secular political parties after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi's dictatorship last year.
Assembled by Islamist political and religious groups, mostly young and bearded men holding up copies of the Koran demonstrated in squares in the capital Tripoli, the eastern city of Benghazi and in Sabha in the southern desert.
In Tripoli's Algeria Square, Islamists burned copies of the "Green Book," Gaddafi's eccentric handbook on politics, economics and everyday life, to underline that the Koran should be the country's main source of legislation.
By contrast, a group of secularists who have staged a sit-in in the square for more than a month chanted: "We want a civil state."
The Islamist demonstrators encompassed members of the conservative Muslim Brotherhood and harder-line Salafis, who both back strict versions of Islam, and relative moderates who prefer a civil state simply inspired by sharia.
The protests offered a glimpse into Libya's political future in which Islamist and secularist parties are expected to vie for seats in a national assembly scheduled to be elected in June to draft a constitution for the North African country.
Experts believe the Muslim Brotherhood is the most organized political force and could emerge as the leading political player in Libya after Gaddafi, who harshly suppressed Islamists during his 42 years in autocratic power.
Western powers are coming to accept that the advent of democracy in the Arab world means bringing Islamists to power. They have become the biggest election winners in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco over the past few months.
The chairman of Libya's ruling National Transitional Council (NTC), Mustafa Abdul Jalil, promised in October to uphold Islamic law. "We as a Muslim nation have taken Islamic sharia as the source of legislation, therefore any law that contradicts the principles of Islam is legally nullified," he said.
The deputy central bank governor said last month a law regulating Islamic banking would be issued in the first quarter of 2012, but stressed that both conventional and Islamic banks would be allowed to operate in Libya.
Islamists in Algeria Square held up placards demanding a financial system respecting Islam's ban on interest and calling for a constitution derived from sharia's legal and moral codes.
"We want to run our life according to Islamic principles, be it the economy, politics or our relations with other countries," said Abdul Basit Ghuwaila, a preacher at a Tripoli mosque. "Most people think Islam is just about harsh penalties."
Ghuwaila, 49, said sharia should not govern all Libyan law, but insisted that legislation should not contradict it.
Nour al-Zintani, a participant in the month-long sit-in for a secular state, said the majority of Libyans wanted Islam to be a part of their life but not a strict interpretation of it.
"We all want sharia," she said, standing next to her teenage daughter, both of them wearing a Muslim headscarf, "but not the one they're talking about, the one that rejects women. We want a moderate Islam that gives women their rights."
Sharia forbids the propagation of non-Islamic faiths, and Sudan's president Bashir had promised an intensified enforcement of Sharia alongside a campaign of cultural and linguistic Arabization. This is simply par for the course. "Sudan Threatens to Arrest Church Leaders," from Compass Direct News, January 18:
KHARTOUM, Sudan, January 18 (CDN) — Sudan’s Ministry of Guidance and Religious Endowments has threatened to arrest church leaders if they carry out evangelistic activities and do not comply with an order for churches to provide their names and contact information, Christian sources said.
The warning in a Jan. 3 letter to church leaders of the Sudan Presbyterian Evangelical Church (SPEC) arrived a few days after Sudan President Omar al-Bashir told cheering crowds on Jan. 3 that, following the secession of largely non-Islamic south Sudan last July, the country’s constitution will be more deeply entrenched in sharia (Islamic law).
“We will take legal procedures against pastors who are involved in preaching or evangelistic activities,” Hamid Yousif Adam, undersecretary of the Ministry of Guidance and Religious Endowment, wrote to the church leaders. “We have all legal rights to take them to court.”
Sources said the order was aimed at oppressing Christians amid growing hostilities toward Christianity.
“This is a critical situation faced by our church in Sudan,” said the Rev. Yousif Matar, secretary general of the SPEC.
Another church leader said the order was another in a series of measures by the government to control churches.
“They do not want pastors from South Sudan to carry on any church activities or mission work in Sudan,” he said.
Sudanese law prohibits missionaries from evangelizing, and converting from Islam to another religion is punishable by imprisonment or death in Sudan, though previously such laws were not strictly enforced. The government has never carried out a death sentence for apostasy, according to the U.S. State Department’s latest International Religious Freedom Report.
Christians are facing growing threats from both Muslim communities and Islamist government officials who have long wanted to rid Sudan of Christianity, Christian leaders told Compass. They said Christianity is now regarded as a foreign religion following the departure of 350,000 people, most of them Christians, to South Sudan following the July 9, 2011 secession.
Sudan’s Interim National Constitution (INC) holds up sharia as a source of legislation, and the laws and policies of the government favor Islam, according to the state department report. Christian leaders said they fear the government is tightening controls on churches in Sudan and planning to force compliance with Islamic law as part of a strategy to eliminate Christianity.
As he has several times in the past year, Al-Bashir on Jan. 3 once again warned that Sudan’s constitution will be more firmly entrenched in sharia.
“We are an Islamic nation with sharia as the basis of our constitution,” he told crowds in Kosti, south of Khartoum. “We will base our constitution on Islamic laws.”
His government subsequently issued the decree ordering church leaders to provide names and contact information of church leaders in Sudan, sources said. Christian leaders said the government is retaliating for churches’ perceived pro-West position.
Muslim scholars have urged heavy-handed measures against Christians to Al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Darfur.
It will lead to democracy, freedom and stability in the region, he says.
Oh, really? And where exactly has the rule of Islamic law -- Sharia, not secular rule such as has prevailed in Turkey since the 1920s, or the Arab nationalist mixture of Western secular law and some Islamic law that has prevailed in many Muslim Arab countries for the last half-century or so, up until the "Arab Spring" -- ever led to democracy? Ever? Again, secular Turkey was established in the context of a rejection of political Islam, not an embrace of it.
And where has Sharia ever led to freedom for women or non-Muslims? Ever? And stability? Where have Sharia states ever been centers of regional stability?
Jimmy Carter continues to aid and abet the forces of oppression. "Carter asks U.S. to support Islamic rule in Egypt," from Aswat Masriya, January 19 (thanks to Twostellas):
Former American President, Jimmy Carter, has called out for the U.S. to support Islamic rule in Egypt, pointing out that it will lead to democracy, freedom and stability in the region.
Carter also told the CNN that Egypt is currently embracing freedom, explaining that it finally now has a real chance to elect a democratic government that protects human rights.
Asking for Americans’ support, the Former President hopes that the U.S. will not reject the Egyptian people’s choice like they did after the Palestinian elections - where Hamas was isolated after their winning.
“We must not repeat that grave mistake with Egypt. I think we could have established peace in the region if we had accepted and supported the people’s choice in Palestine. That is the lesson we have learnt... and Egypt’s choice should be given a chance,” Carter said.
Newt Gingrich's unhappy ex is just about to torpedo his presidential run, but I am glad to see he slipped in a few more home truths before departing the national stage. Hamas-linked CAIR is, surprise of surprises, lying about the nature of Sharia. It teaches the things they say it does, broadly interpreted, but also denies the freedom of speech, mandates death for apostates, and institutionalizes discrimination against women and second-class status for non-Muslims. Western apologists for Sharia such as Islamic Republic shill Reza Aslan lie about Sharia when they claim it is so multiform that it has no particular character that anyone can point to; in reality, wherever and whenever Sharia has been implemented, historically and today, it has looked pretty much the same, and has contained the elements of Sharia that Western Islamic supremacist spokesmen routinely deny are essential to it.
Don't believe me? Fine. Show me evidence of any Sharia state -- not a majority-Muslim state, but a Sharia state -- that did not have as part of its basic law the oppressive items I listed above, and many more. I'll be right here, at director[at]jihadwatch.org.
"Group blasts Gingrich for limiting hires to Muslims who renounce Shariah law," by Joy Lin for FoxNews.com, January 18 (thanks to Nawid):
The largest Muslim civil liberties group in the United States on Wednesday condemned Newt Gingrich for saying he would only hire Muslims to his administration if they renounced the use of Islam's Shariah law as a tool for U.S. government.
Calling Gingrich "one of the nation's worst promoters of anti-Muslim bigotry," the Council of American Islamic Relations suggested the Republican presidential candidate is a segregationist.
"Newt Gingrich's vision of America segregates our citizens by faith. His outdated political ideas look backward to a time when Catholics and Jews were vilified and their faiths called a threat," said CAIR Legislative Director Corey Sayolor [sic] in a statement.
"The time for bias in American politics has passed and Newt Gingrich looks like a relic of an ugly era," Sayolor said.
CAIR said the release was prompted by the candidate's remarks Tuesday in Columbia when, asked if he would ever endorse a Muslim running for president.
"It would depend entirely on whether they would commit in public to give up Shariah," Gingrich said.
"A truly modern person who happened to worship Allah would not be a threat, a person who belonged to any kind of belief in Shariah, any effort to impose it on the rest of us, would be a mortal threat," Gingrich told the crowd, adding that he's "totally opposed" to Shariah law being applied in American courts and favors a federal law that "preempts" its use.
This month, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an Oklahoma ban on the application of "Sharia law" and "international law" in courts.
Pointing to the religious freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, CAIR defends Shariah law as a set of beliefs that "teaches marital fidelity, generous charity and a thirst for knowledge," and mandates that Muslims respect the law of the land in which they live.
Gingrich had a different interpretation of Shariah law, pointing to the, "rising Islamization of Turkey has been accompanied by a 1,400 percent increase in women being killed."
"When you look at the application of Shariah in places like Iran, when you look at churches being burned in Nigeria and Egypt, and that the decline of Christians in Iraq from a million, 200 thousand when the Americans arrived to about 500,000 today, I think it depends entirely on the person," he said.
"If they are a modern person integrated in the modern world and they are prepared to recognize all religions, that's one thing. On the other hand, if they're Saudis, who demand that we respect them while they refuse to allow Christians to worship in Saudi Arabia, that's something different," he continued.
Later in the day during a question and answer session in Aiken, S.C., Gingrich also called the Ground Zero mosque "a deliberate and willful insult to the people of the United States who suffered an attack by people who are motivated by the same thing."
"I think the time has come for us to have an honest conversation about Islamic radicalism. I don't think we should be intimidated by our political elites, and I don't think we should be intimidated by universities who have been accepting money from the Saudis and who, therefore, now have people who are apologists for the very people who want to kill us," he said.
As was the case with Egypt, weren't the Salafists and their sympathizers in Libya supposed to be a Tiny Minority of Extremists? We tried to tell you. "In Libya, a Fundamentalist War against Moderate Islam Takes Shape", by Steven Sotloff for Time, January 18:
The Libyan revolution has not been kind to Mahmud al-Arabi. Last March, forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi ransacked his grocery store in Zuwara after he fled to Tunisia, stealing about $6,000 worth of supplies. When he returned in September, facing mounting debts, al-Arabi turned to selling beer and liquor — an illegal enterprise in a country where alcohol has been banned for four decades. His new business drew the attention of Islamist rebels who helped to overthrow Gaddafi. After they threatened the store's landlord, they blew up Arabi's shop. Out of money and out of work, Arabi spends his days in his trailer home lamenting the turn his country has taken. Says he, "I got nothing but suffering from this revolution."
Throughout this country, Libyans are discovering that their hard fought battle to win freedoms is at risk. Puritanical Muslims known as Salafis are applying a rigid form of Islam in more and more communities. They have clamped down on the sale of alcohol and demolished the tombs of saints where many local people worship. The small town of Zuwara near the Tunisian border, dominated by a heterodox Muslim sect despised by the Salafis, is quickly becoming the battlefield for competing visions of Libya's future.
Arabi's trailer sits on the outskirts of the town, surrounded by crushed Heineken beer cans. Inside, bowls strewn around the floor capture the rain drops that leak through the porous ceiling. "I prefer selling alcohol to begging," he says, explaining how he lost his entire savings during the revolution. After Gaddafi loyalists took the town, he was a wanted man for supporting the anti-regime fighters and had to be smuggled to Tunisia at a cost of 3,500 dinars. "I lost everything in my store and had no money. So I decided to sell alcohol."
He shows off a room with 3,000 small cans of Heineken beer and a dozen liquor bottles. "Business was very good," he boasts. "I had more than a hundred customers a day who bought Absolut [Vodka], J&B and [Johnny Walker] Red Label." But when the Salafis came knocking, Arabi knew his days as an alcohol vendor were numbered. "They said this was a Muslim village where alcohol is forbidden," he relates. "I didn't want any trouble with them and agreed to stop selling alcohol at the store. But the Salafis weren't satisfied with that and destroyed it."
It is not only Arabi who has faced the Salafis' wrath. The estimated 200-to-400 members of the local Salafi movement have demolished shrines belonging to adherents of the Ibadi sect, long considered heretics by orthodox Sunni Muslims. In the town's cemetery, large blocks of stone surround what was once a mausoleum. The large conical shaped structure that once adorned it now lies collapsed in the debris. Salafists are intolerant of other strands of Islam and have physically attacked Muslim minorities in other parts of the Arab world such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Many Muslims frequent the shrines of saints, believing they have powers of intercession with the divine. Salafis, however, believe these are pagan rites that must be obliterated from Islam. "The situation has gotten much worse lately," says Ibadi Sheikh Walid Darder. "We may have not had political rights under Gaddafi, but we did not live in fear of going to the mosque."
Throughout Libya, Gaddafi's fall has emboldened Salafis, who were persecuted and imprisoned under the now deceased leader. They have increased their public presence, taken over mosques, and even hoisted the flag of al-Qaeda over the courthouse in Benghazi where the revolution began eleven months ago. In the capital of Tripoli, Salafis have destroyed more than six shrines. In one incident, dozens swarmed mausoleums belonging to two Muslim mystics and dug up their bodies so that worshippers could no longer visit their tombs. They also burned the relics around the shrines.
Arabi however is not concerned with the destruction of obscure tombs he does not frequent. "I just want my life back," he pleads. "I fought in the mountains here against Gaddafi. My payback is blowing up my shop," he says, turning to dump a bowl full of rainwater on the soggy field outside his trailer.
As I said here, "Rick Perry is woefully unfit to be president of the United States." It is satisfying to see him bringing up the rear in the polls, especially once the Perrybots, including some former friends and allies, made it personal with their false claims and smears after Pamela Geller and I exposed Perry's close ties to Islamic supremacist enabler Grover Norquist and his foolish sponsorship of a whitewashed curriculum on Islam for Texas public schools. How's your boy doing now, fellows?
Anyway, Turkey is not ruled by Islamic terrorists. Turkey is ruled by Islamic supremacists who are working to dismantle Kemalist secularism and transform Turkey into a Sharia state. That is not at all the same thing, although Erdogan certainly shares the goal of jihad terrorists worldwide, which is to impose Sharia.
"Perry: Turkey ruled by 'Islamic terrorists'?," by David Jackson for USA TODAY, January 17:
We wonder if Turkey will be filing any protests with the State Department after presidential candidate Rick Perry labeled it a virtual terrorist state during last night's Republican debate.
Asked if Turkey belongs in NATO, Perry said: "Well, obviously when you have a country that is being ruled by, what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists, when you start seeing that type of activity against their own citizens, then yes."
The Turkish government is run by an Islamic party, but it remains a U.S. ally.
Turkey's press has already responded to Perry -- angrily.
"The debate that the Republican candidate Rick Perry attended on American Fox TV turned into a scandal that contained very ugly statements about Turkey," reported TRT state television.
Mustafa Akyol, a columnist with the English-language Hurriyet Daily news, tweeted: "Rick Perry: what an idiot."...
Indeed so. It is also interesting to note, however, that some time ago I had an interesting exchange with the self-described "liberal Muslim" Mustafa Akyol, after he declared his support for the jihad flotilla that Turkey sent against Israel. The Turkish columnist Burak Bekdil has characterized the "liberal" Akyol as a pro-Sharia, pro-Erdogan Islamic supremacist. But undoubtedly a sly one. Bekdil says that Akyol is working to further "Islamists' global ambition to play the modern day, Muslim Trojan Horse at the gates of western civilization."
Consistent with that, Akyol also says that an Islamic Turkey is coming and that Turkish secularism cannot be salvaged, but that Israelis shouldn't be concerned: as long as they stop defending themselves against the Gaza jihadists and jihad flotillas, all will be well.
Priorities. By banning Barbie and trying to foist a substitute toy on consumers, they have automatically made the Barbie doll that much more interesting to the public.
As always, Islamic morality policing is a cheap way for the government to look busy, shore up its credentials as a pious operation, and to remind the public who's boss, and that they are watching. "Iran cracks down on Barbie, plans toys of captured U.S. drone," by Mitra Amiri for Reuters, January 16:
TEHRAN — Iran’s morality police are cracking down on the sale of Barbie dolls to protect the public from what they see as pernicious western culture eroding Islamic values, shopkeepers said on Monday.
It's Skipper that's actually a Zionist agent, you know...
As the West imposes the toughest ever sanctions on Iran and tensions rise over its nuclear programme, inside the country the Barbie ban is part of what the government calls a “soft war” against decadent cultural influences.
“About three weeks ago they [the morality police] came to our shop, asking us to remove all the Barbies,” said a shopkeeper in a toy shop in northern Tehran.
Iran’s religious rulers first declared Barbie, made by U.S. company Mattel Inc, un-Islamic in 1996, citing its “destructive cultural and social consequences”. Despite the ban, the doll has until recently been openly on sale in Tehran shops.
The new order, issued around three weeks ago, forced shopkeepers to hide the leggy, busty blonde behind other toys as a way of meeting popular demand for the dolls while avoiding being closed down by the police.
A range of officially approved dolls launched in 2002 to counter demand for Barbie have not proven successful, merchants told Reuters.
The dolls named Sara, a female, and Dara, a male arrived in shops wearing a variety of traditional dress, with Sara fully respecting the rule that all women in Iran must obey in public, of covering their hair and wearing loose-fitting clothes.
“My daughter prefers Barbies. She says Sara and Dara are ugly and fat,” said Farnaz , a 38-year-old mother, adding that she could not find Barbie cartoon DVDs as she was told they were also banned from public sale.
Pointing to a doll covered in black long veil, a 40-year-old Tehran toy shop manager said: “We still sell Barbies but secretly and put these in the window to make the police think we are just selling these kinds of dolls.”
Iran has fought a running battle to purge pervasive western culture from the country since its Islamic revolution overthrew a western-backed king in 1979, enforcing Islamic dress codes, banning Western music and foreign satellite television.
Whatever their disagreements may be about how Sharia should be implemented, if the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis do succeed in imposing Sharia upon Egypt, we will see restrictions on the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the rights of women and non-Muslims. Wherever and whenever Sharia has been implemented, this has been the case. Yet in the U.S., we are forced to believe on pain of "Islamophobia" charges that Sharia is so multiform as to have no particular content and is fully compatible with Constitutionally protected freedoms -- and on the basis of these false claims, anti-Sharia legislation is struck down.
"We won’t be another NDP, say Muslim Brothers," from Almasry Alyoum, January 15 (thanks to Wimpy):
Mohamed Gheith, MP for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, on Sunday said his party would not act like the disbanded National Democratic Party (NDP). “We do not intend to dominate parliament,” he said. “All committees will be headed according to a consensus.”
He added that his party would only form a coalition in parliament that is best for the country. “We know that we are watched by our voters, and we cannot let them down,” he said.
He said his party differs with the Salafi-oriented Nour Party over the way Islamic Sharia should be applied. “But we both agree in principle that it should be applied,” he noted, adding that the Salafis have no political expertise....
Yet no one, least of all Western feminists, seems in the least concerned about Sharia's institutionalized discrimination against women. "Growing use of Sharia by UK Muslims," by Divya Talwar for the BBC, January 16 (thanks to all who sent this in):
The use of Sharia, or Islamic religious law, is growing in Britain, with thousands of Muslims using it to settle disputes each year, but women's groups and some others are objecting.
''You must speak the truth, sister. Because Allah is listening to your every word, you can lie to us but not to Him.''
The bearded sheikh is instructing his first client of the day to explain why she is unhappy in her marriage.
Sitting behind a small desk in the back room of a converted terrace house, Sheikh Haitham al-Haddad is a representative of the Islamic Sharia Council, the largest Sharia body in the UK, based in Leyton, east London.
The woman has come to the council for an Islamic divorce because her husband refuses to grant her one.
''I'm not happy. He's never at home and I've seen messages from other women on his phone. He doesn't even give money to help support the kids,'' the woman tells the sheikh.
It is easier for a Muslim man to end a marriage in Islam, but a wife must persuade the judges to grant her a dissolution if her husband is opposed to divorce.
The case is typical of those case dealt with by Sharia councils, as thousands of Muslims are turning to them to help resolve family, financial and commercial problems in accordance with Sharia principles.
Growing demand
An estimated 85 Sharia councils could be operating in Britain, according to a 2009 report by the think tank Civitas.
Several bodies like the Islamic Sharia Council have seen a large increase in their cases in the past five years.
''Our cases have easily more than tripled over the past three to five years," says Sheikh al-Haddad.
''On average, every month we can deal with anything from 200 to 300 cases. A few years ago it was just a small fraction of that.
''Muslims are becoming more aligned with their faith and more aware of what we are offering them,'' he explained.
The principles of Sharia govern all aspects of a Muslim's life. It is derived from a combination of sources including the Koran, the Hadith, which is based on the example of the prophet Muhammad, and fatwas, which are rulings of Islamic scholars.
Saba Zia is a practising Muslim who lives in Reading with her three children. She became a single mother when her husband walked out on her after 13 years of marriage.
"He went to Pakistan for three years and stopped paying the bills and the mortgage.
"I let myself and my kids go. I started starving myself. I would go on average three days not eating anything at all. I remember on one occasion it was seven days. I even started cutting myself. I was aware of what I was doing but I had no control."
Two and a half years after her husband left her, Saba asked him for an Islamic divorce. It was more important to her than her civil divorce.
"I just picked up the phone and said to him: 'Give me a divorce.' But he wasn't going to make it easy for me. That's when I went to the Sharia council."
The Sharia council supported Saba and helped her get the religious divorce she was seeking.
"For me the religious divorce, the Talak, was the first port of call, the most important. The civil divorce was something that could come later. I had to have closure in the eyes of God first.
"I felt like I wasn't alone. They recognised my rights and they helped me move on with my life."
Sharia has been operating in the UK, managed by locally-appointed councils, in parallel to the British legal system since 1982.
But the informal councils have no legal powers and they cannot impose any penalties.
They deal with civil cases alone, but many Muslims are choosing to voluntarily accept rulings made by the scholars.
Omar Hannan, 28, from Solihull, turned to Sharia instead of the British courts after an ownership dispute broke out between the British Muslim partners at his industrial cleaning company.
''It fulfilled my Islamic spiritual principles which was the main reason I went to a Muslim tribunal.
''But it was also very quick. We resolved it in three to four months,'' he said.
''It only cost a couple of hundred pounds, and you can imagine how much it would have cost through the English legal system,'' he added.
As a demand for Sharia thrives, a number of British law firms are starting to tap into the booming market.
Muslim Lawyer Aina Khan has launched one of the first Sharia departments at her London-based law firm.
She offers clients advice that is in keeping with both English and Islamic law.
''I am surprised that the majority of people that I am dealing with are under the age of 50. They are British Muslims who want to satisfy their British identity as well as their Muslim one.
''So I give them solutions to their problems that satisfy both legal systems all under one place.''
Despite the growing demand for Sharia law in Britain, there is also increasing opposition by some groups who argue that the practice discriminates against women.
The Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation (IKWRO) is campaigning to bring an end to the practice.
''We have spoken to many women and all of them tell us the same story; Sharia law is not providing them with the justice they seek. The councils are dominated by men, who are making judgements in favour of men,'' said Diana Nammi.
Concerns such as these have led crossbench peer Baroness Cox to introduce a bill before the House of Lords, aimed at introducing regulation of Sharia organisations in the UK.
The bill has received its first reading and is expected to get a second reading later this year.
But for groups like IKWRO the bill does not go far enough.
''We think there shouldn't be any religious law practising in Britain - all Sharia bodies should be banned. That is the only way we can ensure equality of justice for all women," argues Diana Nammi....
Islamabad: The Pakistani Taliban confiscated computers, television sets and mobile phones from residents of the largest town of the restive South Waziristan tribal region and set them on fire at a market, according to a media report today.
The militants set on fire over a dozen computers, television sets and cellular phones and several cassettes at the bazar in Wana, the main town of South Waziristan Agency, yesterday. The Taliban militants, who belonged to a faction led by Maulvi Nazeer, said they had already banned the use of TV sets and computers for watching movies and playing music.
Part of this behavior is a continuation of Muhammad's antipathy toward music, and familiar patterns of "morality" policing. But a totalitarian government must restrict a population's access to information to maintain control.
They said they had also banned mobile phones with cameras. The militants, who claimed people were defying their ban, seized over a dozen TV sets, computers and mobile phones and several cassettes, reportedly with music, from local residents, The News daily reported.
Before burning the items they had confiscated, the militants closed the main road passing through Wana's Rustam Bazar. A large number of tribesmen gathered to watch the militants burning the TV sets and computers.
Proselytizing is forbidden. It could get Christians killed. In this case, it could get Christians who had nothing to do with it killed. Good thing an appeals court struck down Oklahoma's anti-Sharia law, eh? Islamic Tolerance Alert from Kashmir: "Indian Christians fear backlash due to Sharia ruling," by M Saleem Pandit for TNN, January 13 (thanks to Twostellas):
SRINAGAR: All India Christian Council in New Delhi on Friday feared backlash against Christians in the country due to incrimination of pastors Jim Borst and CM Khanna by Srinagar's self-styled Islamic Shariat court.
The self-proclaimed Supreme Court of Islamic Sharia headed by Mufti Bashir-ud-din on Wednesday indicted Pastor C M Khanna and Dutch national, Jim Borst for their alleged involvement in luring Kashmiri Muslims to convert to Christianity.
The Deputy Mufti-Azam Jammu and Kashmir and son of grand Mufti Bashir-ud-din, Mufti Muhammad Nasir-ul-Islam in a statement on January 11 said that "it was proved beyond doubt that the accused" pastor Khanna "along with other accomplices was luring Muslim people to change their religion."
"The Kashmir situation is going through a critical phase and if such elements are not brought to book it will have a serious and negative impact on the (Kashmiri Muslim) society. It is shocking and surprising that the state government was allowing such activities. Kashmir society will not tolerate such activities at all and we stand united against such elements," Mufti Nasir said. The deputy Mufti added that a detailed verdict against the accused would be made public soon.
The two pastors have already quit the valley. They left soon after Pastor C M Khanna (who lived in Kashmir for past several years) was released on bail on December 1, 2011. The J&K police had arrested him on November 19, 2011 on charges of fomenting communal trouble in the state.
All India Christian Council in a statement on Friday feared that the Sharia court's threatening that it would issue a sentence soon could "encourage extremist elements to indulge in violence."...
German authorities have officially confirmed that they are monitoring German-language Internet websites that are critical of Muslim immigration and the Islamization of Europe.
According to Manfred Murck, director of the Hamburg branch of the German domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), his organization is studying whether German citizens who criticize Muslims and Islam on the Internet are fomenting hate and are thus criminally guilty of "breaching" the German constitution.
The BfV's move marks a significant setback for the exercise of free speech in Germany and comes amid a months-long smear campaign led by a triple alliance of leftwing German multicultural elites, sundry Muslim groups and members of the mainstream media, who have been relentless in their efforts to discredit the so-called counter-jihad movement (also known as the "Islamophobes") in Germany.
Opinion polls show that growing numbers of ordinary German citizens are worried about the consequences of decades of multicultural policies that have encouraged mass immigration from Muslim countries.
Germans are especially concerned about the refusal of millions of Muslim immigrants to integrate into German society, as well as the emergence of a parallel legal system in Germany based on Islamic Sharia law.
In an effort to reverse this tide of public opinion, the guardians of German multiculturalism have been working overtime to regain the initiative by accusing the critics of Islam of engaging in hate speech to try to intimidate the so-called "new right" into silence.
The media campaign has been led by two financially troubled newspapers, the Berliner Zeitung and its sister publication, the Frankfurter Rundschau, as well as Der Spiegel, a leftwing magazine based in Hamburg that has long served as the mouthpiece for German multiculturalism.
In a January 4, 2012 interview with the Berliner Zeitung andFrankfurter Rundschau, Murck said the owners of anti-Islam blogs "have a disturbed relationship to the democratic constitutional state" and often promote "infringements of human rights protected under our constitution."
Murck continued: "I also see evidence of criminal relevance, such as making threats and public invitations to crime." He said criticism of Muslims and Islam constitutes "an attack against the freedom of religion, which is protected by Article 4 of the Basic Law."
The Berliner Zeitung and Frankfurter Rundschau interview was conducted by Steven Geyer und Jörg Schindler, two journalists and propagandists who have been leading an ongoing effort to shut down a highly popular German-language Internet website called Politically Incorrect (PI), which over the years has grown into a major information resource for Germans concerned about the spread of Islam in their country.
PI's motto reads "Against the Mainstream, Pro-American, Pro-Israel, Against the Islamization of Europe" which encapsulates everything the German left abhors....
David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise have ably represented AFDI in our freedom of speech cases against several cities that refused to run our ads offering help to those threatened because they left Islam, or in fear of honor killing. Yerushalmi has also been at the forefront of crafting truly effective anti-Sharia legislation. Now they've joined forces to create the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC):
Having collaborated for over four years on many high-profile cases, attorneys David Yerushalmi and Robert J. Muise have decided to formalize their working relationship by together launching the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC). Yerushalmi, an orthodox Jew, and Muise, an orthodox Catholic, describe AFLC as the Nation’s first truly authentic Judeo-Christian, public interest law firm.
According to Yerushalmi and Muise, they formed AFLC because they share the firm conviction that the strength of our Nation lies in its commitment to a Judeo-Christian heritage and moral foundation and to an enduring faith and trust in God and His Providence. This intersection between our Judeo-Christian values and the preservation and security of our Nation has garnered the interest and support from several prominent leaders, including former CIA Director R. James Woolsey; former Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan and current President of the Center for Security Policy Frank Gaffney; Notre Dame law professor Charles Rice; former Inspector General for the Department of Defense Joseph Schmitz; and former Assistant U.S. Attorney and current contributing editor to National Review Andy McCarthy, all of whom will be serving on the AFLC advisory board.
Through AFLC, Yerushalmi and Muise seek a return to what they describe as “America’s founding commitment to receive God’s continued blessing for America.” Yerushalmi commented, “AFLC will fight for faith and freedom by advancing and defending America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and moral foundation through litigation, education, and public policy programs. Fighting for our Judeo-Christian values is more than simply defending religious liberty; it is fighting for the very survival of our Nation.” He added, “Throughout history, great nations have fallen from within. Make no mistake, America is a blessed Nation, but only so long as it remains faithful to the Judeo-Christian values upon which it was founded.”
Yerushalmi and Muise have pledged to aggressively fight those who seek to undermine and destroy our Nation’s founding principles. They view secular progressives and organizations such as the ACLU and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as domestic enemies to the Judeo-Christian values reflected in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. They vow to fight the “civilization jihad” being waged by the Muslim Brotherhood and other sharia-driven Muslims operating within the United States, including CAIR.
What is AFLC? It is first and foremost a public interest litigation firm. Muise explained the pressing need for an organization like AFLC: “To great effect, elite secular progressives are systematically assailing and destroying our Nation’s moral foundation. Driven by a transnational world view that is hostile to our Nation’s Judeo-Christian values, progressives are zealously sweeping religion from the public square, foisting sharia law and other harmful international precedents into our courts and Constitution, assaulting the traditional family, and weakening our national defense by — among other things — undermining the strength of our military through social engineering and political correctness. Our traditional liberties hang in balance. And for good or ill, this battle for America’s soul is being waged in the courtrooms across America.”
The Salafists do not need absolute power to be a threat to Egypt's antiquities and historical heritage. They already won between a quarter and a third of the vote, enough to be a major force in proposing, approving, and blocking legislation. That will help determine priorities in government, and also threatens a gravitational pull toward stricter enforcement of Sharia as the Muslim Brotherhood competes with them for legitimacy and popularity.
A democracy is only as good as the values that inform its participants. An update on this story. "Naked images of Pharoahs are heresy, says Salafist leader," from Al Ahram Online, January 12:
Images of naked Pharaohs on Egypt’s temples are tantamount to heresy, prominent Salafist Abdel Moneim El-Shahat said on Wednesday.
El-Shahat, who failed to win an independent seat for the Nour Party in recent parliamentary elections, had previously called Egypt’s Pharaonic heritage “rotten.”
Speaking to Moataz El-Demerdash on El-Hayat 2 Channel on Wednesday evening, El-Shahat also reiterated his controversial comments about Egypt’s renowned novelist Naguib Mahfouz, stressing that his novel Awlad Harretna (Children of the Alley), one of the books that earned him a Nobel prize in 1988, violated the principles of Islam.
El-Shahat had previously said that Mahfouz’s novel had “symbols that promote atheism” and accused him of “inciting promiscuity, prostitution and atheism” in his books.
However, El-Shahat said he did not mean to personally attack the deceased writer and urged readers to read Mahfouz’s novels to know that he is correct. He also sharply criticised Egyptian novelist and activist Alaa El-Aswany, author of The Yacoubian Building and Chicago.
“Those who attack me should read Naguib Mahfouz’s novels,” El-Shahat told El-Demerdash. “And I challenge Alaa El-Aswany to read his novel The Yacoubian Building on live TV.”
Speaking about women, El-Shahat spoke about his dream for all Egyptian women to wear the niqab (full veil) and claimed Salafists are not the enemies of women.
More civic-minded Muslims help people abstain from alcohol the Muslim way. "Lebanon: Shop selling alcohol bombed in Shiite-majority south," from ANSAmed, January 12 (thanks to Insubria):
(ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, JANUARY 12 - A bomb was blown up by unidentified individuals last night at a alcoholic beverages shop in southern Lebanon, the latest in a series of this sort of attack - for which no one has claimed responsibility - in an area with a Shiite Muslim-majority population. Reports were from the Lebanese news agency NNA. The explosion - which occurred in Sarafand, about 50 kilometres south of Beirut - severely damaged the shop targeted and, to a lesser degree, surrounding ones as well. However, no one was hurt. In multi-confessional Lebanon, the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages is legal and tolerated in many areas, but not in some with a Muslim majority population. (ANSAmed).
The Islamic Defenders Front demands a ban on alcohol, the Muslim way: with a near-riot, vandalism, and threats of jihad. And what about the sizable number of non-Muslims in Indonesia, who may want to drink alcohol? Pah! Who cares about them?
"Indonesia Islamic group rallies to demand alcohol ban," from Reuters, January 12:
JAKARTA | Thu Jan 12, 2012 8:18am EST (Reuters) - Hundreds of members of Indonesia's Islamic Defenders Front FPI.L rallied in the capital on Thursday to press the government to ban alcohol as part of its drive to turn the fourth largest country in the world into an Islamic state.
Indonesia is a secular state with the world's biggest population of Muslims, most of whom are moderate.
How Reuters defines "moderate" they have never bothered to explain.
The FPI protest group has in recent years raided bars, nightclubs and the office of Indonesia's Playboy magazine, though it has had limited success in achieving its central aims.
It is separate from a series of small, banned militant groups, some of which are affiliated with al Qaeda and have carried out bomb attacks. An attack on nightclubs in Bali in 2002 killed more than 200 people.
The FPI on Thursday protested against a plan by the interior ministry to revoke anti-alcohol bylaws in several areas of Indonesia on the grounds that the laws were in violation of Islamic sharia law.
Some of the protesters outside the interior ministry in the city's main square wore white robes with the word "mujahideen" emblazoned on their shirts.
"President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono must issue a decree to ban alcohol and to cut alcohol distribution in Indonesia to zero percent," said FPI field coordinator Awit Mashuri.
"We will defend anti-alcohol bylaws and we will fight anything that is against the interests of Islam in Indonesia," Zulfi Syukur told the cheering crowd, many of whom pumped their fists in the air and shouted "jihad", or holy war.
Later, some people at the rally vandalised a security post outside the interior ministry and threw plastic bottles, according to Reuters witnesses....
Whenever a society sets apart a second class of citizens, that group bears a disproportionate burden to keep the peace by knowing its "place." To have an altercation with the ruling class (no matter who started it) is to have been found outside of that place, and thus to forfeit any protection that remains under that social structure. That is the case with the rights of women and unbelievers (dhimmis) subjugated under Islamic law. Hence the blaming and shunning of the woman in the report below.
The courts have ruled against these state-sponsored sexual assaults of female detainees, but that has not improved conditions for the victim who dared to publicize what happened to her. "Egypt’s Women Find Power Still Hinges on Men," by David D. Kirkpatrick for the New York Times, January 9:
CAIRO — At first Samira Ibrahim was afraid to tell her father that Egyptian soldiers had detained her in Tahrir Square in Cairo, stripped off her clothes, and watched as she was forcibly subjected to a “virginity test.”
But when her father, a religious conservative, saw electric prod marks on her body, they revived memories of his own detention and torture under President Hosni Mubarak’s government. “History is repeating itself,” he told her, and together they vowed to file a court case against the military rulers, to claim “my rights,” as Ms. Ibrahim later recalled.
That case has proved successful so far. For the first time last month, an administrative court challenged the authority of the military council and banned such “tests.” Ms. Ibrahim will ask a military court on Sunday to hold the officers accountable.
But nearly a year after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, Ms. Ibrahim’s story in many ways illustrates the paradoxical position of women in the new Egypt. Emboldened by the revolution to claim a new voice in public life, many are finding that they are still dependent on the protection of men, and that their greatest power is not as direct actors but as symbols of the military government’s repression. It is not a place where Egyptian feminists had hoped women would be, back in the heady days of the revolution, when they played an active role, side by side with men, to bring down a dictator. [...]
At the same time, the revolution has opened the door for the ascendance of conservative Islamist parties, including religious extremists who want to roll back some of the rights women do have. The mainstream Muslim Brotherhood is poised to win nearly half of the seats in Parliament, when voting is completed this week, while the more extreme Salafis are on track to win more than 20 percent.
While Brotherhood leaders talk of encouraging traditional roles but respecting women’s career choices, many Salafis oppose allowing women to play leadership roles and favor regulating issues like women’s dress to impose Islamic standards of modesty. “We have major concerns because what they are proposing is very oppressive,” said Ghada Shabandar, a veteran human rights activist. [...]
But the stigma attached to victims of sexual abuse continues to force many to remain silent.
Six other women were subjected to “virginity tests” by the soldiers that night in March when Ms. Ibrahim was assaulted. The humiliation was so great, Ms. Ibrahim said, that she initially hoped to die. “I kept telling myself, ‘People get heart attacks, why don’t I get a heart attack and just die like them?’ ”
Her mother’s advice was to keep silent, if she ever hoped to marry, or even lead a dignified life in their village in rural Upper Egypt, Ms. Ibrahim said in an interview.
When she did speak out, Egyptian new media shunned her, she said, and only the international news media would cover her story. She received telephone calls at all hours threatening rape or death. But with the support of her father — an Islamist activist who was detained and tortured two decades ago — she persevered, and next week will go back to military court in an attempt to hold the perpetrators accountable as well....
This ruling has come because of Leftist judges who don't know anything about Sharia and have swallowed the smooth deceptions of Islamic supremacist groups like Hamas-linked CAIR, but it can also be attributed to the fact that the laws themselves have not been focused properly. Americans want to outlaw the elements of Sharia that interfere with Constitutionally protected freedoms, not Islam as an individual religious practice, but in response, Islamic supremacists claim that Muslim religious freedom will be infringed upon.
The point has to be made that these anti-Sharia measures are aimed at political Islam, an authoritarian ideology at variance with the Constitution in numerous particulars -- notably, in its denial of the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of women and non-Muslims. But unfortunately, even many of the proponents of these measures are unable to make this case effectively.
"Court Upholds Ruling Blocking Oklahoma Sharia and International Law Ban," from the ACLU, January 10 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
DENVER, CO – A federal appeals court today unanimously upheld a ruling that blocked implementation of a discriminatory and unnecessary Oklahoma state constitutional amendment that would have prohibited state courts from considering what is broadly described as Islamic “Sharia law” and “international law.”
The court concluded that by singling out Islam for unfavorable treatment in state courts, the law likely violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The court rejected the state’s argument that the constitutional amendment was necessary to protect against improper application of Sharia law, explaining:
“Appellants do not identify any actual problem the challenged amendment seeks to solve. Indeed, they admitted . . . that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other nations or cultures, let alone that such applications or uses had resulted in concrete problems in Oklahoma.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) challenged the amendment on behalf of Muneer Awad, executive director of CAIR’s Oklahoma chapter.
“As the court recognized, this amendment did nothing more than target one faith for official condemnation,” said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief. “Even the state admits that there has never been any problem with Oklahoma courts wrongly applying religious law. The so-called ‘Save Our State Amendment’ was a solution in search of a problem, and a blatantly discriminatory solution at that.”
“No one in Oklahoma deserves to be treated like a second-class citizen,” said Ryan Kiesel, executive director of the ACLU of Oklahoma. “This proposed amendment was an affront to the Constitution and everything it stands for.”...
Wherever Sharia experiences a renewed interest, the observable effect in countries far removed from one another is that tolerance decreases and harassment increases. Here we are again. We tried to tell you.
The existence of such a group aims to put pressure on the government to do it themselves if they don't want freelancers feeling the need to step in. It also attempts to send the message that the "new" Egypt is to be an unfettered Sharia regime and act accordingly.
More on this story. "Egyptians worried over 'morality squads'," by Joseph Mayton for the Jerusalem Post, January 9:
Suzie flops down on the chair and lets out a long breath. Quickly moving to her head, she unfastens her headscarf, the purple and silver head covering she wears during the day, and calmly lets her long black hair fall to her shoulders and down her back.
“I’ve had it with this double life,” she told The Media Line at her Cairo flat. “The problem is I wouldn’t have got my job if I wasn’t veiled so I put it on during the day and take it off at night before going out with friends,” she adds in perfect English, a hint of a British accent coming through.
For 25-year-old Suzie, who is Muslim thanks to her father, Egypt has become a dichotomy of faith and honor. Now, she fears the rise of online groups espousing to uphold the country’s “morality.” These “morality police” groups are gaining steam, and for many Egyptians, especially women, the idea has them fearful that the country could quickly turn into an ultra-conservative Islamic state akin to Saudi Arabia.
“We all know that these vice prevention committees are really a way to subject women to disgusting ways of life and push us farther into the house and away from the public,” Suzie argues.
Egypt is an oddity in the Middle East and with the recent gains being made by Islamic groups in the country’s first post-Hosni Mubarak election, many are worried that a conservative brand of Islam is already rising from the uprising. The Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), and the Al-Nour Salafist Party have won the lion’s share of votes thus far, with nearly two-thirds of votes cast in their favor.
“That can scare people a lot, but we must all remain cautious before we jump to conclusions,” says Nehad Abu Komsan, the head of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR). “I don’t think that many people voted for these parties because of a conviction toward them, but more because that was who was campaigning the most.”
Either way, they're stuck with them now.
The grassroots Committee for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue has adopted the name of an official government body that operates in Saudi Arabia. Armed with wooden canes, the Saudi committee’s paid operatives and volunteers patrol the streets enforcing the strict separation of men and women, conservative dress codes, public prayer and other behavior it regards as commanded by Islam.
Looking nervously at the Saudi model, activists and average Egyptians worry about what the Egyptian vice committee might bring as Islamist parties sweep the elections.
“I do feel the Salafists are powerful and have a lot of support because they have told people that the Western liberals and protesters are doing bad things like drugs and having sex. This scares people who believe them,” says café owner Mohamed Yussif, who runs a small successful middle-class café in downtown Cairo. “I hear people talk about our customers and say they should not be here, especially the women.”
Ehab Mousa, the head of Egypt’s Tourism Supporters Coalition, complained to the attorney-general against the committee, saying it would deter foreign tourism, a critical industry for the Egyptian economy. “Tour operators have had several reservations cancelled over the last days due to this statement,” Mousa told Ahram Online.
A month ago, Around 1,000 Egyptians rallied near the ancient pyramids on Friday to protest against what they said were threats by Islamic radicals to undermine tourism.
As the groups, mainly making a stir on social-networking sites such as Facebook currently, pick up members, the question is how popular they are and how much strength they have on the street.
Suzie contends that they have a big draw for the average Egyptian because of the conservative and religious undertones to their message. She argues that groups that build a mission on faith and Islam are “strong with people who think that anything Islamic is a good thing.”
The on-line group, named after their Saudi brothers, claims the great majority of Egyptians support their efforts, citing “millions of Egyptians who voted for the Al-Nour Party.” They argue this proves their support is not fabricated.
A democracy is only as good as the values that inform its participants.
The group’s official Facebook page – all administrators of the page are anonymous – claims to “preserve the morals of Egyptians in accordance with Sharia law.”
Already, Egyptians are reporting members of the group have entered shops, cafes and other Egyptian locations to lecture owners on the un-Islamic nature of their businesses, often referring to places that sell body-clinging women’s clothes and alcohol as haram, or forbidden in Islam....
“My comrade-in-arms, my pal, my buddy.” — Oriana Fallaci
“Robert Spencer incarnates intellectual courage when, all over the world, governments, intellectuals, churches, universities and media crawl under a hegemonic Universal Caliphate’s New Order. His achievement in the battle for the survival of free speech and dignity of man will remain as a fundamental monument to the love of, and the self-sacrifice for, liberty.”
— Bat Ye’or
“Robert Spencer is indefatigable. He is keeping up the good fight long after many have already given up. I do not know what we would do without him. I appreciate all the intelligence and courage it takes to keep going despite the appeasement of the West.”
— Ibn Warraq
“America's most informed, fearless, and compelling voice on modern jihadism.” — Andrew C. McCarthy, Senior Fellow at National Review Institute
“Robert Spencer is the leading voice of scholarship and reason in a world gone mad. If the West is to be saved, we will owe Robert Spencer an incalculable debt.” — Pamela Geller, Atlas Shrugs
“Over the years, we have become friends, and I have received his assistance on several pieces of legislation I proposed.” — Former Congressman Tom Tancredo
“Few people are capable of applying scholarship, analytical reasoning, and objectivity to their topic -- while simultaneously being readable and witty -- as can Robert Spencer.” — Raymond Ibrahim
“I am indeed honored to call him my friend.” — Brad Thor, novelist
“A top American analyst of Islam....A serious scholar...I learn from him.” — Daniel Pipes
“A brilliant scholar and writer.” — Douglas Murray
“Thank God there’s at least one man with balls left in the West.” — Kathy Shaidle, Five Feet of Fury
“I read people like [Mark Steyn] and Bob Spencer and the rest of them, and I say, ‘Boortz, you’re pretending you’re an author. These people really are. They really write some entertaining, some standup stuff.’” — Neal Boortz
“Armed with facts and fearlessness, Spencer stands up for Western civilization.” — Michelle Malkin
“Widely read in conservative foreign policy circles.” — New York Times
“Widely read in many quarters in Washington.” — Washington Post
“A canny operative who likely has the inside track on the State Department’s Middle East affairs desk should the tea party win the White House in 2012.” — New York Magazine
“A hero of the American right.” — Karen Armstrong
"The go-to Islam expert for the right wing." — Salon Magazine
“Robert Spencer is an Edward Said turned upside down.” — Stephen Suleyman Schwartz
“One of the nation's most notorious Islamophobes.” — Hamas-linked CAIR
“Satanic ignoramus.” — Khaleel Mohammed
“The Likud anti-Christ.” — Dar al-Hayat newspaper (Saudi Arabia)
“Zionist Crusader, missionary of hate, counter-Islam consultant.” — Al-Qaeda’s Adam Gadahn, “Azzam the American”
No Sharia for him, but no presidency, either
